zlacker

I think its a good idea to turn this example around to try and understand the executive perspective in this.

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.

>>kcplat+(OP)
I understand these CEOs might think this way (although I'm not sure if all do, and for sure most have a mix of different reasons), but there is a fault in this reasoning in the sense that working remotely is not in any way novel. I had been working in an international team delivering decent quality code for years that brought my company tons of money long before the pandemic. So you might say these CEOs are afraid of what is new for them, not in general.

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.

>>hdjjhh+wE
WFH at scale only really started happening in 2020 because of the pandemic. I realize that there were a growing number of orgs experimenting prior and some were successful with it. I worked (partially) remotely from 2008-2011, then full remote again since March 2020 and have been since.

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.