[jawns]

I am at a point in my career where I can be selective and only consider 100% remote roles. I am also a manager, so I understand some of the management challenges that lead people to dismiss or be skeptical of the claim that remote work can be just as effective as office work.

One thing I will admit: It is harder, as a remote manager, to manage low performers or people who show signs of disengagement. You can get more out of an office worker who lacks intrinsic motivation than a similar remote worker.

But that's not a knock on remote work itself. You just have to have the right people on the team, just as in any other circumstance.

[the_af]

I agree with you a fair assessment is warranted. Dismissing the downsides of remote work leads to unrealistic expectations/conversations.

That said,

> You can get more out of an office worker who lacks intrinsic motivation than a similar remote worker.

Is this because for an office worker it's harder to disguise the lack of motivation? Or are they pressured into going through the motions even if they don't feel like it? I wonder if this is a good thing at all.

Let me explain: as a fully remote worker, there are days I don't feel like working. On those days, I'll slack off. My work won't suffer because on the longer term I'll achieve my objectives; I'm just not wasting time pretending to work when I don't feel like it. My mental health is better as a result. This wouldn't be possible if I was at the office, because this isn't a socially acceptable mode of working.

[toomuchtodo]

As a remote worker and manager, I see you. When folks on my teams are not feeling it, I tell them to just let me know they're taking the rest of the day or the day and I've got it covered. People are not machines to grind widgets out all day long, some days will be very productive, some days will be useless. That's okay. I'm optimizing over long periods of time. I care about the mental health and wellbeing of those who report to me, and I will absolutely help them find work elsewhere if it isn't working where we're at.

None of this work really matters in the end, so no point in getting too bent out of shape about it. The work needs to get done to a defined standard, but overly focusing on high levels of consistent "engagement"? I don't drink the koolaid and neither should the folks who report to me. We show up, we grind, we go home. And that's fine, that's what the money is for.

[imagineerschool]

"None of this work really matters in the end"

I look forward to this not being true

[toomuchtodo]

I wish you meaningful work if you can find it. Most work is not; self awareness and full context is important in how we operate when interacting with others professionally.

If you die tomorrow, are fired, or laid off, you will be replaced. If your company fails, you will move on to the next job. Per the US BLS, approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. Broadly speaking, ~90% of startups fail. So, I also wish you luck.

Very few of us are saving or improving actual lives or legitimately changing the world for the better (deep gratitude to those folks). The rest of us are not. I am sorry to be the messenger.

[ryandrake]

Realistic and experienced comment. Junior folks with stars in your eyes, please read this.

[imagineerschool]

The legitimately world changing life improving work I do somehow always happens to be unpaid. Funny how that works :)

[toomuchtodo]

Knowing this is half the battle :) money first, then meaning.

[dave881]

I think this has more to do with workers who are only interested in doing the least amount of work they can get away with.

Even highly motivated workers are going to have off days that are less productive, but the average level of output will be higher.

Low performing / marginal workers, in my experience, tend to do their best work when they feel like they are being observed. Providing that sort of motivation is more difficult when they are remote.

[Closi]

Yes - also there are lots of reasons for why people are low performing.

Office environments can take some of those reasons (e.g. certain distractions) away.

[johnnyanmac]

> it's harder to disguise the lack of motivation? Or are they pressured into going through the motions even if they don't feel like it?

As a personal example, it's the latter for me. If I'm having an off day WFH, it's a lot easier to delay meetings or shuffle things around than in an office. I've pushed some meetings back, slept in a few more hours and make up that time either later in the evening or on some other day. Or on the other end may cancel later meetings to just relax later on if my brain is scambled. A lot harder to justify in person. You're there, why can't we meet? why are you nodding off? etc.

>I wonder if this is a good thing at all.

Probably not, but modern work places aren't really designed around "what's good long term for employees". Especially not the US where we barely have vacation days, a lot of passive (or active) aggression around the recent-ish ma/paternity leaves, complaints of burnout are seen as a weakness instead of a proper problem to resolve.

They are fine churning through you in 2 years, laying you off, and training fresh talent later. Even if that approach is horribly unsustainable for building talent and increasing efficiency.

[resonious]

I think in the best case scenario, a person being physically together with their team will genuinely feel like working more often than they would if they were alone in their room.

I also agree with you that people in the office are more susceptible to straining themselves due to social pressure.

I'm not sure how these two balance out. It probably depends on the specific people.

[willcipriano]

Might be easier to manage if top performers were rewarded in a meaningful way.

If the top performer is getting a 3 percent raise this year, the "slacker" is probably higher paid on a per hour basis considering they work less.

When the top performers start buying vacation homes and sports cars as a reward for being one, I'd wager the unmotivated might start moving.

