Pretty sure the prevailing sentiment among the C-level has effectively become "Get back to your cube and shut up because we said so, or little Timmy won't be getting his braces." here in the US.
In the long term, they will lose out. It's like Tinder vs your local dating pool. Why limit your options to a very small subset of people, when better options are just a tap away (ssh tunnel away)?
>Why limit your options to a very small subset of people, when better options are just a tap away (ssh tunnel away)?
Employers like control. Relationships (your example) are pretty similar actually.
Why would someone settle for a partner below their standards? Simple, they enjoy having control in the relationship. Why would an employer settle for a sub-optimal employee? Dependability and reliance.
i don't think this is anything other than the intended outcome.
C-Suites knew attrition would be high, and regardless of what the managers who had to implement the policy might have thought companies knew that return to office was just layoffs in disguise.
I knew from the start that this was a major reason so many companies want RTO, no executive wants to look like a fool in front of their board for wasting millions or more on office space. Even more so when you have bigger companies that have billions invested in real estate across major cities
That's an unfortunate thing with how businesses operate. They shouldn't have to look like a fool in front of their board. Executives are not psychics. I get that their job is to foresee things like that, but sometimes you just.. can't.
Having everyone work in the office all the time was an accepted norm that everyone was ok with. Nobody (really) saw this coming and if they did, everyone would've thought they were nuts. If the CEO decided "hey let's try WFH!" they probably would've been removed by the board. So it's pretty unfair for the board to be like "this guy's an idiot for not trying WFH in the past!"
They could play it off as "wow turns out we were wrong about WFH, this is going to be great in the long term! Right now here's how we might use that extra space" - they could detail things like improving retention by bringing back private offices for people who want to work in the office, subletting the space, and other things.
> they could detail things like improving retention by ... subletting the space
nope, that's actually the root of the problem, nobody else wants to be in the office either so the commercial real-estate market is in slow-motion meltdown for the last 3 years. even if you fervently believe that WFH is the better path, you simply cannot exit your commercial real-estate investments right now without locking in big losses.
at the landlord level the game is to simply let the office space go vacant rather than write down the notional value of the property (which is going to be based on X years of rents, and if you lock in a lower rent value you just dropped the value of your investment). But at the tenant level if you want out, it's not like you can just find someone else to sublet your space either, because the building is full of unoccupied offices already. Nobody wants to sign a deal that realizes the losses that exist on paper.
So instead the move is to force everyone back to the office so it looks like there's value being generated from the property, as opposed to a white elephant standing empty, which is effectively what it is. And yeah, middle managers and CEOs have every incentive to push for people back in the office from their own ends too... the feeling of power/control and the facilitation of their own communication-focused work as opposed to the output-oriented work of the actual ICs.
--
Anecdotally, my current employer has had some weird communication mis-steps where my manager clumsily relayed some "we really want everyone to be at the all-hands this month, in-person if you can!" and it came off as more of a "more layoffs incoming" tone when actually the problem was more that this was boardroom politics around being seen to be using the expensive building we just bought a couple months before the pandemic started. And this is a company that is all-in on remote work already, we have people everywhere (I and another coworker are at least 4 hours from the closest satellite office) and we're nearshoring some junior roles etc. We will never get everyone into an office because that's not the strategy, but even we are not immune to the "we bought the building and can't exit" politics.
Last employer, same thing, but they are going all-in on forcing everyone back to office... despite having hired a bunch of people remote during covid for a project. Since the project crashed I guess they dropped all the contractors and are hiring from a bodyshop, and I guess maybe they're doing local hiring for that. But between IC turnover due to the project being a shitshow, and heads rolling in the team leads due to the project failure, and dropping all the people they hired on remote since COVID... I think they basically turned over the entire team that existed pre-covid minus like three people. So they are starting from (almost) scratch anyway.
> and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted
The poor employers. If only there was some way they could have gained that understanding. Without actually listening to employees and taking them seriously, of course. Don't let's be silly now.
> Some leaders lamented the challenge of measuring the success of in-office policies, while others said it’s been hard to make long-term real estate investments without knowing how employees might feel about being in the office weeks, or even months, from now.
In other words, the two most obvious objections to RTO turned out to be correct. That is, that when the leadership says that being in the office is more productive, they are speaking from desire rather than evidence, and that the sunk cost of a commercial lease had more weight in the decision than the employees' opinions did. Two things they could have avoided with one minute of reflection.
On the other hand, I'm pleasantly surprised that 80% of executives were willing to admit they could have done a better job. I'd expect most of them to say it went flawlessly, in a voice which echoed off the cubicle walls of a nearly empty office.
Most employers instituting hybrid or RTO will have a way to apply for an exception, which is just a filter to keep high value employees (by approving their fully remote requests) while cutting employees without needing to write severance checks - a "soft layoff" if you will.
You are assuming the employees will just accept their exceptional situation instead of using it to gain some time and jumping ship. You are also assuming the managers know beforehand who are high-value employees.
Yeah, I am. To be fair, I inherited that assumption from the GP.
Anyway, you are right, mature business that have no further space to grow may not want to keep them at all. Even when they aren't a differential, they are still worth more than they cost on maintenance, but there are plenty of companies that just skip maintenance and it's not obvious at all if they are any worse for it.
Or the employer interprets higher than average turnover on other things, like greedy, disgruntled workers leaving for better pay, or some other completely unrelated thing to RTO policy changes.
> the sunk cost of a commercial lease had more weight in the decision than the employees' opinions did
That's not what they're saying. They're saying they don't know how to plan their commercial real estate footprint when they don't know if and when people will be in the office.
My brilliant manager still has his home office day during team meeting. So the whole team sits with headsets on their desks and talks to the manager who’s sitting at home. That’s how return to the office plan works for the peasants. Good that I am leaving soon.
The passive aggressive fix for this is to meet in the conference room and put him on the big screen. In the before times I worked on teams with just 1 or 2 remote and this practice was (unintentionally) awful for them.
> If possible, have a whiteboard way at the back of the room where it's visible but incomprehensible.
Bonus points if it's at a steep angle from the camera, making only one side of it slightly comprehensible, as the other side diminishes into unreadable scribbles
But you're assuming that one likes cake/pizza/whatever cheap mediocre food product that's been mentioned. If I was that manager, I'd raise your cake/pizza/whatever with a freshly grilled filet and baked potato with a nice glass of wine. Remind them just what possibilities they are missing for being in the office like peasants! After all, isn't that the point of having direct reports being in the office while you're at home?
> Have some cookies, croissants, pizza delivered right as the meeting starts
I've been in the position of being the sole remote guy (technically in office but working from a satellite site) and this happened soooo many times. The meeting would start and a box of donuts would be on the table and I'd hear "sorry, we'll mail a leftover to you!" followed by uproarious laughter.
It almost made missing the 1-1 asides and whiteboard visuals worthwhile. Declining junk food in person is much more challenging than simply having it 1000 miles away and obviously out of reach.
If you get decent enough video conferencing equipment (e.g. microphone/camera designed for this kind of setup) and have good internet connections then this can actually work pretty well.
I recently moved in to a new office, centrally located in Malmö (which is an incredibly easy to navigate city by bike, foot or public transport).
However, my company is remote first, and when I saw there was a conference room I didn't even think twice about the fact that I would put a large conference table in there and the best A/V equipment that I could afford.
Then I went to Paradox's leaving drinks[0] and met a founder of Frictional Games[1]; they too are remote first but from long before the pandemic, and had a lot of people asking for advice.
I was no different and asked what he learned; He told me, in no uncertain terms, (and without prompting about what to do with my new conference room- merely what worked well for him): that a conference room no matter how well equipped creates implicit asymmetry in meetings.
When I thought back on my career, I realised he was completely right. I have used some truly excellent video conferencing solutions (those big Microsoft TVs that fully integrate with Teams- JAMF boards, the best that logitech as to offer), but it was always more friction than it was worth, and often there was a recap once the "meeting" was over IRL anyway.
>> The sunk cost of unused office space has been a major factor in companies’ decisions to change their RTO approach, says Kacher.
I'm not sure that the author, or the company executives, know what a sunk cost is. Just to clarify, since there is a younger generation on HN now, 'sunk cost' is something you have spent money on that you can't get back.
The 'sunk cost fallacy' is the mistaken belief that you have to use a resource you have already spent money on (sunk cost into).
The sunk cost fallacy is that you should continue spending money on something you've already spent money on.
Make a bad expensive investment but give it up and move on? That's fine.
Make a bad expensive investment then keep pouring money into it because you've already spent so much and can't throw away all this money now? That's the sunk cost fallacy.
> I'm not sure that the author, or the company executives, know what a sunk cost is. Just to clarify, since there is a younger generation on HN now, 'sunk cost' is something you have spent money on that you can't get back.
Depending on how long your office lease runs - and many run 5-10 years - it effectively is sunk cost because, short of a bankruptcy, you can't get out of that super expensive office space that's now sitting 80%+ empty if you don't find some other sucker willing to sublet from you. Best case is you find someone with a sublease, but with a heavy discount so all you're getting from that is a bit lower running cost.
I'm not quite seeing your point. Are you saying the article's usage is inconsistent with the meaning of sunk cost? In some cases companies have multi-year leases for office space that is drastically underutilized due to WFH. Does that not count as a sunk cost in your opinion? It's true rent is paid on an ongoing prorated basis but to quote from Investopedia, "Sunk costs also cover certain expenses that are committed but yet to [be] paid." [0]
Like I said, maybe I'm just missing the point you're making?
My point is that if the companies are locked into their office leases then that is a sunk cost, and companies requiring employees to return to the office in order to justify that expense is an example of decision making under a sunk-cost fallacy.
I don't know why the author doesn't point that out in the article, hence my pedantic tone which some have noted.
Because utilizing a sunk cost isn't a fallacy. Believing that you should utilize a sunk cost isn't a fallacy, either. As you said earlier, it becomes a fallacy when your belief is mistaken, that is, when you continue to utilize or invest in the sunk costs despite the cognizable fact that doing so is a net detriment. But how can the author make a reasoned determination of whether or not these business decisions are detrimental? She doesn't have available all the financials or other relevant information. And even if she did, how to best operate with those facts is a matter of business judgment.
For example, a company might reason that maintaining a vacant business tower will look bad on their expense sheet and lower investor confidence. In that case better to fill it up with hybrid workers even if there's no operational benefit to doing so. If there's a sunk cost "fallacy" there, it's only by proxy perhaps; the business itself is making a reasoned decision based upon the shareholders' (fallacious) need for the sunk cost to be utilized.
Point being that without knowing all the ins and outs, calling the business practice a fallacy would be at best premature.
The sunk cost fallacy applies to more situations than just those that may incur additional investments, although that is how it is often explained.
For example, suppose I have two desks that I can work at...
Desk A is a rental that costs me $100 per month and I am locked into that contract for the next year.
Desk B I've had for years and it cost me nothing as it was given to me by a neighbor when they moved into a retirement community.
Both desks happen to be from the same manufacturer and are functionally identical.
Choosing to use Desk A because it cost $1200 more than Desk B is an example of the sunk cost fallacy.
I agree that the author doesn't have all the information, and they're just quoting an executive (Kacher). And it's completely possible that Kacher is just making assumptions or excuses about the thought process for the companies pushing RTO.
I will concede that in my comment I went a bit too far in saying that the sunk cost fallacy requires a "net detriment" since as you point out, there could be a situation where someone's sunk cost reasoning is not detrimental but still fallacious. Although I think in the devised scenario, your choice to use rental desk A would indeed be reasonable. The rental desk will incur all the wear and tear while the identically owned desk can be preserved in good condition or perhaps resold at a profit. While in such a scenario you might interpret your desire to use A as irrationally based on the sunk cost, I think it more likely that some inchoate awareness of the true benefits would come into play. How about that. You're so smart that even your dumb decisions end up being pretty smart.
I understand the merits of WFH and in-person work. One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee, and more so, employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.
90% of jobs aren't people's "passions" and have no chance at becoming some big world changing venture. Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world. People just work because they need to. Claiming that WFH is bad because you can't bounce ideas off other employees and get into the real world-changing "deep work" is silly because that's just the employer overvaluing the importance of their company. Those companies do exist, but they're in the minority, and employers smart enough to have founded/run those kinds of companies usually are smart enough to see the merits of a hybrid policy.
These very same employers will never take a pay cut for said “passion” that they have for their product (which they probably don’t even use much either).
They want to only pay others per keyboard keystroke but can’t accept that often the most efficient/productive workers don’t need to be busy. They spend a lot of their time thinking so that they can generate more impact with fewer keystrokes.
Treat people like adults and, surprisingly, get adult results. Set strategic goals, not daily quotas for minutia work.
There are two issues in the psychology of employers that keep them from doing this.
1. They care more about control than doing the right thing.
2. They don't get satisfaction from improvements that don't come directly from their doing
Very stringent quotas, asinine team building activities, and of course, mandatory in-office policies construct a narrative for the company that no good thing that happens is from anywhere but the top-down. They can look at improvements in the bottom line and concoct a much more salient narrative that they were responsible for it; that their employees were nannied and hand-held to success. It's much more satisfying for an egomaniac to reckon with this conclusion than the still gratifying albeit less viscerally satisfying one that granting workers respect and independence will merit the best outcomes.
I'd also like to add that even if you are in a field and doing work you are "passionate" about you'll spend between 25-75% of your time doing boring administrative bull hockey that no one is passionate about. Whether it's feeling out a time sheet, or watching HR videos on harassing coworkers.
My passion for my job is limited regardless of salary. I am not going to break my back for someone who makes me jump through arbitrary hoops for everything. Want that promotion? Here's yet another 3 things this review cycle we want to see changed. Just do the work of the title before you're awarded the title! No problem! Take unpaid pagerduty shifts that are forced upon you to resolve problems we wouldn't have if we allowed developers time to do anything!
I work because I have to. There's nothing to be passionate about. Employers are just mad because it takes a little more talent to do as little as possible when remote. If you're smart, optimizing your work to exactly the requisite sprint points (maybe a little more occasionally to show "initiative"), making the appearance of availability, etc will net you the same effect as zoning out at 2pm and staring at your monitor for the next 3 hours when in office. Even better if you learn to exploit PM's miraculous ability to expand into any time available for work. Now you can reduce your sprint obligation commensurate to the amount of time the PM needed you to "plan". Employers never realized often the smartest most talented employees were mentally checking out way before clocking out. The physical appearance of "work" was enough to trick these morons.
I made this realization when I realized how Cxx's, sales, etc view engineers. Just "pie in the sky" dreamers who want "perfect" everything. After making a VP particularly mad at one company (for formally criticizing his dogshit work during an audit as the source of a sev0) I got a reaming that included these exact words. It didn't take long after that to make the connection between engineering and labor, the solid titanium ceiling to progress, and the subsequent solution.
I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office.
> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office.
My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how hard to sell it is and how much higher the interest rates are. Middle management will typically eat up whatever narrative C-level feeds them.
I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!"
> I honestly think it's mostly a huge ego boost to flex with. "Look at how GIANT our new billion dollar HQ is, and look at all of these people working for ME!"
This may sound like a joke but having gleaming, globally distributed offices is absolutely is a matter of great pride and ego for the C-Suite. They absolutely fantasize about how they are jet setting from one office to another and how all the employees roll a red carpet for them.
And of course the mountains of deductions and balance sheet games you can play with a lot of real estate.
We already know the C-suite is oligarchical in nature with wage suppression in Silicon Valley, so we know they meet and communication. And things like corporate real estate is garden variety MBA stuff that these guys can freely talk about at the get-togethers.
Not having employees in buildings means those buildings aren't really worth anything. A collapse in the value of office space is something none of these companies want. It would impact share price, options, and executive pay, because these things are 30-50 year investments at a minimum.
Maybe they could hire all these movie extras who will soon be replaced by AI generated alter egos and be out of work?
Everybody wins: extras get to not be homeless and pay their bills, companies look busier than ever, extras can act whatever fantasy management wants to show off, offices have some kind of purpose again, we get to work wherever we like and do actual work… What’s not to like?
Even if your firm isn’t exposed to real estate, its probable that a lot if its shareholders are and are interested in ending the slump in commercial real estate.
Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.
> Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.
Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I mean, companies only recently were doing it while still being highly profitable.
> Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices?
I'm relatively sure losing people without severance and without WARN Act and similar notice issues, is easier on the financials for the same number of positions cut than the alternative.
> So why did SV companies fire a lot of employees recently, if the severance and WARN act outweigh the positive impact on the share prices?
I didn’t say they did.
I said that if you can get people to leave voluntarily, that’s better for the financials.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t conditions where the best available option (from a serving the shareholders perspective) is layoffs. Just that, ceteris paribus, its better to shed the headcount without the added costs imposed by layoffs; the benefit (when there is a benefit) of layoffs is reducing the headcount, not bearing the severance, WARN Act compliance, and other costs particular to layoffs.
Well, my impression regarding the latest rounds of layoffs is that they are intentionally trying to create headlines about those layoffs. The C level is more interested in higher share prices than they are interested in costs for the layoffs themselves. But, admittedly, it is hard to prove the truth of such an impression.
In my company’s case, RTO is because of tax cut deals with the city/state. They need butts in seats to maximize profit after taxes, so they are passing the cost onto their employees.
That's one of the few non-productivity/collaboration/etc. rationales that may actually make some sense. States (e.g. NH and MA) have had tiffs because workers living out of state are no longer commuting into an office and are no longer paying income tax to the state they used to commute to as a result. I'm sure there are many local cases where there was some agreement about creating jobs in some town which have been essentially thrown out the window now that very few people are actually working in that town except maybe on paper.
I’ve heard this “tax impact / tax break” idea floated as a theory about what’s going on, but if municipalities are putting that type of pressure on companies, shouldn’t we see some concrete evidence of it? What is the actual mechanism by which such force is being applied? I have a little bit of a hard time believing that such large company policies are frequently being set based on deals that we have no actual evidence of. Is there actual evidence that I just haven’t seen?
That and wouldn’t the saved rent expenses offset those taxes anyway? Second companies would have the freedom to move the main location freely to cities/states with lower taxes.
