Netflix's Reed Hastings Deems Remote Work 'a Pure Negative' (wsj.com) 205
From an interview: WSJ: What elements of the Netflix culture are tougher to maintain now that so many employees are working from home?
Mr. Hastings: Debating ideas is harder now.
WSJ: Have you seen benefits from people working at home?
Mr. Hastings: No. I don't see any positives. Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative. I've been super impressed at people's sacrifices.
WSJ: It's been anticipated that many companies will shift to a work-from-home approach for many employees even after the Covid-19 crisis. What do you think?
Mr. Hastings: If I had to guess, the five-day workweek will become four days in the office while one day is virtual from home. I'd bet that's where a lot of companies end up.
Mr. Hastings: Debating ideas is harder now.
WSJ: Have you seen benefits from people working at home?
Mr. Hastings: No. I don't see any positives. Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative. I've been super impressed at people's sacrifices.
WSJ: It's been anticipated that many companies will shift to a work-from-home approach for many employees even after the Covid-19 crisis. What do you think?
Mr. Hastings: If I had to guess, the five-day workweek will become four days in the office while one day is virtual from home. I'd bet that's where a lot of companies end up.
Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry buddy, but I've set foot in my last office.
Remote work is here to stay, if only because it saves employers TONS of money in all sorts of ways.
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Insightful)
and employees could live where they want, not shackled to being within commuting distance. It's been the joke where I work, we maintain servers that are not physically present, we've been working remotely on them for years. But we have to waste hour or more of our lives traveling to work and sit at a certain desk and type on a company PC.... why?
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Insightful)
... why?
Because companies that embrace WFH on a large scale have a poor track record. Yahoo is an obvious example.
Look, WFH saves companies TONS of money on rent, utilities, and even salaries. The advantages are obvious. If WFH had no disadvantages, then greedy profit-seeking capitalists would have greedily embraced it long ago. So clearly there are big disadvantages.
I worked for a company back in the 90s that embraced WFH. It was dysfunctional and eventually collapsed in the 2001 dotcom crash. As Mr. Hastings said, it is hard to toss around new ideas, and hard to get rid of stupid ideas. Employees would sometimes spend weeks working on projects that other people thought were canceled. I am sure that someone will reply and say "Why didn't you just wave a magic wand and have perfect communication at all times?", but the reality is that even in-office companies have problems keeping people informed and on-task. WFH makes these problems far worse.
WFH can work for companies that don't rely so much on creative teamwork. It can even work in the short-term for creative companies. Maybe the tech is finally good enough to make it work. But I have big doubts about that.
Even in this pandemic, problems are surfacing. People who are self-motivated and organized tend to do well working from home. These people tend to already earn high incomes. People who lack this motivation and organization, do less well. These people tend to be in lower-paying jobs. So expect WFH to exacerbate inequality by increasing the value of those who are already valued, and decreasing the value of low-income workers. Also expect the well-paid people to congratulate themselves and claim that everything is working just fine.
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Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say my current work demonstrates issues with pure remote work.
So for top-down assignment of work and work where things naturally happen and get assigned, work from home is fine. Work from home is better than coming in to let some focused work run its course as well.
However, team innovation takes a dive. People working in proximity tend to have problems and solutions move between people even if the people moving it didn't know it was a solvable problem, or that someone near them could get use out of something they worked on.
To try to force the issue they have tried holding online events to push, and attendance is a bit lower, but also making your project statements and volunteering for coming together on a project is just not working.
We have the technology to do this, but not the culture. People have gotten more comfortable with remote meetings and have fared better than they ever did before the pandemic, but they still have two distinct modes of work:
-Organized interpersonal interaction with explicit intention ahead of time to work around concrete known things and to discuss things in a very structured way
-Isolated working on their own stuff without anyone overhearing their complaints or without them overhearing a problem they could actually solve.
In the work place, ambient social interactions drive work value, and that is largely lost in pure work from home. A mix is a great idea, maybe 2 days of office and 3 days from home for my situation, and would probably vary based on the job and needs.
Ambient social interactions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:4, Interesting)
I would say some of that is management. My wife works for a university hospital, in their IT department. Since lockdown she has been entirely WFH. She is part of the team doing the Epic EMR rollout. She is a curriculum designer. When the lockdown eased in May, they ran through the numbers and found that productivity was actually up 30%. They are continuing the WFH for now due to this, in spite of the fact the university is still locked into leases on several of these now empty buildings they just got done renovating. Her job is not assembly line. Its 100% collaborative in nature as not only is the training program being designed dynamically but so are the roles and security applications. No 2 hospitals are identical so an employee might wear several hats inside of the Epic system. In spite of spending money on empty spaces, the productivity still warranted a sustained WFH status. She spends a good half her day in Zoom meetings.
So I would say management is likely to blame for the success or lack thereof in a WFH environment.
Re: Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:4, Informative)
So what you are saying is we need to adapt to work from home business processes. And that straight doing existing processes from home gives mixed results?
Jeez a new idea required new ideas to make to work.
