Hey everyone! I'm officially starting today and will be monitoring/chatting with you all in the comment section from here on out. Let's keep it substantive and civil!
"Let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday and you're not feeling real well, does anyone ever say to you, "We are calling on the company to publicly reckon with the movement-wide crisis we are in; dismantle our white, owning-class culture: and to publicly commit to using the tens of millions of dollars we have to equip our base, and build multi-racial, crossclass community power for a Green New Deal..."?
"No. No, man. Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' something like that, man."
I was genuinely intrigued by that one, I have to say. Who are the owning class, and what is their culture? As far as Groups lingo goes, of course the whole issue is a MacGuffin; they don't know and don't care. But sociologically it actually sounds like a great question, the sort of thing a Max Weber or Thorstein Veblen of our times might take on.
"Most of the work doesn’t happen in the big group meetings that are formal and on the record. Most of the work actually happens through one-on-one meetings and the relationships."
"Instead, Weber was facilitating Zoom sessions to sort through his organization’s culture."
The first quoted section is just as true of businesses as it is of drafting legislation. Trying to use a Zoom to build or change an organization's culture is hopelessly inefficient -- it takes years of in-person work to do it well; on Zoom it might take a decade or more if it is possible at all. I know most employees like the freedom, the lack of a commute, the flexibility to do other things. But I'm convinced the era of remote workers being the norm is something successful companies will abandon.
You and I are in agreement on this and we disagree on a lot usually.
The only caveats I'd provide are the following:
- Sort of a duh statement but a lot of companies by the nature of the business or work involved are more set up to be fully or almost entirely remote than others. This is in part based on anecdotes from friends and family. But a few people I know really do have jobs that don't really require to be in the office at all.
- I don't think 5 days in the office will come back or should come back. I agree there is a real need to be in the office at least a few days a week for the reasons you lay out. But a good chunk of work at any white collar job does not really require face to face interaction. A lot is writing memos, data entry or basically paperwork that can be as easily done at home as the office.
- One thing I don't think enough companies have grappled with is if you're going to take advantage of the benefits of the 1-2 days a week people come to the office, you need to have some pretty set rules about one day a week everyone on a team or division needs to be in the office. Having a hybrid schedule where everyone is in the office on different days of the week kind of defeats the purpose.
Agree, Colin, though I think for the benefits to accrue it will take 3-4 days/week.
As an aside, a benefit of a place like these comments is that people can disagree without being (too) disagreeable. It makes this place different than, say, Reddit or Twitter or most message boards.
A major issue is that the push to come back is driven by paranoia of old school types that if people aren't in arbitrary, panopticon like office environments they aren't working and the embarrassment of long term leases for empty offices sitting on balance sheets. It's completely reactionary, which is why you now hear about absurdities like people commuting a couple days a week to sit in empty offices. The smart approach is to take the opportunity to pivot, which requires figuring out where there is a real value to being in person and structuring schedules and space accordingly, which will of course vary by company, business, and type of work the person does. I think the (completely understandable) push back comes when back to in person just means a futile attempt to turn back the clock to a model that was already passed its expiration date in February of 2020.
The value of in-person, though, is very hard (impossible?) to schedule and plan around. The value is in the serendipitous encounters between people across the organization. Not only on a specific team or within a specific function, but across functions and levels of the organization. Plus, the culture-building effects of seeing how your coworkers and leaders behave around each other.
Those things transform a collection of activities and projects into a living organization. There are some functions that can work like you describe, but I think the true value-added ones cannot.
I think that describes the abstract ideal of what in person work is rather than the actuality of what office life was like pre-pandemic. I have a pet theory that what really happened with remote work is an exposure of just how many offices were teeming with people that don't do much of anything all day but walk around having
*ahem* 'serendipitous encounters' and attending meetings about some other meeting with very little productive being done. Or at least the productivity was not anywhere near commensurate with the hours on site, but would be papered over by personality and office politics and the appearance of doing things.
Which isn't to say in person work never has value, and there are certain things that really do require it. The company I work for has found that there are certain training activities and an annual 'crunch' period where there may be a real benefit to having people on site. Other times the investment in space isn't worth the upside. To me it's really the laziness and lack of forward thinking by employers thats making this into a contentious issue, not the people who found they can get just as much or more done without losing hours of their lives in traffic jams, or on mass transit, or being in a particular place for a period of time for no reason other than to be seen by someone from across the room.
The discourse around remote work distills to the fight between (1) a group of people who think employees will watch Netflix, listen to Spotify, and shop on Amazon all day unless they face the possibility of their direct supervisor (usually some middle manager) walking into their office at any time for a "serendipitous encounter," and (2) a group of people who think the first group of people are pompous self-righteous busybodies with nothing better to do than mind other people's business.
Axios has a report out this morning about the White House push to get Federal workers back in the office. The rationale provided is:
"It is really important to make sure that we're getting the new team trained," McDonough said. "And we're sharing that culture and there's no better way to do that than in person."
