So yes, as a "boss", the work-from-home future is definitely and absolutely destroying my brain, but I think the whole discussion around control in the article completely misses my point. I couldn't care less about control and never cared about seat-in-the-ass time before.
But as an engineer become manager, I can absolutely feel both sides here:
While everything development is massively more chill remote (no interruptions and hey, just go fill your dishwasher while stuff compiles), everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me.
Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog.
Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me.
I'm pretty curious on how all of this will turn out.
Hopefully leaders can learn some empathy from this pandemic.
> everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me.
As an engineer, everything about working in-person completely sucks for me. I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face, I hate sitting in office chairs and desks, and I hate commuting.
> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people.
Again, these all completely suck for me in-person. I'm an introvert and I hate having to put on a happy face for the manager (my resting face looks anywhere from tired to murderous), I hate "sitting in a war room" pretending to focus while my time is just wasted by people talking, I hate traveling and waiting in a lobby for interviews when I'm already nervous, and I hate having to mime the emotions and interactions that leaders think are meaningful but that I just do because it's part of office politics.
Maybe you're an exception, and it would be great if you are. But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager. I think in 2021 it's fair to raise the bar and expect managers/leaders to learn basic online communication to the level that teenagers were doing like 10-20 years ago, rather than shackle everyone to the office and commutes because leaders can't learn how to use slack/zoom
I understand most of your point, but the end of your comment shows a real lack of interest in and understanding of what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.
All of that requires tremendous amounts of communication, and communication over Slack and even Zoom is very low bandwidth compared to communication in person.
Consider this: if your home had only a 56k dialup modem and your office had gigabit fiber, would you still prefer to work from home? Because that’s kind of what covid-remote had been like as a people manager in a larger org.
To make remote management work you need to not just “learn how to use Slack and Zoom,” you need to fundamentally redesign your entire org for extremely low social cohesion and low bandwidth communication. It can be done, as evidenced by many successful remote-only companies, but it’s not simple or easy, and it’s brutal to be a people manager in an org that was designed around office work and leading through the conversion to remote-only.
> what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.
And if WFH improves output and morale at the cost of more difficult management, isn't that absolutely worth it for managers? Their entire effort is dedicated to enabling contributors, if a policy does just that then they should push for it.
I do mechanical engineering, we design stuff for our manufacturing operators and our customer's operators. Whenever some amount of effort on my side may reduce the operator's burden over the life of the product, it's absolutely worth it. I'm not going to make a subpar design just to save myself an analysis, that's the job.
So if WFH requires more management effort, and results in better output for the team, it should be pushed by management. Managers shouldn't compromise their team's output and morale just to save themselves some remote meetings.
Your conclusion is trivializing management and missing the big picture.
1. Not all workers productivity goes up when working from home. During COVID about half my team of ~35 told me they hated working from home and felt their productivity had fallen significantly.
2. It’s often the case that things which are optimal for one team are not optimal for the organization as a whole.
Those two points don’t mean that moving to work from home is never the right decision, it can be the right decision and it can be worth the effort. But it’s just not as simple as most work from home champions like to imagine.
> During COVID about half my team of ~35 told me they hated working from home and felt their productivity had fallen significantly.
It’s pretty common for people to say what the boss wants to hear. It sounds like you like in person work. So I wouldn’t base too much important decision making on your straw poll.
Also, self reported productivity is a terrible measure unless you specifically want to measure feels.
For management decision, you should have some reliable basis that works to control for your biases.
> Consider this: if your home had only a 56k dialup modem and your office had gigabit fiber, would you still prefer to work from home?
Perhaps you underestimate how much I hate being outside of my home. If given a realistic choice, there is no situation where I would ever prefer or enjoy the office. Nothing is worth it, and most of it is an active detriment to my quality of life, especially the people. I'm not asking for everyone to be remote, unlike the many people who want to force everyone to be in-office, I just want the option for myself and others to be remote based on preference.
> it’s brutal to be a people manager in an org that was designed around office work and leading through the conversion to remote-only.
It's brutal to be an introvert/misanthrope forced to sit in a chair 8h a day, and the point is that it's not necessary. Let people who want to be in-office do so, and let the rest stay home. I still haven't heard a convincing or legitimate reason why things should be otherwise except for people who are stuck in the 1940s office mindset.
