25 ms·

Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

• rwmj 5y ago
  https://archive.is/8tuAH https://archive.is/8tuAH
• xvector 5y ago
  Can’t imagine not having at least partial WFH after this pandemic. If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. A good portion of my team is similarly minded, but management is insistent on disallowing WFH. I can’t wait to see their faces when the company bleeds massive swaths of engineering talent. It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that they are. Absolutely sick of this infantilizing, childish requirement to force employees to come into the office. People are not obligated to come into the office so you have someone to talk to, and the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth the countless hours of employees’ lives wasted in commute.
  • ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    They will be happy to replace you with a H1B worker (who himself will be happy to migrate from India to the USA). The current situation is temporary since COVID immigration restrictions remain in place.
    • xvector 5y ago
      I’ll have a new job. They can do what they want. Hiring fresh H1B employees to replace seasoned engineers rarely ends well. It’s part of the reason we get paid as much as we do. If I end up leaving because the company refuses to offer WFH, it won’t be getting a 2-week notice or any form of knowledge transfer from me.
      • dcow 5y ago
        I hear the thing these days is to see how long your former employer will pay you before realizing you aren't doing any work for them anymore. It sounds like a joke but I’ve seen it happen on multiple occasions. Coworker just stops showing up and 5 months later their Slack is deactivated.
        • doctor_eval 5y ago
          I’m not denying this happens but if they aren’t missed by their coworkers - who would presumably take the brunt of the work of the missing employee - then they weren’t really contributing. Plus, there’s something terribly wrong with a company that doesn’t notice this. And in Australia at least, the employee would probably end up having to repay their wages.
          • katbyte 5y ago
            And wouldn’t their manager be responsible for not noticing?
    • ericmay 5y ago
      Eh I don’t think so. If it comes to that Americans will just stop letting people come here to work and dismantle these programs. It’s actually something that has been unifying the Sanders/AOC and Trump camps for some time. I don’t know if he has but if not I don’t see Biden really changing much in terms of opening up/increasing H1B visas or any others in the foreseeable future. Maybe more refugees or asylum seekers though.
      • runawaybottle 5y ago
        The current state of affairs is that we have a labor shortage. The country needs more and more service workers. Tech is the go to backup plan for any college graduate (from any major), so the white collar work is perfectly saturated at the moment due to tech (not just developers, pm’s, sales, designers, etc). The only need for h1b are for the truly ruthless cost cutters. Otherwise, you can continuously undercut just here locally with new college graduates or career-changers (bootcamps, etc).
        • TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
          Wages haven't kept pace with productivity since the 70's, and income and wealth inequality has reached astronomical proportions. IMO its time for a bit of inflation and improved employee leverage.
          • jhawk28 5y ago
            Inflation isn't a good thing. It is probably going to exasperate the wealth inequality and I don't see how it will improve employee leverage. It is an invisible tax caused by government artificially increasing the money supply.
            • tick_tock_tick 5y ago
              Labor shortage plus inflation is the best thing possible for the people at the bottom of the economy.
            • 5y ago
    • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      It's going to be harder to justify a "shortage" of workers when companies cut themselves off from the remote worker pool. I have no doubt they will, but the lie will be much more obvious. Companies also won't be able to claim they hire the best if the rule out remote, but of course they'll still say it.
    • gmadsen 5y ago
      That is very job specific if H1B exist with the skills and experience needed
  • strgrd 5y ago
    The hybrid model is such a joke. For most, working in the office might as well be the 21st century business suit: an antiquated formality designed to demonstrate your obedience to authority. The hybrid model is a suit on a t-shirt. And forcing employees to be in the office X days a week means productivity on those WFH days will be nonexistent, especially if they butt against a weekend. But of course while the WFH life will be sweet for the next 5 or so years, increasingly invasive productivity/monitoring/presence tools will make us long for the days when we could walk away from the computer and not worry about triggering some inactivity alarm.
    • Raed667 5y ago
      I'm struggling with the idea of hybrid WFH. It still means that I need to live near the office. Instead of a cheaper, quieter place far away from cities. Besides making middle-management happy, I'm not sure what is the benefit of having one required day per week at the office.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • marcinzm 5y ago
        I've found that it's much harder to form social bonds, especially cross-team, when working remotely and never seeing people in person. Socializing via Zoom is not the same. The lack of lunch and hallway conversation hurts a lot without even getting into the outside of work socializing. That in turn leads to minor issues exploding because no one has a sense of empathy built for anyone else.
        • teucris 5y ago
          Came to make a comment like this. Some jobs are great to do entirely remotely and forcing workers in those roles to come into an office is completely outdated bullshit. But there are tons of jobs that require trust and collaboration. For those workers, in-person relationship building is a fundamental part of the job. We need to be clearer in our job titles and descriptions about that, so that there is less conflict in expectations of remote work.
  • fennecfoxen 5y ago
    I'll be distressed if we don't have at least optional work-from-office after the pandemic. I'm vaccinated. You're vaccinated. We're all adults. The company remains in possession of empty office space. Yet most firms seem to think the best thing to do is lead from behind, wait and see, until they can protect themselves by saying "i guess everyone is doing it".
    • xvector 5y ago
      Definitely channel that distress into anger. You hold the cards. Encourage the company to change, and vote with your feet if they don’t. WFH isn’t just a preference thing, having the option is about being treated with dignity like an adult. We are uniquely privileged to be in an industry where leaving for better jobs is common and rather doable.
      • fennecfoxen 5y ago
        I already did. I got fired from the job, found another job that gave me roughly a 60% raise (!) (including publicly tradeable equity), and now I rent a private office in a coworking space with some of the extra cash. This was a victory. A consequence of this is a price tag on how much anger I have, and it's fairly small. More peaceful for me this way.
  • endymi0n 5y ago
    I hear this a lot of times recently — what I'm interested by now is where the new equilibrium will be going forward. So far us software engineers have often seen jobs as replaceable and we know we'll have another one at the snip of a finger should we quit. But with enough people actually quitting, how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision? Genuinely curious here: Any of those quitting for the same reason recently, how hard was it to land an equally well paid remote job?