"Greater in-person presence is essential to our ability to problem-solve, build trust, and foster the community needed to tackle the global challenges USAID works on every day," USAID administrator Samantha Power said in a statement.
Non-commuting and flexibility is of great value, so imagine that successful companies with finding middle ground to optimize that value with that of face to face interactions.
A coworker friend and I recently confessed to each other that we’d come to treat WFH Fridays as basically being “on call” and otherwise doing stuff around the house. Wonder why no one ever seems to call on Friday....
I doubt that, the start ups I have worked with bend heavily towards remote models in order to avoid office costs and expand the talent pool. I think the business will point more towards remote models as older businesses are replaced.
Survivorship bias makes us think "well all the cool startups are doing it!" is super persuasive. We should be more reserved. Lots of startups do all sorts of stupid things.
My experience with start-ups is they are easily the most poorly run companies I've been around. As a former founder, this is certainly also a self indictment. What we built was barely functioning chaos. The fact we sold it is still surprising.
This isn't an indictment of you, but I work for a start-up and what I have learned is that founders can be incredibly narrow-minded and stubborn, and are slow to respond to market forces.
That's interesting. My experience is we were too open-minded. This is only with hindsight, but we raised way too much money and hired way too many people and chased too many potentially interesting opportunities rather than ruthlessly prioritizing a very narrow set of opportunities. Live and learn. I doubt I would ever raise from a VC again.
Ah, I see the differences between our companies. We have some VC funding, but most of our work comes from product-development contracts with much larger customers, but a lot of those products don't morph into something that can be sold on the open market because customers keep changing what they want.
I'm still guessing a hybrid model will be a median, and with much variance depending on the profession. Some jobs need to fully be in person, and some jobs can be best fully remote.
Some jobs can definitely be remote. I've seen the rise in low-cost centers in Mexico, India and Eastern Europe (among others) for such things as back-office accounting, software coding, customer call centers and the like. I think the Zoom technology will expand these options for companies who have been reluctant -- for either cost or complexity reasons -- to embrace that model.
I remain skeptical that the core, value-added functions of a company will be mostly remote, though. Just as one example, the experience of remote learning -- and the best organizations are learning all the time -- makes me think it is unlikely to be the norm going forward.
Yeah, I wonder how far this would have gotten if O’Keefe had aired his concerns in person rather than on the company channel or if he'd spent significant time in the office with the other people working at the organization. It's really hard to get nuance through text, zoom messages etc. Zoom meetings are a bit better, but you're still talking over one another because you can't see everyone's body language.
At my organization, the senior leadership and young people starting out their careers want to be in office.
Most resistant are the middle management, which usually are people in the stage of life with young families and the flexibility of work from home is hugely beneficial.
My experience is the opposite. As a middle manager with a young family I hate working remote because:
1. I spend all day on Zoom, which sucks.
2. Onboarding, training, and personnel development is much more difficult.
3. But most importantly, my kids don’t understand “Dad is working,” which causes frequent conflicts despite my having a reasonably good home office.
I feel strongly that working outside the home is better for the kids. With work from home they have learned that even though I’m home I’m not available, and they don’t understand this changes before and after work.
In my industry few companies have gone RTO, and while I’ve looked I have not been able to find a good job that *isnt* all remote.
I have a young family and appreciate the flexibility of work from home, though I agree it's confusing to kids about where work begins and ends for parents.
My office makes us all come in every other Wednesday, and that's fine - there's a lot of socializing among coworkers and that's helpful. But then we also have to come in another day each pay period, and it's pretty pointless because people pick different days and the office is 90% empty. Why commute an hour each way to do Zoom calls in an empty office?
I think the big issue goes back to one of Matt's crusades - YIMBY. I don't think most people hate offices - what they mostly dislike is stressful commutes that eat up so much of their day. Building a lot more housing close to jobs would help.
I'm in tech, and my team/coworkers are spread out all over the world. If I'm forced into the office, I have the commute and I *still* need to do all my meetings on zoom.
If a business is truly located in a single location, or perhaps two, being in the office makes sense. But if the org is distributed around the world (and let's be real, businesses do this to save costs) then you're stuck on zoom one way or another, might as well be at home.
Exactly. There are times where it would be nice to be in the same place as the people I'm on a project with, sure. But the team is currently in Massachusetts, Ohio, Italy, the UK, Spain, and a few other places, so precisely what office would we do that in?
Yeah, same. I'm in tech and I prefer to work in the office, but my current job simply doesn't have an office and my previous job had one, but none of the people I actually interacted with were there, so I didn't go in because the thing I don't like is being on zoom all day, not "being on zoom all day at home."
I don’t understand how you’re supposed to have a kid in the same metro area as a job. I’m an extraordinarily well compensated professional even for my area, and 1BR is the absolute top of my means.
