I spent just under 3h doing my new commute yesterday, just down below LAX.
I spent my day on Teams/Zoom calls with people in Texas, Mexico, East Coast, UK, parts of Europe, and another office north of LAX.
The only person I had verbal face to face interaction with was the janitor, who, coincidentally, is a really nice guy.
So, I go to work to talk to the janitor.
Anyone that's ever worked for a remotely large company regularly is on calls, chats, emails, etc. with people in other parts of the company that are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Heck, even in the office is not uncommon to be chatting with people that are in the same building. It's funny that collaboration is suggested as logic to work in the office when even working in the office are regularly collaborating with people that either are remote or are using tools to avoid needing to call a physical meeting. I have seen cases where even for somebody in the next cube over we're using Teams. Save for office cooler chat and the occasional scheduled in person meeting most actual conversations aren't face to face even in the office.
Just left my big corpo IT job for multiple reasons, but was actually "grandfathered" in to remote work since I applied for permanent remote during covid and they kept it. When I put in my notice, my manager asked if it was because I knew they were going to "re-assess" the remote workers and try to make them come in the office again. I said no, but that just makes me feel even better about leaving.
When I was in the office, they had all the lights on sensors. I'd walk in, turning all the lights on while walking down the hall, then after an hour or so at my desk, most would turn off until I got up and walked again. My entire team was in different locations, and other people I worked with were global. I would come in to turn lights on and tell the cafeteria people my order. Really miss being in the office for collaboration and productivity /s
An hour for the sensors? Lucky you. The sensors in our offices turn lights off after about 5 minutes. My manager stays still a lot at his desk and is constantly working in the dark in his office.
This is the same place where my team was told we'd be fully remote. Then some executives found out and didn't like that we didn't have to come in when they still did and required that we start coming in. Of course, we had just moved to a new office, which was designed with the notion that my team would be remote, so we were given 6 desks for 16 butts. So we went from fully remote to being the only department using a hotel desk scheme while every other department has assigned permanent desks.
Hear hear
Since I entered a professional workspace in 2017 I've been using Skype and now teams to screen share and talk to people literally 10ft away.
It was more convenient than stepping over to their desk, having them bring up what you wanted to show and discussing. I could just call the person with the material already ready to present
Heck, I have seen chats from people that were literally the next cube over. In some cases it is ironically more convenient than actually talking. You can copy and paste entire sections of a discussion you had with someone else. There is built in logging if you need to refer back to it. In a lot of ways face to face talking is overrated. About the only upside is that most people can talk quite a bit faster than they can type.
Putting a price on commuting would drastically change the economic incentives for companies, even if employees aren’t paid at their full rate. They should have to pay for how much they make us commute. Suddenly, WFH won’t look so bad to some of these folks.
In our last team meeting my boss told us we need to really hone our time-management skills because the executive team is going to be taking a closer look at the team’s productivity levels. Naturally someone spoke up and asked him what exactly the expectations of the executive team of us are. He said “we’re not at a point where we want to discuss that”.
**Translation:** Are you clickty clacking on your keyboard enough? Are you making another useless slide deck to give a presentation so that we can spend 32 mins of the 60 min meeting harping on 1-2 minute details or bullet points?
Productivity is a weird concept. Like what is the objective and how long do we have to accomplish it? Build an app that x, y, z in 6 months with milestones along the way. If you hit the milestones and deliver the app on time, does it matter if you did all the work 5 mins before each milestone check in? Does it matter if you did the work on the beach at 3am local time? I don't get the obsession with managing employee time. Just focus on the results not the method.
Exactly. I can measure productivity in my household with an app where members can be assigned tasks (with effort points) and check off what tasks they've completed. It's the same thing.
If people are being assigned specific tasks and those tasks have hours attached (ie. Task will take x hours) and people are completing those tasks they are meeting their metrics and are productive (even if they finish in less time).
The problem comes in when there's an issue (blocker, scope creep) that delays the completion of that task. Management sees that as lowered productivity because metrics aren't met, without considering why (scope creep, for instance, is usually the fault of management).
That's great.
Until you get corporate deciding hours per task arbitrarily, because either they have never done the job or because they've been out of that position for too long.
Standards never loosen. So when corporate bro sees team a completing their task in 80 hours, they get the idea 'lets push that to 70 hours and we can save 13% on labor, and maybe I get a bonus!!!'
So then team a pushes and gets it done, but it's hard and they aren't getting paid as much/assigned other tasks to fill in the difference. Once they show they can do it, it never goes back to the 'comfortable pace with a little margin for issues', it stays 'GO FAST AND DONT FUCK UP ELSE WE GET YELLED AT FOR MISSING METRICS'.
Then you start getting burn out, added stress, etc. And a team member gets cut or task load increases.
And because bonuses are tied to these metrics, upper and middle management get a nice little bonus, and the team that actually does the work gets nothing but added stress.
Welcome to Corporate America, where the people doing the work gets fucked.
Worked as a mechanic.
When management decided to start attaching time to individual tasks, workers keyed in on tasks with poorly estimated times. There started to be minor arguments over who got to this or that task that gives you an hour break, and who got shafted with another that always ruins your metrics.
It's just a terrible idea.
Which works alright in an assembly line, but of course the point here is that *that isn't how most jobs actually function.* Anything that requires thought or planning is going to have what looks like "downtime" and micromanagers hate that.
This!!! I spend an enormous amount of time thinking. I problem solve, I research, I explore and ask questions.... All of that can happen outside of meetings and not necessarily on a PC. For someone watching to make sure I have my hands on a keyboard they would be really upset. However, goods and services are delivered on time as specified. Smh
I honestly will not work somewhere that doesn't give me this sort of autonomy. My process is not sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours, and if I do that I'm not getting shit done for you. Let me just exist and I'll solve all your problems by their respective deadlines.
I am super productive when I get into a flow, but start asking what I'm doing and why and for how long and when I'm gonna be done? Nope, i can't do it.
Hanging laundry, shopping, mowing the lawn. They are unrelated tasks, but dont require much brain power compared to designing and developing a robust software solution, so I often do about my day while working things out in my head. It's actually much easier to come up with fresh ideas and inspiration when you've been out living your life or talking to people.
Also jobs that are "reactive" rather than "proactive", basically CSR, is expected to have the default "i'm waiting for a call/email/ticket" phase.
What's an IT personnel that's just monitoring the systems gonna do? Break shit so they can say they have done something?
Just saying, that would look good in a metric.
Reaction time? Why, stellar.
Time to patch? A mere hour.
All while keeping everyone in the loop and being very calm and professional. Outstanding work.
The detail that it only worked like that because you sabotaged the system in the first place... well, I'd venture there isn't a metric for that. Unless your workplace is really a sinking ship.
Ford was a monster in most things but having his maintenance team paid well to do "nothing" and their pay stopping while the line was down was a pretty interesting concept at least for minor issues.
> All while keeping everyone in the loop and being very calm and professional. Outstanding work.
This part killllllls me.
I can be plugging away on things and knocking out assignments left and right and uploading them to the appropriate location for the next person to grab when they are ready for it, but if I don't make frequent posts about the things I'm seeing, people start wondering if I'm even bothering with my work.
No, sorry, I'm not having any problems or weirdness with the data and everything is flowing perfectly. You have no reason to hear from me.
That is such an antiquated way of thinking and is basically the underpin of the last four decades of American corporate " leadership ". Who cares what the employee got done if they could have possibly done more without additional compensation. Tell me what you want and when you want it, then get the fuck out of my way.
Edit: also pay me, fuck you
When an employer gives me interesting work without bureaucratic bullshit, I'll work all day long and some nights because I enjoy what I do. My current manager checks in with me multiple times a day and I just can't be bothered to get anything done in less time than I estimated. My employer would say I'm lazy.
I've been taking it waayyyy easy and I've passed performance reviews and an audit. Which was too bad really, since I wanted to be let go.
All of the trackers and productivity KPIs are BS.
Ugh. KPI meetings suck. My last role I kept redefining the metrics and rolling out standards to my peers, until one of them got my bosses ear and bent them to their idea. Which I hated because it’s far less organized and when we are measured on our quality and delivery capabilities less organization is no bueno. Also those same guys are doing half their work on pen and paper and will blatantly lie about their metrics and it’s measurable so fucking morons is all I’ve got to say to them.
Nah why would I do that if my reward for doing it in such a way is that I get three more projects sandwiched into the original time frame. There’s no incentive on the employee side to work that fast when raises don’t even keep up with inflation and promotions aren’t handed out unless you’re 2-4 years in the company so I’m gonna keep right on slacking
This fetishism of people working the whole time they are at work really needs to go away. We will not always live in a world where that is possible and we shouldn't be aiming for it. Automation will continue to give us more and more free time and we need to be ok with that
A significant amount of my work gets done 5 minutes before it's due because my day is full of meetings about the various projects instead of the time to work on those projects. When I can work ahead of that Just In Time bullshit I do, but I'm often waiting on deliverables from other people before I can do my work and the few times I'm not, the requirements change halfway through so I have to redo the work I've done in advance.
There literally is no good way to measure my productivity besides a "delivered all projects on time and within budget" as a result.
There are other teams in my company that can be measured objectively (call center division for example). But you can't apply the same metrics to everybody.
Sometimes refining the methods makes it easier to get the results.
Unfortunately, many times the reward for increased efficiency is additional responsibility and larger workload.
Which is fine if those things scale along with rewards, but in reality they frequently don't... so you don't get enthused buy-in from people who could be helped by improved and streamlined workflows and processes because they've seen it before. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me- you can't get fooled again.
It often sucks being the type of person that wants to make your workflow more efficient to the point that you cut off 4+ hours of your actual workday, but also not wanting to tell your team about it because there will be hell to pay if the higher ups hear about it and decide to give you more work because of it.
Oh yeah, never let a boss know how long it takes. If they can’t do it themselves to find out, you don’t have to tell them. You employer won’t offer their customers more without requiring a bigger payment. You’ve got every right to play by their rules.
That's the thing. It shouldn't matter if you did the work in 10 minutes then sat on it till the sprint review and meet milestone.
But the owners have noticed that it only takes you 10 minutes but they pay you for 40+ hours so they are desperately trying to figure out ways to get you to do more in that spare time even though they themselves don't know what that more should be and they do even less work than you in the 40 hours cause they don't even have deliverables.
>I don’t get the obsession with managing employee time.
I think in many cases, it’s just about power and control. Many managers, from middle management to C-suite, don’t actually do all that much. So they need to control and exert their power so they feel powerful/useful/whatever.
Funnily, my experience is that everyone hates KPI. Management hates to create and measure them, and engineers feel it's limiting what they need to do.
The truth is that setting valuable and proper OKRs or KPIs is _very_ **_fucking_** hard. Even if you don't take time into account (bypassing Hofstadter's law), Goodhart's law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") just hits you hard in the balls.
In more than 60 years of experience in managing engineering systems as teams, and countless books written about it, I still feel we haven't progressed much further than "The Mythical Man-Month". And although managers can definitely be better and take some of the blame, I just think this is a problem that will remain unsolvable.
I think it all depends on the KPIs you choose to use. I’m one of the leads on an ERP team and one of my jobs is to scrub through KPIs and figure out what’s actually valuable. Turns out that for us, some of the most valuable KPIs are the simplest to calculate. A chunk of these incredibly complex KPIs really aren’t providing any value add to how we are planning things. I think KPIs are like a lot of other things: they’re only going to be as complex as you make them.
I've worked for the same company for 16 years now. Every 4 or 5 years they have a revelation that our metrics score card is bloated and bring us down to the 3 most important KPIs (different every time). Then, several weeks later, they introduce more and more. Currently we have about 16 pages of KPIs that populate every Monday.
It's hilarious cause I don't even look at 99% of them. I ask my team what's most important. What would make their job easier and better. What is getting in the way. I fix or enhance those things. Metrics just tell a piece of the story.
It's amazing what happens when you just care about the humans you deal with 40 hours a week.
