It all comes down to hiring the right people. The problem with remote is many companies hire the wrong people so they end up not doing the right thing. Then all of the people who are good get punished.
Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
Now everyone expects it, and lazy/weak managers will just make everyone come into the office vs having hard conversations with crap employees to tell them they cant work from home.
> Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
I'm coordinating with developers in Europe, South America and East Asia. The customers are all over, but mainly North American. I'm in Europe. I've seen some of the customers once or twice in person, I see many of my European colleagues at the yearly get-together. But all the contact and all the work is over email, phone and video conferences and the usual mix of other remote collaboration tools, ticket system, git, stuff like that. When I enter our local office, only one of the 50 people working there has anything to do with that I do. My manager is 800km away. Well, there's payroll over here, but the only time I'll need to "visit" them in person is when a paycheck is late ;).
Even before COVID, the world shifted towards remote, even when you HAD to come to the local office because of reasons. COVID just showed everyone what a charade it already has been for the last decade to force people into an office just to get on phone/email/git and work remotely from the office. COVID cut out the stupid useless "going to the office" step.
In the 2000s, it wasn't like that, teams were concentrated at some offices, offshoring wasn't that much of a thing yet. And for lots of things, travelling e.g. to meet a customer was accepted and normal, far more often than it is now. A new contract was a 2-week stay at the customers'. Back then, remote work actually was a privilege. But the world had changed long before COVID, slowly, then very quickly.
I kinda feel like the comparison between an on-prem vs cloud. For the longest time, big, old companies clung onto their data center spaces. No new start-up would ever dream of that though. They would be cloud first from inception. It's probably going to be the same for new companies vs old ones.
The push to cloud happens even when it makes no sense for customers at all. I'm in the mergers and acquisitions consulting space for IT and there are a lot of very mature, stable non-it companies that can save millions going colo vs cloud when we spin them off but the push is ALWAYS to cloud, regardless of the costs.
It's now a selling point when buying a company that the infrastructure is cloud based, even if it's IaaS that has been stable and unchanging for 15+ years - and they require the staff to maintain the servers regardless of where it's hosted.
Problem is that the board and investors are usually also heavily invested in commercial real estate, to the point where artificially propping it up is worth more to them than the company.
Well, culture is just so many rocks you can hold onto while swimming in the market. My regards to the inner city bubble who based a buisness on that millstone being kept afloat.
I solved the same problem by imitating my morning and evening routine. That is, I wake up, get on my bike, and ride - but not to the city, but in the opposite direction, into the forest. I relax biking and come back home. Then my daily starts and I'm full of energy. After I'm done with all my tasks, I repeat the same procedure, just explore some different paths. When I come back home, I no longer think of my tasks.
People get really defensive about remote work I guess? It wasn't just walking, there was also social isolation and being excluded that made it unbearable. And no real boundary between work and home. If you're doing an hour driving every day I can see why you'd prefer remote though.
Yeah, I'd like to come to your defense here. While I do prefer working from home, I totally get what you're saying about the routine of walking to work.
I used to bike commute about 7 miles each way up and down some intense hills; it was part of my routine, and I had to do it. Now that I'm working from home, sure, I could go out and ride 15 miles every day, but it becomes a matter of discipline.
Same with socializing. I tend to prefer solitude, so socializing, like exercising, now requires discipline – I have to make myself do it – whereas before it was baked in, and unavoidable.
People recommending a dog aren't wrong. I do have a dog now, and walk at least 5 miles a day. My dog is an idiot so I can't really do the dog-park thing, but if you have a non-idiotic dog, there's some socialization to be gained there, too. BUT: it's a big commitment, and will have an impact on big life decisions later on like what apartment you can rent, whether you live in a city or a suburb, how easy it is to take a vacation or travel abroad, etc., so it's not like it's a no-brainer or an easy solution.
Only if you live in a country with decent public transportation. The rest of the world still have to deal with traffic jam and polluted air while commuting (cars are difficult to get in many countries).
Not if you count rural areas. In Japan for example, commuting every day in many areas still requires a car or long train rides. And the sardine-packed trains at rush hours in the cities are literally soul-sucking.