My last three jobs had voip phones and remote terminal connections to isolate work and everyone was encouraged to store everything on the cloud drives.
Login into my voip phone on my cell and laptop and I could duplicate everything at work. Except the cooler chit chat. But half my team was in another office so we had ways of working with that as well.
A significant number of jobs can be done remotely.
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I mean, it isn't just a problem with me, there are metrics to be had in this case where a certain class of projects (the more R&D projects that are initiated by teams) at my company are down like 85% across the board. The other work (numbers of ticket worked, marketing dictated projects) have only fallen off by maybe 10%.
I even pointed out in my comment that there are things that are massively better at home, where time gained from no commute, comfort of home environment, less completely work unrelated
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Because companies that embrace WFH on a large scale have a poor track record. Yahoo is an obvious example.
I can't speak with respect to Yahoo, but I work for a large, magenta-colored telecommunications company and even with 95% of all employees working from home, everything is humming right along. Some of the work-related productivity metrics are better than than when everyone was in the office, and not by just a little bit.
Look, WFH saves companies TONS of money on rent, utilities, and even salaries. The advantages are obvious. If WFH had no disadvantages, then greedy profit-seeking capitalists would have greedily embraced it long ago. So clearly there are big disadvantages.
There were disadvantages, but most (not all) have been overcome or mitigated by technology.
The fact is that even if we're on a team, most of us work alone, and most of that work can be done just as well from your couch or home as well as it can be done from inside a big office building.
WFH is better in almost every respect:
fewer car accidents (and injuries), ...etc etc etc, I'm sure people can think up additional advantages and benefits.
fewer miles traveled period,
less air pollution (see above)
fewer colds transmitted in the office,
less frustration from traffic (lol),
you get to sleep in EVERY DAY
more time at home for what YOU want to do
more relaxed pace of work in general (YMMV)
taking breaks whenever you feel like it is no big deal
radically reduced workplace drama
no more people cooking fucking fish in the break room microwave (I'm looking at you, Jenna)
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You had me until "couch". Unless your work is just calling people on the phone and checking occasional emails, you can't work from the couch.
I'm a developer and would never think about not working from a chair/desk. I even played games from the same setup. It started to have a negative effect on me, since I felt I was stuck in the same setting for most of the day/night, so I decided to set up a 2nd computer/chair/desk in my library so that I could enjoy the outside view all day long while I worked, and t
Re: Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:4, Funny)
You forget they exist? Really? That's a personal problem, not a WFH problem. Are you like a toddler who hasn't yet developed object permanence, so that when something is no longer in front of you, it no longer exists?
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:You walk by your coworker Jim and wave to him, and he says, oh hey Mary I've got an idea/question:
Jesus Christ! I work mostly remote and it never stopped the ideas flow. so you are saying that unless you actually walk past a person no interaction ever occurs? I used to work with a guy in China and we always had long random ideas talks on a sunday morning via FaceTime audio. I worked with people in Chicago ( I am in France) and we always had random calls unscheduled ( Hey can you talk? Well give me 5 minute
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19 years ago, people primarily communicated by email and phone calls with expensive conferencing equipment.
The real problem is that a company that embraces WFH without having prepared for it, has to make up for that "in-person" experience by interrupting the people working from home "on record". So what might consist of a manager or supervisor interrupting their staff every few minutes to look busy now turns into a series of chat logs and audio/video conferencing notes.
People who like power, don't want to b
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:4, Insightful)
People who are self-motivated and organized tend to do well working from home. These people tend to already earn high incomes.
You're thinking of the days when WFH was seen as a perk for the few. Suddenly, it has turned into a necessity for companies that never envisioned implementing it. People who are "self-motivated and organized" will be the preferred hires of the new era. The less motivated will be shunted into low-paying jobs that require personal presence and close supervision.
Furthermore, after the pandemic most employees other than an international elite will not be purely working from home. It will be two or three days a week, with hot-desked presence at a shrunken version of the office for the rest of the workweek. This split arrangement will be seen as necessary to maintain corporate culture. Meanwhile, cities will welcome the reduced commuting trafffic.
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You might have noticed that collaboration tools have considerably improved since the 1990s when even email has hardly been a commonly used tool. Today I can easily get whoever I need at a whim, right here and now. I can hold meetings online and if I need an expert, I can instantly attach him to the meeting, even if he's in a completely different building or even town, he'll see the presentation, can add his expertise and be gone the next minute to head off to another meeting needing his input. Before that,
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we've been doing it for almost 7 months because of pandemic and no revenue loss. we can't not do our systems admin stuff, it would be obvious.
dot-coms crashed for other reasons, not WFH
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DotComs crashed for the same reason, we're finding out that major amount of people don't do anything productive. We've had 7 months now, some people totally ghosted and are still on the payrolls, yet the companies are still running.
I've seen groups with 6 sysadmins for maybe 300 computers, they're still running, 6 people on the payroll that aren't showing up, that for all intents and purposes are sitting at home doing nothing because their overlords never gave them and still haven't figured out proper remot
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Our servers are in datacentres, and yeah the four guys at each datacentre who maintain them still have to go there for the occasional hands-on change or troubleshooting. A couple of handfuls of guys going to the "office" (in shifts, mostly, not all at the same time) while the hundreds of other tech staff and thousands of other employees work at home.