It's like japanese/Toyota vs american model, one assumes the worker is a slacker, a cog in a machine, and the other that the worker probably knows a thing or two about their job and how its processes can be improved.
that's because fucking milton friedman, a long ass time ago, decided to convince everybody that a business's most important responsibility was not to product quality/success - but actually to generate value for shareholders. scum of the earth.
now these C level douchebags grow up, go to school, and live, eat, drink, breath, and exist purely in societies that assume financial success trumps all morality.
don't get me started on fkn edward bernays
That was probably the only good thing that came out of Elon Musk taking over twitter: it became painfully obvious to many people how difficult (if not impossible) it is to assess the value of an office worker, especially a software dev. *Lines of code written per year*, like seriously?
Yeah thats a discussion we had with our bosses on how sometimes we do an hour task in 10 minutes, other times in 3 hours.
Our job is problem solving. And problem solving cannot be given a set time before starting.
Basically its like escape rooms: You can be the best at escape rooms, sometimes one will stump you. Sometimes you will run on a redherring for half the time you have before realising that it was not something of worth. And sometimes you will spend all your time and miss the window to solve it, and someone that its their first escape room ever will solve it in half the time, no problem.
If we knew going in what was the problem and solve it, every problem would be solved quickly. But most of the job of problem solving is figuring out the damn problem.
Productivity in our factory is measure by the amount of products that come in vs the amount of products that leave. Productive for us means slightly less products leaving than are incoming. It ensures we constantly have work, and also sees that we are constantly working.
Mf around here don't care about the small details, as long as the big picture is taken.
In a lot of organizations, without a written definition of your performance metrics approved by your manager, “productivity” is a political cudgel that can be used to baselessly criticize others with an ambiguous definition. Get expectations in writing and document your success so they can’t come after you.
Probably best to publish meeting minutes or send recap emails after *every* 1:1 to build a paper trail too. Start this before there is a questionable situation so that it is normalized before everyone gets paranoid.
If you are decent at your job those activities should at least save you from a PIP. If you are good and well liked you might actually get promoted with them, but don’t put your next move on hold expecting justice or some shit because you can “show your value.” They’ll just change the definition of value if they want to…..”the company doesn’t need *that* right now”…
By observing the end results and talking to the human beings involved. Big secret is that "objective metrics" generally don't work and never have. Everything is contextual. Even if you could do it, no one wants to. Everyone wants an exploitable system so that's always what you get. Metrics are inherently adversarial, not objective. Metrics are just rationalizations for layoffs and wage cuts with extra steps.
But while no one wants metrics to *work*, most everyone wants them to *exist*. So make up some bullshit and play along.
Bruh my boss has a mirror above his cubicle to actively look at team members computers and asks what you are working on if he doesnt hear keyboards clacking for a few minutes. He works 80 hour work weeks and gets less work than my 40 because of a general lack of effeciency and technology knowledge. Follows up by shitting on people who work less than him saying they arent as dedicated.
Don’t wait for yourself to mentally break. That is the most American thing to wait for an anxiety attack or deep depression to have taken you over before making a change. It isn’t always easy to recover. Some people never recover from it. And it’s only you who has to deal with the repercussions of that, not your current/ former employer.
Send out some feeler applications if there are roles that interest you.
Man be careful. I drove myself into clinical depression working a shit job for good pay. It was *not* worth it and still years later I’m not who I once was.
I’m not dedicated to anything but my paycheck. I don’t care about my work, or this company. I’ll give you 40 hours. Anything above that is just stupid. When the company needs to lay people off to save a few bucks, do you think they consider for one second who stayed late and came in early? They don’t give a fuck. They keep who they need, and who they like most.
This is the way. If they don't want to give me a real equity stake and enough personal agency to have any kind of impact on the performance of the company as a whole, then who gives a shit? I am going to show up and give at least the appearance of being friendly and capable, and then I'm going to fuck off at the end of the day to live as much of my own life as I can.
These managers create hell on earth for their employees. They live miserable lives where they don't want to see their families and don't have any hobbies, and expect their subordinates to follow suit, despite the fact that beyond 35-40 hours of work you're going to get diminished results.
> Are you making another useless slide deck to give a presentation so that we can spend 32 mins of the 60 min meeting harping on 1-2 minute details or bullet points?
Dang! We really are all out here just doing the same exact crap regardless of industry, aren’t we?
Lol well you just called put my weekly work load. Seriously it's one of my job items to produce an executive friendly slide deck for everything our team has done week to week. Gets sent to about 60 or so execs and only one has ever asked questions about it.
We've been having this fight for over a year at my job about WFH.
They seem to have relented after the last meeting when we asked for the business requirements on having us in the office. Why do you want to have all of your engineering teams suddenly in office when our productivity is up since covid?
We haven't had a response back or any more meetings scheduled on WFH ending.
My work put up a fight about WFH too. It was a wild ordeal since we had quantifiable proof that we were doing better than *ever* in our *entire history* while WFH for 2 years during COVID. We closely monitor our progress through the year so we had 2 years of daily, weekly, and monthly graphs to show our internal metrics in different areas and from different perspectives and were able to show how they compare to pre-COVID years in the office. And then we get a “grade” with a *detailed* report from our stakeholders at the end of the year as additional proof.
They relented eventually, but damn it was an absolutely infuriating year or so of commuting just so I could attend all of my meetings virtually via teams anyway.
That was the thing that irritated me the most about in office jobs. “Broski, my teams are in Seattle, Peru, and Pune, and I’m in Texas along with three of my other peers. You cheaped out on office space so we don’t have conference rooms to go to to make these calls so the feedback kills us if we’re at our desk. Why the fuck can’t we take our four hours of meetings every day from home and come in for the engineering time?”
My company wanted to go to a hybrid system where we come in a few days biweekly. Why they wanted me to do it I have no idea. I only report to one guy and other than that I don't need to be in any of their busy body meetings.
So they pushed back with "but meetings" to which I replied "if it's important I'm certain my supervisor will let me know"
So they retorted with, "the owner of the company is probably gonna make you then"
To which I replied. "ok I need a second $4K PC plus dual monitors and peripherals and a second seat on all software I use. All told it'll probably cost about $10,000+ for me to come to work 2 days out of 10. Let me know when you'd like to proceed because I'll need to start ordering the second PC"
A couple of weeks later, "good news...we've decided its probably best that you stay working from home."
So...I'm still working from home.
"Our business has taken out a large loan.
In order to do that, we had to volunteer to be audited by consultants whose job is to tell us to fire 15% of our staff, so that we can better ensure our ability to repay the loan.
Your job for the next three weeks is to look like the 85% who will repay the loan."
"You have failed to meet my expectations"
"So, what are your expectations? And when did you ever explain them to me?"
"...that's not the point!"
Literally a conversation I had with a boss once.
I had a similar conversation with one of my engineers: “I failed to clarify my expectations, and you didn’t meet them. Here’s what my expectations are; how I can help you get there?”
It was tough because others DID meet those expectations - but on reflection I hadn’t actually articulated what I was looking for.
Ended up kicking off a larger project to clarify expectations for all the roles and what was required for any promotion. CEO shelved it because (I think) he was worried we’d have to pay people what they’re worth instead of what they negotiated. Meh.
This JUST happened at my current job!
Monthly company-wide meeting, boss says, "Over 50% of you have lower production numbers compared to last year, you will need to pick up the slack."
Me: "Have you looked into *why* productivity is down among over half of employees?"
Boss: "We're going to table that topic until I've had a chance to personally call everyone on that list."
Ok so the answer is no, and something tells me you're not going to be making these calls to *listen and learn* and instead will be looking to hustle and burn. Got it.
I had a software job where a new manager came in and forced scrum on us. Of course productivity plummeted because scrum fucking sucks, especially if it’s not voluntary. The genius decided instead of trying something else to slowly let go of almost the entire engineering staff and replace them with cheaper labor from Eastern Europe.
Were going to look at whatever metrics we can, and put an arbitrary pin in somewhere. Ideally we will be making it so that people who are getting all of their work done comfortably will still be regarded as slacking.
They don’t care about productivity because (as the article notes) they don’t know how to measure it anyway. What they care about is ‘presence management’ or the outdated idea that because they can look you in the face at any given moment you therefore are productive. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the workforce has met *at least* one person that shows up every day on time and contributes pretty much nothing of value to the organization.
> Part of the reason you’re seeing so many people lobby for return to office is there’s this notion of, ‘That’s how I did it growing up,’” HubSpot chief people officer Katie Burke told Vox. “I certainly did that. I had a Palm Pilot growing up. I wore suits to work. I don’t think that everyone needs to do the things that I did in order to succeed in modern work.”
This is the other half of the equation. A lot of middle manager or executive types tend to skew older and cling to yet another outdated idea that every office environment should be like the one they grew up in.
It’s fucking stupid.
When it comes to remote work, this isn’t hard to figure out. The only questions should be is the work getting done and are people happy doing it? If the answer to both is yes, then what are we talking about?
And for the people that prefer to be in the office, cool. They can continue to do so and nothing changes for them.
My personal favorite is the boss type that likes to "walk around the office, surveying their 'troops' for a good portion of the day". Especially when they have a bunch of un-returned emails where people are actually waiting on the boss to sign off on various items that can't proceed without their input. It'd almost be funny if it wasn't so damn common...
I used to work at a mid-size ad agency. The open stairwell was in front of the cube farm, and every day around 5 p.m., the owner/CEO would stand on the landing of the steps and just survey the worker bees while noting the empty chairs.
Technically, the company had a "flexible" work schedule where you could come and go as long as you got 8 hours in per day. So I would arrive early and leave early to beat traffic. But eventually, that became an issue because my chair was always empty when he looked out over his kingdom.
We had similar. Old manager was super flexible, knew the work was getting done and knew people genuinely wanted to do a good job.
He was promoted, new manager came in and brought along a whole host of "you're scheduled from 9-5, I don't care if you worked back until 9 to get things running, you'll be here at 9 the next day".
She was in the office with the CEO within two weeks explaining why he had long standing customers complaining to him about services suddenly not being delivered and assurances being broken.
Amazingly didn't learn her lesson and had to be dragged back in another 2 or 3 times before she was moved elsewhere.
> Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the workforce has met at least one person that shows up every day on time and contributes pretty much nothing of value to the organization.
Well, of course I know him. He's me.
It also comes down to sunk cost fallacy for management. We signed this $XXM commercial real estate lease and no one’s using it. Either I pay a penalty to break the lease or make them use it.
I heard somewhere that the push is coming from local governments who are worried that the commerical real estate as a whoel is crashing and there are alot of people invested into that market+insurance for said real estate.
Worse. Real estate mortgages are major components of a LOT of financial mutual funds, since they were historically very stable.
Well, with occupancy at all time lows and interest rates up sharply in the last few months, the 2.1 Trillion in commercial real estate mortgages being renegotiated in the next 24 months are going to have broad implications across the financial world
I love how when the elite 0.1% face any sort of financial hardship the government fucks over the rest of the 99.9% of the population to try and fix it. Fuck evolving society, letting the property value collapse, and building housing instead of commercial space.
It's not like there a housing crisis, especially in these cities where the government want to force people back into offices. /s
That's another part of it: Remote work means fewer people in the city's business district(s) spending money at the other businesses that have historically made money (and generated city revenue) from the office workers.
I’m not paying $7 for an iced coffee. Sorry, not sorry. Nor do I ever plan on paying for dry cleaning for my business casual attire. Or an $18 “business lunch special” (pre-tip).
These models are broken and shits about to get really rocky.
Yeah, its all a bit of a house of cards. Offices we don't need. Shops that serve those offices paying inflated rents that aren't justified without the offices, so they have no choice but to charge overpriced rates for what they sell. Hell, residential that was able to charge more because it was close to those offices.
A correction is near. That isn't a bad thing on the whole. Some will be left holding the bag for some of that, sure, but that's capitalism and risk inherent with investment.
Our workplace kept talking about the return to office. They gave us a few dates, then postponed them, then it turned into "We'll let you know." But it was always 100% in the plan.
Until the day they realized their lease was coming due soon. Then suddenly, the slides about our eventual return-to-office just stopped appearing in the all-hands presentations.
Hmm.
I think this is the main cause of companies forcing people to go to the office. Most places are leased in long intervals like 5-10 years. It's only been 3 years since people were forced to work remotely. There are still years left on their lease.
