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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 similar

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.

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.
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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.