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‘Return to the office’ rhetoric needs to end

• hollywood_court 4y ago
  My wife works for the state. Her team’s productivity soared during the 8 months they spent working from home. Once they were forced back to the office, 6 of her peers quickly left. She and one other person are the only ones who remain. Productivity fell greatly even before her peers left. She only continues to work because she needs ~18 more months to be fully vested in their retirement system. Then she is leaving as well and she will probably just remain at home until she finds something she enjoys. Her managers know that they are capable of being far more productive while at home, but they don’t seem to care. Part of me believes it’s “cruelty is the point” but I’m also aware that the director of her state agency is a conservative who has been trying to “starve the beast” once he took over. He has found the most effective way to starve it as all of the young people are leaving to go to the private sector. Once my wife leaves, the entire state will have exactly one employee to handle her workload. Edit: The worst part is the fact that the other side of her hallway is nothing but empty offices because those people are allowed to work from home. However, she works under a different director and he refuses to allow it. So it’s quite literally one man ruining it for the rest of them.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Thlom 4y ago
    In my team most of us are back in the office now. Luckily we still have the option to work from home, so when that is more convenient I'll work from home, but most days I'll be at the office. Never really got the hang of working from home.
    • yrgulation 4y ago
      “ Never really got the hang of working from home.” And thats fine. Everyone should have the option of whichever way works for them. The only issue is that many of those who prefer on site want it imposed on everyone else.
      • whatarethembits 4y ago
        Exactly. The ones who prefer to go in want to drag everyone along with them, which makes me irrationally angry when they try to come up with “objective” reasons for why on-site is better than WFH. You do you and leave me alone.
      • Thlom 4y ago
        Agreed. Still would like those that WFH to come in to the office occasionally though, even if just to say hi. :-)
  • eachro 4y ago
    What is her team responsible for?
    • hollywood_court 4y ago
      They analyze field reports from other scientists. 100% of her work is done at her PC. When she’s at the office she has to deal with her lower morale in addition to the random coworker stopping by to chat or her manager interrupting her in various ways. During her WFH time, she alway completed her work by 10am each morning. Now she struggles to complete it by 5pm while being in the office. The folks that left had many years to go until they were vested. Since she only has a short time remaining, she decided to stick it out.
      • ianai 4y ago
        I've heard similar reports. I've also directly suffered very malignant management in the past before covid. We're talking people who were outright awful to the business and some who were ultimately fired. There needs to be better management of management.
        • treis 4y ago
          On the flip side there is nothing about an office that should turn ~1 hour of work into a day.
          • ianai 4y ago
            The interruptions absolutely do add up. My suspicion too is office bound work probably suffers from work being added on amounting to whole other jobs. Every job I’ve had as a professional has been essentially multiple jobs not reflected in the pay nor job description.
            • treis 4y ago
              Don't buy it. Yes, interruptions add up. They don't add up to 7 hours a day. I mean look at your story. Your wife's team quit and the office is empty. There's hardly anyone there to interrupt her. Someone going from a 8 hour workday in the office to a 1 hour workday at home is sandbagging it. There's no two ways around it. Let them WFH and off come the sandbags because they can get that time back. Put them back in the office and the sandbags come back because there's no incentive for them to work any faster. They're stuck in the office for 8 hours no matter how much work they do.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • intrasight 4y ago
    A friend of mine works for the state. She was told to return to the office. The office is in another city. She is having to buy a condo in that city in order to make that feasible.
    • hollywood_court 4y ago
      My wife commutes 45 mins each way. It’s awful because it’s so dangerous. Her office is in a dangerous area and the interstate she uses to commute is known for its deadly wrecks.
  • rhexs 4y ago
    No one is owed a remote job. Unfortunately, if you work for the state, it is highly likely you don't have the skills and leverage to force the issue as most of the positions are just supporting some sort of bureaucracy and fundamentally have to exist because a lobbyist at one point got a law passed. State jobs, like it or not, are often effectively just political appointments. Also keep in mind that you can't fire or terminate anyone, ever, in the state, so there's also a chance leadership feels this is the first time they can turnover roles that aren't doing much or meeting their goals. That's a very rare opportunity. If you think "rest-and-vest" is bad in tech, you ain't seen anything when it comes to government. Imagine jobs where no one has accomplished anything in a decade or more. Of course you immediately jump to some sort of conspiracy though.
    • hollywood_court 4y ago
      You made quite a few assumptions there. She’s a microbiologist. There aren’t any private sector jobs for her around this area unfortunately. It’s either the state or the university (also the state). She applied and went through the interview process just like anyone else. There was no “political appointment.” She isn’t allowed to work from home simply because one individual doesn’t like it. Her director refuses to allow it while the director in charge of the other side of the hallway does allow it. It’s the result of one man imposing his will on others.
      • mxuribe 4y ago
        > ...It’s the result of one man imposing his will on others. This comment almost sounds like the kind of thing one sees in non-gov corporate america! :-)
    • tomrod 4y ago
      > it is highly likely you don't have the skills and leverage to force the issue as most of the positions are just supporting some sort of bureaucracy and fundamentally have to exist because a lobbyist at one point got a law passed. State jobs, like it or not, are often effectively just political appointments. This tells me you haven't met or worked with very many people in state or federal jobs. I feel like this needs reasonable pushback. SOME of the leadership positions are political appointments. The majority of employees are a highly skilled workforce supporting a specific mission of that particular state agency. And "can't fire or terminate anyone, ever, in the state" is a bit off as well.
