Author: Juan Tellez

Six years after the Covid pandemic created a revolution in the white collar work office we are still dealing with the controversy.   Two years after RTO (Return to the Office) became the fashion, we are still wrestling with the question.  Every job posting now includes in-office, flexible, or remote models and perhaps that should be sufficient, but I strongly believe that it is an uncomfortable solution seeking to bring people on-site more than necessary. 

 

In 2024 RTO became corporate America’s new call to arms! It seemed that this noble experiment of working from home would be over.  CEOs decreed that working from home was inefficient, that people working in their pajamas at  home were taking advantage of corporate good will and that all workers must return to the office.  But the reality quickly became more complex than that, many people had moved further away, bought homes hours away, and could not, would not start commuting again.  Companies initially fired workers who refused to return, but later softened their policies when faced with losing top talent.  Finally, the absolute mandate of the RTO went down from 5 or 4 days to “on-site”, 4 days, or “on-site” 3 days which is hybrid. 

 

So what option is best for a job, a team or a company? If I’m creating or shaping culture at my small, medium or international conglomerate what should I do?  The answer is, it depends, and your HR policies should be explicit about that.  If you apply a one size fits all solution you will always be wrong.  What you should do is develop rules that apply to job descriptions, seniority level, country and state situations, while providing your budget owners with flexibility to adjust.     

 

Let’s start with who can be an efficient worker in a remote or hybrid setup?   I would like to start with the simple answers.  Any employee who is doing work on computers, who can connect to the company’s resources over the internet, or can take the work home with them on their computers safely.  Anyone who can perform their duties via video conferencing with little or no loss in fidelity is also a candidate.  

 

Let’s list a few people who are probably not good candidates for working from home full-remote.  Workers experiencing their first few years in a work environment need mentorship, guidance, and time discipline.  They are not easily going to receive those at home consistently.  I believe that working in a hybrid or onsite fashion should be better for that group.  This creates an opportunity.  Working from home can be an earned privilege, demonstrated by performance, seniority and experience.   So junior people must start onsite, prove themselves then be allowed to move to hybrid, and later in their careers remote. It is a simple formula, but strangely I have not seen it encased in any HR policy book that I have seen yet.  

 

What about leaders who set the culture, direction and tone of your organization? I strongly believe that leaders at the director, VP and CXX level should be expected to be present in the office as much as possible.  These leaders are critical for the organization and informal meetings are often a key mechanism for these leaders to be effective.  As these leaders move up in their organization, meetings with customers, travel, conferences take a lot of their time and often are not available even if they are close to their offices.  These leaders should make an effort to work in a disciplined, hybrid way, with predictable, scheduled, published on-site days that are maintained religiously.

 

What about jobs or companies that really need that on-site experience?  Examine Elon Musk’s argument against hybrid and remote work. Elon’s companies are often hardware/software combinations, and he resents the software guys for wanting to be at home because the hardware team HAS to be in the office.  In situations such as these, the interaction between the hardware and software team may require more frequent interactions.   I think Elon makes a good case for firmware jobs, and robot controller jobs to be on-site or hybrid.  But I strongly believe that doesn’t extend to all the employees of the company.  I see no reason for Twitter employees to be on-site, or employees in another part of the company who do not interact with the hardware team in a design fashion.  Say a team building a cloud facing sales or support tool.  I see no need to have that team be on-site with the hardware team.   The leadership of such an organization should have the flexibility to make the call. 

 

Startups building something highly speculative, that needs many design meetings over whiteboards may also require an onsite culture. I recently attended a meetup put together by an AI native company.  They said that “re-architecture” is a way of life!  In such a world, thinking in the office changes direction every day, sometimes multiple times a day.  Such teams will want to have everyone in the office as much as possible.  But NOTE ye startups!  Your organization will grow, and you will need to change gears at some point.  Be ready for that cultural moment where your great on-site culture will need to seamlessly incorporate another team in a different country, a different state, or even just another office 2 hours away.    

