11 ms·

Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

107 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

seanp2k2 4y ago
It’s just so ridiculous to me that all these companies were forced to experience how remote work can work, yet they are choosing to pursue hard-line RTO policies, talent be damned.
dijit 4y ago
I’ll be honest: I feel somewhat vindicated due my own personal struggles with the open office[0] and people arguing for the status quo on hacker news[1]. I am extremely sad at the extreme loss of life and horrible conditions caused by the pandemic. So I feel exceedingly guilty for feeling glad that an upside of it is that we can finally do away with this horrible practice of crushing everyone together so the managers can marvel at their panopticon. [0]: http://blog.dijit.sh/how-to-survive-an-open-office http://blog.dijit.sh/how-to-survive-an-open-office [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20469880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20469880
- doitLP 4y ago
  Everything is a mixed bag of good and bad. In fact this pandemic will probably save a lot more lives during the next pandemic in terms of preparations etc. It’s also been great for remote work. No need for additional hand-wringing.
  - sto_hristo 4y ago
    There is no silver lining and the next pandemic will play out raw, just like this one. Antivaxers will blame it on Bill Gate's son and 6G. That is because of human stupidity - it's immutable and ever present. So my hope is that science will come up with better vaccines quickly and natural selection will trim off the Enlightened to a more tolerable level.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      Hopefully “the next pandemic” will not be like this one at all. Because how “the experts” handled this one was shamefully wrong. At virtually every decision point these “experts” did the exact wrong thing. From years of school closures to two years of forced masks to intentionally frightening the daylights out of people. They did everything wrong. History will not look fondly at what was done. I hope to god we never repeat this massive mistake.
      - cumshitpiss 4y ago
        How else would an someone, expert or not, respond to an contagious airborne virus other than masks and closing schools/offices??
        mhb 4y ago
        They would update their opinions when they received new facts. They would also make a bigger effort to acquire new facts.
        spookthesunset 4y ago
        For one thing how about being open and honest about your own publicly available data . Maybe start by clearly articulating the actual risks of Covid instead of letting the media fly away with garbage like “4% kill rate”. To this day people still parrot back “Covid kills 4% of people who get it” when the actual rate is several orders of magnitude lower, even with OG Covid. That would be a start. Hiding facts and data that goes against your narrative and then labeling people who point said stuff out as conspiracy theorists is not cool.
      - sto_hristo 4y ago
        To judge the way the pandemic has been handled, you have to be an expert yourself. Because right now it's like telling a physicist how stupid his theory is while you're flipping his burger at BK. Sure, their theory may sound stupid to you, but that is your problem. > frightening the daylights out of people Yeah, infantilize the populations, shield them from reality, tell them "don't worry, Karen!" Virus will surely take notice and stop being so murderous.
- elric 4y ago
  I'm growing more and more frustrated with open offices, and with $management's unwillingness any concerns. Quitting isn't really an option: I haven't seen a single Belgian company that has an acceptable office layout for software engineers. Even desk sizes seem to be getting smaller and smaller. Remote options are few and far between (and I don't want to WFH anymore).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelchisari 4y ago
    I'm also burnt out on WFH. At this point, I'd appreciate an workplace to go in to. But I'd also appreciate that workplace giving me my own office with a door that closes. I've had that only once in my career and it was bliss.
    - db48x 4y ago
      If you work from home, can’t you acquire an office with a door that closes? Perhaps by building an extension on your house, or a workshop in the yard, or renting an office over a restaurant a mile from home (you know the ones that are usually rented by local lawyers, insurance agents, etc)?
      - michaelchisari 4y ago
        Of course, but renting a solo office somewhere else is still isolating and lacking the social interaction I'm missing.
        db48x 4y ago
        Find like–minded individuals in your neighborhood and meet for lunch occasionally. It doesn’t have to be expensive; just take sandwiches to the park or whatever. You don’t need an office to get social interaction.
- EnKopVand 4y ago
  The open office is a bad idea for a lot of people, but that’s not why it’s cost efficient. It’s cost efficient because it keeps rent, heating/cooling down, lets you have desks for only 60-80% of your workforce and it plays really well with the middle managers handbook of “watching people be busy”. Or in other words it basically checks all the boxes that you care about when you move into the E&Y level of executive power. The entire system is flawed or course. Even the 37-40 hour work week is sort of a left over from when we worked assembly lines. That doesn’t really matter when it’s what gets taught at every management education and is what gets adviced at any management consulting agency, and, because it works. It doesn’t work for every employee (or even manager), but it works for every company. That’s the “cog in the machine” part of the story, the other side is what you can do as that cog. If you posses a skill set that is in demand, you can actually get away with a lot of things in this world. Why people don’t do this is beyond me, especially for IT staff. Of course it’s not easy to find the remote job you want, but in my anecdotal experience I have met so many people who were so much smarter than me who got much fewer benefits. I’ve even heard people defend their low pay, using their bosses talking points. Like, what? I’m not an asshole, I’m not hard to work with but I do have ADHD which is crippling for me when it comes to working on things I dislike for long periods. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always asked to get things my way, but it’s not beyond me how lucky I am to be in a profession where we always have a couple or job openings available.
- lupire 4y ago
  Don't feel guilty. Remote work will help prevent the next pandemic from being as bad.
ryanSrich 4y ago
Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no reason you have to share working hours with anyone. It’s convenient at times, but it’s by no means required.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Can you explain your day to day? And how do you keep up with company politics, changing requirements etc?
  - jcpst 4y ago
    As someone who has been fully remote the past two years, and in a team that is gradually exploring/adopting more async work practices over the past year, I would be curious to hear more too. Our team stopped having a standup meeting- we just have a daily automated post in our chat, and we comment in the thread whenever it makes sense. If we’re working on the same thing for days with no blockers, it’s not a big deal to not provide an update. We’ve reduced our synchronous communication by quite a bit. Some weeks I don’t have a single call I join. If you document everything well enough, you don’t really need to. I find myself on calls when I need to extract information from an architect that is just too busy to write everything down, or I’m mentoring a teammate. Or I’m in my monthly 1-on-1 with my manager. Working outside of regular business hours is not off the table, but it is new. It helps that some of us are in the US and some in Poland. Normally, just blocking off time on the calendar and marking your status (out of office) is sufficient.
  - ryanSrich 4y ago