    • b3morales 5y ago
      > how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision? We'd have to take into consideration how the demand will change at the companies who are refusing remote work right now. I'd expect that it wouldn't diminish: they will still have business goals that will require developers to fulfill. They won't suddenly say "No software people want to work for us? Eh, we don't need them anyways. Let's build toasters instead".
    • claytonjy 5y ago
      I changed jobs recently, though not because the old one was going to make me come back to the office. I've never seen such a frothy job market, I had multiple offers for fully remote roles with a 20%+ raise. I'm a data engineer in the Midwest with just under a decade of experience. All these companies seem to be hiring plenty of other roles and levels of seniority as well.
      • cableshaft 5y ago
        You motivated me enough to finally update my Linked-In and mark it open for work. I'm also in the Midwest (near Chicago). If you don't mind me asking, to what extent did you put yourself out there? For the longest time I just pursue whatever recruiters reach out to me, but I think I should probably do more active searching this time around.
        • 5y ago
  • matsemann 5y ago
    > but management is insistent on disallowing WFH I think a lot of management will be out of a job in the future, and they are grasping for control. Not saying we don't need managers, just that there are lots of fat that can be removed, and people have noticed lots of the managers weren't needed or invisible when WFH.
    • trebligdivad 5y ago
      Having worked from home for ~8 years, I don't think it actually makes that much difference - you still end up with a manager who is responsible for making sure they can handle problems you have or about you and asking you to do things, and you still have managers associated with the projects you work on (those may or not be in any way related). The ones who randomly rearrange the seating however can disappear.
      • dvtrn 5y ago
        The ones who randomly rearrange the seating however can disappear. Reads to me like this is the exact chaff being separated from the wheat in the parent comment, and you know what: good. The less managers like that, the better for labor and the workforce at large IMO. I think a few of us have had that manager and hopefully learned how not to lead and motivate people.
      • me_here_alone 5y ago
        I am a manager that has been full-time WAH for 15+ years. A leader who understands their role should be empowering people to do their jobs, and providing them the tools they need to do it, be it in the office, at home, or on another planet even. That's what leaders do. If they think their job is to monitor and micromanage their teams, then they are not leaders, just bad managers. Leaders see the value in employees creating a situation where they increase their productivity. I really don't care where my employees work as long as they meet clearly defined goals and objectives. They know what they need to do, and I trust them to figure out how best to accomplish it!
    • silvestrov 5y ago
      Just like with developers there is a huge difference between a mediocre and a splendid manager, both in productivity and how nice they are to work with. WFH just makes the difference much more obvious.
  • ck425 5y ago
    Companies that don't allow partial WFH confuse me. All my employers, even before the pandemic, have allowed ad-hoc WFH whenever. It worked fine. If the team had a meeting or day where we all needed to be in we just said so and worked around anyone who had to WFH at certain times or days. There was never any official policy, people were just trusted to be sensible. Got a GP or dentist appointment near home, just WFH. Feeling under the weather but not so bad that you take a sick day, WFH. Need a day to focus, WFH. Hell if you know you're going to have a hangover, WFH (you never said so but it was an open secret and no one cared so long as the work got done). It was great and I can't see any downside to it at all.
    • solipsism 5y ago
      That kind of ad hoc WFH is very common, but it's different from a policy that permits N days a week WFH.
    • mech422 5y ago
      I've been remote/WFH for the past 20 years, and it gets more common every year. For the past 4-5 years, I haven't even worked for companies in the same time zone/continent. Its never been an issue for me personally/professionally. The EU companies I've worked for seemed based around the 'life happens, just get your work done' premise.
  • dheera 5y ago
    Personally I look forward to hybrid but where I decide when to go in to the office as needed to get work done. Probably that would mean 2-3 days a week for me, given the kind of engineering work I do. I'm actually tired of staying home all day every day because of work. I actually kind of enjoy "going somewhere" for the day, seeing the sun rise, smelling the fresh bread and coffee as I pass the bakery, seeing restaurants setting up for the day, and the world waking up together with me as I step outside. Somehow that sensual experience gives me a sort of motivation to get stuff done. In my current commute situation it meas going from peninsula to SF for the day, which also means I get to have lunches in the city that I wouldn't otherwise get at home, and can meet people after work who live in the city. My work is also a couple blocks from the Caltrain station, and so the commute isn't really an issue, I just walk into this big metal box and keep working and I appear in SF an hour later, it's actually kind of relaxing, and I just like trains in general, and looking out the window watching the entire Bay Area fly by me without me having to drive. In the evening on the return ride I see the fog rolling over the mountains as I look out the train window, and that's relaxing too, and as I pass by about 10 other bay area towns, I can choose any single one of them to get off the train and have dinner, or bike around the town just for the hell of it, to get some exercise. I don't want to commute for face time though. Rather, I'd do it for things like a big space with proper air conditioning, sunlight, and conference rooms without annoying gas leaf blowers that linger in front of my front door exactly when I'm having meetings. I also work on industrial-sized robots, and even if the company were to buy extra hardware, it's pretty impossible/unsafe to be running that kind of stuff at home. It's enormously more efficient to sit in front of the actual thing than to try to cope with a video feed. I'm a bit of an ambivert, slighly more introverted, but not an extreme introvert. I do enjoy company, and I do miss the lunch conversations about wild and awesome things that I didn't get during the pandemic. I've also found time and time again at past organizations that those in-person socializing circumstances enormously helped build mutual trust with coworkers (specifically peers, not managers or subordinates) for when things actually went wrong. We're social animals and it's still hard to get around that biological fact. Moving to the middle of nowhere to get cheaper rent and a bigger work space isn't really what I want to do either, because I do like having access to public transportation and food from around the world, including the grocery stores of the ethnic foods I'm used to eating. I'm kind of happy living in a cosmopolitan/global part of the world. I hate the high rents, admittedly, but I realize I can't have it all. But yeah, no, I wouldn't commute or do hybrid to please management. It's just me. I still want to make the decision about when to go in myself based on circumstances.
