As someone who's been working remotely (or nomadically) for nearly a couple dozen years or so, I firmly subscribe to the notion that the sentence "hell is other people" was coined because someone kept interrupting the author, or because they had to share a workshop (or an open space office) with apprentices, bolstering peers or customers barging in unannounced.
You can have spontaneous conversations in a number of ways, but anything that requires focus work suffers greatly because of the insistence in shoving people together without providing suitable spaces for isolated work--which is why I would, back in the 2000s, frequently grab the brick that passed as a laptop and find an empty meeting room to work in, and later (thanks to GPRS and 3G, not even Wi-Fi) "upgraded" to sitting in the cafeteria or a lounge for two hour stints every day just to get work done.
Yes, you need to coordinate with people. And yes, you need to manage them. But doing either by having them within earshot and "not knowing" what they are up to are truly the hallmarks of incompetent managers, or of a broken company culture. Set up office hours. Rotations. Anything but mandatory RTO at arbitrary days that will force people to spend 4h a day in a commute, be unable to pick up their kids from school, or aid elderly relatives (or friends).
I sincerely hope that I do not have to go back to an open-space office ever again, and that my trips to the office are driven by actual need rather than management insecurities.
I agree with this in a sense. Every time someone talks about how they've been able to make remote work and how every company should as well, the thing that pops into my head is "well why doesn't the company just completely change their culture".
Can companies to this, yes. Should they, (opinion). Can it be understandable why a company might be resistant to completely changing their culture?
Take your example of "incompetent managers". How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills? How long would it take them to backfill those managers and what's the cost to the business in the meantime?
> How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills?
Parent's comment is mildly revealing in a sense. Management does not want to learn new things. It already thinks it has all the tools needed. It had them ready and polished since 50s and they work so well. So well. And them youngins come in and upset applecart with all that remote work. Stupid pandemic ruined managing.
FWIW, I am exaggerating, but only slightly. I did overhear an actual comment from a manager that they had to 'toss out their toolset' to deal with remote.
However, at a tech company that's targeting an ecosystem that changes every few years, managers that are unwilling / unable to learn new stuff are incredibly damaging to morale and to the business as a whole.
If Google was making widgets that were designed in the 1950's, and have undergone zero customer-visible revisions, then yeah, they'd need conservative managers that can keep cutting costs / defect rates a few percent every year while investing as little as possible in evolving the core business.
However, Google isn't there yet. They're facing an existential threat, where Internet search is going to be lights-out in a few years thanks to LLMs, their primary revenue sources are being outlawed in large swaths of the first world, and they are a distant third in public cloud, which is the thing that's driving economies of scale for server-side compute (meaning they're dangerously close to falling on to the wrong exponential curve when it comes to datacenter hardware innovation).
If a manager can't figure out how to manage via zoom + slack, I seriously doubt they'll be able to figure out how to incorporate non-human intelligence into their team workflows while also pivoting from surveillance capitalism to a privacy-respecting revenue model, and also becoming customer-focused (at Google!! Hahaha!!!) enough to court enterprise customers.
I work in the office, but when I really need to make progress on some stuff, I tell my boss I'm staying home. It absolutely makes a world of difference to be hard to find.
I read somewhere - I can't remember where - that the expression "other people" was at the time (written during the German occupation) a euphemism for German soldiers. I don't know if this is true and I've never actually read No Exit so maybe there's no softening the phrase but it could be that there's some nuance there.
You can have spontaneous conversations in a number of ways, but anything that requires focus work suffers greatly because of the insistence in shoving people together without providing suitable spaces for isolated work--which is why I would, back in the 2000s, frequently grab the brick that passed as a laptop and find an empty meeting room to work in, and later (thanks to GPRS and 3G, not even Wi-Fi) "upgraded" to sitting in the cafeteria or a lounge for two hour stints every day just to get work done.
Yes, you need to coordinate with people. And yes, you need to manage them. But doing either by having them within earshot and "not knowing" what they are up to are truly the hallmarks of incompetent managers, or of a broken company culture. Set up office hours. Rotations. Anything but mandatory RTO at arbitrary days that will force people to spend 4h a day in a commute, be unable to pick up their kids from school, or aid elderly relatives (or friends).
I sincerely hope that I do not have to go back to an open-space office ever again, and that my trips to the office are driven by actual need rather than management insecurities.