• xchip 4y ago
  Not even the managers want to go back :D
• kranke155 4y ago
  The truth is a significant portion of managers, in my experience, are not particularly well suited to the task or are incompetent on some level. Usually their domain level knowledge of what is happening is lower than it should be, so they struggle with leading teams because they’re not as good at knowing what’s going on as they should be. One way to mask that incompetence and lack of domain level knowledge, in my experience is to come by the workers and look over their shoulders and ask questions. This is not a problem managers who are experts in what their workers are doing have. But those people in my experience are a minority. They are hired by high performing companies, everything in the middle and down get the cruft. High performing managers don’t need this, because they know what’s going on even if everyone is at home. They can see who’s slow, who’s fast, who’s delivering what they need. And they know why and how to fix things very quickly. Poor performing low domain level knowledge managers struggle with this, because they can’t “look over the shoulder”, and ask questions until they have some understand of what’s going on that allows them to (attempt to) fix things. Thus low to mid performing managers do poorly at WFH while high performing managers are fine with it (in my experience). Having the “over the shoulder” view does indeed allow for lower performance managers to get a grip on a project so I understand why they want to keep it.
  • kemiller2002 4y ago
    >>This is not a problem managers who are experts in what their workers are doing have. You're more or less right, but I don't think this is exactly the case. A good manager shouldn't need to be an expert in what their staff is doing. The manager should be there to help them let them do their jobs and stay out of the way. I always say the same thing around this, "If you have to constantly watch your employees either, why do they still work for you, or why are you the manager?"
    • PeterisP 4y ago
      Managers play very different roles in different jobs. There are many jobs where your direct manager is a foreman who is doing pretty much the same job but is expected to be an expert in that job and has the responsibility of teaching the others how to do it and doing quality review/supervision to ensure that they're doing it properly.
• wikitopian 4y ago
  A vast subset of our economy depends on parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work. If you think they and the government institutions and their politicians who rely on their tax revenues are going to politely shut up, you're mistaken.
  • UncleEntity 4y ago
    > A vast subset of our economy depends on parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work. You mean people who work in the coffee shop down the block so you can get your $7 latte on the way to the office? Quite the interesting definition of ‘parasitically’ if you do.
    • mellavora 4y ago
      Maybe they mean the people who own a coffee shop which charges $7 per latte.
    • intrasight 4y ago
      I had interpreted "parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work" to referring to those corporate managers. But certainly one could expand this to include all those who provide products and services in our economy. In fact, one could expand it to include the entire human race which is a parasite on this plant.
    • series11 4y ago
      Probably more along the lines of personal vehicle ownership and a fast fashion wardrobe only needed for the office.
    • bart_spoon 4y ago
      Probably refers more to corporate real estate interests. Just because people stop commuting to work doesn’t mean they will stop eating out. Maybe they won’t be located in the same places, but there will still be demand for food, coffee, etc. What doesn’t persist is the demand for giant corporate offices, and so there are some people who would be stuck holding some massive bags if the office real estate demand becomes permanently reduced.
• oldnetguy 4y ago
  We have people working remotely and they are supposed to be available and online and I find that many are not available. We have even had emergencies where we reached out to people only to not get a response. There are people actually working from home and they are people "working" from home.
  • diffeomorphism 4y ago
    Then you should be paying money for people to be "on call" not "available and online". An error in planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
    • oldnetguy 4y ago
      If an emergency happens on a system you are responsible for in the middle of the work day then it is expected that you fix the system you are responsible for.
      • falcolas 4y ago
        It’s telling that you aren’t mentioning why they were unavailable? I’m certain you found out. Catch them on their lunch hour? While they were handling an emergency with family? Taking a mental health break from tech? Internet outage? Also, why is there only one employee able to fix the issue?
        • oldnetguy 4y ago
          The team is supposed to be available. All members of the team are supposed to be available during their work hours. We have determined the cause, it's called people were not doing their job.
          • falcolas 4y ago
            And when in the office, do you chain them to their desks? Never letting them take a bathroom break, never letting them handle family emergencies, never letting them take a lunch break, never letting them step outside to take a walk? I'm guessing that's not the case. So even in the office, the team's availability is not absolute. Which raises the question of why would someone expect otherwise when working from home.
• mikece 4y ago
  A stark truth about working from home is that the useless layers of middle management are exposed as not being needed. When everyone is both on and active on Slack/Teams/etc then high level decision makers can interact with low-level leads and front-line managers who are actually getting things done and shape strategic direction more easily -- and the lower lever folks can access leadership more easily and quickly when problems arise. No running it through seven layers of management, no weeks of delays to have meeting to plan meetings to think about having a meeting to discuss the issue: just get straight to the point with the people who matter. If I was a useless middle manager I would want an immediate return to the office as well.
  • gsibble 4y ago
    I believe this is the primary reason for pushing people back to work. All those middle managers are shown to be useless idiots, as they usually are, when people work from home. They're trying to save their skins and justify their existence.
  • jevgeni 4y ago
    Sounds like the top can't stick to its own designs.
    • intrasight 4y ago
      >then high level decision makers can interact with low-level leads Not my experience at all. There is no "slack" or anything comparable. There is no communications that skip levels. Why would a manager allow that? They would lose their power.
      • jevgeni 4y ago
        Why would top management assign a middle manager, if they don't want them to manage?
        • ornornor 4y ago
          “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it”, “because we need a way to keep the file and rank docile but don’t have the time to micromanage ourselves”, “because we owe Bob a favor”… many reasons, none that make actual sense.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jevgeni 4y ago
  Yet another snarky take by a techie blaming all on "management layers"... Sometimes I come to HN just for that sweet myopia.