  • vl 5y ago
    I suspect that most of the drive to get back to the office is coming from the middle manager. You just can’t do ass sniffing at home at it’s essential for their carrier advancement in the megacorps.
    • culopatin 5y ago
      Oh man do I feel this. I used to report to the director, just one step below the VP. Zero issues. Everything went smoothly. My team is very independent and we interacted with the guy like once a month, he’d just ask about one particular issue and move on. Everyone is retiring here and they want to prepare new blood, that means unnecessary middle management. Everyone has them, but I was lucky. Until 2020. This new guy wants to meet once a week. Got us all in the office FIRST, while everyone else was still WFH. I do need to be onsite for a few things, but I live 3 miles from work and being on call had been working great, but you think he was listening? Now I just spend my time sitting at the office when I could be letting my dog out with the same productivity. Additionally he has no power of making any decisions that matter, so talking to him is useless. He doesn’t have the courage to transmit messages to other teams that could be a problem for someone else, so we are basically gagged. And whenever something happens he will defend himself, not us, so we are pretty much abandoned. The decline in quality of my position went from an easy 90 to a 10 in a matter of months. In other words, my happy job turned into me looking for a job.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • d110af5ccf 5y ago
    > ... the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth ... Crazy idea - install a whiteboard at home and point a 4k camera at it. The broke college student version of this involves a pen, paper, and the camera on your cellphone; it works quite well.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      Whiteboard area in a conference room has some challenges to recreate. That said, we've found collaborative editing replaces a lot of sloppy handwriting and people capturing with smartphones and recreating after the meeting. To say nothing of the fact, that wealthy SV companies complaining that they have to structure their entire companies arounf in-person because virtual whiteboards are a really hard problem should be basically ridiculed. I actually agree that in-person get-togethers are useful. I'm just not convinced they can't be handles as quarterly events in many situations--as many companies with distributed workforces already do.
      • d110af5ccf 5y ago
        I didn't mean to claim 100% equivalence, just to point out how trivial it is to replace the core functionality if that's really what the issue is. Personally I think that collaborative editing tools are a strict improvement in all areas except for free form diagrams. > virtual whiteboards Even a fully virtual equivalent is fairly trivial. Just buy a damn drawing tablet already! Being good enough to do commercial artwork on, they're all but guaranteed to far exceed the needs of any software developer.
      • lazide 5y ago
        Having used said virtual whiteboards - they suck. Most of ‘whiteboarding’ is the low lag communication, body language, ease of just ‘doing something’ by hand. In my experience, the connection issues, lack of ability to get good fidelity in communication, random glitches and other issues, just ruins the majority of it. Not having a terrible commute or paying 10x the national average for a closet to live in are definitely a strong plus in the other column though for sure.
  • FpUser 5y ago
    Never mind that. In some companies HR mandates meetings on various social and workplace issues where they essentially being told what they should think. This blatant disregard for freedom of thought makes me think of nothing short of "politinformation" meetings in good old USSR. Teambuilding outings especially when forced and on weekends fall into the same category. I am very lucky that I was employed only in one company before going on my own and never had to deal with the crap like that personally but I saw it happen to other people.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    Our CEO wanted everyone back in the office even after agreeing that fully remote resulted in no perveptible decline in productivity. The rationale is that serendipitous interactions happen more often in person, which I believe, but not enough to come back in full time. Anyway, engineering was pretty clear that we would have even more attrition if we had to come back in, and the CEO relented. I’m trying to think of a less dramatic way to describe the aftertaste of that interaction, but all I can come up with was that it felt a bit like servitude—like this person felt he could dictate to me where I would do my work including an unpaid commute (it’s not like my work depends on me being in a factory, for example). I’m thankful that my skill set is basically on fire right now and I can go elsewhere without losing money, but at the same time sad for everyone else who lacks that luxury.
    • kibwen 5y ago
      > it felt a bit like servitude A feudalistic remnant in the nature of corporate hierarchy is that people higher up in the hierarchy feel that this gives them inherent superiority over people lower in the hierarchy. In reality, there's no reason that someone in a corporate hierarchy needs to have their status (including compensation, etc.) determined by their place in the hierarchy. A hierarchy should just be an efficient means to organize a group effort, and not a social order.
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        Agreed, and in fairness the fact that it was such a noteworthy experience means that it is rare, at least in my life. For the most part the hierarchy has been just a means to organize a group effort. And even then I prevailed. I think that says a lot about the intervening progress.
      • neutronicus 5y ago
        It's possible that the rank-and-file will only follow leaders who have been granted outsize status. That way, executive compensation would need to be high even if value over replacement executive is low.
  • neilwilson 5y ago
    The 'hybrid model' is just a marketing trick to try and force people back to offices using the Fear of Missing Out routine. It's classic foot in the door sales psychology. Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote and understands that remote can only work properly if everybody is operating in the same mode - precisely to avoid the natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical room. A good way of judging all this is to start costing your time from the moment you start getting ready for work to the moment you stop thinking about it and start doing something else. When you do that, you'll often be shocked at your hourly rate. We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device?
    • thakoppno 5y ago
      > to the moment you stop thinking about it In that case, i work 168 hours a week and i’m the most productive when walking my dog.
      • rorykoehler 5y ago
        This is the truth. Measuring work in hours only makes sense for work that you can only do when 100% applying yourself to the task (like brick laying or stacking shelves). Most of my high value output happens when I'm in the shower, riding my bike or going for a walk.
