I once had a former employer force me to take an espresso machine home that I had brought to work because it created a situation where a different shift was coming to our teams area to use it when we weren’t there and they were concerned by the liability. Very non-specific concerns, I might add. So rather than ensure teams had access to real coffee they banned employees having their own coffee equipment so we can all commiserate together over the bottom dollar filth in the break room.
This is the type of basic shit most companies can’t get right, much less the far more complicated challenges involved in creating positive team dynamics.
I have no faith that any sufficiently large company can make an inviting office environment, and this is a major reason why I am a staunch remote work advocate.
What's disheartening is that a lot of "return to office" plans I've heard of from friends involve conditions even worse than what was there before. For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office.
I'm too young to have lived through the golden age of engineers actually having an office to work in. But my best experience (besides WFH) was at my first job out of school, in a cube farm - at least you had a little bit of privacy and space to put your stuff. Every office trend since then has been for the worse.
Then came the stupid trend of organic seating. Cubicle’s ? Thing of the past they said, yet our productivity suffered. Great for sprints but quickly diminished due to constant distractions forcing engineers to invest in noise canceling headphones.
The WFH movement is because water flows downhill. We learned that we made the office an incredibly inefficient place to work, because we didn’t follow the science and threw away decades of research because of a new ‘fad’ that the CEO’s liked. Too bad CEO’s, I have been WFH ever since corporate America thought organic seating was cool.
I will never go back, in fact us programmers should unite and unionize to solidify this benefit before they try and take this away for good and make our jobs more difficult.
I was in focus heaven and I didn’t even know it. Miss that job.
I doesn't actually replace it. It's an additional horror on top of all the old ones.
Now I think those people are getting the same back to office spiel.
The team was large. Like 50+ devs easily. All scatter in different rooms.
Bliss
Some office spaces being bad doesn't imply we should get rid of office spaces overall.
If the company you're working for is so crazy on its office requirements, it could be as crazy with its remote work requirements.
Seems like this is a company specific issue, not an office vs remote issue.
Seems like you've been at a fair share of bad companies, but that's doesn't generalize to a broader picture of all office spaces.
I would oppose you _my_ office experience (which ofc doesn't generalize either), which is overwhelmingly positive. Yet I won't argue that because my experience is good, everyone should feel the same.
But it's the overwhelming majority of companies.
where I used to work, the micro kitchens all had their own foodservice licenses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d balked at employees bringing their own equipment
small companies don’t give a shit about stuff like that ime
Such is the consequence of complex organizations and outsourcing, as well as employees increasing demands to have a say in their schedule.
When you really think about it, collaboration is the problem rather than the solution. The modern distributed nature of work means that you need a huge amount of collaboration to even figure out what to do, when, and to resolve all dependencies.
So it's pretty maddening that managers call for more collaboration. We need less of it. The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through.
Modern employees spent half their time in email, chat and meetings. Not producing anything. And that's generous, quite a few have to find actual productive time in the fragmented 10% of their schedule. It's as if we've all become managers.
Spot on.
> The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through
In traditional manufacturing processes (i.e., physical goods), this is possible and often achieved. Productivity can be easily measured by dividing the physical output - like the number of items produced - by the factory headcount. Innovation exists in cycles that precede manufacturing, since changes to the factory layout are expensive and often require interrupting production.
Software development is a different beast. Innovation is intermingled in the 'manufacturing' process. Requirements change faster, and we need processes to accommodate that. Work happens in smaller time frames (e.g., two-week sprints). Productivity and delivered value are harder to measure. Paying customers are in the loop and provide constant feedback we need to filter and incorporate for our 'product' to succeed.
The software development challenge is more consultative in nature than the manufacturing one.
Why would I be entitled to interrupt someone to review my code, just because they are sitting next to me?
Always on zoom? No, thanks. It invariably devolves into micromanaging.
Constant KPI awareness? Most companies cannot even agree on how a valuable KPI looks like.
Remote pair programming? Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
Yes. Whether remote or in person, pairing works best when there's a experience/skill mismatch. Both parties benefit because the senior has to know and explain the why and the junior learns the what. I enjoy it as long as it's small doses.
