I'm with a large organization (government, military) that also implemented a hybrid model under covid and decided to keep it going. But not a day goes by that someone doesn't scream for it to end. We have too many people "working from home" all the time and never getting done the stuff that cannot be done from home. Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in Monday-Tuesday. They put the real property maintenance people on a hybrid model. No joke: The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half the week.
"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."
That sounds mostly dysfunctional and not really a WFH issue.
> 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.
> 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.
> Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job
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.
There's no expectation you're going to work 8 hours in the office.
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.
Because you said "the vast majority" of workers would not bother actually working, and very much sounded like you were saying that the subset of people that don't enjoy their jobs is the same subset that would watch netflix instead of doing their work. I don't think that's true at all. I think most people will attempt to fulfill the obligations they signed up for; their job.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with people looking after themselves. A lot of of the people committed to a mission are going to end up getting screwed. (Not everyone, but probably most.)
Ok, so just consider a world where jobs paid no money. How many people do you think would have a job? 10% of the amount now? 1%?
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
This is a bit of a misdirection because it equates jobs, which are work done for someone else, with all work. I am sure that the majority of people would still do something that can be considered work in a world without jobs.
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.
For startups is it perhaps easier to be intrinsically motivated in the company's success because there is likely to be more financial benefits?
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
> because there is likely to be more financial benefits?
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.
> That would be a lot of companies and workers out there, dare I say the vast majority even.
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.
>> A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT
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.
I think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point and hiring won't change that.
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 think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point
Would you be surprised to hear that most companies in the world are just like that?
HN readers are in a bubble where they can afford to be picky on where they work choosing companies that fit in their belief system in terms of organizational efficiency and work culture, instead of just choosing the least horrible job they can find with the best pay, like the other 99% of the people in the world.
I said nothing about the ratio of dysfunctional organizations to non-dysfunctional, nor did I encourage OP to switch jobs or even try to change something in the org. All I said is that their organization is dysfunctional and hiring new people into the dysfunctional teams will do absolutely nothing to fix that.
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.
> most people know this but still plenty choose to work there and put up with that dysfunctionality instead of fighting to change it ... 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.
You speak a lot about "reasonable" things. The parent probably could have made things a little more clear, but concerning "government, military" work policies it's almost expected a high percentage will be unreasonable.
At the rate things are currently changing, I won't be very surprised if non-trivial server capacity gets located in orbit thanks to some successor to Starlink.
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 could still be office-based though, sure technically remote from the server, but so are the web servers software engineers develop for typically, sometimes even their development environment is. I don't think that really factors into remote (WFH) vs office working at all, at least from an employer's perspective. Maybe it makes it easier to work remotely, but certainly doesn't necessitate it: you can work from anywhere, and that can still be the office.
But only mandatory in the sense of distance to the equipment - it still won't stop some managers from wanting them all corraled into an office somewhere.
Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the office is not any different from a laptop out of the office.
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.
>> Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the office is not any different from a laptop out of the office.
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.
I was always curious - in fully remote IT (especially one located in another state/country), who does the actual on-site visits? Say, a PC part has to be replaced or a new laptop has to be deployed.
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?
Employees go to local repair store and charge the expense to the employer.
Laptop arrive straight from China from Apple.
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.
"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."