      • neilwilson 5y ago
        If that's your "consideration" then charge for it. It's what other time based professionals such as lawyers do. e.g. https://sherborneslaw.co.uk/pricing/ https://sherborneslaw.co.uk/pricing/
    • pawelwentpawel 5y ago
      > We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device? Assuming that there is ~260 working days in a year, subtracting 30 years for holiday we have roughly 230 days that one would have to commute on. My average London commute was 1 hour each way. That's 2 hours per day. That's 10 hours per week. 460 hours per year. 4.6k hours over a decade. This is not a chill "going on a trip" time in a train - it is stressful rush hours madness, breathing underground air and constantly bumping into a crowd of frustrated commuters who happen to be power walking the opposite way. To put this into perspective and assuming that an average working day is 8 hours, over the last 10 years I could've easily spent 19 months of full time work commuting during rush hours. Also ironically ~20 years of commuting adds to almost 10k hours which supposedly would put me on a world-class expertise level in terms of being a train passenger. The problem is I'm a Software Engineer, not a professional underground train passenger.
  • elevenoh 5y ago
    >Absolutely sick of this infantilizing, childish requirement to force employees to come into the office. It's not infantilizing or childish. There's pros & cons. Find a company that aligns with what you seek. To each company their own.
  • jjav 5y ago
    > If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. Agreed. I hope to never work in an office again. It's a horrible concept. I was ok with office work during the first 15+ years of my career when I had a private office. That works very well. Commute was annoying, but I'll take it. But then came the cubicles. Ugh. Then came the open office nightmare. I will never be in an open office again. Not an option, full stop. You want my expertise? The options are remote or private office.
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    We already had partial WFH - my company has a lot of developers late in their career (aged 50+), they've been through the mill and can't be fucked with stupid hours anymore. And don't need constant supervision either. Another thing; partial work from home has been a thing over here for a long time now, called "the new working". In practice though, it was just as bad as the open office, in that it was a tactic to reduce the amount of office space needed. Because some clipboard warrior decided that office space was their biggest expense, not staff, nor the realization that they can do more with the same staff if they make some changes to improve their productivity - e.g. no open offices, fixed workspaces, and a goal in their career.
  • BatteryMountain 5y ago
    I think asking employees to come in, say once a month is a pretty cool balance. So on that day that everyone comes together, rather make it a social thing and not a sit and work day. Have a friendly townhall and focus on cohesion & empathy. Ask them what they need, if their home circumstances can be improved etc. They can have a much smaller office space (can be fancier since it is smaller) for people to meet if they really need to (specifically client facing), then there are internet & coffee & snacks, desks & couches available. 90% staff don't have to go to the office to be honest. And the rest of the money being saved on having smaller offices can be funneled to employee bonuses/benefits or gear (better desks/chairs if you are chair-bound) (more frequent upgrades or let the employee choose what gear they want (within reason)), (at work I have 1x 24" 1080p screen, at home I have 2x 27" 1440p but I bought it with my own money... (which is the ultimate size and density for programming for me)), (decent webcam & dedicated microphone and good headphones), paid for tooling (like gitkraken/jetbrains/pluralsight subscriptions). Stuff like that will make a huge difference.
  • steveville 5y ago
    You might as well stay at home and do nothing because no one wants to work around whiny crybabies like you,anyway.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes. Not necessarily refusing to work in an office. The headline is misleading. It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms: > In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000. The higher turnover is expected in a booming economy like the one we’re in. These articles with hyperbolic headlines and underwhelming actual data are very common right now. It feels like the journalists want us to believe some sort of revolution is happening, be it WFH or remote work or people quitting in droves. I’m beginning to think the reality is mostly a boring return to pre-pandemic normalcy, though, given how hard these articles are teaching for something noteworthy to share.
  • repsilat 5y ago
    >> It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms: > In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000. If those are monthly figures they are roughly going from "quit once every five years" to once every three. It's a pretty big change, I think. Positive, IMO -- mobility is healthy for the economy.
    • karaterobot 5y ago
      But the caveat should be that we can't extrapolate from a unique event like emerging from an 18-month quarantine, which is the context of this entire phenomenon. I think that at least part of the original commenter's point is that the article shouldn't try to frame what may well be a temporary correction as a revolutionary shift, which I agree is what it's trying to do.
      • beezle 5y ago
        Exactly. It should be expected that (for many people) after 18 months there would be an excess of people who would have wanted to leave, if they could. Now that they can, there is a log jam at the exit door.
• cyberlurker 5y ago
  I actually don’t mind one way or the other, but I just want a clear rationale for over riding the employees preference. I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM. I do it at work and then shortly afterwards with friends on discord. The real reasons for return to office should be tangible. If you have metrics that people are taking advantage, share them. The only thing I’ve seen so far is out of this world productivity increases.
  • cratermoon 5y ago
    > I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM Different people have different work styles. The water cooler theory is predicated on random, unplanned interactions, which are much harder over those channels. At the proverbial water cooler, an employee might engage with someone they had not planned to speak with, or maybe don't even know, and get some information or connection of value. Maybe you overhear* a couple of other people talking there and you join the conversation because the subject happens to impact you. I'm not sure how well that's replicated by Discord/Slack channels. After a year+ WFH during the Inside Times, I have come to see the value of at least quarterly, if not monthly, face-to-face team meetings or casual events. Of course, if you have employees in different cities, like west and east coast, you can't affordably meet very often. * I would hope people would not have a conversation that should be private in a public space, so being overheard is not a bad thing.
  • dheera 5y ago
    It's also worth noting that there's a huge bias toward pure software engineers on HN. I do software, but I have to work with some large industrial hardware and it's so much easier to just have the hardware in front of you. Especially when you have to from time to time set up hardware that isn't even on the network yet. Telepresence just isn't there yet, and the quality of internet connections and videoconference tools still suck. I have dual 4K monitors and still get 720p feeds or worse on most videoconference tools, you can't even read a damn whiteboard with that, let alone push physical reset buttons or e-stop buttons on actual hardware.
    • 5y ago
• akmarinov 5y ago
  That’s good, it’ll naturally lead to companies that are either WFH only or office only and people will have their pick. Everyone wins.
  • forz877 5y ago
    Unless one performs better than the other.
