Counter-perspective, but largely in agreement: I did grow up with a mobile phone and instant messaging and whatnot, and so using Slack (and to some extent, Zoom, as much as I dislike video compared to text) feels very natural to me.

To me, as someone who has deep and meaningful friendships with certain people mediated almost entirely through Discord messaging, which is basically non-work Slack, asynchronous mentorship and collaboration don't seem strange at all. I do recognize not everyone's a fan, and that there is a certain learning curve involved if you're not used to it (gamers, for example, seem to fall into virtual work naturally), but it's absolutely doable and these C-levels who say it's not are behind the curve.

I'm in my 40s. I prefer zoom meetings. I don't think mobile phone usage has all that much to do with it tbh. Some people just really seem to want other people to be in the room with them and at the same time are somewhat oblivious to the fact that we don't care or don't want to be there.

I can, and so can many others. I guess it comes down to preference and personality.

I spent so many years in offices, in open plan offices where whole teams would sit with their headphones on loud, trying to ignore the presence of all other humans, that actually working in my own space has been a relief.

In my 40s now though, I work on stuff I’m interested in, and have a work ethic that doesn’t require oversight. 20 years ago I may not have been so good at it.

What is your model? That is, how did you measure this? Productivity and the impacts to it are highly multivariate and most analysis thus far has failed to do show convincing effects in either direction from remote work.

Genuinely, there is too much appeal to emotion from both sides of the argument and not enough substance, so if you have something here I'd be interested to read about it.

To anyone else coming across this: this is a lie.

> ultimatum

Yeah, I think there's a bigger issue with management here if this is how it was handled.

> in person meetings have people staring at their laptops and phones too

I've worked at a variety of places with a variety of problems, but I've never seen that kind of rudeness be widespread or persistent. It was corrected in different ways depending on the company culture, but it was corrected.

Where I worked in the past, those people would get a private reprimand after that meeting.

Updated, yes.

If people are checked out during meetings, maybe they don't really have to be there. When I set up a meeting I try to ensure only people who really, really need to be there are invited. Way too many meetings are like: "1. Eng Lead Presenter, 2. VP who's receiving the update, and 3-10. Team members involved in the project." If 3-10 are not expected to speak/contribute and already know what 1 is presenting, why the fuck are they there? To sit there and pick their noses? They could be a lot more focused and productive back at their desks (or not connected to video conference). I don't invite them, and if I invite them by mistake and they know they aren't contributing, I expect them to decline and not show up! I don’t want tourists at my meetings.

Companies where non-contributors and non-receivers feel pressured to come to meetings just to show their faces are Doing It Wrong.

fewer, more purposeful meetings usually helps (not saying you do too many useless meetings, but it’s the general sentiment on here and with people i know IRL about why they slack off - cis the meetings they’re in are usually a waste of time)

see latter part of other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43056026

edit — was also going to suggest, at the start of the meeting politely but assertively request everyone turns their phone off at the start.

if it looks like someone is fucking around with their phone, pause the meeting. remind everyone about the request at the start of the meeting. resume the meeting. don’t drag it out and turn it into a rant. don’t call the individual out. just make it known that the behaviour is not okay. get back on with things. do it each time it happens.

do that for every meeting for a few weeks. some people will hopefully get the message. some people might not. hopefully enough people get the message to make a difference.

they might think you’re a dick for it, at least to begin with (it’s enforced change from an authority), but up to you to decide whether it’s valuable enough to see through.

Apart from anything else, I see most people at in person meetings in conferences on their laptops and such working away, that’s not a problem, but doing similar remotely is?

Seems more like neither of them really actually needed to be there. If you didn’t actually miss or note their lack of contribution, then they were perhaps less necessary. I’m perfectly engaged with the meetings that meet those criteria.

Phones are an addiction. I know executives who have a box outside the conference room and everyone has to put their phone in the box as they enter the meeting. They pick up their phone on the way out.

How do you get management to take their job seriously? Sure if we had magic perfect meeting dust but people are mostly lazy…

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Bingo. Remote work requires/rewards good communication, and amplifies the ill effects of poor communication. You have to put in the effort, but a lot of people don't know how or don't think they need to!

> i’ve had this exact conversation with my 70+ still working father so many times now.

> but then i explain to him how i do remote work and suddenly gets it.

I don’t understand how he gets it if you have to have the same conversation numerous times.

> the problem is, yeah, a lot of people do treat it like a chance to sit at home doing the bare minimum

The thing is... I've been in offices before COVID that were full of people doing the bare minimum. And they were able to do that because management, generally, has always sucked and was never good at their jobs.

What I've noticed is that people don't seem to have the attention span to read the document or memo I wrote, and the meeting is so they can get the TL;DR.

My teams velocity increased when we started doing hybrid instead of full remote. Of course thats not proof of anything as our jira points arent objective but it definitely lines up with feeling more productive. We were pretty async while remote. I dont think remote without productivity loss is impossible, but you need very skilled managers and most companies dont have those.

The cfpb, Dodd-Frank,glass-steagall were bureaucratic responses to ‘creative’ (criminal) banking.

“Banking” being the operative concept here, I think, moreso than “creativity”