It’s amazing how many LinkedIn posts say some variant of ‘remote work is bad because remote teams can’t do {thing remote teams have been doing successfully since IRC was the state of the art in communication for remote workers}’.
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It’s amazing how many LinkedIn posts say some variant of ‘remote work is bad because remote teams can’t do {thing remote teams have been doing successfully since IRC was the state of the art in communication for remote workers}’. And what they mean is ‘I don’t know how to manage remote teams’. It takes a special kind of arrogance to believe that just because you can’t do something that other people have been doing for decades, that thing is impossible.
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Bart Van de Poelreplied to david_chisnall last edited by
@david_chisnall People who manage by yelling or physically posturing have difficulty doing that over teams I guess.
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david_chisnallreplied to Bart Van de Poel last edited by
@bartvdpoel There are a lot of variations, but most of them are in two categories:
People who can't judge productivity, but can judge attendance. This is probably the case with Elon Musk. He's totally incompetent in every domain and so can't tell whether people are working productively or not, but he can tell if they're in the building and so he wants to optimise for the thing he can measure (the fact that it also lets him indulge in a little power trip is a bonus).
People who are overly reliant on similarity bias for their communication and so need a scenario that causes similar people to be in the same place. These people have typically never done anything active to ensure that their team gels and they wonder why they have difficulty retaining anyone who isn't a white middle-class man who went to the same kind of university as them.
Overlapping with these is people who have absolutely no clue how to manage, but ran things that were successful in spite of their efforts. Often there was someone else on the team who was doing all of the human-facing bits of management (in many cases this person was a woman and was then passed over for promotion because she wasn't doing enough 'hard technical' work, because her manager doesn't understand the value of the work that she was doing because he doesn't actually know how to manage people). These people think management is easy because they've never actually done it (in spite of what their job title might say) and they think remote management is hard because it's more obvious that they're not actually doing it.