I keep hearing "young people don't actually care that much about WFH" and some surveys even back it up, but it's so far from my personal experience.
Everyone I know who is 25-30 works remotely as much as they are able to. It is perceived of as a major benefit. I guess I just socialize with people who don't have aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder?
Do you know any young people? Or are you just making this all up? Maybe this is a thread to sit out because you're not adding anything to the conversation.
Donors and boards should be going apeshit if any nonprofit is found to be paying any staffer who doesn’t absolutely need to be there a DC metro area living wage.
This is the definitive hate read. God do I despise these bullshit left wing policy groups that would rather accuse each other of being racist and push for communism than actually show up for a meeting with the president. Reading this also makes me dislike Biden’s admin more for catering to these idiots in the first place.
"You could have met the president but instead you had to deal with a middle manager who decided to mutiny" *could* be phrased as "you took the wrong meetings", if you want to be a huge jerk.
Nah, it was a smart move to bring them into the fold and let them implode all on their own. If he had ignored them then they could have been united in opposition to the establishment. By letting them be part of the establishment he made them swallow the poison pill that would cause their demise. Dark Brandon FTW!
In May 2019 I took my middle-school daughter and some of her friends to St. Paul for Minnesota's youth climate protest, one of the rallies happening across the country that day. Walking to the capitol building with thousands of young people was inspiring, and I felt hope. But then we got there and the speeches started.
As I recall it, there was almost no discussion of actual policy goals related to climate change; there might have been some talk of stopping pipelines, but that was it. There was, on the other hand, a lot of discussion of identity. Young people were heralded as the first BIPOC leaders of local climate groups. They didn't talk about what they were going to do as leaders; the important thing was the fact of leadership by someone who was a minority. Speakers talked about intersectionality and the disparate impact of environmental harms on minorities. The dubious claim was made that a European-style garbage incinerator in Minneapolis is evidence of systemic racism--never mind that there's no good evidence it's a source of pollution at all, much less that it contributes to climate change, and that it's situated in a neighborhood of young, mostly white, professionals.
When the speakers on the program were through, the microphone was open for anyone to offer comments. A young white man took the opportunity to suggest vegetarianism as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A following speaker, a white woman, lambasted this comment as racially insensitive. She yelled that it failed to consider that many BIPOC people don't have the economic resources to buy healthy vegetarian options, and it might be contrary to their cultures.
Maybe a reduction in eating animal products is a good way to fight climate change, and maybe it isn't. In any case, it was just about the only concrete idea for addressing the actual issue that anyone offered all afternoon. But rather than a discussion of it on the merits, it was angrily shut down as being racist.
I had a similar experience in 2016 after Trump's election. Freaked out by the result, I went to a local Indivisible meeting where "action plans" and the like were supposed to be discussed, but it turned into an open-mic competition about which racial group was about to be harmed the worst by Trump. It soured me on activist culture and everything I've seen in the years since has only dimmed my view further.
I kind of get the impression that for a lot of people in the climate movement, climate change something that we really need to address. But it's also an opportunity to get some of their less popular policies passed if you link them to climate change policies because if we're in a climate change emergency, you can't just refuse to pass a climate bill because it's got some provisions that are from the nuttier end of the social justice movement.
The thing about stuff like this is that it often turns off people with technical expertise to help come up with realistic policy solutions. And we need more people who can do the calculations to determine what effect each policy is likely to have.
There have been many thousands of words written in the paper about people talking about the garbage burner and not a lot of the people quoted are willing to point out which direction the literal wind blows. They are afraid :(
I really hope that the next left leaning admin realizes what a waste of time trying to build bridges with the NGO left is and just doesn't bother. All this has done is made the bills we've passed less effective, the president less popular, and the Groups TM more confident in their murder suicide tactics.
I'm usually the one at least semi defending Progressive activists and yet I read this post and thought "You've got to be kidding me". This sentence in particular was just infuriating "At the end of March 2021, Alex O’Keefe, among the first Black hires of the Sunrise Movement and a member of management, dropped a long manifesto, signed by three others, into the organization’s Slack account, indicting the leadership for a culture of white supremacy." This Alex O'Keefe person should fired. This is a coup attempt plain and simple; a play to feed your own ego and inflate your own importance at the cost of actually accomplishing the goals your org. is trying to accomplish.
This whole excerpt and previous Matt posts on the same topic actually make me think of Frederick The Great of all things. Specifically, his famous quote "he who defends everything defends nothing". He was obviously talking specifically about military strategy; you have limited resources, if you try to defend every nook of your border, you're troops will stretched to thin and you'll lose. But I think it applies to this situation with Sunrise and similar orgs. You can adjust the aphorism to "he who prioritizes everything prioritizes nothing". And this excerpt is possibly a paradigm example of this. Sunrise had an opportunity to actually influence policy and to quote Robert DeNiro "You blew iiittttt!!!".