But you have that option. Remote work is available and plentiful, now more than ever. So work remote if that’s what you need. It sounds like that should be non-negotiable requirement number 1 for any job you consider.
All I was pointing out in my original comment is office work is not a conspiracy by management to torture you: it’s by far the best work environment for many people and many kinds of jobs. If you could understand that - while also understanding yourself and that it’s not a fit for you - you might be able to let some of that anger go and find a more comfortable fit on a team.
> It sounds like that should be non-negotiable requirement number 1 for any job you consider.
You're right. Thankfully I'm finally in a position where I can do that moving forward. Before my current point in life, I was more in a position where I had to take what I could get, which is where the lack of flexibility became very frustrating. Just like we let engineers listen to music and wear hoodies, I think it's reasonable to let engineers work from home or the office as desired.
> office work is not a conspiracy by management to torture you: it’s by far the best work environment for many people and many kinds of jobs. If you could understand that - while also understanding yourself and that it’s not a fit for you - you might be able to let some of that anger go and find a more comfortable fit on a team.
You're right about this as well. It's not a conspiracy to torture, and office work is best for some people. But again, I think people underestimate how much people want to have the option of working remote, and overestimate how important in-office presence is for a huge majority of cases.
As an engineer who transitioned to p eople management pre-covid, then back to engineering during covid (after burning out HARD), I gained a ton of empathy for my managers.
It's really shocking just how complex and demoralizing mid-level management can be, especially-so in the remote world.
After seeing just how hard it can be to simply know what your team is doing on a given day (let alone to align them to some vague OKR passed from on-high)... Let's just say it's made me want to adopt some practices that make me easier to manage.
At the very least, I'm putting more effort into keeping my tickets & PRs up-to-date and easy to understand at a glance.
That’s a disingenuous interpretation and not what I said. Good managers work hard to try and help everyone on the team do their best work. Just keep in mind that the overall team optimum may not be the individual optimum for you. It’s basically impossible to create a work environment that is ideal for more than 3-5 people. The more people you add the more you need to balance everyone’s preferences.
But good management can and does create a work environment where everyone feels things are pretty good.
As for me, the biggest takeaway I have from COVID life is that open office designs have to go, and possibly that hybrid remote work has some answers for how to make that possible. Open office is fine for some kinds of work, but ruins deep work. I think most people who are having an epiphany about work from home either had a terrible commute and didn’t realize how much it stressed them out, or had never gotten to do deep work before and didn’t realize how valuable it was. Those are important things for all of us to learn.
Exactly. Leadership/management love to complain about how they want to be in office because it's better for them, but then couldn't care less when people work better at home.
Only terrible management fits this description. Good managers care very, very much about what’s best for their people, and are willing to sacrifice a lot to help them achieve.
My morale has never been lower than when they moved us into an open office where I had to hear everyone jabbering away (plus it was in another state which more than doubled my commute).
Hate is a strong word, but if you phrased it as "would prefer not having to be near people, listen to people while trying to focus, or be forced into unwanted face-to-face social interactions" the percentage would be fairly high, especially among developers.
Those are only the negative experiences. Many people do not like those things. But there are positive aspects to being in the office that you misleadingly did not list.
The more extroverted among us get emotionally charged by parties and social interaction.
The more introverted among us get emotionally drained by parties and social interactions.
For the introverts, the draining effect is much less pronounced if the party is among a tight-knit group where being conscious of social norms is not needed.
After a large gathering of people I am not emotionally close to, I need a couple hours alone, without human contact just to decompress.
Based on your description I'm an introvert, but I still need WFH in my life for the social stuff and structure. I guess it's a continuum. I'd go crazy without at least 2 days a week in office.
> Maybe you're an exception, and it would be great if you are. But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager. I think in 2021 it's fair to raise the bar and expect managers/leaders to learn basic online communication to the level that teenagers were doing like 10-20 years ago, rather than shackle everyone to the office and commutes because leaders can't learn how to use slack/zoom
With all due respect, I‘ve been chatting on IRC since the birth of Undernet, but some people I thought I had meaningful connections with I should have better not have met IRL. These days I prefer to make my connections in meatspace.