Only Japan would remotely apply unless you're cheating the system by checking only hotspot cities and trying to claim they are the entirety of their country. Suffice to say, most people don't live near Amsterdam, let alone able to afford it.
>> Think of how much time is stolen from you in a daily commute
> Not that much.
OK, let's assume it's not 90 minutes but only 20 minutes a day. That compounds, and it's a lot of time I could spend on what really matters to me, not work. Why should I do it, if I have a choice? Time is the most precious thing we have. I will never come back to the office, period.
It’s 20 minutes where I catch up on the news get a bit of walking in from the home to the train station and generally wake up to arrive at the office ready to go.
ha 20 minutes. Some days I waited for the bus longer than that. I waited because in Sydney the bus is on-time about 15% of the time. If you miss it, you wait an extra hour.
Not sure where you live, that's got a 20 min commute, but most people either live in a concrete prison to reduce the commute, or spend 2 hours a day on a bus/train.
I do know this.. if you worked from home, you could get all that you've outlined, and likely spend a pile less on rent/mortgage. Others who work with you would also get to see their kids before bed.
Stolen? You were paid for and took the job you knew was a certain distance and commute away from your home.
I believe employees have to start to get used to being paid less when working remote. People who work in an office or factory have to be rewarded for this commute. Some jobs cannot be made remote.
I assume a lot of people working remote also like the fact that they can do the laundry, clean the house, do some errands etc during the working day. This flexibility should also allow the salary for remote workers to be lower than for people working in an office.
I wasn't necessarily comparing a programmer working remote with a programmer working in the office.
I mainly tried to say that if we want to have people working in factories, working as nurses or doing office work that requires working as a team in person or meeting clients or what ever it might be then we have to start to pay them more compared to people who work from home.
>People who work in an office or factory have to be rewarded for this commute.
Last I checked, no one paid me" for my commute time or comp'd the wear on my vehicle. If those hours* spent in traffic should have been counted on the clock, then golly gee, I have invoices yo get written!
Seriously, I get it. There should be something for it, but there never will be. Wage theft. Management will do anything possible to get unpaid time out of you.
Well, most people took the job as a being-in-the-office job (before the work from home took off). Which means you took the job + commute for that salary. If you then suddenly don't have to go to the office it's not such a stretch to think you could/should be paid less.
As it's probably easier to hire someone to work remote than hire someone who has to go to the office, the salaries will probably over time be less for work from home jobs anyway (for the same type of job).
It's funny how people feel so entitled to their salaries and that management is there to rip people off. I get it for warehouse people, but for tech workers, come on.
>Well, most people took the job as a being-in-the-office job (before the work from home took off). Which means you took the job + commute for that salary. If you then suddenly don't have to go to the office it's not such a stretch to think you could/should be paid less.
That does not follow. I quote you a salary sufficient to warrant me to work for you. You don't get to come back and demand that you should be able to pay me less when I no longer commute when I'm still working for you. Unless the physical presence in the office is absolutely essential (which it isn't for knowledge workers in the way it is for a stocker or laborer), and the tech exists where working remote is a reasonable accommodation (which it does), then you wanting me in the office to get the job done is now something on the table for me (the employee) to charge you, the employer extra for. In no way are you, (the employer) entitled to an extra discount because I'm not driving in. Nevermind that I don't offer one of those. Though I may to have to ruminate on it.
>It's funny how people feel so entitled to their salaries and that management is there to rip people off.
It's funny how companies feel entitled to their profits and that employees are there to rip them off.
A) People are free to set the price of their time.
B) Management is explicitly there to get the absolute most out of workers with the least input. Even if that means playing dirty, (hopefully not, but I've seen a lot of it). You can say their purpose is leadership, but I've been privy to what high level management types think leadership is, and unfortunately, it ain't leadership. I know leadership. Come from a family with a lot of military background. Civillian business management theory abandoned most facets of leadership in order to cut corners, and maximize value generation. Just look at the C-Suite-to-everyone else pay disparity to see the fruits of that.
The firm didnt give 2 bits about your commute.
They pay you to be in on time. Not your commute. I know people who travel 6 hours a day. They get paid the same.
Why would any firm increase salaries, for services you were already providing?
