'cause executives are the ones whose neck is on the line for success of their business division so they are extremely motivated to keep a close eye on profitability and progress on business goals, particularly when the economy looks wobbly. [mic drop]
(Yes, there are examples of executives who are incompetent and/or just plain dumb, but they are the minority.)
And, of course, before I get attacked as pro-RTO, I myself WFH and only go to the office when circumstances require it.
...so? What is the conclusion? You force people to do what they hate and hope for better results? It really makes no sense.
Imagine how high productivity would be if managers were allowed to literally crack the whip at engineers who slow down after working for 10 hours a day.
We don’t allow that because it’s inhumane. I think a similar principle applies to WFH. Even if it’s less productive it’s still better for society.
> Imagine how high productivity would be if managers were allowed to literally crack the whip at engineers who slow down after working for 10 hours a day.
I'll tell you what would happen. The engineers would quit on the spot and you'd end up with a sea of empty desks.
Why are some managers so dense? Is this an ego thing?
Articles like this are just the effect of a parasite class buying off 2nd rate "news" outlets to postpone their demise.
But the status-quo is gone, and it's a positive delight to be able to tell these jumped up flunkies that they are redundant.
Well, it might work for some people, but I guess only short term and they will leave at the first opportunity.
You know what you think you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know.
If your financial livelihood and the financial livelihoods of many other people are dependent upon you delivering a highly complex block of code—would you want to rely on a brand new production method or tool to deliver it that you don’t trust? A method that departs from successful methods of historical code production that have worked well for you for decades. A method that your peers, whose opinion you trust, advise against? A method that successful industry leaders are publicly moving away from rapidly?
Seems like there isn’t a WFH preaching engineer that is going to willfully move away from their set of tools and comfortable knowledge base to deliver something critical, I am not sure why we should expect something different from these leaders either.
It’s not really just a thought experiment.
Terrible things like slavery and indentured servitude aren’t wide spread because they are illegal… not because they wouldn’t be wildly popular with the class of people who could actually buy slaves and hire overseers to whip them.
In the past scheme, it may have been indentured servants getting the whip, but today it may be undocumented immigrants and H1B1 workers tethered to their current job.
Moreover, this line of reasoning completely ignores the influence of employee satisfaction on productivity. They had something they valued a lot, now you take it away. I witnessed it several times and every time CEOs did that, productivity plummeted significantly and people were starting to take photos for LinkedIn.
So we have WFH at scale for 3 years balanced against in-office work that has decades and decades of successful history behind. Also consider that the global catalyst that drove WFH at scale is now no longer a factor.
So when presented with a choice of what’s comfortable vs uncomfortable, people will opt for the comfortable unless forced to the uncomfortable. What’s happening now is simply a restoration to a comfortable business state…from the executives POV because there is no longer a pandemic forcing them to be operating in an uncomfortable business state.