Not obscure at all. They are also invested in all the other lucrative service businesses that feed and clean and move and supply all those offices. And then there's the leases on the office buildings they own that are under threat etc etc.
The article mentions "sunken cost [fallacy]" as a driver to fill the offices again. Where office space is paid for, and hence has to be filled or else this investment is wasted.
HN keeps telling me it’s sunk cost and it’s not real estate so stop saying that. Then this article also mentions it’s real estate. Guess what HN? It’s partly real estate costs and having few people fill those spaces.
> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity
Whatever management’s current whim is represents not only a reasonable but the only effective way to serve shareholder interests, amd to do anything differently would be a irresponsible and anyone disagreeing is objectively working against the interest of the firm, and any prior contrary statements about what is best for the firm are nonoperational and any reference to them is a bad faith distraction.
Oceania, Inc., has always been at war with EastAsia, LLC.
> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity.
The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.
Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it.
When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer generally only got those 8hrs out of me, period; because I had none of my personal time to spare. Working from home, on the other hand, gives me more flexibility for meetings, to work at different hours, to be on later in the evening, to put in more time (when needed), etc; and I'm happier.
The headphones thing reminds me of a big events ticketing company I worked for that, when people complained about noise, distractions, etc they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones.
Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.
Reminds me of one job, my boss was looking to leave, and was handing over portions of her job to the rest of us. I said I don't have time to do more additional work... she said they can send me on a course to better manage my time. haha.
Hahahaha same as my work - they said we understand concerns you have about coming back to the office - as a solution to these concerns we decided to buy everyone noise cancelling headphones.
>they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones.
>Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.
At least they bought you NC headphones; that's a LOT more than I can say about most companies. And the fact that you had a "health and wellness" budget at all.
> Depending on your budget, you can block out anything short of jackhammers with either IEMs or earbuds+noise reduction earmuffs.
Perhaps more a personal thing but it induces a dizziness/ drowsiness with extended use. It’s fine when watching say a movie but I could never work for long periods with my ears blocked. Wonder if I’m the only 1 but I have heard of similar cases.
That problem went away for me once I found headphones that are actually over-ear and not only marketed as such. I can wear them all day every day because they're large enough to not even touch my ears, very light because of a plastic case and open headphones so they don't feel as "pressurized". Bad for noisy environments, though.
Totally agree. It is also bad for your hearing to have to wear loud headphones all the time to drown out a loud work environment. Your ears do wear out.
Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.
There is one model even worse: when leadership claims that they too sit in the open office like everyone else … only to take up a big meeting room all day as if it is their personal office, causing the actual meetings booked there to have to move to the middle of the open space, making everyone an unwilling meeting participant.
There is an exception to this observation about senior management: Andy Grove used to sit in a cubicle. It was a big cubicle in a labyrinth of his assistants' cubicles.
There's an exception to almost everything. Intel was a famous exception on cubicles for upper management; the CEO had a cubicle just like normal employees (except the CEO's was bigger and not accessible from the aisle of course). The CEO also didn't have his own special floor, special bathroom, special elevator, etc.
it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent.
To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping tea sitting across from me. I couldn't see him but I could sure hear him and there was no way for me to get up and move.
I don't know. I'm certainly not a millennial and I've never had any real issue with ambient coffee shop or equivalent background when reading/working/etc. and I'm rarely putting earphones/headphones on or playing music in general. People probably just have different tolerances and types of tolerances for distraction--not sure how generational it is.
As I've said before, people here pine for private offices a lot but, in my experience, typical workplace private offices have tended to be door open by default absent private meetings/phone calls/some urgent deadline thing.
Even with the door open, it still blocks a lot of ambient sound. Sound also isn’t the only problem with open offices. The other problem is with visual distractions. It’s hard not to interrupt your work whenever the constant stream of people pass by, especially when they greet you
It’s more a new way to cut costs further. Plenty of boomer leadership hopped on the open office trend despite plummeting employee productivity and satisfaction
For sure, and like he says near the beginning of that video, "Most employees have moved to other buildings." I've been in some of those other buildings and guess what, they're almost entirely private offices... no open office plan.
They learned their lesson from the Frank Lloyd Wright building. It's a wonderful piece of architectural history, but it's not wonderful for productivity.
He doesn't mention one of the most interesting things about that building -- the building has no square corners, everything is round (even the elevator).
I unironically miss my cube. They were natural sound breaks and sound absorbing so you could talk and not intrude horrifically on people adjacent. I had a place for my things so I didn't have to shuttle them in and out every day. I had a phone that worked, an Ethernet jack that was not temperamental, and a whiteboard that was ready to go. I also had a few different ways I could sit at my cube so I wouldn't get the same pains I get sitting in an open office plan because there is no way to customize anything for comfort in many cases. I have seriously considered packing a drill and a set of bits to tear off idiot things like keyboard trays (when nobody has an external keyboard) but I am resisting only just.
In a moment of clarity the real thing about open office plans is that most times when you show up it has the vibe of a floor being fired and everyone's desk wiped clean. There are no remnants of those who are there, no photos of family or the odd dollar store fun thing that kicks around a desk, every desk is wiped clean more austere than a hospital room.
I would definitely prefer good cubicles over open assigned desks. (I mean, with open desks or cubicles, I would ask the other person to stop slurping loudly.)
But "good" is the key there. I worked at an office in 2001 which had a cubicle system that was probably only a year or two old. The desks were wood (probably veneer) with nice big keyboard shelves, as was the style at the time. The panels were either grey metal or red fabric, and they stepped up and down so that beside your close coworker there might be only a 4' wall, and then a 6' wall to the "hallway".
Immediately after that, through an acquisition, we were in an office whose cubicles were probably from the 80s, and they were all 6' well-worn beige fabric panels, which despite being private and relatively quiet were just so ugly and energy-draining.
Hmm, I think it’s more a managerial thing than a millennial thing. I don’t know a single millennial that wants to sit in open floorplan offices. Just because something happened when our generation entered the workforce doesn’t mean we were the driving force for it. Maybe millennials also caused climate change, as far as I know that started becoming a recognized problem around the time we were born. Expensive housing is on us too.
The open office trend happened before millennials started having careers, open offices are always an economic choice. It's cheaper to cram more people into less space.
Open office look great! Just like TV. I don't think I've ever seen an office environment that has not been open on TV. A TV show with everyone in a private office would not work, no drama!
But to work in them is a noisy hell. I had a lawyer friend talk about how great these open offices must be to work in. So productive and dynamic he would say. But of course this is coming from a profession where having a private office is an absolute requirement.
> When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions
Sometimes I just want silence. Not music, not $color noise. I also get itchy ears after wearing headphones for hours on end, and noise canceling headphones give me a headache… or, you know, I could work wherever I prefer, with little to no commute, and an office arranged how I like it.
Yup, this too. Half the time I had headphones on, I didn't even have them playing anything. I just had ANC turned on to muffle the background noise (and deter people who didn't actually needy assistance with anything). But I definitely had ear stink/itch at the end of most days.
In my anecdotal experience, it’s important to take of headphones every now and then to prevent moisture from accumulating in the ear canal. That moisture is unnatural and id probably very nice for various germs.
The worst place I worked I needed industrial earplugs, then chuck white noise on top of that to get almost distraction free. The way to get the desired peace was to leave
I used to do that but then every 15 minutes some coworker would tap me on the shoulder to ask some inane question, and I would spend 5 minutes taking things out of my ears before I could hear them. Fun (not).
I see it as a fairness and reasonableness issue. It’s unfair and unreasonable that the ones polluting the space with noise are the ones that get to enjoy the freedom to use the space without restrictions, while the victims of the noise are the ones that suffer the restriction of the full use of the same space. The same with smoking, which fortunately has been recognised to some extent in recent years.
Cheaper noise cancelling headphones would make me nauseous, however I got the Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones with 8 external mics to sample the surrounding noise and it was a game changer, super high quality, no more nausea.
I think specific problem is high density open plan offices. At about 20sqm per person, and keeping quiet and noisy professionals in separate rooms, it is not too bad.
I remember the first time I was in an open office. I was flabbergasted. We'd all get on a call so we could talk to some remote vendor. Other people would have their mics on, so I'd hear my own voice repeated and delayed through the Zoom call. I could barely talk, and barely hear anyone. It was a self-evidently terrible decision that everyone was just going along with. Sometime later we were moved to a different open office space. It was deafeningly loud in there, and I eventually discovered that there was a white noise machine on the ceiling above every single employees head. Apparently this was meant to help with the open office design, but it did the opposite: much like a busy cafeteria, everyone had to shout over top the all the extra noise in the room. (the combined sound of about 100 white noise speakers + the sound of about 100 employees talking or working) Again, such a stupid decision I can barely understand how someone could set it up this way. I eventually just waited 'til no one was around and unplugged most of the speakers. It was a huge improvement, and no one complained.
Bumping this up a notch, I have co-workers who work together 4hrs/day on the same meeting but cannot sit together because our Zoom calls all collide when any one person is speaking. Core issue is the lack of conf rooms in a zoom-centric organization.
Same here, add to that some office equipment at a huge discount, when they had to close the office during the pandemic, a one-time fair amount of cash for spending in home office equipment, and a smaller but nice yearly amount for the same.
Sure, many don't. And many people have found that the tax office does inspections from time to time. That's not a pandemic issue, the laws and the jurisprudence have been in place for decades.
But you just have to love how HN endorses tax fraud.
This is correct and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted. In Germany, you'd better only every use the work-room for work only. As people have pointed out, you're not likely to get audited for this but often, with apartments, it can be quite obvious that you're using the space for non-work stuff too (for eg, if you're living in a 50 sqm apartment, it's pretty easy to say that you can't possibly have a dedicated work only room).
In the US, my accountant always (and as I understand it, the rules have gotten stricter) recommended against taking a home office deduction unless you really had dedicated space for equipment etc. and didn't have an office you could reasonably commute to. The way more typical "office space you often use for doing work" was long seen as a red flag for a deduction and, in the typical case, as you say, truly dedicated space is rare absent a large place and/or specialized needs.
I could make a room a dedicated day-job office but it would cost me way more to do so than I would ever get as a deduction and it would almost certainly be inferior to the mixed-use setup I use.
This is such a perverse rule. You don't have enough living space? You can't possibly claim compensation for being forced to also use that as a workspace.
That might work if the job is fully remote and doesn't have a physical office for you to work at, as most companies will simply say "you can come to the office and use the facilities there for free".
Most decent companies will give you some money though for WFH or let you borrow stuff from the office like chairs and monitors.
While I'd love to have the financial burden of commuting/WFH be imposed on the employer instead on the workforce, that would require another labor revolution, so far I'd just be happy to have 100% WFH possibly. Internet I use anyway, and I can pay for the extra water, energy and heating by myself, the extra difference is insignificant compared to the time I save commuting to the office.
Why not just 1099 everyone at that point? Oh because then you can't bullshit people with career carrots and establish sunk costs and healthcare anxiety to retain people.
Empire builders love to see and display their footsodiers. Nothing like sweeping a gaze over a big plateau with a few 100 serves to affirm your confidence.
Yeah, I think people often underestimate the role of ego in this kind of stuff. Hell, it can even be used as a philosophical razor: Never attribute to necessity that which is adequately explained by egomania.
Trouble is, one's superior's egomania is one's necessity. By the time it reaches lowly me, it's a bunch of arbitrary stuff I had to conform to that I can't even understand fully.
When we returned to the office, my boss decided even a single day WFH was frowned upon. Having to beg to stay home for a dentist appointment became a big ordeal. But my boss was a bit unhinged before covid.
I found it funny that my lockdown productivity suddenly counted for nothing.
I have friends at other companies who have been 3 days per week WFH for 2 years and really appreciate the flexibility.
My main gripe was that my manager seemed to be having mental health issues (manic over-talking and occasional hints of psychosis). WFH was what helped me last through the covid years as I could avoid her being sat near me.
I was good friends with many people there, some of us still occasionally meetup. And I hear of a steady stream of other developers leavings because they can't work from home any more. Usually it's the younger guys who just had a kid or people with long commutes.
Our team is still fully WFH even tho the corp expects us to come in 3 days min. My manager (and his manager) know we are waaaayyy more productive at home and don’t want to upset the apple cart so we don’t need to come in.
And I gotta say stuff like that gets me even more motivated to do work cuz I know they’re catching heat from the higher ups but we’re just producing too much work for them to really complain too much.
depends on the place of work. mine is also useless. the manager is clueless so some team members just tells every single thing they did for 15 minutes for clout with the manager.
Just my experience. A work culture where people approach each other without somebody telling them to do so is much better. Respect of each others time is also crucial. Get the motivating factors right and you dont need to bore the x out of everyone.
Indeed, and I would even say that this applies to any meeting you can think of.
However if you get the purpose of the meeting straight and somehow manage for everyone to properly collaborate, you'll get a 3-5min daily meeting that easily enables efficient collaboration and awareness.
Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting. Those are for informally updating everybody on what you're working on and whether you're stuck on anything. They lead to 1 on 1 meetings to solve those issues.
That’s the problem. Most teams don’t have stand-ups. They have gigantic status meetings on a daily basis, which is rarely valuable.
Give me a meeting every day to get people to talk about blockers, but it should be 15-30 seconds per person at most, and it should be scheduled outside of productive hours (easier said than done).
Anyone who cares what you’re working on can look at Jira. And if you’re stuck you shouldn’t be waiting for a meeting to tell people this. Standup are a total waste of time.
Many are. But I've been in more than a few that resulted in discussion that ultimately saved many many hours of time that would otherwise have been spent on something that wasn't necessary.
Actually the only thing I dislike about stand-up is struggling to remember everything I did the previous day, then realising I've forgotten to mention one or two key things after the meeting's ended, and wondering what everyone thought about the fact I apparently did so little... (which is silly, I know, but we're all human).
Jira never tells the entire story. And of course you can also reach out to people outside of the standup meeting, but that doesn't make them a waste of time. They can be quite effective, and they really do not take much time.
> Discussions, yes, but discussions aren't for the standup meeting.
What actually happens in a standup meeting tends to be a mix of:
(1) What theoretically belongs in a standup meeting, which is a meeting that should have been a kanban board plus identification of blockers that have been deferred for the standup rather than properly addressed when encountered and,
(2) tangents into discussions which should be 1:1 (this especially happens when blockers are discussed, because people want to help get them unstuck.)
As others have pointed out, that's not what a standup should be for. Any tool, process or structure that is not being used properly tends to be annoying and useless.
The problem is therefore not with the concept of a standup, but rather with how they are usually run.
Running efficient standups, or any sort of meeting at that, is a skill.
I don’t find mine useless, but I focus a lot on prioritizing and un-blocking people. The tasks we have are usually very different between engineers though so I can see why someone would find that useless time.
Mine are also useless. Communicating with your team is super important but the mandatory status checkin when team members are working on unrelated things is pointless and draining.
Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing.
Equally common in operations roles for the same reasons. Lots of servers and networking gear. You might be changing failed hard drives in a RAID array while someone else is patching servers while somebody else is upgrading some 20 year old Cisco firewall. None of these three people rely on the work the other is doing. Especially if they’re working in different server cabinets.
Exactly. I work in a team that has multiple products so different team member can be working on different products, different priorities, different deadlines and for different stakeholders.
Sure, my own team work on multiple products, but it's all the same codebase and all of us share the work for all products between ourselves. There is another team in the company that works on an entirely separate product with a very different codebase (different tech stack entirely) and upper management seem to have this idea we would work better as one big "team" - thankfully so far we've managed to persuade them it would make little sense. I'd probably be looking for alternative job options if we had to do daily stand-ups with that many other coworkers, half of whom I'd never have reason to engage in actual teamwork with.
Because it is a team in the sense that it made no difference (or little difference) who on the team picked up a specific work item off the kanban board. Theoretically, we should all be able to fill in for each other if we’re absent. But most of the time we’re all present and working on our individual tasks that don’t rely on other individual tasks. It might be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in devops or a traditional operations role, I suppose.
If you're all picking unrelated tasks off the same kanban board I would think a quick daily stand-up would still be worthwhile then. Just needs to be sensibly run so individuals don't get bogged down in describing every little detail of what they'd been working on.
Group of people == team because all report to same manager.
Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardless of whether they are being managed well or not.
Manager needs daily updates of all things going on his "team", because otherwise not have fucking clue about what manager is "managing" and clearly far too difficult for manager to read JIRA board, look at commit histories etc. Much more efficient for everyone to sit around for an hour during which they maybe have ten minutes of productive discussion.
That's actually not been the case in many teams I've worked on - but we have all been working on the same set of related products (or subset of a product). Actually the managers often weren't even in the teams. I foolishly assumed that's how most people used the term "team"...
I have to admit I like these meetings. Yes, today I work on an autoscaling runner but tomorrow I'll be working on CI pipelines so it's (mildly) interesting to hear what is going on and specifically what kind of problems my colleagues are dealing with. And, last but not least, usually I can cover a few miles on my stationary bike before the meeting ends.
>Mark Zuckerberg’s firm says it is attempting to avoid returning to the cubicle culture of the 70s and 80s by introducing its own design.
>The Cube helps to asorb sound instead of reflecting and echoing it around colleague’s workspaces.
>Meta claims that its new design reduces sound levels by approximately 20 decibels.
This is BS. Either Meta is actively lying, or they really are SO clueless they've never seen cubicles in the 90s and 00s (when they were really phased out, not the 80s), and really believe somehow that cubicles were made of sound-reflecting materials. They weren't. They were made of cloth, with what I think was cardboard behind it. The cloth worked very well to absorb sound and keep the ambient noise level down. (The cardboard was to give some structure, and also so you could use push-pins/thumbtacks on them to hold things in place.)
The only thing "new" here is maybe using some kind of recycled plastic material to make the cloth. BFD.
90s/00s cubicles were a dream to work in, compared to the open offices of today. Everyone complained about them at the time because they sucked compared to walled offices with doors, but in reality, most workers never had those in the decades before. You can see photos online of engineers working in the 1950s: it was all open offices with a bunch of big desks in a grid.