• roland35 5y ago
  I had a job where I worked in a cubical next to the main door, unfortunately also next to the head of engineering's office. I actually got in trouble with him because I would frequently walk by* and also a lot of people would talk to me as they hung around the area (literally the water cooler...). The experience completely soured me on the whole company, and as soon as I could I found a remote working job and am much happier now! *after I was told I walked around too much I kept an internal record of every time I left my desk and for what reason. It turns out, the main reasons I walked by was 1) meetings, 2) lab work, and 3) bathroom. I was hoping he would bring it up again so I could show him the Excel sheet!
  • xvector 5y ago
    I find it kind of absurd that management thinks it’s appropriate to chastise employees as if they are naughty children. It’s dehumanizing to say the least. Why does management care what I do in my free time, so long as I get my job done? It’s a power trip, plain and simple. I hope you gave a reason if they asked why you’re leaving.
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    I used to walk around the office a lot because I'm a fidgeter. At home as well, I rarely stay seated for long.
• deleted 5y ago
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• sam0x17 5y ago
  I've been working from home for the last 5 years, and I'm never going back. I get more done, I have more energy throughout the day, and it makes it much easier to put family first (which is one reason I think FANG and others are so afraid -- they lose a little bit of control).
  • xvector 5y ago
    It is most definitely a control thing. Companies are afraid to lose the iron grip they have over the lives of employees.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      > iron grip Jeez, give it a rest. Companies don't give a crap about your life. None have ever showed the slightest interest in anything I do when not at work.
      • obmelvin 5y ago
        I feel your point, but obviously not every work environment is the same.
        • WalterBright 5y ago
          The phrase "people like ice cream" does not mean "all people like ice cream".
          • obmelvin 5y ago
            That's true, but it's weird to tell someone to give it a rest because you have a different experience.
      • xvector 5y ago
        If this was really the case, WFH would be a no-brainer and would not meet so much resistance from management. Most companies clearly care more about the fact that they can account for the time you’re in office, as opposed to how productive you actually are.
• bigmattystyles 5y ago
  Ask again when the job market isn’t as good. And be careful, when layoffs come, those that aren’t seen as much will be thought off as less useful, even if it’s untrue. I’m for WFH where possible but let’s not pretend time zones and in person interactions, just to name a few benefits of colocation have no benefit or that they don’t appeal to anyone. Personally, my personality is such that I need to be at the office to be productive. I don’t actually think I’m in the minority.
  • xvector 5y ago
    Sure, but how many years of my life will I waste, wringing my hands in fearful anticipation of when the job market tanks? Either way, I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to get a job, or have enough saved to weather the storm. In the meantime, the sense of freedom that comes from WFH is unparalleled.
    • bigmattystyles 5y ago
      You got kids? :-)
      • luffapi 5y ago
        WFH with kids is amazing. You get to see them grow up and can move to a lower cost of living area where they can have room, a yard… It’s definitely the most family friendly working arrangement.
        • bigmattystyles 5y ago
          I was talking more about the stress of keeping the same standard of living during a downturn. Again, I am pro-WFH but fear the vulnerability one is in when not seen in person. I've been bit before. Perhaps it's a critical mass thing, the more people WFH, the more my fears will assuage, but for the time being, I guess I just don't know. Remember, during a down turn, the company wouldn't even have to lay you off to get rid of you, just rescind their WFH policy. If you're far away, they know you won't relocate.
• mlang23 5y ago
  I cant wait until I can go back to the office 100%. WFH, while convenient, is something I never wanted. I didnt want it 20 years ago when I started to work, and I dont want it full time today either, even with the covid experience. Human interaction is not tradable, and online conferencing sucks even more then a real meeting.
  • brabel 5y ago
    Good for you. Just don't be surprised if you're the only one at the office when you get there, though. You might need to find human interaction outside work.
    • marcinzm 5y ago
      Being the only one talking to the VPs and CEO in the office during lunch is probably going to be a great career boost. So don't be surprised when the people who go into the office get the nice promotions and you don't. Interestingly my whole team is very much in favor of being in the office a few days a week.
      • xvector 5y ago
        Most promotions happen by moving jobs anyways, so eh.
        • marcinzm 5y ago
          And the best jobs go to personal referrals from those who are trusted. Which is easier if the VP you used to work with is vouching for you than if they don't know you.
      • bootlooped 5y ago
        I think a lot of people on the 100% remote side of the debate are heavily underestimating the value of relationship building and team cohesion (for most people). You can't replace the frequent face to face social interactions, lunches, and drinks after work with a Zoom call. We are social animals and the more channels there are in an interaction (words, voice, body language, etc...) the richer that interaction is, and the more we get out of it. A likely counter to this will be "well I don't care about those things", ok, that's fine, but that is not true for everybody.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Make the office worth going to. Have socials that are interesting enough to come to. Meetings all day should be done digitally since we have a globalized economy. Organize in person events that are worth attending. Maybe we found a new purpose of management…
• k__ 5y ago
  I have to admit, after I fought for remote work with a bunch of hiring managers before the pandemic, I feel quite a bit Schadenfreude right now. Also, I think, in the long run remote work will level the playing field between introverts and extroverts quite a bit.
  • foobiekr 5y ago
    It will not because remote only will continue to be rare. There’s a bit of a Harrison Bergeron thinking there.
    • metalcore 5y ago
      Why would it? Are you reading the replies here? Most people want it. I doubt that management will be able to continue keeping it down.
    • halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
      Take a look at Dice, Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs, Github Jobs, etc. Look at the amount of remote positions there are now. Objectively, your comment is false.
      • foobiekr 5y ago
        Let’s see where things are in 18 months. As someone who hires, remote at least does have its pluses - one can reasonably expect comp (costs) to decline and perks are gone. Not sure why I wouldn’t just hire a team in Eastern Europe though once remote is the way.
        • halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
          You're not going to hire a team in Eastern Europe for the same reasons why, in our current time, most companies don't use that method of hiring: time zone differences, language/culture differences and size of qualified talent pool. American developer salaries are so high not just because they're located in high COL areas, it's because most of the high performing developer talent is in the US. This isn't saying there isn't talent in Europe but per capita, the US has the lion share of the talent.
