[PragmaticPulp]

> WFH will reduce middle management

In my experience, it's the exact opposite. WFH creates more of a fog of war, so companies end up hiring more managers to stay on top of it.

Some employees are great at self-directed WFH, but many others struggle without the physical, social context of the office to get them focused. Again, companies rely on more managers to compensate for those employees who struggle more with WFH.

I know people will say "Just hire people who are good at WFH", but if we transition large amounts of the workforce to WFH then you can no longer pick-and-choose just the good WFH people. You have to deal with the realities of managing WFH at scale.

[benreesman]

You know WFH is bad for non-technical EMs because of how hard they are fighting it.

Senior ICs are split on WFH. Managers who can code are split.

Managers who can’t code are unanimous.

[RestlessMind]

What about Junior ICs who need a lot of mentorship and coaching? They are a lot more in number (twice that of Senior ICs in my observation) and almost everyone uniformly asks for more in-person events and more mentors.

[benreesman]

In fairness Junior ICs also miss the collegiate atmosphere of going out with all their work friends after the day wraps ;) I was a Junior IC with smart attractive colleagues once…

It is a real issue though and the answer isn’t obvious. I tend to think that something like A16Z’s model will wind up as the end state: modest amounts of flex office space, geographically distributed, with frequent, family-friendly off sites.

Pair-programming software infrastructure will have to improve, and maintaining a hub of urban office space where Senior ICs get a COL bump to be near the young folks will probably be part of it.

It’s a new world, and there will be an adjustment, but there’s enough critical people who simply aren’t going back that it’ll be management’s job to figure it out. I imagine figuring it out well will pay commensurately well.

[RestlessMind]

A simple first-order approximation of your first 3 paragraphs - hybrid model. Companies are discovering that offsites are in fact costlier for the value they provide. Hybrid would require an office and hence a higher cost, but it also has a much bigger bang for the buck.

> but there’s enough critical people who simply aren’t going back that it’ll be management’s job to figure it out

Pendulum is swinging, my friend. With a big recession looming, companies will have all the leverage. Elon has already paved the way and other big companies will soon follow. On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of startups will be bootstrapped in this recession and a majority of startup founders want to have the initial bootstrapping team to be together[0].

[0] Based on my first hand observation working as an advisor for a VC firm.

[benreesman]

Your point is taken about the macroeconomic situation (I'm not quite convicted enough to go short but it's a near thing, Q3 earnings are looking to be a shit show).

With that said, we've been through this before: companies always have leverage with many/most of their employees, and that is going even further up for awhile, but Google Search doesn't stay up without a meaningful number of people who have made enough money to not be pushed around.

This is the flip side of being one of the "CEO/VC class" and having a boom decade or two: most of the real pros made some serious money on stock and can't be herded like cattle the way new grads can be.

The American economy has become an experiment in how close you can get to indentured servitude for your working people without calling it that by twisting the macroeconomic knobs until the kid doesn't get medicine unless you hump that bullshit job. I'm sure the money guy who figures out how to do that to hardass infrastructure hackers or founder-caliber kids will be hailed as a hero (in private), but it hasn't happened yet alhamdulillah.

[Aeolun]

To be fair, if they’re all in the office it’s much easier to see that all the butts are in their seats.

If you try doing that remotely you need permanent surveilance with a webcam, and people get all uppity about it when that happens in their own home.

[benreesman]

Oh I agree, but if attendance is a performance metric then the work going on doesn't need an expensive white collar management infrastructure, which I think is part of Dr Burry's point (even though the article is referencing cooked studies about WFH productivity loss and couching the reference in weasel language).

[ehnto]

You seem fairly resolute that knowing if someone has their butt on their seat is useful, but I would invite you to try finding some other metrics that actually measure output, and try rewarding people for performing highly on those metrics. I can tell you, I've seen countless unproductive hours wasted with butts firmly on seats. It's not a good measure of productivity.

[Spivak]

What kind of job has no other measurement for output than time spent in a chair?

[shapefrog]

Jim is a hard worker, always first in the door and last out at night. - if only you were as committed as Jim, instead of being 2x plan, you would be 4x plan.

Jim sits and watches cat videos on youtube all day - is 0x plan, and will be promoted to being your boss next year.

[ehnto]

> Again, companies rely on more managers to compensate for those employees who struggle more with WFH.

The tactic never seems to be to hire more people to do the actual work though, curious!