I introduced Slack to our company and am fully able to use Zoom, but there‘s a difference between four Zoom calls a week and four a day (yes, you do need to manage up and to the sides as well).
You might hate your manager, but so far companies don‘t work without leadership and coordination either.
I hope we can find something better going forward together.
I don't feel the WFH pros/cons align perfectly with engineer/managers either. I know many managers who are very comfortable with managing a geo-distributed remote team. Mine in particular is quite good at it.
I sometimes wonder if software developers who share these sentiments are often disappointed by the way things work in the industry because they expected to be coding/interacting with machines and toys the whole working time but in reality there is a lot more to building software that solves business problems than just coding.
I can only speak from personal experience, but yes, it was pretty crushing. I knew interacting with people would be required, but I did not foresee the full on panic attacks in the bathroom, trying to calm down so I wouldn't just run out the front door and never come back.
Ditto. I haven't had the same intensity, but I always take office lunch in isolation somewhere, take a lot of bathroom breaks where I'm just sitting on the toilet, etc, just to get some solitude. It's a real drag having to interact with people
> But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager.
Me too, but I think perhaps that you and I are several standard deviations above the median in terms of reading comprehension and ability to write clearly.
Not everyone is capable of this, as I learned when I tried to run a whole-ass engineering org like I previously ran more informal teams on irc.
Most people are bad at reading comprehension. It's why they tell people to repeat and rephrase their points when communicating, to give their readers a second chance at getting it.
Perhaps, but how is this different from any other soft-skill? A manager with poor reading comprehension who can't do their job unless they require every single person they manage to be physically available seems to be just as ill-suited for their job as an engineer who is incapable of working on a team, or data scientist unable to present their results in a comprehensible way to stake-holders.
Seems to me that remote-work has been a bit of a reckoning for managers, in the sense that our societal work environments have been tailored in a way that unnecessarily hampers employee well-being and productivity, all to cover up the fact that many managers are lacking in some soft-skills that are critical to actual management.
Couldn't have said it better myself. The shore went out during the pandemic and we saw how many managers and leaders have been swimming without swimsuits. And unsurprisingly, you see a lot of them making excuses rather than finding ways to evolve and grow the way individual contributors have had to do this whole time: adapting to cubicle life, adapting to desks instead of cubicles, adapting to shared workspace, adapting to flexible workspace where you don't even have your own assigned workstation. Meanwhile Mr. Manager in his corner office loses it if he has to make a zoom call
There is also the aspect of being on the record in corporate chat. There is way more on the line when everything is recorded than informal in person talking. People also 'have to be there' with their jobs, doing something they necessarily do not enjoy. On IRC in the 90s when everyone was anonymous and nothing was on the line, you had the social freedom to be more open, and the people who wanted to be there didn't have to be paid to be there.
Yet another good reason why corporate chat message TTLs should be no more than 7-14 days.
(Another is that the default of "forever" in things like Slack and Mattermost means that a compromise of a single user account gets to see every DM (including sensitive stuff DMed like passwords or PII) ever sent or received by that user. It's insane. It's also able to be subpoenaed. Expire your messages!)
People get really annoyed that they cannot find answers to previous questions, and if you have q&a website to get around that, your just moving the chat goalposts around. Not to mention its a higher friction process, so people go ask questions anyway on the company slack.
Also screenshots are a thing and easy to do in secret impulsively, recording stuff when your talking in person has a much higher threshold, and far less people are typically listening.
Also once you get to a certain size, there are legislative retention requirements and legal holds.
I would humbly agree, and you make good points. I never thought about why repeating points is so important. I have often wished to some extent that the bar for communication were higher, but I guess that's something most workplaces would rather just plow through than try to really improve.
Hiring is hard enough without chopping off 50 or 80% of otherwise-qualified applicants because they have gone their whole life without reading things very carefully.
It’s not clear what exactly you’re referring to by “attitude” or how you think “Therapy” will affect it.
On the other hand, I can easily see how the sort of non-constructive verbal lashing-out demonstrated in your comment could be a problem in the workplace, and a behavior that one can learn to avoid through Therapy.
"I hate being around people, I hate hearing people, I hate interacting with coworkers face to face, I hate sitting in office chairs and desks, and I hate commuting."