I worked in cubicles up until 2011. Then I joined "trendy" startups. I only started hearing about open-plan offices around that time. In the 90s it wasn't even remotely a thing.
It's so frequent and so bizarre that people are getting paid by an employer, and they spend their work hours constantly thinking "I wish this employer would allow me to do the job they pay me to do".
It feels like I'm thinking the Earth is the center of the universe, then watching Mars go retrograde. Something's profoundly wrong with my understanding of the world. I see two options:
1. Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. Which says that a lot of jobs are in large part about making the boss feel important, not about the assigned work.
2. Communication between leaders and workers is so bad that leaders have no idea what workers really experience in their working conditions.
> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home.
In our case, we do have good, long-standing metrics: we measure how happy our customers say they are with our service. Since the whole point is to have happy, repeat customers and they have no reason to lie about being happy, we can trust this. That went up significantly and sustained itself during the pandemic.
While my employer did initially want to bring people back to the office, they relented after the push back and have been relatively soft and flexible about this, actually opening up a dialog to talk to everyone about what they need and want.
It doesn't hurt that they're looking at some significant cost savings by significantly downsizing our office footprint.
One point to remember is that during the pandemic, customers were much more sympathetic to everyone. The overall quality of customer service has gone done since the pandemic (even in companies that returned to office) and we, the customer, are forgiving of that. Pre-pandemic, we were not nearly as forgiving.
That doesn't seem to have regressed much, though. I do feel like people are more forgiving of home office interruptions since they became more common, but I don't think it makes that much difference. At the end of the day they still need their stuff fixed quickly and want good advice. And at least the current management believes in human capital and keeps good people for a long time, so people generally get that and turnover is rather low.
Yeah, thankfully they weren't trying to play Jack Welch by renting from themselves or some other distracting financial "strategy" involving your office space.
Public statements about productivity are rarely negative. No one wants to hire a business with lazy workers who might not fulfill their contract. So public statements have to be positive.
It's reasonable to think in retrospect that, even assuming companies had reasonable measures of productivity and related metrics (which is by no means a given), OF COURSE during the pandemic, they were going to make statements to the effect that "everything is fine/better than we expected."
And, even from a somewhat less cynical perspective, it's reasonable to see a more complicated picture where many things, but not all things, are indeed more or less OK. Overlaid on this is that a lot of companies have cut back on travel etc. budgets so one of the alternatives to people getting together in local offices is at least somewhat off the table.
> My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good
My money would be on that being half right. They have no way to really measure productivity, but they were very afraid that productivity would drop to zero—and that is something they would be able to see.
Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”. I think in a lot of places that was a genuine fear—nobody will be working.
So seeing productivity not go near enough to zero to be noticeable was… really good productivity compared to some people’s initial expectations.
Honestly, when I work from home, I watch TV all day. Not literally -- I mostly read HN and other sites, do personal email, do household tasks, walk the dogs, do a load of laundry. I still get my work done, to a "meets expectations" level, which takes me a few hours, normally right after lunch, and that's good enough for me.
I start work around 6:00 AM and frequently am still at it at 8:00 PM. I've always been a top performer, but I still worry I'm not productive enough and that I'll get laid off. I still prefer this arrangement to going to the office.
Much as many people here have a deep abiding dislike for executives, that's probably a pretty typical lifestyle for successful executives at a large company (or a startup) to which you can probably add months of every year on the road.
The people two rungs up the ladder from me in my consulting job work like this, if not more so.
They all have families and are PTA presidents and things so def not absentee parents or spouses. Some people just have a seemingly unending source of energy and ambition.
This used to be me until I burned out for the second time about 4 years ago.
Got a new job and now for the most part I "work" from 9 - 5 but in reality a solid 3 hours of that is just surfing the web. Still get good reviews but I'm not on the verge of collapse so thats pretty good. I just genuinely don't care so much anymore and its worked wonders for my outlook on life.
>I still worry I'm not productive enough and that I'll get laid off
that's the neat part; you get laid off anyway. Layoffs are rarely actually about keeping the most productive people on board. If they want your wing of work to be marked as a redundancy, there's not much you can do from a purely productive standpoint.
And supposedly, layoffs aren’t legally allowed to be performance or merit-based! You’re supposed to lay off only for eliminating a position. When projects are shut down, that’s a natural one, but when it’s a X% cut of all engineering staff, for instance, it’s meant to be almost random, on paper at least. Of course in real life nobody would lay off the absolute most genius 10x developer, but nobody’s supposed to be laid off because they’re slackers. If they’re slackers that should be a separate issue and a PIP.
>>And supposedly, layoffs aren’t legally allowed to be performance or merit-based!
Where is that? Even in the EU where employee protections are very strong you can absolutely let go of someone because of poor performance, you just have to do the whole dance of giving them enough warnings, then a PIP, then you can terminate their employment as they are failing their contractual duties. It's not super simple but it is legal and it does happen.
A layoff is a reduction in force, ie we need to lower headcount by 10% so bring me 10 names at this 100 person company. Firing someone for performance/attitude/don't-like-you-anymore reasons isn't a layoff.
I don't think that's right. I know as a fact that when Facebook did their layoffs here in UK they got rid of their lowest performing employees, going through the proper multi-month process, but at the end of the day they got rid of a large percentage of their staff purely based on merit/performance. I literally don't see how that's not a layoff.
> Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”.
Before COVID I’ve seen plenty of people shop online, chat to friends or play games all day in the office.
What difference does it make? Those that do will anyway. It’s pretty delusional to think sitting in-office = working. If that’s the case all the kids at school should pass, right?
I wonder how much of is just about getting local cities tax breaks, or even state taxes in some cases.
Governments are not ready for the majority of people having the freedom to work anywhere.
The whole foundation of our local and state governments control is based on manageable demographics, we are red or blue, we embrace the old or the new ways, etc., they are not ready for a sudden change in the mix, every local government had worked really hard to keep the status quo.
Our company is mandating a 3-day in office starting soon.
I’m a bit of an exception because I’m in a city that only has a couple hundred employees, but when I do return to the office, it won’t be to collaborate with teammates: I will be joining zoom calls with people in other cities (which was my day-to-day pre-pandemic). Pre pandemic I would travel every 2-weeks to company HQ to be in-person for demo with stakeholders and sprint planning, but even then many people would join via zoom anyway.
I don’t think return for office has anything to do with productivity and more about anxiety around investments in commercial real estate.
The few times I’ve been back it’s worse. Since everyone is on zoom meetings anyway, everyone is just talking all day long making it hard for the other people on zoom meetings at the office to hear what they’re doing. So productivity actually goes down.
All of which makes things worse for the people at home on the zoom meetings.
As soon as a significant fraction of your employees aren’t in office, it starts to become a productivity problem to force people to stay! Well, unless you gave everyone their individual offices with doors. But you can’t do that can you. Because then what would make the senior people special? So you have to use cubes so everyone can hear each other on zoom calls.
I’ve started talking about crystals to attract hot chicks that are already into crystals. Many are, or want to believe, just like researchers want to believe in a room temperature superconductor.
The alpha is that pedantic and over-analytical guys dismiss crystal energy at the expense of their reproductive opportunities, and the way around it is literally just not doing that.
One thing I quickly noticed is that the purpose of all crystals are expected to be the same.
“It absorbs energy and gives out good energy”
So I same the same thing everytime.
Employers must be encountering something similar from some form of stakeholder, such as the board for an analogous self preservation or reproductive opportunity, so the answer is always “increase productivity” every time.
It’s because meetings and full calendars of check ins and touch bases is constant and actually is the productive work for an executive. They are the ones wanting productivity for themselves. The byproduct of this executive productivity is it causes the busy work for the people who are lower in the org chart. Busywork for them is a big source of their nonproductive time and what was freed up during mandatory WFH generating the productivity boost.
Then what happened was a lot of the pending and backlog of projects and busyness got moved over to a completed status. But the lack of productivity at the executive levels meant that the project funnel wasn’t keeping up. So the company was at risk of having a ton of people with not enough to do.
This is purely my personal anthropological perspective of the situation having been an active participant working closely with executives making these decisions the past few years as well as talking with colleagues that do the same. I’m aware it’s probably completely BS.
I think that there's something else at play - mostly two major factors:
- real estate agencies push for return to office(as they own a lot of office space that's now empty)
- Turns out.. you don't need so many middle managers - without their direct oversight everything just kept working fine. So now you have internal vested interest in return to office for people in power.
I think the definition of "productivity" is part of the problem. Managers view "productivity" as the ability to bounce ideas off each other and working collaboratively to get traction on hard problems.
This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient.
There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff.
There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.
You can't "manage" people who work remotely the same way you manage people in the office. That's the issue.
Also, you shouldn't have to watch newer employees like a hawk if you've given them clear tasks / projects and expectations. No need to micromanage people.
It's not about managing. It's about the friction to reaching out for help and lost productivity from having to schedule meetings combined with inexperience making it hard to decide which problems are worth the friction of reaching out and which ones aren't. There's also the sense of isolation that being remote gives, because asking for help over a private message makes it look like you're the only one that needs help. All of this is still a problem regardless of clarity of expectations and tasks.
My preferences are likely going to change once I get more experience under my belt but I absolutely feel there are some facets of remote work that benefit senior engineers at the expense of junior engineers.
There can be friction scheduling and holding meetings, absolutely. Starting a meeting friction can be overcome through tools like Slack huddles which basically require one click to join if people are around fairly predictably, but scheduling friction can be reduced with some techniques.
Our remote-first company has a daily standup everyday which shifts everyone’s brain into talking/collaboration mode for that bit. If someone - especially newer or junior engineers - have a question, that is a great opportunity to either have an impromptu discussion, or to have scheduled a discussion about it the previous afternoon jf it wasn’t particularly urgent.
The conditions aren't the same. When COVID caused many workplaces to go full WFH, most employees had nothing to do except work and hang out with those in their household. A lot of the increased productivity came from working instead of doing other things. Once things opened up, in aggregate they stopped working as many hours. Ultimately, it was never sustainable.
One aspect is company culture. Where there is no trust, people feel the need to micromanage just to feel in control. Where there is trust, people do what they know best and managers intervene only at say critical moments if needed.
> Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world.
Pretty much. The only time I've considered going back to in-person work since the pandemic was for a FAANG. If you think your employees want to go back to the office, you are either a big tech company or you are deluded
Realistically most FAANG employees are not doing anything that will be written down in history either. For example, whichever division at Microsoft is responsible for Teams.
It's a common joke at Google: thousands of PhDs moving fields from one protobuf into another. Can confirm, did some of that personally before transferring into a more interesting area.
Actually, I work for one of the FAANGs. The vast majority of employees don't one to go back to the office either.
What makes it even worse is the one-size-fits-all mandate, with strict enforcement, like you didn't come in to the office Monday, so you have to come on Tuesday.
"Hybrid" is just in office work with a fancy name. A company I worked for pushed heavy for RTO and said "Its part time Hybrid". But we already had 1+ days (at managers discretion) WFH a week before covid hit. Hybrid was In office Tuesday through Thursday with remote Monday and Friday. This was actually less flexible than 1 or maybe more as you need it WFH that we had it prior.
YMMV. two of the companies I worked at mid-post pandemic were truly hybrid when they opened back up. Some people never ever came in and a few came in everyday. Others still were very far away so it was never an option.
But I've also heard of old co-workers at later jobs where hybrid was just flowery words and really meant "mandatory remote time and mandatory office".
What’s the difference between producing something measurable that gets scrapped before ever hitting prod regardless of the several months spent working on it and not producing anything measurable at all? Unfortunately, these are the thoughts I’m left with, especially now that my current job is deprecating the years of effort some other guys spent building the last system.
It's also naïve to assume that the work people do when supervised is always valuable and not optimizing for the appearance of work, rather than work itself.
It's also naive to assume that optimizing for productivity is some goal we should work toward when zero reward structures are in place for it. The thing to optimize for is just enough productivity.
> when zero reward structures are in place for it.
we used to have them. Pension is long dead, however. Hell, promotions and raises are arguably dead as well in certain industries. It's practically common knowledge that it's easier for tech jobs to change jobs for a 20% raise than to ask the current company for a 5% raise. And then that company you left after 2 years proceeds to pay someone a 20% raise in order to ramp up someone doing your same job.
Companies need to reward tenure and actually budget for employee bonuses if they don't want to keep doing this. But from what I've read, they don't care and HR may even be incentivize to do this song and dance: https://old.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/uo589a/why_are...
or if you want a TL;DR for the TL;DR:
>HR / recruiting "wins" when hiring, and does not "lose" when employees leave. Their incentives are in most cases at the fastest possible rotation of people.
The kind of person who isn’t going to work when not stared at all day by a manager is also probably the kind of person who is going to try to LOOK busy at the office without actually having to do a lot of REAL work. Surfing the web, playing games, chatting with their friends, whatever they can get away with when someone’s not watching. Or maybe doing their real tasks really slow.
They’re just not a hard worker.
Where is an employee who tends to do a good job is going to try to do it whether they’re in the office or not (assuming that’s possible for their position). They don’t really need to be monitored at home or at work. They would do basically the same either way.
So all you’re left with is you need to check real productivity instead of the appearance of productivity. THAT’S what matters, not where the employee is physically located during the day.
Some people are exceptions and will work significantly better in one environment or the other. But if you have an employee who took remote work to mean “watch TV and occasionally jiggle my mouse“ i’m willing to bet they weren’t a good employee in the first place.
This is a long comment section, with many good viewpoints, but your summary is the most insightful: WFH spreads the performance distribution of pre-existing traits for attitude to work.
The question for management is, are you hiring, cultivating, and retaining the best people? And are you defining "best" appropriately? If management's concerns around remote employees slacking off are at all valid, it's management's own fault in the first place.
Thing is, I'm just as supervised at work, honestly (which is to say, not at all).
I still have 1:1s with my manager, am still accountable for my targets and organizational goals, and generally do the same thing whether I'm WFH or in office.
Office work has several advantages: 1) I like discussing in person with coworkers - sometimes coming up with fun/interesting ideas 2) office itself is more conducive to a particular type of work 3) I get some isolation from the family
To look and feel important. I worked for a company that moved to a building simply because the CEO wanted the sign to be seen from a major highway. My 20min commute would become 1 hour or more. I left upon hearing that rationale.
Exactly: the problem isn't the corporate employers, it's the middle-class Americans who bought into the suburban dream. Now that they got away from the black people downtown, they're complaining about the commute.
I think it's more that residential areas are 1hr+ commutes from offices/downtowns. You could build an office next to a residential area, and some do, but many of the job applicants will be in a different residential area -- often even in a different city. Suburban sprawl, y'all.
You could have smaller offices in different neighborhoods, but there's usually not enough people in any given suburban area to justify an office. Co-working spaces are one compromise but larger companies dislike them for security/secrecy reasons.
I would also add that many people have reasons for not moving closer to work even if they could. Also people are no longer working for decades at the same job, and moving is a hassle if you're changing jobs every few years.
It's not "intentional", at least on the part of the company. It's intentional in that this is the product of American car culture and suburbia, and it's something that Americans have been buying into willingly for many decades now. The company can't just locate down the street from your house: that's zoned for residential use only. They can't locate at the shopping center near your subdivision: that's zoned for commercial use only (for storefronts/shopping, not corporate offices). And even if they did, that wouldn't help: it would be a nice short commute for you, but not for the other employees that all live in other subdivision scattered at a similar radius from the city center. The employees that live on the other side of town will have a horrible commute. What you're complaining about is simply what you get by building with such low density and making everything dependent on cars.
Which is also where you get pointless busywork. Doing things on your computer to pretend to look productive because if you were to just sit and think or take a five minute break a micromanager would yell at you or nosy teammate would rat you out as “unproductive“.
Even if you’re thinking through a heart problem or just finished something mentally draining from complexity.
If I am ever forced into office, I will look very productive as I update my resume, schedule interviews and spend hours on https://leetcode.com/ every day! The butts-in-seats managers will probably want to promote me by the time I hand in my two weeks notice.
Unsupervised and left to my own devices, I tend to spend my time on what I actually think is the most valuable contribution I can make. Selfishly, perhaps, because that tends to lead me toward what I find to be the most fulfilling and enjoyable work. This tends to upset some people, because my maximum effort is not funneled toward advancing their immediate metrics. But others get it.
In my experience, just doing work you are told to do is the surest path to burnout (at least for me). If I am allowed to pick an area I concentrate on, I remain engaged and excited about the project and spend more hours per week on it. From manager's POV is that so bad?
That's only if you work at big companies with several offices where teams are distributed anyway, so in-office work was remote-work anyway except done in the office instead of in your home. Big international companies were already basically remote even before the pandemic and had plenty of inefficiencies already built in.
What I notices small companies in my area (here in Europe) with only one office, put a lot of value in having all employees coming to the office so they can react faster and cooperate easier than distributed teams, rather than saving on rent and letting everyone WFH 100% of the time from wherever they are, seeing it as one of their strengths over big distributed companies where things move slower.
While there's some truth to their arguments about the response time and cooperation in the office, I find they're selecting for people who drink their cool-aid and buy into "the mission" of the company instead of seeing the work as a simple transaction of "I give you my time and mental labor, you give me money, period".
In-office work isn't the same as supervised work. If you have managers/cameras hovering over your shoulder at all times in an office, that's a toxic work environment.
People have always found ways to be unproductive even in the in-office era: going to the bathroom while on the clock, constantly hanging out in the break room under the guise of getting coffee, office small talk, or just old fashioned web browsing on their computers/phones. Pretending like every white collar job was at 100% efficiency in the pre-pandemic era was just pure delusion on management's part.
> One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee
Which is also a hilarious self-own on the part of the company because they:
1.) hired the person
2.) have such a shitty remote work structure that the same employee is somehow more productive in the office
All of these companies that aren’t remote first, or were forced into remote because of the pandemic have put in roughly 0% effort to make remote actually work.
It’s not like you can just pick up the office culture and move it to slack. You have to actually make an effort to build the process, tools, and workflows that allow employees to be effective remote workers.
> employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.
Being in the office only works with others in the office, so it's a balancing act between this (likely minority) group of both people managers and employees that want RTO, and the group that excels when working in their own curated, controlled environment.