    I’m a startup co-founder, so day to day can be a lot of different things. But it’s something like this: 1. log on to Slack in the morning and see if there’s anything that needs attention. We use slack as a central hub. All of our tools funnel activity into slack. My team is small (3 full time, 2 part time contractors). Most of my team works over night and into the morning (very different time zones). Typically when I wake up, there’s a few PRs for me to review, or questions to answer on a ticket in linear. We also have a check in bot that runs once per week. No real need to do daily checkins. 2. After I catch up and respond to any questions (which most likely will be read by people that night or the next day) I see if I have any sales meetings. Since we’re a startup it’s still founders in sales mode. I might have a demo or 2 each day. This is probably my only non-async activity. 3. Outside of sales work, I also write code, review design work, and field customer support questions. So the rest of my day is a buffet of random stuff. As far as politics go. There really isn’t any. The team is pretty small. We might have a disagreement on how a feature should be implemented or something like that, but I’m the deciding factor and everyone is a professional so it’s not a problem.
xeromal 4y ago
>Although there isn’t any hard data to show increased quits due to ending flexible work specifically, anecdotes of worker exits are starting to trickle in. Quote straight from the article.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  It's a news article, not a peer-reviewed scientific study - why don't people understand the difference?
  - izacus 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure people understand that this article is indeed unsubstantiated clickbait like most of other unsourced news articles. Well, at least outside bunch of HNers which will ignore the article and just dump their personal WFH stories in this comment section as usual.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I don't really understand the point of a news article where not even a poll is used. Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" does nothing but reinforce existing biases that everyone here will have. Hard data will at least convince some people who have biases but trust scientific processes to change their opinions.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" That's what a journalist does. They go out and listen to people and they tell you what they're hearing and provide context to it. You want a scientist - that's a different thing. Both are useful in practice.
      - xeromal 4y ago
        I'll agree with you that it can definitely be useful. I just don't see the usefulness in this particular instance. Work From Home is a heated topic that is sharply divided between types of personalities so articles like this will just cause circular arguments IMHO.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Quitting for that is only possible as a solution if you have remote friendly alternative to go to after you quit, but if, like in Austria, all the employers in the country went back to the office then you pretty much have no other options than to go to the office as your employer demands, since you quitting won't fix this issues :( A solution to force the employers hand to allowing remote work might be mass resignations across the country, but Austrians in general are too submissive and fearful to collectively strike against their employers like the French for example.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  There are plenty of companies out there that hire internationally, especially since you’re in the EU it should be little issue finding one if you’re a competent engineer. Pay is often better that way as well
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    The issues here are taxes and labor laws. If you work remotely for a company abroad then taxes are now higher for you, since now you're paying the share your employer was paying for you, since you work as a freelancer (Austria does not allow direct employment for companies not headquartered in Austria), and you also loose social benefits like PTO and sick leave despite paying higher taxes. So international remote work is kind of a loose-loose scenario here unless you get some super high compensation to make up for the disadvantages. Also, I had a lot of negative experiences interviewing for remote only companies. Week long take home projects (basically free labor), multiple interview stages with IQ tests, culture and other hazing and then finally, either ghosting or rejection for whatever undisclosed reason. This is not a good use of my time, especially not for weeks on end, after 8 hours of actual work at my current employer. I was buying myself a one way ticket to burnout central.
- themitigating 4y ago
  If you can't find another job quitting might not be an option. Imagine if you have a family or someone that depends on you.
rossdavidh 4y ago
I have worked remotely more often than not in the last 10 years. I think it absolutely works in some cases, and hybrid (e.g. 3 days remote per week) works for more cases. But... The first time there is a bad labor market, most of the current remote jobs are going to disappear. Not all, but most, and in nearly all professions the remote jobs will mostly be contractors who have no long-term employment with the company anyway. Not saying this is the way it _should_ be, but when it comes time for layoffs, the people who were working remotely are just emotionally and practically so much easier to choose, than the people who show up in the office every day. Not saying it's right, just that it's so.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  Remote workers should be mostly contract in the first place. If you look at how most are operating odds are good they’d pass almost every test from the IRS. All they’d need is to take a couple gigs at once. And why shouldn’t they take multiple gigs at once? It’s not like people working remote are at their current employer for the culture or politics or anything. In fact most do remote to avoid that crap. Might as well formalize the relationship and just go 1099. Then you can deduct your very real home office expenses and whatnot. Then you can own your own equipment and office expenses. Then you can work “arms length” from your clients. All I know is if I went full remote again, I would definitely restructure myself as an independent contractor. Turns out though that I actually like being in the office and working side by side with my team to build cool shit. But that is a bit because my role isn’t a developer. Developers are easy to do remote if they don’t care much about the actual product they are building. As long as you feed them fairly well speced work they are good to go.
  - hellisothers 4y ago
    The main test has nothing to do with remoteness and everything to do with how much influence your employer has over your day to day work. None of the companies I’m familiar with that are in this struggle have suddenly let the workers have more free determination over their work then before.
    - 4y ago
hardware2win 4y ago
>Freedman agrees, pointing to firms like Spotify that are continuing to pay New York City-level salaries to workers no matter where they're based. Is that true? Will I get $200k in eastern eu?
- DogLover_ 4y ago
  If I have to guess, they mean within US
  - capableweb 4y ago
    So Spotify employees in Stockholm would earn differently than the ones in the US? Doesn't really sound like "continuing to pay New York City-level salaries to workers no matter where they're based" if that's the case. Edit: Here's a source that says they pay the same no matter if you're in the office or at home (basically), but it's limited to countries Spotify agrees you can be in: > Location choices – we will also introduce more flexibility when it comes to what country and city each employee works from (with some limitations to address time zone difficulties, and regional entity laws in the initial rollout of this program). - "Introducing Working From Anywhere" - https://hrblog.spotify.com/2021/02/12/introducing-working-from-anywhere/ https://hrblog.spotify.com/2021/02/12/introducing-working-fr... - "Distributed-First Is the Future of Work at Spotify" - https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-12/distributed-first-is-the-future-of-work-at-spotify/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-12/distributed-first-is...
    - DogLover_ 4y ago
      My guess is that they still pay US higher but I have no evidence of it. AirBnB also allows you to work from anywhere but if you look at their job-listing they still show location as San Francisco for pretty much all of the jobs.
      - bbarn 4y ago
        Of course. Pay is always set as low as possible to retain the right level of employee. If the market for engineers in the US is higher than Europe (it is) it will pay higher.
