[chronotis]

The article talks around the issue, as others have commented, but I take from it a preview of what's to come in our own 25-person environment: a commitment to continued hybrid work policy, but not a similar commitment to remote-friendly work policies. The owner is most comfortable in an environment where they can wander by and create an immediate change-of-priority at the individual level; there are many middle managers and executives everywhere who also have grown to their positions of power/influence with the same style.

I'd read the various media coverage earlier in the week about Iceland's 4-day-workweek experiment, and can't imagine how you would even start to have that conversation at our US-based company.

[ehnto]

Some might be thinking of a flat-hierarchy being a better fit for remote work, and certainly I think that's a step in the right direction but there are caveats there too.

You can end up with a distributed and diminished sense of ownership of the whole project, as people feel ownership of the parts they worked on but not other parts. To the point where really obvious problems, lets say a bug in the software, can linger or regress because no-one feels full ownership over that particular part of the project.

That being somewhat inevitable, you need an individual who has that full, holistic ownership who feels responsible for getting those orphaned problems fixed.

I think there is a huge value in a project manager who can effectively sit at the same level as developers, and work with them to organize and set priorities, and I've worked with a few like that and a few who prefer to elevate themselves and disconnect from the nuts-and-bolts of the work, and I can say we got more good work done with the former because we could more easily navigate complex problems in the product.

One particular PM I worked with marketed himself as a "Technical PM" and I think that's the right way to think about that role. If you wanted to demark the difference between a Technical PM and Lead Developer, I would say the technical PM has more of a stake in the end-user experience, and a lead dev has more of a stake in the technical competence of the build, but they both sit very close to the work itself and there's likely some overlap.

[PragmaticPulp]

> The owner is most comfortable in an environment where they can wander by and create an immediate change-of-priority at the individual level; there are many middle managers and executives everywhere who also have grown to their positions of power/influence with the same style.

I worked in a mixed office/remote/distributed company before the pandemic. At first we had a lot of travel and in-person meetings to continue with some face to face influence. Like you said, the in-person meetings often felt like managers flexing their power and influence because they saved big changes for the in person meetings.

Later the company tried to reduce or eliminate travel to save money and speed up communication by making it all digital. At first I was excited to have an opportunity for full remote, but I quickly came to miss those in-person meetings. Some of the managers and executives completely lost touch with the human side of the employees they no longer saw in person. It was too easy for them to fire off Slack messages that demanded last minute changes or crunch time because they didn’t have to look us in the eye to deliver the bad news. They also couldn’t read the room or see reactions when they made unreasonable demands.

Full remote also created an environment where too many people just wanted to withdraw socially and stay hidden as much as possible. It took extra work to make sure everyone was communicating properly and to ensure that the load was being distributed evenly.

Working part-time in office solved a lot of these problems. Remote can and does work with the right team in place, but having done it (pre-COVID) I’ve come to believe that proper candidate selection and mentoring is crucial, as well as a willingness to do the hard thing and let employees go if they can’t work or communicate effectively in a remote environment even after being mentored. Remote isn’t for everyone.

[wsc981]

First of all, this is from my view as a freelancer that has been working remotely for about 4 years now. I realise full-time employees most likely feel differently.

> Some of the managers and executives completely lost touch with the human side of the employees they no longer saw in person.

As a remote worker I don't care too much about the human touch either. I have a business relationship with my client. I do believe most employers are reasonable however and if a remote worker /on average/ delivers good results, it'd be stupid for a company to refuse adapt around some incident in a remote workers' life.

> It was too easy for them to fire off Slack messages that demanded last minute changes or crunch time because they didn’t have to look us in the eye to deliver the bad news.

As long as the managers understand that change of plans might result in more time needed for deliverables, I think this is fine. This might be a point for the remote worker to communicate back to the manager though, just to prevent any misunderstanding to develop later on. I always try to be very clear with my clients that if plans change, my delivery schedule changes as well.

> Full remote also created an environment where too many people just wanted to withdraw socially and stay hidden as much as possible.

As an introvert I like to deal with other people as little as possible as well. I prefer people in a business relationship to mostly communicate work-related issues with me (not too much smalltalk). I'm fine with communicating every day on my work (sending out a Slack message, perhaps with a few screenshots or a build), but apart from that I like to keep communication limited. I am glad to say that my current and previous clients were happy with this mode of working as well.

[PragmaticPulp]

> First of all, this is from my view as a freelancer that has been working remotely for about 4 years now. I realise full-time employees most likely feel differently.

I’ve done a lot of remote freelancing as well. It doesn’t really compare to remote work as an employee. The dynamic is too different and the freelancing work is more isolated by design.

[ornornor]

> Full remote also created an environment where too many people just wanted to withdraw socially and stay hidden as much as possible.

If that’s what these particular individuals want, why do you feel like the company knows better and has to « fix » these people? I’d lean towards the fact that they’re adults who presumably know how to live their lives and don’t really need anyone else to tell them how. Maybe I misunderstood your point, but that seems very patronizing to me.