[hotnfresh]

I’ve just recently encountered a company with a culture that doesn’t interact so well with remote work, and it’s been eye opening. Lots of preference for talking (in person, or call) as soon as a message exchange goes past about two messages, when often what needs to happen is one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly—the talking doesn’t help, either, just wastes more time. Awful weirdly-restrictive chat room organization, which is shocking considering nearly-leaderless online communities manage to arrange those kinds of things better. Everything important gets posted to one-on-one chats or ephemeral and invisible-to-outsiders small group direct messages. The effect is they’ve accidentally made a bunch of stuff opaque and secret that really, really should not be. It’s poison for collaboration.

I also get the impression some folks here just kinda… aren’t comfortable with written language. Reading or writing it.

It’s so weird to see, but some of the folks who’ve been living this kind of job-life 10+ years, now I get how they think remote can’t possibly be as productive as in-person—but it’s mostly due to dumb mistakes that are also harming collaboration in the office. Most of them have no idea the place is doing things so entirely wrong, or how much better it can be with some simple tweaks.

[smeej]

It is absolutely incredible to me the number of people in professional roles who cannot read and write coherently, even when English is their native language.

I cannot tell you how many meetings I've had where someone told me I "wasn't communicating clearly" and I asked them to read the unclear message back to me so I could understand what would make it clearer for them.

And then I find out they can't read, at least not fluently. They either skip key words altogether or mistake them for other words.

I'm convinced fewer than half of American adults could read a random book out loud, fluidly, without preparation.

[trane_project]

I looked this up and found this report: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill.

I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns.

Edit: Found the source of this figures (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-...) which has data from more contries in the OECD. Japan scores the highest, followed by Finland.

[sokoloff]

> Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess)

The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention (OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5."

The PIAAC definitions of each level are here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_... and I would estimate that extremely few daily tasks would require (or even be aided by) level 5 literacy proficiency.

[smeej]

Most of my experience is in customer-facing roles, and I would argue that reading a customer email chain where they try to describe what is happening, sometimes with pictures, requires level 4 understanding.

You often end up with multiple documents (several emails, pictures, logs). There's often competing information (customers are speculating about what's wrong, but they likely include lots of other information because they don't actually know). And you definitely need background knowledge about the product.

Add in translating that into a bug report for the engineering team? A successful high-level customer support agent needs level 5 reading ability.

But my experience asking questions of my teammates in the company Slack channels tells me very few of them are even actually at level 3.

[steveBK123]

> one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly

This is exactly my observation on zoom/meeting heavy cultures

A lot of people cannot put their wants & desires into the written word.

With a lot of these people I end up taking contemporaneous notes in a slack message to then send back to them.

[lsmeducation]

Okay, so why do you think that will get better in person? Just curious. Why is "lets meet in person" the go to solution? Look, the RTO people are LOUDER. Period.

They will win this fight if the Remote or Die crew doesn't get loud.

[hotnfresh]

I think in-person talking papers over a bunch of dysfunction, in this case, at enormous cost in still-much-worse-than-ideal productivity (plus the overhead of offices). But does let things get done more efficiently than if they tried to take that dysfunction into a heavily-remote environment.

It also, separately, masks it—people working in-person, but hobbled by bad communication patterns, at least look productive.

I’m not claiming this is good, mind you, but that it’s made me understand at least one (I suspect large) segment of the “remote can’t be as good as in-person” side of the argument. If this is how they think “serious business” should or must function, no wonder they’re skeptical of remote work. Meanwhile they’re actually just organizationally bad at communication, in general.

[lsmeducation]

Alright, I guess.

In-office had a long time to evolve (half a century I'd say). Remote work kind of only had the COVID years. It's a baby in an incubator. The RTO stuff is kind of like infanticide. So while I understand your perspective, from a war point of view, we have no choice but to protect this baby. They want to cut this experiment off asap. Every little anecdote, every little corporate RTO plan, every little CEO saying shit, is just chipping away at such an infant life.

Give it the same chance the office bullshit had, which was decades. I kind of have to be militant about this. Thanks for the other side, but this baby gotta be kept alive.

If your team sucks, your team sucks. Doesn't matter if you're in office, or out of office.

[hotnfresh]

I’m on your side. I just think understanding the “enemy” is usually more beneficial than not.

[edit] to explain, I’m using this information to push the organization toward improvements that I can sell without mentioning remote work, but which, if adopted, will surely cause people here to notice a smaller difference between WFH days and in-office days. It may take a while, but this should reduce reluctance to allow long stretches of, or indefinite, remote work.

[ecshafer]

I don’t think the RTO people are louder, what they are is more powerful. You have a lot of upper management and executives that are RTO people, for whatever reasons that may be. But they hold a lot more power than the ic that like remote.

[lsmeducation]

The LGBTQ community got these people flying rainbow flags. You're telling me the actual IC community can't even get them to respect this platform? Maybe we have some learning to do.

Covid is over, so unless we start fighting better about this, they are absolutely going to chip away at this.

[likenesstheft]

A culture around frequent calls is toxic. It reeks of insecurity from some people who are afraid of paper trails.