It is draining and tiresome when done for long periods but I think worth it. It keeps you sharp and builds relationships with teammates.
Pairing with someone on your level can also be beneficial but with diminished returns.
I don't know about strict pair programming where one person instructs and the other person types, and then they switch after a while.
But.. if you mean two or more devs on a call looking at code.. then that is very much a thing.
Yes, and because your work depends on them.
It's still by far the most effective tool for certain tasks. Inherit an extremely complex codebase with 50 levels of abstraction? You could spend a week tinkering with it, or you could step through the code with the guy who wrote it for 30 minutes. But it's not something you'd want to do every day, or even frequently.
I’ve just encountered it at my newest job.
A little of it actually seems good, but more as a “show and tell” of how some part of the system you know operates, that may include writing a little code in service of better learning.
Otherwise it seems to be a great way to get two developers to have the output of half a developer.
Still, pair programming makes sense in the abstract: Coding is not manufacturing. Applying SQC to code is nonsensical. Under the circumstances, 100% inspection is all you've got. Pair programming probably makes sense in cases where minimizing bugs at every step, right down to the creation of every line of code, is needed because the cost of a bug explodes the longer it exists. Probably rare cases. But worth knowing to know that coders are not working on a production line.
If, however, you see them as humans with different skills that can be shared amongst each other, then pair programming makes a lot more sense.
The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
The return to office has nothing to do with productivity, trying to look at things through that lens reflects a total lack of understanding of whats going on.
I know i'm supposed to "contribute to the conversation" but it's important to recognize that the above point is exactly right.
There’s no grand conspiracy where executives are helping boost the holdings of REITs and institutional investors. Executives as a “class” and a “job” just like the traditional butts in chairs approach to work. They have to think about the entire company and it’s easier to have a singular approach. Instead of bespoke approaches by team/department/title where some people are RTO and some WFH as that quickly reverts to everyone is on zoom/teams for every meeting because of the remote people.
WFH has also provided a whole host of new and unusual problems for HR. I’m sure most executives are just tired of hearing about it. In my own experience/approximation only about 1 in 3 people are can actually self manage in a way that’s needed for remote work to be effective. I think software development is a very specific job that is very well suited to WFH but most other jobs within a company are not.
So yeah, I am told to subsidize failing real estate without getting anything in return. Won't I think of the poor, poor investment managers and their real estate? Why would I? Do they think about me?
This is argument keeps getting parroted without evidence or skepticism. Where's the evidence? Just because many people don't like RTO doesn't mean that RTO is driven by evil forces up to no good. There's nuance - on both sides of the debate! - and it does no one a service to reduce the arguments to bumper stickers.
No, employees wanting to work from home don't universally want to loaf off. No, employees that want to work from an office aren't universally middle managers trying to justify their existence. Some people work better at home, others work better at the office. Some companies have found WFH to improve productivity overall and are flexible, and other companies have found RTO to improve productivity overall. If you work better from home, go work for the former. If you work better from the office, go work for the latter. Let the market decide. If WFH is overall more productive, eventually the RTO companies' performance will suffer, and vice versa. No need to blame things on the boogeyman behind the curtain!
There's also a segment of the population that somewhat overlaps with the previous paragraph that uses work as their primary social outlet.
It is also why I am shamelessly pro-WFH. The banality of this mindset as the possibly main major contributing cause from labor for RTO and all the many, many issues that office work causes is too much for me to handle.
Get some non-work friends and hobbies. Understand career mobility and productivity, if that’s what you really want to prioritize, is equally there via WFH. Leave the rest of us out of it.
I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side.
I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig.
A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time.
1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin).
2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers.
3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.
And yes I know some of those bottom feeders in our place too. They're the ones constantly distracting you at work with chitchat. I have several people I try to avoid but unfortunately our pisspoor desk booking system (Planon, never buy that!) doesn't even allow to look up where other people are.
This time though it's more because enough isn't being built to meet demand. A good chunk of property is be gobbled up by AirBNB.
Two anecdotes supporting this.
Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered.
At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable.