'git push from my desk at home works like 'git push' from my desk in the office. SSH from my desk at home works like SSH from my desk in the office. The videoco
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is not whether this is really the best choice for some employees. Obviously there are some individuals, especially who think of work as just a paycheck and have limited professional ambition would love to work from home, and want the flexibility to pick their home independent of their work location.
The question is how all this works out for organizations, and the individuals within these organizations who are tasked with making everything work fare.
In my company (mid-size to large, 100% software), here is what I have observed:
1) Over the first 2-3 months, overall productivity actually went up. This is because everyone was on their best behavior and were on what I call an `exam footing'. Projects that had been planned before executed a bit faster.
2) After the excitement wore off, things started flattening out. Productivity dropped back to pre-pandemic levels. Planning new projects however started taking longer. New designs and architectures started taking far more review iterations to converge. This was directly due to people not being able to do quick brainstorms/sync/ask impromptu questions. Everything is a zoom meeting now, and there is a LOT lost in translation in slack.
3) Misunderstandings/miscommunications are WAY up... even within a single office, let alone across geographic locations.
4) E-mail as a mechanism of mass information dissemination has now proved to be useless. Nobody has time to read large emails. Furthermore, there is a tremendous amount of unwitting misinformation that is disseminated because people interpret the same email in different ways. Managers and other engineers have become information clearing houses, who have to ensure that everyone in their team has the information they need to get the job done. Stress and frustration among this class of employees is way up.
5) Parents and folks who have young children at home are under severe stress. Their productivity has noticeably dropped (there are exceptions of course).
6) Employees who were not really motivated in the first place are actually less.
Look, I understand that things may never go back to the old normal. However, let us not fool ourselves thinking there are only positives in this new situation.
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Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, there it is. If you want to instil the cultish we're-a-community-and-this-company-is-your-life belief in your employees, that's going to be super difficult if they're free and enjoying their actual lives. Probably also hard when you've just "furloughed" a bunch of them during a crisis.
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the point.
Managers and Executives can't fathom why anyone would NOT want to work in the office and be around them, because being around them gives them power. If you take that away from them, suddenly their role is meaningless.
In an ideal, perfect, environment, there would no longer be any "office" work, but that requires quite a few things to line up.
- Internet connectivity (presently 1Gbit symmetric) and latency (under 50ms) must be available to all, employees.
- Dedicated VPN hardware and business-provided computer hardware, yes software VPN's work, but software VPN's require the computer to work and if the computer requires remote-administration it can't be done over a software VPN (eg password resets, because the machine won't be on the domain to receive the update.)
- "Cloud" software licencing to not be married to the machine but to the "seat", as in when the software is running on the VPN, it acquires the licence over the VPN. If the VPN is turned off, then the cloud software (eg Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, and so forth) needs to the user to login via the Enterprise SSO (eg their work email address) with a 2FA. Without this, any time the user switches from being home and the office, the "licence" seat gets consumed as the cloud software sees a different identity unless the user is taking the same machine home every time, this problem is presently a huge problem for "guest"'s in large offices because they may borrow a machine for the day with their login and then the software gets re-activated for that user. MS Office 365 is terrible for this, as they borrow a new machine and it activates one of the licences, so if they have a bad habit of forgetting their machine, they eventually run out of licences unless they use someone's machine where it's already been activated.
Any environment that is not a physical work environment (eg film sets, manufacturing, and so forth) can push for more automation, manufacturing can be automated to the point that everything can be monitored remotely, requiring only security and maybe one or two people who can emergency stop/start the equipment as a fail safe. Film sets in particular can be turned into CG sets, requiring the actor to only provide MoCap, as the technology is at a level already where entire films can be done in CG, however not typically done due to cost and CG actors looking creepy outside of a fantasy/cartoon environment.
Companies that embrace work from home without having designed their office organization for it, are of course going to have issues:
- Leaks of sensitive information from illegal devices being connected to VPN's or employer equipment, or employer equipment being stolen
- Licencing issues (eg over-provisioning due to twice as much equipment being used, but no change in users. Under-provisioning for anal-retentive software licencing, such as plugins for AutoCAD and Photoshop)
- Privacy issues (eg cameras without lens covers, microphones left on, desktop/screen recording software left to run on shared business/home equipment)
Like, if a company will not embrace WFH, the company doesn't believe it's employees are responsible adults, and the company pretty much deserves to burn to the ground in an emergency (such as the pandemic, or you know if the actual office location burns down.) Like the grocery store and fast food worker can be replaced with an environment where it operates as a "kitchen only" location, and food is prepared on-demand.
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He wants to make sure his employees aren't watching Netflix.
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have found working from home that I have been far more able to get my point across in virtual meetings. Normally in person, a boss will feel to jump in and express their opinion and I have to work to hide my nonverbal communication and work on a new correct response. While remotely with everyone else remote. I can be grumpy or happy but plan a good response without trying to make sure I am fully acting the way I am expected.
