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Ask HN: Why certain companies are ending working from home?

• chrisbennet 10y ago
  For IBM and Yahoo at least, I think it was a head count reduction strategy. They wanted it to be inconvenient enough that employees would quit.
• jph 10y ago
  There's debate about this and I've seen a range of ways during my consulting. Some companies and teams strongly believe that all core teammates must be in the same room. Some companies and teams strongly believe in location independence. One of my clients has a very powerful example of how location independence helps scale many microservices, across dozens of developer locations, many timezones, and five worldwide SRE hosting centers. Surprisingly the success has little to do with mitigating commute time, nor working preferred hours, nor any of the usual claims. Instead, the success is mostly to do with enabling good asynchronous tooling such as chat, workflows, domain driven design ubiquitous language, and the composability of microservices ecosystems. After seeing this success and the careful management of it, and replicating it at my other clients, I'm a strong advocate of location independence and investment in the tooling to make it successful.
• mattbgates 10y ago
  My company moved me across the country just so I could work in an office. They claimed that "communication" was the most important reason for bringing all their employees into an office. However, I pretty much sit in a private cubicle and do not talk to anyone, really. So yeah, I don't think they really moved us here for that. They had even hired me as a "full-time employee" with full benefits, paid me to move across the country, and I was able to negotiate a very nice raise. Before that, I was working remotely as a "contractor" with no benefits, no vacation time, no 401k. Nothing. I also was happy to log on to my computer for my shift a half hour early and I even stayed late without complaint. My company would have a move-it-or-lose it policy during this new move of eliminating remote workers. Basically, you move from wherever you were living to the two main headquarters, located in two different states. Those that did not move would get laid off. I know of only one or two people who managed to bypass this rule and keep their jobs and work from home. At the same time, Marissa Meyer of Yahoo was also doing this same thing, "come work in an office or get out of our company", so I thought the "higher powers" were certainly highly influenced by her actions. They claimed otherwise. Unfortunately and fortunately, I was able to do it and moved. I love where they moved me. My life is far better than it was where I was living. Cost of living is cheaper and access to the country is better, but I do miss my family. However, they are only a plane ride away, so I try to go see them once a year or every other year. So I probably cost the company less money as a contractor, but they preferred to give me all benefits and pay me more if I came into an office. So why not? Anyways, I did later find out that, at least in the state I chose to move to, the state itself was giving the company tax breaks for the employees it hired, so I can only guess that whatever money they saved in taxes, they ended up giving to me. Win! Do I miss working from home? Absolutely. Do I see the importance of having to go into an office that is literally 5-10 minutes from where I live for 8-9 hours a day? Not at all. I don't think it improved communication one bit. If anything, my boss can now directly yell at me in person, instead of doing it via phone call. I'm sure he loves it. But every Friday, I go into the office for 3 hours and then I get to work from home the remainder of the shift, since me and only two others are in the office in the evenings on Friday nights, so my boss was nice enough to just say: "Just go home every Friday after 6 PM." There are reasons FOR and AGAINST why companies are doing it. I won't list them all here... because companies have their own reasons. Contractor working at home with no benefits, no health insurance, no sick days, and no vacation time--NOTHING vs. Full-time employee with a 401k, health insurance, vacation time, company parties, etc. Apparently, costs of employees were not really an issue for the company. I could weigh the benefits of working with no benefits: you create your own vacation time, take your computer with you... which is great, and no immediate boss constantly looking over your shoulder was nice. But all the costs of trying to get anything else were more expensive. It was a catch 22: Obamacare said I was making too much money, but after taxes, I could barely afford my rent. And at the time, the penalty for not having health insurance was still a year or two in the works, so it had not affected me to the extent where I needed to have some health insurance. On the other hand, having the benefits of the company healthcare had shielded me from the effects of Obamacare. Having official company vacation time and sick days are awesome. Seeing the benefits of whatever happens in the office -- including raises, company shared success (everyone gets a small % of the profits every year if the company does well), and yearly (once or twice a year) company parties is a nice benefit to actually working "for" and at the office.