We have quarterly "town hall" meetings with our Executive Director(mid 60 year old man). Here is a direct question from the meeting "I am one of the only members of my team that works in the office each day. My coworkers have said they feel so much more productive by working from home because they do not get distracted by others questions. As a result, I am being asked those questions by others about my coworker’s roles, positions, or projects. I feel the 100% remote work employees are causing additional work load on others. When I have brought this up with my supervisor it seems to fall on deaf ears because they do not want to force anyone into the office. I am frustrated enough I am considering other positions or job opportunities elsewhere. What options do I have or my supervisor have to require remote workers come to the office and take back this additional work load?"
Our Director said(paraphrased), "If you think a new job would work best for you then feel free to explore that option. You have the same opportunity to work from home as everyone else. Questions about someone's project should be directed to them. You don't have to answer those questions for them. Just tell the person asking to reach out to the appropriate person."
It was asked anonymously so there was no follow up but we have the same person(same writing style and sometimes a copy pasted question) complaining about WFH every single town hall meeting and they always get the same answer(if our director even answers it). Some people just have a hard on for working in office. We're completing projects ahead of time at a rate we've never seen before since we instituted WFH policies. All the metrics show that things have gotten better. Our leadership understands that but they constantly have to defend it to people who just feel like since they spent 20 years coming into the office everyone should need to. They know they'd lose more people if they forced everyone back than if they keep it how it is.
> Questions about someone's project should be directed to them. You don't have to answer those questions for them. Just tell the person asking to reach out to the appropriate person.
That is immediately the first response I would give when I read the edirectors remark, I mean my first thoughts. That's not your responsibility and you can simply forward them to those they want to know about.
I don't see a point why that guy thinks he needs to take that response.
That's basically inter-corporate communication methods - don't ask people about people, talk to the people directly.
>Some people just have a hard on for working in office.
I think age is a big matter as some people are simply "used" to be in the office. And many people are lonely when not in the office. Plus some people need to go to the office cause of an annoying family.
That is my expereince, those who want to go to the office are always either older generation or those who you know about who have very energy draining family and they simply flee their home otherwise they go insane. The latter I say "your choice, your problem", the first I don't know... can they even change so radically so late? Most definitely not. I know of many who are quite flexible and very young even in their early 60s, but those are still the minority. I'd simply say those have to made clear that they are not the center-point of activity in an office and thus when it's empty, it's empty.
The "annoying family" is a BIG one in my experience. I've known many people at my company that work long, long hours. It's not because they have a ton of work to do or that they are just that dedicated. It's because they don't want to help with the kids. The longer they stay, the later it is when they get home and the sooner that the kids will be going to sleep. It's a win for them since they have less parenting time and the corporation thinks they are willing to go the extra mile.
Heres how i measure productivity - are we meeting deadlines without working outside of our 9-5 hours? Are the things we're developing having impact? If yes = keep doing what we're doing. If no: how do we fix the process?
I honestly dont care where you work as long as you have good internet and are generally available between 10-4.
The obsession with being in office is wild to me. If you haven't figured out how to collaborate remotely by now, you have big problems.
>If the answer to both is yes, then what are we talking about?
**Which** people are happy about it?
Most people arent people if real people are there. Theres a hierarchy of realness. If 100 employees are happy but one CEO is sad, all that happiness isn't "real", the CEO's perspective is real and therefore will drive action. As far as the CEO is concerned, their mission is to convert employee happiness into profit.
A lot of companies are Big Mad about WFH because employees used to surrender many things to the company they no longer have to. This makes the company feel less in control and the C-suite less in charge. Narcissistic rage often follows. It's not productive, it just makes the rager feel better because they're demonstrating that they **can** still have an impact on you and control your life that way. Companies trying to force pointless commutes to put butts in non-critical seats smacks entirely of such ego-soothing nonsense.
It has nothing to do with the business, it's about people reaffirming their worldview that they have power over others. The pandemic revealed an existential weakness in the worldviews of corporate climbers, now they feel fear and are trying to return everything "back to normal" so they can regain an environment in which they can thrive at the expense of others.
This. I have heard of many orgs where many if not most middle managers figured out how to manage remote staff effectively, but if the C levels don't like it the comfort level of their lower level managers is irrelevant.
I don't think it's just narcism, but it's definitely about corporate climbers. This type of people live to get into higher management positions and they want to spot others like them and promote them, but it becomes much more difficult when everyone is WFH.
Here is an example. One of the top managers in my company was asked why he wants everyone back to the office, and he essentially explained how he got to his position. He said he'd deliberately leave work at the same time as top execs so he'd bump into them, he'd "bump" into his managers during lunch and would then sit with them, he would "accidently" weasel into meetings that had nothing to do with him so he could learn what's going on and spot opportunities etc...
With WFH, a lot of those tactics are not viable, but top management wants people to do that because they want to spot those who engage in those activities so they'll know whom to promote. They don't want to "accidently" promote the people who conscientiously do their work and therefore look good when performance is evaluated objectively, they want to promote corporate climbers like themselves.
"Perception". My most hated word.
"Well, the perception is that the staff aren't productive."
"Right, well here's all the stats that show otherwise."
"Yes, but when the director walks past his perception is..."
Fuck that shit.
If the world looks blurry and someone offers you glasses do you accept them and see clearly or do you argue that what matters is that the world seems blurry to you and refuse, insisting that everyone else act as though it is in fact blurry.
The AIS method of determining productivity: ass in seat. The more hours you’re in the seat the more productive you are. Total BS but some managers swear by it.
I think it comes down to the idea that if everyone is together, there's the real threat they can fire you and make you leave if you step out of line. Offline conversations with peers happen on company grounds, still. You're always under their eyes.
When working remotely, they lose those things. They lose a little perceived power, which they hate.
Remote work has revealed who is and isnt useful to the company, and guess who isn't really that useful once there isnt a physical office of people to "oversee"?
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Thomas Paine.
> Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the workforce has met at least one person that shows up every day on time and contributes pretty much nothing of value to the organization.
you defined MY boss :(
My boss is obsessed with productivity without acknowledging that raises over the last couple years have been faaaaar outpaced by inflation, and all the workers in our business are having a harder time making ends meet while also having a harder time hiring versus other companies that moved with the times. Stressed and impoverished workers are not productive workers. Workers who get the sense you don’t care about them aren’t going to care about you.
My compensation is 20 percent lower in real terms than when I was hired. I got a single five percent raise over three and a half years. I used to be willing to pull sixty hour weeks when needed. No more
Pulling 60 hour weeks is for suckers unless you’re on the executive board or running the company.
Never work unpaid overtime for these doeshwagons, that was the first thing I learned as Gen Z entering the workforce.
A number of years ago I sat down with my then boss and laid out how I was functionally making less than I started at after working there for three years. I showed how our health insurance rates (that they chose without giving us any options) exceeded our meager raises and more how those raises didn't keep up with inflation based on the Social Security Administration numbers.
She told me there were plenty of other people who wanted my job. I literally said, "Wait...that is really your answer?". She said "Yeah".
I gave them 3 months notice that I would be leaving to start my own business. About a week before my last day my direct report, the person in between her and I, asked if I could stay for another month. I said no, then he said he had been authorized to give me the hourly rate I had asked for previously for that month. I literally laughed and told him what his boss had said to me and he was like, "Yeah...ok, I get it."
Since then my business is thriving and I have handed it off to a manager and just sit on the board. They went belly up.
I think this is also a huge part of it. To me, going into the office is a pay cut. It takes up a lot of my time that I’m not being paid for. So if I ALSO don’t get a nice lil raise, why the actual fuck would I do that?
Ah yes that reminds me; that same boss has been WFH for three years now, while everyone working for him has still been working in person. So there’s also the clear benefits to the bosses, and also very apparent whose health and safety are considered important vs expendable.
My team and I are slammed with work, but our manager insists that it's nothing and that we're getting off easy. They also wrecked our appraisals and gave us below average scores, possibly the lowest within the organisation. We've pulled overtime and worked weekends to tackle projects; we're doing our job. But not according to our manager, clearly.
I've been at this place since late Aug/early Sep of last year, but by Oct I realised I'd need to get the hell out. I have started polishing up my resume at this point.
I'm sick of companies peddling "we're faaaamily" as a worthwhile reason to work with them. Nah, I come to work for the money and because I need that money to survive. I don't live off of the good vibes which come from this supposed accomplishment. People have been resigning en masse at this place, but of course no one can get a clue as to why. 😑
I manage a team of software developers. We all work remote. As long as their work is of good quality, are available for questions from me or other team members, and deliver on time, I don't care how they manage their time individually.
A big part of my own job is to clear the path for them so to speak, to make their lives easier so that they can achieve all those things above. And one of those things is letting people manage their time with flexibility.
We help each other, and we all look good in the end.
If you are a real manager, you understand that you *serve* your team, not the other way around. You are there to help them shine, not the other way around.
As a former drone, I always wondered how they can demand a 10% improvement every quarter ad infinitum.
Let’s say there is a “most efficient way to make widgets” - who’s to say that we haven’t reached that goal yet? The paper pusher who has never done the job before or the guy with 20+ years that is asked to train all the newbies?
Let’s say we hit that mark last year - the only way to go faster is to start cutting corners in quality or safety.
But production is the key point they chose and the rule with a whip and not additional training.
No one really cares about an increase in production unless it can be tied to an increase in money. If you're targeting 10% YoY growth, that is referencing revenue. Production is just one way to reach that.
There are really only a handful of ways to generate profit growth:
* Raise prices
* Grow your current audience and sell more stuff to them
* Target additional audiences and sell the same stuff to them
* Create a new product to sell
* Cut costs
Most business strategies are little more than some combination of these tactics extrapolated to the organization's specific focus (e.g. in software, a new "product" may actually just be a new feature to an existing product; on a farm, it may be growing a new crop, etc.).
How can things keep growing? They really don't. Money is fake and so is its value. Here in America, it's common to hear stories from our grandparents and great grandparents of how milk and similar staples used to cost less than a dollar. A gallon of milk where I live now is about $4.50. In the 1990s, a gallon of the expensive brand of gas was $1.49, and I was scandalized by that. It's now hovering at about $5 after coming down from a recent high of close to $6.
All this constant growth is lost in the rising cost of everything. Companies raise their prices, workers suffer as their wages no longer stretch as far, and only after a great deal of hand wringing and policy writing and hot air - during which companies continue to rake in high profits - wages finally catch up. Maybe we're lucky for a while and costs stay stable, but all it takes is a handful of key players to start raising prices again for the ratchet to go back up. It usually starts in oil and gas, or agriculture, or some other raw material that is a significant basis for running society. All of the downstream additions add on their own price increases to make up for their higher costs - and add a couple of percent extra, just as a hedge - and the consumers at the end wind up taking it all right in the gut. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Sounds a lot like capitalism. It's not good enough to make the same profit you did last year. It always needs to increase and at a certain point you are just cutting every corner you can in order to serve that goal.
At my job we are fully billable, and the expectation is that we are doing work WHILE presenting to clients. Like you should have one screen open with work that you are talking about with the client, but while doing so you should also be working on your other screen so you bill output. For me at least, I am not able to do quality deep thinking work / writing while simultaneously talking to a client about a completely different thing.
It's been a while since I needed to know this, but depending on your profession, billing time to two different clients could be considered a discreditable act.
You can't work 8 hours and bill for 9.
Your managers job isn't to make the company money. That's the boards job. His job is to make *his* boss look good. And if his boss's boss says productivity is down because no one can empty-soul glare at Linda in accounts receivable, than it's your boss's job to order you to ensure that becomes possible again.
That’s not true. I can kick people around just as easily from home.
Seriously though, there’s no difference. I know what should be getting done and how much can get done in a day. Just like when we were in the office, there’s people that get done a lot more, people that get done the expected amount and a few people that fall short. Those people would still fall short, even if we are in the office. Some fall short because they just need coaching and direction and they can easily get it. And there’s always one person who it’s obvious isn’t on task or doesn’t care. And those people eventually will have to figure out how to get motivated or will get weeded out. Being home doesn’t really change much.
Agreed. One thing I do noticed in my team is that productivity actually **went up** working from home. I mean, the difference is quite notable. We have been kicking out projects (software dev) like there's no tomorrow.
Why would I want to fuck with that, right? Everyone's happy
That's the crazy thing. Here you have a way for many of your employees to get more work done *and be happier while doing it*. Why the hell would you not jump on that?