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Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have found working from home that I have been far more able to get my point across in virtual meetings.
That's a good point.
Because of the "one at a time" structure of videoconferencing, I've noticed that meetings are more orderly, seem calmer, and people can speak without being talked over as much. The very nature of videoconferencing seems to loosely enforce better manners.
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Interesting)
On the flip side, if someone really *should* speak up they may be run over by the current speaker, or whoever is bold enough to talk enough to become the dominant voice. In an in person meeting, I tend to hear the sentence "Wait, it seems like X has something to say" or silently adjusting their behavior in recognition that someone clearly has something to say.
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Certain jobs can absolutely go 100% WFH. Many require at least some time in the office for a day or two per week. I've been home with my son since mid-March and my offi
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These have to do more with the currently still crude tools that is zoom, slack et al, rather than with the distributed work concept. Of course, as few companies pursued distributed work before March, the tool vendors made fairly limited investments. With Zoom and similar companies getting much higher valuation, competition and investment should increase. The product vision of each company will have a ton more user feedback to work with, now that a lot of companies push the tool vendors to do more and do bet
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It sounds like he is just not very good at interacting with people online. For example the stuff about not being able to debate ideas. It should be easier. We have far better tools for online collaboration than we do for managing in-person meetings.
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:5, Interesting)
When he said "Debating ideas is harder now." I took it to mean "browbeating underlings into accepting my opinions is harder now". Whole conversations can take place where he can't stick his nose into them.
Re:Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:4, Interesting)
When he said "Debating ideas is harder now." I took it to mean "browbeating underlings into accepting my opinions is harder now".
Bingo.
I've noticed that the more domineering a boss is, the more he hates WFH and virtual meetings. I'm sure there's no correlation whatsoever.
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It sounds like he is just not very good at interacting with people online.
That was exactly what I thought.
Maybe he's used to verbally dominating in meetings and he just can't bully people as effectively if they're not in physically the same room.
All in all Reed Hastings sounds like a dick, and not someone I'd want to work for.
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It sounds like he is just not very good at interacting with people online.
That was exactly what I thought.
Maybe he's used to verbally dominating in meetings and he just can't bully people as effectively if they're not in physically the same room.
All in all Reed Hastings sounds like a dick, and not someone I'd want to work for.
Always give people the benefit of the doubt. He could just be completely clueless.
From the summary:
Debating ideas is harder now.
Uh... debating ideas should be done by email or chat anyway, so you have a record of what was said and can refer back to it throughout the debate, rather than forgetting about potentially important points simply because the person in charge of the meeting is initially dismissive of something whose implications they don't fully understand. If you're doing any important debating via in-person meetings, you're
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Uh... debating ideas should be done by email or chat anyway
Without any tone, nuance or context; sure it should.
If tone and nuance matter, it isn't a debate. It's a popularity contest.
Look, in the world of business, if you're having a debate, it better be about trying to figure out the right decision to make about something important. If it isn't, then leave it the h*** at home. And if it is, then the extent to which someone is passionate about an issue shouldn't matter. Either it's the right call or the wrong call. If you've made your case to the best of your ability, but you got outvoted, that's too bad. Don'
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The savings to companies is less than you would think, and is offset by a number of risks that will require legislation to resolve. Some industries are especially poorly suited for remote work, and some managers (/personality types) lose tremendous effectiveness.
More senior staff generally adapt to it better, but we see a motivation challenge across the board.
For my company, we will likely permit more WFH long-term; we have a few people that are 100% already. 50% will likely be available to most of the offi
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The savings to companies is less than you would think, and is offset by a number of risks that will require legislation to resolve.
There isn't a CEO alive who wouldn't gladly dump their expensive office building in a heartbeat if they could. And now they can.
There's going to be a glut of office space on the market in 6 months or so, and I suspect you'll see prices for commercial real estate drop to record low levels as they get emptied out.
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The office space glut is different than companies actually saving money. General rule of thumb is office space is about 5-10% of your payroll. So, if you make $75k the expense would be expected to be around $5k/year. You as a company are still on the hook for any furniture needs the employee has, as well as the efficiency lost. I don’t know a solid industry-wide number for VPN and remote support premiums, but we see about $150-250/employee/month in added costs. Our IT support hours have easily tr
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ha ha, suck it, Reed! (Score:2)
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Sure, it saves them money... for now. I'll be adding a significant amount to my salary demands since I'll have to pay for my own office area which means a larger more expensive apartment/house. And have to shell out more money for a higher bandwidth internet connection, good office furniture, dedicated phone, and electronics... all of which previously would have been supplied by the employer. The savings from not commuting don't come close to offsetting those costs.
I guess different companies have different ways of dealing with remote work on a large scale. At my company, 75% of the employees have been working from home full time since mid-March. The company gave all of us a choice among four very nice chairs from the Staples catalog, and had them delivered. As far as I know, everyone who asked was given permission to take their large widescreen displays home. They are giving all remote workers an extra $75/month to compensate for using personal phones and Internet co
Commuting costs. (Score:3)
How much that costs really depend on your situation. If you already have a home area for hobbies or other work, then you already have the space. If you have a Netflix-capable internet connection then you have a work-capable internet connection (for almost every job).