What about the group that thinks they excel when working in their own curated, controlled environment?
Companies can probably get more out of average and below average people easily by forcing them into an office. That’s good enough for some companies to get by. And I say this as an average person who would get more done if I didn’t work remotely.
We have a generous hybrid work policy: you can WFH, but you may be required to attend on-site sessions and meetings, for example if we're doing architecture brainstorms or design reviews. We've not found this to work well over zoom. Overall, this works out to a day or two a month, but most people choose to come in at least 1 day a week for various reasons (mostly social).
We casually observed there seemed to be a split in employee WFH performance, with most performing as expected or better when WFH, but a minority performing MUCH worse. That is, significantly less than 50% of the productivity they have while in the office.
We've had casual one-to-one meetings with those individuals, and while a few will sort themselves out, most just flat out deny a difference. So we resorted to adding some very basic anonymised monitoring tools to a random subset of staff laptops (hence throwaway account).
What we found was that the majority are indistinguishable which days they are working from home and which days they are in the office, but a minority basically do no work when WFH. By this I mean, behaviour such as their laptop is idle for 20 minutes then active for a few seconds. As it's anonymised we can't be sure, but I'm guessing those are the staff we've identified as having a problem. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a second job.
The problem is: what to do about it? We're in the UK so just firing people without cause isn't an option. HR are saying it would be unfair, humiliating and potentially constructive dismissal if we forced the problem staff into the office but not everyone else. There's also a lot of valid discomfort and GDPR-related fear around the idea of installing heavy surveillance tools on laptops to collect evidence, and a concern that it will make for a hostile work environment. Even if we just used it very selectively on staff suspected to be breaking their contract, they would undoubtedly tell their colleagues which would lead to discontent. But without that evidence, it's very difficult to legally justify sacking someone.
The HR people are trying to force us back to the office because these issues are too challenging to deal with, but we (the tech team management) are trying to find a way to deal with staff who are taking the piss without upsetting everyone else in the process.
What's the play here? Genuinely looking for a good solution as, like many others, I personally enjoy WFH and don't want to have to give it up.
Why not have the managers of the underperforming employees be straightforward with them? Tell them that, as far as the manager/company is concerned, they're underperforming (no need to single out the WFH aspect here if you don't want to). They may deny that their performance while working from home is different from their performance in the office, but the manager can dismiss that. It's unpleasant, but better than resorting to surveillance software, and better than making things worse for everyone just to help out this minority who underperform while working from home.
Once they've been notified that they're underperforming, try to help them out. If they can't be helped, fire them with well-documented cause (their history of poor performance).
Start with how you know they're under-performing. What externally visible indications do you have that they're not working?
Eg, if bob was working well at WFH he'd do X, Y, Z, but he only did 0.3 of X. You could even compare that to other employees to show that it's just this one person.
See if embracing async work does it for those individuals, with some pressure on the deliverables but instead of end-of-day of that day, you let them deliver the next morning prior to chatting. Basically the same pace, but you shift on them the accountability of meeting the deadline for whatever widget you need, so if they didn't do anything that day, the expectation would be that they log in sometime during the night or very early in the morning to do it in one shot, because of the pressure being used as a motivator. If you identify that pattern, you have a procrastinator with potentially an attention/motivation disorder.
With a little of handholding and outcome motivation management, you should be able to hack into their dopamine cycle, keep their interest and those deliverables coming.
Make sure you have good ways to measure work product. For example, you can see if people are pushing to git repos.
Set aside a couple of times where people are required to log into chat or voice room every day. Have them type in a report on what they are working on and be available during that narrow window to answer follow up questions.
They just procrastinate on their own rather than corporate laptop when at home. The solution is to make work about delivery rather than hours on a chair. If someone can do it in 20 seconds then good for them, less good for you (not personally) in terms of how efficient you are in allocating work and managing its delivery. Very few employees are motivated to do more than asked for them. The rest are not the exception but the norm, and getting them back in office with unchanged work management will only help in having them look elsewhere. That’s a motivation perhaps but if you have work to do you still need to improve because the next round of employees will be similarly distributed.
Yeah this is a problem with specific employees, not with WFH. If people aren't adult enough to manage their own time and perform their duties without someone over their shoulder then that's a them problem.
I worked at a company which had a similar approach to the one being considered , i.e. force everyone in. Every decision there was based on the lowest common denominators. This meant that the really good high performing people all quit. It's a ghost town over there these days.
Set expectations, support people with meeting them, fire them if they continue taking the piss. Don't ruin it for all of you high performers because you can't be bothered going through the process to fire someone. You'll have better overall performance, satisfaction, and retention if you work to get the slackers either performing or out.
You can't assume that people who are not on their laptop all the time aren't working. I frequently research stuff on my own devices as the web proxy at work blocks too much stuff.
I also have slow days where my energy is low, and intense days where I work longer than normal. People are not machines. Regardless, I get all the things that need to be done done, and usually a bit more on top.
You should measure productivity, not laptop utilisation.
> We're in the UK so just firing people without cause isn't an option
It seems to me that if they are working few seconds every 20 minutes, there should be drop in their actual productivity. If these people have half functioning managers, they should be able to figure that out.
Dismissing people for having almost no output is dismissing for a cause.
For me it's not even about the office I quite like there it's quiet compared to home, but the one hour commute back and forth heavily impact my quality of life
There's a lot of nuance that isn't discussed in the WFH circles. I don't believe the cynical claims some offer of VC's losing out on real estate deals, or mid-level managers needing to boost their butts-in-seats numbers or whatever. For some, perhaps, but on average?
What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term? Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town? Do you still "know" them the same as you did when you regularly met in person for lunch or drinks? Is it awkward when you do see each other in person that one visit a year?
Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction. A pure voice-only relationship can feel close, but it's not the same thing. Current technology like Zoom and similar is just not a good replacement for in-person interactions.
How many times have you spoken right over someone on a Zoom call or Discord server? The social queues are erased, and things become awkward and less productive. Creativity (which applies even in engineering) is diminished when you have to use online whiteboards and planning tools vs. a real physical whiteboard with everyone holding their own pen and bouncing ideas around in real-time. To use Zoom et al effectively, the pace of thought and contribution are greatly diminished into a sort of per-turn dance.
WFH is fantastic when you have a head-down, concentration-demanding task that is very clearly defined. For most other things, it's actually harder to get work done.
WFH is simply not a replacement for team cohesivity. There is a great deal lost when you do not meet in person with the people you work with on a regular basis - we can't just sweep that under the rug because we'd prefer to sit in our home office. We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team".
That's not the say WFH doesn't work. Some people make an entire career working from home after all. It is simply an acknowledgement that WFH isn't as beneficial in all situations as you might believe.
I think you're right about this, but there are companies that are putting distributed teams back into open offices just so that... they can sit in zoom meetings with their team. But now, they're less likely to have ad-hoc collaborations over Zoom because it's a pain in the neck to find a conference room and feels borderline disrespectful to one's neighbors to carry on a long call when they're trying to focus.
It's all situational. I agree with you that in-person collaboration is beneficial, but bringing people to the office doesn't necessarily do that without restructuring teams that were built on a distributed basis, which can be super disruptive and lose a lot of organizational context.
It's not necessarily the case, it happens that most of the people who come are happy to be in the same room for a meeting, but often they still have to endure one single distant coworker that preferred to stay home and selfishly forces all other ones to use the shitty tools.
At work we've bought small PCs for the meeting rooms so that all those present can be in the same room, and have the rare distant ones participate to the call remotely without preventing other ones to discuss in the room. It's obvious the quality of the participation is much reduced for the remote one in this case, which proves how poor such exchanges are when they're all remote. At least here we can preserve a good communication between those who make the effort to meet in person.
> but often they still have to endure one single distant coworker that preferred to stay home and selfishly forces all other ones to use the shitty tools.
How does this hateful comment reconcile with geographically distributed teams?
the same way some believe that forcing talented people to waste their time trying to use inappropriate communication tools will in the end disgust them so much they will give up trying to excel at what they used to.
It's true that it isn't always the case. We have no more than 2 people on the team at any given office, and are spread across 5 offices and a few full-time remote on a broader team of about 10.
We are social animals and having in person interactions would probably boost the team’s cohesion. But it’s not a requirement and we’d have plenty examples of projects built over virtual meeting and async communications.
As someone else said in another post, unless you like touching your coworkers during meetings then a camera works just fine.
And to jump onto one of your points, Linux is the big elephant in the room. Almost every company uses it yet there’s no office building for Linux HQ where the devs all go and sit to build it.
The sweet spot in my experience has been for WFH orgs to get together periodically for extended offsites. A one week gathering twice a year has forged some incredible bonds on my distributed team.
Ugh. Multi-day work offsites are the worst. Along with conferences. You have to make arrangements to be away, (try to) sleep in a hotel room, end up eating and drinking too much, getting a workout in is nearly impossible, they just completely disrupt all your routines and responsibilities.
It's harder 2 weeks a year, but that is so easily offset by the 50 other weeks that make your workout, eating habbits, routines and responsibilities so much easier.
Is 2 weeks of travel a year that unexpected? A job I got hired at said to expect quarterly travel for various conferences. Not week long arrangements, but we're talking about being ready with a few week's notice to fly out for a few days to some different part of the world.
of course I got hired in that place in 1/2020, so we know how that turned out.
It sounds like you are perhaps just inexperienced at traveling, or don't like it.
All of your complaints are (usually) easily solved by experienced travelers. It's okay to not like travel, but it doesn't condemn the concept of a weeklong company offsite a couple times a year.
I'm not crazy about travel, that is true. But I'd concede it might be worth it if the offsite or conference provided exceptional value. I my experience, they don't. Never had an offsite meeting where the actual information being communicated could not have just been in an email. The social component of it is something I'd rather manage for myself on my schedule and with people of my choosing. Work relationships should be professional and collegial, I don't need or want to be in an egg race or play charades or go hiking or do some other stupid "team building activity" with Betty from accounting.
The social animal bullshit is a myth. You can see it around you everyday. People in public places everywhere spending time on their phones rather than talking to people around them
Maybe it’s not a myth, in a sense that without a phone they had to interact and learn how to do it, but that is too bad compared to what phones give for free.
It's true that we can see them everywhere but you'll probably notice that you don't know what jobs such people do and that those who you know and who need to benefit from others' experience typically do not do this. I tend to think there is a class (and a large one) of people who live only for their phone and social networks just because they have no life and they're trying to get one in such superficial stuff. Or maybe they just feel that nobody looks at them because they're not redefining the world and are not interesting, and they're trying to exist through groups of other people like them. It often makes me sad to see how they can be absorbed by these non-sense activities instead of simply being proud of what they are.
"It often makes me sad to see how they can be absorbed by these non-sense activities instead of simply being proud of what they are."
....because "being proud of what you are" doesn't work when no one cares about what you do or who you are. Then, your options are two-fold: you either become an isolated loner who doesn't care about socialising, or you participate in those superficial activities in hope of human connection.
What happens when we swap phone with a hobby? I can't blame someone for feeling bad about themselves after putting themself out there and being ignored or hated on. On global networks, that feeling is somewhat amplified because it starts to feel like nobody would find you interesting, out of 9 billion people.
Why should we feel interesting? Well, I personally would not want to socialize with someone who found me boring. The juice should be worth the squeeze.
I am curious about your view on pride. The idea of pride is somewhat alien to me. What is there for an average Joe to be proud of? Most of us are trapped in an oppressive economic situation and are forever distracted from any meaningful goals in our lives by responsibilities and society's selfish expectations.
The loss of third places exacerbates the problem. People don't belong in their own communities, and they feel it.
No it doesn't, false dichotomy. Addiction can coexist with socialising, see pubs for evidence of that. Also, the instincts that drive us to be sociable may also make aspects of social networks enticing. In the same way that desire for sex drives porn use. We can not always tell the difference between artificial experience and real.
How does this reconcile with learning and the internet? Or books? The assumption that someone is using the addictive apps or services is the flaw in your argument.
Same with bars, people can go to a bar not for the purpose of socializing at all. They may simply want to get away from home and be left alone while drinking some beers at the bar. Maybe the in-laws are in town. I do this myself.
Some people don’t need socialization and yet aren’t “loners”, their focus is just elsewhere. Trying to state all humans are social creatures is what a few posts up is about. Not everybody is the same, haven’t we learned that already?
> For some, perhaps, but on average?
> What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term?
If only you believe you have this "relationship" at work that's even remotely close to things being equal. For some, perhaps, but on average?
- Do you get to decide what to do or your boss? Even if you know better ways of doing things or see issues you might not have the politics to pull it off. Does this happen in a relationship? If so, it's pretty poor.
- Can you "unfriend" a co-worker and choose not to work with them? Do you choose your team? You can certainly quit your relationship or even friendship. In a company you get assigned a team. You can't pick and choose.
> Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction.
And you will get it? You assume your co-workers are your friends. Friendship and relationships common together on common things they like. Co-workers come together to work and may not actually have anything in common. So you prefer being forced together and fake friends than not have any? It can be worse. Being professional is all it is.
> We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team"
That's not a WFH issue. Your whole argument sits on that the only way to build relationships is in-person, even by quoting how long-distance relationships fail. Well do you hug and kiss your "team"? If not, then maybe it's fine. And it fails because there aren't ways to enforce the long-distance relationship to spend time together. Are you forced to spend time together with your co-workers? Yes.
Coworkers are much more like family. You don't get to choose them and you don't have to be friends with them but come thanksgiving, you just need to get along.
In that context, wfh makes it a lot easier to just get along.
Different skills dominate in WFH vs. in-office cultures. It should ultimately be unsurprising that people prefer to work in an environment conducive to their strengths.
Some folks focus on deep work, and benefit from working remote - others focus on collaboration. There are cons of remote work, there are also cons of in-office work. Remote workers who work best with deep stretches of focus are unlikely to be as productive in office. Collaborative workers who focus on long brainstorming meetings etc. are unlikely to be productive remote where people can just go on mute.
I think framing as deep work vs collaborative is a bit too assertive. It’s people who prefer working solo versus working socially, and there are different types of work that naturally lend themselves to one personality or the other, but the preference is “lower level” than that.
For example, brainstorming we pretty much know to be ~ineffective at this point, but people who love socializing continue to do it. Inversely there’s definitely work that’s ridiculously hard to accomplish solo/async, but people with a strong preference for solo work want to muscle their way through it solo anyway.
Solo workers are willing to give up some collaboration and social workers are willing to give up some focus.
>What percentage of long-distance relationships work out long-term? Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town? Do you still "know" them the same as you did when you regularly met in person for lunch or drinks? Is it awkward when you do see each other in person that one visit a year?
that's the crux of a lot of people here. You are comparing coworkers to friend and some people don't care about friendhips at work. They just want to do their work, stay in good graces, and get back to their leisure ASAP. It's not their job to care about overall company productivity, so as long as they feel more productive it's a win. Any inefficies is irrelevant because it means the ball is in their court and they still get more time for said leisure.
As of now, the WFH initiative is the cloesest we got to a wide scale 32 hour work week that many desire.
It's more like a 52 hour work week for me. I think it depends on your personality. I have a hard time stopping my work, but I still think the benefits outweigh that.
I had this problem and solved it by tracking time spent in a spreadsheet. I have time targets for work and personal projects per week. If they are above, next week I switch some time e.g. from work to personal projects. I found this greatly reduces risk of burnout for me.
Why not just use a time tracking app like Toggl instead of a spreadsheet?
I guess the spreadsheet isn't so bad if you work in long, 2-4+ hour chunks. I often work in 30-minute bursts so just being able to click the start and stop buttons in my browser is less tedious than entering the time manually
Sure, that would work as well. I have macros in the spreadsheet, so starting/stopping a timer is quick too. I like to see at the beginning of the day what is my current ideal work/project ratio.
> Do you become more or less close with friends after they move out of town?
Do you continue doing what it takes to be close with those friends? Do you talk every other day, for instance, like you do with your teammates? Do you share your experiences, think together, have plans and commitments?
Geographical proximity is not the most important contributor to closeness. I feel closer to random strangers on the Internet than how much I feel close to my neighbors.
I agree the conspiracy theories don't add up. The potential benefits of WFH for employers are substantial. Lower real estate costs is direct money saved. Ability to recruit from a much larger candidate pool means they can hire faster and for lower salaries than otherwise.
There have to be meaningful downsides that CEOs and the like believe is outweighing all that.
"Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction. A pure voice-only relationship can feel close, but it's not the same thing. Current technology like Zoom and similar is just not a good replacement for in-person interactions."
I cant stand it when people put out these blanket statements in the form of objective facts. If I'm in a group team huddle with our cameras on - I'm able to pick up on body language, I can see their faces and we can all exchange ideas at the same time. As far as somebody talking over somebody else you can split into multiple groups if it's too big, you would have the same issue in proximity.
You seem to be under the impression that social interactions can only happen if we're all breathing the same air. The only thing that being on site would add is potential tactility. Do you find yourself hugging and touching your coworkers a lot?
Whenever you hear someone trot out facts about “human nature” you know they’ve run out of reasonable avenues of thought on the issue.
Why, for instance, didn’t any of this apply pre-COVID when distributed teams were already common? Are humans beings not social creatures when the same conglomerate owns the office real estate containing all meeting participants?
> online whiteboards and planning tools vs. a real physical whiteboard with everyone holding their own pen and bouncing ideas around in real-time
I was wondering if there is an online whiteboard where every participant can work concurrently. I think excalidraw has a shared feature but I haven't tried it with > 2 people.
If my boss implied that I'm some lazy git taking advantage of WFH he could find a new employee. It's just insulting. Maybe others are, but don't make unfounded accusations.
> 90% of jobs aren't people's "passions" and have no chance at becoming some big world changing venture. Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world.
They're not completely to blame; the hordes of people who claim their 'passion' is analyzing widget sales or what have you share some of it. Going along with what are essentially lies about motivations to fit in with the perceived trends of the crowd is understandable (people want to get and keep jobs), but still immoral. And, n=1, but in my experience, it isn't actually necessary.