izacus 4y ago
There's a lot of "considering" and "thinking" in this article, but how many people are ACTUALLY quitting over that? What's the increase in turnover because of WFH policies? A few % total? EDIT: Oh, just saw this in the article: >Although there isn’t any hard data to show increased quits due to ending flexible work specifically, anecdotes of worker exits are starting to trickle in. Carry on then.
- Agamus 4y ago
  I have worked from home for the past two years, and my company has started the return-to-work policy last week. I applied for, and was given, full remote status. If they had not done this, I would have definitely found another job that was willing. Click-bait indeed, but while I'm a small sample size, the idea checks-out to me.
  - sibit 4y ago
    I tried to do the same thing. On the first day back in the office I was venting to my manager about all the issues I had with working at the office (noise, smells, talkative coworkers) and I requested the ability to resume remote work. Later that day I was pulled into an impromptu meeting with my manager, our VP, the CEO, and the HR manager. They explained that they knew I had a great work ethic and that I was one of the top developers, however, I couldn't work remotely because it would be "unfair" to the developers. The claimed the rest of the team could not be trusted to work remotely therefor I couldn't either. I'm not sure if what they said was true but I applied at 4 jobs that evening, scheduled all 3 interviews within the week, and put in my notice by the end of the second week. I'm also a small sample size but the idea checks-out to me too.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- ipaddr 4y ago
  I've passed on companies looking to return to the office and will not consider any in person job. This reduces the workforce.
renewiltord 4y ago
I'm glad the market is segmenting into people who want to work remote and people who don't. I am among the latter but lots of people I respect are in the former group. I don't think I'll work on a remote team for a long time but it's important that what's good for a lot of people is doable by them.
deleted 4y ago
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gorgoiler 4y ago
Some types of tech work well with remote, largely unalignable staff. Some don’t. I’m finding that where I can build small modules, by myself, that allow lots of flexibility to make final integration possible, I’m getting a lot of work done. When I need to collaborate with a bunch of people and get small pieces of code landing in different places before I can start to see results, then I’m finding the remote angry nerd keyboard warriors harder to work with. It’s much harder asking for trust and collaborating on a design when they don’t really care about anyones work except their own. Going into 100% selfish mode matches up with everyone’s culture, but it doesn’t feel great, and means I don’t really get much in the way of quality code review any more. I’m trying, struggling, and failing to articulate what the good and bad patterns are here. Can anyone help me? How do you structure a tech team, culturally, to promote progress in spite of everyone now having the social skills, flameyness, and diplomatic finesse of a faceless forum user?
- mattlondon 4y ago
  Just wanted to echo this - the lack of in-person discourse leads to strained relationships IME. There is so much nuance lost in pure digital (especially email/chat but also video calls) that it puts up communication barriers/friction. As a result people communicate less, or even "come out swinging" (i.e. angry/forcefully) if they feel their work/decisions/etc are being questioned. I am sure pure remote works well when requirements are 100% understood, there is a perfectly groomed list of prioritised bugs/features to fix/implement, and the design/architecture is both correct (now and in the future) and understood by all engineers. If not then I don't understand how you can easily and efficiently resolve these problems in a remote way without taking hours and hours or even days and weeks for chat or stilted video calls. Sometimes nothing beats just getting in a room with everyone for 90 mins and talking things through around a whiteboard or whatever.
  - bluepizza 4y ago
    > even "come out swinging" (i.e. angry/forcefully) if they feel their work/decisions/etc are being questioned That is incredibly unprofessional, no matter where one is working from. No job descriptions include a blank check to do whatever one feels like without justifying it.
dlsa 4y ago
If the office is so great, pay me extra for the commute.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  Many companies try to! The problem is that paying extra for the commute deterministically implies that people who do end up working remote are penalized, which they understandably aren't happy about. As the article describes, when companies like Spotify try to come up with an employee friendly policy they inevitably conclude that remote employees should be paid the same as in office ones.
  - dlsa 4y ago
    I think just wiping the fees/charges off commuting would be a good start. PT / Fuel costs are still a thing as they continue to increase. Not everyone is using EV. Yet.
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
Counterpoint: For many careers remote work deprives young workers of mentoring, relationship building, and learning by osmosis. This is already being seen at law firms for example. So, enjoy your remote work - and for many professions it won't be an issue - but for some careers watch as your in-person colleagues advance faster, earn more & enjoy greater trust and responsibility.
- deleted 4y ago
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- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  On the other hand it might encourage companies to do these things "intentionally" instead of just "by osmosis".
  - ozim 4y ago
    Some things you cannot teach by intentionally saying "do X" or writing down "code of conduct". To know when to talk or shut up in a meeting or read other people emotions to see that someone might be polite but is actually pissed off takes quite a lot of working together and a lot of meetings.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  I've been mentored remotely. I think the drawback to remote is far and away the lack of face-to-face interaction on the daily, and as you allude to this can build closer connections. The virtual substitutes are lackluster. However, some of us already have social needs met otherwise and don't put a premium on what is missed.
- 21723 4y ago
  Counterpoint: For many careers remote work deprives young workers of mentoring, relationship building, and learning by osmosis. This is already being seen at law firms for example. If the bosses (the higher-ups, not the middle managers) don't like you, you're not going to get this anyway, and 99% of whether they decide they like you is based on preexisting social class similiarity. The pre-anointed winners with rich, connected daddies benefit from this--they're the ones who get tapped to be CEO's proteges--and they'll be just fine without going into an office. The rest of us, if we have to go to an office, are just wasting our time so someone else feels important, and that's really it. They don't see us as one of them, so they're not going to invest in our careers, so we have no reason to care beyond the minimum and having to pretend otherwise (that is, indulge and uphold bourgeois false consciousness) is emotional labor we're better off without having to do.
vermooten 4y ago
I'm still genuinely uncertain why companies are so desperate to get staff into the office. 'Business people' like HR, sales, marketing LOVE being together in person; Engineers somewhat less so. Given that companies tend to be run by 'business people' then yeah I think I just answered my own question.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  I observed at my current company that the worse the manager the more they wanted people to be in the office. If you're a bad manager that no one tells anything to due to lack of trust and who doesn't tell the team anything then working remotely is basically a giant mess. In the office a manager can more easily spy and micromanage people while organic cross-team communication can work around the manager's lack of communication.
- nprateem 4y ago