That is asking for your employer to say well none of your coworkers want to work with you "total break down in trust" bye bye
Which was my point the person does need to understand that he has to work with other people other wise they will be fired.
But he’s not saying he doesn’t like working with people in general, or even that he doesn’t like the people he currently works with. Only that the previously enforced method of interaction isn’t his cup of tea. And for all you know his co-workers feel the same.
Thanks, that's right. I actually am grateful to have a team that I like a lot at the moment; I just prefer working fully remotely and my coworkers happen to feel the same way, in this case.
He plays the game in office. But it’s exhausting and pointless. The only benefit I see of being in office is not having to compete with others around the world for jobs.
Concise and correct. The latter is probably one of the few benefits I've seen to being in-office, but even then I think it depends on your country. I don't think it's easy for foreigners to get an American remote job, for example.
Maybe you missed the parts where I mentioned acting/miming. I'm not so oblivious as to be a grouch at work lol. That's y whole point: I _have_ to exert effort to be friendly and likable and get along with my coworkers. It takes effort because it's not something I enjoy or want, but is essentially necessitated by any job. I don't like working or coding that much either, but I still put in the effort to do a good job because that's what working is: work. It would just be easier for me and people like me if I could take out the unnecessary stuff like being in an office, just like employers generally pay for air conditioning so you don't have to try working through heat stroke during hot summers.
> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done
As a person who at a previous job was often pulled into said "war rooms", we almost never "got that hard problem done", but we did always make management feel good about not being able to fully solve hard problems. Mostly these "huddle-work" scenarios created more problems (long term) than they solved, because people weren't motivated to solve the problem, they were motivated to leave the war room. I do my best work when I'm not constantly distracted by others, but many managers simply can't understand this and instead hamstring their employees by having "war rooms" and white-boarding sessions and stand-ups and deep-dives and all the other nonsensical ways of preventing people from actually focusing and accomplishing a task. Good riddance to the on-location office and all the hot garbo that comes with it; the rest of us will be quietly humming away, getting tasks done and solving major problems without such managerial hindrances.
There are entire classes of problems where a group of n persons working effectively together will produce a much better solution than 1 single person on an island (where n > 1).
In those situations, white boarding and deep dive are useful activities.
Business owners would absolutely love it if you could just run a complex (high value-add, high margin) business by only getting a bunch of commodity developers just pulling JIRA tickets from a heap, quietly humming away.
Reality is that, collaboration is important and is required in order to create non trivial products, and thus the margin to pay for the “people doing real work”.
I agree collaboration is very important. What's interesting to me though is that very early in my career (pre ubiquitous video conferencing), I worked for a large multi-site corp. Me and another developer were the only developers in the local office, yet somehow we were able to collaborate using phone calls and email to build some pretty cool software with other team members in various offices around the US.
I'm not saying that digital tools are always perfect replacements, but there is a large gradient between a single person on an island and sitting shoulder to shoulder at a fold out table (which I have also done).
I'm at least 50% convinced that there is a natural selection where managers are the people who like that stuff but people who stay developers hate it. I totally agree with you, from the moment I step into one of these rooms with my laptop in hand I just want to get out of there and back to my chair, my monitors and time to think things through.
1) creative brainstorming (ux, ui, branding, early architectural decisions) to ensure everyone can present and validate their ideas, and people are more on board with decisions as they saw democratic backing (or, at the very least, feel that objections they raise were heard!)
2) bringing staff that would normally be spread across multiple buildings and units together - the bigger the org and the more stakeholders involved, the more important a common space for (at least) the leadership team is, especially to cut through red tape and organizational barriers.
3) when you have an immediate problem (outages, GDPR incidents) to solve and secrecy is involved - no need to take care about people not in the loop, seeing stuff they are not supposed to etc.
What "war rooms" often enough end at, unfortunately, is cramped chicken coops. Not enough space, sales/PM people directly sitting and blathering in their phones next to developers, ... for months. That's a farce.
As a cynical take: Often the real purpose of a war room is not to actually solve the problem, but to provide visible evidence of Serious Business™ Happening, even if it's all just performative. A product owner calls a war room to visually show higher-ups that things are happening and people are nebulously doing things and looking very serious while doing them. It's performance art, but it is re-assuring to the people paying the salaries.