[throwaway737max]

It's hard to find a metric that can't be gamed. Otherwise we would not have this issue in the first place. You would also get a lot of office politics and an unfriendly work environment, because everyone would want the projects that would have the highest visibility.

All to often there are invisible "heroes" who quietly fix issues, prevent bugs and makes sure everything runs smoothly. They are simply not as visible as someone who creates high profile features and firefight bugs introduced by their coding. From the management point of view they are hard workers that work late fixing issues.

Management can only recognize what they can see. The quiet dev who just makes things work is a huge value to the company, while the "bro" that master the political game gets all the recognition.

What metrics can they use that are not quickly gamed?

[willcipriano]

You can probably see some variation of the logic in your comment on here on a daily basis.

I argue that it's management's job to know what's going on well enough that "invisible heros" don't exist. If they can't, what exactly are they managing?

I've been in the situation you describe and I just find another job, what may be invisible to your current manager may be obvious to your future one.

*Bonus content: I suspect most of the time the reason people don't "see things" is for political/human reasons more so than they are blind. You probably didn't seem as interested in your bosses new Tesla as he would've liked or something.

[johnnyanmac]

>What metrics can they use that are not quickly gamed?

You're right, goodheart's law. But I do think the current metrics can definitely be improved.

We can definitely identify "quiet heroes", but people look towards others like them. For management, that's exactly those "high visibility", constantly reporting hype men (who can be high or low performers). Introverted IC's can still perform miracles, an introverted manager who spends most of their times in meeting would definitely struggle. Even if those skills are not necessarily what is needed to perform optimally at some roles, that is what managers seek out of everyone. Because that's how they got to where they were, after all.

There are ideas out there, but ultimately nothing will change until we can at least admit these biases first.

[gumby]

> I am at a point in my career where I can be selective and only consider 100% remote roles.

I assume “point in career” you mean “around the block for a while”. My kid graduated and considered only remote jobs, and after a couple of years when the big-company employer tried Return to Office he jumped to a startup. That’s just an n of one, but these days anybody can consider it.

My company is not 100% remote, but that’s only because we have a chem lab with some special instruments and other equipment. But if/when you don’t need to be in the lab, remote is the default.

[onethought]

Onboarding is harder. Social cohesion is… different.

Remote work has just as many issues as in person.

But perhaps a lot of the issues are the employers problem more than the employees. Hence the shift and the tension

[CuriouslyC]

Onboarding is different. The work you would put into onboarding directly, you mostly put into documentation and architecture so people can achieve goals without having to have a mental model of the whole application. Try to design your application so you can part out components/endpoints/modules to people on Fiverr - you code is decoupled and documented well enough that short term contractors can come on, look at an example/template and fill in the blanks for the current requirements without a ton of direct support. When you're at that level, onboarding basically reduces mostly to a quick task overview/ticket discussion, a few DMs over slack and a code review.

[jordanpg]

Framed this way, it seems like remote work can actually be an effective filter that can identify and screen out low performers.

[fendy3002]

It is. It's almost impossible to fake performance since there's only one parameter to measure: work / result / etc. Good performers will produce better / more result, more initiative, and more responsive.

However it's also easier for a bad, micromanaging managers to make their team appears low performant. That's basically the trade off.

[robertlagrant]

I disagree. Someone who's always getting Slacked with requests and keeps unblocking people won't be doing the work you're measuring, but they're helping 20 people do their work in half the time.

[fendy3002]

Then what's the problem? There'll be work record somewhere, either emails, commits (if they're software engineers) or system audit trails.

Moreover if you ask those 20 people during performance review, it'll clear as day.

[sokoloff]

People who get unblocked by Pat and as a result accomplish their work are very likely to talk about the latter and forget/not mention the former when it comes to performance review time.

[robertlagrant]

Yes, and not because they don't care about Pat, but because they don't see the other timeline where Pat didn't help and it took them a week to figure it out (or wait for Pat to spot their issue).

[robertlagrant]

This seems pretty unlikely to surface. Saying "oh you do that by doing these 3 things" in Slack, or going off and fixing a broken thing in a test environment, might save someone else hours or days, but they won't report somewhere "this person saved me hours", particularly if it happened 3-12 months ago (whatever the review cycle is). Combing through emails and commits is also just pretty unlikely to happen.

[fendy3002]

There's some possibilities:

* The impact is actually much smaller than you initially think

* You're not vocal enough about that, or that's just one-off thing (high performers usually pretty consistent)

* You're in a bad environment where good work isn't getting recognized

I've did exactly that and my coworkers keep know how that benefits them, so it's not impossible. Anyway, being vocal on what you're doing or achieve in remote work is also crucial, if the environment cannot discover your achievement easily.