• ElCheapo 4y ago
  Option A: return to office Option A-bis: return to another kind of office Option B: work from home Option C: hybrid Question: what is the goal of the employer? how do the options contribute to the goal? "Return to the Office" is not a rethoric, there are certain metrics that are boosted by having people in the same buildings, and other that are boosted by having people work naked in their bedroom. I'd say this " 'Return to the Office Rhetoric needs to end' Rethoric needs to end"
  • jevgeni 4y ago
    It's essentially a question of focused vs. collaborative work multiplied by commute times. Figure out how to provide both focused and collaborative models, optimize for commute times and you're set.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  > Those who cannot manage their time correctly and have to work past five to get things done and those who feel corporate pressure to work past five because others are doing it. Doesn't it depend on how much work you have to do? Whatever amount of work you can get done while managing your time correctly and working 9-5, isn't there some larger amount of work that your employer could expect/demand of you? Yes, the amount of work you can get done while managing your time correctly between 9 and 5 is different for different people (also different for the same person different weeks, for sure). But this is why I've had trouble understanding "oh, it doesn't matter how many hours I work as long as I get my work done, the work they expect of me." What is the "work they expect of me"? For me, putting in (roughly, on average) the time my employer expects me to work is the work they expect of me, it's what allows me to push back if they try to assign more work than fits in, if they try to just keep adding more "priorities". I can, agile-style, work on whatever you say are your top priorities, for the X hours a week you expect me to work -- what I get done in that time is what I get done, it is unreasonable of you to expect more. This only works if I'm really working that time though, my end of things. This seems relevant to me because, from the worker's perspective, it is one of the the things people suggest as advantages to working from home, in these forums -- hey, I can work half days every day, as long as I "get my work done". (There is even someone in this thread suggesting someone could "get their work done" working an hour every day. Presumably if their bosses knew that they would assign more work, and be right to do so?).
  • youerbt 4y ago
    But there is always some expected body of work. If you don't pull your weight, despite working 9 to 5, you might get fired. I'm one of those "half days" people, and it's not about doing less. It's about realization, that you are productive for less than 8h daily and that difference + commute time is simply wasted. Even if you plug some optimistic numbers, like 6h of productive work vs 8h office + 1h commute, its 30% of time spend on "work" just lost. Daily.
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      If your employer knew you were only working half-days, do you think they would be unjustified in adding to your workload? Does this work situation require keeping it secret from your employer how much you are working? How do they determine what is the "expected body of work"? What keeps them from making it too high to actually get done in 8 hours? If it's not knowing that it would take you more than 8 hours to complete, if you expect how much time you actually take is private information and can be less than 8 hours and it's none of their business.
• paxys 4y ago
  What needs to end is the "hybrid work" rhetoric. There is no such thing as hybrid. Either I live in proximity to the office or not. Either I buy a car/figure out public transit or not. Either I set up a home office and buy WFH equipment or not. If I am forced to go into the office for >0 days a week then I have an office job, period. "Oh but you can work a day or two from home!" Pretty much every tech employee was already doing this well before the pandemic, and "hybrid" wasn't touted as some big perk then.
  • danaris 4y ago
    > Pretty much every tech employee was already doing this well before the pandemic Your experiences are not universal. This is definitely not true of most "tech employees" I have known personally or heard from—at least if your "day or two" is intended to mean "day or two a week" or even "day or two a month". Maybe it's true in Silicon Valley, but please try to remember that Silicon Valley does not employ even close to all the "tech employees" in the country (let alone the world).
• z9znz 4y ago
  Every situation is different, but for sure there are a group of people like me who have decided that we will only consider jobs where the work is fully remote. Once in a great while an on-site event or meeting is ok, but a "hybrid" of some days in and some days remote each week is not acceptible to me. This is not just because I prefer working at home (or very much dislike working in a typical office), but also because I like to be free to work from anywhere. It's funny too when people use the argument about how much better collaboration is in the office. Except for certain stages of product development, collaboration is rarely needed because planning and designing is usually straightforward or the work is just routine. Most jobs ultimately suck, so I don't have much FOMO when I tell a recruiter that I am not interested in any opportunity which requires specific on-site time.
• amhokies 4y ago
  My mother-in-law works an office job and is easily able to do her job from home with no impact on productivity. She also has had a heart transplant so is immunocompromised. Recently her bosses have started pushing her to come back 100% to work even though she has a note from a doctor saying she shouldn't be going into the office.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    I'm only guessing where you are, but just try that shit in Europe (over-ruling a doctor, that is). I stand to be corrected.
    • amhokies 4y ago
      I’m sure you correctly guessed that I’m American
• streblo 4y ago
  Let's be real - a lot of tech companies over-hired from late 2020 to early 2022. Many need to cut staff now that the capital markets have dried up. The easiest way to do that without an actual layoff is to reneg on the promise of being able to work from home. A lot of people will just deal with it, but a small amount won't, and will quit. This is the easiest way to go if you're the executive team, since a lot of this 'soft layoff' will happen voluntarily and will save a lot of the expenses (not to mention the negative signals sent to the market) that come with a real layoff.
  • Invictus0 4y ago
    Who do you think leaves when promises are reneged on? The best people.
    • SamuelAdams 4y ago
      Yes, but the best people typically know their worth and leave in 2-3 years anyways, downsize or not. What’s important during a layoff is keeping the company running. How deep can you cut without affecting day-to-day operations? You don’t need 10x experts to keep legacy systems running for 6 months. Good people leaving is a calculate risk that managers probably considered.
    • streblo 4y ago
      Not sure I agree. My anecdotal first hand experience is that it's irrespective of talent or work ethic.
      • x86x87 4y ago
        Nope. People with options leave first. Who has options? The best people. It's called the deadsea effect - look it up.
        • streblo 4y ago
          Makes sense in theory, doesn't always seem to in practice.
• uhtred 4y ago
  At this point the return to office articles are just click/flame bait. The boston globe publishes one probably once a month and of course it leads to hundreds of furious comments like "I will quit before I go back! Never going back!".
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  They should just make the CEO stay at the office and not travel if the rest of the workers can't work from home.
