Comment by Aurornis

Comment by Aurornis a day ago

I’m in a big peer group for managers where a lot of us are remote managers. (Let me repeat before the angry downvotes and comments: I am a remote manager and proponent of remote work)

This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.

It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.

The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.

I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.

candiddevmike a day ago

What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.

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Aurornis a day ago

New to the company. Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people you wouldn’t normally run into in your corner of Slack, and pick up more info about how the company works.
> If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges.
In person accelerates onboarding for all the reasons I mentioned above. It’s not a game of trust or “carrots”.

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- parliament32 13 hours ago
  
  > Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people
  Critically, this is impossible if most of the team is already remote. You're not going to make the new guy sit around the office by himself right?
  I think hybrid is where we'll end up once the dust settles. Avoiding the daily commutes, but a couple days a week makes a lot of sense.
  
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jayd16 a day ago

Why have managers and reviews and non-automated promotions and security groups if you trusted them enough to hire them...
Well because obviously that trust only goes so far.

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- Aurornis 21 hours ago
  
  The “if you trusted them enough to hire them you should trust them with everything unconditionally” meme is popular, but it’s a very weak argument.
  Everyone has to build trust and establish a reputation at any job. Every company treats new employees as probationary, whether they make it explicit or not.
  You don’t get hired into a company and immediately have the same trust level as the guy who has been there for 5 years and has a long history of delivering results.
  For some issues with new employees you can pivot quickly: If you discover that someone is not good at interacting with databases and is causing downtime and restore from backup situations, you pivot quickly and remove their database privileges while you observe their skill growth.
  With remote, you can’t pivot quickly. If you’re 12 weeks in and the new remote hire obviously can’t communicate remotely or focus at home, you can’t pivot quickly and have them work in the office most of the time because remote hires don’t necessarily live by the office. So it’s a slowly earned privilege in companies that aren’t remote-first.
  I’m surprised this is a foreign concept. This was actually the common situation with remote work before COVID: Gaining WFH ability was something earned and negotiated over time. It wasn’t widely publicized, but that’s how many of us started working remote.
  
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- jacquesm 21 hours ago
  
  Building trust is a gradual thing. You give some, you get some, you do that long enough and you will have a lot of trust. You can still lose it all in a heartbeat. But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.
  'Trust comes on foot, but leaves by horse'.
  
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  Aurornis 14 hours ago
  
  > But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.
  I always tell juniors that even if their company doesn't have an explicit probationary period, they should assume their behavior and results are being carefully monitored for the first year to watch for signs of a bad hire.
  Hiring someone is never equivalent to having full trust in them. Reputations don't start at 100% on day 1, they start as a neutral value that you need to build up over time. You also need to avoid breaking it down. It's much faster to destroy a reputation than build it up.
  
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zeryx a day ago

I've only ever worked remote professionally and I've got a track record, when I apply to a new role there's no question that I can adapt to working remotely at X company.
If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk

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- Aurornis a day ago
  
  I knew this was going to turn into a shoot the messenger (or downvote the messenger) situation.
  Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
  Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
  
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  jacquesm 21 hours ago
  
  > We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
  Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
  > The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
  A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.
  
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unethical_ban a day ago

I say that hiring someone is not an absolute vote of confidence in a person. Even if someone is a veteran worker, most companies have a new employee orientation. Having a "probation period" where someone comes into the office to integrate and meet people and work more collaboratively makes sense to me.
Disclaimer: While I benefit and often like a remote work or hybrid setup, I also know that my career and my ability to absorb new technologies has been crippled by the isolation of remote work. And, my success and my level of knowledge in my field is directly attributed to being physically around a lot of people and several related departments in order to ask questions and mingle with experts.
Remote work sucks for learning, for me - and I know I'm not alone.

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wiseowise 20 hours ago

> A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons

So how come those who can handle it are being punished?

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Aurornis 14 hours ago

Valid question, but it's quite obvious: The shift to WFH was sudden and rushed, so now the number of people who need to be brought back in the office is huge.
You can't go through a company and retroactively subtract a benefit from ~half of the people without getting completely buried under discrimination lawsuits from angry people who think you forced them into the office but let Bob WFH because you're illegally discriminating.
So the companies are changing the policy for everyone and then granting "exceptions" on a case by case basis going forward, using newly defined criteria.
Again, please don't downvote the messenger. I'm just describing what's happening, not saying I approve.

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- venturecruelty 12 hours ago
  
  I mean, layoffs are always sudden and rushed, but companies don't seem to mind thrusting people into that new situation. Also, I'm sorry, but we've had about six years to figure this out (i.e. to get Zoom volume licensing). Any company that hasn't figured out how to set up a VPN and video chat by now is uh... slow.
  
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angiolillo 21 hours ago

> This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.

Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.

Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.

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