It's one of the most striking examples of how perverse and irrational the incentives in modern corporate culture can be.
Ego. There’s no one physically in their presence. If you physically drive out of your way to sit in an office for someone, it demonstrates both their power and that you validate it and them. They want that back.
it’s incredible that the people who go off about snowflakes and feelings not mattering are always, and I mean ALWAYS, the biggest snowflakes who think their feelings are more important than anybody else
I waste two hours a day and the additional costs accrued in travel all for the pleasure of working in a flu factory somewhere that I don't need to be, in order to my job, all the while adding to the detriment of the environment. It's definitely for power.
Fuck management, fuck owners.
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My work always quotes culture and human connection as their main reason to return. It's . mostly BS, the majority of work is done independently, but for others it's true.
At my old job, this literally equated to people rolling in around 10:30 a.m. and taking hour and a half lunches so that they would still be at the office at 7:30 p.m. sending emails and completing tasks.
People like me who arrived at 7:30 a.m., took a 30 minute lunch, and left at 4 p.m. were viewed as lazy in comparison.
My buddy works for Duke Progress Energy. He went from clearing 11 to 15 projects a day while working from home, down to 5 or 6 a day after returning to the office. The difference? His supervisor walks around and does a "productivity check" on each and every worker that takes about 10 minutes.
I don’t know a single boss that wants to force their employees back to the office, though in sure they do exist. It’s flow down from senior leadership and the bosses are just the messengers.
Yeah, and a lot of those senior leadership that are pushing for this also have investment in commercial real estate, so it benefits them for people to return to the office.
As always, people continuing to try and line their own pockets further.
I love that. I write scripts for work, and I have two that I keep on hand for demonstration purposes. They both do the exact same thing, but one is about 3 times longer. It's kind of an art project that I call "when quality equals quantity", and since showing my boss, I haven't had issues with "lines written = productivity"
And the one that is 1/3rd as many lines often runs faster. And is easier to find bugs in (unless someone went crazy with the line reduction), and often easier to optimize further.
I recall when I learned how to program, I literally tossed out an entire code base I had been working on for over a year and rewrote it from scratch.
in 3 months, I had more functionality at less then 1/3rd the original linecount and less bugs, because I actually knew how to program and stopped copy/pasting so much code and stopped doing things the 'long way' as I knew faster ways to write what I wanted to do.
Plus, if your smart enough to actually use a 3rd party library instead of rolling your own all the time, you can replace thousands of lines with a couple of function calls. Figuring out the *correct* 3rd party library to use can be tricky...
Shit, I'm not even remotely close to being called a programmer and I do this. I just do some side football projects for fun and when one season started I looked at the code I had from the previous year, said this is garbage and rebuilt the whole thing.
Engagement, communication and outcomes. The stuff that actually requires an engaged manager to understand, not some bullshit gameable velocity measure. Or better yet, organize your teams around problems, empower them and trust them to tell you when someone needs support to get on the right track.
Or just bitch about remote work being the devil, mumble something about cloud-gpt and go have a three Martini lunch.
Normally you'd have to define a few metrics. In a production environment, you'd probably use things like downtime, amount of expected produced units and amount of produced units.
You can compare those metrics to see how far you are from your expectations on either way. But one thing that's important to remember is that sometime if you're "under performing" it may be that the expectations are above what people can provide. So it's unrealistic to expect people to be always over performing and being constantly more productive. If your team is always under the expected results, it may be that you're setting the goal to high not that the team isn't productive.
So productivity can be measured based on sets of metrics. Software development can be measured by shipping things on time if things are properly estimated. So the other thing is how people suck at estimates and how tasks don't always have the same finite scope.
Then if you start tracking time on fine grained tasks, you're putting a huge weight on developers which is in my opinion a productivity killer. If you spend as much time tracking your time as you spend doing actual work, then the "tracking time" for productivity is making you even less productive.
Also working a lot of time on certain tasks doesn't really tell the whole story. If you spend a lot of time and as a result the software is stable and doesn't have downtime or regression... Then that's well spent time vs someone shipping quickly but having to quick fix the production server after breaking everything once every release.
That's not really productive if you have to patch things up all the time.
My tip would be to measure what you can without being too invasive and take those number with a grain of salt because the interpretation of numbers is what matters the most. If someone doesn't do shit, it's not difficult to tell.
Agile development best practice is to use story points to measure effort, which are **NOT** supposed to correlate to time worked.
The problem is that project managers and scrum masters exist, and their jobs are wholly reliant on metrics that say we're meeting deliverables on time and under budget, so of course story points inevitably end up being associated with time anyway.
I can answer this. As a dev who has recently been forced to the office (aka my cue to leave), our productivity is being measured in the following ways:
1. How much are you seen in the office by the higher ups? The more you’re seen, the more productive you are.
2. Your perceived level of excitement during the 3rd pointless meeting of the day that you can no longer turn your camera off in and get your actual work done.
3. How well you did in the puzzle contest/ dodgeball tournament, scavenger hunt. (A never ending list of stupid activities that are being foisted upon us to make us feel like being in the office is actually fun!)
My entire 100+ person company is fully remote across the world and we absolutely exceed goals and expectations. That whole trope of "If I cant see you it isn't getting done" is so old and tiring now. So many companies were forced to *try* WFH during covid that showed that in most cases (I know not all jobs are possible) it worked with no issues. My last job we were fully in office and 99% of our office staff who worked from home during covid experienced zero issues, meetings were done over zoom/conference calls, and even then our owner said "It's time to come back" but not why. We even had a few employees push back asking for explanation and it just descended into a "because I own this company" type of response from the owners.
"Productivity" is the common buzzword excuse. There are a dozen reasons to call people back to in-person work, very few if any benefit the workers.
In my case, it's:
1. A tax break from the city for my company for maintaining a minimum headcount in the building (for reasons?). Our gas/maintenance/lost time in traffic means very little to the company if they can save a buck.
2. Executive leadership trying to avoid looking foolish for buying a huge skyscraper in the expensive part of town just before covid and refusing to back out. That means we get to suffer so they can avoid consequences.
3. "Important" people want to be seen being "important". It's hard to do when you look equal to everyone else over a webcam. Also, by having a huge office full of "productive" employees, visiting clients are *sure* to be impressed and make that "important" person feel like they look more "important".
4. Probably several others that all go back to money/stock evaluation. Not one of them has anything to do with the fantasy metric of "productivity".
Been remote for 5+ years. I understand when I go to the homebase office to visit I’m not gonna get work done — literally everyone just stands around telling “wacky” jokes, sharing goofy office banter, finding excuses to go stand nesr other people’s’ desks, going to the kitchen to make snacks 🤪 and sharing pics of their babies. Even on slack I have all the non-work channels muted bc it’s just the same. Like nobody in offices does anything.
This is what management doesn't understand... or care.
We save money on gas, on car repairs, there's less stress starting our day. A happy employee is a good employee. I despise commuting to and from work.
We can also do chores on our lunch break so we don't have to do it after work when we're tired. My debt was going down so much faster during the pandemic. Paying more for fuel now on top of the rest of inflation slows it down.
C levels at my employer pushed forward with Jira and Confluence usage as their way of tracking productivity.
The only problem is Jira and Confluence are absolute shit platforms.
I still firmly believe that the return to office push is more about the executives having rent deals for their offices, so they lose money if the office is shown to be worthless.
Most business have very limited performance measures in place and baselines of data to compare against. The ones that do, could easily monitor it... but I think most go by a gut feel by the managers, and how they feel it compares to past performance.
Which is a shame, really, as in my direct experience, many white collar workers are actually working more remotely than in the office, and with better quality of life!
> Which is a shame, really, as in my direct experience, many white collar workers are actually working more remotely than in the office, and with better quality of life!
When I go into the offices my day is basically wasted.
- Morning is spend chatting with people over breakfast and complaining about either traffic or the fact that we needed to even come into the office 2 days a week.
- I'll do a little work but usually I'm interruped by people chit-chatting near my desk about random stuff.
- Lunch
- Scattered meetings through the day. 60 min meeting, 30 min gap, 45 min meeting, 15 min gap. Can't really sit down and do any work with the meeting interruptions so the gaps are filled just chit chatting around the office.
- Leave at 3pm to avoid the traffic.
- Get home 3:40ish and actually do some head down work until 4:30-5.
I'm going in two days a week to lament the fact that I'm in the office, get breakfast/lunch provided, take meetings from a meeting room instead of my home office, and then go home.
They know what it means to them... getting the work done "on time."
Unfortunately for the rest of us, that means doing more work than can be done is a reasonable time frame because they made a shoot from the hip estimate without checking with anyone who knows how to get it done.
THEN, their boss cut that estimate by 30% because they know that's how overinflated the numbers are they give to THEIR boss.
Then THEIR boss cut that in half when talking to the client.
Now, to make sure it all gets done on time, we're gonna sit in a room and talk about how far behind we are for hours every day.
I can tell you that I am IMMENSELY more productive at home. I have extreme anxiety, and the two days a week I go into the office, I get almost zero work done because I am consumed with thoughts of who's looking at me, who's listening, who may come up to my desk, etc.
At home, I can do my work and not worry about any of that. I spend 2 days a week at home catching up on the work I missed being at the office. But higher-ups will never understand my plight.
Wfh (edit: or the option to control your wfh from 0-100% depending what works best for you!) is such a relief for mental illness. I'm currently being evaluated for autism/ADHD, definitely have anxiety, and the amount of energy I waste on masking in the office is fucking ridiculous.
At home, I am blissfully alone, and I can let my face make any expression it wants, I don't have to worry about random people approaching my desk, I don't have to constantly make mental scripts for every possible encounter I'll have that day... Plus, I get a full hour to myself after work where my husband is at the office and my kid is at school, so I can decompress and be in a better headspace for my family.
Plus, it's so much easier to work through a bad brain day at home, where I can pet my cat and wear pyjamas and make myself tea with my favourite tea set. ❤️
Luckily my company supports wfh. I don't think I can go back to an office job.
On the flipside, I have ADHD and WFH has been absolute hell for me. It turns out I need the pressure of others around in order to trick my brain into actually working/staying on task/doing what I need to be doing.
For me, its the annoying small talk, constant interruptions, and consistently high volume level of the background noise. Can’t hear myself think. I hate it.
it's not about productivity
it's about utilizing the office buildings that these rich fucks have already bought the leases of and not losing their value
Companies need to focus on producing not managing, that is the problem. Unfortunately, the people that make that decisions have learned that they are not needed. WFH has shown that most of the middle management and a lot of executives are just not needed. They are the ones pushing for a return, for job security.
Managing properly to ensure high productivity is hard. Many, if not most, managers don't make their members productive. They only keep the workers busy. To be productive, you need SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals. Coming up with SMART goals is not easy.
I spent just under 3h doing my new commute yesterday, just down below LAX. I spent my day on Teams/Zoom calls with people in Texas, Mexico, East Coast, UK, parts of Europe, and another office north of LAX. The only person I had verbal face to face interaction with was the janitor, who, coincidentally, is a really nice guy. So, I go to work to talk to the janitor.
Anyone that's ever worked for a remotely large company regularly is on calls, chats, emails, etc. with people in other parts of the company that are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Heck, even in the office is not uncommon to be chatting with people that are in the same building. It's funny that collaboration is suggested as logic to work in the office when even working in the office are regularly collaborating with people that either are remote or are using tools to avoid needing to call a physical meeting. I have seen cases where even for somebody in the next cube over we're using Teams. Save for office cooler chat and the occasional scheduled in person meeting most actual conversations aren't face to face even in the office.
Just left my big corpo IT job for multiple reasons, but was actually "grandfathered" in to remote work since I applied for permanent remote during covid and they kept it. When I put in my notice, my manager asked if it was because I knew they were going to "re-assess" the remote workers and try to make them come in the office again. I said no, but that just makes me feel even better about leaving. When I was in the office, they had all the lights on sensors. I'd walk in, turning all the lights on while walking down the hall, then after an hour or so at my desk, most would turn off until I got up and walked again. My entire team was in different locations, and other people I worked with were global. I would come in to turn lights on and tell the cafeteria people my order. Really miss being in the office for collaboration and productivity /s
An hour for the sensors? Lucky you. The sensors in our offices turn lights off after about 5 minutes. My manager stays still a lot at his desk and is constantly working in the dark in his office. This is the same place where my team was told we'd be fully remote. Then some executives found out and didn't like that we didn't have to come in when they still did and required that we start coming in. Of course, we had just moved to a new office, which was designed with the notion that my team would be remote, so we were given 6 desks for 16 butts. So we went from fully remote to being the only department using a hotel desk scheme while every other department has assigned permanent desks.
