The 50% WFH policy will allow people to work from home but force them to live in the same region (within hours of the work). So, a worker from Santa Clara office cannot relocate to Austin and still work for Santa Clara office (unless flying 3 days a week).
Well they need to justify the $5B Donut!
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ppl who want to slack can slack at office too. Btw s/w engineers mostly follow agile methodology so you have to show progress in task everyday.
yes, you can quickly figure out who is slacking. given that, I was a at âslowâ dinosaur tech company until recently, so the SWE maaaaaaybe worked 4-5 hrs a day unless they were staff developers. Another reason we lost a lot of young top talent, they were bored out of their mind. but if you wanted to slack great place to do so.
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Yep, most software engineers really only spend 2-4 hours a day coding. Itâs hard to code longer imho at a high level. If youâre SRE, itâs mostly busy work. If youâre staff, you spend most of your time reviewing code and meeting for architectures. If youâre ML/AI, itâs generally easier work reading through papers, data munging and waiting for models to build. ML/AI work is best imo for time optimization. 
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Is there any job where people work 8 hrs a day?
AFAIK, most people only work 4 hrs a day 
The people who work building physical products or in healthcare etc
Staff engineer and above spend 8 hours in meetings and another 8 hours in doing real work.
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These staff engineers are inefficient. Fire them.
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Actually, engineering manager is the worst job in the tech world. Total time sinkhole. I know many who tried and went back to staff or sr engineer. I go back and forth, and I definitely enjoy just being an engineer. So much more freedom.
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I see ppl bash product managers too being overpaid
How do people brainstorm when everyone is remote? Or whiteboard a technical problem? My impression is that remote works well when there is little dependence among team members, everyone has clear path forward and just focus on their own piece. If any of these conditions doesnât apply remote can be a time sink.
People with comparable experience and skill level have been able to work remotely. If in chip design or software, they share actual test-case and debug live through zOOM or Teams. It is working out well . Companies have done away with live training courses. Pretty much everything is online. Onboarding/Offboarding is done online. For knowledge workers, workplace will transform to be like a cafeteria where they come to sip some coffee and discuss free items, including some work related issues.
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Thatâs because you hang around with hands on tech people. Now, if you hang around with the business side of things the perspective will be different.
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this is DEFINITELY harder. but the rest I love WFH, since I am in a LOT of really boring procedural meetings and I can multi task during them saving time elsewhere. It was a lot harder to multi task in person when the person in front of you is droning on about something utterly useless, which happens about 90% of the time in the dinosaur tech companies. my husband who does startups has to suffer less fools so he has less of this.
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conclusion - 
WFH is more efficient, and these âhand wavers in the airâ need to do a real job.
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For real. my old boss, who was a real dirtbag, made about $350k/year doing nothing but walking around chatting with people, going on useless business trips, and passing the work to others in the name of âleadershipâ. When COVID happened, it was a lot more clear to everyone, including senior mgmt, that he really accomplished nothing for the 350K/year they paid him.
What happened to the dirtbag? Did he get fired?
This observation is from blind. There are numerous posts on this. Btw Iâve a product manager friend working in PayPal too
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Agree with you. For 5 years, I was an Engineering Manager, with a team of 5-6 people reporting into me. Itâs a time sink. Since then, I have become a senior individual contributor with people dotted lining into me. Much better situation. I recently turned down a âpromotionâ offered to manage a group - told our VP that I prefer to remain an individual technical contributor and manage projects.
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