[SkyPuncher]

I'm a big advocate of remote work, but my role has changed it's value significantly:

* As an IC, remote is amazing. It gives me distraction free space to focus and be productive. With moderate process, I'm able to be extremely productive and unblock myself.

* As a manager, remote can be challenging when trying to drive cross-team/cross-org impact - especially on ambiguous projects. It's far more challenging to drive outcomes when you can't simply walk into someone's office for a quick conversation . Good process can help with this, but most companies don't reward for this.

[BaseballPhysics]

As a senior manager who's job is entirely cross-team/cross-org change management, I can assure you remote hasn't made things much harder. Orgs have always been geographically diverse (show me an org that doesn't have to coordinate across multiple sites and I'll show you an org that isn't big enough to have these issues in the first place) and managing change in remote parts of the org was always hard and always necessary.

[SkyPuncher]

I generally agree with everything you say. It aligns with my experience as well. Once you hit a certain size, people are in different locations no matter what.

The difference with remote-only is _everyone_ is in the hard bucket. That includes the people who you work most closely with.

While it's not insurmountable, it can add friction.

[BaseballPhysics]

Sure, but my comment was with respect to managers, not ICs.

For ICs, I agree, distributed teams can face coordination challenges due to increased friction, poorer communication practices (if they haven't adapted well to remote communication patterns), etc. Personally, my ideal world is teams that are geographically co-located but working remotely. That minimizes things like timezone challenges while also giving the team the option to meet face-to-face when they find it makes sense.

But management does not (or should not) require that level of highly engaged, coordinated work. Hell, pre-pandemic, the vast majority of my interactions were already remote because, outside of my direct reports (with whom my relationship is largely about providing strategic direction and then delegating responsibility so they can get the real work done), the people I work with represent a cross-section of the company's functions, and thus the company's offices.

But hey, maybe what remote is doing is exposing those micromanagers, or organizations, that rely on heavy-handed top-down hierarchy who are finding it difficult to adapt.

In which case I say good riddance.

[cudgy]

This post contradicts itself. Basically, it seems to suggest that whatever benefits your role is what needs to be done.

However, given that there are far more staff employees, wouldn’t it make sense to optimize for their output?

[SkyPuncher]

I could have done better elaborating on the conundrum.

Ultimately, companies are looking for outcomes (e.g. financial return). Outputs are an important part of outcomes, but not the goal in of itself. Outputs also need to be working towards valuable goals. Without value, outputs are worthless.

This creates a conundrum where you need to find a proper balance between the large quantity of people who need to make the outputs and the fewer number of people who need to guide the value.

[frumper]

Can you give some examples of ambiguous projects? That doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful endeavor to begin with.