5 ms·

Expect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023. They know that due to layoffs, people are likely to stay. There is a case to be made for certain sec

Expect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023. They know that due to layoffs, people are likely to stay. There is a case to be made for certain sectors definitely being more productive while at the office, especially those that are working on future products. The issue is that from a management standpoint, you can't make certain people come in while letting others who can easily do work from home stay with WFH. So generally, there will be policies mandating everyone to return to a certain extent.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 4y ago
> Expect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023. Especially companies with a similar real estate lease footprint
- asdff 4y ago
  The writing is on the wall. Are you really going to resign that lease on all that office space when you've proved you can do business without it? The experiment has been ran on a grand scale. The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air. If I were a company with a big lease obligation right now, I would be trying to toss the hot potato and sublet this waste of budget as soon as possible. Seems there's plenty of business owners who would happily take on that burden themselves out of pride at least these days, "we work in the office for synergy" and all that dilbert style thinking which remains ever popular.
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air. Results also show lower productivity of fully-remote teams, especially when more than half of your team is new, people haven't ramped up on complex codebases and haven't made good bonds with their colleagues.
    - abosley 4y ago
      Microsoft showed the opposite. (Microsoft employee here). We were more productive by every common software dev measure when working from home. That's why Satya has been calling other CEOs out on their rather misguided need to "get the employees back in the office". It's a management problem (bad management) - not an employee problem. Focus on outcomes and create an environment that enables teams to achieve them...including ones with new hires and junior folks. It's possible. It just takes some (gasp) work. By managers.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Probably because management considered remote onboarding as a temporary thing that would be over in three weeks for the past three years, instead of the new normal that would require more thought to how to onboard remotely effectively. There's been plenty of companies that were mainly remote long before the pandemic as well. Even in government sometimes employees working on sensitive info get a scif installed in their basement. If it didn't work people wouldn't do it. Sometimes its nice to also think about the personal benefits to the employee to their life outside of the work, versus the companies absolute bottom line all the time.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Plasmoid 4y ago
      I have never seen a study that actually bears this out. If you've got citations I'm all ears.
      - RestlessMind 4y ago
        Given that we are barely coming out of pandemic, I don't think we have had enough stabilization yet to conduct meaningful studies. I have started compiling research on similar topics. Initial thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235
        marcosdumay 4y ago
Loughla 4y ago
>The issue is that from a management standpoint, you can't make certain people come in while letting others who can easily do work from home stay with WFH. I do not understand this. That was the reasoning given by my previous employer as to why folks had to come back to the office as well, and it just doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Delineation of duties and clear expectations is sort of step 1 of managing people. Some people have jobs that can be effectively done off-site, and some do not. It's just a matter of sitting down with folks and outlining what and why. If they disagree, you provide an avenue for evaluating the business case they have, other than 'I just prefer it'. If there is a compelling case to be made, let them make it and quantify its positive impact on the business. I just don't get that statement, at all. I didn't three years ago, and I don't now.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  In my experience, it's less about the job and more about the person. Some people just can't handle working from home. A lot of people, actually. Heavy-handed management can somewhat keep them in line, but then you're tying up extra manager time just to get certain employees to do their job. That's not to say people can't slack off in the office, too. The problem is that someone prone to getting distracted has 10X more distractions at home and feels 1/10th the peer pressure to work like everyone else in the office. But if you start picking and choosing who has to come back and who gets to stay home, it's a disaster. The people forced to come back to the office will resent the people who get to stay home, creating more divisions in the team. The real issue, IMO, is that companies hired way too many people who couldn't handle remote work. At this point it's not an option to apply more management pressure or lay them off because they make up large parts of the employee base. It's not exactly fair to people who can WFH, but at some point bringing everyone into the office starts to look like the only practical solution to addressing widespread problems.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I believe that a flat policy either yes or not, is a sign of piss-poor management, or too many employees with nebulous work that isn't being measured. Further, if I was a productive employee at one of those companies, I would stand up and say so. It's not about the people. It's about the position (unless the person identifies that they should not do X because they are easily distractible, but then, that's where the business case comes in). If a position is deemed able to be WFH, then the position is WFH. If a position is not, then it is not. Based on duties and expectations. Management is about setting expectations and measuring outcomes while providing appropriate support for staff. If the expectation is that you can work from home and produce at a consistently acceptable level, then that's great. And when the easily distractable person falls behind, you either develop them, or get rid of them. That's not heavy handed management. It's just management. If it's too heavy handed to measure how productive people are in some fashion, then what even is the point of management? The thing you said just seems like avoiding measuring someone's output and avoiding confrontation. It sounds toxic.
asdff 4y ago
IMO the cat is out of the bag at this point. People know that working from home is a compelling benefit, even worth taking a salary hit for. Management knows workers want this. Recruiters know it. All it will take is one major company to say "screw this, lets offer wfh and reap the rewards" and then they win the title of best company to work in that sector and well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them. Employees who have had experience working from home are like a dog thats gotten a taste for blood at this point. They will always be a flight risk if they don't have it. This is the new world.
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  > well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them. When I asked "well qualified candidates" what they prefer, there was a split between hybrid, remote and in-office with hybrid winning a plurality. People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming. Much easier to tackle complex design over a whiteboard than trying to do so over zoom. In-person beats video when it comes to transferring thoughts.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - echelon 4y ago
    > People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming. Hands down. But I'd like to see approaches like "two weeks a month" rather than "three days a week". Start the month off with planning, brainstorming, collaboration, integration, then end it with heads-down focus.
    - asdff 4y ago
      I wonder what the breakdown would look like flying an employee in on a $250 airline ticket and renting a conference room for a day vs paying for an office that sits unused half the month? I think it would also be interesting to see what ends up happening when cal hsr is finished. Now you can live in merced and could end up in sac, la, sf, san diego, anaheim, population and job centers all over the state really for a lot less hassle and cost of flying. Trains are generally more spacious and comfortable for getting some work done on the laptop as well, maybe you can bake the train commute into your working hours since you'd essentially be in an office that moves at 220mph around the state.
tootie 4y ago
Did't Github just close all their offices permanently? I think this is going to be a crazy push-pull for a while longer.
shostack 4y ago
Also, they may need additional voluntary attrition and this is one way to increase it.
danwee 4y ago
> They know that due to layoffs, people are likely to stay. Not really. My company announced return to office 100%. All the IT department complained. Executives reconsidered their decision... now it's hybrid mode for non-IT folks only. A few key engineers already set their green labels "open for work" on Linkedin and that scared upper management a lot. Western Europe.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