You get maybe 12 waking hours a day, 8 working +2 commuting. Getting 2 hours back is a 16% raise.
You don't get it do you? The person took the job knowing that they have to commute. Be it 5 minutes or 5 hours. the took it based on a certain salary.
If they then all of a sudden don't have to commute (let's say 5 hours), then why could they then not be okay with a slightly lower salary (as they save 5 hours a day).
While true, it does highlight the fact that white collar jobs are diverse, and not all of them require one to be in the office. In fact, most of probably do not.
If your job is to meet and talk to customers, then yea, it isn't required to be in the office. In this case, you're not WFH. You're actually WFWCA (where ever customers are).
So is he either a figure head that can work remotely because he doesn’t matter, or is he doing “real work” and it turns out that working remotely does work?
Execs like to paint working remotely as something that is wasteful and so the common employee shouldn’t be allowed to do so, while simultaneously extolling the virtues of their remote work.
It’s reminiscent of the time I worked at one company and the chairman of the board showed up to give us a rousing speech that included the fact that he only showed up because he was going to a board meeting for another company whose board he was on in the same city. This was less than a month after one of our coworkers got shit canned after it was found out that he was moonlighting.
This is a bit ranty by the tl;dnr is that lots of jobs align with remote work and I am personally pissed that you try to frame it as ok because it’s a CEO and then in the next sentence you try to blunt the message by saying he’s just a “co-ceo” so it’s not that bad
Just read the article. He doesn't like to work from the office because he said he prefers to be on the road meeting customers.
Meanwhile, the brand of WFH HN folks want is to not leave the house and interact with real humans in person.
The only reason I said "co-ceo" is because I was responding to someone who, for whatever reason, thinks a multi-billion public company shouldn't have its CEO talk to customers.
Is he firefighting? Why isnt he doing strategy, management and the other things CEOs do?
Like hiring a CMO or BD head to do all the traveling he is doing?
>Well, I’m a remote worker. I’ve always been a remote worker my whole life. I don’t work well in an office,” Benioff said. “It just doesn’t work for my personality. I can’t tell you why. I do love to go in to visit customers though. I’m on the road constantly visiting customers.”
Ah, so he doesnt need to do sales. He likes doing it. It just …works… for his personality.
I know of one company who got the majority of their business because their CEO wined and dined some of his fellow CEOs and take them rides on his private aircraft. If Benioff is doing that sort of thing and enjoys it, more power to him
Even on the less cynical side, there's something to be said for hearing from customers directly instead of filtered through 5 levels of middle management
I am now back to a developer role, rather than being a manager (by my own choosing). I am much more productive (and actually communicate more with my colleagues (!)) when I work from home. Luckily my terms allow me to choose where I work from when by my-self.
Off topic, but I’ve been thinking about doing the same, I’ve seen other people at my level take pay cuts of only 10%~ going from management to IC while erasing meetings from their calendars
I’m kinda jealous, the only thing that is keeping me in management roles is the fantasy that the perfect company will come along with the right product, right growth stage but that is looking unlikely in this economy.
Recently someone posted an office etiquette post on our intranet, citing all you should do or avoid so that your coworkers can work and focus comfortably.
The person posting it probably though it was helpful, but it was just showing how an hell of a place offices have become since they went the open space route.
I’d like a good write-up. My current boss has this tendency to interrupt anyone when he is not doing something, let daily stand-ups go into 30-40 minutes, and ask everyone to gather for spontaneous group meetings regardless of their ability to contribute or how important their current task is. I’m not very good at phrasing this criticism positively, and while I have addressed some of them, little has happened. I try to educate myself to become a better leader, and I only want to help him do the same.
Some in my company argue that remote is the way to go but when it comes to traveling to another office on another continent, it suddenly becomes so important to meet colleagues in person and they stay here for weeks or months, all while making weekend hops to vacation destinations.
This is quite an editorialized title... it makes the CEO look like they have an extreme viewpoint, but in reality it sounded like the CEO had a pretty based and nuanced take: never enforce remote, and recognize that different kinds of work require more in office than others.
The only thing that I disagreed with was the "we don't want to lose our stars" mentality. Your mentality should not be about pushing people as far as you can until you have retention problems. Rather, it should be to inform people and provide them with opportunities to be productive in whatever way they prefer, and cut them lose if their output is not sufficient. Make decisions by outputs - not inputs.