I can see such people wanting RTO.
You must be a great person to work with if this is whats going on with your internal monologue about the people you interact closely with.
If your commute time was paid for by the firm, all the firms calculations would shift dramatically.
A worker rise up moment, if we ever needed more.
The commonly stated goal is to “work together” - something you can do if you have years of experience being in online communities, and alien if you have not.
These people somehow managed to internally identify the company with the office, and reducing the (open plan) office space with downsizing the company. And they were dead serious. No arguments (we did this during the pandemic and our revenue soared, acting against the wishes of all employees means shooting oneself in the foot) would be accepted. So the best engineers left, end of story.
Projecting much?
I can see why office culture doesn't appeal to you, you sound like a grump who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. If you can enjoy the cognitive dissonance of socializing with black squares in a zoom, that's great, but I'd rather enjoy the time I spend working, not merely tolerate it. I don't think that makes me a loser.
I'd much rather spend that time with people I chose. Some you of you borderline sound like you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome
Doesn’t make you a loser, but it does make you very lacking in empathy for the real life consequences of the missed band recitals, lunches with a spouse and many many opportunities to build the life-long links of family via wfh for in exchange for a 2-3 year relationship with colleagues
Those colleagues won’t remember your name in another 2-3 years. But as this version of the argument goes, your short term social needs get prioritized?
He had the habit of playing music really, really loud from his speakers. It got so bad that they tried to relegate him to different floors and build a separate office, just for him and the lucky few that worked with him (me included).
Another thing he did was being his dog to the office despite there being people allergic to dogs in the office.
And people are trying to force everyone nack to the office because of "collaboration".
But only senior people could have windows so they covered his windows in cardboard …
I once worked at a company where almost the opposite was true, or at least they prided themselves on not factoring that in and in moving desks several times a year. Managers and senior people tended to be near the center of a very crowded office space, away from the windows, I suppose to be closer to the "action". Newer or less important folks tended to be near the windows.
Yeah, well, conflict with the corporate overlords tends to be pretty one-sided, so we’ll need to attack that problem if you want that to change. There are proven approaches. But this isn’t “compromise”, it’s workers having their work environment dictated to them.
> sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy.
Oh wow, uh, that was not the direction I expected the rest of that sentence to go.
> I’ve experienced some of my most joyful work in teams working together in the same space. I’ve benefited from flexibility and inclusion with remote work. I’ve also been able to contribute as part of larger open source communities where I couldn’t even know everyone by name.
On the topic of knowing everyone by name: so very much easier remote. Real people don’t have a name tag next to every statement they make, or hovering under their face at all times. Much harder in person.
I am still not convinced "in the same space" makes any difference. I couldn't care less if co-worker is sitting next to me or on the other side of the country. But in person, you get an extra cognitive load of being around people. Someone brings smelly sandwich, someone else forgot to shower then another one keeps chewing gum and making loud mouth noises.
> Supporting a joyful environment.
One man's joy is another man misery. Certainly having people making morning journey from across the country and then observing how they "work" may be joyful experience for a manager feeling insecure.
Best compromise I saw is that if someone can't work at home, company gives them vouchers at their local co-working space of their choosing. No commute and office experience.
Company: What are your thoughts on returning to the office?
Staff: What are your thoughts if we all say fuck off?
And that was decided.
This. I get that remote isn't always practical or effective, I do. But it's the staunch insistence on one way of working, and the denial that it needs improvement, that pisses me off so god damn much.
If I could actually get more work done in an office, of course I would go back. I have a huge backlog of shit to get through! But an hour commute isn't making that easier. And we all have been in the office where half the team is spread out just because they want to get away from noise, or to find a more comfy place, or they need heads-down time without interruptions. We've all been in meetings where 3 people are remote just because they needed to let a repair man in at noon, or their daughter's sick, or something's going on. And that is fine. So what's wrong with keeping that the same, and just not requiring people go in?