• unity1001 4y ago
  Let's face it: The economic, time and energy cost of the commute is WAY too much for the return to office to be justified. Average one-way commute in the US is ~30 minutes. An hour lost every day. 20 hours every month. Literally we are losing ONE DAY at the road every month. 12 days every year. And its much worse than it looks: When you commute, you don't only incur a time cost. You spend cognitive energy - you have to navigate transportation, cars, people, you have to avoid hitting another car or getting hit by a car, catch the tram at a certain time, do various things just to be able to get to the office. All of these have a cognitive cost. They burn energy and especially cost concentration. Then you have to enter the office, say hi to peopl around, settle in your desk, and start getting into the work mindset... only to be interrupted by the stand-up or whatever other practice your place has. Or maybe you will just wander around and not do much until that stand-up or meeting. ALL of these cost immensely for both people and organizations. Economic cost. Energy cost. Burnout cost. ... Compare this to the situation when working from home: You get up. Get something to eat and a cup of coffee. You sit in front of the computer. You are ready to work without all that cognitive and time cost.
  • ahoho 4y ago
    Commuting is not so bad when public transportation is good and/or you live close to the office. I used to live a fifteen minute walk from my previous job. It was something I relished, and on days with poor weather, I just worked remotely. Now I take a subway and I can read for 20 minutes. I wonder if employers might start setting up smaller, “hybrid-first” offices in less expensive, more residential areas (eg, in the outer boroughs in Manhattan). I enjoy working from an office, but if no one comes in, the appeal is diminished.
    • unity1001 4y ago
      > Commuting is not so bad when public transportation is good and/or you live close to the office. Nope. Consider the BEST case: You live NEXT DOOR to your office. You get up in the morning. You quickly grab a bite. Then prepare for ~10 minutes for going to the office. Getting out of your house, going into the next building, settling down etc all take another 10-15 minutes. And that's for people who prepare in the morning fast, walk fast, settle down fast. So its still ~1 hour lost every day. > Now I take a subway and I can read for 20 minutes. Would you sit and read for 20 minutes if you didnt have to commute? That sounds more like pulling something good out of an undesirable situation through discipline and personal talent than any benefit. Not to mention that if you actually sat and read in your own house, that 20 minutes of reading would also be totally different than reading in the subway.
• TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  In my view, none of the "return to office" rhetoric has anything to do with actually doing the jobs. It's a problem with new hires. Without at least meeting someone face to face, and talking to them from time to time, there's no context for any of your other interactions. There's no chance to build any camaraderie or rapport. That's fine for one-off calls with IT support, but it's not for a team of people centered on doing a particular thing. I'm one of the more introverted people around, but even I see the need for at least some in-person interaction. Our group has hemorrhaged people over the past 2 years (and the software I write has greatly helped to at least partially make up for this), but it's not a situation that can last forever.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Counterpoint: my team has onboarded two new hires, and it’s gone well. Mostly because they are not depending on work for their social life, so normal daily interactions via video calls has been sufficient for them to integrate.
    • unethical_ban 4y ago
      >Mostly because they are not depending on work for their social life I've heard this a lot. It seems a point of contention. I don't see how people don't depend on work for some level of social interaction. How can one want to spend 1/3 of their life not giving a fuck about the people they work with? How can someone want to sit at a computer banging out useless shit for faceless corporations and not have the conciliation of suffering through it with people you know and like? At my last pre-covid job, once covid hit, my team of 10 or so would do voluntary virtual happy hour (VHH) and we would, for several months, be on zoom for hours and hours after work on Thursdays, drinking, playing music over Zoom, Among Us, and so on. And work was about 10x more enjoyable than whatever it is I do now, in large part due to that comradarie. Even before that, part of the success of my job was through socialization. I don't mean climbing the ladder or kissing ass. I mean getting to know people on different teams through running into them, working in the same area, and spontaneously chatting about their work and how our teams affect each other. That kind of communication and collaboration is much more difficult to scaffold on Slack. I know that a lot of movement into IT and within IT was through this kind of spontaneous meeting of people when walking through the halls or running into each other at the coffee shop. Work was a community of diverse roles and individuals, a microcosm of society where people could see how others work and be part of something bigger than our team. It sounds cliche, but that's how it felt. Now, we have #team-chat and #diversity-and-inclusion and @manager. TLDR: Social interaction at work is healthy; social interaction at work helps people enjoy work, learn about other roles and have job flexibility and helps them do their own job better; The thing you spend 1/3 of your life doing should have a human component.
• iosystem 4y ago
  In academia we've lost multiple great programmers to the private sector because of the "Return to the Office" nonsense and even when the rule requires being at the office ~40% of the work week. The replacements being low paid foreigners on work permits and they're needing to be taught but we no longer have enough experienced programmers for the task. My impression is productivity lost isn't valuable enough unlike the political reason of why people need to drive into work everyday.
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I'll Return To Office when local employers learn how to compete with remote employers. I've said it before, I don't like working from home. But I dislike working for underpaying petty feudal overlords with garbage tech stacks and mediocre management even more. I know what my local market is like, and there's plenty of remote companies happy to outcompete them. So that's what I'll do. That said: Apparently showing that you can continue to deliver at a high standard, remotely, for two years is not an indicator that you will be able to work like that always. In reality, I know that Google's own metrics showed marked decline in productivity during that period. I witnessed it first hand and saw all sorts of deadlines slip and things get cancelled. Whether that was due to WFH or people dealing also with having kids and spouses at home -- and the fact that the whole world was seemingly falling apart around them -- I don't know. I know I didn't cope well with it. But also, I think those kinds of Big Companies proved themselves absolutely woefully incompetent in adapting. They didn't handle it well. At least my team didn't.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    If you're working at Google - other local companies probably don't make enough money to pay you to be competitive...
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      I do not work at Google anymore.