You're missing the fact that work/job _is_ life changing for someone who needs it to put food on the table. Just because no one is inventing anti-cancer medication every other week doesn't mean that person's internal world is not improved by having a job.
That point has nothing to do with WFH. If you get paid you can afford food, regardless of where you work. In fact WFH is better because you can save up to 2 hours a day not commuting and instead can spend it on cooking, grocery shopping, food prep, gardening, or any other food on the table related task.
The comment I was replying to was premised on most of our work being essentially meaningless in the grander scheme of things. That’s false. You can’t eat if you don’t have UBI or a job.
Complete tangent: I wonder if it's uniquely American to believe that people can/should only be passionate about jobs that are world-changing. Or maybe it's just very common in the tech-world and HN.
I'm absolutely guilty of this. I'm a software engineer, and I feel proud of having worked on products that millions of people use. Steve Jobs's challenge to "put a dent in the universe" is axiomatic for many of us.
Yet I know that in other countries (e.g., Japan) there is a belief that any job, no matter how humble, is worth doing well and that passion for excellence is a virtue inside us and is not conditional on the perceived pecking order of the job.
If we had such an attitude, maybe it would be easier to feel fulfilled--if you're holding out for changing the world before you can be happy, you're (statistically) going to die miserable. On the other hand, maybe a culture in which we give 110% to meaningless jobs is just another chain for the rich and powerful to keep us productive.
I find it very difficult to find meaning in a large portion of the jobs available today. Most workers are just another cog in the wheel. The system is so large that one cannot directly appreciate the effects of their work, or even know whether they are positive at all.
This contrasts with say, a subsistance farmer who produces food for their family and lives in a small community where every product of their labor has a known and appreciable impact. In that case, the equivalent goal of "changing the world" is "helping the community", which is much more attainable.
> I find it very difficult to find meaning in a large portion of the jobs available today. Most workers are just another cog in the wheel. The system is so large that one cannot directly appreciate the effects of their work, or even know whether they are positive at all.
My experience is that the same job also has a large range for meaningfulness depending on how well leadership manages to facilitate it.
> Yet I know that in other countries (e.g., Japan) there is a belief that any job, no matter how humble, is worth doing well and that passion for excellence is a virtue
That's a reason why the quality of most Japanese products is superlative. Another nation that is passionate about their stuff are Italians, but they value good looks and good food above all. The US values profits and growth and China values high output volumes.
If one works in a Fortune 500 company they're probably creating value for shareholders instead of changing the world. What they are primarily changing is the income gap, by making the rich richer.
> Another nation that is passionate about their stuff are Italians
At least where I am from, Italians have a reputation for shoddy products, laziness, and not caring. As you say: They are happy as long as the facade looks good. Behind the scenes is a mess.
It's funny, because my perspective as a European is American culture places more value on the performative idea of "love your job" even for the entry level jobs where here it's much more honest about it just being a job
>if you're holding out for changing the world before you can be happy, you're (statistically) going to die miserable
You bring up Japan yet they're known for being excessively and pointlessly overworked to the point of depression and suicide. It is a culture that rewards obedience and prostration to your job above everything else. So many were peer pressured into finding meaning in their work to such an excessive extent, and of course didn't become happy because its a system that optimizes for cohesion and stability, not happiness and meaning.
We are just more full of shit in America. Being passionate and changing the world is Silicon valley kabuki theater that lasts just long enough to cash out the stock options you have.
There is also an entire generation that has been trained to pretend what they happen to do for a living is exactly what they are passionate about in life. To say otherwise with the slightest doubt would be to feel like the biggest failure.
> One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee, and more so, employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.
If only it's all the "employers" fault. I've seen plenty of employees post on social media about how their office is "alive" again and feeling the "vibes" of their team with photos sharing them and their co-workers in-office.
It's the pro-office crowd in general that wants to crush everyone. Some employers are guilt-tripped or forced to support these loud people. They would complain that it's lonely and no 1 is coming to the office with them.
My cynical take is that HR teams don't know how to manage or engage remote teams. Instead of picking up that skill, they are forcing a return to office.
> Claiming that WFH is bad because you can't bounce ideas off other employees and get into the real world-changing "deep work"
What is a bigger hindrance to this to me is an open office plan. Being distracted by watching everyone walk around, no one respecting my headphones being on, walking over to me for a "quick question" that disrupts my flow and ends up being 60 minutes of work which I get no credit for but they do. At least over slack I can not respond to messages, though the ping is still disruptive.
What helps create deep work is a fucking door which I can communicate to people that I am in the zone and do not bother me unless you really need me.
The truth is that people are just justifying their previous decisions. They made open offices because it is "cheaper" (short term, but arguable long term) and have to come up with a reason that it is "better" other than cost. The same shit happens with WFH because they are still paying for office space. This is crazy since silicon valley was known for crazy perks like laundry and free food and all that but still wouldn't give you an office with a door. But now all that is going away as all their stocks are still going up. The reason those companies got big in the first place is that they realized that there were diminishing returns on financial compensation and that giving other perks actually boosted performance, created loyalty, and keeps people happy. So why stop doing something that is working? (gotta get those stock prices up somehow, right? And a quarterly level, not long term)
> a "quick question" that disrupts my flow and ends up being 60 minutes of work which I get no credit for but they do
I ask which project this is for and log my hour on that. At least my boss sees I'm not slacking, and if it happens a lot can take action. Perhaps the other person needs more guidance or maybe was a poor fit for that project.
>Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world.
to be fair, the center of talk on this site are usually in fact the cutting-edge enterprise that is making a real impact on the world (whether that impact is positive or negative is arguable).
>employers smart enough to have founded/run those kinds of companies usually are smart enough to see the merits of a hybrid policy.
so far, I believe Google and Microsoft and Facebook haven't. Twitter sure hasn't but that's honestly the least of their problems.
I've also found it's all just a matter of processes.
For example, open source is often all online, and it creates innovation all the time. People bounce off ideas on forums, on issues, often with a high level of thought going into it all. Great exchanges can happen in written form.
But I think a lot of companies that went remote just had no clue how to organize processes, discussions, and decision making for a remote environment.
>I understand the merits of WFH and in-person work. One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee, and more so, employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.
Also the acceptance of that by employees who have no personal life or live for office drama, and are anti-WFH.
God forbid people miss the wondeful brainstorming opportunities of BS meeting -that-could-have-been-an-email, or the wonderful backstabbing and gossip watercooler camaraderie.
This is particularly amusing to me as I sit in bed, right now, at 6 AM on a Saturday morning, having just figured out how to do something and done it in an isolated staging environment, after bouncing ideas of a co-worker in another time zone who happened to also be online and thinking about it right now.
And if the idea of working on a Saturday morning at 6 AM sounds toxic, I also logged off at 2 PM yesterday to spend the afternoon with my wife, who'd come home early from her office, and went to sleep by 8 PM, so it's not like I'm hustle culturing it working 80 hour weeks. I just happen to like early mornings.
It's not a straw-man, I've seen behavior in the past year that I've never seen in my entire career things as absurd as someone working 7 other jobs while pretending to work for us.
Frankly it isn't worth the risk or waste of time or money anymore. Thankfully just by saying you need to be in the office a few days a week will weed out 90% of timewasters.
>employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.
Employers don't owe you a living, you're welcome to go work somewhere that's fine with you not showing up.
> someone working 7 other jobs while pretending to work for us... Thankfully just by saying you need to be in the office a few days a week will weed out 90% of timewasters
Either they're not producing enough output to warrant their salary - in which case you have good grounds to fire them regardless - or they're perfectly productive - in which case why does it matter?
The biggest issue many managers have is that they have no idea how to measure employee output, separately from time spent at the desk imor in meetings.
>I've never seen in my entire career things as absurd as someone working 7 other jobs while pretending to work for us.
I'm sure I don't understand. You were paying someone for 40 hours a week and getting ~5. Why was this not apparent to their management? Or, if it was, why was nothing done about it?
The problem that your organization pays someone for 8x the output they're getting is definitely a problem, but if your management's only solution to this problem is to force the entire workforce to commute to an office, I think the bigger problem that should be addressed is that your management sucks.
I get their fears about people slacking off WFH, but if they think that I will slack off WFH, but would work like a miner's horse because they are "supervising" me, these poor bastards are so deluded it's not even funny. There's no way they could supervise anybody to that extent, purely on numbers even. Nah, if somebody is prone to slack off because they failed to motivate and engage him, that'd happen in the office in the same way.
My company forced a three day a week hybrid, despite major pushback from the employees and a lot of resignations after it was implemented. They’re now trying to nudge people to come in every day.
On Mondays and Fridays the CEO comes in, pacing around, unamused the big fancy space is sitting empty.
All the executives want to force full time RTO but of course they come in late (if at all) or leave early whenever they want as nobody monitors their schedule. Rules for thee and not for me.
We can slice it the way we want. We can talk about office space cost or "decreased productivity" or whatever. The real reason these execs are pissed at remote workers is because these filthy peons now get to enjoy a bit of the freedom/flexibility that was until then reserved to them.
A friend of mine works at a company that keeps pushing full time RTO. One of the big arguments is the CEO is always there every single day. “Setting the tone“.
For an hour or two. The rest of the time he works from home.
You can guess what the employees think of that. It is absolutely not a secret. The big believer doesn’t follow his own rules.
But even if he did, so what? Someone with skin in the game on life changing money or equity will have different motivations to someone just doing a job to get by.
They’re not regretting the decisions. They’re regretting the fact their poor decision making capabilities are on full display.
Most of these “bosses” would still be caught doubling down on the RTO narrative and threatening people to show up to work.
Bosses with Elon style of management, please take a warning. A weekly email threatening to fire people if they don’t show up in the office 5 days a week only works the first three times you send it. After a while, half the people leave and the other half don’t show up to work anyway daring you to fire them all the while laughing at how ridiculous you sound.
Doe these threatening emails convey any kind of warning to prospective new employees? Not just in the WFH/RTO topic, but if they are this draconian in one area, would it not be safe to assume it would span other areas as well?
Even if I was looking for a new job where the WFH issue didn't exist, I'd personally still be hesitant about working at a place managed by people doubling down like that
You’re not wrong, but it’s not that obvious to people. Most people look at this from a perspective of “ohh I’m okay with RTO so I don’t care” or “ohh I like RTO and people should stop complaining and being so entitled”. What they fail to realize is that soon it will be your paid parental leave cut down to two weeks or medical plans moved to cheaper options with less coverage, what are you going to do then?
It would to me. Any employer who wouldn’t negotiate on something like this for a job that does not require being in-office is potentially toxic.
Commuting can be expensive and even potentially dangerous. Car, insurance, gas, dangerous traffic, time wasted driving at least 2x a day.
There’s also the potentially unproductive office environments: loud, annoying co-workers, constant interruptions, etc.
RTO has costs, WFH has benefits and employers who don’t recognize that should be shunned. If the reason they require you to come back is because they wisely rented office space and didn’t even consult the employees on whether the workers would return, that should tell you how much you can trust management and how much they value you as an employee.
The safety issues are what kills me. In a large enough office you will regularly have employees getting maimed and killed on their commutes. This is literally justified on the grounds of employee productivity as if employers just get to wash their hands of any culpability for safety so long as their employees die on their way to or from work instead of at work.
Employers literally demand blood sacrifice from their employees and wonder why their employees are either leaving or becoming non-complaint when they do this without accordingly raising wages.
Not only that but those that stay are the “yes” men/women who are either bootlickers or accept that they aren’t valued much and thus will put in minimal genuine effort and just comply with stupid directives to the letter.
In the end you just don’t get that diversity of thought through disagreement/evolution/personal ownership that you otherwise get when people feel comfortable enough to genuinely show up and be mission-driven.
Ironically, I know people that like to be in the office, and are now pissed because they can't get a desk because of all the people who don't want to be there.
> 80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making.
Envoy's not exactly an unbiased source here, since they sell software to collect this data.
Interesting. While 80% said they would approach it differently, 66% felt they would have improved layout and space on-site and 52% would have improved amenities. That tells a different story.
So what this really says is that 80% of executives would have used a different approach if they had data about the subject. Which... is pretty lackluster? If you don't change your strategy in response to new data, you're bad at your job.
It says they would change their approach. It does not say they would change their position.
So while some may have been more open to letting employees work from home, others may have just decided they would’ve used different arguments against it instead now that they know the ones that used didn’t hold up (as widely forecast).
I know for a fact that many HAD data on employee willingness and on Productivity and it didn't lead to 3 days in the office RTO but that followed interests in the retail value and government taxes due to "reviving" downtown and similar ideas of centralized economic growth (which only benefits the few who have investments in those dense office zones and actually damages decentralization, horizontal growth and environmental improvements).
The problem that I've observed is that far too many bosses made their decisions about remote based on emotion, despite the fact that it is incredibly obviously a decision that should be made based on logic.
Not saying that one answer was right or wrong. Just that it has shocked me to hear otherwise smart people using subjective emotional decision making on this topic, when it's so clearly just an economic / incentive decision.
Fyi, CNBC (a news site) is citing a figure in a white paper by Envoy, an employee analytics platform, that leaders regret not having more employee analytics.
> "73% workplace leaders believe that easier access to data would enable them to drive smarter decisions about their space, programs, and policies... "
> "80% of executives say they would have approached their
company’s return-to-office strategy differently if
they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making.
I was recently offered a long-term contract job that was double anything I would expect my salary to be. Why? Because the company instituted a policy of not hiring new remote employees. So the workaround to get the help they need is to hire contractors that aren't beholden to silly employee policies.
Double what you expect your salary should be is to be expected for contracting from healthcare and other expenses alone. Never mind the instability premium.
Absolutely. Working on 1099 means paying significantly higher taxes, doing so as quarterly estimated payments, zero benefits, business expenses, and a lot less legal protection. It needs to be a decent margin just to break even. I was more commenting on how counterproductive RTO policy is.
I had lunch, not too long ago, with a senior executive of a silicon valley tech company that was moaning about how much of a pain it was to get people to come into the office and how it felt like things would never return to the way they were. And I told them I actually knew of a way to get 100% of their employees to return to the office happily. When they asked what this magic bullet was I said, "Go back to offices, with doors."
It isn't that complicated. Even if you have to work out of your bedroom when you are home you can close your door and focus, that just isn't the same in open plan office space.
that would require folks moving back to the bay area. No way in hell I'd want to do that. That would require sacrificing my wife's career and our quality of life significantly.
My best, most productives were in offices with doors and one other space-mate and we both liked the door closed and the light off. I rebuilt Compaq 4U rackmount servers in the dark in that office. I loved it.
-
I hated Intel cubes - even though the cube was ~7' tall and the ceilings were ~13' - they still sucked. (I forgot the humble brag ;; my cube and Pee Schedule was right next to Andy Grove - and for who-knows we always ended up peeing next to eachother (never spoke)
But I never went to my cube next to his (SC5)
And we just ran the game lab... (golden gaming of my life (about to start BG3) - but yeah I have had surreal tech experiences in my life...
I've hated every open office. (fb being the worst)
--
The WAYMO campus should just be little auto-driving "cubicle pods" that roam around and find the magnettic connection to the person you want to talk to and you both agree to meet - and then on the SmartMAC (like tarmac) the little pods just route you to eachother and dock.
Think Conways Game of Conferencing - and all the little pods can form SNAKE like elements, or TETRIS Rooms - gimme a big L!
Only this would make me consider going back to the office: a 5 hour workday, paid as 8. The 3 remaining hours would be compensating for the commute, which includes the time to get dressed. Commuting costs and food should be compensated as well.
Nothing else. Even with the above, I would still prefer a hybrid or remote positions as long as I have a choice.
Standing on a crowded train is not something I want to do every day (once a week is plenty), there is simply nothing the company can offer to make me reconsider.
Thanks for mentioning this. It drives me crazy how people think of commute time as the time their engines are running, whereas the overhead of doing so is relatively significant.
Generally yes. I typically prefer just being in my boxers at home. No shirt or pants. Always strip down to that the moment I get home too.
Many times if I needed to be on camera I'd only put on shirt long enough to be on camera and make sure my camera was positioned high enough that if I stood up. My boxers wouldn't be seen. Buy even then it did happen from time to time.
Not just dressing or engine running but everything.
When wfh I can prepare breakfast during morning meeting wearing wireless headset. When going into office I either had to make food before I leave or go out of my way to buy something (on way to work or at work).
It's not hard to listen in on daily morning meetings and prep breakfast or same with lunch.
Yea that makes no sense. Maybe during the pandemic it made sense when daycares were closed down and people were worried about the health risks. But now, there is no way you can tend to a kid and be a productive remote employee at the same time.
I'm a relatively young parent and I've had (childless) friends tell me similar things. Some people don't understand how much work it is to keep a 4 year old entertained.
The article funnily mentions "pet or child care", with EY handing out 800$ per year for it. What's 800$ of childcare, like two weeks? One week?
Based on what I know, $800 is roughly two weeks depending on where you live. A full month at $1600 is not unreasonable for an 8 hour work day, 5 days a week at a reasonably good daycare. It can be perhaps as much as $600 lower a month in low cost areas and hundreds higher in major metro areas. This is for one kid.
But these costs are dwarfed by hiring a legal nanny for watching a single kid. To do it legally in most states requires making them a full time employee with benefits and insurance, which I suppose is nice and all except it makes the entire thing unaffordable for even upper middle class incomes. So of course plenty of people do it under the table, which has its own set of problems.
Childcare and modern parenting is actually fascinating and depressing. The answer tends to be money and/or leaning on family.
Also the government does some kind of tax savings account for daycare expenses but the total amount falls far short of enough to cover services for a full time job. An obvious policy tweak would be to do a means tested daycare spending account with caps that reflect realistic full time jobs and help low income folk. The current one is a joke.
Back on topic: an underrated benefit of WFH is you can set your own hours with some clever time management with a partner. A parent can get up early and do work, have the other parent drop the kid at daycare, and then the first parent can pickup the kid from daycare so the second parent can work longer. And there can be trading of time between the parents to accommodate deadlines. Having to physically go into an office on a regular basis screws this entire system
up. The forced nature of in-office work is something I will fight against as much as I can, even though I very much enjoy gathering with others to work in person when it makes sense.
