“web development” casts a wide net.

The classic imagery of someone playing with frontpage back in the day, or screwing around with html in a text editor, sure. But those folks wouldn’t call themselves web developers (there was a phase over 20 years ago where anyone that cobbled together a geocities would declare ‘web developer’ on their resume, but I haven’t seen someone do that in ages).

However, you can get in pretty deep with code running in the browser as javascript and/or wasm. Backend gives them some nested dictionary in json or protobuf and they parse, manipulate, iterate over it, sometimes making some pretty complex visualizations. Basically a ‘web developer’ is nowadays on par with any Game or GUI application developer in terms of what they might be writing. There are a few things left out of direct reach by a browser runtime, but you have access to plenty and the backend abstractions to get something in reach of HTTP are often no easier than the thing being abstracted, it’s just reframed as ‘http’.

Ah yes, I’ve spent decades cringing when I meet a self-proclaimed or even peer-proclaimed “rockstar”, “ninja”, “guru”, “jedi”, or probably a half dozen other “cool” designations for a tech worker.

The thing is the concerns for control are pretty much moot in an EV.

Need torque right this second to overtake regardless of speed? It’s already there. Want efficient operation when you don’t need acceleration? It’s got the efficiency, even though it still has the power. Want a higher gear for a quieter ride? The EV is quiet all the time. Need a lower gear because you are going down a mountain and need engine braking to spare the brakes? EV constantly wants to do regenerative breaking so the brakes aren’t the first resort for allowing down anyway.

Now automatics try and are generally good at naturally providing for most of these. However you can feel them changing gears and may sometimes disagree with the shift point, e.g. the automatic may delay shifting more than I would because it wants to keep the general power band higher even if I know I can tolerate a bit slower ride for quieter engine. There’s also the delay when you punch it and it downshifts. In real terms, it’s almost certainly faster than your downshifting, but it feels worse because you are waiting on something else instead of it being your actions being part of the delay. Also you might want to downshift before pushing the pedal instead of a reaction to pushing the pedal. In any event, all but the most superficial concerns are not applicable to an EV.

My car had always been a stick shift. I bought an electric car and am very happy.

As a consolation, EVs can be considered “manual”, they never shift gears of their own accord. They just only have one gear… So it’s a one speed manual transmission…

That’s the rub, management has no idea about the deliverables, they don’t understand the product or customers at all. They got spoiled by a self actualizing team that figured things out better than the hierarchical leadership, and effectively peer leadership.

When the group is broken up, then some folks stray, and while they are talented and working hard, they get caught up in their own little world when the work doesn’t organically come.

Frankly, while I bemoan how little our management does, I’m happier more directly engaging with clients, marketing, and sales. My peer groups that have clearly more direction handed down seem doomed to have suboptimal product inflicted by the game of telephone through the bureaucracy.

In short, I see challenges either way it gets sliced. Self directed teams with clear purpose and connection can thrive in any scenario, however I feel like you are lucky to find 2-3 people to make that team, and there’s some value to be added by having people along that might need some more clear steering.

Number of things at play.

Most companies can’t take advantage even in theory of saving costs if they have an office today. If they own it, who is going to buy in this climate? (keeping in mind that if it is office space, then it pretty much has to stay office space, without exorbitant effort and money to change it to something else) My company has 10 years left on their lease, with penalties of vacating early so bad that they would be just as well letting the lease run. If there’s one thing a company hates it’s being forced to spend money/have assets that are not seeing use.

Contributing to the above, a lot of these folks have a big part of their portfolio invested in real estate, so collapse of the office space segment of real estate would be bad news for them.

A lot of management looks awfully superfluous in a remote worker scenario. Without the visual aid of dealing with people in person, it seems like maybe you could double the sizes of departments, maybe erase a layer of middle management. So management needs people in person to maintain the appearance of relevance.

Companies also like to give tours to clients and show a busy looking office space of people working toward their customers goals. You need people in person in order for those tours to look adequately impressive.

Some of their levers to get longer work out of people work better in the office. For example, my office had way less parking than they had people coming in, and an overflow lot dangling a literal mile away from the buildings. In response to complaints that there’s no reasonable parking, that there’s no shuttle, that folks have to cross a fairly busy street without a signal light, an executive said “if you cared about your work, you’d come in early enough to get a good spot”. They considered people who came in at 8AM to be lazy slackers, because the real dedicated people came in at 7AM, even though office work technically started at 9AM for most of them.

Frankly, remote work isn’t objectively more productive across the board. You can find/create metrics to “prove” either side of the argument (measuring “productivity” is really subjective, and many of the studies are self-reporting where employees decide for themselves their productivity, or even outright state how productive the workers feel. In my experience, individual productivity may see a boost with improved focus, removal of commute, fewer work social distractions. However, the relevance of the work may suffer (for example, in my group one guy spent three weeks doing something no one needed done because he didn’t have the presence of others to remind him about what really mattered) and others that depend on collaboration may falter (for example, new college hire is left adrift because it’s really hard for an early career person to get traction in a pure remote scenario). We tend to care less about folks who are little more than icons next to text most of the day, or a disembodied voice for select meetings. Ambient collaboration takes a hit, as the barrier to talk to someone is a bit higher when you have to explicitly go to the trouble of typing a message or calling. It seems more intrusive.

As to why the message tends to be softball, well a number of things.

They don’t want to get into the “data” game because the employees can find studies with data saying the exact opposite. Employees have a vested interest in believing their favored data.

Other statements are too aggressive, and they want to try to maintain some semblance of morale by being the “good guys”. At least at the company level. From what I can tell, the corporate level at my job gets to send the happy, gentle prods to come into office, but the managers are expected to go as asshole as needed to “fix” the attendance problem.