What bothers me more is that these tech companies aren’t even trying to have a conversation with their employees. If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial. But the managerial gang knows that and they want to side step it.
The companies want to pretend they care about the employees. They claim to be giving them perks. In reality, these perks are just gamification to make the employee spend more time in the office.
The managerial gang gamified CS careers with silly interviews and performance reviews. They gamified apps and information dispersal. Entire democracies were at stake and nothing changed.
WFH won’t ever happen. These managers have to maintain appearances, name drop names and pretend to be “in the know”. Every engineer knows that 90% of these people are like language models regurgitating what they’ve heard. They can’t do that effectively via video.
To me this is the most blatant admission of their inability to measure developer productivity.
> If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial.
I'm not so sure about that. My company recently announced that our offices wouldn't be reopening until at least November, and there was a lot of quite angry pushback from people who are desperate to get back.
I'm not sure I would want to manage that. I mean imagine your 2 year search finds the Typescript and Rust DevOps engineer with six sigma black belt who uses Vue is familiar OracleDB and Azure and disagrees with your team's consensus on where one should work? Do they accept the job and get to cause a revote? Are key members of the team now paying more attention to how they might vote than anything else?
It has always been the case that if employee "disagrees" with management decision that their ass should be in the office 5 days a week, then they will have to find a new job. Now this could become up to consensus inside the team, which in my opinion is much better and fairer approach.
BTW team doesn't have to chose between two strict options (WFH or office 5 days a week). Another options could be hybrid office work or allowing _individual_ team members to chose how they work and mandate all meetings to accommodate online participants.
> It has always been the case that if employee "disagrees" with management decision that their ass should be in the office 5 days a week, then they will have to find a new job.
Not really. You negotiate with a boss who has to consider how your deal will affect other's deals. The deal environment changed so the deals they need to make are going to change.
Everyone voting on the same deal that is compatible with all roles in a group and strikes everyone as fair to them is just a less ideal negotiation that will make arbitrary decisions when the group changes. (I.e. the manager wants everyone in office so they hire a lot of interns and juniors who vote that way for the local help they need.)
> Not really. You negotiate with a boss who has to consider how your deal will affect other's deals. The deal environment changed so the deals they need to make are going to change.
I'm in a team that has multiple "remote" people since before pandemic. We all can't suddenly show up to single office because we are on three different continents, so, obviously, there is not much risk of our deal changing to something more strict.
> Everyone voting on the same deal that is compatible with all roles in a group and strikes everyone as fair to them is just a less ideal negotiation that will make arbitrary decisions when the group changes. (I.e. the manager wants everyone in office so they hire a lot of interns and juniors who vote that way for the local help they need.)
I assume that company with such malicious management wouldn't conduct the vote in the first place.
> I'm in a team that has multiple "remote" people since before pandemic.
When I was in a similar position, I regularly worked in groups who gave me every indication the majority would vote to relocate all positions to in-office in California. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be hopping groups after each vote while the team was telling me how wonderful the west coast is. It was better that my role was negotiated and a group could deal with it or suffer consequences of looking for an all California team.
It seems to me like you are trying to fix a problem that doesn't affect either you or me, and I am saying I don't like the consequences to me of your fix.
But it does affect me! Last time when I was looking for a new job I had a requirement that it must be either remote-friendly or have the office in walking distance to my home, which significantly reduced the choices for me. I really hope that pandemic will result at least some empowerment of teams to chose their preferred way to work.
According to the article you can now apply to 75% of jobs. I don't know why you want teams empowered to vote on what you are allowed to do, that is like looking for a new source of irrational barriers. If you would rather have holocracy, etc as a form of organization than sure, maybe it will reach more efficient decisions. But little artificial groupings of people with no other structure vote for things that are illegal in a republic sense or in this case an employment sense.
I’d be more comfortable with a mandate in such cases, either way. It’s at least evidence based. And like I said, I’d feel part of the conversation. Right now I’m like “I/We need to be back because <blanks out> … “
HN has a bias towards WFH but that's definitely not true in my circles. Developer productivity is notoriously hard to measure but by most measures it is lower at home. I'd rather fewer hours of more focused productive work than a low level anxiety about work all day, which is functionally what wfh has become
>What bothers me more is that these tech companies aren’t even trying to have a conversation with their employees.
I would wager most if not all tech execs today have never experienced a walkout, a strike, or a simultaneous mass exodus of any sort before. I'm not saying that will happen, but it's more likely today than any time I can remember.
They also have golden parachutes generously granted by the shareholders, so if the company implodes, no real skin off their back.
WFH will happen because firms practicing will be saving significantly on expensive office space that can be used to hire developers, especially in COL areas, and with remote not being the norm they are able to attract talent they would not have otherwise. It will take time but I will be surprised if full time onsite is still the overwhelming norm it was in 10 years
> WFH won’t ever happen. These managers have to maintain appearances, name drop names and pretend to be “in the know”.
There are many smaller companies who can't afford having these kind of managers and work culture - else they'd have a hard time hiring and retaining developers.
The companies want to pretend they care about the employees. They claim to be giving them perks. In reality, these perks are just gamification to make the employee spend more time in the office.
The managerial gang gamified CS careers with silly interviews and performance reviews. They gamified apps and information dispersal. Entire democracies were at stake and nothing changed.
WFH won’t ever happen. These managers have to maintain appearances, name drop names and pretend to be “in the know”. Every engineer knows that 90% of these people are like language models regurgitating what they’ve heard. They can’t do that effectively via video.
To me this is the most blatant admission of their inability to measure developer productivity.