This is inherently a problem with full-remote or hybrid work.
People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated.
Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it helped their productivity. But these people are biased because they were probably one of the few who were disciplined enough to make it work and they gained the employer's trust over time.
There were a lot of reports of Zuckerberg bemoaning about productivity. Tim Cook wanted everyone back in the office full-time before Delta. Google also wanted everyone back in the office. Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party studies.
This opinion is not popular here but this is how I see it.
I’d agree with this. Anecdotally speaking I have never met anyone on my team and I honestly can say that I feel like I’m a mercenary whose job is to just destroy tickets and keep a lookout at our monitoring. It feels so impersonal and is it really my fault or my colleagues that they don’t feel as invested?
Messing with k8s, looking at logs, or occasionally hopping into a zoom to discuss architecture for an upcoming project that I don’t find any interest in beyond ensuring the stock goes up, it feels like I’m a cog and I just do things and somehow we keep going.
Three years ago I would be super engaged and going to conferences to show off our latest work. Maybe it’s the combination of doing boring (to me) infrastructure and dev ops work along with zoom culture. Back in the day I was a mobile application developer so that was quite a different lifestyle compared to this. Idk man, I’m doing my best to do a good job but honestly it is the worst experience of my life so far. I’ve been spending my time outside of work in evenings and weekends hacking away on side projects. They give me far greater joy, which I used to find previously at work.
I found much greater joy going to the office everyday, working, meeting with my coworkers, doing things after work like grabbing a beer in the kitchen, etc. I really missed those things. Now I'm just staring at a screen for 10 hours a day. Two extra hours because I feel like I need to prove that I'm working while I'm remote.
It sucks. I feel way less energy and less passion for the company.
Completely agree. There is no more banter. No sharing of ideas. No creativity. It's all just zoom bullshit.
I keep wondering when this crap is gonna end and people will realize that this "pure remote" shit absolutely kills innovation and creativity. But man... it's super depressing. I used to love my work. Now it sucks.
I think it will take many years before this shakes out. I think companies that are in-person will out-compete and out-innovate those who aren't. I think the pendulum will start swinging back to in-person.
I dunno. It's exhausting though. I feel very trapped by all this crap. I could only imagine being a new-hire or some fresh college grad...
>Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party studies.
Asking people to 100% return to the office is unpopular (or at least controversial) to some, right? If there was "real data", why wouldn't they mention that in their communications to staff? Instead, it's full of wooly statements like "there's something missing" and vague stuff about collaboration.
This seems to be a more generalised fallacy - "The <government/CEO/authority figure> don't do things on a whim, therefore they must have additional (secret) information on <controversial decision>. Based on this, they're obviously correct - after all, they've got that secret info!".
>Asking people to 100% return to the office is unpopular (or at least controversial) to some, right? If there was "real data", why wouldn't they mention that in their communications to staff? Instead, it's full of wooly statements like "there's something missing" and vague stuff about collaboration.
FYI, Facebook and Google CEOs both said productivity is down and they expect more out of their workers. They said so to their employees which obviously got leaked because there are tens of thousands of them. I'm guessing that they don't want to specifically blame remote/hybrid work because it might offend a lot of people and get bad PR. Instead, they're slowly nudging their workers back into the office.
Apple never said anything publicly or to their employees about the lack of productivity and they never will. They will never do so because it'd be a huge PR hit. It's not Apple's style.
I disagree personally but voted up because this is a valid opinion and I suspect this is the reason why it feels like we get less done. Personally I feel like I thrive remotely, probably work too much but I like it so there's that.
It comes down to some people thrive working remotely and some don't. At any level higher in mgmt than a single team there isn't really any way to determine who can thrive and who can't. Pretend its a 50/50 split across 100 people, the only way upper mgmt can see to get pre-covid productivity is to go back to the office.
I will say another unpopular related point on this: people with young children are more than likely to not thrive working remotely. Or at least they've probably never had the chance to see if working remotely is good for them because they may have had their kids home with them these past couple years. You know how we don't like distractions when trying to do focus work? I can't imagine trying to do focus work with a child or two under the age of 5 there with you all day.
We're thriving, just in a different work/life balance proposition. Of course, sterilizing entry-level engineers would lead to much higher overall productivity + zuckerbucks for shareholders. Maybe we need to have that conversation.
I mean the middle men meeting where someone translate business requirements to technical solutions. Engineers should be treated as problem solver and not code monkey
You do realize that most engineers would hate to have to do the work of a PM? Talking to users. Analyzing data. Coming up with solutions. Convincing executives. Convincing designers. Convincing dev managers. Convincing devs. Writing specs. Handholding the project through the finish line.
You told me you don't want more meetings. But you realize that you'd have to have a ton of meetings to do the above? You think a spec just magically shows up and a ton of work was not done before it ever makes it to your queue?
>Engineers should be treated as problem solver and not code monkey
Engineers solve technical problems. Some engineers want to solve business problems too. Those might be good candidates to become product managers.
Based on previous experience at a SV "unicorn", more often than not, a ton of work was not done. The "specs" were vague and poorly written. "Lacks attention to detail" is how I would describe most PMs at that place. I think they had a 1:1 ratio of PMs to engineers.
I was only slightly exaggerating. Though I do remember being in my daily standup, and regularly there were 3 engineers, a dev manager, 2 PMs, the product directory, and a designer of some sort.
The translation is a legitimate skill that should not be underestimated. Especially when you add in that there ought to be flow the other way as well. As an engineer, I want to be involved early in the business processes, because as we all know sometimes business people assume that very hard things are easy, but sometimes there is something I can offer them that they don't have any idea is easy. It's best to work through the cost/benefit process together, rather than the business people huddling in a corner before flinging over a set of requirements to engineering as Holy Writ.
(Kinda struggling with that now; I'm peripherally involved in a project with big monetary implications. The "solution" is to build a big system as quickly as possible and run around making super-high-priority requests across a whole lot of teams, almost all of which need to be in place before any value is obtained, and which consequently is behind schedule and dragging out. On the other hand, a week, some database queries, and a reasonable amount of manual labor could get about 50-75% of the value now. But none of the project managers are interested in that fact, which frankly boggles my mind. I'm not sure if they just don't understand what I'm saying, or are just so stuck on the solution they designed that they've lost all ability to think outside it. One thing I have confirmed is that it isn't just that I don't have a full picture of the problem, which is the usual situation; I'm quite confident what I'm thinking would work.)
However, while that skill is not necessarily something you need a graduate degree for and 20 years dedicated experience, and engineers can pick it up, there are engineers who don't have it yet, or even won't pick it up because they despise it. The list of skills required to be an engineer is already pretty long, requiring this to be added as well raises the bar even higher.
People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated.
Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it helped their productivity. But these people are biased because they were probably one of the few who were disciplined enough to make it work and they gained the employer's trust over time.
There were a lot of reports of Zuckerberg bemoaning about productivity. Tim Cook wanted everyone back in the office full-time before Delta. Google also wanted everyone back in the office. Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party studies.
This opinion is not popular here but this is how I see it.