Brutkey

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us

The furthest east person in my team is in Kuala Lumpur. The furthest West is in Ontario. One person in my team is in the same city as me. We go to the pub sometimes.

If you can’t manage a remote team, you can’t manage.

If you are hiring exclusively people who are willing and able to come into the office in a single city, you are excluding over 99% of candidates before you even see CVs. The probability of hiring the best people when you do that is vanishingly small.

Julian Schwarzenbach
@jschwa1@mastodonapp.uk

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us One team I have been working with tried a more aggressive policy to get people to attend the office, but they had also reduced the amount of office space, so there were not enough meeting rooms, staff were based on different sites etc. So teams were still in online meetings, often sitting close to each other with one or two more remove.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

@jschwa1@mastodonapp.uk @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us

The RTO policies at Microsoft are driven by the same people who rebuilt most of the campus as 'team rooms' (open plan) to 'encourage collaboration' (in spite of all of the research showing that open plan is worse for collaboration). I last visited Redmond just before the start of the pandemic and the outcome was 100% predictable:
People wore noise-cancelling headphones in the team rooms to minimise distractions.
People avoided talking to each other in the team rooms to not disturb other folks.
People collaborated in the team rooms primarily by chatting on Teams.
People worked from home to avoid distractions and so occupancy in the team rooms was often 40% or lower.
People found it hard to book meeting rooms for discussions (which they now needed to because they couldn't do it in their offices) and so often did Teams meetings on days when everyone worked from home instead.