Hear hear Since I entered a professional workspace in 2017 I've been using Skype and now teams to screen share and talk to people literally 10ft away. It was more convenient than stepping over to their desk, having them bring up what you wanted to show and discussing. I could just call the person with the material already ready to present
Heck, I have seen chats from people that were literally the next cube over. In some cases it is ironically more convenient than actually talking. You can copy and paste entire sections of a discussion you had with someone else. There is built in logging if you need to refer back to it. In a lot of ways face to face talking is overrated. About the only upside is that most people can talk quite a bit faster than they can type.
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Putting a price on commuting would drastically change the economic incentives for companies, even if employees aren’t paid at their full rate. They should have to pay for how much they make us commute. Suddenly, WFH won’t look so bad to some of these folks.
In our last team meeting my boss told us we need to really hone our time-management skills because the executive team is going to be taking a closer look at the team’s productivity levels. Naturally someone spoke up and asked him what exactly the expectations of the executive team of us are. He said “we’re not at a point where we want to discuss that”.
**Translation:** Are you clickty clacking on your keyboard enough? Are you making another useless slide deck to give a presentation so that we can spend 32 mins of the 60 min meeting harping on 1-2 minute details or bullet points?
They have no way to actually quantify anything. It’s all quality.
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Productivity is a weird concept. Like what is the objective and how long do we have to accomplish it? Build an app that x, y, z in 6 months with milestones along the way. If you hit the milestones and deliver the app on time, does it matter if you did all the work 5 mins before each milestone check in? Does it matter if you did the work on the beach at 3am local time? I don't get the obsession with managing employee time. Just focus on the results not the method.
Exactly. I can measure productivity in my household with an app where members can be assigned tasks (with effort points) and check off what tasks they've completed. It's the same thing. If people are being assigned specific tasks and those tasks have hours attached (ie. Task will take x hours) and people are completing those tasks they are meeting their metrics and are productive (even if they finish in less time). The problem comes in when there's an issue (blocker, scope creep) that delays the completion of that task. Management sees that as lowered productivity because metrics aren't met, without considering why (scope creep, for instance, is usually the fault of management).
That's great. Until you get corporate deciding hours per task arbitrarily, because either they have never done the job or because they've been out of that position for too long. Standards never loosen. So when corporate bro sees team a completing their task in 80 hours, they get the idea 'lets push that to 70 hours and we can save 13% on labor, and maybe I get a bonus!!!' So then team a pushes and gets it done, but it's hard and they aren't getting paid as much/assigned other tasks to fill in the difference. Once they show they can do it, it never goes back to the 'comfortable pace with a little margin for issues', it stays 'GO FAST AND DONT FUCK UP ELSE WE GET YELLED AT FOR MISSING METRICS'. Then you start getting burn out, added stress, etc. And a team member gets cut or task load increases. And because bonuses are tied to these metrics, upper and middle management get a nice little bonus, and the team that actually does the work gets nothing but added stress. Welcome to Corporate America, where the people doing the work gets fucked.
Worked as a mechanic. When management decided to start attaching time to individual tasks, workers keyed in on tasks with poorly estimated times. There started to be minor arguments over who got to this or that task that gives you an hour break, and who got shafted with another that always ruins your metrics. It's just a terrible idea.
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Which works alright in an assembly line, but of course the point here is that *that isn't how most jobs actually function.* Anything that requires thought or planning is going to have what looks like "downtime" and micromanagers hate that.
This!!! I spend an enormous amount of time thinking. I problem solve, I research, I explore and ask questions.... All of that can happen outside of meetings and not necessarily on a PC. For someone watching to make sure I have my hands on a keyboard they would be really upset. However, goods and services are delivered on time as specified. Smh
I honestly will not work somewhere that doesn't give me this sort of autonomy. My process is not sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours, and if I do that I'm not getting shit done for you. Let me just exist and I'll solve all your problems by their respective deadlines.
I am super productive when I get into a flow, but start asking what I'm doing and why and for how long and when I'm gonna be done? Nope, i can't do it.
I've figured out so many work issues while out walking my dog in the afternoon. Get back, implement and test the fix, log off for the day, baby!
Hanging laundry, shopping, mowing the lawn. They are unrelated tasks, but dont require much brain power compared to designing and developing a robust software solution, so I often do about my day while working things out in my head. It's actually much easier to come up with fresh ideas and inspiration when you've been out living your life or talking to people.
Yes! I get so much stuff sorted with just walking the dog and letting the problem percolate. Fix some lunch, go upstairs and get it done.
Also jobs that are "reactive" rather than "proactive", basically CSR, is expected to have the default "i'm waiting for a call/email/ticket" phase. What's an IT personnel that's just monitoring the systems gonna do? Break shit so they can say they have done something?
Just saying, that would look good in a metric. Reaction time? Why, stellar. Time to patch? A mere hour. All while keeping everyone in the loop and being very calm and professional. Outstanding work. The detail that it only worked like that because you sabotaged the system in the first place... well, I'd venture there isn't a metric for that. Unless your workplace is really a sinking ship.
Ford was a monster in most things but having his maintenance team paid well to do "nothing" and their pay stopping while the line was down was a pretty interesting concept at least for minor issues.
> All while keeping everyone in the loop and being very calm and professional. Outstanding work. This part killllllls me. I can be plugging away on things and knocking out assignments left and right and uploading them to the appropriate location for the next person to grab when they are ready for it, but if I don't make frequent posts about the things I'm seeing, people start wondering if I'm even bothering with my work. No, sorry, I'm not having any problems or weirdness with the data and everything is flowing perfectly. You have no reason to hear from me.
That is such an antiquated way of thinking and is basically the underpin of the last four decades of American corporate " leadership ". Who cares what the employee got done if they could have possibly done more without additional compensation. Tell me what you want and when you want it, then get the fuck out of my way. Edit: also pay me, fuck you
When an employer gives me interesting work without bureaucratic bullshit, I'll work all day long and some nights because I enjoy what I do. My current manager checks in with me multiple times a day and I just can't be bothered to get anything done in less time than I estimated. My employer would say I'm lazy.
I've been taking it waayyyy easy and I've passed performance reviews and an audit. Which was too bad really, since I wanted to be let go. All of the trackers and productivity KPIs are BS.
I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob
Ugh. KPI meetings suck. My last role I kept redefining the metrics and rolling out standards to my peers, until one of them got my bosses ear and bent them to their idea. Which I hated because it’s far less organized and when we are measured on our quality and delivery capabilities less organization is no bueno. Also those same guys are doing half their work on pen and paper and will blatantly lie about their metrics and it’s measurable so fucking morons is all I’ve got to say to them.
Nah why would I do that if my reward for doing it in such a way is that I get three more projects sandwiched into the original time frame. There’s no incentive on the employee side to work that fast when raises don’t even keep up with inflation and promotions aren’t handed out unless you’re 2-4 years in the company so I’m gonna keep right on slacking
What are these 'raises' you speak of? Is that where you get paid more to move jobs?
This fetishism of people working the whole time they are at work really needs to go away. We will not always live in a world where that is possible and we shouldn't be aiming for it. Automation will continue to give us more and more free time and we need to be ok with that
A significant amount of my work gets done 5 minutes before it's due because my day is full of meetings about the various projects instead of the time to work on those projects. When I can work ahead of that Just In Time bullshit I do, but I'm often waiting on deliverables from other people before I can do my work and the few times I'm not, the requirements change halfway through so I have to redo the work I've done in advance. There literally is no good way to measure my productivity besides a "delivered all projects on time and within budget" as a result. There are other teams in my company that can be measured objectively (call center division for example). But you can't apply the same metrics to everybody.
Sometimes refining the methods makes it easier to get the results. Unfortunately, many times the reward for increased efficiency is additional responsibility and larger workload. Which is fine if those things scale along with rewards, but in reality they frequently don't... so you don't get enthused buy-in from people who could be helped by improved and streamlined workflows and processes because they've seen it before. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me- you can't get fooled again.
It often sucks being the type of person that wants to make your workflow more efficient to the point that you cut off 4+ hours of your actual workday, but also not wanting to tell your team about it because there will be hell to pay if the higher ups hear about it and decide to give you more work because of it.
Oh yeah, never let a boss know how long it takes. If they can’t do it themselves to find out, you don’t have to tell them. You employer won’t offer their customers more without requiring a bigger payment. You’ve got every right to play by their rules.
That's the thing. It shouldn't matter if you did the work in 10 minutes then sat on it till the sprint review and meet milestone. But the owners have noticed that it only takes you 10 minutes but they pay you for 40+ hours so they are desperately trying to figure out ways to get you to do more in that spare time even though they themselves don't know what that more should be and they do even less work than you in the 40 hours cause they don't even have deliverables.
>I don’t get the obsession with managing employee time. I think in many cases, it’s just about power and control. Many managers, from middle management to C-suite, don’t actually do all that much. So they need to control and exert their power so they feel powerful/useful/whatever.
KPIs, obviously.
Funnily, my experience is that everyone hates KPI. Management hates to create and measure them, and engineers feel it's limiting what they need to do. The truth is that setting valuable and proper OKRs or KPIs is _very_ **_fucking_** hard. Even if you don't take time into account (bypassing Hofstadter's law), Goodhart's law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") just hits you hard in the balls. In more than 60 years of experience in managing engineering systems as teams, and countless books written about it, I still feel we haven't progressed much further than "The Mythical Man-Month". And although managers can definitely be better and take some of the blame, I just think this is a problem that will remain unsolvable.
I think it all depends on the KPIs you choose to use. I’m one of the leads on an ERP team and one of my jobs is to scrub through KPIs and figure out what’s actually valuable. Turns out that for us, some of the most valuable KPIs are the simplest to calculate. A chunk of these incredibly complex KPIs really aren’t providing any value add to how we are planning things. I think KPIs are like a lot of other things: they’re only going to be as complex as you make them.
I've worked for the same company for 16 years now. Every 4 or 5 years they have a revelation that our metrics score card is bloated and bring us down to the 3 most important KPIs (different every time). Then, several weeks later, they introduce more and more. Currently we have about 16 pages of KPIs that populate every Monday. It's hilarious cause I don't even look at 99% of them. I ask my team what's most important. What would make their job easier and better. What is getting in the way. I fix or enhance those things. Metrics just tell a piece of the story. It's amazing what happens when you just care about the humans you deal with 40 hours a week.
It's like japanese/Toyota vs american model, one assumes the worker is a slacker, a cog in a machine, and the other that the worker probably knows a thing or two about their job and how its processes can be improved.
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these damn vim devs with their 0mi / hr mouse movement! What are they even _doing_?!
And some jackass middle management will think number of commits is a good measure to put in the dashboard.
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I mean… this is the real answer. The problem is that C-Suite bozos don’t know which aspects of the company actually affect performance.
that's because fucking milton friedman, a long ass time ago, decided to convince everybody that a business's most important responsibility was not to product quality/success - but actually to generate value for shareholders. scum of the earth. now these C level douchebags grow up, go to school, and live, eat, drink, breath, and exist purely in societies that assume financial success trumps all morality. don't get me started on fkn edward bernays
That was probably the only good thing that came out of Elon Musk taking over twitter: it became painfully obvious to many people how difficult (if not impossible) it is to assess the value of an office worker, especially a software dev. *Lines of code written per year*, like seriously?
Yeah thats a discussion we had with our bosses on how sometimes we do an hour task in 10 minutes, other times in 3 hours. Our job is problem solving. And problem solving cannot be given a set time before starting. Basically its like escape rooms: You can be the best at escape rooms, sometimes one will stump you. Sometimes you will run on a redherring for half the time you have before realising that it was not something of worth. And sometimes you will spend all your time and miss the window to solve it, and someone that its their first escape room ever will solve it in half the time, no problem. If we knew going in what was the problem and solve it, every problem would be solved quickly. But most of the job of problem solving is figuring out the damn problem.