Then there's all the other dysfunctional shit that has nothing to do with an office, where the office is the excuse to never fix it. We can't figure out our online communications? No problem, just buy a big room and shove people in it and they can just walk up to each other all the time. We can't properly organize our documentation? Big room, shove people in it, walk up and ask where something is. No documentation? Big room, shove people, interrupt, ask how it works. Need to decide something but don't want to have a meeting? No problem, just interrupt 5 people at once and have an impromptu meeting. Who needs to improve their business process when they can just have people interrupt each other all day and never write a single thing down?
Remote doesn't magically work well either. You have to do specific things to make remote successful. I'm pretty sure the reason for mandatory return is just that they don't want to try. Even if half the workforce wanted to work in an office, they could buy a smaller office and let workers do what they need to do. But that would still require improvements to get the remote half to work well with the in-office half, so let's just avoid that extra work and force everyone into the office. That's easy for management, but sucks for the workforce, and the business.
This wasn't the case during covid, of course, and also during the beginning of post-covid.
It seems all is behind us. Not sure what the value of all this is, except for some people telling others how they have to live life.
Don't act like this is a one-way street.
If you're working remotely then your employer is also telling its employees how they have to live life. It's just that in this case you happen to agree with them so it's A-OK!
At this point, I haven't seen a single attempt from any company to offer such a rationale.
We can reasonably infer that such policies are not rooted in any evidence-oriented analysis.
There are certainly perceived benefits to management and/or related to real estate interests, including but not limited to: easier observation and suppression of employee organizing, different legal exposure profile as fewer people are casually creating business communication that may later be sifted during legal discovery, propping up commercial real estate investments, etc.
Those gatherings are great. Working with my team remotely is also great.
I'll take the happiness thanks. You can keep the joy, let me know when you can share in the rewards of those achievements more robustly and I'll consider sacrificing for it.
I've never encountered this perspective before. Why was/is this disliked?
Yes, some people don't have the option of remote work, but if you have that option, how does that affect those that don't? Cleaning my plate won't feed starving kids in Africa, and taking shit over working from home doesn't help people whose jobs require physical presence.
Some people can work from home, and entire fields can't. So what? How is that relevant? Some jobs just don't require physical presence and business owners don't like that for a variety of unfair reasons. People who can work from home are being treated unfairly. How does that affect kids in Africa? Does it hurt them? Help them? Or are they utterly irrelevant to the problem at hand?
The existence of farmers doesn't really have a single thing to do with call center workers taking calls at home. Of course farmers can't farm remotely, but that's utterly irrelevant. No one is trying to force farmers and nurses to dramatically change their work environment on the whim of some middle manager who read a really good thinkpiece from WSJ.
Discussion about this problem doesn't mention doctors and farmers because the conversation is not about them in the same way that it's not about starving kids in Africa
Secondly, you most be very out of touch to think that everyone who can work from home is a 180,000 a year Peet's coffee filled software engineer. Lots and lots of lower wage, lower education jobs can work from home but are getting forced to the office. Executive assistants, customer support, marketers, copywriters, I could list a lot more.
These are the worst comments on HN, just ultra lazy defense of the status quo with no real meat to it.
Customer support folks working from home predated the pandemic. In fact, they often work from outside the country.
Marketing is a profession like engineering. They don’t get paid by the hour.
Most hourly workers have to work onsite.
I feel like your comment is less logical argument and more emotional reaction.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
I stopped caring about what random strangers think when I was in high school. The correct answer to this is to tell these random people who have no skin in the game to fuck off.
Carbon emissions are literally killing people, and are bound to kill many more millions if we don't change our ways.
So if the cooks and nurses and truck drivers have no choice, then I'd say that it's our duty to work remotely in order to do our part in reducing emissions.
And this happened day in day out with nobody ever questioning the sanity of such a practice.
Press X to doubt; sounds like billionaire brainwashing noise to me.
I actually think professional class is more prone to tolerate this attitude from the management, because it's what corporate environment teaches to do.
1. it can work 2. it is against existing, entrenched interests
Hence the tension.
FWIW, our company just mandated RTO and there was push back, because the person making the decision made it basically within a week from publishing date and a lot of people have kids so it is not exactly a flip a switch kind of situation PLUS there are a couple of high visibility projects that rely on staff good will to push it past the finish line. No flexibility from company means no flexibility from us ( no more calls after 5 to deal with fires and so on ).