> among the first Black hires of the Sunrise Movement
There's a certain kind of person who tends to get hired when liberal organizations decide they need to institute minority quotas, as exemplified by this guy.
I've talked about this on here before, but my very liberal company was ahead of the "reckoning" curve by about 2 years and due to some internal politics hired a bunch of activist-types, because when your goal is to improve the top-line minority representation numbers they are *very* easy to find (literally, search "queer POC" in linkedin, for example). We did some COVID-related layoffs and almost every single one of them was let go, because they didn't do anything except disrupt.
The truth is any kind of race-conscious hiring is morally repugnant and counterproductive by definition. You should hire whoever is likely to do the best job, period.
The crappy part is, there is almost certainly plenty of qualified Black/Hispanic/POC candidates for the jobs required and your company likely hired the people they did for the PR and suffered the consequences.
This is going to sound like a weird digression, but this reminds me of debates over $15 minimum wage. Like just raising the wage to $15 is going to disproportionately help POC given realities of socioeconomic stratification. No need to add social/racial justice angle; you end up harming your cause as you make it that much harder to pass legislation.
In this case, no need to look for activist key words on LinkedIn. In fact, the appropriate candidates who probably would be good at the job are probably less likely to have all these buzzwords.
Not legal advice, but I would be genuinely concerned that screening résumés based on inclusion of pronouns could violate some state anti-discrimination laws on the theory that people who include such information are disproportionately likely to be "sexual minorities." Probably want to check with your legal department (or outside labor & employment counsel) about that if you haven't already.
I would just like to say that the reason to not do things that have either a discriminatory intent or a discriminatory effect shouldn't be done because they are wrong, irrespective of whether they are illegal and irrespective of the likelihood you'll get caught.
My job extensively involves counseling people on compliance with laws/regulations or otherwise avoiding doing things that are likely to get them sued. The moral dimensions of that are a separate issue. (There are many things that are immoral that are lawful and probably almost as many thing that are moral that are unlawful.)
This is a publicly accessible blog post. I have no clue whether it's possible to extract an IP address or other information from comments and/or user profiles here that would enable someone to track down a commenter IRL, but my (totally not legal advice) two cents would be to not mention doing anything unlawful in comments or at least not mention it in a way that suggests you are actively doing it today, as compared to did it many years ago.
As a follow up. In my "I'll semi defend the far left" role, I'll say that it's not entirely wrong to see fighting climate change as intricately tied to racial justice. Freeways and highways were famously not just plunked down through major cities, but plunked down in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Those same freeways very likely increased lead exposure in the air thereby helping fuel the major crime rise of the 70s and 80s.
Probably the most famous example where environmental justice and racial justice are tied at the hip.
So having said that. Let's say Alex is right. Let's say Sunrise was not centering "racial justice" concerns nearly enough and therefore was contributing to Ta-Nahesi Coates formulation* of "white supremacy". You're way of confronting this is a manifesto to the entire company indicting the current leadership?! Considering this person is new and literally hired by the leadership, the fact that he didn't even think to bring this up privately and say "hey, I think we need to prioritize racial justice concerns more", but instead writes a manifesto that's now made it into a book is the part where I'm most on board with a) this was fireable and quite frankly the leadership likely has a defamation of character suit if they wanted to go down that road b) this was 80% this person's ego.
*Another place where the fact that Coates is a much better writer than most humans ended up harming his own cause. His Atlantic essays, whatever you may think of their ultimate arguments, had a certain amount of subtlety and rigor. Manifestos like this I think I can safely say are not subtle.
Hey everyone! I'm officially starting today and will be monitoring/chatting with you all in the comment section from here on out. Let's keep it substantive and civil!
Welcome 🥂
I've got big shoes to fill!
Look, there's no need to make fun of Milan's weirdly big feet.
You know what they say about blog moderators with big feet don't you?
[waits a beat]
They go on to become podcasters with advertising deals from "big & tall" clothing retailers.
If you're looking for troublemakers just search for "David", they're usually the culprits.
Welcome, Ben! As with Maya, I recommend shivving somebody here on your first day to show you mean business.
Find the most considered, substantive comment, and tear it to shreds.
Welcome!
Hi Ben, welcome! It was great to meet you at the happy hour, and it's nice to see you here.
"Let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday and you're not feeling real well, does anyone ever say to you, "We are calling on the company to publicly reckon with the movement-wide crisis we are in; dismantle our white, owning-class culture: and to publicly commit to using the tens of millions of dollars we have to equip our base, and build multi-racial, crossclass community power for a Green New Deal..."?
"No. No, man. Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' something like that, man."
And they took my stapler, and I never got any birthday cake!
IYKYK
Close.
damnitfeelsgoodtobeagangsta.mp3
Uncivil and unsubstantive.
"Owning-class culture" in particular drew a snort-laugh. New tome of Groups lingo just dropped.
