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by dijksterhuis 485 days ago
i sort of agree wit your sentiment, although probably would use more nuanced language about it.

i’ve had this exact conversation with my 70+ still working father so many times now. i’ve heard the rant in the article over and over again. and, like, he blames remote work too. “its the fucking zoom bullshit”.

but then i explain to him how i do remote work and suddenly gets it. like, remote working means you are required to work in a more direct and efficient way. you have to work hard at comms. you have to write everything with purpose. no “oh hey did you look at X”. instead “hey we need X done by T because otherwise Y. if you need to speak to P about it, they’re available this afternoon. contact me if anything is unclear and i’ll explain it to you on a call asap. let me know when you’ve read this please.”. like, i’ve debugged a production outage on my phone with other devs while in a doctors waiting room.

the problem is, yeah, a lot of people do treat it like a chance to sit at home doing the bare minimum.

and i think you kind of hit the nail on the head for something i hadn’t clocked. they can get away with it because “management” utterly suck at their jobs and haven’t adapted. like, i hear about people stuck in zoom meetings all the time… WHY?!? you don’t need face to face comms to work remotely. at all. it’s clinging on to the old ways of doing things!

up until now i’d been putting it down to a purely generational “can’t teach old dogs new tricks” thing. maybe it kind of is, just not in a way i’d seen before.

4 comments

Bingo. Remote work requires/rewards good communication, and amplifies the ill effects of poor communication. You have to put in the effort, but a lot of people don't know how or don't think they need to!
> i’ve had this exact conversation with my 70+ still working father so many times now.

> but then i explain to him how i do remote work and suddenly gets it.

I don’t understand how he gets it if you have to have the same conversation numerous times.

he gets it on that call.... then he gets pissed off about it all over the next few months after he's forgotten our call about it. then he complains about it on the phone to me. then i remind him, then he remembers or i explain it again.

repeat.

> the problem is, yeah, a lot of people do treat it like a chance to sit at home doing the bare minimum

The thing is... I've been in offices before COVID that were full of people doing the bare minimum. And they were able to do that because management, generally, has always sucked and was never good at their jobs.

What I've noticed is that people don't seem to have the attention span to read the document or memo I wrote, and the meeting is so they can get the TL;DR.
oh god yeah these people do my head in. i haven’t found a good strategy for them yet.
The Amazon Way used to be for you to send out a memo so that people would be productive at a meeting, and cancel the meeting on the spot if more than a third hadn’t read it or read enough of it.
"used to"? What do they do now?
Constantly passive aggressively say "as per my document" in the meeting. I see the upside of companies that have memo culture.
If you can tldr your memo or message, maybe you should write a shorter memo or message.

People are busy. Nobody got time for waffle. Get to the point or get out of the way.

Read the book The Mythical Man Month, then work at a big company, and then you'll appreciate the challenges of organizing five different teams to accomplish a large and complex task.