I guess "drops a bomb" is a little over the top but the rest of the title are just facts. Salesforce really did ask people to come back, and he did indeed say he doesn't work well in an office.
It seems fair to use some amount of propaganda to push the "I want to work from home" agenda, since companies pushing "return to work" are also playing that same game.
I agree that he seems to have nuance on the topic, but the playing field seems to have already abandoned fair play.
It may be fair to do so but not necessarily effective. People tend to start tuning out what they see as hyperbole.
The companies may seem to get away with it, but not because they use a particular language tactic. They have the power to back up their "opinion" by firing people. People who want to keep their job may stop arguing, not because they buy the BS framing but because they have bills to pay.
The folks who hope to take a stand in the interest of worker's rights would be better served by trying hard to stick to the facts, promote nuanced discussions and not let the companies drag them into this kind of pissing contest.
Just remember ... the CEO role of a major company is radically different than any other job.
What Marc calls "work", you and I can't relate too.
He's spending a disporportionate amount of time talking to investors, talking to customers, talking to his Board.
I wouldn't be surprised if he's traveling 100 business days a year as a result.
Which if you're not at home because you're traveling for work, or if you are at home but just talking phone calls - that's a very different type of "working remote".
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EDIT: why the downvotes? Please comment if you disagree with something I said so that we can have a health discourse.
Yes, when he says he doesn’t work well in an office people here are reading he wants to work from home.
In reality, he’s probably thinking he’d rather be on the road than stay in his SV ivory tower.
Two stories about Benioff you might find interesting; when we were selling our startup there were two bidders on the table, Google and Salesforce.
Google sent out minions, Larry and Sergey were only reachable via email/call.
Benioff flew over to wine and dine our founders, they found common ground and he charmed them with his vision of where he saw our product going. He won with a lower bid than Google.
After the acquisition closed, he flew over to London too to visit my business unit, we met with him in the office and the senior management team were again taken out for some 1:1 time with him over dinner. Any skepticism they might have had was washed away after that evening, they all came back “brainwashed” into the Salesforce way — he even gifted us one of the domain names from his personal collection to use for our product (my email was marcos@social.com for a while, which I did find really cool)
The second story, he once logged into an all hands call using a shitty satellite connection from his yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean. He could have delegated while he was on holiday, but I don’t think Benioff ever switches off, hence why working from anywhere is his default mode of operation.
Thanks for sharing that story, really enjoyed reading it.
>> "He won with a lower bid than Google."
Off topic: why would a company every sell to a lower bidder? If you have any investors in the company (not bootstrapped), don't you have a fiduciary responsibility to always sell to the highest bidder.
Good question, not always; I suppose. The founders had quite a good share of stock which probably helped but ultimately it came down to vision.
My understanding was that Google didn’t really offer us a future plan, and the competitor they ended up acquiring (Wildfire) quickly disappeared — another fun little story is that Arielle Zuckerberg was working for Wildfire at the time, so she ended up at Google — while the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is stronger than ever after more acquisitions, even where the individual products disappeared.
All in all it still was extremely lucrative for founders and investors, the official number was $689m but there were also extra bonuses and employee retention incentives and such so the real number was higher.
I didn’t really gel with the FAANG style culture at the time so I left after I vested most of my stock, but I know some people made long careers out of it.
I know this, and I know logically it makes sense but I can also understand as a founder it's partly an emotional choice and you prefer to join the company that is courting you better.
Just like in any kind of b2b sales, the decisions are never fully data-driven.
If you have a job where you're constantly travelling (for sales calls, customer meetings, relationship building, etc.), then, yeah, having to report to an office when you're back at home base doesn't make any sense.
I have a job like this (presales; previously consulting). I'm usually on the road/in the air every week and, COVID aside, have been for the last seven years. An office hasn't made sense for me in a long time.
However, the co-CEO saying this just after pushing an RTO mandate feels really out of place. Many will definitely not get the nuance.
There’s no nuance here. There is not a single way in the universe that __everyone else__ needs to be in office but his job is so special that he has to WFH.