"Hello, this is General Smith." "Sir, ... um .. you are answering your own phone?" "Yup. My EA is working from home thursday-friday and we cannot get the secure phone to forward calls to her cellphone." "Did you talk to IT?" "It is friday. IT works remote on fridays." "How about I come to your office?" "Please do, I'm all alone here."

> Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in Monday-Tuesday.

A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT or at the very least an oncall that goes to wherever the server is to fix it.

> The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half the week.

Pretty much the same thing.

As someone who is a big proponent of WFH, one thing I must still agree to is that organizational and cultural issues that existed prior to WFH at usually just worse in WFH. If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost.

That would be a lot of companies and workers out there, dare I say the vast majority even.

Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job, but they put up with it because housing in expensive and it was the least horrible job they could find with the highest pay they could land, enabling them a lifestyle upgrade, even if they don't care for the work itself, so of course they'll take every opportunity they get to slack off and watch Netflix if they can.

Expecting all your workers to be fully invested and committed on work while on the clock is an exercise in futility and something no company past a certain size will ever accomplish because everyone just looks after themselves and their own self interest first, screw the company and their shareholders. And the companies know this, hence the culture of micromanagement, spyware, RTO, etc.

That's why start-ups and small companies can accomplish things the likes of Google can't, because they're formed mostly of motivated people who care about the product and the mission first and foremost, while the likes of Google are full of coasters who are there just to make as much money as possible with as little work as possible while the gravy train lasts.

There are a lot of people that don't enjoy their jobs, but do the work because they're getting paid to do it. You seem to assume that anyone doing their job _only_ because they're being paid to do it will _not_ do their job if they can get away with it (even though they're still being paid to do so). Not everyone is a horrible person. Plenty of people will continue to do their job even if they could lie and not do it; because they agreed "if you pay me, I will do my job".

I've had times where I wasn't enjoying my job, but I still did the work... because that's the agreement I had with the company I worked for. And, like a lot of people, I wouldn't see it as acceptable to scam the company I work for.

What if you're taking a break? What about drinking a coffee? Chatting with coworkers? Playing table tennis or some arcade videogame in the break area? Various studies point at a lower bound for endurance when doing knowledge work. Some say 4h.

As long as they get something done those employees will still feel like they put in their day of work and they will still get good reviews. Could they have done it in half the time? Maybe, but who can tell?

I'm my own boss and I'm paid if I deliver results (and I think everyone should work like this, being an employee is opaque and overall sucks for earning potential if you are a good performer) but sometimes I put on a movie on a second screen while I'm working, mainly to make dull work (it's crazy how much you can charge to write the same old boring API or the same old Reaxt component for the n-th time) more tolerable. I'm definitely working slower but at least I'm getting things done without losing the will to live.

Am I stealing time from my business?

How's that different from what I just said?

Even if there are some very rare individuals that go to work primarily for companionship or for personal fulfillment that doesn't mean it's even worth bringing up in a discussion like this

It's obvious that few people are going to subordinate themselves in a world where they don't get paid for doing so, and if they did it would look more like volunteer associations (only emergency response involves much hierarchy, most volunteers are only loosely associated with the org, individuals choose which shifts to turn up to, local leaders are elected and view it as a burden rather than a privilege) and less like work (you don't get to choose anything).

Edit: I should add that I'm in no way against jobs, I just think that people who are doing largely unproductive work for free are still working, even though it'd be better for everyone if they were getting paid to do something more useful.

When large established companies complain about productivity and lack of employee commitment, the answer seems very obvious to me... Swap platitudes, certificates of recognition and motivational speeches with tangible financial incentives.

If the executive wants everyone to come into the office 5 days a week, then offer a 25%+ pay rise and watch people flood in

I don’t think this is true for the vast majority of startup employees though. Maybe the founders get some crazy return 10 years down the line if they’re lucky. Most everyone else would earn the same or less if there is a successful sale as they’d have at a “normal” company. And if there is no successful sale, they’d have earned less.