On-site activists often believe that their strategy has no down-side, or at least not a downside that cannot be fixed by just hiring people near me.  Here are some strong reasons why you should create a system that allows for all work models—in-office presence, flexible arrangements, and fully remote options—in the same company:

On-site activists often believe that their strategy has no down-side, or at least not a downside that cannot be fixed by just hiring people near me.  Here are some strong reasons why you should create a system that allows for all three approaches, on-site, hybrid and remote in the same company:

• The top engineers may not be near your core office site.  
• The most COST EFFECTIVE engineers needed to scale your org, such with skillsets such as SREs, support, or high end mathematics may not be near your core office site.  If your company is budget conscious but wants to have bar raisers in a high cost area, don’t expect to be able to hire that person to be on-site.  Find that top bar raiser in another city and have them travel once a month! 
• Your customers may be global and you may want 24x7x365 support, global SRE, engineering on-call rotations.  The best way is to have 2 or 3 sites around the world. This solves two problems: it provides engineering cost arbitrage and naturally creates on-call rotation cycles.
• Employees HATE to commute to work for 1 hour only to spend the entire day on Zoom.  Jobs that require constant video meetings should have a hybrid option.  If your company already has many sites, requiring employees to be on-site near some arbitrary office just so they can go on Zoom, is nonsensical. Doing so just means you don’t trust your employees.   Long commutes are inefficient and unproductive.  Better to get 8 hours of an employee who is fresh and ready to go.  

 

One size fits all for a company is a bad compromise, and while it does create stress points for your legal and HR organizations, and for your company culture, having a flexible system that finds appropriate rules to apply across in-office, hybrid, and distributed setups is the best compromise.  

 

There is one more pressure point that leaders of hybrid or remote employees should be clear about.  Managing a hybrid or remote employee is different from an onsite one.  You will need new skills.  It is critical that you maintain good goals for your employees, that you meet frequently and that those goals are measurable, via OKRs, task counts, weekly updates, or any other methodology that fits your job and style.  You must be able to comfortably measure your employees’ performance, in such a way that you are both in agreement that the measurement and weight given to that measurement is fair and accurate. 

 

If you have a large group of remote and hybrid employees in your organization be prepared to organize regular get togethers.  Onsite is the new offsite!!! Bring your teams into the office and discuss change in direction, architecture, strategy and have group, face to face meetings to discuss challenges.  Be mindful and purposeful when you hold these meetings, make sure to take action items after you do them.  If you bring everyone in for a holiday gathering, make it a 2 or 3 day trip with some working sessions before the big celebration.  

 

In summary, don’t create a one size fits all strategy and don’t tie yourself so strongly to your strategy that you don’t allow for flexibility to either add remote or on-site to your playbook.  Look carefully at your needs and ignore the trends and fashion of the day.

 

It is December of 2020. I have a 6 year old Mac Book Pro that I got from a startup fire sale. It was configured with 8gb memory and 500Gb SSD so at birth it was a solid software development machine. It was lightly used when I got it. We re imaged it so got rid of any crud that might be affecting its performance. It then went to sea with me, and served well for writing, backup chart plotting, writing code, sending emails, doing zooms, and applying for jobs.

While I was in Colombia, it gave me the black screen of death for the first time. Just before it happened, the screen flashed that scary (I’m dying flash). So I did what any reasonable engineer in 2020 would do. I googled it and got a ton of hits.

• applegazette
• youtube: Tips 2 Fix
• osxdaily
• Apple Discussions Thread
• ifixit

When it first appeared some variation of reboots with OPT-R and/or SHIFT-POWER, hold for many seconds, eventually got the screen back. Strangely after acting this way for a while, the screen became stable. Roll forward one and a half years later, this screen glitch came back, and off course, it was just before some important Zoom video meetings.

Recalling the original problem I looked up the various NVRAM, reboot sequences, and tried them without luck. Then some combination of reboot and SHIFT-POWER waiting for 15 seconds got me the screen back, and then it was gone. It seems my screen or graphics controller is dead or dying. I had to either quickly buy a new Mac, or hack up a fix.

Being the enterprising person that I am, I tried various sequences until the video returned, while connected to an external monitor, I setup the screens to mirror, and as I did that bang! It was gone again. I rebooted one more time, then closed the laptop, and bingo, it booted on the external screen. I added a keyboard, a mouse, a webcam a USB bus adapter, and I now have a really small desktop box!

I’m afraid my laptop is no more. Operating it with its open face is probably a thing of the past. When I get a new Mac or have a free low risk window to experiment, I will open up the face and try and do the tips from “Tips 2 Fix” in youtube. For now, enjoy this picture of my new desktop! This is not a particularly pleasant result, but it will do for now.

There are a great number of myths of the silicon valley startups. One such myth revolves around a hard edged, take no prisoners, cut throat culture. It is believed to be a boys network where the best, most talented and most ruthless engineers survive. In this world there is little room for diversity, unless you are a 10X coder, and all that counts is how fast you can help to build that next unicorn.

In this telling of the SV company, engineers practically live in their companies, working 60 hours or more per week, managers code, founders code, everybody codes. In this world the office becomes the proxy home and your coworkers are your proxy family, as long as they can keep up with the pace. The most important thing is how comfy the bean bags are and how good the food is .