I was genuinely intrigued by that one, I have to say. Who are the owning class, and what is their culture? As far as Groups lingo goes, of course the whole issue is a MacGuffin; they don't know and don't care. But sociologically it actually sounds like a great question, the sort of thing a Max Weber or Thorstein Veblen of our times might take on.
"Most of the work doesn’t happen in the big group meetings that are formal and on the record. Most of the work actually happens through one-on-one meetings and the relationships."
"Instead, Weber was facilitating Zoom sessions to sort through his organization’s culture."
The first quoted section is just as true of businesses as it is of drafting legislation. Trying to use a Zoom to build or change an organization's culture is hopelessly inefficient -- it takes years of in-person work to do it well; on Zoom it might take a decade or more if it is possible at all. I know most employees like the freedom, the lack of a commute, the flexibility to do other things. But I'm convinced the era of remote workers being the norm is something successful companies will abandon.
You and I are in agreement on this and we disagree on a lot usually.
The only caveats I'd provide are the following:
- Sort of a duh statement but a lot of companies by the nature of the business or work involved are more set up to be fully or almost entirely remote than others. This is in part based on anecdotes from friends and family. But a few people I know really do have jobs that don't really require to be in the office at all.
- I don't think 5 days in the office will come back or should come back. I agree there is a real need to be in the office at least a few days a week for the reasons you lay out. But a good chunk of work at any white collar job does not really require face to face interaction. A lot is writing memos, data entry or basically paperwork that can be as easily done at home as the office.
- One thing I don't think enough companies have grappled with is if you're going to take advantage of the benefits of the 1-2 days a week people come to the office, you need to have some pretty set rules about one day a week everyone on a team or division needs to be in the office. Having a hybrid schedule where everyone is in the office on different days of the week kind of defeats the purpose.
Agree, Colin, though I think for the benefits to accrue it will take 3-4 days/week.
As an aside, a benefit of a place like these comments is that people can disagree without being (too) disagreeable. It makes this place different than, say, Reddit or Twitter or most message boards.
A major issue is that the push to come back is driven by paranoia of old school types that if people aren't in arbitrary, panopticon like office environments they aren't working and the embarrassment of long term leases for empty offices sitting on balance sheets. It's completely reactionary, which is why you now hear about absurdities like people commuting a couple days a week to sit in empty offices. The smart approach is to take the opportunity to pivot, which requires figuring out where there is a real value to being in person and structuring schedules and space accordingly, which will of course vary by company, business, and type of work the person does. I think the (completely understandable) push back comes when back to in person just means a futile attempt to turn back the clock to a model that was already passed its expiration date in February of 2020.
The value of in-person, though, is very hard (impossible?) to schedule and plan around. The value is in the serendipitous encounters between people across the organization. Not only on a specific team or within a specific function, but across functions and levels of the organization. Plus, the culture-building effects of seeing how your coworkers and leaders behave around each other.
Those things transform a collection of activities and projects into a living organization. There are some functions that can work like you describe, but I think the true value-added ones cannot.
I think that describes the abstract ideal of what in person work is rather than the actuality of what office life was like pre-pandemic. I have a pet theory that what really happened with remote work is an exposure of just how many offices were teeming with people that don't do much of anything all day but walk around having
*ahem* 'serendipitous encounters' and attending meetings about some other meeting with very little productive being done. Or at least the productivity was not anywhere near commensurate with the hours on site, but would be papered over by personality and office politics and the appearance of doing things.
Which isn't to say in person work never has value, and there are certain things that really do require it. The company I work for has found that there are certain training activities and an annual 'crunch' period where there may be a real benefit to having people on site. Other times the investment in space isn't worth the upside. To me it's really the laziness and lack of forward thinking by employers thats making this into a contentious issue, not the people who found they can get just as much or more done without losing hours of their lives in traffic jams, or on mass transit, or being in a particular place for a period of time for no reason other than to be seen by someone from across the room.
The discourse around remote work distills to the fight between (1) a group of people who think employees will watch Netflix, listen to Spotify, and shop on Amazon all day unless they face the possibility of their direct supervisor (usually some middle manager) walking into their office at any time for a "serendipitous encounter," and (2) a group of people who think the first group of people are pompous self-righteous busybodies with nothing better to do than mind other people's business.
Axios has a report out this morning about the White House push to get Federal workers back in the office. The rationale provided is:
"It is really important to make sure that we're getting the new team trained," McDonough said. "And we're sharing that culture and there's no better way to do that than in person."
"Greater in-person presence is essential to our ability to problem-solve, build trust, and foster the community needed to tackle the global challenges USAID works on every day," USAID administrator Samantha Power said in a statement.
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/30/biden-zients-federal-workers-return-to-office
Well said, John.
Non-commuting and flexibility is of great value, so imagine that successful companies with finding middle ground to optimize that value with that of face to face interactions.
