Examples

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Why remote work is destroying our industry

I have now managed remote teams at three companies, and the pattern is unmistakable. In every case, the engineers who worked from home shipped less code, attended fewer design discussions, and were the first to leave when things got difficult. Remote work simply does not function for software teams.

Consider the evidence. Yahoo ended its remote work programme in 2013. IBM recalled thousands of remote staff to offices in 2017. Best Buy abandoned its results-only work environment. Three of the most recognisable names in technology looked at the data available to them and reached the same conclusion. That is not a coincidence; that is a verdict.

The studies claiming productivity gains deserve little weight. Most of them are produced by researchers who themselves work remotely, or funded by the very companies selling video conferencing software. It is hardly surprising that people whose comfort depends on an answer manage to find it.

The most vocal advocate of remote work in our own organisation is a junior developer who has never managed anyone, has been with the company for eight months, and by his own admission has not been in the office since March. It is difficult to take seriously a theory of team management advanced by someone with no experience of managing a team.

None of this is to say people should never work from home. An occasional day is fine. But the idea that a serious engineering organisation can be run without a shared physical space is, on the evidence, wishful thinking.

The text analysed

On founders and mornings

Every founder I know who made it wakes up at 5am. Meanwhile the ones who sleep in are still stuck. The science on this is settled.

The text analysed

Scheduling the Kingsway bridge inspection

Our maintenance policy is explicit: any road bridge carrying more than 10,000 vehicles per day must undergo a full structural inspection every four years. This threshold was set by the transport authority in 2019 and has not been revised since.

Traffic counts for the Kingsway bridge were collected continuously throughout last year using inductive loop sensors at both approaches. The annual mean was 14,200 vehicles per day, and the lowest monthly mean, recorded in February, was 11,800. The bridge therefore exceeds the threshold in every month of the year, not merely on average.

The most recent full structural inspection of the Kingsway bridge was completed in March 2022, which is more than four years ago.

It follows that the Kingsway bridge is now due for a full structural inspection. This conclusion depends only on the policy as written and the traffic figures above; it does not depend on any judgement about the bridge's current condition, which may well be excellent. If the authority wishes to avoid the inspection, it must change the policy or dispute the traffic counts, not appeal to the bridge's appearance.

One caveat should be stated plainly. The sensors were offline for eleven days in August following a power fault. If traffic during that period had been unusually low, the annual mean would fall slightly, but not far enough to approach the threshold, since the February minimum already clears it.