• teeray 5y ago
  WFH will also be the ultimate hiring perk. It now basically costs nothing, since the costs have already been realized. Also, everybody wants it, so it’s high value among candidates. You can basically offer the same comp as a current employer but add WFH and you have a compelling offer.
  • forz877 5y ago
    WFH already has been a hiring perk for many who were willing to put in the effort to get there.
• dhruvrrp 5y ago
  I don't think people quitting directly correlates to WFH. A bunch of people I know who wanted to quit during the pandemic are quitting now instead. No one wanted to risk being unemployed during the pandemic.
  • foobiekr 5y ago
    This. I know a ton of people who were planning to move going into 2020 who put it off because interviewing is still a massive clusterfuck right now. I’ve been warning the execs I deal with that they should expect a massive uptick in the exit of competent people in the coming months as things normalize.
  • symlinkk 5y ago
    Ironically with the increase in unemployment pay and stimulus packages, it probably would have been better to be unemployed during the pandemic
    • iaw 5y ago
      > Ironically with the increase in unemployment pay and stimulus packages, it probably would have been better to be unemployed during the pandemic Not for a large chunk of the HN audience. The stimulus and unemployment don't come close to covering the six-figure salaries many on here get paid.
• marmada 5y ago
  I think there's a pretty big downside to WFH: lack of in-person contact reduces team bonds which causes much more... volatility? I.e arguments are more likely to spiral out of control since you don't really know other people / care about them. A concrete hypothesis might be: Less people would have left Base Camp if they were not remote.
  • theli0nheart 5y ago
    I mean, it’s your choice if you don’t want to meet up with your team. Lunch or coffee probably won’t be forbidden by company policy.
    • forz877 5y ago
      Not really true is it? WFH can mean I'm in Seattle and you're in San Diego. Not exactly a quick trip to the local cafe.
      • theli0nheart 5y ago
        What you're describing seems more like a remote gig. I don't read WFM and remote as the same thing. Remote is WFM but WFM is not necessarily remote. You can have an in-office job that's WFM for 4 days per week, but that's not remote.
• 41209 5y ago
  Good. I intend to find a fully remote role and then move back to a cheaper city. Not everyone needs to live in San Francisco
• paulpauper 5y ago
  Despite a lot people leaving the workforce permanently, the stock market keeps going up, GDP forecasts are very strong, and so are corporate profits. It goes to show the remarkable ability of companies to adapt in the face of adversity, and also the resiliency of the US consumer ,especially the high-end consumer. "If 50% of employees quit, fine, we'll just boost the productivity by 100% of the 50% who remain using cloud, zoom, and other services"
  • lowkey 5y ago
    Given the high-inflation environment we seem to be in currently, I wonder if employees might actually start to capture some of that increased productivity in the form of increased compensation? I don't expect employers to pay more willingly, but if these supply/demand changes continue, perhaps they won't have an alternative?
  • enraged_camel 5y ago
    The stock market has been going up because the Fed has not stopped pumping money into it.
  • iaw 5y ago
    > the stock market keeps going up It's not because of productivity gains, the Fed has been pumping money into the economy without regard for inflation and we're finally seeing the financial system respond. everything is more expensive, not just stocks.
    • CameronNemo 5y ago
      While this is true, the stock market gained something like 20% while CPI is sitting at ~5%.
• eyeball 5y ago
  I need to figure out how to segregate my work issued laptop from the rest of my home network when I'm working from home. I don't trust work IT to not be scanning traffic on my home network.
• The_Colonel 5y ago
  I'm convinced that distributed teams, where team members need to cooperate a lot, will be almost always (often significantly) less productive than co-located teams. I'll mention something trivial yet having strong effects. While working, I often come up with a bunch of random work questions. When co-located, I often look at the person who could answer / I could discuss with. Are they in the office currently? Are they currently looking deeply focused or are they already distracted / looking bored so asking them would not probably cause an issue? If yes, I can ask them and get an immediate answer to solve a problem / clarify my thinking etc. There's no corresponding possibility with WFH which leads me to shooting an IM which is often answered too late thus delaying the problem-solving. You could say that the difference between getting an answer in 1 minute or 10 minutes does not make much difference, but in reality it can have big consequences. With 10 minutes latency, you've probably already switched contexts and will take a look at the answer later, thus introducing even more delay. Another thing I noticed that different people manage differently with WFH. Some people communicate often and even build relationships over Zoom calls with ease. Such people typically have great communication / interpersonal skills in the first place. But OTOH there are people who hardly ever initiate communication, very often keep muted in most calls etc. Those are usually the more quiet ones in IRL, but in WFH they are even quieter, and it shows. This is very much amplified when the team did not ever meet each other IRL. I think that the "best WFH performers" can form great distributed teams. But it's not going to work for the majority of teams, who are likely to see productivity decrease. I actually believe most of the WFH communication problems could be solved / mitigated with better technology (VR office), but we're simply _nowhere near_ that.
• 3853126461 5y ago
  You are a lazy piece of shit!!! I hope you all quit so you don’t get unemployment. I have never herd of such stupid words come out of a persons mouth. Lose your cars and home then live in the streets I will laugh my ass off. Oh but you would want welfare because you are entitled, the only thing you are entitled to is get off your ass and go back to work like the people who have been on the front line this entire pandemic. There are plenty of qualified people to do your jobs, people like you are why the world is having a shortage on about everything that is a commodity. Let’s talk about wasted time like every time your lazy fat ass gets hungry you stay logged on and go fix a snack which takes 20-30 minutes and then you have to shit for the third time in the am and don’t forget you tend to your kids for another 20-30 minutes because your husband who is supposed to be working from home is out mowing the lawn, because you want to get a early start to the weekend and you don’t want to use your personal time to mow and clean the house. You are a piece of work!!!! Then let’s talk about the amount of work accomplished, you can’t complete the task because it takes approval or some kind of input from someone else but your not going to the office until Monday ,oh did I mentioned it was Tuesday and the person who has to sigh off on your task won’t be in until Thursday and then again you won’t get it until the following Monday now two weeks ave gone by for something that you could have walked over to there cubicle and had them sign off in 15 minutes or less. You and everyone like you is why we are in the state we are in. I hope you do quit and take your lazy friends with you. The average person working from home is working less than 50% of the time and accomplishing even less so quit we will hire people who want a job and are willing to show up to work for it. Thank you to all those who have continued to put there self out there, so lazy pieces of shit could either wfh (lmfao) or collect unemployment good luck to you and your family I fill sorry for your pitiful children who will suffer because of your laziness and take a shower I can smell you from here. I know you will also do that while you are on the clock.