And when they're 4 - 8, they can entertain themselves and just need a little bit of occasional help. So you can have kids that age at home and still get some work done with reduced, but not zero, productivity.
Can't agree more. I don't care about a personal cubicle with a door. But I care how much time I spend in traffic on my way to and back from the office.
> I care about commute - time and money, especially time.
I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do?
Not snark, 100% serious. Hired a consultant who was fairly specialized and she spent 6 months working for me and at the end quit but offered to come back in 6 months. Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved. She had worked out what was, to me, an ingenious solution to the conundrum that there isn't anywhere near where you want to live that you would like to work.
There are a lot of reasons why people won't work in the office, and I get it, working from home is way better for the employee. One of the more interesting things COVID did was switch the "balance of power" from employers back to employees and so far it has been pretty awesome. In my lunch discussion my message was more "You are gonna have to make people be willing to work in your office if you want to compete for the best ones." The unemployment rate is low, but employees are a population, not a single type, their effectiveness falls along a standard distribution like most things. To compete for the talent you want is making management "cave" to things like offices. It has been relatively minor so far, but as work actions go the whole "I don't wanna go back" movement has certainly been felt in the Bay Area.
Organizational dynamics is a really well studied topic and co-located organizations are able to respond faster, and more effectively, to changing conditions. Consider firefighters who used to respond to a call from home, get to the station, and then head out. Versus ones that are living in the station and can start out immediately. It is a dramatic illustration of the principle but one worth considering if you are managing a large organization.
Reading the comments (which are great btw!) I have observed that a number of people haven't contextualized work yet. Specifically, an employer is an enterprise that employs people to achieve its goals. The employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss). They want you to stay of course, it is better for them, and this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful. Yes, making such demands forces them to decide, and their decision might be one you don't like, but if you are true to your goals and needs you will be happier with either decision. It is just harder to recognize that future happiness in the moment when you're crushed by them saying, "Okay then, we will call Friday your last day then."
> When <critical QOL factor> comes up empty though, what do you do?
As for anything, we settle.
Now, the physical circle example feels weird to me as we're talking about remote work. Sure no one is guaranteed to find a good remote work opportunity when looking for a job, but there is enough of choice for someone who was successfully employed for a while to find a decent remote position with reasonable trade-offs. It's at least a lot easier than finding employment at 200m of one's home.
> Consider firefighters
I'm not sure how relevant it is to our field, where very few people still have to physically move to a common place to do their job. Data center maintainers still have to go to the server racks to actually plug/unplug machines, but for most other roles we kinda see the reverse, where people can react to a crisis way faster from home than when having to go to an office in the middle of the night.
> this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful
What's lost on me is this tireless search for a middle ground, when we have better options all-around. To get back to your firefighters example, there was a time they had contracts for specific buildings and wouldn't extinguish fires on places out of contract. Should we try to find a middle ground to bring back these contract systems in some way, removing some of the most awful parts ? Or are we ok to move on to a completely different system that better benefits the city as a whole ?
> Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice."
Haha, god no, that’s constructive dismissal. “Quit or I make your working conditions worse, require relocation to a new area, or reduce your salary” is not something the law or the courts treat as a voluntary choice, they’re not quitting, you’re laying them off not-for-cause due to a shift in organizational strategy. You’ll be paying these people to go away.
The whole “RTO as a backdoor headcount reduction” has sort of been sold as this whole thing where it’s do or die, and the proper response is “well, if I choose not to do it, what does the severance package look like”?
The fact that you are making this offer org-wide and you don’t know who’s going to take it is your problem, it’s still a layoff like any other change in strategy.
That's a fair point. Depending on where you work you might have even more power than it seems at first.
A friend at IBM when they said "Okay, come back to work in the office" just nodded and gave positive sounding responses but never really went back to the office. Their manager decided not to push it to a point of separation. I suspect that IBM's understanding of their obligations in that situation were part of the equation.
>Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved.
so her solution was a gamble? get a job and hope they care enough to compromise in 6 months when she tries to move back? It's an interesting strategy, but not an ironclad one without a lot of street smarts. stuff that's hard to research when you're not a local.
>he employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss).
but it sounds like the executive of interest more or less lost this gamble as well. they hoped most people would stay, and they either didn't or it fell below expectations, perhaps lofty ones. I feel it's a two way road here: employers won't sympathize with an employee who wants to WFH when the company doesn't, why shouold it work the other way around?
Sorry but I can’t help but feel this comment smacks of consultancy. The facts of WFH don’t align with management desires. Management may think it’s the business but the business is bigger than management. This is true in two ways: 1) employees make a business and 2) investors begin a business.
Employees are happy to have a work solution that works for them. If you want the talent to make them productive you should come to terms with reality that WFH jsut works for a lot of people.
Investors are happy when a company is making money and a company is making money when it’s employees (not its management) are productive. Employees are productive when they are given a work solution that works for them
Saying “put a door” on their office completely negates what makes employees happy to come work for you given the new reality.
>I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do?
Well, no. There isn't many companies that need SE around me, let alone companies that pay well or do interesting stuff.
Before WFH I've worked for a few years at one company and then WFH arrived and I've started applying for interesting offers.
For me the main reason is I want to keep living where I live. Village near a small city in western Europe. Cheap living, lots of nature. But no big tech around. The closest "hub" with some tech corps is too far to commute daily.
There's no way I'm selling my house to go live in a shitty noisy, overpriced appartment in or near Amsterdam Paris, Berlin or whatever and spend double the current amount on groceries, dining etc. I imagine in the US this is way more the case even.
So if you insist on RTO, regardless of doors, you'll miss out on a large group of individuals who live too far away to commute.
> I've been commuting like 3h / day before WFH and I don't want to go back unless you pay me at least 2.5x
I don't think this is even that crazy either. I do WFH but if I were to goto the office in NYC, here's what that 9-6 work schedule would look like when you're dependent on a train:
- Wake up at 6am, eat breakfast, get cleaned up, prepare for the day
- 6:50am, drive to the train station
- Catch the 7:10am train to NYC which arrives at 8:30am
- Walk 15 minutes to the office
- Work until 6pm (no private offices, segments of open floors with desks and monitors to plug in a laptop)
- Walk 15 minutes back to the train station
- The next available train back is 6:40pm which arrives at 8pm
- Drive home from the train station to be home around 8:10pm to 8:15pm
Here's the direct costs associated with that:
- $268 a month for 20 train trips (a business week) with a discount applied
- $150 for 10 lunches (I'm trying to average out things like a slice of pizza sometimes or something nicer and maybe you bring lunch half the time)
- $200 for 10 dinners (half the time you eat near the train station while waiting because the idea of cooking after getting home is too tiring)
- $15 a month in gas (kind of rounding here based on miles per gallon, etc. but this is close)
That's an extra $633 a month and the food budget is likely way lower than it would realistically be. It also assumes you never once take an Uber or the subway while in the city. Realistically this could easily be $900 a month not even accounting for wanting to do fun and cool things after work since you're already out there.
That's 6:50am to 8:10pm end to end (~13.5 hours) and you still need to handle dinner half the time. You also pretty much have to get up around 6am every day so you can't do too much at night. You're lucky if you manage to get dinner and fall asleep while watching a movie.
Compare that to working from home:
- Wake up anytime before 8:45am to give you some time to get ready
- Do whatever you want between 6am to 9pm if you wake up early
- Work until 6pm (my own private office or anywhere within reason)
- Do whatever you want until you decide to fall asleep
Your food budget is fully up to you. You can do optimized meal prepping to your heart's desire or eat out every day.
Pants are optional at any point during the work day. I say that as a joke but also kind of serious. Your work environment may require wearing pants even if it's 90f / 32c with 70% humidity.
There's also a huge amount of flexibility in the sense that maybe you have something to do between 2pm and 4pm like a doctor's appointment. You can still work around those hours when doing WFH and maybe eat lunch at your desk and put an extra hour in the evening to make it for it. Or maybe your job is ok with you just taking that 2 hours to do your thing and don't worry about it. That's not really an option when you have a long commute. You have to take the full day off.
So now you go back to the person I'm replying to who says they would need 2.5x to go back. That's not all that crazy. Your work day goes from 9 hours to 13.5 hours which is already 50% more. You can't just add 50% to your salary because you're going to get taxed on that, and all of that will be taxed at the highest bracket you're in. Your life transforms from "work with a decent amount of personal time" to "I can't really do anything except work and commute". That's priceless in value or at least requires a substantial increase to consider it given what you're giving up.
I always wondered (although never tested) if you could do this unilaterally. Which is to say, assuming you work 8AM to 5PM "nominally" (with an hour for lunch = 8 hours) and each morning got in your car at 8AM and got to the office whenever. Then when your favorite map application said "leave by x PM to arrive by 5PM at your home address" you left. It would certainly create some interesting tension right?
At one time Google was discussing live-in housing on campus so that people could live there. It was a non-starter due to zoning issues but their reasoning was they could create dormitory style housing like Foxcon did and pay people less actual money for more hours of their time. At its heart it was profoundly evil but the pitch was all "they are young, single, they don't want to bother with renting and keeping house they loved their college environment and they will love it here." And through the lens of the founders, for whom the best times of their lives was living in college working through the night on cool technical problems, it no doubt seemed like heaven.
Yes, if you want to return to office... I better have an office. Not a desk in a "modern open collaboration space" or what every they used to call them
I get to have lunch with my partner every day and see them when I take breaks working from home. That’ll never happen at an office, and it’s more valuable than any comp to me. I would not entertain on site even at 500k/year (legit offer from a high frequency trading firm in downtown Chicago for an infosec cloud/iam engineer role). I can always make more money, and I only need so much to live well, but I have a finite amount of time and I’m spending the time I have left wisely.
Not going to lie spending some "quality time" with my wife during the middle of the work day has been pretty freaking awesome and a very hard perk to cap.
I'm the same with this. Both and me my partner work remote, and we spend so much more quality time together, and are able to take breaks with each other. I can't see giving that up.
Hey, if you're somewhere near Chicago, we should meet up sometime. Long shot, but I'm down in Lake Saint Louis. (Rather far from Chicago, but I've been looking for an excuse to visit anyway.)
That might get more people back to the office, but still probably not the majority of them. I have a 1-2 hour commute each way to the office. I did it for three weeks while I was not staffed on a project, but as soon as I got staffed on another project I stopped going to the office.
My commute sucks, the office environment is way inferior to my home, and the lack of flexibility sucks. The only thing I looked forward to while I was commuting was trying out a new restaurant in the big city for lunch. I was practically pulling my hair out of boredom the last two hours every day (had work I could and did somewhat do, but I could no longer focus on it because I was so sick of the office).
Them giving me my own office at work wouldn't change anything.
They’re not bad. I would welcome the idea. However they cannot compare to every other benefit of WFH including private bathroom, 0 commute, ability to cook and eat my own food, more rested, time for exercise, more personal time for kids and sopouse, etc etc etc
It’s something. It would fix a large complaint with most offices, and it shows that you’re really trying. You know what else would be trying? Offering other other incentives. Like increased pay to compensate for the commute time and cost.
Bringing in cupcakes once a month it’s not trying. Simply threatening layoffs is not trying. Saying the word culture 30 times is not trying.
The pandemic proved work from home works for a large number of people and many of them found at a serious quality of life improvement. trying to take that away and asking people to pretend it didn’t exist in exchange for some stupid token like adding a couple extra plants to the office so it feels more “homey“ shows employees that you don’t care about them AT ALL. Just like it did when you tried to force them back into the office during the initial height of a deadly pandemic.
It's a curve. Your goal isn't to convince people who are deadset on never stepping foot in an office again. The cost to try and change that mind is so extreme that you're only reserving that value to executive or fellows anyway. Who already have that flexibility.
But if they really do care about RTO and they want to incentivize people with a modest commute to come back... make the office better.
I have an office with a door at home. Why would I want one I have to drive an hour to?
I go in the office every other week for a day when some other coworkers will be there. It's my least productive day, but it is good for planning with coworkers.
Pay for my commute (on top of salary) and I'll think about it.
Working from home I can take my kids to school in the morning, sometimes even pick them up, have lunch with my wife, always be home for dinner, live in a very nice low cost area, and I even get to start work much earlier than I would if commuting.
I'm not sure that would be the magic bullet, but you're on the right track. If you want people to return to the office, use carrots not sticks.
I personally can't stand virtual meetings with more than 2 or 3 people. They are wildly more inefficient then in person. Add on top a meeting focused on brainstorms or discuss and it's a shit show.
Give people a reason to return, and have it actually be true, and people won't complain about being asked.
But just saying "you need to be back in the office just because" is just going to breed resentment.
The worst is "hybrid" meetings where some are in the same room and some are remote. It just doesn't work.
Fully remote meetings work for routine stuff like regular team planning etc. Where they fail is what I call the "magic meeting" where management types seem to think if they get the right people in a room together things will just magically happen. But those meetings never achieve much anyway apart from making people feel good for a while. A remote meeting just removes any illusion.
Negative. Offices with doors are nice. But the reason people don't want to go into an office is the commute. You're asking people to just erase 30-120 minutes of their day (or worse, spend that time in a stressful uncomfortable environment), 5 days a week, in perpetuity.
I worked for over 20 years in open office environments that were thoughtfully laid out with over 9m^2 space between stations. I then changed to a company where it seems 'space was a premium' with a dense open plan workspace with different teams mixed in the same bull pen and it is absolutely horrendous. There are specific people that don't take social cues like turning back to your monitor when you want to try and focus on something, yet continue to chit-chat all day. I can't believe the c-levels don't see this as a problem. The WFH policy is still reasonable but I have heard the occasional "see... this is why Elon is strict on RTO for collaboration" and I just scoff internally as I know they are desperate to revert it all. Fundamentally there is a huge issue of trust in these organisations, mostly driven by insecure egocentric managers, and I think that trust is satiated only through fear and subjugation of the employee, and more often than not a fallacy - if they go completely RTO I am looking around and/or changing careers.
I like that for the present moment there are a diversity of approaches and people can somewhat self-select into a work culture that fits their preferences and needs. If you make abrupt changes I don’t like, rest assured I will be using my new time commuting on the train to prospect new job opportunities. But good for those who want and prefer an in-office culture. Voluntary association is a wonderful thing.
I mainly reserve scorn for companies issuing abrupt ultimatums to employees they hired remotely that they must relocate long distances or be fired. Nobody established in an area with a partner that also works, potentially has family nearby or kids in school is going to accept that. That move signals a toxic brew of tyranny and cowardice from execs who don’t want to take responsibility for doing a real layoff. Grindr, looking at you this week.
Return to office is a massive sink cost fallacy and effort for executives to save face after strangling their companies profitability by signing long unnecessary leases. Rather than shrugging at what COVID wrought and going “meh, act of god, this unused office space is a write-off” fart huffing executives want to bend reality to their will by declaring work from home a huge problem and return to office the only way to save their companies.
In doing so, they replace an understandable situation in which the were blindsided by an extremely low probability act of god, with an intentional hoisting upon their own petards. It’s incredible to me how many people have OPENLY cited how much they’re paying for office space as a reason for their return to office policies.
The US government accountability office framed unused office space as an environmental and financial problem. Not the office space itself but the fact it was unused is clearly the problem. So of course the solution is to have your workers burn a whack of oil during an oil shortage, burning through their own money, to “save” the environment and government finances by making them commute to these offices so they can’t be say converted to residential housing or something useful. The true costs of such idiocy are hidden by shoving a large portion of the costs onto the workforce who are expected to ask for no additional compensation for the extra unpaid work and uncompensated expenses they’re taking on.
This doesn’t actually work because workers actually vote with their feet. Or they simply don’t comply with policy knowing that nobody is either paying attention or has the guts/inclination to actually fire them. How much do you really expect people to do this performative labour for executives that COSTS them money when non-compliance or finding a different job can make such a difference in their financial well being and quality of life?
I decided I will never again work in an office, for the rest of my life. It's a lifestyle choice. I refuse to put up with the B.S. anymore. I'm lucky that I've had a long career and my skills are very much in demand, so I will always be able to find a remote job somewhere.
People doing jobs with more qualified candidates in the pool will probably have a harder time, and that sucks. For them, I hope they can band together as a union and force companies to hire them remote. There is no excuse anymore about it not working, because the whole planet did it through a friggin' pandemic, and work actually improved. We just have to stick to our guns, because the suits will continue to try to ruin our lives as long as it benefits them.
Not just work but also profits (except of course where profits depend on people’s physical custom, such as restaurants, but that is no longer an issue). So basically a lot of these digital product and service companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Also not commuting meant fewer expenses meaning more disposable income. Essentially a free economic boost.
Don't you think full remote is kind of selfish? I mean, I also love it, but what about new hires and junior? How are they going to learn and improve if each time they have a question, they need to post it on slack and just wait...
Slack is no different than the desk if you're using it like that.
You can hop as easily to huddle as you'd do an interruption. Of course, a junior interrupting ALL the time in real life would be a terrible thing so you definitely need to strike a balance.
But I see most arguments for office is better from people who just don't know how to communicate effectively through tools and potentially are bad at cross location team collab, which happens all the time in big companies.
I'd argue remote is way better, if you share screens over google meet or similar it is far far better than physically sitting around a single workstation. Also, by default it encourages respect of people's time rather than tapping people on a shoulder or an interrupting them (don't get me started on open plan offices).
Vscode live share beats the snot out of traditional pair programming. I can view where my colleagues are on the side while looking up something else, and vice versa. If a colleague is writing a function or something and needs to know how some system works, I can go and look it up while they're working, and not break their flow. Traditional pair programming, with a single terminal, makes this impossible
Did it occur to you that there are people who were hired during the pandemic, who had full virtual onboarding experience? How did they survive?
Actually I myself joined my current company after March 2020. I can't imagine a 5-day, in-person experience would be any more effective or productive. If anything, I was able to completely pay no attention the mandatory training of "corporate value" nonsense -- it felt great to be "in" the meeting but spend the time doing actual development or doing some household chores.
I joined a new company in September, and most of my colleagues were fully remote. I have enough experience and was able to handle myself, but when I imagine this situation in my first year, I'm sure it would have been much harder.
