The only thing I hated worse than going into the office was our remote employees, who never seemed to be available when you needed them, had their status set to Away (or wouldn't respond for hours if they were green).

It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.

Interesting. I've been remote for 5 years across three different companies, and if anything I've had the opposite experience: my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.

I have a more nuanced take here. For low performing or junior employees, remote work was generally a terrible thing that led to less productivity (and more managerial overhead). For strongly performing employees with obligations at home, there were many who preferred working at home.

I fall more into the latter camp (at least I hope so) and, given I've only worked in nice offices with catered lunches, gyms, video games, offsites, etc, I enjoy a 3 day hybrid schedule works best for me.

That seems like an issue of company leadership and culture. There are many remote companies where this isn’t true. I’ve seen comments from Amazon workers talking about they were much more productive in a remote work situation, even though their leader (Andy Jassy) chose to make the company go back to the office 5 days a week with invasive monitoring of how people badge in and out.

I'm very pro remote working, but I think people like me need to realize that this is a real issue. It happens in the office too, but it's a bit harder to get away with, and it's really a performance management issue which brings us nicely to your second point.

I agree, managers are always the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing. But they do the same in the office by disappearing into meeting rooms for the entire day. I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.

It always seems weird to me how people complain about such things. Just do your thing and don't care about others. If others are blocking you, just say so in the daily or to your manager. Easy.

I don't really care about unproductive people, I care about myself.

I abuse the WFH thing because my manager promised me a raise if I complete a project and then sabotaged it, then put the blame on me, and finally changed the raise requirements. Really can't stay motivated in such an environment. If the game is "who fucks harder the other party" then don't be surprised that I watch porn during WFH and then try to convince other employees to do the same.

I will forever fight this with saying that chat is an async medium. If you need a response right now, pick up the phone.

Worst offenders are people who say things like: Hey, how are you doing?

And then ... nothing.

Or maybe people are actually working on something. And your 2 minute question might cause them to lose 30 minutes.

This is why it is important to have multiple work-streams going when doing remote work, so that you don't sit around and wait until you have your answer.

> It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.

IME, managers do this in the office just as much as remote.

Look at the typical manager's schedule. It's completely full of meetings - most of which are bullshit "busy" meetings, and they never respond to anything timely.

> It was a privilege

Hardly. It was COVID. It forced companies to do the most logical thing they could in a world of high speed internet. Many of them refused to read the writing on the wall and assumed it would return to normal one day. They made no efforts to internally reorient themselves around this new work strategy.

> people abused it

Other than your anecdote what evidence is there that this is true? Has the economy faltered? Is there any second source for the data which shows _any_ impact _at all_?

I've experienced it both ways. The least available and responsive workers were remote, but the most available and responsive workers were also remote.

Abused it in which way? Don't touch the money-makers. And if you're in the office, don't daydream about 'improvements' you could make that touch the money-makers in a vain attempt to quell your anxiety about not appearing to do anything of value.

Reading this comment I can't help but imagine a high school student using the same pattern to respond to an "open period" being changed to "study hall" with mandatory in-library presence; which is not to dig on you, just to raise the idea that maybe k-12 education really is a conspiracy to train people to sit in factories.

How/can we "montessori-fy"?

This is the issue. Too many people take the absolute piss with it. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have people who don't switch off and put in a lot of extra hours essentially picking up the slack. I'm finding a lot more people (both at work and amongst friends) who are desperate to avoid speaking on calls or turning their video on because it makes them nervous. Probably healthier for everyone to just be in the office.

And yet here you are, perpetuating the “crabs in a bucket” mentality that continues to be a blight on our industry.

[flagged]

At our company some people outright admitted on a survey sent out to employees that they would go out and run errands during work hours.

Like, how stupid do you have to be to kill your golden goose of life work balance?