  • kiawe_fire 4y ago
    It’s unfortunate, but there is a strong link between company culture and their remote work offerings. At this point, companies that are “office first” tend to be of the poorly managed, tech-debt riddled, low trust variety, while remote first companies tend not to be, but also tend to have an actively hostile culture towards in-person work. I believe there is a slowly growing cohort of people who do their best work when regular or semi-regular, in-person collaboration is involved. In time, I think well-managed organizations with proper tech practices will emerge that recognize this, and will attract the right people for it. Until then, and for as long as each side in this straw man debate views the other as a mutually exclusive, almost existential threat, then this “rhetoric” from both sides most certainly won’t end and we will all continue to be subject to articles filled with lists of value judgements and personal projection on “the one true way everyone must work”.
• TexanFeller 4y ago
  The thing that worries me is that WFH could bring back offshoring in a big way. WFH may come to be Work from Hyderabad. Lots of brilliant minds in other parts of the world.
  • dam_broke_it 4y ago
    All the "lowish" positions were offshored DECADES ago. Companies still trying to do this REAP what they sow.... (easily google the results of this MISadventures)
  • papandada 4y ago
    Met brilliant minds no doubt. But between working on Indian Standard Time vs N. American time zones (for me) and the average Indian company exploiting their employees at multiple clients and with an impressive layer of account manager invincibility against individual accountabilities, I'm not feeling too threatened... yet.
  • greedo 4y ago
    Yup. My company employees a lot of people from overseas, as well as uses consultants from India. It works generally. There are friction points but WFH has actually made some of it easier since everyone is treated the same. The TZ difference is the biggest obstacle, but that can be worked around. A friend has a completely virtual company and has multiple employees from Czechia and Hungary. Much cheaper than US employees, but again, there's some added friction. Just need to decentralize and delegate to be most effective. Now that sounds easy, and for some small companies and small business units, sure. But for a big corporation?
• trabant00 4y ago
  I've been working remotely for 4 years and will likely never go back to the office if I can help it. That being said let me be the devil's advocate and say that if I owned a large company I would likely fight against remote work. While a minority of workers thrive remotely and they have the results to show for it, this is clearly not the case in general. Lots of people can't focus from home and lots still simply take advantage to slack as much as possible. These things are from the horse's mouth. In person social pressure pushes people to work more. It's too hard and too expensive to measure performance per person, I mean we have regular threads about that. And even if you could measure you can not act because you can't fire most people and neither can you discriminate who is allowed remote and who isn't. Overall I think it is more honest to frame this as a conflict of interest (in a lot of cases) between employer and employee, and not as right vs wrong.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later. Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being temperature controlled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself. The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
• SkipperCat 4y ago
  I can't say there's anything wrong with what the author states. It all rings true. But when I read these articles I constantly detect a theme of "one size fits all" or "this works for me". For some companies, remote works fine, for some, its a partial failure (or even worse). If you have teams that are mature, and have solid interpersonal relationships, remote can be a boon to productivity. But, you need to have defined workflows and protocols for getting things done. If you don't have that, being remote exacerbates the problem of bringing things to completion. I'd also say that if you're a manager and your team can't get stuff done remotely, you are failing as a manager. Conversely, if you have younger (not in age but company tenure) teams, you may need that in-person time to build the relationships and workflows. There's nothing wrong with that, and as a manager you should codify them ASAP so they can be taught and learned by new hires. When it comes to remote work YMMV. I'd actually like to see someone do an in-depth study of this and quantify the performance of many companies that WFH/Hybrid/Office and find out what the actual performance numbers are. I'd then like to see some research into best practices about how to create teams that thrive WFH and also what makes them fail at WFH. It's a new world folks, it's probably going to take some time to suss this all out. And until that happens, I'm going to enjoy the 2 days per week I work from home.
• digitalsushi 4y ago
  Last week I went into the office for the second time since February 2020, and I said one of the things on bad-mock list: "You cant whiteboard over zoom" as a cohort and I scribbled gleefully over the four 6x10 foot whiteboards facing inwards for three hours straight. This isn't a complaint, it's a question - what are people using for remote whiteboarding? I won't say what my os/meeting software so as to keep any responses somewhat general. Thanks, though, I know people must be doing something better than what I have run into.
• balderdash 4y ago
  A handful of observations: 1) the dispersion of outcomes is quite large, I know people at fully virtual startups that are having great success, I also know that some of the governmental organizations I’ve interacted with have literally accomplished nothing in the two years since they’ve “gone remote” 2)I’d posit that a team’s ability to work remotely is a function of 1) experience (few junior employees that are learning on the job), 2) caliber of employee (white shoe lawyers vs say the accounts payable department) 3) while I had a positive experience with remote work during the pandemic, if I were senior leadership I’d have real concerns around long term implications for employee development, company culture, and productivity
  • mring33621 4y ago
    My brother-in-law works for the state of IL. When COVID hit, his department went 'remote'. According to him, while 'remote', anyone without a computer did not have to do anything, but was still paid. Suddenly, lots of people "didn't have a computer".
• t43562 4y ago
  I think the obvious bullshit in this is in companies which outsource overseas. Somehow it's fine to work remotely with people in India or China but it's not ok to work with someone in your own timezone....
• intrasight 4y ago
  The article doesn't touch on what I believe to be a bigger issue with RTO - the huge carbon footprint of human travel for work. If there were a "carbon credit" for WFH, I think many more companies would embrace it. But that would mean first creating carbon penalties, which society is unwilling or unable to do.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Unnecessary complications just add avenues for corruption. See recent thread about business buying and selling carbon credits that do not result in reduction of fossil fuel usage. A simple tax on fossil fuel would address the issue with little to no avenues for corruption.
    • intrasight 4y ago
      Which is what I meant by "first creating carbon penalties" Once you globally tax it, you can globally trade it without so much gaming of system.
      • lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Globally trade what? The taxes would be denominated in local currencies like all other taxes, and currencies are already traded.
        • intrasight 4y ago
          Trading offsets is here for the duration
  • makz 4y ago
    At my office the rhetoric is: we have green technologies, working here is more energy-efficient than working at home, even when including the commutes.