It’s different, and harder in some ways, but easier in others. I just think we need to get better at accepting the new paradigm which is clearly better for many people, instead of lamenting what we might have lost. Onwards and upwards!
I see this argument all the time, but I've onboarded like a dozen new hires and juniors since going fully remote in 2020. It's fine. The tools and processes are different, but fundamentally it's still just about communicating and working together. You genuinely do not have to be in the same physical room to do that.
That said, the problem I do see is that the folks hired into a fully remote environment have a significantly lower "attachment" to the company. Working together in an office fosters a sense of belonging to the group (over time) in a way that remote work cannot. This is the thing that isn't getting attention, IMO - but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we were all overly attached to our jobs anyway :)
Well, these people were lucky to have you. Unfortunately, many people just want to not be disturbed, and it's much easier to ignore someone through Slack than in person.
That's a question of culture and organization. Onboarding a new hire is a job, and someone has to do it. Same for mentoring juniors. If you're relying on in-office for that, because the newbie needs to tap physical shoulders to get attention, then I'd argue the setup is not good to begin with.
I've spent years now in a fully remote team, and we had no problem getting people integrated and productive, and bonding everyone into a real team. Likewise, I was the newbie in in-office teams before and have felt like an outsider who needs to beg for help for months.
In my experience, remote or not is not the deciding factor for onboarding and team building.
Nobody has the right to interrupt you while you are doing your job, to ask you any question they feel like, at any time. They can talk to you when you have office hours, they can schedule a meeting to talk to you, they can post it on slack, or they can interrupt you for critical concerns.
The lack of structured times to communicate and collaborate is a big reason working from an office is counter-productive.
A cultural shift needs to happen if people aren’t getting responses via Slack. If someone is reaching out for help, people need to respond in a timely manner, and it’s up to leadership to make sure that happens, ideally by being a good example.
I have many team members who work extremely well in this kind of environment, but there will always be some who don’t. It’s both a choice and a skill to function as a part of the team, and leadership needs to cultivate that culture. I don’t see this being any different in person, though it may not be quite as visible to the folks making the return to office decisions.
New hires and juniors can easily learn by taking an active part in their own education. Firing a question into a public slack channel waiting for someone to answer is the laziest attempt to actually get an answer. Better is identifying someone who can help you and asking them a question directly. Take the time on your own to figure out what it is you don't understand, make a list of questions, and ask them directly, or better yet, hop on a quick video meeting and ask. The most effective way to learn in person isn't any different. What you are describing is in fact the laziest way to learn, which is to try nothing on your own, and expect everyone else to tell you exactly what to do.
Requiring everyone to be in an office because your personal learning style involves no personal effort and requires everyone else to enable you to be effective is in fact selfish.
I made a similar decision. I decided I will never ever work in an open-plan office ever again. However, I guess I would be ok with working in an office, if an employer offered offices with 4 walls, a door and a window with some natural light.
Having butts at desks allows them to do things like manipulate people to stay at work longer (Google perks), monitor them closer, discriminate, and justify lavish office expenses that they want for image rather than productivity. They literally don't know how to manage work or workers so they just stick people in the same place because they only know how to use their eyeballs and ears.
- The people who need to stay home to take care of their children and family members.
- The companies who can't find [good] enough local talent, or can't afford them.
- The people who can't find jobs locally and cannot move, due to financial, familial, environmental, or other reasons.
- People with diverse needs who require a flexible schedule and safe space.
- People who live in dangerous places where commuting could put them at increased risk. (see: can't move because of X) (also: commuting is actively dangerous to your health; constant sitting, danger of traffic collisions, being robbed at bus stops, etc)
- Anyone who wants to live in a cheaper, less dangerous city, or doesn't want to commute a long time.
WFH can benefit everyone, but they have to learn how to work a completely different way, and most people are lazy as hell so they don't.
You're right, I left out a lot of life situations that could benefit. Let me be a little more specific:
- if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from.
- if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.
- if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)
So yes, if you just need a paycheck for skills you already have, and that can be done remotely, that can be convenient. If you are looking for more you need to consider these kinds of tradeoffs.
The young people I know hate going into the office, it's all the older folks that want to go in. I've been almost entirely remote since I've graduated and haven't missed being in person at all. I've developed my skills more being left alone and having time to read and learn on my own than I ever have being forced to sit in an office and struggle to be productive. I'm absolutely not established, but I've had no issues convincing others of work of my impact. You simply need to take writing seriously and learn how to communicate your work.
Companies are just learning they have terrible onboarding processes and documentation. Turns out those things are important and being in-person is an expensive and poor quality bandaid.
Yeah, the only young people who I know want to go into the office are interns and fresh-grads. There is a lot of in person upskilling that happens in those years, but after that, learning is effectively self-guided.
There are 2 kinds of jobs in tech. Demanding jobs and chill jobs.
Demanding jobs involve effectively resigning your life to the company for 5 days of the week. The hours saved on commute and ability to actually get chores done between at-home downtime allows people to put a lot more hours from home than from an office.
Chill jobs on the other hand, lead to a terrible commute vs hours worked ratio. You're in the office for 40 hours of the week, but spend 5 hours commuting, 5 hours chilling during lunch break, and another 5 hours waiting in line to select one of 10 fancy coffees. That's effectively 30 hours of work, 10 hours of in-office loitering and 5 hours of out of office mind-numbing commute. Make those same people work 'real' 40 hours from home and you'd see a 30% productivity increase just from hours saved. Remote employees take meetings during lunch, coffee is instantaneous and there is no commute.
People complain about how much better in-person meetings are. But, have we even tried to make remote work palatable. Slack and Zoom are terrible tools for remote work. Give every employee a 2000$ digital whiteboard. Make them stand and give their presentations using better cameras. Use gather.town to make collisions feel more natural. Guess what? with remote work, all your meetings & interactions can be captured. You can send out meetings summaries & key screenshots for every interaction without ever lifting your finger. But nope, remote work is relegated to having the same in-person secondary tools (zoom, slack) without leveraging new primary tools that work well for remote work.
> if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from
You can easily learn from coworkers working remotely, I personally have had no issues doing so. The idea that you can't is a weird one and I have no idea where it comes from.
> if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.
So make others know you through your impact. Your work speaks for itself. If you have to be in person to demonstrate your impact, are you actually having an impact, or just making a show of having one?
> if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)
Low cost of living countries come with plenty of their own barriers that prevent hiring, and out-sourcing isn't some new concept that has emerged from the pandemic era of WFH. On the contrary, what has emerged is the ability for those capable of WFH to move from high COL areas to low COL areas, or for those in non-traditional hubs to gain access to high paying, high quality jobs they didn't have access to before without relocation. Its a huge boon to those struggling financially.
I think a lot of weak tech leaders took their RTO clues from Elon. When Elon took over twitter he started a very successful anti-programmer propaganda campaign, calling us spoiled, overly pampered, overly paid, etc.
Shocking how the CEO of Evoy could come up with that result.
(and then getting to present it on global tv)
I believe the company is trying to help companies shrink their physical offices.
I am not 100% sure since the website for Envoy seems like satire.
""Envoy Workplace is the only fully integrated workplace solution for all your workplace needs.
Join thousands of companies that rely on Envoy to efficiently manage hybrid workplaces, so everyone inside can connect, collaborate, and thrive.
In today’s world, it’s almost impossible to optimize space without smart space technology. Reducing your office footprint cuts costs. Smart space solutions help you understand how your space is being used, so you can decide if and where you can cut.
"""
I am pretty sure if tomorrow they have on a CEO of company making their
living off of renting out as much office space as possible he will have
a survery with a different result.
Would be fun to see the whole system going down because most nerds decide to quit all this shiny disneyworld of plastic and do weird tech things again.
I can't figure this out, but there seems to be some monied interests in people returning to work because of corporate real estate...
That part makes sense to me, the part I don't understand is why every other corporation seems to want to continue buying into that when they could, for example, stop and save money on their current corporate real estate...
Perhaps it's like stocks? "It'll bounce back", and land is traditionally one of the safest investments to make.
It's a weird whiplash to hear about empty office buildings on the enterprise side, while also hearing that the real estate market for private citizens is absolutely exploding. I've had some real estate agent come to my door every month this year asking about trying to sell my house.
Maybe enterprise wants to be ahead of some future office gold rush (that may or may not happen)
Most (tech) jobs involve huge amounts of co-ordination and creativity. This is waaaay easier in person, so having all the people needed in the same location makes a huge difference.
But the "same location" is almost an inverse square law. Same room - great. Really strong. Same floor. pretty good. Same building. Well that's starting to hurt. Different building, different town, different time zone. At the different time zone level the "gravitational interaction level" is something you need LIGO to pick up.
If you have a "team" of people answering first line support calls, spread them across the globe and get them to read off the same wiki.
If you just launched a 10M dollar project to fix "something vaguely defined that the board know is important but cannot agree on", welcome to hell. It's possible if you lock the best tech and rising business stars in the same room. Good luck otherwise.
Where do you get that coordination and creativity require in person time?
I would argue that most creative activities are better done alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods. And I coordinate just fine with tools available online.
I think you might be mistaking the kind of co-ordination that is possible with CI/CD tools to the co-ordination possible with shouting at each other in a room or having coffee or just being part of human interactions
If you are emailing people and co-ordinating that way you are already part of the political in-group.
If so then co-ordination is fine. But who is part of the political in-group, especially for constantly evolving projects and setups is a human activity and those are best done in person, walk bye, conversations that just happen.
Maybe your company culture does everything over email utterly in the open. Maybe the linux mailing list is the right way to do things.
I was not talking about CI/CD tools, but things like slack, tickets, wiki, shared calendars, etc.
I "shout" at my coworkers through slack and I feel like it achieves the same result as if we were in an open office. Better even since they can wait until they reach a stopping point in their current activity to answer me.
I do not believe in the magical "water cooler" conversation. I worked almost 10 years in an office before going full remote 6 years ago and I've never seen or heard this amazing conversation over coffee during which the next Gen product is discussed. Just my empirical experience, but lunch conversations are usually about batching about the clueless PM, or deciding where to get a drink after work, or stuff like that.
I have a new conspiracy theory on RTO in Big Tech. Much has been said about commercial real estate. But I think getting highly capable people to work hard for you is a difficult problem & something tech executives put a lot of thought into. If you don't pay people enough, someone else will. But if you pay them too much, they'll become financially independent.
Mid six figures is an objectively life-changing amount of money that an engineer would be insane to walk away from & that few companies can match. But because it's contingent on living in places where the "working rich" are on the lower half of the housing market totem pole, housing will always place significant pressure even on an obscene income, and your home will never be quite satisfactory. It keeps you on the treadmill working harder and longer, worrying about the stock price, chasing the next promotion or refresher so that you can afford a little more light, a little more space, a little less commute time. And that's right where they want you. Location independence means people could actually get their fill of "TC" which would make it difficult to keep them sweating over such uninspiring projects.
Yep. Hence the economic alarms about salaries being “too high”: remote work enables geo-arbitrage, which removes a significant portion of employer leverage.
If employees could buy their way out of the system, then, by definition, capital is leaving power and money on the table. And it absolutely loathes that.
They get what they pay for. Companies that offer remote jobs will be able to pick from and retain a wider gamut of talent. I suspect a lot of this RTO is related to the tech market just generally being down. Once things heat back up, recruiters will be knocking down doors to get people to interview for remote gigs just like before. It may take some time to get to that point though, because there are a number of factors at play currently that could prolong the depression in tech.
My contention is they won’t be able to sustain it, because either the wages will be uncompetitive or remote workers will pay off their houses and no longer need to work (as much).
Wages aren't even close to being high enough that companies won't able to afford workers. Developers in the standard ranges don't even need to consider what a company can afford when doing salary negotiations. With the exception of small businesses, it's about what they are _willing_ to pay, not what they are able to.
I'm not saying they can't afford high wages. I'm saying levels.fyi-scale wages for a few years in a normal housing market would leave an employee much pickier about companies/projects/conditions vs. someone who still needs to grind hard for his first 1BR in New York or San Francisco.
I don’t think it’s really a conspiracy theory, this a fundamental aspect of American capitalism.
Health insurance is a perfect example of a carrot that companies want to maintain control over in order to maintain a dedicated workforce. By keeping “affordable” (eye roll) access to healthcare tied to a full time job, they keep butts in seats. This isn’t new or isolated to tech companies. It’s always been about maintaining control from the top.
I’ve always thought this. Having healthcare primarily accessible through your job must be a strangely subservient place to be. You could literally die if you lose or leave your job!
Im not one for conspiracy theories, but that’s a great position for governments and big business to find themselves in!
Health insurance equivalent to what an employer subsidizes is pretty accessible without the employer at healthcare.gov, but the tax deductibility is not if you are working for an employer too small or cheap to offer or, or not employed at all.
The premiums just happen to be very expensive (even for the employers’ subsidy portion) to the tune of $10k/$30k+ per individual/family.
Healthcare is just another cost in your life and you should view the benefit as part of your TC. It's only slightly distorted here in that companies can use pretax money but it isn't like it's a small expense to companies either.
I've personally never used Cobra, because it is in fact cheaper to buy individual plans.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's how the system works. You are taxed on pretty much all of your income either from the state, the landlord, the credit card company or the lifestyle obligations that stems from the area you are living in.
> And that's right where they want you.
This is the part where we diverge, and I think where people confuse emerging phenomena for conspiracy.
>it's still the result of human action, it's purposeful and intentional.
Orcheastras imply a conductor, a central figure with the score to direct their symphony to play.
1000 conductors means there is no conductor. Each one may have a purpose and intention, but a conspiracy implies... well, conspiring. That isn't a conspiracy, it's a mob. Even if somehow the symphony manages to make a melody out of the madness, it's not a result of a conspiracy because it never happened.
I'm simply invoking Hanlon's razor. I've seen enough of the sausage to acknowledge that 95% of these "top brass" are just making it up as they go along.
1000 conductors means that there is 1000 conductors and 1000 orchestras.
They've all done their research, and they've all independently decided to have their orchestras play mostly the same songs as all the other orchestras.
They've arrived at this decision by copying what the most successful orchestras are doing, reading in orchestra magazines about best practice for orchestras, going to orchestra conferences, talking to other conductors over expensive meals and games of golf, etc
I agree it's not a conspiracy. There's no big room where all the conductors get together and all agree which songs to play.
But it's not accidental either. Each conductor is seeking the best song list, and by using the resources available to them they are all coming to similar conclusions.
I think I've tortured this metaphor enough.
I just do not want the human element to be abstracted from the equation here. Yes, I agree there's no conspiracy. Ultimately this crap is "emergent" from the systems in place. Those systems were built by humans, and then the "emergent" behavior is just humans concluding "based on this system in place this is the best set of actions I can take". Those humans then are successful so other humans try to copy them.
There is a word for it, stigmergy. It is just conspiracy minus the direct communication. A network where nodes each behave according to their observations rather than communicating. Termites don't conspire either.
they're not saying lifestyle expenses are a tax in themselves, but rather the inflation on the lifestyle expense is a tax (ie. "cost of living"), as well as the need for certain expenses to begin with (eg. the need for a nanny because both parents need to work long hours bc of high COL and commute times)
Obviously no one would rather pay 4x as much for the same thing. In that sense no one chooses the price of their house as they'd clearly pay $1 if they could.
But yes, you choose to pay a lot to live near work (you value your time), in a place with great weather and public schools and natural beauty (since we seem to be talking Bay Area here). The $300k house in BFE Ohio does not have these properties.
At one point in my life I chose to live in a basement for about 10% of my monthly post tax income. Why don't you choose that? Turns out you do, in fact, have agency in choosing your living conditions.
We have agency in that we could choose to renounce careers in tech. That’s it.
There is a price/quality tradeoff in every housing market; all complaints about price can be interpreted as insufficient willingness to compromise on quality. A cardboard box under a bridge is free! “You’re actually obscenely wealthy because you don’t live in a basement and drive 6 hours to work” is not the argument you think it is. Tech workers are telling you how they feel about Bay Area weather, schools, and transportation every time they complain about RTO. We all want nothing more than to get the fuck away from here. Nothing more except, perhaps, to do the work we were meant to do.
Moving to New York or Los Angeles for affordable housing is ridiculous on its face. Austin, Denver, and I would add Miami were basically flash-in-the-pan situations: first movers got some great deals, but the housing markets have priced it in by now & the forward-looking job market outlooks are uncertain.
Seattle is interesting in that it's clearly a durable tech job center and is meaningfully cheaper than San Francisco. It's still twice as expensive as a normal place ($862k vs. $400k) and its street conditions reflect a housing crisis every bit as severe as San Francisco's, but it's true that you could keep your career while paying ~30% less there. So I guess the delta between SF and SEA could be interpreted as a lifestyle splurge.
This is absolutely being orchestrated, right out in the open. OP’s entire post is fundamentally about the balance of power between labor and capital. The Fed’s stated goal is to cool the labor market so that wage growth will calm down. In other words, the Fed thinks labor is too strong, calls too many of the shots in negotiations and so wants employees to be more desperate so that their employers will have the upper hand.
Obviously capital would prefer to pay lower wages, all else being equal, and in this case the Fed backs them up on that to prevent a wage-price spiral. What’s less obvious is how to keep even very-highly-paid employees from deciding they’ve made enough and checking out.
Very true, and the reason why it's important to spell this out explicitly is because any solution that hinges on identifying and blaming a single or few orchestrators is dead on arrival.
Lobbyists are pushing for it. Big investment firms like Vanguard and Blackrock that have a lot to lose if the commercial real estate market collapses are pushing companies to mandate RTO policies if they want to keep getting investments. Makes sense.
The last 40 years of economic policy has been about aggressively loosening restrictions on capital movement, while keeping in place or strengthening restrictions on the movement of labour.
The WFO wave was an disruption in that cycle. But only for the professional class. It won't last, at least not for the lower end of the market.