Companies have always given some amount of lip service to all the values of diversity, mentoring, and career building, but when the pressure was turned up, the reality is that delivering was the only thing that counted. In early 2000s, when I approached my manager and asked: “I’m interested in managing, what do you think?” , my manager looked at me sternly, and replied: “… I see, would you be able to fire someone if you had to?”. I thought for a second, nodded, then returned to my desk wondering what the that was about. The message was clear. This was not a softer type of management and there was not going to be any career building or mentoring for me.

I did not end up managing for that startup, but soon after in a larger company I did enter the dark side of management. At the time, I took various training seminars that tried to improve what I did as a manager. They focused on appropriate management techniques for getting the most out of your teams. Some training was oriented to career development, but this was not a strong focus. Mentoring was a thing, but not a key aspect of what you did as a manager. In this big company, there were two keys to success. One key was fitting into the complex industrial engineering processes of this large company. The other was technical leadership, that focused on internal innovation. All the soft management skills were relegated to third or fourth tier.

But since that time in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, somewhere along the way something has changed. As I was doing some research into companies in San Francisco I found some interesting trends. One such trend is the emergence of the mission driven, highly diverse, highly principled work place. This new startup puts an emphasis on the values of the company and where possible and highlights the work environment as inclusive, family oriented, and highly supportive.

I have always believed that I practiced a style of management that is focused on the growth and the happiness of my teams. Whenever I could, I tried to help my employees to move through their careers, which for engineers usually meant a technical track or an engineering track. My goal as a manager was helping the engineer choose between these tracks, then help them develop in their chosen track. For the technical track, helping engineers lead small teams as tech-leads, going to conferences, and doing technical presentations, and for management types leading scrums, doing scoping plans, and presenting project outcomes or proposals to managers. I did all these things naturally and intuitively, without much training or support from the companies that I worked for. I believed I was nurturing the careers of the people who worked for me, and I felt that was part of the job description, even though I was mainly being evaluated on whether the projects were finished on time and did what they were supposed to do.

I was therefore surprised and caught off guard when I was asked recently during an interview for a technical leadership position: “Tell me about a time when you mentored an engineer and explain to me what the result was.” I was really not ready for that question. It took me a while to think of a good answer. I thought that mentoring, teaching, guiding for a manager and a director of engineering is like breathing. If you don’t do it, you die. I don’t remember what I answered the first time this question came up. What I do remember is that my answer was not very satisfying to me or my colleague at the other side of the Zoom call.

This was my first indication, that something was changing around me, or that something had changed and it was my first time noticing it. At first I thought this was an outlier, but then I noticed that job posts, and company values pages included terms like “inclusive”, “nurturing” and “mentoring”. Clearly a priority was being set by the leadership to have a holistic approach to creating a work environment that is welcoming to people other than the traditional hard core geek. If our small startup companies are to be welcoming to under represented minorities whether this is gender, racial, socio-economic background, it is critical that leadership be ready to guide people through the land mines of the startup world. What is surprising to me is that the founders recognize this, and set it in stone early in the life of the startups.

It is easy to see what happens in small companies where the values are not set at the beginning of thttps://telleztec.com/2020/12/03/is-silicon-valley-startup-cut-throat-culture-endangeredhe startup’s life. When the company decides to finally create a diverse workforce, it finds itself facing a nearly unsurmountable barrier. Ultimately if the company does not succeed in jumping this barrier, it will not succeed in growing quickly and scale beyond its initial 20 or 30 engineers. Where managers do not help their engineers grow, you will struggle finding new managers to fill leadership roles, and architects to take the design roles. The founders and hot shots engineers of those first heady days will become bottlenecks and the company will stall. Engineers that feel stuck in the same roles they started in, in turn will leave for other places that give them opportunities for growth.

While there are still many teams out there where the focus is on productivity, or engineering technical prowess, there is an equally large number of engineering teams that are highlighting the soft skills of the engineering manager and talking about values with their small companies. I for one, welcome this trend. Without this type of focus, training and priority setting it is not going to be possible to attract under represented minorities to startup companies. In addition we will not see those same minorities in middle management, and in turn upper management positions in both small and large companies. I truly believe this is more than political correctness. Companies who have more diverse engineers are more creative, more productive and in the end are happier, and ultimately will scale better to hundreds of engineers on a global stage.

I’ve been working using Digital Ocean hosting a Kubernetes instance, running two nodes. I’ve added WordPress to publish this site. It has been relatively easy. I’ve got the domain name, added certificate publishing, used a one button creation for WordPress and I’m off. Fun!