News: 1592569811

Will anyone remember what Yahoo was by 2022?

They! will! if! you! ask! the question! a little! like! this!

Possibly also triggering PTSD.

*sigh*, it's:

They ! will ! if ! you ! ask ! the ! question ! a ! little ! like ! this !

I don't agree necessarily with all the reasons in the article but I definitely think that WFH will not be the norm. There are too many problems with trying to manage such a system and much as I hate the term, team building which is important just won't happen as well between a team who see their. Colleagues as small images on a screen.

Human/management relationships, either good or bad also need genuine human contact not a remote face on a screen, never mind that many workers and managers will find ways to game remote working systems, resulting ultimately in poorer performance.

For those and many other reasons I doubt that the C19 related WHF culture will last much beyond the end of this pandemic.

So how is that different from geographically dispersed teams? For example, on my team of 5 (plus two managers), I'm in Blighy, two are in New Jersey and one each in California and Chicago, with the two managers in NJ and Pittsburgh. We still have a pretty good team atmosphere particularly among us three older hands, yet all our communication is via phone, email, IM & VC, so it's not that different for us.

Exceptions prove the rule.

Remote working some of the time is fine for some stuff, especially when a team already works well together. But it is far from suitable for everything. I'm freelance and generally work from home but, on big projects, I realise the importance of being with the team as much as possible and I think the researchs tends to back this up.

Here of course 'prove' is in its original sense of "test" as a proof mark on Gold items which pass assay.

Geographically dispersed teams suck balls. (edit: probably after it reaches about 2 dozen people - for really small groups it's fine)

You have to keep in mind which timezone someone is in, people miss important emails/slacks/IRCs/WTFs, and people end up forming cliques in each area, where the Switzerland group knows what's going on but doesn't realize the England/India/US groups haven't been fully informed.

In [1][email protected] situations, if the US is not fully aware of what other countries are doing it means that the NSA is asleep...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection

> how is that different from geographically dispersed teams?

It heavily depends on what those teams are doing (their profession). Some tasks only require an update every now and then to make sure everyone is still in tune, while other tasks require almost constant interaction lest they lose all efficiency and productivity.

The critical factor is communication: If your task depends heavily on abstract, codified information (math, code), email might suffice. On the other hand, if group efficiency depends heavily on non-verbal communication, subtext and nuances, no HD video will ever be enough, you'll need the full person-to-person communication all humans have been trained for since childhood. Everything less than that and your team becomes a loose bunch of acquaintances.

You are hardly typical of the majority of workers.

"team building"

Ah, yes, those and other "motivational" events. I found them thoroughly demotivating, culminating in an episode that lead to enforced early retirement escape into freelance. I also found myself remembering those jobs a decade or more earlier where I ended up in circumstances that needed an armed escort and wondered what sort of screaming fit those team building wonk conducting the course would have had if they'd had to do that without going on a team building event with their new colleagues.

It's worth standing back and reflecting if an entire operating system - not just a kernel but all the additional layers up to and including applications - can be built by globally dispersed teams with just the leading lights getting together at annual conferences.

On a smaller scale I worked for a body shop that had staff scattered in ones and twos, maybe threes, in locations across London but arranged an after ours get-together once a month by putting a suitable sum behind the bar in a central London pub.

It's not sustainable concentrating employment into cities so large that the employees end up scattered across a few thousand square miles of countryside and it's certainly not sane to tell those employees that they should be walking or cycling to work.

It's time businesses and the government woke up to the fact that big businesses have so many employees that they end up living in idely dispersed areas and looking to other solutions than the big Head Office.

Look to a number of smaller offices dispersed closer to where people live and let them commute into their closest one. That could well end up with a "team" spread between multiple offices but with individual members working next to members of other "teams"; it might even turn out better for cohesiveness of the business as a while.

Government's role in this would be recognising that a considerable part of the country's environmental problems stem from a decades long planning policy that separates work places from living places. This mess has been planned - not deliberately but nevertheless planned. They need to look at how they plan to get out of it.

> reflecting if an entire operating system - not just a kernel but all the additional layers up to and including applications - can be built by globally dispersed teams

AFAIK it did work for Linux, didn't it?