[johnnyanmac]

>here'll be work record somewhere, either emails, commits (if they're software engineers) or system audit trails.

Sure, it'll be somewhere. Will a manager bother looking around for that when it comes time to layoff? Do they even care about that to begin with? Are they even close enough to the product where they bother to look at something like a commit log? Half may not even look at the dang Jira points they keep forcing teams to keep up with.

It comes down to care, and to be frank (in my experiences) almost no manager cares enough to take that time. They have a lot of other stuff on their plate, after all. They aren't rewarded for retention, they don't necessarily get punished if the companies underperforms as long as they can rationalize a scapegoat. why try to retain these low key "glues"?

>if you ask those 20 people during performance review, it'll clear as day.

My performance reviews tended to be personal, in my experience. a skip manager/director may ask about my direct lead, but other than that I can't recall ever calling someone out (good or bad) during one.

It comes down to the same metric, are those managers/directors going to take the time to ask everone about who they think is an unsung hero?

[jimmydoe]

> You just have to have the right people on the team

you put it nicely, the flip side is most of companies/teams may not have the luxury to have all 100% right people, they may get disengaged and some of them may come back engaged again. the challenge here is remote work makes it relatively harder to get some of them back on track.

[jawns]

Yes, that's true. If it were as easy as "just hire high performers" then everyone would do it. And even if you do hire high performers, helping them emerge from a period of disengagement is tough.

So perhaps one way to express my position is that when it comes to remote work, you almost have to treat yourself as an independent contractor or consultant, even if you're technically an employee.

[johnnyanmac]

given the current market they probably do.

But when many companies barely respect the employees to begin with, they shouldn't be surprised when the employee disengages and always has an eye on the next opportunity. There will always be other semi-unavoidable issues like pay, location, and personal passions that get in the way, but having some intention to retain and nurture your talent will go a long way. Something that has very clearly shown to NOT be the case these last 18 months or so.

[P_I_Staker]

I've never met a manager that was good at these things. In my industry they just look for any defect and then start applying pressure, until they get someone new, or you change.

Pretty atrocious policy when disability, mental health and trauma can come into play. It essentially relies on inducing despair. I know for a fact much of big tech is like this. Atlassian has been called out for it.

Perhaps you work for a small-to-midsize company.

[econner]

Agree with this completely. I have found it consistently challenging to create the structure necessary for low performers to turn their work around. We have also had issues with people actively working for other companies while turning in poor work, spending most of their time freelancing, etc. It is hard to correct that level of effort when they think it is "good enough". Sadly the whole overemployed phenomenon is ruining it, not because they work multiple jobs but because they are disingenuous about it.

[johnnyanmac]

>not because they work multiple jobs but because they are disingenuous about it.

it's definitely a situation with no one coming out looking good. employees should be honest, but bad companies really screwed the pooch being hawks trying to preside over every minute of their lives. messaging them in dead hours of the night, micromanaging breaks, being worried when they leave about "leaking secrets", pressure to work overtime (e.g. stealing their time for no extra pay). There's no way in high hell I'd tell my workplace anything happening outside of it unless it involves extended leave.

But I do think either way that's it's unacceptable to have two "full time jobs" with shared hours, unless all 3 parties agree to it. I have some long term freelance work I'd continue on the side, but that's specifically because the hours are low and I can fit them into evenings after conventional work hours.

[rrr_oh_man]

> You can get more out of an office worker who lacks intrinsic motivation than a similar remote worker.

No, you will have them sitting at their desk.

That's not work.

That's the appearance of work.

Unfortunately, that's enough for bad managers.

[marginalia_nu]

It's a spectrum.

It's indeed true you probably can't get someone who's completely disengaged to be particularly productive. They'll do the bare minimum to make you go away but mostly just phone it in. These people probably should be encouraged to leave anyway, if nothing else for their own sake. Odds are they're in a late stage Office Space-type burn out and could really do with a change of scenery.

That said, there are personalities who genuinely benefit from hands-on management. Some just don't have a lot of initiative and will just do nothing until they're told what to do next.

[rrr_oh_man]

> That said, there are personalities who genuinely benefit from hands-on management. Some just don't have a lot of initiative and will just do nothing until they're told what to do next.

Absolutely.

But you don't need physical handholding for that.

[szundi]

Even though I had this team all the time who are pretty engaged, lot of people are not motivated and a lot of them cannot be ever motivated enough. They had a childhood that killed it.

Until we have 40% unemployment, these people are working under certain CEOs. After some easy deduction, lots of CEOs have to decrease/kill the Home Office for these people if this is true what parent commenter wrote.