I accept not all jobs are ready for WFH ( butcher, surgeon and so on ), but some absolutely are.
If you as a professional class worker think the rent is too damn high, consider how insane it is for people who make less and work longer hours.
It's become clear to me that real estate is the economic problem, at least in the US. I said the economic problem, singular. I don't think any other issue compares.
The phenomenon of younger generations feeling poorer than their parents is largely attributable to real estate costs. I think real estate is at the root of a ton more problems too: homelessness (for obvious reasons), collapsing birth rates, low rates of family formation, even crime. Real estate is basically cannibalizing the future.
All workers deserve to have a say in their working conditions.
How one talks about it can be entitled or spoiled sounding, but the desire to influence and change one's working conditions is noble and in common with great majority of workers.
When my children were small I started working remotely while my partner worked in an office still. I looked for a remote job so that rather than being in a office and going to get some coffee I was excited to instead get to see my 8 month of doing some baby biz on my coffee break.
What a wonderful privilege it was during that age of growth. How great it would be for more people to have that experience (which was very common before industrialization).
Going to the office before the pandemic was totally different. Even though I did work from home regularly then too. But at the office I had the same colleagues around me (even though my direct colleagues were all in different locations). I had my own desk with my stuff. Now I just have a locker and I'm a dumb number that nobody cares about. I hate the company.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
They decided to get into a profession they doesn't have working from home as an option. They can change if they want.
Also I don't really give a F if other people think I'm spoiled.
My experience is that the rest of the population has very little day-to-day contact with people like me and remote work only reduces it, so they simply don't care.
I get some vague interest in the details of my life when salaries are mentioned, but when I explain what kind of hoops you have to jump and what kind of lifestyle you have to lead (desk job and learning after hours) to get to these figures, interest is usually lost.
Overall people are way less interested in how strangers live their lives and visibly less envious than one would think. For most this line of work is boring and soul crushing and they don't think the salary makes it worth it.
Should we also cancel telehealth programs so those nurses that actually do work remotely don’t become spoiled and entitled?
* Employers should pay the cost of employee travel to work, at least count the time spent traveling to work as work hours. If I'm driving into work it's not really my free time.
* If I lived near my workplace, I wouldn't care about working from home so much. Society has done something seriously wrong where most people cannot live near where they work.
* By getting the professional class off the roads, traffic is better for those who have to work in person. By tearing down the offices that aren't really needed and replacing with residential and other mixed use, we might have a shot at rearranging things where the people that need to be physically present at work can live close to work.
The fact that other roles cannot work remote is beside the point. People want a reasonable say in their work environment regardless of the nature of their work. And they'll negotiate accordingly if the work requires physical presence.
Desk workers aren't spoiled for pointing out the waste and abuse of involuntary butt-in-seats policies. The accusation comes across as trying to incite discord.
Keeping more people away from commutes though does reduce traffic for those who need to get around.
Central commercial real estate could actually provide useful things, rather then "places people sit at computers they could do anywhere".
Distributing the work force out means more mixing of class and profession. Service jobs can be closer to where people live because they're more distributed.
So people who can work from home should go to the office to satisfy "the rest of the population"? This is some novel concept. Have you tried approaching company owners and CEO and ask them to make their compensation to be more in line with the general population as well?
don't know what this argument is supposed to be? seems like something a ceo made up to emotionally justify their position rather than based in any sort of objective reasoning
things shouldn't get better because other things haven't gotten better? is that the crux of your argument?
My partner is a nurse. Of course she can't work from home. Her job is literally touching people, putting things in them and taking things out.
They're not making her go to the hospital just to fuck with her.
My job, on the other hand, does not involve physical contact. In fact, I don't even need to leave home, as demonstrated by years of working at home. I deliver value at home so I get paid for it. It's as simple as that really. It's completely irrelevant how other people deliver their value.
He would often get offended in the open office around the other engineers. Why? Language. He once asked me not to say "damn" around him because he's very religious.
It was a C/C++/C# codebase, so that was never going to happen.