  It's because it's much more difficult to brainwash you into the company culture while you're remote. Even when they run large video chats, most people probably just leave the laptop on and go and do something actually enjoyable.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I genuinely believe MGMT-types enjoy face-to-face interaction, but would not discount the theatrical power of it all. A manager with a Hobbesian conceptualization of power in a raw physical sense sees their own power as the accumulation of the accumulated ceded power[1] of their direct reports. That is to say, the more of their workers in their physical presence, the more powerful they are and the more workers I have over you, the more power I have relative to you. Social relations too become spatial relations. In this conceptualization, a manager seeks to display their own status(via power) in the dramatic interactions they have with other managers. Whole areas, floors, or even buildings comprise the managerial territory under control, complete with the material wealth of physical assets, both inanimate and human. Finally, we have Hobbes instrumentall power or the corporate ladder climbing we all know - power for power's sake. Beyond the creation of wealth, good, and value lies the drive for power itself. 1. http://changingminds.org/explanations/power/hobbes_power.htm http://changingminds.org/explanations/power/hobbes_power.htm
oohaboga 4y ago
I like my coworkers professionally and enjoy building stuff together, but hate contacting with them otherwise, like team-events, lunches, smalltalk near the coffee machine. Remote work has been such a blessing.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  I love that stuff. My company is remote optional, but most days I'm the only person in the office which defeats the point. I wish I could find a hiring board for in-office only companies.
ChicagoDave 4y ago
This will evolve. I think 100% remote is great for some people (small children, busy schedules, health issues) but many people would also benefit from being with their teams. The change I'd like to see is some sort of geographically centric pod office where it's not mandatory, but a team lead could say, "We need two days at Pod X to run through A, B, C initiatives." No one is required to arbitrarily attend a physical office, but rather very task and team specific meetings. I think many people that are against that arbitrary return would be open to task/team scheduled gatherings.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Any in-person gatherings are red flags. For a party, to hear the ceo speak or for a team building meeting.
  - ChicagoDave 4y ago
    A company has every right to build its culture, so I'd disagree with this. It's really the "you must be at a desk in our office for 8 hours just because" part that most people object to.
yalogin 4y ago
I actually like talking to people in person and having those chats at their desk or coffee machine. However even I wasn’t ready for the noisy environment at a cubicle. Over the course of the pandemic I forgot how tough they make it to focus and now would much rather work from home!
DogLover_ 4y ago
If they want people to come into office willingly, something needs to seriously change. Perhaps change hours from 9-17 to 9-14 for people coming into the office. The output would likely drop but perhaps that's what you need to do if you want people to want to come back to the office.
s-xyz 4y ago
At least 2 days home office, should be the ideal mix
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Make it how many days of WFH each employee wants. This way all 3 camps are happy.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  The worst of many options where you are forced to live in a city and work in a small apartment or drive from a distance in and you lose your desk and other perks.
nprateem 4y ago
I've decided to quit since my remote job won't let me work abroad. That's a dealbreaker now given the summer. I'm just left wondering why I should be tied to the UK instead of being able to explore all of Europe and further afield. There's no real reason, so I've started looking around. If anyone wants an expensive, fully remote contractor with experience as an AWS SRE (golang, python, k8s, terraform, bash), full-stack web dev (django, vueJS, some react, forgotten PHP), rusty big data (scala & spark) a part-time MBA in progress, and a 30 day notice period, let me know :)
- jjeaff 4y ago
  How would they know if you are abroad? Couldn't you just setup a static IP in a data center in the country you are supposed to be in and VPN through it?
  - nprateem 4y ago
    Corporate VPN pops up an alert. Plus even though I may be able to circumvent it, it's unethical so I haven't tried.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Correct me if I’m wrong, but “expensive dev” in the UK means $100-200k, whereas in SV it’s more like $600k-1m. Hope you find what you’re looking for, consider SV firms as they pay way better AFAICT.
  - nprateem 4y ago
    Yes you're right. Has anyone who's been successfully hired as an international contractor by SV companies got any tips for how they made the relevant contacts? I may consider full-time but I hear people in the US work insane hours which I've no intention of doing.
deegles 4y ago
I got Covid last month. I have the vaccine and a booster and it still took me out for a week. Why should I continue to risk re-infection and long Covid? Do I wear a mask while in Zoom calls if I'm sitting in a shared area? Do I have to call out coworkers not wearing a mask? Will the next variants actually cause less severe symptoms or is that just wishful thinking? Am I overreacting or not? There are a thousand questions that I just don't have to deal with if I just choose to work from home permanently. I encourage everyone who gets a message from a recruiter to make it clear you'll only accept WFH, that feedback trickles back to hiring managers and might slowly change their minds.
shrubble 4y ago
I had to go into the office for the Fortune 500 company I work for; talked to the security guard and was told that every Monday they are handed a stack of security badges to process and remove from the system--people inform their managers they are leaving on Friday and hand in their badge. The commute time, the price of gas, and the nature of the work in this building (tech work for customers who are themselves remote, with everything handled by a ticket system) are no doubt all factors. It is seen as a power ploy by management, I think, to have "butts in seats" again.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Good; let them burn for poor management decisions.
kkfx 4y ago
The curious part is that the Green New Deal invest in WFH, at least in advertisement, and IT giants have formally done the same to sell services... Anyway any change is hard in general, any social change happen only in long timeframe, but it's clear to anybody that jobs eligible from remote work should be done as much as possible remotely. Surely we benefit from being together, so for certain activities, like schooling we must keep physical proximity, but for many others the trade off is far on the side of remote.
parkingrift 4y ago
I’m loving the companies that are trying to force workers back to the office. I just troll on LI for the announcements and then target their devs. It’s never been easier to recruit. Employers can’t win this but I’m glad so many are trying.
- coffeedan 4y ago
  Maybe? I think it will take time to know who the winners and losers are. It might be good for your recruiting numbers right now, but market performance over an extended period will decide winners and losers.
  - seanp2k2 4y ago
    My prediction is that the places bleeding talent won’t do so well in the long run.
ubermonkey 4y ago
It's weird this is even NEWS. So many jobs could always have been done remotely, and now post-COVID we can see that. The HN demographic is probably on the leading edge here. I work for a small software company, but I don't code anymore; I'm effectively the head of operations. I've been here 15 years. We have NEVER had an office anywhere. Our employees have been spread nationwide this whole time, working from home. It's fine. I think the only thing we really miss about an office is that we think it would be difficult to onboard a baby dev. I DO think there's something to be said for learning the "professional programmer on commercial software" ropes in a place where you're physically near other people doing that. But that's really just a suspicion; we don't actually KNOW, but hiring for us is still such a big deal (narrow expertise) that we're not likely to do so as an experiment.