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• sigstoat 5y ago
  i’ve gone back in to the office a few days just for change of pace. i’d forgotten that they buy the cheapest kleenex, and the cheapest toilet paper. but hey there’s an endless supply of sugary drinks to tempt me all day.
• ushkarev 5y ago
  Personally speaking, I cannot wait to have the opportunity to be back to the office 100% of the time. I just cannot cope with the lack of proper division between my home life and work life. Some of my colleagues agree, but I obviously recognise the fact that most do not. Even before the pandemic our organisation had hybrid working conditions and I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re aiming for again in the near future; for good or for ill.
  • loloquwowndueo 5y ago
    “ lack of proper division between my home life and work life.” This tells me you’re doing WFH wrong or don’t have enough discipline for it. That’s okay, wfh is not for everyone, but don’t blame this on anyone but yourself. There are tons of ways to have that proper separation, including but not limited to, replacing the transitional commute with a walk to switch contexts. You can find a lot of tips and techniques on the web. When I’m done with work for the day, I’m done, and it doesn’t intrude in my home life, even though my “office” is literally in the next room.
    • seoaeu 5y ago
      I'm sorry, but seriously how out of touch do you have to be that 14+ months into the pandemic you still think that people can't have poor WFH experiences for reasons out of their control?
      • pdimitar 5y ago
        Can you give a few examples of those reasons?
        • seoaeu 5y ago
          Lack of a dedicated home office, children/family members interrupting, noisy surroundings, bad setup, etc. I'd argue that "brain chemistry unsuited for WFH" qualifies as well.
• dls2016 5y ago
  My last job was remote even before pandemic, but the pandemic was used as an excuse to fire people... who a few months later turned into off shore replacements. Thankfully I received an SBIR which will cover half my salary for a few months. But it’s also a good time to quit due to child and health care tax credits!
  • vmception 5y ago
    "Revenue crunch used as excuse to lower overhead costs" man, employees are never going to get it and they resist unionizing? see you in 100 years this is hilarious
    • dls2016 5y ago
      I fully agree regarding unions or even co-ops. The managers at this job wanted me to have ideas about the future of the product... that is, do their managing for them. Why would I contribute in that manner after you demonstrated your view of the workers as disposable?! I will take my ideas and capture the value, myself or with a like-minded group. Not be the phd face lending legitimacy to your mismanaged business.
• okareaman 5y ago
  Social and Economic Effects of the [Bubonic] Plague Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them. https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plague/effects/social.php https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plagu...
  • lainga 5y ago
    And for about 150 years they enjoyed such a rise in living standards, until the gains were erased in the early 1500s, leading to the Great Peasants' War in Germany.
  • jlos 5y ago
    Don't get too excited. Labor laws were passed forcing workers to take their pre-plague and limiting their mobility. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351
• gnicholas 5y ago
  Can someone whose company is doing hybrid WFH share a bit about how zoom and in-person meetings are scheduled and happen? Do people coordinate their in-person days so that meetings can be in-person? How do zoom meetings happen when some employees are in a meeting room together, and others are on zoom? It’s easy enough to have a big screen in that room to put remote participants on-screen, but how do remote people know who is talking or see all around the room? Where are cameras placed?
  • detaro 5y ago
    > How do zoom meetings happen when some employees are in a meeting room together, and others are on zoom? Generally, remote attendants means everyone takes the call from their desk. (some exceptions if the structure allows it, e.g. people in a meeting room present to a distributed audience, but for general meetings that's the default)
  • DanHulton 5y ago
    I did hybrid at a company a couple years ago, and the way we solved the meeting problem was that everyone at the in-person meeting would connect via their laptop as well. All in-person laptops would be on mute except one, who would have a good camera that could capture the room. I found it pretty natural to _also_ look at the camera while also looking around the room, as if you were just making eye contact with a new person. And while the "highlight" border would only ever show for one in-person person, cameras are usually close enough that your eye is naturally drawn to whomever's mouth is moving.
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• FpUser 5y ago
  >"management is insistent on disallowing WFH." Color me surprised. For some managers it may become a time where they'd have to look for a new job and likely not because that was what they wanted. Yes there are very good managers that help great deal in facilitating development. I am sure those would be just fine. But I suspect there are more managers who are busy with nothing but convincing the rest of the company that they are needed and irreplaceable while doing useless work.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  WFH doesn't seem worth all this anger. It emphasizes to me that Internet rage/outrage is a social activity, to a degree, an exciting opportunity to join with others, share emotions with them, and have some power.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  People are not atomic units at work. They are part of teams and part of a larger organization. The question is not where you work best, but where the teams and larger organization work best. Silicon Valley leaders, such as Google, have long invested significant resources in incentivizing people to stay at the office - great food, massages, ping pong, lectures, etc. The value of being at the office hasn't changed, and Silicon Valley already experimented with mostly remote work and rejected it, years ago. I remember Yahoo (IIRC) abruptly canceling their experiment and bringing people back to the office. I'm surprised to see some SV companies now planning for WFH. Nothing has changed in that regard, especially for them - it's not like their employees didn't understand how to use Zoom and were forced to do it by the pandemic, like people in less tech-savvy industries.
• doctor_eval 5y ago
  Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online. The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business. I want to be able to jump on the whiteboard at a moments notice and maybe pull in a couple of others, while other people in the office can also listen in. This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business. If the sales guy and I are having a discussion and the junior front end developer hears us, he gets a sense of how we work that he’ll never get if the meeting is held in PMs on Slack or Discord. I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office. I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary. I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first. But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
  • logicslave 5y ago
    Right, so you want whats best for you and your profitability, with no consideration of the expense to the employee.
