I am one of the founders of my own company. With covid I go in about once a week. I don't even like going in that much.
I am in the process of restructuring my life around the concept of not going into my own office, ever. I will live where I want to live and not care about the local economic situation. I will work the hours of the day I want to work.
What covid means to me is that I will live the life that I want to live without work imposing constraints that don't really benefit my company.
Without covid, I might have drifted along not changing much.
Needless to say, I am in a technology industry where things like github and whatnot allow for collaboration and highly purified communications. I regularly read people saying how these tools don't work. I laugh my ass off at that and know the real statement should be, "These tools don't work for me as I am a bad manager."
Things like micromanagement don't work when you have proper tools tracking things that do need to get tracked. For instance, if someone is working on a thing and a manager drops by their desk to ask them to "have a quick" look at another thing, this usually doesn't show up in any record. With a proper system like kanban or something similar the micromanager would have to shout out onto the record that their "quick little thing" was to be a higher priority than the thing the programmer was working on. The same if you have 5 managers playing tug of war over a set of employees having them hop back and fourth on a bunch of different projects and problems. This is super easy if you can just drop by the person's desk and "suggest" they do something else.
Often the above sort of BS is what happens when you have a too many managers managing too few people. One company I worked for had a near 1:1 ratio of capable programmers to managers. These managers spent every day desperately trying to justify their existence. Stand up meetings and other crap filled their days and wasted massive amounts of productivity.
If you have a proper task system with reasonable breakdowns of the tasks, programmers can just work away and any manager who needs to know what is going on can look at a simple status chart. If something stalls, then they can ask what's up.
A good development culture will fit well with remote work, a broken culture will see remote developers as a poison; except the thing that is getting poisoned are the bad managers careers in that the bad ones are glaringly redundant to the organization.
I love reading the plaintive bleating of these managers saying how this has broken "informal" communications, and other communications communications communications complaints. What they are really saying is that it is glaringly obvious that regularly dragging groups of programmers into a video call is a waste of everyone's time and company resources.
So, when I read or hear about a manager demanding that people go back into the office I am hearing that they want to make people miserable so that they feel better about themselves.
Sunvilian on June 3rd, 2021 at 16:48 UTC »
All jokes aside this is actually happening. People are quitting their jobs when asked to return to the office.
HashFap on June 3rd, 2021 at 17:06 UTC »
"I sold my car during the quarantine, and I can no longer commute to the office."
FartyFingers on June 3rd, 2021 at 18:50 UTC »
I am one of the founders of my own company. With covid I go in about once a week. I don't even like going in that much.
I am in the process of restructuring my life around the concept of not going into my own office, ever. I will live where I want to live and not care about the local economic situation. I will work the hours of the day I want to work.
What covid means to me is that I will live the life that I want to live without work imposing constraints that don't really benefit my company.
Without covid, I might have drifted along not changing much.
Needless to say, I am in a technology industry where things like github and whatnot allow for collaboration and highly purified communications. I regularly read people saying how these tools don't work. I laugh my ass off at that and know the real statement should be, "These tools don't work for me as I am a bad manager."
Things like micromanagement don't work when you have proper tools tracking things that do need to get tracked. For instance, if someone is working on a thing and a manager drops by their desk to ask them to "have a quick" look at another thing, this usually doesn't show up in any record. With a proper system like kanban or something similar the micromanager would have to shout out onto the record that their "quick little thing" was to be a higher priority than the thing the programmer was working on. The same if you have 5 managers playing tug of war over a set of employees having them hop back and fourth on a bunch of different projects and problems. This is super easy if you can just drop by the person's desk and "suggest" they do something else.
Often the above sort of BS is what happens when you have a too many managers managing too few people. One company I worked for had a near 1:1 ratio of capable programmers to managers. These managers spent every day desperately trying to justify their existence. Stand up meetings and other crap filled their days and wasted massive amounts of productivity.
If you have a proper task system with reasonable breakdowns of the tasks, programmers can just work away and any manager who needs to know what is going on can look at a simple status chart. If something stalls, then they can ask what's up.
A good development culture will fit well with remote work, a broken culture will see remote developers as a poison; except the thing that is getting poisoned are the bad managers careers in that the bad ones are glaringly redundant to the organization.
I love reading the plaintive bleating of these managers saying how this has broken "informal" communications, and other communications communications communications complaints. What they are really saying is that it is glaringly obvious that regularly dragging groups of programmers into a video call is a waste of everyone's time and company resources.
So, when I read or hear about a manager demanding that people go back into the office I am hearing that they want to make people miserable so that they feel better about themselves.