107 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

It’s just so ridiculous to me that all these companies were forced to experience how remote work can work, yet they are choosing to pursue hard-line RTO policies, talent be damned.

dijit 4y ago

I’ll be honest: I feel somewhat vindicated due my own personal struggles with the open office[0] and people arguing for the status quo on hacker news[1]. I am extremely sad at the extreme loss of life and horrible conditions caused by the pandemic. So I feel exceedingly guilty for feeling glad that an upside of it is that we can finally do away with this horrible practice of crushing everyone together so the managers can marvel at their panopticon. [0]: http://blog.dijit.sh/how-to-survive-an-open-office http://blog.dijit.sh/how-to-survive-an-open-office [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20469880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20469880

doitLP 4y ago
Everything is a mixed bag of good and bad. In fact this pandemic will probably save a lot more lives during the next pandemic in terms of preparations etc. It’s also been great for remote work. No need for additional hand-wringing.
- sto_hristo 4y ago
  There is no silver lining and the next pandemic will play out raw, just like this one. Antivaxers will blame it on Bill Gate's son and 6G. That is because of human stupidity - it's immutable and ever present. So my hope is that science will come up with better vaccines quickly and natural selection will trim off the Enlightened to a more tolerable level.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    Hopefully “the next pandemic” will not be like this one at all. Because how “the experts” handled this one was shamefully wrong. At virtually every decision point these “experts” did the exact wrong thing. From years of school closures to two years of forced masks to intentionally frightening the daylights out of people. They did everything wrong. History will not look fondly at what was done. I hope to god we never repeat this massive mistake.
    - cumshitpiss 4y ago
      How else would an someone, expert or not, respond to an contagious airborne virus other than masks and closing schools/offices??
      - mhb 4y ago
        They would update their opinions when they received new facts. They would also make a bigger effort to acquire new facts.
      - spookthesunset 4y ago
        For one thing how about being open and honest about your own publicly available data . Maybe start by clearly articulating the actual risks of Covid instead of letting the media fly away with garbage like “4% kill rate”. To this day people still parrot back “Covid kills 4% of people who get it” when the actual rate is several orders of magnitude lower, even with OG Covid. That would be a start. Hiding facts and data that goes against your narrative and then labeling people who point said stuff out as conspiracy theorists is not cool.
    - sto_hristo 4y ago
      To judge the way the pandemic has been handled, you have to be an expert yourself. Because right now it's like telling a physicist how stupid his theory is while you're flipping his burger at BK. Sure, their theory may sound stupid to you, but that is your problem. > frightening the daylights out of people Yeah, infantilize the populations, shield them from reality, tell them "don't worry, Karen!" Virus will surely take notice and stop being so murderous.
elric 4y ago
I'm growing more and more frustrated with open offices, and with $management's unwillingness any concerns. Quitting isn't really an option: I haven't seen a single Belgian company that has an acceptable office layout for software engineers. Even desk sizes seem to be getting smaller and smaller. Remote options are few and far between (and I don't want to WFH anymore).
- deleted 4y ago
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- michaelchisari 4y ago
  I'm also burnt out on WFH. At this point, I'd appreciate an workplace to go in to. But I'd also appreciate that workplace giving me my own office with a door that closes. I've had that only once in my career and it was bliss.
  - db48x 4y ago
    If you work from home, can’t you acquire an office with a door that closes? Perhaps by building an extension on your house, or a workshop in the yard, or renting an office over a restaurant a mile from home (you know the ones that are usually rented by local lawyers, insurance agents, etc)?
    - michaelchisari 4y ago
      Of course, but renting a solo office somewhere else is still isolating and lacking the social interaction I'm missing.
      - db48x 4y ago
        Find like–minded individuals in your neighborhood and meet for lunch occasionally. It doesn’t have to be expensive; just take sandwiches to the park or whatever. You don’t need an office to get social interaction.
EnKopVand 4y ago
The open office is a bad idea for a lot of people, but that’s not why it’s cost efficient. It’s cost efficient because it keeps rent, heating/cooling down, lets you have desks for only 60-80% of your workforce and it plays really well with the middle managers handbook of “watching people be busy”. Or in other words it basically checks all the boxes that you care about when you move into the E&Y level of executive power. The entire system is flawed or course. Even the 37-40 hour work week is sort of a left over from when we worked assembly lines. That doesn’t really matter when it’s what gets taught at every management education and is what gets adviced at any management consulting agency, and, because it works. It doesn’t work for every employee (or even manager), but it works for every company. That’s the “cog in the machine” part of the story, the other side is what you can do as that cog. If you posses a skill set that is in demand, you can actually get away with a lot of things in this world. Why people don’t do this is beyond me, especially for IT staff. Of course it’s not easy to find the remote job you want, but in my anecdotal experience I have met so many people who were so much smarter than me who got much fewer benefits. I’ve even heard people defend their low pay, using their bosses talking points. Like, what? I’m not an asshole, I’m not hard to work with but I do have ADHD which is crippling for me when it comes to working on things I dislike for long periods. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always asked to get things my way, but it’s not beyond me how lucky I am to be in a profession where we always have a couple or job openings available.
lupire 4y ago
Don't feel guilty. Remote work will help prevent the next pandemic from being as bad.

ryanSrich 4y ago

Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no reason you have to share working hours with anyone. It’s convenient at times, but it’s by no means required.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Can you explain your day to day? And how do you keep up with company politics, changing requirements etc?
- jcpst 4y ago
  As someone who has been fully remote the past two years, and in a team that is gradually exploring/adopting more async work practices over the past year, I would be curious to hear more too. Our team stopped having a standup meeting- we just have a daily automated post in our chat, and we comment in the thread whenever it makes sense. If we’re working on the same thing for days with no blockers, it’s not a big deal to not provide an update. We’ve reduced our synchronous communication by quite a bit. Some weeks I don’t have a single call I join. If you document everything well enough, you don’t really need to. I find myself on calls when I need to extract information from an architect that is just too busy to write everything down, or I’m mentoring a teammate. Or I’m in my monthly 1-on-1 with my manager. Working outside of regular business hours is not off the table, but it is new. It helps that some of us are in the US and some in Poland. Normally, just blocking off time on the calendar and marking your status (out of office) is sufficient.
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  I’m a startup co-founder, so day to day can be a lot of different things. But it’s something like this: 1. log on to Slack in the morning and see if there’s anything that needs attention. We use slack as a central hub. All of our tools funnel activity into slack. My team is small (3 full time, 2 part time contractors). Most of my team works over night and into the morning (very different time zones). Typically when I wake up, there’s a few PRs for me to review, or questions to answer on a ticket in linear. We also have a check in bot that runs once per week. No real need to do daily checkins. 2. After I catch up and respond to any questions (which most likely will be read by people that night or the next day) I see if I have any sales meetings. Since we’re a startup it’s still founders in sales mode. I might have a demo or 2 each day. This is probably my only non-async activity. 3. Outside of sales work, I also write code, review design work, and field customer support questions. So the rest of my day is a buffet of random stuff. As far as politics go. There really isn’t any. The team is pretty small. We might have a disagreement on how a feature should be implemented or something like that, but I’m the deciding factor and everyone is a professional so it’s not a problem.