  • cookiengineer 5y ago
    I think that most people that hate working in the office don't hate it because of the office - they hate it because of focus quality. A social obligation here, a senseless chat there, a coffee here...a person reminding you about an unimportant email there. There are just way too many distractions from work, at work. And those distractions are what people describe as "corporate life" because corporates over-micro-managed everything. Open office spaces are horrible, except for the people not having to work in them - which coincidentially always decide pro open office work space. If the work culture is manifested in interrupting your colleagues over unimportant stuff all the time, it's perceived as toxic by engineering people because they lose valueable focus time. That is essentially what it boils down to. Add the additional time required to get there (and costs on the side of the employee for commute) and you have the perfect formula to get rid of quality work people. While there are upsides of working in the office, there's also huge downsides that management likes to ignore in the discussion.
• rkedii 5y ago
  If it has to be hybrid only, then how about going into office for one week a month and the employees can pick whichever days they want to go in person to office and do WFH the rest of the month. I feel like this will make employees collaborate more and choose to come in person on specific days all together.
• rkedii 5y ago
  If it really has to be hybrid only, would it be better if the in person office was set to one week a month? That way the remaining 3 weeks employees can do WFH, and also decide which one week/5days they would like to go in person. I feel like this approach would make it more collaborative for employees as they can decide which days they want to go in person, probably pick a day when some/few office colleagues want to go into the office. Any important meetings can also be set for those days. People wouldn’t have to move to their actual cities in this fashion, also companies would still be seeing people in the office. Just a thought.
• idkwhoiam 5y ago
  IMO these people are shooting themselves in the foot long term. If companies learn to WFH full time these people will eventually be replaced with cheaper labour from oversees.
  • decremental 5y ago
    Totally true. They're already being replaced domestically by cheaper labor coming here from overseas. Imagine if there wasn't all that paperwork involved and their hiring pool gets larger at the same time.
  • ra423 5y ago
    Aren't there some restrictions regarding what can be outsourced to foreign countries?
  • yellow_lead 5y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure. Many overseas contractors I've worked with lack communication skills that Americans have. Whether it's due to cultural differences, native language, or something else. And these gaps can waste a lot of time.
  • mech422 5y ago
    yeah - been thru that once..twice..wait 3 times... lets see: india, china, russia... And yet, all the developers I know actually managed to stay employed/get jobs/etc. The world is full of doom-sayers...and someday they'll be right. I just don't think thats day is today :-)
  • pdimitar 5y ago
    I've seen that happen several times already and I'd say you are usually wrong. I mean yes, you absolutely can hire much cheaper devs, sure, but I've witnessed the fallout from them not being good at their jobs which then mandated bringing me and several other senior devs onboard so we can fix the mess and get the project back on track. So can companies utilize the global market and hire cheaper devs? Yes. Is that usually risky? Also yes. (Exceptions exist of course, e.g. Eastern European devs are usually high quality and are happy with 2X, if not even 3X-4X, less payment than the American ones.)
• abraxas 5y ago
  The success of the “open office” on full display.
• ajarmst 5y ago
  That seemed like an awful lot of words to describe the entirely predictable fact that the job market will pick up significantly as we shed pandemic restrictions and that workers in low-wage service jobs tend to quit a lot. A few anecdotes about people liking WFH doesn’t make the trend any more mysterious or novel.
  • TameAntelope 5y ago
    I think we've gone a little overboard with the whole, "unprecedented times" stuff. Sure, pandemic economics are weird, but they're not "up is the new down" weird, basic economic principles apply, and we're not throwing out the whole book, just writing a new chapter.
• ggm 5y ago
  As a 59yo I have come to appreciate how my future post work (fulltime) life may look, and what limits I'd need to place on EITHER WFH or Back-To-Office life. So thank you plague, for showing me what my future holds.
• jpollock 5y ago
  If people haven't been changing jobs in the past year, and a typical tech turnover is 15%, we can probably expect a lot of turnover this year. It's going to be an interesting amount of churn.
• coliveira 5y ago
  Many traditional companies are bound to the office for a simple reason: they have offices as a financial investment. This is true even for super rich tech companies, who went into a big real estate buying spree during the last few years. If they don't have use for these offices, the value of such real estate will go down precipitously. They are forced to keep the office style, at least for a majority of their employees.
  • pertymcpert 5y ago
    But why? Isn't that a sunk cost fallacy? In fact, running those offices is going to cost more in operations and maintenance that having them under-utilized? Presumably they bought empty commercial real estate. If it remains empty they'll get back most of that investment when they sell.
    • faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      OP probably meant it in an industry wide phenomenon. If one corp transitions to full WFH, their office just keeps their value. If all corps go WFH, nobody would want offices like that, and all offices would plummet in value.
• mkw2k 5y ago
  I will absolutely quit if my job tries to force me back into the office.
• marttt 5y ago
  I wonder if partial WFH causes more or less environmental pressure in in the bigger picture. No need for daily travel from the worker's perspective, but e.g energy usage at home increases. Also, companies still keep their office spaces with all the creature comforts, heat those buildings "just in case", etc. It's like we have double options for everything now.
• windex 5y ago
  A lot of middle & senior level "aggregator+PPT+strategy rejig only" managers are going to find themselves out of a job if people dont come back into offices. The actual "task doers" will hopefully get their way this time.
• jliptzin 5y ago
  Of all the people I know who prefer to work in the office rather than WFH, it's always for reasons unrelated to the actual merits of WFH. For example, they live in a tiny apartment in the city with wife, kids, nanny, and need a place to go to get away during the day. Or in one interesting case someone wants a chance to hit on other employees.
• meg066 5y ago
  I agree, for years American s worked liked dogs, for 2 weeks vacation when Europe gets six weeks off paid. We spend more time at work with coworkers than we do with our family’s. We need to rethink our work model.Please, I am not going back