Two days in. Two days at home. One day to do all the errands and clean. Two days to nap.
Repeat.
A coworker friend and I recently confessed to each other that we’d come to treat WFH Fridays as basically being “on call” and otherwise doing stuff around the house. Wonder why no one ever seems to call on Friday....
I work 4-10s.
I doubt that, the start ups I have worked with bend heavily towards remote models in order to avoid office costs and expand the talent pool. I think the business will point more towards remote models as older businesses are replaced.
Survivorship bias makes us think "well all the cool startups are doing it!" is super persuasive. We should be more reserved. Lots of startups do all sorts of stupid things.
My experience with start-ups is they are easily the most poorly run companies I've been around. As a former founder, this is certainly also a self indictment. What we built was barely functioning chaos. The fact we sold it is still surprising.
This isn't an indictment of you, but I work for a start-up and what I have learned is that founders can be incredibly narrow-minded and stubborn, and are slow to respond to market forces.
That's interesting. My experience is we were too open-minded. This is only with hindsight, but we raised way too much money and hired way too many people and chased too many potentially interesting opportunities rather than ruthlessly prioritizing a very narrow set of opportunities. Live and learn. I doubt I would ever raise from a VC again.
Ah, I see the differences between our companies. We have some VC funding, but most of our work comes from product-development contracts with much larger customers, but a lot of those products don't morph into something that can be sold on the open market because customers keep changing what they want.
> I doubt I would ever raise from a VC again.
What would you rather do instead?
I'm curious: How many startups have you worked for and why did you leave the ones you did?
These are companies I have worked with as our contractors.
Is this actually a Zoom issue, though, or being expected to solve racism before anything else can be addressed?
Don't be ridiculous, obviously you can only solve racism after you solve capitalism.
With enough capitalism, anyone racist will eventually be outcompeted by those who take advantage of otherwise-underrated non-white talent.
I'm still guessing a hybrid model will be a median, and with much variance depending on the profession. Some jobs need to fully be in person, and some jobs can be best fully remote.
Some jobs can definitely be remote. I've seen the rise in low-cost centers in Mexico, India and Eastern Europe (among others) for such things as back-office accounting, software coding, customer call centers and the like. I think the Zoom technology will expand these options for companies who have been reluctant -- for either cost or complexity reasons -- to embrace that model.
I remain skeptical that the core, value-added functions of a company will be mostly remote, though. Just as one example, the experience of remote learning -- and the best organizations are learning all the time -- makes me think it is unlikely to be the norm going forward.
Some of us do not like those things! Or more correctly but less pithily, we recognize the *extraordinary* tradeoffs they represent.
Yeah, I wonder how far this would have gotten if O’Keefe had aired his concerns in person rather than on the company channel or if he'd spent significant time in the office with the other people working at the organization. It's really hard to get nuance through text, zoom messages etc. Zoom meetings are a bit better, but you're still talking over one another because you can't see everyone's body language.
I find it odd that some people "root" for or against remote work.
Obviously, there are many types of organizations - some operate best in-person and some operate best remotely.
At my organization, the senior leadership and young people starting out their careers want to be in office.
Most resistant are the middle management, which usually are people in the stage of life with young families and the flexibility of work from home is hugely beneficial.
Can attest that the vast majority of my twenty-something year old friends have now transitioned into wanting in-person office jobs
Learning, growing, socializing, networking.
My experience is the opposite. As a middle manager with a young family I hate working remote because:
1. I spend all day on Zoom, which sucks.
2. Onboarding, training, and personnel development is much more difficult.
3. But most importantly, my kids don’t understand “Dad is working,” which causes frequent conflicts despite my having a reasonably good home office.
I feel strongly that working outside the home is better for the kids. With work from home they have learned that even though I’m home I’m not available, and they don’t understand this changes before and after work.
In my industry few companies have gone RTO, and while I’ve looked I have not been able to find a good job that *isnt* all remote.
I have a young family and appreciate the flexibility of work from home, though I agree it's confusing to kids about where work begins and ends for parents.
My office makes us all come in every other Wednesday, and that's fine - there's a lot of socializing among coworkers and that's helpful. But then we also have to come in another day each pay period, and it's pretty pointless because people pick different days and the office is 90% empty. Why commute an hour each way to do Zoom calls in an empty office?
I think the big issue goes back to one of Matt's crusades - YIMBY. I don't think most people hate offices - what they mostly dislike is stressful commutes that eat up so much of their day. Building a lot more housing close to jobs would help.
I'm in tech, and my team/coworkers are spread out all over the world. If I'm forced into the office, I have the commute and I *still* need to do all my meetings on zoom.
If a business is truly located in a single location, or perhaps two, being in the office makes sense. But if the org is distributed around the world (and let's be real, businesses do this to save costs) then you're stuck on zoom one way or another, might as well be at home.