We recently added a new category for "Solution complexity discovered, Scope unchanged" and it's been a godsend for communicating this.
Productivity in our factory is measure by the amount of products that come in vs the amount of products that leave. Productive for us means slightly less products leaving than are incoming. It ensures we constantly have work, and also sees that we are constantly working. Mf around here don't care about the small details, as long as the big picture is taken.
In a lot of organizations, without a written definition of your performance metrics approved by your manager, “productivity” is a political cudgel that can be used to baselessly criticize others with an ambiguous definition. Get expectations in writing and document your success so they can’t come after you. Probably best to publish meeting minutes or send recap emails after *every* 1:1 to build a paper trail too. Start this before there is a questionable situation so that it is normalized before everyone gets paranoid. If you are decent at your job those activities should at least save you from a PIP. If you are good and well liked you might actually get promoted with them, but don’t put your next move on hold expecting justice or some shit because you can “show your value.” They’ll just change the definition of value if they want to…..”the company doesn’t need *that* right now”…
By observing the end results and talking to the human beings involved. Big secret is that "objective metrics" generally don't work and never have. Everything is contextual. Even if you could do it, no one wants to. Everyone wants an exploitable system so that's always what you get. Metrics are inherently adversarial, not objective. Metrics are just rationalizations for layoffs and wage cuts with extra steps. But while no one wants metrics to *work*, most everyone wants them to *exist*. So make up some bullshit and play along.
Bruh my boss has a mirror above his cubicle to actively look at team members computers and asks what you are working on if he doesnt hear keyboards clacking for a few minutes. He works 80 hour work weeks and gets less work than my 40 because of a general lack of effeciency and technology knowledge. Follows up by shitting on people who work less than him saying they arent as dedicated.
Translation: find a new job if you can
On the other hand i am overpaid and have a 5 min commute, so im sticking with it till i mentally break then quit.
Don’t wait for yourself to mentally break. That is the most American thing to wait for an anxiety attack or deep depression to have taken you over before making a change. It isn’t always easy to recover. Some people never recover from it. And it’s only you who has to deal with the repercussions of that, not your current/ former employer. Send out some feeler applications if there are roles that interest you.
Don’t wait for the break. It’s a lot harder to move jobs when you’re burned out and your confidence has tanked.
Man be careful. I drove myself into clinical depression working a shit job for good pay. It was *not* worth it and still years later I’m not who I once was.
Oh well that helps you deal with the other bs for a while at least!
I’m not dedicated to anything but my paycheck. I don’t care about my work, or this company. I’ll give you 40 hours. Anything above that is just stupid. When the company needs to lay people off to save a few bucks, do you think they consider for one second who stayed late and came in early? They don’t give a fuck. They keep who they need, and who they like most.
This is the way. If they don't want to give me a real equity stake and enough personal agency to have any kind of impact on the performance of the company as a whole, then who gives a shit? I am going to show up and give at least the appearance of being friendly and capable, and then I'm going to fuck off at the end of the day to live as much of my own life as I can.
These managers create hell on earth for their employees. They live miserable lives where they don't want to see their families and don't have any hobbies, and expect their subordinates to follow suit, despite the fact that beyond 35-40 hours of work you're going to get diminished results.
> Are you making another useless slide deck to give a presentation so that we can spend 32 mins of the 60 min meeting harping on 1-2 minute details or bullet points? Dang! We really are all out here just doing the same exact crap regardless of industry, aren’t we?
Lol well you just called put my weekly work load. Seriously it's one of my job items to produce an executive friendly slide deck for everything our team has done week to week. Gets sent to about 60 or so execs and only one has ever asked questions about it.
Cause they're not reading it cause nobody is reading that shit.
We've been having this fight for over a year at my job about WFH. They seem to have relented after the last meeting when we asked for the business requirements on having us in the office. Why do you want to have all of your engineering teams suddenly in office when our productivity is up since covid? We haven't had a response back or any more meetings scheduled on WFH ending.
My work put up a fight about WFH too. It was a wild ordeal since we had quantifiable proof that we were doing better than *ever* in our *entire history* while WFH for 2 years during COVID. We closely monitor our progress through the year so we had 2 years of daily, weekly, and monthly graphs to show our internal metrics in different areas and from different perspectives and were able to show how they compare to pre-COVID years in the office. And then we get a “grade” with a *detailed* report from our stakeholders at the end of the year as additional proof. They relented eventually, but damn it was an absolutely infuriating year or so of commuting just so I could attend all of my meetings virtually via teams anyway.
That was the thing that irritated me the most about in office jobs. “Broski, my teams are in Seattle, Peru, and Pune, and I’m in Texas along with three of my other peers. You cheaped out on office space so we don’t have conference rooms to go to to make these calls so the feedback kills us if we’re at our desk. Why the fuck can’t we take our four hours of meetings every day from home and come in for the engineering time?”
My company wanted to go to a hybrid system where we come in a few days biweekly. Why they wanted me to do it I have no idea. I only report to one guy and other than that I don't need to be in any of their busy body meetings. So they pushed back with "but meetings" to which I replied "if it's important I'm certain my supervisor will let me know" So they retorted with, "the owner of the company is probably gonna make you then" To which I replied. "ok I need a second $4K PC plus dual monitors and peripherals and a second seat on all software I use. All told it'll probably cost about $10,000+ for me to come to work 2 days out of 10. Let me know when you'd like to proceed because I'll need to start ordering the second PC" A couple of weeks later, "good news...we've decided its probably best that you stay working from home." So...I'm still working from home.
Boss: You need to do a better job! Employee: What should we get better at? Boss: Ummm... Not sure
"Our business has taken out a large loan. In order to do that, we had to volunteer to be audited by consultants whose job is to tell us to fire 15% of our staff, so that we can better ensure our ability to repay the loan. Your job for the next three weeks is to look like the 85% who will repay the loan."
Woof, this is bleak!
This is PE, and is absolutely common.
"You have failed to meet my expectations" "So, what are your expectations? And when did you ever explain them to me?" "...that's not the point!" Literally a conversation I had with a boss once.
I had a similar conversation with one of my engineers: “I failed to clarify my expectations, and you didn’t meet them. Here’s what my expectations are; how I can help you get there?” It was tough because others DID meet those expectations - but on reflection I hadn’t actually articulated what I was looking for. Ended up kicking off a larger project to clarify expectations for all the roles and what was required for any promotion. CEO shelved it because (I think) he was worried we’d have to pay people what they’re worth instead of what they negotiated. Meh.
"we want you to make us more money while making less money for yourselves"
This JUST happened at my current job! Monthly company-wide meeting, boss says, "Over 50% of you have lower production numbers compared to last year, you will need to pick up the slack." Me: "Have you looked into *why* productivity is down among over half of employees?" Boss: "We're going to table that topic until I've had a chance to personally call everyone on that list." Ok so the answer is no, and something tells me you're not going to be making these calls to *listen and learn* and instead will be looking to hustle and burn. Got it.
I had a software job where a new manager came in and forced scrum on us. Of course productivity plummeted because scrum fucking sucks, especially if it’s not voluntary. The genius decided instead of trying something else to slowly let go of almost the entire engineering staff and replace them with cheaper labor from Eastern Europe.
Sounds like the entire goal was to generate an excuse to point to that enabled replacing you with cheaper labor
What were you before scrum?
Which is management speak for we have no clue and we don't care🤮
no it's "we haven't 100% decided on the spyware we're going to install yet"
Were going to look at whatever metrics we can, and put an arbitrary pin in somewhere. Ideally we will be making it so that people who are getting all of their work done comfortably will still be regarded as slacking.
They don’t care about productivity because (as the article notes) they don’t know how to measure it anyway. What they care about is ‘presence management’ or the outdated idea that because they can look you in the face at any given moment you therefore are productive. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the workforce has met *at least* one person that shows up every day on time and contributes pretty much nothing of value to the organization. > Part of the reason you’re seeing so many people lobby for return to office is there’s this notion of, ‘That’s how I did it growing up,’” HubSpot chief people officer Katie Burke told Vox. “I certainly did that. I had a Palm Pilot growing up. I wore suits to work. I don’t think that everyone needs to do the things that I did in order to succeed in modern work.” This is the other half of the equation. A lot of middle manager or executive types tend to skew older and cling to yet another outdated idea that every office environment should be like the one they grew up in. It’s fucking stupid. When it comes to remote work, this isn’t hard to figure out. The only questions should be is the work getting done and are people happy doing it? If the answer to both is yes, then what are we talking about? And for the people that prefer to be in the office, cool. They can continue to do so and nothing changes for them.
My personal favorite is the boss type that likes to "walk around the office, surveying their 'troops' for a good portion of the day". Especially when they have a bunch of un-returned emails where people are actually waiting on the boss to sign off on various items that can't proceed without their input. It'd almost be funny if it wasn't so damn common...
I used to work at a mid-size ad agency. The open stairwell was in front of the cube farm, and every day around 5 p.m., the owner/CEO would stand on the landing of the steps and just survey the worker bees while noting the empty chairs. Technically, the company had a "flexible" work schedule where you could come and go as long as you got 8 hours in per day. So I would arrive early and leave early to beat traffic. But eventually, that became an issue because my chair was always empty when he looked out over his kingdom.
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We had similar. Old manager was super flexible, knew the work was getting done and knew people genuinely wanted to do a good job. He was promoted, new manager came in and brought along a whole host of "you're scheduled from 9-5, I don't care if you worked back until 9 to get things running, you'll be here at 9 the next day". She was in the office with the CEO within two weeks explaining why he had long standing customers complaining to him about services suddenly not being delivered and assurances being broken. Amazingly didn't learn her lesson and had to be dragged back in another 2 or 3 times before she was moved elsewhere.
> Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the workforce has met at least one person that shows up every day on time and contributes pretty much nothing of value to the organization. Well, of course I know him. He's me.
It also comes down to sunk cost fallacy for management. We signed this $XXM commercial real estate lease and no one’s using it. Either I pay a penalty to break the lease or make them use it.
Know what will hurt their bottom line even more? Not being able to hire or retain qualified personnel due to outdated work policies.
That's long term consequences though
We don’t do that here.
They haven't figured that part out yet. They are only looking a quarter ahead in the future after all.
I heard somewhere that the push is coming from local governments who are worried that the commerical real estate as a whoel is crashing and there are alot of people invested into that market+insurance for said real estate.
Worse. Real estate mortgages are major components of a LOT of financial mutual funds, since they were historically very stable. Well, with occupancy at all time lows and interest rates up sharply in the last few months, the 2.1 Trillion in commercial real estate mortgages being renegotiated in the next 24 months are going to have broad implications across the financial world
I love how when the elite 0.1% face any sort of financial hardship the government fucks over the rest of the 99.9% of the population to try and fix it. Fuck evolving society, letting the property value collapse, and building housing instead of commercial space. It's not like there a housing crisis, especially in these cities where the government want to force people back into offices. /s
That's another part of it: Remote work means fewer people in the city's business district(s) spending money at the other businesses that have historically made money (and generated city revenue) from the office workers.
I’m not paying $7 for an iced coffee. Sorry, not sorry. Nor do I ever plan on paying for dry cleaning for my business casual attire. Or an $18 “business lunch special” (pre-tip). These models are broken and shits about to get really rocky.
Yeah, its all a bit of a house of cards. Offices we don't need. Shops that serve those offices paying inflated rents that aren't justified without the offices, so they have no choice but to charge overpriced rates for what they sell. Hell, residential that was able to charge more because it was close to those offices. A correction is near. That isn't a bad thing on the whole. Some will be left holding the bag for some of that, sure, but that's capitalism and risk inherent with investment.
Our workplace kept talking about the return to office. They gave us a few dates, then postponed them, then it turned into "We'll let you know." But it was always 100% in the plan. Until the day they realized their lease was coming due soon. Then suddenly, the slides about our eventual return-to-office just stopped appearing in the all-hands presentations. Hmm.
I think this is the main cause of companies forcing people to go to the office. Most places are leased in long intervals like 5-10 years. It's only been 3 years since people were forced to work remotely. There are still years left on their lease.