Yes, I think you’ve really got it there. The federal government is absolutely trying to orchestrate this situation for the benefit of companies. They try to keep unemployment at a sweet spot number where not too many people are living on the street, but companies have a pliable and plentiful labor pool. It’s achieved through a careful balance of monetary policy, taxes, immigration, education, and laws limiting reproductive choice. The CEO of every Fortune 500 is working towards the same in their own realms, such as all the lobbying that tech companies do on H1-b visas.
But at the same time, we also have a brutally efficient marketing and advertising discipline that taps into our emotional biology and keeps people wanting more and always looking over their shoulder at what everyone else has.
I’ve thought before that by default, most people will be pushed to work ceaselessly, barely affording everything they think they should have and saving nearly nothing. It takes a choice to and self denial to step off that treadmill and start building the wealth that can set and individual free from living off their labor.
Remote work is a huge threat because of geo-arbitrage. Clever employees can quickly get ahead of then saving curve and throw off the reigns. Hungry employees are the easiest to manage. Fat employees have the power to say no.
Save 50% of your gross salary, invest in index funds, and be patient. You can speed up the process via geo-arbitrage, climbing the career ladder without lifestyle creep, working at a FAANG, being more frugal, or side hustles. Search for FIRE for more details.
Let's be honest, it's only possible for people with rare skills and/or prestigious credentials (which are largely a function of your parents social class).
Earning median wage most of that goes towards rent. There's nothing left to save. Move further away and you lose big on earnings.
> Earning median wage most of that goes towards rent. There's nothing left to save. Move further away and you lose big on earnings.
If you are in your teens or 20's in a median wage income, then I advise considering vanlife grinding towards FIRE. I spent so much time in libraries or labs at that stage of my life that in hindsight, I should have dismissed the stigma of "homelessness" and adopted vanlife, scraped enough together for a duplex down payment, rent both sides out initially until one side is paid off, and then settle in that side should I want out of vanlife at that point.
Exploited? Working for a living is called being an adult. The inverse of which is sticking your hand out and demanding that everyone carry you through adult life. People who agree to work for someone else are, in no way, being exploited. You have a choice to be a bum, as much as you have a choice where to work. And your options are greater when you're not a bum and have marketable skills that employers are willing pay for. Furthermore, if you're not a bum and you acquire skills, you can start your own business and do extremely well for yourself, and support dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of families if your business requires employees. I'm interested in discovering where you learned that successful business owners are "exploiting" people who willingly work for them.
Absolutely. I’m not a fan of the overly broad definition of exploitation meaning “anyone who has a job.” Clearly voluntarily selling your labour for money isn’t exploitation. Save your money and live off the interest.
For some definitions of wealth, sure. I think the minimum definition is that you are freed from at least some need to labor. Clearly there’s a wealth point at which you need to capture excess value from the labor of others.
I assume everyone had roughly the same thought around 2012. Mid sized city jobs paying 100k+ and you could still find homes with half an acre for $300k. As salaries got inflated due to FAANG and startup competition it really seemed like an easy out was just keep a lower cost place or rent. The dream of WFH was find a HCOL job and buy LCOL place and a helicopter or maybe just save for retirement at 45.
Now given the cost of living increases, the $300k places push $900k in midsized cities. The HCOL areas have gone up in value and the mortgage due to interest is almost twice as high over 2019. Assuming a $15-$20k net take home the housing will be half of it. Grocery bills seem about twice as high. Even with much higher salaries it seems like everything has been squeezed back to the 2012 math. Not everyone ended up riding the salary train and it's even harder form them. And that's assuming you get to keep your job in the shuffle back to the office/layoffs.
Thanks for posting this. I always found it odd that the transition from labour to capital seemed to be so hard, even with mid-figure 6 income TC's it always seemed like you can't quite escape the rat race, you can definitely live more comfortably, or maybe as comfortably as you can as one of the rats in the race but never escape. Of course with very disciplined saving and LCOL arbitrage you stand a chance, however it seems like these methods are being purged with COL adjustments, inflation purging cash savings, markets tanking 401k's. Just when you think you are out they pull you back in. I often wondered whether this was by design, because it seems a bit too convenient for labour pools, or whether its a feature of the economic system we operate in.
Seems to me that it’s central to the economic system we live in. If advancing from labour class to capital class was not very very hard, there would be far fewer workers, which is untenable in our society.
This is too “brilliant villain”. Too many chain links of logic to actually implement and make work.
I suspect it’s the far more evil banality of “we paid for this office space and it’s pretty awkward to explain to the board why we have this red line item for a ‘10 year lease - office space’ and nobody is in there, so let’s just force 100s of people to come back in against all common sense and metrics that show this is a bad idea.”
That’s surely a factor for remote work in particular, but we must also ask why engineering orgs that embrace globally distributed sites & happily span SF, SEA, and NYC allow for so few seats in places like Chicago, the Triangle, or the Sun Belt. It’s cheaper & the collaboration setup is no different!
Very well said. Forcing employees to live in high cost of living locations and commute to an office reduces employee leverage. High housing prices keep you on the treadmill and dependant on your employer. Employers want you to be dependent on them
> Their plan was put on pause through the end of the year as Covid-19 cases ticked up once again throughout the U.S., so EY leaders used that time to ask employees about their reluctance to come into the office. Common threads stood out to Frank Giampietro, EY’s chief wellbeing officer for the Americas: Employees weren’t sure what to do about pet care or child care.
> In response, EY announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care and dependent care costs for each of its 55,000-plus U.S. employees. The fund, which is ongoing, had an immediate positive impact on employees’ in-office attendance, Giampietro adds. Since EY first rolled out this benefit in February 2022, EY has seen a 150% uptick in office attendance across the U.S. “It didn’t take a complete rehaul of our return-to-office policies to make employees happy,” he says. “We just needed to listen to our people and understand what, specifically, was problematic for them, and offer resources to address that.”
This is hilarious. $800/year comes out to ~$70/month. That's a tiny fraction of commuting/pet-care/childcare costs. And that's peanuts compared to the average salary for someone working at a big-4 company. We're supposed to believe this is responsible for a 150% uptick in office attendance, as compared to any number of other factors in play in early 2022?
I have to admire the the "Chief Wellbeing Officer"'s chutzpah. I suppose that's the kind of PR spin that lands you a plush C-suite job
Same, I've been going into my office a couple times a week and usually I am one of a couple dozen people there in an office that fits hundreds. I love it.
However last week there was a company event and the office was full all week. It was terrible, couldn't get anything done.
For me, there's no money or perks or flexibility that will get me into an office. I haven't had covid, don't plan to get it, and it's honestly a lot riskier today than it would have been in 2020 since we've collectively given up on precautions. I need my brain to work effectively, and the risk of cognitive impairment caused by long covid is just too high to be worth the risk.
The article mentions NY costs of $16,000 p.a. per person-space.
This is the underlying problem: Listed Property trusts are facing massive write down of value, and many industries at scale are partially invested in property assets.
Deciding to unwind a lease has consequences all round. Getting staff back "in" may be logistically simpler for the CFO and risk committee of the organisation. HR comes second.
My honest opinion after 20 years in industry is in-office meetings and "collaboration" is mainly to cater to people who don't communicate very well. They have low reading comprehension and/or patience, and they require a lot of repetition the same thing when in meetings. In person works a bit better for them with the extra body language and not having to hand off audio in online meetings.
I did software work for most of my career and am a huge fan of remote and hybrid arrangements.
But having started a hardware robotics company… it does seem more difficult to run the team remotely. When we get together in person, everything moves faster. We have more equipment. EEs can fix things on the spot. Perception engineers can perceive their algorithm’s behavior in front of their face. We can mitigate safety concerns with proper protections.
I wish we could all be remote, but I think the team does need a component of hybrid to pool resources and move faster. I only say this as there’s a lot of “C-suite bad they just want to micromanage” and I feel like it’s not that simple for many businesses.
Don't feel bad. Working/developing with real hardware seems to me a legitimate case where wfh might not work.
This does not mean that the constraints you have apply to everyone and most places that are forcing RTO are actually optimizing for other things like CRE.
Not every job can reasonably be done remotely. Working with specialized and expensive hardware is an area that seems to me to have a reasonable expectation that people work in the office, at least when they need to test on actual hardware.
Also why I'm avoiding such fields personally, despite thinking they're pretty neat.
My [very big] company just mandated return to office 3 days a week. My employment contract, signed a little after covid stipulates fully remote so I am exempt. I am also very far from an office. Its really the people that have been working here a long time that are taking the hit. All of these loyal people are going to have to start paying for after school care again, tolls, gas, lunch, etc. with no raise to compensate them. This is after already getting hammered by inflation. I genuinely feel bad for them.
The real reason behind RTO is the management needs of a soviet-alike economy in cities now, and tomorrow a slave-based service economy.
The today need is the fact that offices keeps up many related activities, as a proof look at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/20/bowser-bid... who have no economical meaning for the society but are the sole activity of many people, like soviet adage of digging holes today, fill tomorrow and dig again to state there is no unemployment issue.
The tomorrow need is well depicted by https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... witch means "how to make people owning nothing?" well, living in an expensive high-density city means need to earn much just to pay their cubicle-based life. More inflation, more people seeking owning less to spend less, so are more reliant on third party services. Cars too expensive? Well, go for the public transport. Homes too expensive? Go for smaller and smaller apartments. Not enough room to store and cook food? Go for ready made food, possibly delivered directly to you. No room for a washing machine? Go for public washing machines services and so on. In the end: people living a stressful life not to live but to pay services, without enough time to think, but with a vague idea of having still much thanks for the availability of such services.
Both today's and tomorrow needs of such small cohort of humans who profit form pasturing the masses can't be satisfied if people start to spread. In a mild density living economy is mostly made by SME, not much by giants with few exceptions possible, and people own, know the value of owning, so have enough asset backups behind their back to be not so easy to steer using the genital garrota of the economy.
I’ll never understand why people think an office is important for any reason other than monitoring time at desk.
The office is a sea of noise cancelling headphones. Globalised workforces mean any meeting ends up on Zoom anyway. Random chit chat is usually frowned upon by management so “water cooler inspiration” is a unicorn - usually it’s just a distraction.
I think I’m in the majority when I say that I prefer WFH but honestly, working ONLY from home is not something I like. I can work for a week or two in remote but then gotta spend a day or two in office. Naturally, it depends on a number of variables, like personal character and the relationship with the other employees but in general I think most people fall in my category. Having the option for both is the best possible solution.
Maybe. For me personally, I'm glad I had the experience of what it was like to work in the office for two weeks when I was in between projects recently, because it helped reconfirm that yeah, I hate going to the office.
It was good to see people in person, but everything else was a pain in the ass, and the office is such a sterile and boring place (pretending it's not, with an arcade machine, shuffleboard, a small stack of board games, and a ping pong table -- none of which anyone ever uses), with lighting that seemed to suck the energy out of me.
I'm going to the quarterly party in two weeks (for the first time since I started working a couple of years ago), but I feel like I'm really forcing myself. It's just so inconvenient to head downtown from the far suburbs.
I keep getting recruiters send me messages on linked in with very vague details about the job, often omitting if its work from office or home. So I always ask, and often get "The employer offers a great flexible hybrid system" or some such nonsense. When you dig further its almost always a max of 1-2 days at home per week or in some cases per month.
One of them was incredibly persistent and I told them I was only interested in remote opportunities. Their reply - "This is remote! They allow you to work from home one day a week". Er....ok then.
Any employer enforcing ANY length of time in the office is going to lose out at this point. Thankfully my current employer has adopted a "dont care, do what you want" approach, so long as you get your work done they dont care if you're in the office, at home or abroad.
> In response, EY announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care and dependent care costs
I can understand dependant care being considered an "employee problem" in the strictest causal sense, so it's amazing that this is considered. That being said, childcare can cost up to $3000/mo - so $800/yr is woefully inadequate.
Commute costs are another story entirely. If I were to entertain RTO (which I wouldn't), my commute time would be paid time. If being in the office is considered a job function, then by definition I should be paid while performing that function. Me doing that for free effectively cuts my salary by 20% (for a 2hour commute on top of 8hours). Furthermore, $800 is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of fuel and maintenance - another free benefit that employers enjoy.
$800/yr doesn't cut it, not even close - especially if the employee is using that benefit for all the purposes listed.
I don't see why my employer needs to cover 100% of my expenses for the benefit to be useful. They are paying me extra money to try to convince me to come into the office. Especially when they can just change their policy to force me to come in without the added benefit.
Tuition reimbursement doesn't cover the total cost of college classes but I'm still glad they provide it!
It's even cover a month of daycare and it pays out over a year, so it's beyond useless. This would cover 3 months of aftercare for me, which I'd only need to have because I was going into the office. Why would I opt into that extra expense, especially when it's significant.
To even have a return-to-work policy one has to be a businese that was able to work from home in the first place. But a great many of us work in fields that never really had that option. So data about working from home being better or worse is inherently biased as it comes from only that subset of businesses that can easily make such a move. I propose that the people/jobs who can even consider the debate represent a minority and so any percieved advantages should not be automatically applied to all. No blanket statements.
I say this at 0530 saturday morning as i check my email before driving to my office. (No busses in my town on a saturday morning.)
More like dont make statements such as "all workers should be allowed standing desks" or "nobody should work saturdays" when clearly such things do not apply to enormous blocks of the population. We all need to remember that most people do not work similar jobs to ourselves, that our own experience is rarely ever applicable to the larger workforce.
> they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted
They knew what their employees wanted, they just didn't anticipate consequences. Aside from it almost being impossible to not have noticed everyone's opinion on this, if a manager actually doesn't know what their employees want maybe they should try to communicate with them? Or, more realistically, not willingly ignore them.
Poor executives! If only there had been some way to know employees would be unhappy about it /s
On another note, I found this note curious - this would imply that offices should be 70-80% full not half full. May be a bias in their survey data! “59% of full-time employees are back to being 100% on-site, while 29% are in a hybrid arrangement and 12% are completely remote, according to new data from WFH Research. Offices are still only half full compared to their pre-pandemic occupancy.“
A portion of office space needs to become more fungible. Work office pods of 4-8 offices or desks that are lockable if needed.
Small satellite offices that don't need big commutes would probably bring in more people. I like the idea of a small office that I can come into if I want - I just HATE commuting. I also hate open office spaces - its anti productive.
False title. The article states that they would have approached their plans differently. Regret is a much stronger emotion, but I guess we wouldn’t have clicked on the title without it.
I remember in covid times, everyone was on remote, we would just call each other, hang out in teams, discuss work, really collaborating. Low threshold for doing some ad-hoc discussions etc.
With the "hybrid" solution, when I am at the office "no-one" else is, can't really get everyone together anymore, some will be in office, others at home.
People in the office busy with talking to other non-project colleagues etc.
Must schedule everything etc.
Also, for international teams, going to an office in a country where maybe none of their closest co-workers are located, really make no sense at all. Yet due to some company policy people must clock-in, and will generally be less available to their respective teams.
"A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted"
sigh
The problem here isn't RTO or anything else relating to where people sit when they're working. These idiots didn't even talk to their employees before making grand decisions affecting their work situation.
This is, btw, exactly what's happening in my workplace right now. I guess more accurately they are talking to employees, but just straight up ignoring what they're hearing.
Can we stop promoting workplace consultant marketing masquerading as research to the front page?
No one reads the article. They see the headline and jump in make to make the same comments which might have been fresh and interesting on the first 20 return-to-office “research” pieces but now are simply tired and tiresome.
I think Work From Home vs Return To Workplace is now a pendulum. I wonder if it will swing back and forth, spurred on by radicals in both sides, until it goes out of control, or if it will come to rest at a central location?
I don't think that return-to-office is driven by executives, I think it's driven by owners. They simply have a religious belief that a slave you can't see is an indolent slave.
They think that WFH is an "obvious" inefficiency that they can pull back from and be rewarded with "free" productivity. The scare quotes around "free" are because they know that returning to work is done at the worker's expense rather than the company's, so they're running literally no risk even if it doesn't improve a thing.
Return-to-work is essentially giving everyone a pay cut based on an ideologically-based wager that it might help the bottom line. It's gambling for yourself, staked with employees' personal time and money, because you can.
I've noticed that CEO's who forced people back to the office really regretted it after the senior engineer's and related all quit. They offered to make it remote again but by that time all of their talent left so at least two companies I know of.
There is no amount of money that would get the best and most talented to go work in an office. Productivity suffers immensely in an office as opposed to working from home.
This happened at my old job. I left because of RTO (after trying to come to a reasonable agreement with my manager). Between the day I put in my two weeks' notice and my actual last day, there were at least seven farewell emails from other devs. The company was about 500 people, so that's >1% attrition in two weeks.
The CEO spoke to me for the first time ever trying to get me to stay, offered me a gigantic raise, etc. Leaving was the best thing I've done for my career.
Wow! I'm glad that everyone joined in your cause as well and the CEO offered you so much to stay. The best thing you could have done (and did!) was leave. Very happy for you.
I had to do a day in office for the first time in over a year.
The only positive was a feeling of engagement, which would quickly go away because my commute was turned into an hour ordeal each way.
Seems the city made a lot of changes to encourage bicycling, which is great for residents but it really f’ed up traffic.
So while the day in the office did recharge a bit of team enthusiasm, doing that daily with the new traffic patterns on my own time and dime, would wear thin quickly. I would find a different job if forced.
If I can be paged and forced to crack open the laptop and work whenever needed, (and I am), it really does not matter where I do my work, engagement be damned.
I found it very surprising that Zoom itself would about face on remote work. Even if they’re seeing real problems, keeping remote work will give them a meaningful incentive to fix those problems, and likely add up to a better product.
Companies that doesn’t provide flexible WFH will simply be less competitive in the jobs market. Ending up with candidates that aren’t good enough to work for WFH flexible companies.
Now that I'm working from home I voluntarily go to a co-working space. Interestingly, it has an open-office plan for the basic membership (although you can pay 6x and get a private office if you want). I find that I really like going there and I can concentrate fairly easily if I'm in that gear. The problem with working from home is that although you can have a private office with a really nice set-up, you really are completely by yourself. I am single and do not have roommates or pets, so it is just me and the furniture here. That's fine for a while, but there is something nice about just having other people walk past you once in a while.
no actual remorse
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