Oh, never think that you can get away just because you are remote. Now we just have multi-hour ‘this is a war room’ meetings, where the entire team is trying to get work done while connected to a permanent zoom session.
Arg. Screw that noise. I refuse to join these "co working zoom hours" where everybody is on the same zoom call. Or zoom happy hour. Or any of that. That stuff is dystopian as hell.
Remote work is great if you are a contractor with well defined scope. In fact it is ideal. You can set firm boundries with your client.
But being an employee who isn't just a cog in a machine, remote is rife with pitfalls. You lose connection with the greater company. People you used to work with on other teams. New hires. There is no doubt a huge chunk of people within my own little org that were hired over the last 1.5 years that I don't even know existed. I've lost complete track over the greater org.
Naw. A year from now it's gonna be almost exactly like what it was like in 2019. There is a reason why we didn't do this pre-lockdown and it wasn't just because of "micro managers" or "the suits justifying their work". FAANG companies pour huge amount of "HR marketing dollars" into their office environments. It literally helps them attract new talent.
I really just don't see these "hybrid" things panning out long run. We'll revert right back to 2019 before anybody knows it.
I agree with "war rooms" not being as effective...but whiteboards, standups and deep dives personally can be helpful.
I think the key thing for me is that I never force people to sit in on these.
When an employee starts a large piece of work they don't understand that I feel have some knowledge on. I ask if they would like to whiteboard a solution with me...or deep dive something in the code, or do daily standups just to talk about w/e is on their mind
Doing these remotely is totally fine, but I do feel these activities...or atleast whiteboarding and deep diving is nicer in person for me
Agreed. I think people don't realize how much WFH sucks for people who are not ICs (or don't care). Pre-pandemic, I was pointing my career in a management direction. I enjoyed both development work and managing and they both took advantage of different skill sets. However, in my mind, management had more upside in the long run, and if I was going to be going into an office every day anyway, might as well keep at it. So at the start of the pandemic I was doing remote management of a technical team. And all those negatives you mention started to add up. In the last few months I got a different job as a senior developer to take advantage of the unbelievable W/L balance of permanent WFH. I decided "being a developer remotely" >> "being a manager in the office" >> "being a developer in the office" >> "being a manager remotely".
On the other hand for my partner who is non-technical and squarely in management, WFH is an endless nightmare of virtual meetings with no breaks. Hard to read people, hard to get people engaged, nonstop pings preventing what little focus time she has left. She wants to get back to an office ASAP, and I don't blame her.
yeah it says that the person expressing it has worked with managers for years and years now and even the good ones' biggest value-add is just telling the bad ones to fuck off
those managers are great for a remote IC. makes my life easy so I can minimize my hours and increase my effectively hourly rate
They don't necessarily stop but they're...different, I would say. For one thing, if someone is grabbing your attention in the office for a "quick question", it's easy to make a clean break from that interaction and move on. Verbal communication is just more efficient, and it's obvious when you have a legitimate conflict and need to move on from the conversation (On my way out the door, to lunch, to a meeting, etc).
It's also harder to get multiple "quick questions" at the same time, because in office people see when you're physically occupied. And it could be just me, but WFH I've noticed there is more psychological pressure to respond quickly to chats. Don't want people to think you're lounging off! A red "busy" indicator can mean a lot of things, in contrast to someone physically seeing you in conversation with your laptop closed in a meeting room.
In theory you should enforce boundaries "I'll respond to all questions after this virtual meeting is over" or "I have a firm cut off at 5PM and will not respond after that". But that becomes tough when leadership, who should be setting expectations on this stuff, breaks it's own rules and multi-tasks during meetings or has unrealistic availability. Definitely a cultural thing that heavily depends on your exact role and the organization norms.
TL;DR For "Zoom calls and text messaging" are not a drop in replacement for physically talking to someone, especially for people who spend a lot of their day having many small, ad-hoc conversations.
> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but, you're doing it wrong. As a leader you should be adjusting to the dynamic that ensures meetings respect your teams' time, have clear outputs and follow-ups, etc. As someone who has been, and will continue to be, remote for many years in a leadership capacity, it's not the attendees of a meeting's fault if the person putting it on doesn't respect their time.