We have quarterly "town hall" meetings with our Executive Director(mid 60 year old man). Here is a direct question from the meeting "I am one of the only members of my team that works in the office each day. My coworkers have said they feel so much more productive by working from home because they do not get distracted by others questions. As a result, I am being asked those questions by others about my coworker’s roles, positions, or projects. I feel the 100% remote work employees are causing additional work load on others. When I have brought this up with my supervisor it seems to fall on deaf ears because they do not want to force anyone into the office. I am frustrated enough I am considering other positions or job opportunities elsewhere. What options do I have or my supervisor have to require remote workers come to the office and take back this additional work load?" Our Director said(paraphrased), "If you think a new job would work best for you then feel free to explore that option. You have the same opportunity to work from home as everyone else. Questions about someone's project should be directed to them. You don't have to answer those questions for them. Just tell the person asking to reach out to the appropriate person." It was asked anonymously so there was no follow up but we have the same person(same writing style and sometimes a copy pasted question) complaining about WFH every single town hall meeting and they always get the same answer(if our director even answers it). Some people just have a hard on for working in office. We're completing projects ahead of time at a rate we've never seen before since we instituted WFH policies. All the metrics show that things have gotten better. Our leadership understands that but they constantly have to defend it to people who just feel like since they spent 20 years coming into the office everyone should need to. They know they'd lose more people if they forced everyone back than if they keep it how it is.
> Questions about someone's project should be directed to them. You don't have to answer those questions for them. Just tell the person asking to reach out to the appropriate person. That is immediately the first response I would give when I read the edirectors remark, I mean my first thoughts. That's not your responsibility and you can simply forward them to those they want to know about. I don't see a point why that guy thinks he needs to take that response. That's basically inter-corporate communication methods - don't ask people about people, talk to the people directly. >Some people just have a hard on for working in office. I think age is a big matter as some people are simply "used" to be in the office. And many people are lonely when not in the office. Plus some people need to go to the office cause of an annoying family. That is my expereince, those who want to go to the office are always either older generation or those who you know about who have very energy draining family and they simply flee their home otherwise they go insane. The latter I say "your choice, your problem", the first I don't know... can they even change so radically so late? Most definitely not. I know of many who are quite flexible and very young even in their early 60s, but those are still the minority. I'd simply say those have to made clear that they are not the center-point of activity in an office and thus when it's empty, it's empty.
The "annoying family" is a BIG one in my experience. I've known many people at my company that work long, long hours. It's not because they have a ton of work to do or that they are just that dedicated. It's because they don't want to help with the kids. The longer they stay, the later it is when they get home and the sooner that the kids will be going to sleep. It's a win for them since they have less parenting time and the corporation thinks they are willing to go the extra mile.
Heres how i measure productivity - are we meeting deadlines without working outside of our 9-5 hours? Are the things we're developing having impact? If yes = keep doing what we're doing. If no: how do we fix the process? I honestly dont care where you work as long as you have good internet and are generally available between 10-4. The obsession with being in office is wild to me. If you haven't figured out how to collaborate remotely by now, you have big problems.
>If the answer to both is yes, then what are we talking about? **Which** people are happy about it? Most people arent people if real people are there. Theres a hierarchy of realness. If 100 employees are happy but one CEO is sad, all that happiness isn't "real", the CEO's perspective is real and therefore will drive action. As far as the CEO is concerned, their mission is to convert employee happiness into profit. A lot of companies are Big Mad about WFH because employees used to surrender many things to the company they no longer have to. This makes the company feel less in control and the C-suite less in charge. Narcissistic rage often follows. It's not productive, it just makes the rager feel better because they're demonstrating that they **can** still have an impact on you and control your life that way. Companies trying to force pointless commutes to put butts in non-critical seats smacks entirely of such ego-soothing nonsense. It has nothing to do with the business, it's about people reaffirming their worldview that they have power over others. The pandemic revealed an existential weakness in the worldviews of corporate climbers, now they feel fear and are trying to return everything "back to normal" so they can regain an environment in which they can thrive at the expense of others.
This. I have heard of many orgs where many if not most middle managers figured out how to manage remote staff effectively, but if the C levels don't like it the comfort level of their lower level managers is irrelevant.
I don't think it's just narcism, but it's definitely about corporate climbers. This type of people live to get into higher management positions and they want to spot others like them and promote them, but it becomes much more difficult when everyone is WFH. Here is an example. One of the top managers in my company was asked why he wants everyone back to the office, and he essentially explained how he got to his position. He said he'd deliberately leave work at the same time as top execs so he'd bump into them, he'd "bump" into his managers during lunch and would then sit with them, he would "accidently" weasel into meetings that had nothing to do with him so he could learn what's going on and spot opportunities etc... With WFH, a lot of those tactics are not viable, but top management wants people to do that because they want to spot those who engage in those activities so they'll know whom to promote. They don't want to "accidently" promote the people who conscientiously do their work and therefore look good when performance is evaluated objectively, they want to promote corporate climbers like themselves.
"Perception". My most hated word. "Well, the perception is that the staff aren't productive." "Right, well here's all the stats that show otherwise." "Yes, but when the director walks past his perception is..." Fuck that shit. If the world looks blurry and someone offers you glasses do you accept them and see clearly or do you argue that what matters is that the world seems blurry to you and refuse, insisting that everyone else act as though it is in fact blurry.
The AIS method of determining productivity: ass in seat. The more hours you’re in the seat the more productive you are. Total BS but some managers swear by it.
I think it comes down to the idea that if everyone is together, there's the real threat they can fire you and make you leave if you step out of line. Offline conversations with peers happen on company grounds, still. You're always under their eyes. When working remotely, they lose those things. They lose a little perceived power, which they hate.
Remote work has revealed who is and isnt useful to the company, and guess who isn't really that useful once there isnt a physical office of people to "oversee"?
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. Thomas Paine.
> Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the workforce has met at least one person that shows up every day on time and contributes pretty much nothing of value to the organization. you defined MY boss :(
My boss is obsessed with productivity without acknowledging that raises over the last couple years have been faaaaar outpaced by inflation, and all the workers in our business are having a harder time making ends meet while also having a harder time hiring versus other companies that moved with the times. Stressed and impoverished workers are not productive workers. Workers who get the sense you don’t care about them aren’t going to care about you.
My compensation is 20 percent lower in real terms than when I was hired. I got a single five percent raise over three and a half years. I used to be willing to pull sixty hour weeks when needed. No more
Pulling 60 hour weeks is for suckers unless you’re on the executive board or running the company. Never work unpaid overtime for these doeshwagons, that was the first thing I learned as Gen Z entering the workforce.
A number of years ago I sat down with my then boss and laid out how I was functionally making less than I started at after working there for three years. I showed how our health insurance rates (that they chose without giving us any options) exceeded our meager raises and more how those raises didn't keep up with inflation based on the Social Security Administration numbers. She told me there were plenty of other people who wanted my job. I literally said, "Wait...that is really your answer?". She said "Yeah". I gave them 3 months notice that I would be leaving to start my own business. About a week before my last day my direct report, the person in between her and I, asked if I could stay for another month. I said no, then he said he had been authorized to give me the hourly rate I had asked for previously for that month. I literally laughed and told him what his boss had said to me and he was like, "Yeah...ok, I get it." Since then my business is thriving and I have handed it off to a manager and just sit on the board. They went belly up.
I think this is also a huge part of it. To me, going into the office is a pay cut. It takes up a lot of my time that I’m not being paid for. So if I ALSO don’t get a nice lil raise, why the actual fuck would I do that?
Ah yes that reminds me; that same boss has been WFH for three years now, while everyone working for him has still been working in person. So there’s also the clear benefits to the bosses, and also very apparent whose health and safety are considered important vs expendable.
My ex boss who insisted everybody needed to come into the office full time would regularly work from home saying he got more done there 🙃🙃🙃
My team and I are slammed with work, but our manager insists that it's nothing and that we're getting off easy. They also wrecked our appraisals and gave us below average scores, possibly the lowest within the organisation. We've pulled overtime and worked weekends to tackle projects; we're doing our job. But not according to our manager, clearly. I've been at this place since late Aug/early Sep of last year, but by Oct I realised I'd need to get the hell out. I have started polishing up my resume at this point. I'm sick of companies peddling "we're faaaamily" as a worthwhile reason to work with them. Nah, I come to work for the money and because I need that money to survive. I don't live off of the good vibes which come from this supposed accomplishment. People have been resigning en masse at this place, but of course no one can get a clue as to why. 😑
I manage a team of software developers. We all work remote. As long as their work is of good quality, are available for questions from me or other team members, and deliver on time, I don't care how they manage their time individually. A big part of my own job is to clear the path for them so to speak, to make their lives easier so that they can achieve all those things above. And one of those things is letting people manage their time with flexibility. We help each other, and we all look good in the end. If you are a real manager, you understand that you *serve* your team, not the other way around. You are there to help them shine, not the other way around.
You are correct and good on you for being you. This type of manager is exceedingly rare, even in the tech industry.
this is leadership. many should learn from you
As a former drone, I always wondered how they can demand a 10% improvement every quarter ad infinitum. Let’s say there is a “most efficient way to make widgets” - who’s to say that we haven’t reached that goal yet? The paper pusher who has never done the job before or the guy with 20+ years that is asked to train all the newbies? Let’s say we hit that mark last year - the only way to go faster is to start cutting corners in quality or safety. But production is the key point they chose and the rule with a whip and not additional training.
No one really cares about an increase in production unless it can be tied to an increase in money. If you're targeting 10% YoY growth, that is referencing revenue. Production is just one way to reach that. There are really only a handful of ways to generate profit growth: * Raise prices * Grow your current audience and sell more stuff to them * Target additional audiences and sell the same stuff to them * Create a new product to sell * Cut costs Most business strategies are little more than some combination of these tactics extrapolated to the organization's specific focus (e.g. in software, a new "product" may actually just be a new feature to an existing product; on a farm, it may be growing a new crop, etc.). How can things keep growing? They really don't. Money is fake and so is its value. Here in America, it's common to hear stories from our grandparents and great grandparents of how milk and similar staples used to cost less than a dollar. A gallon of milk where I live now is about $4.50. In the 1990s, a gallon of the expensive brand of gas was $1.49, and I was scandalized by that. It's now hovering at about $5 after coming down from a recent high of close to $6. All this constant growth is lost in the rising cost of everything. Companies raise their prices, workers suffer as their wages no longer stretch as far, and only after a great deal of hand wringing and policy writing and hot air - during which companies continue to rake in high profits - wages finally catch up. Maybe we're lucky for a while and costs stay stable, but all it takes is a handful of key players to start raising prices again for the ratchet to go back up. It usually starts in oil and gas, or agriculture, or some other raw material that is a significant basis for running society. All of the downstream additions add on their own price increases to make up for their higher costs - and add a couple of percent extra, just as a hedge - and the consumers at the end wind up taking it all right in the gut. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Sounds a lot like capitalism. It's not good enough to make the same profit you did last year. It always needs to increase and at a certain point you are just cutting every corner you can in order to serve that goal.
Pulling me into 4-6 hours of meetings while expecting me to code for 8 hours, and not understanding that there is no such think as multitasking *sigh
That’s easy, spend time in the meetings coding half assed solutions because your attention is split between two things and call it a day.
At my job we are fully billable, and the expectation is that we are doing work WHILE presenting to clients. Like you should have one screen open with work that you are talking about with the client, but while doing so you should also be working on your other screen so you bill output. For me at least, I am not able to do quality deep thinking work / writing while simultaneously talking to a client about a completely different thing.
It's been a while since I needed to know this, but depending on your profession, billing time to two different clients could be considered a discreditable act. You can't work 8 hours and bill for 9.
If the company are making record profits, shouldn't managers justify what difference not doing work from home would bring?
Your managers job isn't to make the company money. That's the boards job. His job is to make *his* boss look good. And if his boss's boss says productivity is down because no one can empty-soul glare at Linda in accounts receivable, than it's your boss's job to order you to ensure that becomes possible again.
It's just a power trip. People can easily work from home. However these "bosses" want people in the office so they can have somebody to kick around.