xeromal 4y ago

>Although there isn’t any hard data to show increased quits due to ending flexible work specifically, anecdotes of worker exits are starting to trickle in. Quote straight from the article.

chrisseaton 4y ago
It's a news article, not a peer-reviewed scientific study - why don't people understand the difference?
- izacus 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure people understand that this article is indeed unsubstantiated clickbait like most of other unsourced news articles. Well, at least outside bunch of HNers which will ignore the article and just dump their personal WFH stories in this comment section as usual.
- xeromal 4y ago
  I don't really understand the point of a news article where not even a poll is used. Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" does nothing but reinforce existing biases that everyone here will have. Hard data will at least convince some people who have biases but trust scientific processes to change their opinions.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" That's what a journalist does. They go out and listen to people and they tell you what they're hearing and provide context to it. You want a scientist - that's a different thing. Both are useful in practice.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      I'll agree with you that it can definitely be useful. I just don't see the usefulness in this particular instance. Work From Home is a heated topic that is sharply divided between types of personalities so articles like this will just cause circular arguments IMHO.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

Quitting for that is only possible as a solution if you have remote friendly alternative to go to after you quit, but if, like in Austria, all the employers in the country went back to the office then you pretty much have no other options than to go to the office as your employer demands, since you quitting won't fix this issues :( A solution to force the employers hand to allowing remote work might be mass resignations across the country, but Austrians in general are too submissive and fearful to collectively strike against their employers like the French for example.

SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
There are plenty of companies out there that hire internationally, especially since you’re in the EU it should be little issue finding one if you’re a competent engineer. Pay is often better that way as well
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  The issues here are taxes and labor laws. If you work remotely for a company abroad then taxes are now higher for you, since now you're paying the share your employer was paying for you, since you work as a freelancer (Austria does not allow direct employment for companies not headquartered in Austria), and you also loose social benefits like PTO and sick leave despite paying higher taxes. So international remote work is kind of a loose-loose scenario here unless you get some super high compensation to make up for the disadvantages. Also, I had a lot of negative experiences interviewing for remote only companies. Week long take home projects (basically free labor), multiple interview stages with IQ tests, culture and other hazing and then finally, either ghosting or rejection for whatever undisclosed reason. This is not a good use of my time, especially not for weeks on end, after 8 hours of actual work at my current employer. I was buying myself a one way ticket to burnout central.
themitigating 4y ago
If you can't find another job quitting might not be an option. Imagine if you have a family or someone that depends on you.

rossdavidh 4y ago

I have worked remotely more often than not in the last 10 years. I think it absolutely works in some cases, and hybrid (e.g. 3 days remote per week) works for more cases. But... The first time there is a bad labor market, most of the current remote jobs are going to disappear. Not all, but most, and in nearly all professions the remote jobs will mostly be contractors who have no long-term employment with the company anyway. Not saying this is the way it _should_ be, but when it comes time for layoffs, the people who were working remotely are just emotionally and practically so much easier to choose, than the people who show up in the office every day. Not saying it's right, just that it's so.

spookthesunset 4y ago
Remote workers should be mostly contract in the first place. If you look at how most are operating odds are good they’d pass almost every test from the IRS. All they’d need is to take a couple gigs at once. And why shouldn’t they take multiple gigs at once? It’s not like people working remote are at their current employer for the culture or politics or anything. In fact most do remote to avoid that crap. Might as well formalize the relationship and just go 1099. Then you can deduct your very real home office expenses and whatnot. Then you can own your own equipment and office expenses. Then you can work “arms length” from your clients. All I know is if I went full remote again, I would definitely restructure myself as an independent contractor. Turns out though that I actually like being in the office and working side by side with my team to build cool shit. But that is a bit because my role isn’t a developer. Developers are easy to do remote if they don’t care much about the actual product they are building. As long as you feed them fairly well speced work they are good to go.
- hellisothers 4y ago
  The main test has nothing to do with remoteness and everything to do with how much influence your employer has over your day to day work. None of the companies I’m familiar with that are in this struggle have suddenly let the workers have more free determination over their work then before.
  - 4y ago

hardware2win 4y ago

>Freedman agrees, pointing to firms like Spotify that are continuing to pay New York City-level salaries to workers no matter where they're based. Is that true? Will I get $200k in eastern eu?

DogLover_ 4y ago
If I have to guess, they mean within US
- capableweb 4y ago
  So Spotify employees in Stockholm would earn differently than the ones in the US? Doesn't really sound like "continuing to pay New York City-level salaries to workers no matter where they're based" if that's the case. Edit: Here's a source that says they pay the same no matter if you're in the office or at home (basically), but it's limited to countries Spotify agrees you can be in: > Location choices – we will also introduce more flexibility when it comes to what country and city each employee works from (with some limitations to address time zone difficulties, and regional entity laws in the initial rollout of this program). - "Introducing Working From Anywhere" - https://hrblog.spotify.com/2021/02/12/introducing-working-from-anywhere/ https://hrblog.spotify.com/2021/02/12/introducing-working-fr... - "Distributed-First Is the Future of Work at Spotify" - https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-12/distributed-first-is-the-future-of-work-at-spotify/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-12/distributed-first-is...
  - DogLover_ 4y ago
    My guess is that they still pay US higher but I have no evidence of it. AirBnB also allows you to work from anywhere but if you look at their job-listing they still show location as San Francisco for pretty much all of the jobs.
    - bbarn 4y ago
      Of course. Pay is always set as low as possible to retain the right level of employee. If the market for engineers in the US is higher than Europe (it is) it will pay higher.

izacus 4y ago

There's a lot of "considering" and "thinking" in this article, but how many people are ACTUALLY quitting over that? What's the increase in turnover because of WFH policies? A few % total? EDIT: Oh, just saw this in the article: >Although there isn’t any hard data to show increased quits due to ending flexible work specifically, anecdotes of worker exits are starting to trickle in. Carry on then.

