My strong anecdotal evidence based belief here is that remote work requires more management effort to coordinate and that's the actual cause of the friction.
There's a greater need to schedule, document (generally more writing things down), and coordinate when working in a team with remote culture. (Either that, or you have a team with really strong social capital and everyone knows what needs to be done with little coordination overhead)
Now management type have more work on their hands to keep everything coordinated and that's why you have this showdown.
This reasoning is quickly falling apart in a hybrid model. Once a single person is not on-site, you will need to work as if everybody were remote. According to the article, Amazon is apparently is currently targeting said hybrid model.
As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening
Yeah, but ask for developers to do better documentation and you will get angry answers ;-)
Remote work requires higher seniority, more independence and more decision making on worker side, but a lot of people don't want to make decisions, so there is a lot of meetings, calls and similar stuff which is replacing normal in office interaction. Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings, finding time which fits both sides and so on. Stuff which was done by talking during walk for lunch is now meeting. Meeting in person which took 30 minutes are taking 60-90 minutes because people are not build to use simplex channel where only voice is transferred. Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Working from home you don't have all this stuff which is happening next to watercooler.
IMHO WFH is making people also less happy, it is more comfortable, but makes people more miserable.
Tons of assumptions in this that don't fit with my experience. I need a meeting, now I just send a message on teams. "Hey, do you have a minute for a call? Yes, great. No, ok, when is a good time for you?"
I wouldn't say that, it just requires better juniors.
You can't do as much hand holding remotely but remote mentoring is definitely possible. But it requires employees that have above average communication skills and an ability to debug and investigate themselves.
These abilities aren't cheap but pretty much required to pass a serious Engineering/CS program. The difference is just night and day.
> Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings
Or a well written email.
> Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Margeret Heffernan has a really good TED talk on this topic [0]
"Social capital is what gives companies momentum. And social capital is what makes companies robust. It means that time is everything because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better because it takes time to build the trust you need for openness and candor. And it’s time that builds better value."
Really good talk.
Brian Chesky of Airbnb also talks about this as "culture" [1]:
"Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap. Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes."
When you have strong "social capital" or "culture", there's less management overhead, but it's very hard to come by and requires time (or hiring the right people).
There's a greater need to schedule, document (generally more writing things down), and coordinate when working in a team with remote culture. (Either that, or you have a team with really strong social capital and everyone knows what needs to be done with little coordination overhead)
Now management type have more work on their hands to keep everything coordinated and that's why you have this showdown.