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flippant remarks about the “great resignation” wave

2011 was the year working remotely became a reality for me. It lasted for about four months. That was when I learned about the first caveat around working remotely: some companies allow working remotely solely for financial reasons: they simply cannot afford to work the way they really want to work—in an office, probably an “open” office without private (quiet) rooms.

Now I am aware that there are authentic, remote-first companies (like StackOverflow) but these were elite organizations, all-star teams, looking for rock stars. In part because of my Microsoft bias, I was not attractive to these organizations. (And, yes, StackOverflow is a Microsoft shop but they were relatively small and my SQL-server-with-million-hit-per-hour-web-site-building experience was—and still is—rather limited.)

So, based on the relatively crappy organizations that would hire me, I concocted a plan. The plan was based on the very definition of a ‘crappy organization’: a crappy organization is one that holds more than six months of technical debt, meaning it would take at least six months to get rid of legacy load that is demonstrably slowing down organizational progress on a daily basis. Most of the companies I have worked for are way, way past six months. In fact, one can argue that almost all IT-based organizations are crappy and are one ransomware attack away from proving my point.

So my 2011 plan was naïve: show leadership that I can get them out of technical debt while meeting current business needs and they will ‘reward’ me by letting me work remotely. Now, in 2011, I was around 43 years old—clearly, a young and dumb 43 because what I was asking for was totally from another world, alien to the typical, narcissistic/evangelical manager. I actually thought that a manager would consider not being in face-to-face contact every day a reward.

Most managers will say that they want to be surrounded by smart people—and they mean that spatially within earshot. It has taken upwards of a half-million American pandemic deaths for management to start to figure out that many of these smart people are smart enough to not be impressed by the politics swirling around in an office building. Tech journalists are floating this term out there, the “great resignation” wave, to scare management into waking up and redefining what “surrounded by smart people” means. You cannot scare these people with resignations. Unless you’ve done something illegal (or helping to make the company make a super-profit—which could also be illegal), North American managers don’t chase you—they replace you.

In 2011, I resigned from a company because working remotely was treated like an emergency privilege instead of a humane necessity. And I understood ten years ago that most management types want to live in the 19th century when it comes to seeing their “team”: they literally want to see 👀 them—with eyeballs—every work day. Since one young lady manager literally thought I was accusing her of being a racist when I used the phrase ‘19th century’ in her general direction before I resigned, it may help to mention that:

  • working remotely requires writing skills—do not let Zoom fool you: most Americans who were in their 30s in 2011 find writing much more difficult than chatting in person (19th-century illiteracy)
  • workers in general and managers in particular use impromptu, unrecorded face-to-face meetings as a way to run down the clock, to turn a 10-hour work day into a six-hour one with great conversations (19th-century factory-supervisor work)
  • managers became managers by pressing the flesh—even technical managers are people people—and remote workers are incompatible with such “normal” contact (19th-century evangelism)
  • many roads to management are paved with the blood of the manager and working remotely seems like a “vacation” away from the suffering—and many managers like to share the suffering instead of taking the full responsibility for getting paid the big bucks (18th-century elitism)
  • many managers destroyed their family relationships to become a manager and working at home is last place they want to be—and they assume the same must be case for you (19th-century patriarchy)

Okay the phrase “destroyed their family relationships” seems a bit unfair. On the contrary, great family relationships mean there will be babies and toddlers at home—and even I understand how a manager can be annoyed (eventually) by baby background noise while trying to conduct business. Additionally, for those single folks out there in a predatory real estate market, an employee might have five roommates, all trying to share work-from-home Wi-Fi. In “Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution,” the leading winners are “high-income workers at highly profitable companies” but even these folks can have roommates and babies.

One way to solve the roommate problem is to work remotely from a less expensive/predatory real estate market. But such a move eventually leads to the question, “Should You Take a Pay Cut to Work Remotely?” which, to me, is an invitation to evil. Such pay cuts can lead to well-founded accusations of economically punishing employees who prefer to not be in the physical presence of their management. And this leads (me) to the deeper question, Are you really a great asset to a company when you cannot make your management feel “good”? One would naïvely assume that making management feel good is by meeting openly shared KPIs but in my experience the KPIs are not openly shared and these indicators are not enough.

From 2011 to 2020, I survived the hostility and willful ignorance of remote work by saving money for a barely tolerable gig, being unemployed, running up debt and getting another barely tolerable gig. I have had decades to “see the light” and “hack” my personality to force myself to enjoy working in person in an office filled with loud people who are not working with me at all by any objective measure. In fact, I spent three years sitting in an office in El Segundo insulting myself by being placed next to a noisy call center that had absolutely nothing to do with my day-to-day work.

People literally had to die for me to see a remote-first developer world for the months of 2020 and 2021. I will be astonished to see 2022 offering the same. Most modern American companies are built on sales and marketing—and sales and marketing mean pressing the flesh of potential customers (complete strangers). To disclose that you dislike meeting strangers against your will (intrinsic motivation), is to disclose a moral deficiency to most of these evangelical people. Like a racist, these evangelicals are not scientifically accurate or intellectually precise by design: when you say (mostly non-verbally) you dislike meeting complete strangers on a daily basis they willfully and eagerly assume you dislike all people. Once they convince themselves of this, then it becomes easy for them to dehumanize you and commit acts of at-will-employment evil. In my American experience, it’s been violence by default.

https://github.com/BryanWilhite/