RTO is a lie, 3rd party misinformation, the source of my anecdotes, and how (not) to make decisions. An article of many topics!
Sometimes writing about one topic just isn't good enough.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
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Today’s a fun day for me. Instead of writing one long article, I’m writing about 4 topics. I enjoy these compound articles as a change of pace.
As I mentioned in the past, I build up drafts of articles where I run out of steam. I perhaps write a thousand words, but then realize that the concept doesn’t require a full article to cover it. It’s a great topic to cover, but I don’t want to needlessly expand a topic. So I put it to the side, and use it in one of these combination articles.
Return to the office is a lie.
We haven’t been in the office in a while.
Here’s what I mean. The continued argument made for RTO is, “It’s time we get back into the office together, and interact in person.” That would at least be an honest reason if we’d been in the office together before the pandemic.
I spent 12+ years at Amazon, and a year at Facebook/Meta. In all that time, there were zero teams and zero major projects where we didn’t have at least one critical partner in another location.
In almost all situations, major meetings had to have video chat / online resources. Why? Because we had a team we were working with in India, or Phoenix, or Detroit, or Canada (apparently our enemies now), or California. Or even 5 blocks away in Seattle, and that team sure as heck wasn’t going to walk over to our building for a meeting. Have you ever met an engineer? They’re lazy as heck.
You can’t RTO when you’re not all in the O to begin with.
Of course, I’m not saying we had zero in-person meetings. Yes, we had impromptu hallway conversations. And we did stand at whiteboards and had great discussions in person.
But we were already working with remote workers. And we were slowly learning how to work with those people better. What we would frequently do (as we matured), was stop those hallway conversations and say, “Hey, this is actually really important. We should pull in a few more people. For example, X, and Y.” And often, X or Y were in another location.
So we’d get a conference call going. We might get into a conference room and get the AV system going. Or we’d just go to our offices and use our laptops.
Either way, as our companies became more global, we learned that critical discussions needed to take place online.
We didn’t have a perfect solution to replace whiteboards, so teams kept experimenting. Sometimes we’d collaboratively edit a notes document. Sometimes we had a shared drawing program where we could live diagram things. At other times, someone would point a video camera at a whiteboard, and the person in that room would draw there, with people yelling out helpful things, like “That box. Yeah, that box. Can you make an arrow to the database? No, the other database.”
It wasn’t perfect. In many situations, it meant that we regretted having to work with the remote teams. “Ugh, if we didn’t have that team involved, we could just meet live.” But those were growing pains, and it was the cost of doing business at a global company. As we built remote worker muscles, it became less of an issue.
We learned to visit people in-person to build those social connections. We learned how to use our tools better, and identify gaps in tooling. And of course, our companies got better VC hardware, so our in-person groups could more easily collaborate with remote workers.
Then the pandemic started, and I think a lot of us became optimistic about the opportunities it presented. We were used to remote teams being a bit of a pain, but now we were all remote. Finally, we’d fix the last remaining pain points. We’d allow people to work in-person or remote, whatever worked best for them.
But instead, there’s a renewed push to move workers local. “Time to get back into the office” they say.
What is actually happening? I’ve heard from dozens of big tech workers.
“Now I sit in the office, on my laptop, talking to people in other offices.”
“I commute to an office so I can sit in a conference room on video chat.”
Yes, I’m sure some teams (most frequently at smaller companies) are actually in person, and they feel this works well for them. And yes, I’m sure some people love being in offices again.
But I think we missed out on a great opportunity, and we absolutely have ignored the fact that we were already global remote workers.