I see a huge shift in narrative even in comments around the Internet about return to office. Just saying.
I am a manager and manage a team of six people. One of them is in a completely different country. I trust all people in my team to do their job properly and am available to them all the time if needed. It works. Our team is profitable and we do a good job. Client and employee retention is high.
Managers requiring return to office and 'butts in seats' have their own issues. Nothing to do with work, communication, performance. That applies to jobs that can actually be done remotely of course.
Funny how the same people that are against remote work have no issue with remote customers. I doubt google would be happy with customers showing up at their offices to make payments or check emails. They expect customers to trust them. But google wont trust their very own employees to work remotely.
In my view its time to out these dinosaurs out of their misery and move on to companies equipped for modern day and age work habits.
Not sure that makes the point you want. The experience of being a remote customer of Google is pretty awful. You can't talk to anyone, things go wrong and there is nothing you can do about it.
They prefer remote customers because they want this dysfunction.
You mention that your team is profitable and your client retention is high: this suggests a very particular type of business.
Could it be that the nature of your work is well suited to remote work? Perhaps you’re delivering fairly well-known outputs or have really mature processes around getting work done?
It would be interesting to ponder some of the worlds greatest creations and timelines they were created on, if folks had all been remote. Could the transistor have been created if your physicist and mathematician were both sitting at a slack screen?
Probably not, but also modern day plumbers can’t really WFH either. I didn’t notice any implication that _every_ role can be done from home successfully, but many software engineering roles definitely can.
Plumbers have a 100% location-dependent job role by its very nature.
Inventing the transistor* or the next leap in LLMs are both knowledge work, so could both be performed remotely
*of course, there was a ton of actual science experimentation and lab work that needed physical presence, but my understanding of the key interactions between team members is that the key collaboration didn’t require physical presence
I know this one! Yes. One of my good friends is a senior electrical engineer who designs components for cern and during covid (and still) they told everyone to take all their equipment home and so his second bedroom is a a
full on lab. They've never stopped launching new products.
The opposite argument. Could AI advancements have accelerated if your ML engineers had to live in a crumbling city spending 25% of their work hours commuting and preparing to commute?
I am a manager and manage a team of six people. One of them is in a completely different country. I trust all people in my team to do their job properly and am available to them all the time if needed. It works. Our team is profitable and we do a good job. Client and employee retention is high.
Managers requiring return to office and 'butts in seats' have their own issues. Nothing to do with work, communication, performance. That applies to jobs that can actually be done remotely of course.