I think that was the point being made :)

Team building is not necessarily an event, those are usually not worth the money they cost in terms of having a better team at the end, though just having a break from work may be beneficial.

Team building is more often not the result of any pro active effort but a result of normal human bonding in the workplace often helped by good leadership and equally as often hindered by poor leadership.

In my opinion any manager who feels the need to do a team building course with his/her staff, has no real idea what a team is or how to lead it.

Perhaps leadership courses for manglers would be money better spent?

Working from home means that many middle managers are doing very little. Their main occupation before CV-19 was:-

1) Going to Meeting after Meeting

2) Micromanaging their team. Making sure that they were not reading El Reg or andy NSFW sites while at work.

With less meetings or zoom/skype/teams/whatever calls and not being able to check if their people are posting here they are feeling rather redundant.

Getting the proles back into the office means that their job is safe for a few more days.

There are alternatives. Will companies be willing to adopt any of them?

I have seen a rash of posts in LinkedIn over the last week or so from people complaining about micro-management even whilst WFH. Not being online in Teams/Skype/Zoom etc at the normal start time or not taking lunch/breaks at the usual time being some of the favourites.

I have also observed that the only requests I have seen for video calls rather than just audio on Teams etc are from more senior people, both in terms of rank and age.

Not being online in Teams/Skype/Zoom etc at the normal start time

Therein lies a big part of the problem. Middle Managers/PHB's wanting to transfer the Office to your Home and they want to be there with you, looking over your shoulder making sure that you aren't slacking/jerking off on company time.

They simply don't trust their teams to do the work to the agreed quality, timescales and spec.

Time to change the boss. Make sure that the words 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss' don't come true or you really will be 'fooled Again'.

Sadly my camera has failed to function since I collected my new laptop, could be a system fault, could be an incorrect BIOS setting, could be a bit of tape or could be all of the above and any other blocker I could put in. By now everyone knows my camera doesn't work and amazingly it makes absolutely no difference in meetings if they can see me picking my nose or not while listening to some Manager waffle on about blah blah blah

Personally I don't want to shame my managers with my book collection behind me. All the Gary Larson cartoon books, every Asterix book, Sandman, etc. They just couldn't compete. ;-)

Even companies that have been doing this remote thing for a while can have a culture of "you're not green on Skype, you're clearly not working" ...

It's the endless cycle of managers having "important" meetings with other managers - and human resources - self-perpetuating "work". Might keep them busy and make them look important but has no effect on the workers.

Now they are all too aware that we can't see them looking busy...

Once that bubble is burst you ask what they are actually good for - and the answer is "not much".

Middle managers are there to act as a brake so that things can't run out of control.

In addition to realising they don't need big head offices businesses might also realise they don't need all those middle managers. Need to slim down the business for the New Normal? Keep the ones who do the work, get rid of the unproductive middle.

I entirely agree with the proposition that the seniors in a company can find space in their homes to work from home comfortably.

When I was a junior I lived in a small apartment in Paris that was badly insulated, and I had a good lunch subsidised by the company.

So today if I was going to buy or rent I'd need an extra space for a real desk. 1 room appartments the world over will become unsellable.

There will be many unforseen impacts.

Personally I'm gaining weight, not loosing it. I used to cycle to work and eat tiny lunches...

I'm saving money and losing weight because I'm not spending it on travel, coffee and a huge lunch any more. I eat less and more frequently when I'm at home.

WFH is perfect for an antisocial hermit like me.

activated by 5G, surely.

But only if your core network is provided by the company that can not be named

Bravo. I fully expect to see sizeable chunks of this in your leaked memo articles in 2022.

this piece must have been written by a resentful and bitter BOFH, forced to prowl the empty and decaying offices while maintaining the IT infrastructure that makes working from home possible.

With no victims to relive the tensions of each day full of "my cam has stopped working" emails, he resorts into hacking the conference streams with video of the lusers activities during the previous evening and then watching the resulting bunfight..... but this brings no where near the satifaction of the open window above the carpark or the none appearance of the lift at the open lift doors.