Since I joined the workforce, I encountered something like two or three people doing actually nothing at work. And once they are identified, I just know that I can't expect any output from them and just do without them.

It's the opposite that I'm confronted with daily : people who are absolutely terrible at their job and who constantly try participate. Not only I know that I have to triple check their outputs, but I also have to come up with fake tasks to give them so that they are not constantly asking for things to do or worst, doing disasters on their own initiative. They consume a lot of time and energy from the productive members of the team, while having no positive output for the company. It's like daycare for adults. And given that everybody is paid at the end of the month, I have nothing but love for unproductive (in the eyes of the company) people who take care of themselves.

I'd rather have both those people doing what they enjoy outside of work instead of forcing themselves to be here because governments and corporations are saying that you are not a member of society if you are not selling your time to capitalism.

Ya. We had that. We had 10+ people doing trouble tickets 8am to 4pm across more than a dozen buildings. They worked hard, but were never actually done. There was always a priority list. Now they work half the week from home. Stuff is piling up and we are begging for more non-at-home IT staff to be hired.

Based on your description you don't have a WFH policy, you have a policy that incentivizes not working at all. What makes you think that these hypothetical new hires are going to actually work while the rest of their department doesn't? What sane person would put up with that treatment?

I never said that's not dysfunctional, I said most companies ARE dysfunctional in one way or another, and it's something most workers who've been around the block a few times learn to live with eventually, since they prioritize hobbies, family and having a roof over their heads instand of finding that ideal Goldlacks company that's never dysfunctional in any way, because that doesn't really exist.

Especially traditional companies tend to be insanely dysfunctional when it comes to IT and SW engineering in general. And most people know this but still plenty choose to work there and put up with that dysfunctionality instead of fighting to change it, because like I said, it's just a job that pays the bills, not a personal identity, and a lot of the people in the real world aren't as fussy about this as HN is.

Again: I didn't suggest anyone fight to change anything or switch jobs. All I said is that hiring new people into the dysfunctional organization is going to do absolutely nothing to fix the problems OP is describing.

You're replying to what you imagine people on HN would often say, not replying to me.

This will make remote work mandatory, even if it still can't fix all the possible issues.

(Only due to your comment did I realise I was ambiguous, I meant remote work specifically for the IT department would be mandatory, not everyone in general).

It definitely feels like most people complaining about wfh have no friends and work is their entire life. I honestly do not understand how anyone can pretend they get anything done, while also being constantly interrupted or having conversations about what they're doing this weekend, or such and such sports team last night etc. Like... just get the work done and move on, jeez, it's work, not a social club. Ending wfh so you can force people to hang out with you is weird.

Maybe if you are working at Google, with infinite budgets and gleaming-new machines everywhere. But we have old stuff. We have phones that cannot be managed remotely. We have desktop computers that cannot get up and walk between offices unaided. We have fiberoptic wires that break when 60+yo buildings shift on their foundations. We have UPSs that cannot change their own batteries. We have antennas exposed to the wind/rain/snow. We also have innumerable systems that are either too old or too classified to be managed from a laptop at starbucks. None of this stuff can be fixed from home.

For the deployment I guess you can use something like ImmyBot or Intune, but at some point someone has to be there and connect a new machine to the internet/intranet. How does that work in practice?

If the delivery doesn't make sense they don't even ask to return computers, they just do a call where they superficially check you deleted company stuff.

IT just solves dumb problems on slack "I can't download acrobat reader" and owns the admin roles on all the saas we use.

In software development, there is usually an "infinite amount of work" to be done, so the important thing is to prioritize well as a lot of that work will never get done. But what does it mean to say "you've met all your objectives"? If you say "great, I finished all my objectives in 20 hours this week, see you at the beach", this company will eventually get killed by competitors who are just as productive yet work 40+ hours a week.

But fundamentally, the idea of "you've met your objectives, now you can go home" just feels like a fantasy in the world of software development.