I mean, I kind of get having that kind of thing in, say, an airport or somewhere with security concerns, but being treated like that in an office environment is horrible.
No thanks, I'll take my 2 ply, my own toilet, and actual nutritious lunches.
Each employee is given a small budget and menu where they can decide what amenities their bathroom gets stocked with. You can decorate it according to your whims.
There's so many logistical and even geometric problems with the idea. But just imagine the retention numbers if someone was actually able to pull it off. You have your own personal bathroom overlooking a serene wooded area, wall mounted TV doing sports ball recap, small private library, and scented candle with that sent you can't get enough of.
[Although, honestly, I would be happy if they just made the toilet stall dividers go from the floor to the ceiling.]
Something like:
Completely false. There are more successful companies than there are most talented people.
The way we used to work is an emergent reality that had begun to fray long before the pandemic, see multilocation strategies, selective remote working options, hotel seating with over subscribed occupancy. The cost of commercial real estate was already being eyed carefully. As a senior executive in multinational mega corps I can tell you definitively “bring your own office” in 2019 was seen as bigger than “bring your own device” in terms of potential to reduce cost, increase productivity, and maximize EPS. The biggest barrier was the 5-10 year real estate development and tax abatement cycles, but you were already seeing compression of available seating and over subscription with a 10 year plan to compress to only essential coworking. Further, while panned now, the WeWork model was seen as the future - essentially elastic occupancy as opex, burstable cloud like office space flexibly located where the talent lives.
The pandemic accelerated this stepwise from 20% to 100% overnight. I could see it in the eyes of the CEOs as they saw the culture they understood disappear overnight and the emotional entrenchment that “this can’t be allowed to persist.” Despite all the prior plans and agreement, an emotional reaction took hold. They saw the productivity improvements and were unswayed. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about productivity, it wasn’t about efficiencies. It was about a way of living being threatened, a way the CEOs were manifestly beneficiaries of, and was the only lifestyle they knew and understood. They didn’t want things to change. To buttress their desires, tax abatements and leases obligated use of the real estate. But make no mistake, the RTO movement is almost entirely driven by a near maniacal gripping onto a way of life the decision makers benefited from and can’t let go of.
Joy of the team, sacrificing the individual for the greater good, watercooler serendipity, “think of the kids,” etc, are all smokescreens for the real motivations: fear of an unraveling of the emergent reality that todays leaders owe their entire successful career to, and at that level, that’s all they have in their life. That office culture is literally the cornerstone of their identity, and being more or less all narcissists, they believe their identity is the cornerstone to the world.
The rest of the article is pretty good. I wouldn’t stop reading based on the intro.
The essence is there’s a continuum of work styles along a two dimensional system (in office - remote / sync - asynch). Each quadrant has its own benefits. They seem to assert the middle, hybrid, is the worst of all worlds, and it’s better to pick a style and lean into it. They offer a variety of ways to lean into a style.
IMO I think this is overly simplistic and the most efficient reality, and likely the emergent one we land in within 10 years, is a mixed reality. Coworking works well for some, doesn’t for others. The skills for a remote workplace benefit a multi location team, a hybrid team, or a fully remote team equally. Some tasks are async, some are sync. Once a team has one person not on site, the team only functions as a remote team; otherwise the person not onsite isn’t a part of the team. Recognizing that any team level work would be handled as if everyone were remote.
There will be a contingent who work best in an office. They will continue to have one, albeit a smaller space with fewer and fewer amenities as the occupancy cost / person is squeezed. Those that work best remotely will land at a place that values them for the way they work best. We will continue to refine our work protocols to accommodate this new way of working. The CEOs of today will become the CEOs of yesterday. The new CEOs will be the ones who emerged ahead during the pandemic. The new mid level will be the ones who excelled in remote school and remote entry level.
Bring your own office will become the buzz word. Boards will see the cold hard reality of occupancy cost per head in office rising relentlessly. Tax abatements and leases will have frayed. Then, either the weworks of today or its replacement will have its day.
Order the team to work from office 996. Unlock their potential, don't compromise! Kill the individual autonomy.
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