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While I can't speak for every manager, I can speak for myself managing a hybrid team going on 5 years now (obvious disclaimer, not necessarily the views of my company etc) > Imagine being an IC software developer and being stuck on dial up. That’s what it’s like to be a manager in a remote environment. This is hyperbolic. I would also suggest it takes some autonomy and responsibility away from managers to adapt and learn new ways for building an understanding of your engineers. If adapting to remote is problematic, adapting to employees with dramatically different methods of thinking and communication (of which there are many) will also be problematic. Are there challenges? Sure. From my perspective, the largest among them likely being the loss of organic opportunities to casually interact and build rapport, such as over lunch. The second worth mentioning is the friction added to nonverbal communication. (Onboarding is one of the most critical places these hit, but they're ongoing headwinds as well.) But neither of these are in any way insurmountable, or even high on the list of "things that keep me up at night" managing a team.
At the risk of a simple answer, I've found they're usually well addressed by intentionally making opportunities to just... interact, and of course finding what works for an individual dev, with a team-wide emphasis on async methods of alignment, knowledge sharing, and consistency/coordination. None of the things you mentioned, what a dev is doing, what they want and need, should have in-person as a requirement. The statement of "more intrusive" is especially ironic, as I find knocking on an office door and interrupting flow, or bugging someone in the hallway or over lunch "what's the status of X" far more intrusive than having a good process and cadence and ongoing awareness for work being done, and trusting/cultivating engineers to reach out if something comes up. (These are systems which, to emphasize my point, come very naturally when one is supporting a remote or hybrid team, but have broad benefit.) I'd add as well that "is someone smiling" is an... extremely lossy and unreliable heuristic for knowing your engineer, to put it more gently than I probably should. The funny part with all this said: Your core point, that managers are contributing to the RTO push, potentially has some truth to it. (although I'm inclined to disagree that it's THE major component just knowing the discussions and tax implications between legislators/business owners/bigcos in my own city, it's totally a guess on my part) I've just been reading a bunch of posts lately that seem to defend what is, in my eyes, a cop-out for a manager who should be adapting to far more than remote on a day-by-day basis, resulting in concrete costs both for employees in location/commute and for managers in being unable to hire high quality remote engineers, and this being said so overtly pushed me to write this wall-of-text. |