    • intrasight 4y ago
• gsibble 4y ago
  Thankfully I already work so remote I'm literally on the other side of the country so I can't be called into the office. I've always favored working from home as someone who codes 90%+ of the day. Getting and saying in flow/focus mode is extremely important. A single distraction can waste an hour of time, which adds up significantly when it happens multiple times a day across many days a week across many weeks a year. Some companies I worked for before the pandemic recognized my productivity soared when I worked from home and let me work there for weeks at a time, while others kept me handcuffed to my desk. I've had the fortunate experience to work for two remote-first / no-office companies now and have only become more productive and collaborative. I don't buy the "we need to return to the office" BS one bit. Just managers who don't trust their employees trying to justify their bloated salaries. That being said, I have looked into getting a private office for myself somewhere outside the house since without it, I rarely ever leave the house and both me and the wife work from home. We both want some separation so we have a nice reunion at the end of the day to look forward to.
• tomrod 4y ago
  My concern is outsourcing. Despite many companies being burned by outsourcing quality gaps the last few cycles, I am starting to hear "If your job can be done from Moscow, Idaho it can be done from <pick your favorite outsourcing target>."
  • Nasrudith 4y ago
    That has always been a fear-mongering fallacy. The proper response to any threats of outsourcing is to call the bluff. "So why aren't you doing so already?" There is no need or use in threats if there is already a superior for costs alternative.
• 3pt14159 4y ago
  I've gone back and forth from being in management and just a straight up IC. As an IC, I love "work wherever you want and we also have an office and we trust you." But that said: People that judge managers that want a return to the office as "incompetent" in my opinion misunderstand competence. Competence isn't a spectrum. It's a function that depends on inputs and is matched to some selection of innate traits and acquired skills. As a manager, if I'm supposed to be managing remote, I absolutely need frequent one-on-ones. I have ADHD that I can't take meds for, and the inattentivety is real. Not to be confused with a lack of conscientiousness, I am much better at managing people in person because I can pick up on social cues in a way that remote just can't. And yes, many workers don't go straight to management when they're stuck. They quietly twiddle their thumbs, and if you dear reader are being honest with yourself, you know this is true at least for a sizeable portion of the workforce. So my advice here if you're a manager: Daily one-on-ones in the morning with defined goals and blockers. For the most dedicated, weekly is fine. Don't force in office if you don't need it for real work to be done. But make work success clear. If you're an employee getting pressured to come in: Ask your manager for a daily one-on-one for two weeks to see if they get the sense that things improve first. They can always say "no" and you can always leave.
  • papandada 4y ago
    Just a random comment to say that untreated ADHD with high conscientiousness is a certain kind of suffering.
    • 3pt14159 4y ago
      It can be, yeah. Timers and todo lists help. Same thing with setting boundaries with people and understanding your needs to help others effectively. Edit: Also, I feel like my ADHD is at least partially treated by the above and I don't dislike it overall. I like who I am now that I know how to help people better. I also found the power of prayer in the past couple years, and that helps too.
      • papandada 4y ago
        Can be, yes! And just to say it was meant as sympathetic to the situation, not, "get treated!" Really appreciated your perspective and experience.
• yrgulation 4y ago
  Without remote work options tech is simply not a family friendly career. If you want more in life than the “opportunity to work in a fast paced environment”, rent a lousy miniature home or live with housemates then tech is not the right choice. Sure there are those who get paid a nifty compensation in return for their freedom, but thats not sustainable. Remote work on the other hand allows for proper personal growth. The higher the reward the better the motivation the more productive you are. A win win situation.
• Eridrus 4y ago
  I barely come in to the office any more, and this has been fine for me, I know all the senior folks in my org, I have a big meaty project that I am driving that has appropriate staffing, and it's largely not from the city I live in, so I don't really benefit a lot from showing up to the office anyway. But I also haven't interacted with new folks my org has hired in my city unless I have directly worked with them, which isn't really a problem for me, but I have more experience with our technology/systems/processes that new hires would benefit from, and I am not interacting with them enough to share it. Anyway, my eyes started glazing over when this post said there was no evidence, since all the big companies have done studies on the effect of the covid shock & WFH. Microsoft published theirs and found that it wasn't totally cost-less, even if primary productivity metrics were not impacted: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-effects-of-remote-work-on-collaboration-among-information-workers/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-eff... You can argue that the evidence is being misinterpreted, that companies are trying to have their cake (increased task-specific productivity when WFH) and eat it (increased innovation) too, but to say there is no evidence is to not engage with it at all. In general, I find it unsurprising that someone from an SRE background at a relatively small company is bullish on WFH, the job is largely not innovation focused and is probably one of the parts that is least impacted by the downsides of WFH. I think we've all experienced too big a shock for things to go back to how they were before, but pretending there are no downsides is just dogma.