How much does commuting cost? In the UK, commuting costs into London can easily exceed £5000/year (US$6500/year) just for the train ticket, excluding any other costs. How much is your train ticket, or your car fuel and maintenance for the
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I'll be adding a significant amount to my salary demands since I'll have to pay for my own office area which means a larger more expensive apartment/house.
Good luck with that. I'm sure your manager will be super supportive. lol
And have to shell out more money for a higher bandwidth internet connection, good office furniture, dedicated phone, and electronics...
Oh please, stop whining. No one is going to buy you all this shit. They'll fire you and hire someone who has a decent internet connection and who isn't going to shit his pants demanding a new chair.
The savings from not commuting don't come close to offsetting those costs.
Do you have any idea what just one floor of an office building costs to rent in San Francisco, Seattle, or New York? News Flash: It's expensive. The cost savings from dumping buildings are all that most CEOs are talking about right now, and t
Joke's on Reed (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect that genie is out of the bottle and it is never going back in. Having experienced it, proving it works, proving we can still collaborate, and proving how much better it makes people's lives, I'd be hard pressed to ever take a job that wasn't mostly work from home in the future.
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This. The guy's thinking is stuck in the past. Maybe being in the office works for senior executives, who have to be seen to be present to prove they are in any way worthwhile to the business, but for the people who get the work done, it is far less necessary.
His 4 days in, 1 day off is so far off the mark it is funny. I could have accepted 3+2, but I expect it will move to 2+3 or even 1+4, with the day in being far more social team aspects than work.
If your competitors are offering 2 days in, 3 at home, th
Re:Joke's on Reed (Score:5)
It's about control. Management feels disempowered when they can't pop into someone's office any time they like for a "friendly chat" (which everyone knows is just an inspection regime). A smart manager knows how to set goals and motivate a team wherever they are. Quit fixating on hours worked which in many industries is a terrible metric for productivity.
Re: Joke's on Reed (Score:2)
Re:Joke's on Reed (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree. In my experience it takes a certain kind of person to be able to work remotely effectively. Self-motivated, hardworking, focused.
While in IT these traits are reasonably common; many, many people do not have these traits.
I've noticed since the start of the pandemic that customer service reps and government employees are much harder to contact and much less responsive because they are now working from home "full time". Heck, my town government was essentially closed for 3 months and now has a months-long backlog of town business to catch up on.
Many businesses are reconsidering remote work being a blessing. It may work decently at first when 100% of staff is remote, but over time you lose cohesion between the team as any company "culture" that existed slowly disappears. The company I work for is requiring people to start coming back into the office after Labor Day, as are many others.
Re:Joke's on Reed (Score:4)
Personally, I never want to work from home again. I hate it... It's too quiet, too many distractions (all my personal projects are at home), and I feel totally socially isolated. So glad that I'm back in the office (I'm a "muddy boots" Engineer anyway, it's hard to fit my work product in my livingroom to begin with). Home is my place, not my companies. The moment I leave the office door, work is done and I don't think about it again until I work in the next day.
Re:Joke's on Reed (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked from home from 1999 until 2009 (for a company three time zones away), and by the end I hated it. I still do. I like the option to work from home, but would prefer to go to the office most days. I have to get out of the house every day, and WFH doesn't help with that. Everybody I work with these days is overseas, so it's not like I'm going in to the office to work face to face with them, but I still prefer it.
Slaveholder mindset (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds a bit like "how am I going to supervise my slaves if they work from home"? Anybody that sees no positives in this situation is a problem.
Re:Slaveholder mindset (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe he has a property portfolio too. There have been lots of David Brents writing articles recently about how the commute is "part of people's identity and the work experience" or how the office is where people find true fulfilment.
What they really mean is their yacht fund is down and they need you to waste your life on a crowded train so it goes back up.
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Probably. There are always some losers when changes happen and usually they argue that the old way was better and that it should be kept.
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how am I going to supervise my slaves
Worse yet: What happens when my slaves don't need supervision?
Work from home will be made available to certain employees as appropriate. Those that meet the criteria are the sorts of employees you'd like to keep. Those that need supervision are the ones you can easily cut come the next downturn.
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how am I going to supervise my slaves
Worse yet: What happens when my slaves don't need supervision?
Work from home will be made available to certain employees as appropriate. Those that meet the criteria are the sorts of employees you'd like to keep. Those that need supervision are the ones you can easily cut come the next downturn.
You have that completely backwards! Obviously, those that work from home are easily replaced by some cheap offshoring, because obviously their jobs are so simple that they can be done remotely without supervision. Hence these must be the least valuable employees! Those that work on-site must be exceptionally valuable because their work cannot be off-shored, hence they get to keep their jobs.