The reality of remote work being forced in the office crowd that I see is a reckoning of where mere presence was taken for value. I would never expect to get the best work out of someone by sticking them in a dungeon for a week. Let them walk in the sunshine with a headset, sit in the shade with their laptop, or take a breather to enjoy their own safe space while exploring new ideas.
This was a real jolt to read though. I've been really bullish about WFH or hybrid work for the future, since as an IC I've seen nothing but the benefits as you mention. I never thought of the stress of remote work in a management role though, so thanks for sharing!
Don't forget interns. Those poor souls are absolutely screwed by all this. In no circumstance can I see mentoring an intern working remotely. At least not nearly as effectively as in person.
When the pandemic started, I was working as a manager. It was my 6th year in that company. I thought, working remote is the best that ever happened to me.
Now I changed my job three months ago and remote work is killing me.
I realized that managing remotely it’s easy if you already have build strong relationships while in the office. You know how to approach each team member, who you can trust. It also takes much more time for people to trust you.
A good portion of the workplace population seem, to managers, to be unmanageable. Another good portion seem, to workers, to be unable to manage. It will take real skill to ameliorate that remotely.
Perhaps "remote leadership" is a new skill, a growth area to be exploited by the talented?
> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog.
Being in any meeting or war room is also an energy hog. I do understand what you're saying though. What worked before, doesn't work anymore. Remote means management has to change. IC work for the most part was easy to move remote. Work that involved coordinating people and communication is going to take longer to figure out. It can be done, as many pre-COVID remote companies showed. But, it takes work to adapt.
I think some of the reason that so many workers welcome this change is that they have had bad managers (which it sounds like you are not). For my self I had a on-site manager managing a team of 6-7 people out at a customer, however he failed to pick up on my detoriating mental health which lead to a severe case of burnout and me leaving the company. The signs was there, and I am still baffled what on earth he spent 8 hours on each day since the didn't do anything to stop that (at least for the sake of the company - I was not productive to say the least). Given that experience there is nothing gained in having a manager that I physically meet. Interesting to know if the different feelings people have regarding this is due to their experience with different managers.
I hope that you find some way to adjust for the new way of working, if it is having regular workshops, having workers come in regularly, or if it all blows over and thing go back to normal.
This is an organizational problem. You should not have that many meetings. People need to learn how to write. I manage people and we work fully asynchronously by using gitlab to its full potential. I have close to zero meeting a week. Everything is in writing. We write epics for new features and discuss there. A
> Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me.
Managing people in-person requires you to develop certain skills. Managing people remotely requires an overlapping but different set of skills. It is not harder or easier, just different, and like any skill, it can be learned with practice.
I'm curious if/how this could be addressed with better collaboration systems.
E.g., suppose everyone's WFH office had a Google Jamboard and high-quality videoconferencing system.
If it addressed your concerns and per-employee cost was $10k initial + $5k/year, I would think it's still a win given the typical total-comp cost of a U.S.-based software developer.
As a manager, how would you feel about a hybrid setup with people in the office say two days a week?
Would it recapture a substantial portion of the benefits, or do you think you find that the manager utility of each extra day in the office doesn't diminish much?
Honestly I would like to be in the office as little as possible. I get knowing a person face to face has value, but having a fixed schedule of this would feel artificial and more draining.
I've worked in organizations that were from ~20% remote to ~90% remote (for the teams I worked with), and while I've never been the boss - never had more than a couple of people reporting to me - I observed that somehow the bosses' work was getting done, and the organization has not descended into chaos any more than usual. I have to conclude from that that there are ways to run a remote engineering org, with results no worse than for a meatspace-local one. Maybe you're just about to discover them.
This is a great point. For the most part, I love working from home, and will never go back to an office if I can help it. But I completely agree that these aspects of the job are much harder, and the perspective of someone who has never had to do them is going to miss some important things.
But as an engineer become manager, I can absolutely feel both sides here:
While everything development is massively more chill remote (no interruptions and hey, just go fill your dishwasher while stuff compiles), everything about managing remotely completely sucks for me.
Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog.
Honestly, I really enjoyed being a leader for a technology organization, but right now, I absolutely hate it. There seem to be others who cope better, but it's certainly not for me.
I'm pretty curious on how all of this will turn out.