• andrewla 4y ago
  There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education. This dream was killed by COVID, and likely it'll be another generation before it is even considered seriously again. The epitaph is not yet written for remote work and work-from-home, but I think we need to wait a couple of years before we can consider a success or a failure. There are troubling signs of its failure that I see at the larger tech companies; their culture has been ripped apart and reassembled into a Frankenstein imitation of its previous state. For better, for worse, who can tell, but subjectively, the change mostly seems for the worse. Management is completely unable to adapt and has moved even further in the direction of only pursuing work that can be accurately scheduled and whose execution is therefore trivial if laborious, and the only people who can get anything novel done are those that can execute while simultaneously snowballing their management with fairy tales about work estimates and milestones. We'll have to keep an eye out in ten years for the companies that emerge out of the fertile ground left by the workers at these companies that find they have built up a repertoire of skills that they are no longer allowed to use.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    >There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education. Realistically the dream was always that large hall, largely broadcast, lectures could be replaced with video of world-class lecturers. And while there are obstacles--most schools don't want to replace half their course content with videos--it's eminently doable. The key point though is that the other half of the content and in-person assistance can't be replaced in the same manner nor can courses requiring equipment, hand-on work, etc.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    > There was a dream of remote education, where the best educators in the world can reach out and teach students anywhere in the world, and be a great equalizer of education. > This dream was killed by COVID, and likely it'll be another generation before it is even considered seriously again. I think the future is that rich countries are gonna Baumol's Cost Disease their way out of being able to pay in-person teachers. I think we're trending that way already, in fact, and Covid wage-hikes in much of the rest of the economy, plus the most recent anti-educator (don't think that's what it is? Ask some teachers how they've perceived and experienced it) political movements (anti-anti-Covid-measure movements, shitty, ambiguous anti-LGBTQ and anti-teaching-about-slavery legislation) have pushed us right to the edge of that cliff. For the US, at least, I expect: 1) We'll see falling teacher quality over the next few years, due to declining relative wages and deteriorating work conditions. We won't spend enough to reverse this trend—we already need an ~20% wage hike just to stop the bleeding, let alone reverse damage already done, I'd guess. 2) Rich people will continue to use tutors or private schools and get excellent small-class-size in-person education for their kids. Mid-priced private schools may become more common as this expands down-market to cater to people who can't afford $45k+/yr, but can afford maybe $15k or $20k per year, and are now motivated, by declining quality even in "good" public school districts, to pay it. 3) There will likely be some remote learning experiments to try to counter #1. I expect we're going to see the phrase "online charter school" a lot more in the coming couple decades. But the education will still be worse than what we had before, and way worse than what the folks in #2 are getting—though, maybe, better than the hollowed-out in-person schools. 4) We may start to aggressively import teachers from poor countries to try to cover the gap. This may even work—I think it's got a better chance than other options, at least. If it's not a Federal initiative, it'll likely mostly happen mainly in blue states and exacerbate the education gap between "blue" and "red". IOW I do expect we will see fairly extensive online education experiments in the near future—but not for the reasons one might hope.
• helen___keller 4y ago
  I was already on a distributed team when the pandemic hit. I think it ended up that way by combination of being a high-trust environment and being a low-corporate-overhead environment (ie still a startup, albeit a late stage one). It was the most reasonable place I ever worked. I wasn’t given timelines, but I was the one proposing them, and everyone understood that timelines shifted due to unknowns. They paid my health insurance premiums and copays so I didn’t need to think about or worry about any of that crap. every meeting had a remote call link and nobody asked why you weren’t there in person. The management treated employees like adults. For a twenty something who only ever had butts-in-seats type office jobs, it was pretty revolutionary to me.
  • helen___keller 4y ago
    Ironically, when everything went remote in 2020, it took away a lot of the culture I valued (imagine being at a place full of cool people who arent there because they are forced to come in but because they want to be there). That plus an acquisition and an opportunity to double my pay ultimately led to me leaving. I wonder how the culture has recovered now in 2022.
• gttalbot 4y ago
  The office model that the likes of Google et. al. have is also a means of doing age discrimination on the sly. These offices are in places that it's vastly difficult for cost and other reasons to have a family, so folks that get to that stage in their lives end up leaving or finding some way to do distance based arbitrage. Remote work short circuits that so of course they don't like it.
  • suoduandao2 4y ago
    eh, my office has strong wfh policy and lots of young families, but I can still tell who's young and single - it's the ones volunteering for overtime whenever the call goes out. And that's really what I as a manager care about, not whether someone's entertaining their kids while the code compiles. Maybe it's different at google, but there are plenty of accidental reasons an org would age discriminate as well.
• schnevets 4y ago
  I am curious how the leanest of "cutting-edge" startups will adapt to these new employee expectations. In the short-term, designing a company as "remote first" is a huge boon, but I could foresee a bounce-back to close collaboration in the coming years. Innovation is rarely harvested in a vacuum; the best ideas emerge when experts hang out "at the water cooler". I think the volatility of the past two years has reduced the demand for innovation, as no one knows what the "new normal" is actually going to look like. Once this stabilizes, I can foresee passionate, lean teams that work in close proximity outperforming pre-2020 firms. Or maybe my contrarian views are unfounded and the "Garage Startup" has truly been killed by the "Discord Startup"
• throwHMaway 4y ago
  H&M is Stockholm is putting this in place as we speak. After 2 years of successfully having teams cooperate across countries, continents, time zones, the leadership team is forcing everyone back to the office full-time. If anyone is looking to recruit, feel free to poach at H&M
• lampshades 4y ago
  This is something I think about a lot now that I’m working remote and have decided to move to a remote (near family) location to complete the transformation. I keep wondering what will happen if I move and then my company starts the RTO talk. Well, sure, there are more remote companies, but what if they jump on board with RTO? I’m going along with the assumption that I’m remote forever, but it gives me anxiety having to make life decisions on shaky foundations.
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Yeah, we ended up buying a house in Dublin rather than moving to a surf town for exactly this reason. That being said, I'm in a job search right now and almost every company I talk to is remote first, so maybe it wouldn't have been an issue.
    • lampshades 4y ago
      Do you plan to stay in Dublin or are you still contemplating moving to a surf town?
      • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        We've bought the house now, and we can't rent it out until we get the LTV a bit lower so no surf town for the foreseeable future. Also, I kinda would like to go back to an office part time at least, just to get out of the house.
• nprateem 4y ago
  I think hybrid is best for new teams. People need time to bond and actually trust each other. People are wired to be friendly with people they are physically close to and spend lots of time around. I think it'd take far longer to do this remotely and would lose spontaneity, camaraderie, etc. I think initially 3-days a week in-office would help during these forming & norming stages, perhaps for the first 6-8 weeks or so. Once teams have formed and normed, they could go remote and I think be quite effective if there's a good dynamic. Also, for team meetings I think it's easier to get peoples' attention in the office. Large video calls just don't work well IME. They're so unengaging, so it's more difficult for leaders to be inspiring and charismatic on video calls.