Oh, you were talking about a company that actually makes something other than hot air, right? Well, then you are perfe
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Worse yet: What happens when my slaves don't need supervision?
Ask Spartacus how well that worked out. :(
Re:Slaveholder mindset (Score:4)
Well... I cannot speak for everyone, but there has always been this idea in my mind that it would be cool to work for Netflix next. I live close by, I am interested in the type of work they do at cutting edge of chaos and reliability engineering, I have decades of experience and after talking with several of their engineers at conferences, I know I'd have a lot to contribute. So it seemed to make sense. Well that idea is now 100% gone in just 3 responses from the CEO.
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Well that idea is now 100% gone in just 3 responses from the CEO.
Smart move.
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Notice how they're all worried about the preservation of some "corporate culture"? In my experience, unless an organization was new enough not to worry about culture, any "culture" that they crowed about came about by accident, survival of the fittestunder the company's top-down dictates, or cult of personality. I peg Hasting's company for a combo of all three.
Some organizations do have a sort of vibe that makes them special. I now retract that statement - every organization has a sort of vibe that makes th
Re:Slaveholder mindset (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, as far as "the before time" what do you actually need to do in person that can't be done remotely? Touch them? Since that's not a viable reason I can only think of feeding them. The ol' client "Wine & Dine" and/or "Employee Happy Hours".
Psychopathic and sociopathic manipulation tactics hinging upon control over group dynamics are extraordinarily ineffective remotely - both due to the fact people can record what you're saying and try to hold you to it better than their memories will under the influence of such tactics, and because someone ranting and raving remotely is met with eye rolls rather than the desire to appease them and get on with business. Since most execs and upper management are such psychopaths and sociopaths who managed to exploit those group dynamics and instinctual reactions of people (from simple appeasement to straight intimidation) to get where they are they're sticking out like a sore thumb as idiots with no even half-decent ideas who just want to control people for sport or personal power.
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I mean, as far as "the before time" what do you actually need to do in person that can't be done remotely? Touch them? Since that's not a viable reason I can only think of feeding them. The ol' client "Wine & Dine" and/or "Employee Happy Hours".
Psychopathic and sociopathic manipulation tactics hinging upon control over group dynamics are extraordinarily ineffective remotely - both due to the fact people can record what you're saying and try to hold you to it better than their memories will under the influence of such tactics, and because someone ranting and raving remotely is met with eye rolls rather than the desire to appease them and get on with business. Since most execs and upper management are such psychopaths and sociopaths who managed to exploit those group dynamics and instinctual reactions of people (from simple appeasement to straight intimidation) to get where they are they're sticking out like a sore thumb as idiots with no even half-decent ideas who just want to control people for sport or personal power.
Sounds entirely plausible to me. Also, typically these defectives assert power over their underlings by wasting said underlings time (by endless meaningless speeches and the like). In fact, a measure of your importance in any bureaucracy is how much time of others you can "bind" (i.e. waste). The more you can, the more important you are. Hence some people have vast teams that have no other purpose than to come up with and enforce ways to waste time of others, often using vast convoluted and typically meanin
Re:Slaveholder mindset (Score:4)
You don't technically *need* it, it's just easier. Something that you can explain to someone in just a couple of minutes in front of a whiteboard can take 5 to 10 to explain to someone online. Additionally, there are nonverbal communication factors that exist when communicating in person, as you can often tell almost immediately whether or not the person you are talking to in person is understanding what you're saying even before they've said anything, and adjust in real time to meet that demand. The more that your job depends on being able to communicate with other people, and especially if that communication was always previously in person, the worse it's going to be for you.
Simply put, the communication overhead is *FAR* higher when trying to use teleconferencing. Is it doable? Sure.... is it really just as productive? Not a chance.
That said, I'm of the opinion that even this disadvantage is outweighed by the numerous advantages that working from home does still offer. It is conceivable that in time, we might learn newer and more effective methods of communication when conducting business remotely, or perhaps some day possible technology might advance enough to help bridge the gap that currently exists in this regard.
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You raise an important point. Today's level of WFH is only possible at all because Zoom-style software has improved the communication interface. It has to get a lot better still in the future for ideas to flow among people as easily as they do in an office. Email is passable as a universal lowest common denominator, but it is full of holes as an office communications medium.
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You don't technically *need* it, it's just easier. Something that you can explain to someone in just a couple of minutes in front of a whiteboard can take 5 to 10 to explain to someone online.
I do not really believe that. What does get more difficult is coning people. Whether it is conning them into believing something is cool or important, or conning them into believing you have certain skills or insights.
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I speak from my own personal experience in the matter. The more your job depends on communicating with others that traditionally had always been done in person, the harder the transition to working remotely will be, and productivity will decline as a result.
I also did say that this is probably a limitation that can eventually be overcome with time, either as we as a society learn newer and better ways to effectively communicate without requiring being with the person, and perhaps even as technology adv
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Oh, sure, there are other problems. But they are not universal and do not apply to everything. The problem with the Netflix CEO is that he sees no advantages. And that is just fundamentally wrong.