Exactly. There are times where it would be nice to be in the same place as the people I'm on a project with, sure. But the team is currently in Massachusetts, Ohio, Italy, the UK, Spain, and a few other places, so precisely what office would we do that in?
Yeah, same. I'm in tech and I prefer to work in the office, but my current job simply doesn't have an office and my previous job had one, but none of the people I actually interacted with were there, so I didn't go in because the thing I don't like is being on zoom all day, not "being on zoom all day at home."
I don’t understand how you’re supposed to have a kid in the same metro area as a job. I’m an extraordinarily well compensated professional even for my area, and 1BR is the absolute top of my means.
I don't get how you train an onboard people if they all are remote. It's a huge issue where I work.
That's one of many reasons why we were all remote for about three months!
I keep hearing "young people don't actually care that much about WFH" and some surveys even back it up, but it's so far from my personal experience.
Everyone I know who is 25-30 works remotely as much as they are able to. It is perceived of as a major benefit. I guess I just socialize with people who don't have aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder?
Do you know any young people? Or are you just making this all up? Maybe this is a thread to sit out because you're not adding anything to the conversation.
Donors and boards should be going apeshit if any nonprofit is found to be paying any staffer who doesn’t absolutely need to be there a DC metro area living wage.
This is the definitive hate read. God do I despise these bullshit left wing policy groups that would rather accuse each other of being racist and push for communism than actually show up for a meeting with the president. Reading this also makes me dislike Biden’s admin more for catering to these idiots in the first place.
I’m loling. It’s a real hate read alright, written for a managerial class whose biggest put-down is “you’re so dumb you took the wrong meetings!”
I’ve decided to take this as a compliment
Seems like a pretty legit putdown if aimed at somebody whose whole job is taking the right meetings.
"You could have met the president but instead you had to deal with a middle manager who decided to mutiny" *could* be phrased as "you took the wrong meetings", if you want to be a huge jerk.
Nah, it was a smart move to bring them into the fold and let them implode all on their own. If he had ignored them then they could have been united in opposition to the establishment. By letting them be part of the establishment he made them swallow the poison pill that would cause their demise. Dark Brandon FTW!
"Protest Disorder (Syndrome)"
That's genius! I've not heard that before. Well done.
In May 2019 I took my middle-school daughter and some of her friends to St. Paul for Minnesota's youth climate protest, one of the rallies happening across the country that day. Walking to the capitol building with thousands of young people was inspiring, and I felt hope. But then we got there and the speeches started.
As I recall it, there was almost no discussion of actual policy goals related to climate change; there might have been some talk of stopping pipelines, but that was it. There was, on the other hand, a lot of discussion of identity. Young people were heralded as the first BIPOC leaders of local climate groups. They didn't talk about what they were going to do as leaders; the important thing was the fact of leadership by someone who was a minority. Speakers talked about intersectionality and the disparate impact of environmental harms on minorities. The dubious claim was made that a European-style garbage incinerator in Minneapolis is evidence of systemic racism--never mind that there's no good evidence it's a source of pollution at all, much less that it contributes to climate change, and that it's situated in a neighborhood of young, mostly white, professionals.
When the speakers on the program were through, the microphone was open for anyone to offer comments. A young white man took the opportunity to suggest vegetarianism as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A following speaker, a white woman, lambasted this comment as racially insensitive. She yelled that it failed to consider that many BIPOC people don't have the economic resources to buy healthy vegetarian options, and it might be contrary to their cultures.
Maybe a reduction in eating animal products is a good way to fight climate change, and maybe it isn't. In any case, it was just about the only concrete idea for addressing the actual issue that anyone offered all afternoon. But rather than a discussion of it on the merits, it was angrily shut down as being racist.
It was disheartening.
I had a similar experience in 2016 after Trump's election. Freaked out by the result, I went to a local Indivisible meeting where "action plans" and the like were supposed to be discussed, but it turned into an open-mic competition about which racial group was about to be harmed the worst by Trump. It soured me on activist culture and everything I've seen in the years since has only dimmed my view further.
I kind of get the impression that for a lot of people in the climate movement, climate change something that we really need to address. But it's also an opportunity to get some of their less popular policies passed if you link them to climate change policies because if we're in a climate change emergency, you can't just refuse to pass a climate bill because it's got some provisions that are from the nuttier end of the social justice movement.
The thing about stuff like this is that it often turns off people with technical expertise to help come up with realistic policy solutions. And we need more people who can do the calculations to determine what effect each policy is likely to have.
There have been many thousands of words written in the paper about people talking about the garbage burner and not a lot of the people quoted are willing to point out which direction the literal wind blows. They are afraid :(
Away from people, or towards?
Away from the neighborhood that everyone claims to be extremely concerned about.
I really hope that the next left leaning admin realizes what a waste of time trying to build bridges with the NGO left is and just doesn't bother. All this has done is made the bills we've passed less effective, the president less popular, and the Groups TM more confident in their murder suicide tactics.