• crhulls 4y ago
  This article, like many on this topic, speak as if there is an absolute truth. Like agile vs waterfall vs "cool framework of the day TM," you will always be able to find successes and failures for each methodology. Each company is unique. There is no right or wrong. There is no evil conspiracy theory. While markets are far from perfect, this does seem to be a problem capitalism can and will solve. Companies need to attract talent - engineers will vote with their feet if this is important to them. And, companies need to perform - if WFH truly doesn't work it will become apparent very soon (or conversely, if it works far better than in-office, the next crop of world class companies will all be remote). One thing that is relatively undisputed common knowledge is that company culture and norms become ever more critical as a team scales. The startups and companies that navigate this the best will likely be highly intentional about whatever path they take, and both new and existing employees will be naturally repelled/attracted based on how much this suits them. This should be a good thing. You, as an employee, get to pick whichever one you want. Just ask questions so you know what you are getting into.
• deleted 4y ago
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• newaccount2021 4y ago
• jspash 4y ago
  Off-topic, but as I was reading the article I kept double-clicking the page thinking I had accidentally selected the entire page. On osx the default settings for showing selected text is black on a blue background.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• McDyver 4y ago
  It's interesting that this is happening mainly with Big Names. At the Big Name Im'm working for, this is also being mandated, at the advise of PwC. 4000 people back to the office full-time. I wonder if others are also being influenced by consulting companies.
• tayistay 4y ago
  Climate change is an “existential threat”, but hey let’s all get back in our cars and commute each work day when we don’t have to!
• ladyattis 4y ago
  It seems like the return to the office call is really about multiple issues. First, there's the sunk cost fallacy that some companies have with regard to their office leases or buildings which keeps them trapped in the idea that they must have said offices or buildings or they're not a real company (as if the cost of existing as a firm should incur a dead weight such as unused or underutilized office space). Second, there's some companies that are perpetually in the panopticon mindset. They think if they measure, spy, and constantly monitor their employees then those employees won't slack off. The problem is that often the process adds more dead time than it removes. So many meetings, so many reports or email summaries to write. So much paperwork that is fundamentally unnecessary to the process. Third, there's just some people in charge that don't want to acknowledge that everyone is a little different in significant ways. Some folks thrive on just being given their duties and producing output that helps the process with little interaction with other employees. Some really need that watercooler talk time to get going for the day. And some just are a mix. In any case, this is something that all companies will have to face in the future since it can't be just all or nothing. The old ways aren't going to work for you and the new ways are yet to be understood. Ultimately, I'm going to say that work from home is going to be a permanent aspect of work and attempts to stifle it rather than figuring out how to integrate it is just delaying the inevitable.
• badcppdev 4y ago
  Gee I miss just how much of the office day is “wasted” for me by people who walk up to your desk to say hey and how’s it going and start a conversation that lasts 45 minutes.
• Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Meh, at this point I'm not even interested in arguing anymore the various points of why this should or should not happen. I simply won't work for companies that require physical presence in the office. If they're able to recruit people who are willing to do that, great. If not, well, not my problem. There's no shortage of companies thrilled to hire experienced talented remote workers. Maybe if we fall into an economic depression, that will change, but more likely businesses will see physical offices as a no longer affordable luxury indulgence for the middle management class.
• kkfx 4y ago
  Hum, some parts are obviously reasonable: there are a certain amount of reactionary people in all modern society (like probably in any society) and for relevant cohorts they mostly concentrate in management. BUT some parts are obviously crazy IMVHO: hybrid work is a no go: - for a company it means still having office costs, BUT for an up-front unknown number of workers witch inevitably means less used but fully paid offices, plus extra costs for extra gears because not everything can be moved back&forth; - for a worker means being tied to a geographical location, typically a city, where typically density do not allow amazing gardens and individual homes, plus the need to move gears back&forth - for both means creating issues between cohorts of workers who do not "meet" much each others, a "pro-office cohort" who tend to work as a team ignoring those from remote and a remote one who tend to be quicker and chatty ignoring the in-office one. What I do not read, nor I do not found in wide public debates are other and IMO much more important and uncomfortable issues that NEED to be discussed carefully: - WFH must not means "smart working" in the sense "get this craptop and craphone and work the f* you like" but rent a room to your company/from the worker with proper services and safety (for instance locked door to avoid judge-cat or couples having sex during a work meeting, to cite famous recent episodes), so it must be a SERIOUS choice for BOTH party involved: the worker MUST provide a home office, the company must pay it's use; - WFH have bug "market" issues: skilled workers normally haven't much of them, but the total fraction of eligible remote workers in majority have them; if you live in a cheap country you can earn less and still having a good life. Witch means on one side a legal/fiscal nightmare with companies trying to hire people from third world countries, some workers from the west migrating "just a bit south" and an overall fall in quality of anything we already seen here and there, for workers a salary war with all the premise to be a modern slavery war; - for society WFH for all eligible ON SCALE means a little big revolution that depopulate cities, pushing non-eligible workers like downtown bar/restaurants, cleaning services etc, no one know where. Witch means BEFORE starting a stampede like covid-era flee with so many facing "unexpected" (obvious) issues like "holy crap my mountain home ADSL is reeeeealy slow!!!!" and beyond a plan to figure out how things will change need at least a public debate and analysis; - property values change are also an important issue: people who own homes/flats in towns will suffer and some will be in trouble creating another potential societal issues with few sharks that try another estate bubble.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  This is slowly transforming from tiresome to nauseating. Yes, the rhetoric needs to end, but not that rhetoric. People should stop whining about how they don't want to return to office, and just find jobs where it is not mandatory. There are thousands of these jobs, and there's nothing wrong with them. Let market figure that out. Or, if you are really interested in FAANG-level salaries - you should play by their rules. And please stop making up stories about how bad managers are to blame. Just don't work with bad managers.