To me this is the more telling part... (Score:2)
Misleading headline (Score:3, Informative)
He didn't say remote work is a pure negative, just that not being able to meet in person was.
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On the quote itself, it's fairly obvious the guy has the wealth to live far closer to work than employees below the c-suite. Nobody who wastes 2 hours commuting per day would say there's no positives to working from home.
International 'get togethers' (Score:4, Interesting)
So we need to fly around the place for face-to-face meetings? I don't think so.Since the 1980s, at the start of teleconference (where everyone seemed like they were underwater), I've worked in projects that effectively used remote meetings. Last one, a couple of years ago, I flew from London into Austria, twice in a six month project. That was a 'nice to have' so that we could eat a little good Viennese food, mainly.
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It seems to me that there are whole layers of middle managers at some multinationals that just fly around the world constantly to distract everyone from the fact they don't do anything at all. They talk of air miles and hotel points, act social with each other, but know nothing of ongoing work or corporate direction and seemingly lack basic competence in the areas they are meant to manage. Even if those people stay at home on full salary it will save a fortune on flights and hotels.
Re:International 'get togethers' (Score:4, Interesting)
seemingly lack basic competence in the areas they are meant to manage
This is the next level of the Dilbert Principle [wikipedia.org]. Step one: You promote the incompetents into management to get them off the shop floor. Next, you identify the worst cases now in management and sent them out to "interface". They are out of the office and, with any luck, they will either be hired by a competitor that they meet at an industry convention. Or their plane will be shot down over Obscuristan.
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I'm a scientist. Most of us work with people all over the world, and most of us can't afford to fly around very much. We do just fine with e-mail and phone and whatever, plus maybe an in person meeting one a year if we can convince someone to pay for it.
Then there's the "middle management" who fly around all the time chatting to each other. They don't really come up with very many ideas and in my experience when they try and share them with each other, very bad things happen.
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So we need to fly around the place for face-to-face meetings? I don't think so.Since the 1980s, at the start of teleconference (where everyone seemed like they were underwater), I've worked in projects that effectively used remote meetings. Last one, a couple of years ago, I flew from London into Austria, twice in a six month project. That was a 'nice to have' so that we could eat a little good Viennese food, mainly.
A lot depends on the type of work. For technical projects that don't require a lot of ongoing discussion and one on one followup, sure. An added in tech projects is you can mute the annoying techies who insist their solution is the only one that works. When you need to get multiple senior directors to agree on things, not so much. the ability to drop in on shjort notice, talk and observe the body language is critical.
Paywalled article.... (Score:2)
So it's rather difficult to decide if the summary fairly captures Reed's intent or is just more "fake news."
Remote work genie is out of the bottle.... (Score:5, Informative)
I work at a fortune 50 company that previously was rather hostile to remote work. There were some people that could work remotely, but it was "at the manager's discretion" and senior leadership made it crystal clear that it wasn't the desired outcome. Six months ago, we switched to 100% remote across all of our locations and I've seen a shift in thinking from leadership. Productivity is at LEAST as productive as it was before and I'm inclined to think it's actually better. My expectation is that a significant percentage of employees will work remotely at least a couple of days a week going forward. It's anyone's guess when we'll find out though, since the oft-discussed return to the office seems to be perpetually a month or two down the road. We may see commercialized nuclear fusion power plants first. :)
Extrovert in charge (Score:5, Insightful)
on-site is best for senior managers (Score:4, Informative)
This!
Distributed workforces are less convenient for senior managers who expect to be able to impose themselves in-person on their staff and have the staff and employees be in a place at a time of the manager's choosing. They miss being able to call a staff meeting of everyone they want to talk to right now.
Having to schedule a meeting in advance, or wait for someone to respond to their chat message, is something they haven't had to do before.
Welcome to the world the rest of us live in!
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It's called "Management By Walking Around" and it can be quite effective in certain fields.
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It's called "Management By Walking Around" and it can be quite effective in certain fields.
Otherwise it's micro-management by continual hassling, and it's quite corrosive in many fields.
Try harder, Reed (Score:2)
It's not an inherent property of working from home that 'debating ideas is harder'. Maybe if you're finding that WFH is falling short, the problem isn't the working, it's the managing. This isn't construction, where you have to lay hands on things, this is creative work. I've been on the internet for 20 years, and I've seen great collaborative work between people for tech or art or any other number of endeavours. To riff on a common argument of people that advocate for office work, if you think the way peop
Re:Try harder, Reed (Score:5, Interesting)
Entrepreneur CEOs who can't handle a company bigger than one you can get into a meeting room and talk to, or (if they can delegate a bit) who can't handle a company where you can't get all your management leads into a meeting room and talk to, are very common. Failure to manage a larger company is one of the main problems of entrepreneur CEOs and one of the main reasons they get displaced as a company gets bigger.
It sounds like Mr Hastings has this problem. He sounds like he has no other way to manage people, to motivate them, to share ideas, to coordinate work and deliver results, other than to gather them in his office and talk to them. He must grow and develop himself and his skills in order to succeed.
