A lot of the people who apply to our remote openings think that working remote is going to be a shortcut to working less, interacting with fewer people, and doing less communication. They may have read books or blogs or Reddits that talk about remote work as an opportunity to shrink their workday to 4 hours or less so they can travel the world or something. Or they have fantasies of working two jobs or building their startup while collecting paychecks and health insurance.
Others have good intentions, but then struggle with the lack of face to face interaction. It’s common for people new to remote work to have trouble interpreting text communications or to start assuming the worst. Some people are nice in person but then into flame war monsters when you drop them into a Slack channel where everyone is just a screen name.
I hate it, because the more of these candidates we let through our filters, the less welcoming of remote work the company becomes. Filtering out these candidates is imperative to keeping the remote work going. And sadly, firing them quickly when it doesn’t work out is also important.
This blog is a prime example of what happens when companies don’t filter and instead just let the bad candidates run wild on remote work. You get silly ideas like “WFH is a two-day workweek” because that is exactly what the bad candidates do if left unchecked.
It’s time we stopped pretending that WFH is appropriate for everyone. It needs to be selectively applied if we don’t want the abusers to become bad apples that ruin the whole concept.
I don’t think that’s a conversation anyone is ready to have. People (online) either dogmatically believe WFH is perfect and without issue and anything by bad is someone/something else’s fault, or is exactly what’s in the first quote in the article (e.g. it’s completely awful and everyone is a lazy slacker if I can’t look over their shoulder).
I keep wondering what it’s going to take to have a real conversation about how, for instance, WFH is terrible for my data team, but fantastic for my engineers and that that’s ok and not, on either side, an organizational or leadership failure. Judging by this post, it won’t be any time soon.