Yes, this!
I'm usually the one at least semi defending Progressive activists and yet I read this post and thought "You've got to be kidding me". This sentence in particular was just infuriating "At the end of March 2021, Alex O’Keefe, among the first Black hires of the Sunrise Movement and a member of management, dropped a long manifesto, signed by three others, into the organization’s Slack account, indicting the leadership for a culture of white supremacy." This Alex O'Keefe person should fired. This is a coup attempt plain and simple; a play to feed your own ego and inflate your own importance at the cost of actually accomplishing the goals your org. is trying to accomplish.
This whole excerpt and previous Matt posts on the same topic actually make me think of Frederick The Great of all things. Specifically, his famous quote "he who defends everything defends nothing". He was obviously talking specifically about military strategy; you have limited resources, if you try to defend every nook of your border, you're troops will stretched to thin and you'll lose. But I think it applies to this situation with Sunrise and similar orgs. You can adjust the aphorism to "he who prioritizes everything prioritizes nothing". And this excerpt is possibly a paradigm example of this. Sunrise had an opportunity to actually influence policy and to quote Robert DeNiro "You blew iiittttt!!!".
> among the first Black hires of the Sunrise Movement
There's a certain kind of person who tends to get hired when liberal organizations decide they need to institute minority quotas, as exemplified by this guy.
I've talked about this on here before, but my very liberal company was ahead of the "reckoning" curve by about 2 years and due to some internal politics hired a bunch of activist-types, because when your goal is to improve the top-line minority representation numbers they are *very* easy to find (literally, search "queer POC" in linkedin, for example). We did some COVID-related layoffs and almost every single one of them was let go, because they didn't do anything except disrupt.
The truth is any kind of race-conscious hiring is morally repugnant and counterproductive by definition. You should hire whoever is likely to do the best job, period.
The crappy part is, there is almost certainly plenty of qualified Black/Hispanic/POC candidates for the jobs required and your company likely hired the people they did for the PR and suffered the consequences.
This is going to sound like a weird digression, but this reminds me of debates over $15 minimum wage. Like just raising the wage to $15 is going to disproportionately help POC given realities of socioeconomic stratification. No need to add social/racial justice angle; you end up harming your cause as you make it that much harder to pass legislation.
In this case, no need to look for activist key words on LinkedIn. In fact, the appropriate candidates who probably would be good at the job are probably less likely to have all these buzzwords.
Not legal advice, but I would be genuinely concerned that screening résumés based on inclusion of pronouns could violate some state anti-discrimination laws on the theory that people who include such information are disproportionately likely to be "sexual minorities." Probably want to check with your legal department (or outside labor & employment counsel) about that if you haven't already.
The daily (hourly?) push and pull I feel between "Always write down everything!" and "Never write down anything!"...
I would just like to say that the reason to not do things that have either a discriminatory intent or a discriminatory effect shouldn't be done because they are wrong, irrespective of whether they are illegal and irrespective of the likelihood you'll get caught.
My job extensively involves counseling people on compliance with laws/regulations or otherwise avoiding doing things that are likely to get them sued. The moral dimensions of that are a separate issue. (There are many things that are immoral that are lawful and probably almost as many thing that are moral that are unlawful.)
This is a publicly accessible blog post. I have no clue whether it's possible to extract an IP address or other information from comments and/or user profiles here that would enable someone to track down a commenter IRL, but my (totally not legal advice) two cents would be to not mention doing anything unlawful in comments or at least not mention it in a way that suggests you are actively doing it today, as compared to did it many years ago.
As a follow up. In my "I'll semi defend the far left" role, I'll say that it's not entirely wrong to see fighting climate change as intricately tied to racial justice. Freeways and highways were famously not just plunked down through major cities, but plunked down in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Those same freeways very likely increased lead exposure in the air thereby helping fuel the major crime rise of the 70s and 80s.
Probably the most famous example where environmental justice and racial justice are tied at the hip.
So having said that. Let's say Alex is right. Let's say Sunrise was not centering "racial justice" concerns nearly enough and therefore was contributing to Ta-Nahesi Coates formulation* of "white supremacy". You're way of confronting this is a manifesto to the entire company indicting the current leadership?! Considering this person is new and literally hired by the leadership, the fact that he didn't even think to bring this up privately and say "hey, I think we need to prioritize racial justice concerns more", but instead writes a manifesto that's now made it into a book is the part where I'm most on board with a) this was fireable and quite frankly the leadership likely has a defamation of character suit if they wanted to go down that road b) this was 80% this person's ego.
*Another place where the fact that Coates is a much better writer than most humans ended up harming his own cause. His Atlantic essays, whatever you may think of their ultimate arguments, had a certain amount of subtlety and rigor. Manifestos like this I think I can safely say are not subtle.