Soon the effects of being the only person in the building begin their dreadful toll with our BOFH starting to build traps for unwary janitors, with the result the seemingly empty building starts getting a dire repution, only to be hurried past at a run, with salvation being the at the nearest pub.

But even that is infected with stories of the hagged and pasty faced spectre that appears at 3pm on a friday demanding drinks......

In my cousin's day as a banker some time ago. "working from home" meant a repatriation to UK from India to allow "breeding time" with wife, about every 3 years one got a 12 month 'at home". His last home period was in 1960s (12 years or so after partition) when he left to settle in Australia, with his very pretty local acquired wife.

Hang on, are you saying your cousin had a wife stranded at home in the UK, with only very rare conjugal visits to keep the relationship going (for either of them), and then (perhaps not unsurprisingly) he found a new partner in India, seeing as he was, after all, living there for most of the time?

Probably the best for the cousin (I doubt that any long distance relationship could really survive such long periods of separation), but at the same time I can only hope that things ended well for the stranded original wife as well: perhaps, I hope, she had someone to attend to her garden regularly, in the absence of "the man of the house"?

I suspect WFH can simply not be grafted onto a company culture not initially designed around it, unlike Automattic (makers of Wordpress), who sold their expensive San Francisco office a couple of years ago because no one was using it.

Having worked from home for 3 months, I noticed that it might be worth to accept a little pay cut when allowed to WFH, since it saves considerable amounts of money.

No gas bills, less car wear implying potential maintenance costs, things can be combined more easily.

WFH maybe different for other people, but as a society we would benefit if we stopped spending significant amounts of time just to commute to work.

Giving employees the legal right to WFH, in case the profession allows it, would be an intelligent way to reduce CO2 emissions.

And if this generation is not able to shed the idea. " if you are not there, you don't work", I am sure the next one will.

> WFH maybe different for other people

Well, there are professions which can't WFH (like medical professions, construction workers, cooks, bus/truck/taxi drivers, store employees, etc.). The only professions really able to work from home are those doing abstract things using computers, which might be a huge majority here at El Reg, but actually are a vanishingly small part in the world as a whole. Some other professions can function at reduced efficiency in a WFH environment (schools come to mind), but a majority of professions require you leave your home.

My point is this is a very localized problem, only affecting our small subset of professions. Most workers can't reasonably WFH.

I was just now trying to find statistics on how many people could feasibly work from home in the UK (not had much success).

You have to wonder how much harder some countries have been hit by the pandemic as a result of unnecessary office work. That would be a bastard to try and estimate, but it can't have not played a part.

Unfortunately I can see counterarguments running along the lines of less offices = less need for shops, cafés, lunch places, pubs = worse for "the economy", spewed from the same mouths that waffle on about "creating jobs" as if creating more work for the sake of it is a good thing.

EDIT: yep, counterargument present and correct in the letter.

> as if creating more work for the sake of it is a good thing

It is - That's how a nation makes money! If 1 working citizen earns you $1, then 50 million working citizens are worth a $50 million...

Had an all-hands call this week. Question about WFH came up. The executive said our metrics indicate people are being more productive than before. To avoid over-working the employees, they are expediting the return to the office.

If the employee is okay with it (not everyone is), and the company gets more productivity, and the company can save office space....what it the problem??? Oh, right. The problem is management 'managing' by counting butts in chairs, not by looking at productivity. They are worried if there is too much WFH that their expensive MBC* degree will not be needed.

The fact of the matter is... When commute time is factored in, the employee is actually putting LESS of their personal time in to work. That gives a bit more to the employer, and everyone comes out ahead.

* Masters of Butt Counting

That was a good read: well thought out and insightful as well as laugh out loud funny in places. :)

I'm one of the few people in our company that *hated* working from home and still do. Too many distractions at home (including the rather annoying cat) which is a problem for me because I am easily distracted. Partly because the schools are out, the vast majority of our dev team are working from home and they prefer that in the main. That means the office is quiet and practically empty: perfect for me.

We had moved to the dreaded open plan organisation some years ago. I do certainly miss my little cube, with a space to put up my big white board with which I used to do most of my thinking.

I wonder sometimes if manglement really understand what developer need to get work done. They seem to try to thwart us at every opportunity.