He can't lack technology for this. He must have people who can send audio and video streams between sites, and manage the technology of videoconferencing.
I'm going to assume he can read and write English well, although I've met a surprising number of senior executives, native English-speakers, whose reading and writing skills were weak. You can often tell these people by their insistence on short text no matter how complicated the issue ("you have to keep your updates shorter - Bob doesn't read anything longer than one page"), preference for charts and simple numbers over narrative, poor spelling and grammar if they do send a written message, and tendency to want to talk to people in-person. I don't know if Mr Hastings has this problem, but if he does it would explain a lot.
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I hope someone mods you up insightful, because this is an excellent crystallization of the problem.
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This comment is only insightful if that sentence is the only one out of my whole comment that you read. ...It IS, isn't it? Well get back in there, chummer, and read the rest of it. Don't worry, it'll only take you an hour or two!
So a company that does movies remotely (Score:2)
Yea, no. (Score:2)
I am not going back to the shitty one hour each way weekly commute even if its 4 days a week. I can see 2 half days Mon and Wed for team related meetings. I do not need to be in an office to work in front of a computer, my productive has gone up, my free time is up, I'm sorry if middle managers can't handle not seeing people face to face to determine work output, if anything it should prove how worthless most middle management actually is....
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I'm sorry if middle managers can't handle not seeing people face to face to determine work output, if anything it should prove how worthless most middle management actually is....
Or, how imperceptible an individual's contribution really is.
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Yea that begs the question, if an individual's work contribution and thus performance is imperceptible without seeing a face, then whatever merit system is in place prior to this lockdown was broken at best and a complete sham at worst.
Amazingly, msmash left out two important words (Score:4, Interesting)
The title of this piece should read:
"Netflix's Reed Hastings Deems 'Remote Work' A Pure Negative For Netflix"
Pure negative for Reed Hastings... (Score:2)
... in that he's unable to look out at his throng of assembled serfs.
"particularly internationally"? (Score:3)
"Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative"
If he means the occasional business travel, fine, but that isn't the normal day.
On a typical day I have meetings with people in 4 countries and multiple US states.
We have never been in the same room.
WFH and OSHA (Score:2)
Prior to the pandemic, whenever the discussion of being entirely remote had come up with my employer, the legal dept had stated repeatedly that they can't make WFH the official position, because OSHA requires that if a job is expected to be performed remotely, it is the employer's obligation to ensure that the remote work location meets the same ergonomics, lighting, fire safety, etc standards as the office workspace. And so we'd have to allow our employer into our homes to let them inspect smoke detectors
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Maybe its time the OSHA laws (which were probably written long before WFH was a thing) were changed to remove this totally stupid idea that employers are responsible for stuff in someones house when they do WFH.
Disappointing. (Score:2)
All I take away from this is that Netflix's Reed Hastings doesn't understand the internet any better than my great grandmother.
partially agree.. (Score:2)
Caution note for would-be investors (Score:2)
Netflix may have been a good stock in the past [not judging either way in this post, it's not the point] but any current or future investor should pay attention when somebody like this says stuff like this - it's a big flashing neon sign.
The management of Netflix apparently is not sufficiently creative and innovative enough to make this work, or they are not competent at managing, or they have managers too insecure to remote manage (which would save massive piles of INVESTOR MONEY), or they are bad at hirin
Re:People can't debate ideas remotely? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll push back on this. There is a particular geek culture (heavily white) where you can have a tech meeting that is *very* efficient. People get cut off all the time (with the implicit "I understand your point now") with the possibility of raising your voice slightly and continuing ("no, you haven't"). When everyone is sympatico, a 2 hour meeting can be finished in about 30 minutes with barely anyone having gotten a full paragraph out. It's almost a verbal ballet that requires a level of mutual understanding and respect.
You can't do that over teleconference. It requires a *lot* of reading each other because you cannot afford to interrupt someone unless you are quite certain you've understood their point, and you can't afford to just raise volume and continue unless you are *certain* they don't. (Sure, there are idiots who always escalate, but it's amazing how quickly they get forgotten to be invited into such meetings.)
Now, the counterpoint to this is that it requires a very specific geek culture. Even pre-covid, I've moved away from this meeting format because as teams grow more diverse, not everyone prospers under this meeting style as there are many who are not comfortable cutting off their peers or bosses. Sure, the meetings last 3 times longer, but it means people unwilling to fight for their ideas still get heard and that's a net plus if the alternative is good ideas being lost.
However, I can see in a place like Netflix, which may have a strong geek mono-culture, people like Reed would hate the fact that the density of ideas in the meeting has significantly decreased (and he sounds like the type who conflates "value of an idea" with "how much you're willing to fight for an idea", which is very culture-specific).
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People get cut off all the time (with the implicit "I understand your point now") with the possibility of raising your voice slightly and continuing ("no, you haven't").
This seems like it has around 100% chance of leaving some of the participants in the meeting, without fully understanding all the points.
That kind of thing works for a few people that do "lets gather around the whiteboard and figure this thing out", but not something with enough people to warrant a meeting in the conference room.