About 6 months ago my manager, who happens to prefer RTO told me how if I only visit office sometime, I should not expect to have a desk. I was amused, but I did not ask if that means I can just stay home then.
Clearly management class figured out a fun little plan. Announce RTO so that people can 'self-select' thus reducing headcount ( lower cost ), introduce hybrid ( so that you can claim you are flexible in posting even if you offer 1 remote day out of 5 and save real estate at the same time ), sell non-performing real estate ( lower cost ) and cramming employees into rotating cubicles ( efficiency ).
What does it all translate to? Bonuses.
I am not exactly a revolutionary type, but its now or never if you are on a particular side of the fence. Whatever window is there to establish a normal, it is closing now.
That is the weirdest part of this whole shift for me. Remote positions now get tons of applications and can afford to select best possible candidates, while 'old guard' is left with 'not best' candidates. Granted, some positions do not need a rocket scientist, but one would think a company would want someone, who is capable enough to have options.
And yet, HRs across the US spectrum seem to be sending the same memo. I am mildly annoyed by this, because I had a mini-conversation today and the tone from an executive was: business won't let this ( WFH ) stand.
Maybe it is not about best possible candidate. Maybe they are ok with less capable people for whatever reason.
I think it is a valid question and I will attempt to respond in good faith.
I do not personally think that there is no value to politics. Sadly, we have to navigate those waters somehow.
But, if people who self-select out say they do not want to deal with it and instead contribute to company growth one line at a time, why would you not allow them to specialize in that?
Or are they just an easy target practice for politically astute?
FWIW, I am probably not a great remote worker. Still, good enough to get the job done. What more does an employer want from me? They are good enough to me that I can extent some loyalty and goodwill, but why would a company want me to also participate and contribute to its craziness politically?
<< Cliché that the best people are among the remote workers.
Well, it is that way now because fully remote work is in demand if you look at sheer application numbers for those roles. Companies have their picks for those. Anecdotally, my company, where my manager is RTO-oriented, but does not seem to want to rock the boat too much, begrudgingly seems to have accepted that for the position he listed ( niche in niche kinda deal ), he won't get a guy to just move from another state just to sit in a chair one day a week ( and depend on corporate whims ) so he had to accept that reality.
Mebbe its a cliche, but, not unlike stereotype, there is a reason it exists.
> why would you not allow them to specialize in that?
Because it requires pre-hashed work. It requires someone else to do the politics for them. But we may be unclear on the definition of office politics.
In this situation, the politics is simply drawing on a whiteboard an architecture with or without Kubernetes, taking note of who cringes and who is unhappy, and extracting the technical reasonings which a very real and legitimate for the future of our app. “I’ll be hella expensive”, “Will be awesome because every dev wants Kubernetes exposure” “Will be a hell because no-one know K8s”, all those concerns are not “playing office politics” but “finding and addressing the technical hurdles”.
Once we know we want K8s, sure, any remoter worker can do it, but this is not the difficult part in that process. It’s like the chain factory was already set up, and here’s your seat.
In a chain factory, the genius is not in the chain worker, but in the engineers who split the work.
Remote people can participate in office politics, but the fact that during 3-days-remote-per-week, office politics only happen on the remaining 2 days, it shows it’s much more smooth in face-to-face.
Our org had a different plan. They put the entire office (region based) on organized teams and sent out an email. You get team points based on:
- visits to the office
- meals in the office
- attendance at after hours events
- etc. etc.
SMDH. I can see the article headline now "Innovative gamification in the office"