Agamus 4y ago
I have worked from home for the past two years, and my company has started the return-to-work policy last week. I applied for, and was given, full remote status. If they had not done this, I would have definitely found another job that was willing. Click-bait indeed, but while I'm a small sample size, the idea checks-out to me.
- sibit 4y ago
  I tried to do the same thing. On the first day back in the office I was venting to my manager about all the issues I had with working at the office (noise, smells, talkative coworkers) and I requested the ability to resume remote work. Later that day I was pulled into an impromptu meeting with my manager, our VP, the CEO, and the HR manager. They explained that they knew I had a great work ethic and that I was one of the top developers, however, I couldn't work remotely because it would be "unfair" to the developers. The claimed the rest of the team could not be trusted to work remotely therefor I couldn't either. I'm not sure if what they said was true but I applied at 4 jobs that evening, scheduled all 3 interviews within the week, and put in my notice by the end of the second week. I'm also a small sample size but the idea checks-out to me too.
- deleted 4y ago
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ipaddr 4y ago
I've passed on companies looking to return to the office and will not consider any in person job. This reduces the workforce.

renewiltord 4y ago

I'm glad the market is segmenting into people who want to work remote and people who don't. I am among the latter but lots of people I respect are in the former group. I don't think I'll work on a remote team for a long time but it's important that what's good for a lot of people is doable by them.

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gorgoiler 4y ago

Some types of tech work well with remote, largely unalignable staff. Some don’t. I’m finding that where I can build small modules, by myself, that allow lots of flexibility to make final integration possible, I’m getting a lot of work done. When I need to collaborate with a bunch of people and get small pieces of code landing in different places before I can start to see results, then I’m finding the remote angry nerd keyboard warriors harder to work with. It’s much harder asking for trust and collaborating on a design when they don’t really care about anyones work except their own. Going into 100% selfish mode matches up with everyone’s culture, but it doesn’t feel great, and means I don’t really get much in the way of quality code review any more. I’m trying, struggling, and failing to articulate what the good and bad patterns are here. Can anyone help me? How do you structure a tech team, culturally, to promote progress in spite of everyone now having the social skills, flameyness, and diplomatic finesse of a faceless forum user?

mattlondon 4y ago
Just wanted to echo this - the lack of in-person discourse leads to strained relationships IME. There is so much nuance lost in pure digital (especially email/chat but also video calls) that it puts up communication barriers/friction. As a result people communicate less, or even "come out swinging" (i.e. angry/forcefully) if they feel their work/decisions/etc are being questioned. I am sure pure remote works well when requirements are 100% understood, there is a perfectly groomed list of prioritised bugs/features to fix/implement, and the design/architecture is both correct (now and in the future) and understood by all engineers. If not then I don't understand how you can easily and efficiently resolve these problems in a remote way without taking hours and hours or even days and weeks for chat or stilted video calls. Sometimes nothing beats just getting in a room with everyone for 90 mins and talking things through around a whiteboard or whatever.
- bluepizza 4y ago
  > even "come out swinging" (i.e. angry/forcefully) if they feel their work/decisions/etc are being questioned That is incredibly unprofessional, no matter where one is working from. No job descriptions include a blank check to do whatever one feels like without justifying it.

dlsa 4y ago

If the office is so great, pay me extra for the commute.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
Many companies try to! The problem is that paying extra for the commute deterministically implies that people who do end up working remote are penalized, which they understandably aren't happy about. As the article describes, when companies like Spotify try to come up with an employee friendly policy they inevitably conclude that remote employees should be paid the same as in office ones.
- dlsa 4y ago
  I think just wiping the fees/charges off commuting would be a good start. PT / Fuel costs are still a thing as they continue to increase. Not everyone is using EV. Yet.

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

Counterpoint: For many careers remote work deprives young workers of mentoring, relationship building, and learning by osmosis. This is already being seen at law firms for example. So, enjoy your remote work - and for many professions it won't be an issue - but for some careers watch as your in-person colleagues advance faster, earn more & enjoy greater trust and responsibility.

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diffeomorphism 4y ago
On the other hand it might encourage companies to do these things "intentionally" instead of just "by osmosis".
- ozim 4y ago
  Some things you cannot teach by intentionally saying "do X" or writing down "code of conduct". To know when to talk or shut up in a meeting or read other people emotions to see that someone might be polite but is actually pissed off takes quite a lot of working together and a lot of meetings.
slothtrop 4y ago
I've been mentored remotely. I think the drawback to remote is far and away the lack of face-to-face interaction on the daily, and as you allude to this can build closer connections. The virtual substitutes are lackluster. However, some of us already have social needs met otherwise and don't put a premium on what is missed.
21723 4y ago
Counterpoint: For many careers remote work deprives young workers of mentoring, relationship building, and learning by osmosis. This is already being seen at law firms for example. If the bosses (the higher-ups, not the middle managers) don't like you, you're not going to get this anyway, and 99% of whether they decide they like you is based on preexisting social class similiarity. The pre-anointed winners with rich, connected daddies benefit from this--they're the ones who get tapped to be CEO's proteges--and they'll be just fine without going into an office. The rest of us, if we have to go to an office, are just wasting our time so someone else feels important, and that's really it. They don't see us as one of them, so they're not going to invest in our careers, so we have no reason to care beyond the minimum and having to pretend otherwise (that is, indulge and uphold bourgeois false consciousness) is emotional labor we're better off without having to do.

vermooten 4y ago

I'm still genuinely uncertain why companies are so desperate to get staff into the office. 'Business people' like HR, sales, marketing LOVE being together in person; Engineers somewhat less so. Given that companies tend to be run by 'business people' then yeah I think I just answered my own question.

