alt Hacker NewsIf management is so poor that they can't communicate intention in writing, then I don't really see how being in office or anywhere for that matter will help. They're just flat out incompetent. I've seen the opposite of this as well, where whatever management clearly communicated is most definitely not what is going to get executed.
If internal politics are blocking knowledge, access, & contribution of any employee the correct action is not to hire them. If they are already hired, the correct action of management is to offer them severance.
My experience working in software startups is that the average retention period of an employee is 2 years, in any work environment. What you're calling the honeymoon period is effectively just the average retention of the industry anyways.
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The big issue is that companies are indeed poor in so many ways, and all they have to fix it with is money, and sometimes not even that.
I think you're glossing a bit over the word "intention". It's certainly easy for any competent manager to communicate instructions or requirements in writing. What's hard is communicating the full scope of their intentions, including things like:
* This bit is confusing to me even as I say it - I want to keep it in mind as we move forwards in case we're thinking about it wrong.
* This requirement is really annoying and I'd love to find a way to get rid of it.
* This part is super super urgent, and if we find a way to do it faster without too many other costs we should rework the plan.
You can't "just" write these things down, both because some requirements aren't so annoying you can come out and explicitly say it and because too many parenthetical clauses start to make a document impossible to read. If they're not communicated nonverbally it's hard to communicate them at all.
I wonder if that's because at the 2 year mark, people get a lot more responsibility, but no pay increases to compensate.