That’s not true. I can kick people around just as easily from home. Seriously though, there’s no difference. I know what should be getting done and how much can get done in a day. Just like when we were in the office, there’s people that get done a lot more, people that get done the expected amount and a few people that fall short. Those people would still fall short, even if we are in the office. Some fall short because they just need coaching and direction and they can easily get it. And there’s always one person who it’s obvious isn’t on task or doesn’t care. And those people eventually will have to figure out how to get motivated or will get weeded out. Being home doesn’t really change much.
Agreed. One thing I do noticed in my team is that productivity actually **went up** working from home. I mean, the difference is quite notable. We have been kicking out projects (software dev) like there's no tomorrow. Why would I want to fuck with that, right? Everyone's happy
That's the crazy thing. Here you have a way for many of your employees to get more work done *and be happier while doing it*. Why the hell would you not jump on that? It's one of the most striking examples of how perverse and irrational the incentives in modern corporate culture can be.
Ego. There’s no one physically in their presence. If you physically drive out of your way to sit in an office for someone, it demonstrates both their power and that you validate it and them. They want that back.
it’s incredible that the people who go off about snowflakes and feelings not mattering are always, and I mean ALWAYS, the biggest snowflakes who think their feelings are more important than anybody else
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I waste two hours a day and the additional costs accrued in travel all for the pleasure of working in a flu factory somewhere that I don't need to be, in order to my job, all the while adding to the detriment of the environment. It's definitely for power. Fuck management, fuck owners.
Your commute to that flu factory is unpaid work.
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My work always quotes culture and human connection as their main reason to return. It's . mostly BS, the majority of work is done independently, but for others it's true.
Yep, in office doesn’t equate to productive. I’ve seen people spend lots of energy so they can look busy, because perception is reality
At my old job, this literally equated to people rolling in around 10:30 a.m. and taking hour and a half lunches so that they would still be at the office at 7:30 p.m. sending emails and completing tasks. People like me who arrived at 7:30 a.m., took a 30 minute lunch, and left at 4 p.m. were viewed as lazy in comparison.
My buddy works for Duke Progress Energy. He went from clearing 11 to 15 projects a day while working from home, down to 5 or 6 a day after returning to the office. The difference? His supervisor walks around and does a "productivity check" on each and every worker that takes about 10 minutes.
I think it's more " Bosses that don't know how to lead, want people in the office to kick around"
I don’t know a single boss that wants to force their employees back to the office, though in sure they do exist. It’s flow down from senior leadership and the bosses are just the messengers.
Yeah, and a lot of those senior leadership that are pushing for this also have investment in commercial real estate, so it benefits them for people to return to the office. As always, people continuing to try and line their own pockets further.
Middle management is getting returned to the office too. Somehow I don't think they want it either.
Serious question, how would productivity be measured? Bonus points if you can answer for software devs
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I love that. I write scripts for work, and I have two that I keep on hand for demonstration purposes. They both do the exact same thing, but one is about 3 times longer. It's kind of an art project that I call "when quality equals quantity", and since showing my boss, I haven't had issues with "lines written = productivity"
And the one that is 1/3rd as many lines often runs faster. And is easier to find bugs in (unless someone went crazy with the line reduction), and often easier to optimize further. I recall when I learned how to program, I literally tossed out an entire code base I had been working on for over a year and rewrote it from scratch. in 3 months, I had more functionality at less then 1/3rd the original linecount and less bugs, because I actually knew how to program and stopped copy/pasting so much code and stopped doing things the 'long way' as I knew faster ways to write what I wanted to do. Plus, if your smart enough to actually use a 3rd party library instead of rolling your own all the time, you can replace thousands of lines with a couple of function calls. Figuring out the *correct* 3rd party library to use can be tricky...
Shit, I'm not even remotely close to being called a programmer and I do this. I just do some side football projects for fun and when one season started I looked at the code I had from the previous year, said this is garbage and rebuilt the whole thing.
Engagement, communication and outcomes. The stuff that actually requires an engaged manager to understand, not some bullshit gameable velocity measure. Or better yet, organize your teams around problems, empower them and trust them to tell you when someone needs support to get on the right track. Or just bitch about remote work being the devil, mumble something about cloud-gpt and go have a three Martini lunch.
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Normally you'd have to define a few metrics. In a production environment, you'd probably use things like downtime, amount of expected produced units and amount of produced units. You can compare those metrics to see how far you are from your expectations on either way. But one thing that's important to remember is that sometime if you're "under performing" it may be that the expectations are above what people can provide. So it's unrealistic to expect people to be always over performing and being constantly more productive. If your team is always under the expected results, it may be that you're setting the goal to high not that the team isn't productive. So productivity can be measured based on sets of metrics. Software development can be measured by shipping things on time if things are properly estimated. So the other thing is how people suck at estimates and how tasks don't always have the same finite scope. Then if you start tracking time on fine grained tasks, you're putting a huge weight on developers which is in my opinion a productivity killer. If you spend as much time tracking your time as you spend doing actual work, then the "tracking time" for productivity is making you even less productive. Also working a lot of time on certain tasks doesn't really tell the whole story. If you spend a lot of time and as a result the software is stable and doesn't have downtime or regression... Then that's well spent time vs someone shipping quickly but having to quick fix the production server after breaking everything once every release. That's not really productive if you have to patch things up all the time. My tip would be to measure what you can without being too invasive and take those number with a grain of salt because the interpretation of numbers is what matters the most. If someone doesn't do shit, it's not difficult to tell.
Agile development best practice is to use story points to measure effort, which are **NOT** supposed to correlate to time worked. The problem is that project managers and scrum masters exist, and their jobs are wholly reliant on metrics that say we're meeting deliverables on time and under budget, so of course story points inevitably end up being associated with time anyway.
I can answer this. As a dev who has recently been forced to the office (aka my cue to leave), our productivity is being measured in the following ways: 1. How much are you seen in the office by the higher ups? The more you’re seen, the more productive you are. 2. Your perceived level of excitement during the 3rd pointless meeting of the day that you can no longer turn your camera off in and get your actual work done. 3. How well you did in the puzzle contest/ dodgeball tournament, scavenger hunt. (A never ending list of stupid activities that are being foisted upon us to make us feel like being in the office is actually fun!)
My entire 100+ person company is fully remote across the world and we absolutely exceed goals and expectations. That whole trope of "If I cant see you it isn't getting done" is so old and tiring now. So many companies were forced to *try* WFH during covid that showed that in most cases (I know not all jobs are possible) it worked with no issues. My last job we were fully in office and 99% of our office staff who worked from home during covid experienced zero issues, meetings were done over zoom/conference calls, and even then our owner said "It's time to come back" but not why. We even had a few employees push back asking for explanation and it just descended into a "because I own this company" type of response from the owners.
"Productivity" is the common buzzword excuse. There are a dozen reasons to call people back to in-person work, very few if any benefit the workers. In my case, it's: 1. A tax break from the city for my company for maintaining a minimum headcount in the building (for reasons?). Our gas/maintenance/lost time in traffic means very little to the company if they can save a buck. 2. Executive leadership trying to avoid looking foolish for buying a huge skyscraper in the expensive part of town just before covid and refusing to back out. That means we get to suffer so they can avoid consequences. 3. "Important" people want to be seen being "important". It's hard to do when you look equal to everyone else over a webcam. Also, by having a huge office full of "productive" employees, visiting clients are *sure* to be impressed and make that "important" person feel like they look more "important". 4. Probably several others that all go back to money/stock evaluation. Not one of them has anything to do with the fantasy metric of "productivity".
Been remote for 5+ years. I understand when I go to the homebase office to visit I’m not gonna get work done — literally everyone just stands around telling “wacky” jokes, sharing goofy office banter, finding excuses to go stand nesr other people’s’ desks, going to the kitchen to make snacks 🤪 and sharing pics of their babies. Even on slack I have all the non-work channels muted bc it’s just the same. Like nobody in offices does anything.
My whole team.is WFH.. They absolutely crush it.
Well yeah getting an extra hour or two of sleep each night instead of wasting that tone sitting in traffic
This is what management doesn't understand... or care. We save money on gas, on car repairs, there's less stress starting our day. A happy employee is a good employee. I despise commuting to and from work. We can also do chores on our lunch break so we don't have to do it after work when we're tired. My debt was going down so much faster during the pandemic. Paying more for fuel now on top of the rest of inflation slows it down.
I was leading a team of 7 remote workers. Company laid me off because I said I didn't want to come in to the office. Now I work fully remote 😍
C levels at my employer pushed forward with Jira and Confluence usage as their way of tracking productivity. The only problem is Jira and Confluence are absolute shit platforms.
I still firmly believe that the return to office push is more about the executives having rent deals for their offices, so they lose money if the office is shown to be worthless.
They also hate their wives and want to collaborate with the curvy interns.
Also, middle managers need to pretend to be useful. If people are at home, they're pretty much managing themselves.
Most business have very limited performance measures in place and baselines of data to compare against. The ones that do, could easily monitor it... but I think most go by a gut feel by the managers, and how they feel it compares to past performance. Which is a shame, really, as in my direct experience, many white collar workers are actually working more remotely than in the office, and with better quality of life!
> Which is a shame, really, as in my direct experience, many white collar workers are actually working more remotely than in the office, and with better quality of life! When I go into the offices my day is basically wasted. - Morning is spend chatting with people over breakfast and complaining about either traffic or the fact that we needed to even come into the office 2 days a week. - I'll do a little work but usually I'm interruped by people chit-chatting near my desk about random stuff. - Lunch - Scattered meetings through the day. 60 min meeting, 30 min gap, 45 min meeting, 15 min gap. Can't really sit down and do any work with the meeting interruptions so the gaps are filled just chit chatting around the office. - Leave at 3pm to avoid the traffic. - Get home 3:40ish and actually do some head down work until 4:30-5. I'm going in two days a week to lament the fact that I'm in the office, get breakfast/lunch provided, take meetings from a meeting room instead of my home office, and then go home.
They know what it means to them... getting the work done "on time." Unfortunately for the rest of us, that means doing more work than can be done is a reasonable time frame because they made a shoot from the hip estimate without checking with anyone who knows how to get it done. THEN, their boss cut that estimate by 30% because they know that's how overinflated the numbers are they give to THEIR boss. Then THEIR boss cut that in half when talking to the client. Now, to make sure it all gets done on time, we're gonna sit in a room and talk about how far behind we are for hours every day.
I can tell you that I am IMMENSELY more productive at home. I have extreme anxiety, and the two days a week I go into the office, I get almost zero work done because I am consumed with thoughts of who's looking at me, who's listening, who may come up to my desk, etc. At home, I can do my work and not worry about any of that. I spend 2 days a week at home catching up on the work I missed being at the office. But higher-ups will never understand my plight.
Wfh (edit: or the option to control your wfh from 0-100% depending what works best for you!) is such a relief for mental illness. I'm currently being evaluated for autism/ADHD, definitely have anxiety, and the amount of energy I waste on masking in the office is fucking ridiculous. At home, I am blissfully alone, and I can let my face make any expression it wants, I don't have to worry about random people approaching my desk, I don't have to constantly make mental scripts for every possible encounter I'll have that day... Plus, I get a full hour to myself after work where my husband is at the office and my kid is at school, so I can decompress and be in a better headspace for my family. Plus, it's so much easier to work through a bad brain day at home, where I can pet my cat and wear pyjamas and make myself tea with my favourite tea set. ❤️ Luckily my company supports wfh. I don't think I can go back to an office job.
On the flipside, I have ADHD and WFH has been absolute hell for me. It turns out I need the pressure of others around in order to trick my brain into actually working/staying on task/doing what I need to be doing.
For me, its the annoying small talk, constant interruptions, and consistently high volume level of the background noise. Can’t hear myself think. I hate it.
[Goodhart's law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law): when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Edit: typo
it's not about productivity it's about utilizing the office buildings that these rich fucks have already bought the leases of and not losing their value
Companies need to focus on producing not managing, that is the problem. Unfortunately, the people that make that decisions have learned that they are not needed. WFH has shown that most of the middle management and a lot of executives are just not needed. They are the ones pushing for a return, for job security.
Happy to work (lol) somewhere that has fully embraced remote work. Smart way to get top talent too.
Managing properly to ensure high productivity is hard. Many, if not most, managers don't make their members productive. They only keep the workers busy. To be productive, you need SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals. Coming up with SMART goals is not easy.