marcinzm 4y ago
I observed at my current company that the worse the manager the more they wanted people to be in the office. If you're a bad manager that no one tells anything to due to lack of trust and who doesn't tell the team anything then working remotely is basically a giant mess. In the office a manager can more easily spy and micromanage people while organic cross-team communication can work around the manager's lack of communication.
nprateem 4y ago
It's because it's much more difficult to brainwash you into the company culture while you're remote. Even when they run large video chats, most people probably just leave the laptop on and go and do something actually enjoyable.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
I genuinely believe MGMT-types enjoy face-to-face interaction, but would not discount the theatrical power of it all. A manager with a Hobbesian conceptualization of power in a raw physical sense sees their own power as the accumulation of the accumulated ceded power[1] of their direct reports. That is to say, the more of their workers in their physical presence, the more powerful they are and the more workers I have over you, the more power I have relative to you. Social relations too become spatial relations. In this conceptualization, a manager seeks to display their own status(via power) in the dramatic interactions they have with other managers. Whole areas, floors, or even buildings comprise the managerial territory under control, complete with the material wealth of physical assets, both inanimate and human. Finally, we have Hobbes instrumentall power or the corporate ladder climbing we all know - power for power's sake. Beyond the creation of wealth, good, and value lies the drive for power itself. 1. http://changingminds.org/explanations/power/hobbes_power.htm http://changingminds.org/explanations/power/hobbes_power.htm

oohaboga 4y ago

I like my coworkers professionally and enjoy building stuff together, but hate contacting with them otherwise, like team-events, lunches, smalltalk near the coffee machine. Remote work has been such a blessing.

missedthecue 4y ago
I love that stuff. My company is remote optional, but most days I'm the only person in the office which defeats the point. I wish I could find a hiring board for in-office only companies.

ChicagoDave 4y ago

This will evolve. I think 100% remote is great for some people (small children, busy schedules, health issues) but many people would also benefit from being with their teams. The change I'd like to see is some sort of geographically centric pod office where it's not mandatory, but a team lead could say, "We need two days at Pod X to run through A, B, C initiatives." No one is required to arbitrarily attend a physical office, but rather very task and team specific meetings. I think many people that are against that arbitrary return would be open to task/team scheduled gatherings.

ipaddr 4y ago
Any in-person gatherings are red flags. For a party, to hear the ceo speak or for a team building meeting.
- ChicagoDave 4y ago
  A company has every right to build its culture, so I'd disagree with this. It's really the "you must be at a desk in our office for 8 hours just because" part that most people object to.

yalogin 4y ago

I actually like talking to people in person and having those chats at their desk or coffee machine. However even I wasn’t ready for the noisy environment at a cubicle. Over the course of the pandemic I forgot how tough they make it to focus and now would much rather work from home!

DogLover_ 4y ago

If they want people to come into office willingly, something needs to seriously change. Perhaps change hours from 9-17 to 9-14 for people coming into the office. The output would likely drop but perhaps that's what you need to do if you want people to want to come back to the office.

s-xyz 4y ago

At least 2 days home office, should be the ideal mix

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Make it how many days of WFH each employee wants. This way all 3 camps are happy.
ipaddr 4y ago
The worst of many options where you are forced to live in a city and work in a small apartment or drive from a distance in and you lose your desk and other perks.

nprateem 4y ago

I've decided to quit since my remote job won't let me work abroad. That's a dealbreaker now given the summer. I'm just left wondering why I should be tied to the UK instead of being able to explore all of Europe and further afield. There's no real reason, so I've started looking around. If anyone wants an expensive, fully remote contractor with experience as an AWS SRE (golang, python, k8s, terraform, bash), full-stack web dev (django, vueJS, some react, forgotten PHP), rusty big data (scala & spark) a part-time MBA in progress, and a 30 day notice period, let me know :)

jjeaff 4y ago
How would they know if you are abroad? Couldn't you just setup a static IP in a data center in the country you are supposed to be in and VPN through it?
- nprateem 4y ago
  Corporate VPN pops up an alert. Plus even though I may be able to circumvent it, it's unethical so I haven't tried.
seanp2k2 4y ago
Correct me if I’m wrong, but “expensive dev” in the UK means $100-200k, whereas in SV it’s more like $600k-1m. Hope you find what you’re looking for, consider SV firms as they pay way better AFAICT.
- nprateem 4y ago
  Yes you're right. Has anyone who's been successfully hired as an international contractor by SV companies got any tips for how they made the relevant contacts? I may consider full-time but I hear people in the US work insane hours which I've no intention of doing.

deegles 4y ago

I got Covid last month. I have the vaccine and a booster and it still took me out for a week. Why should I continue to risk re-infection and long Covid? Do I wear a mask while in Zoom calls if I'm sitting in a shared area? Do I have to call out coworkers not wearing a mask? Will the next variants actually cause less severe symptoms or is that just wishful thinking? Am I overreacting or not? There are a thousand questions that I just don't have to deal with if I just choose to work from home permanently. I encourage everyone who gets a message from a recruiter to make it clear you'll only accept WFH, that feedback trickles back to hiring managers and might slowly change their minds.

shrubble 4y ago

I had to go into the office for the Fortune 500 company I work for; talked to the security guard and was told that every Monday they are handed a stack of security badges to process and remove from the system--people inform their managers they are leaving on Friday and hand in their badge. The commute time, the price of gas, and the nature of the work in this building (tech work for customers who are themselves remote, with everything handled by a ticket system) are no doubt all factors. It is seen as a power ploy by management, I think, to have "butts in seats" again.

seanp2k2 4y ago
Good; let them burn for poor management decisions.

kkfx 4y ago

The curious part is that the Green New Deal invest in WFH, at least in advertisement, and IT giants have formally done the same to sell services... Anyway any change is hard in general, any social change happen only in long timeframe, but it's clear to anybody that jobs eligible from remote work should be done as much as possible remotely. Surely we benefit from being together, so for certain activities, like schooling we must keep physical proximity, but for many others the trade off is far on the side of remote.

parkingrift 4y ago

I’m loving the companies that are trying to force workers back to the office. I just troll on LI for the announcements and then target their devs. It’s never been easier to recruit. Employers can’t win this but I’m glad so many are trying.

coffeedan 4y ago
Maybe? I think it will take time to know who the winners and losers are. It might be good for your recruiting numbers right now, but market performance over an extended period will decide winners and losers.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  My prediction is that the places bleeding talent won’t do so well in the long run.

ubermonkey 4y ago

It's weird this is even NEWS. So many jobs could always have been done remotely, and now post-COVID we can see that. The HN demographic is probably on the leading edge here. I work for a small software company, but I don't code anymore; I'm effectively the head of operations. I've been here 15 years. We have NEVER had an office anywhere. Our employees have been spread nationwide this whole time, working from home. It's fine. I think the only thing we really miss about an office is that we think it would be difficult to onboard a baby dev. I DO think there's something to be said for learning the "professional programmer on commercial software" ropes in a place where you're physically near other people doing that. But that's really just a suspicion; we don't actually KNOW, but hiring for us is still such a big deal (narrow expertise) that we're not likely to do so as an experiment.