If you work at a smart company, your manager doesn't spell out much of your job, and ROWE can encapsulate that if you and your manager have a shared understanding of what an effective month/quarter/year looks like. If you're that kind of senior engineer, the exercise should prompt some good discussion about reducing the number of hours you spend on more measurable, less effective tasks.

The goal is to create something that both you and your manager buy into, so they feel good if that's 'all' you do and you feel it's doable to review the list and feel good about it before the end of a typical workweek.

As you might be able to tell, it's not easy to come up with a list that achieves this. Most managers will be too timid, or won't understand themselves well enough, to put the real full expectations of a job on paper.

However, a 'certified ROWE' workplace undergoes coaching so they have a better chance of success, similarly to how some organizations do for OKRs if they want to use them as intended and not as fantasy aspirations.

In practice, if you have a boss that hates ROWE, you're going to have a tough time convincing them that you've met your objectives enough to step away from work for a bit, no differently than how any other flexible work arrangement stops being flexible the moment your boss stops trusting you.

(I'm close to a ROWE-certified organization that has been successful with it for about 15 years.)

That’s how I’ve done it, and have seen it done in the last 7 companies I worked at.

Your reasoning is so foreign to me. The only way it makes sense if you are speaking as a manager.

Well, to each their own, but that has never been the case in any of the companies I've worked at. In fairness, over the fast 5 years or so more and more the companies I've worked at have used Kanban over sprint planning, because usually the "estimation" part of agile (i.e. the cards, the voting) has proven to be the most useless piece of agile.

It doesn’t matter what you use for planning, you agree to do something in advance, and you provide a reasonable estimate of how long it will take. Your manager should trust your estimates, even if they are sometimes wrong.

I also believe everyone needs a mental break at the end of an accomplished iteration. The satisfaction of feeling done. You might only answer email or edit docs on that day but that’s definitely worthwhile.

Not to mention, when you have a family, weekends aren’t especially relaxing, so if you “sprint” every week for years, it leads to almost certain burnout.

In other words, we don’t run marathons at full speed for a reason.

Oh and by the way, even at the contracting place where we were given fresh tickets when done early, no one ever expected them done immediately. So in effect we’d sit on them, take a mental break, and everyone was happy with appearances—the theater of work.

In my job, every problem seems to take a random amount of time. It might be the thing I'm assigned is trival and done in 1-2 hrs. It might be it would be trivial but it pointed out an issue elsewhere than needs to be fixed first. It might be trivial but the CI was down for 6hrs. It might be trival but requires some other library to roll to a new version and the roll broke something else. It might look trivial but turns out to need a non trival refactor to work.

I ran into that last one yesterday where I started on an issue that seemed like it should be trivial, in an object with different options than it currently has. These objects are cached by their options since they are heavy. The code that gets an existing or new one is 5 levels deep. It creates them from a factory but the info this new issue needs needs to query the factory to figure out the creation options. So, what seemed like a 10-15 min change is going to be several hours to decide how to surface or pass that factory to/from the top level

the point being, from outside management is going to see different levels of work. It's not as trivial as "created N widgets an hour" nor is it as trivial as "lines per hour"

I feel like there could be lots of unintended consequences with people only taking the smallest tasks or whatever to avoid taking tasks that take longer or to find ways to account things so it looks like they're doing more, etc

Don't count the result, but the actual work itself. Meaning, you need to document every little step you do, every command, script, search you have. Write down your thoughts and conclusions, and so on. But this is very annoying, and barely anyone is well-equipped for doing this. And most people have some natural defensive for exposing themselves to this level. Though, it would also be helpful for yourself to be able to review your work. So maybe some balanced middle would be a way to go?

Maybe if tools would be designed in a non-annoying way to support this, more people would be willing doing something like this.

This just gives wrong ideas to the team.

Leadership churn is often high these days, so workplace experiments or innovations tend to just vanish, unless they become popular across multiple companies very quickly and become the new norm.