[VariableStar]

I am not surprised. I don't know how this plays out across different cultures, regional or corporate. I only witnessed how it went in the circles I work in here in Europe. My impression is that the group of people that clearly reacted mostly negatively to the work-from-home-during-the-pandemic period were indeed middle-managers, lowly heads of units, project managers, and those that populate the middle ranks of organisations with funny and unclear job titles. Perhaps these people are by nature of the extroverted people-person type that need extra social interaction to feel good. Or perhaps they found that their need to control others was more difficult to satisfy at distance. In my country it was also discussed at a point that many people were confronted during the pandemic with the meaninglessness of their jobs. I really believe it can be the case for many people, and not not only those middle-managers with funny job titles.

[bonecrusher2102]

That's interesting that you mention Project Managers, mainly because my experience has been just the opposite. We've been leaning much harder on those folks to manage the increased communication and coordination overhead that comes from WFH.

[yakak]

From what I've seen those people are leaned on to continue to give management a sense of purpose. They need to organize lots and lots of video meetings with lots of unwanted participants showing up.

[bonecrusher2102]

My take here (as a T.PgM) is that I really see my role as doing the opposite of what you describe. We really do try to think quite a bit about if a meeting is necessary, can it be moved to async communications (whitepaper, email, ticket, slack conversation, etc.), and most certainly who are the minimum possible amount of people needed to resolve a given issue.

And this is certainly not to be directly contrary to your post -- which does raise a great point. In fact, it is many peoples' (warranted) criticism of and aversion to pointless meetings that helps me and my colleagues keep minimizing communication and coordination overhead at top of mind.

And everyone's interests tend to dovetail in this regard when these things are done well anyway: folks spend their time in meetings sparingly and efficiently, which in turn speeds up and makes more efficient the project/launch/program/whatever.

[hungryforcodes]

OK but the meaningless of a job is supposed to be compensated by a paycheck -- I don't mean that as some patronizing middle manager -- but rather I've done loads of jobs I thought were meaningless, but did them anyways, because I needed to pay my rent.

[ip26]

We can get a sense of how an IC’s productivity changed during lock down. But it’s harder to tell how the effectiveness of management or leadership might have changed over a one or two year period.