barbazoo 4y ago

> Expect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023. Especially companies with a similar real estate lease footprint

asdff 4y ago
The writing is on the wall. Are you really going to resign that lease on all that office space when you've proved you can do business without it? The experiment has been ran on a grand scale. The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air. If I were a company with a big lease obligation right now, I would be trying to toss the hot potato and sublet this waste of budget as soon as possible. Seems there's plenty of business owners who would happily take on that burden themselves out of pride at least these days, "we work in the office for synergy" and all that dilbert style thinking which remains ever popular.
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  > The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air. Results also show lower productivity of fully-remote teams, especially when more than half of your team is new, people haven't ramped up on complex codebases and haven't made good bonds with their colleagues.
  - abosley 4y ago
    Microsoft showed the opposite. (Microsoft employee here). We were more productive by every common software dev measure when working from home. That's why Satya has been calling other CEOs out on their rather misguided need to "get the employees back in the office". It's a management problem (bad management) - not an employee problem. Focus on outcomes and create an environment that enables teams to achieve them...including ones with new hires and junior folks. It's possible. It just takes some (gasp) work. By managers.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Probably because management considered remote onboarding as a temporary thing that would be over in three weeks for the past three years, instead of the new normal that would require more thought to how to onboard remotely effectively. There's been plenty of companies that were mainly remote long before the pandemic as well. Even in government sometimes employees working on sensitive info get a scif installed in their basement. If it didn't work people wouldn't do it. Sometimes its nice to also think about the personal benefits to the employee to their life outside of the work, versus the companies absolute bottom line all the time.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Plasmoid 4y ago
    I have never seen a study that actually bears this out. If you've got citations I'm all ears.
    - RestlessMind 4y ago
      Given that we are barely coming out of pandemic, I don't think we have had enough stabilization yet to conduct meaningful studies. I have started compiling research on similar topics. Initial thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235
      - marcosdumay 4y ago

Loughla 4y ago

>The issue is that from a management standpoint, you can't make certain people come in while letting others who can easily do work from home stay with WFH. I do not understand this. That was the reasoning given by my previous employer as to why folks had to come back to the office as well, and it just doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Delineation of duties and clear expectations is sort of step 1 of managing people. Some people have jobs that can be effectively done off-site, and some do not. It's just a matter of sitting down with folks and outlining what and why. If they disagree, you provide an avenue for evaluating the business case they have, other than 'I just prefer it'. If there is a compelling case to be made, let them make it and quantify its positive impact on the business. I just don't get that statement, at all. I didn't three years ago, and I don't now.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
In my experience, it's less about the job and more about the person. Some people just can't handle working from home. A lot of people, actually. Heavy-handed management can somewhat keep them in line, but then you're tying up extra manager time just to get certain employees to do their job. That's not to say people can't slack off in the office, too. The problem is that someone prone to getting distracted has 10X more distractions at home and feels 1/10th the peer pressure to work like everyone else in the office. But if you start picking and choosing who has to come back and who gets to stay home, it's a disaster. The people forced to come back to the office will resent the people who get to stay home, creating more divisions in the team. The real issue, IMO, is that companies hired way too many people who couldn't handle remote work. At this point it's not an option to apply more management pressure or lay them off because they make up large parts of the employee base. It's not exactly fair to people who can WFH, but at some point bringing everyone into the office starts to look like the only practical solution to addressing widespread problems.
- Loughla 4y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I believe that a flat policy either yes or not, is a sign of piss-poor management, or too many employees with nebulous work that isn't being measured. Further, if I was a productive employee at one of those companies, I would stand up and say so. It's not about the people. It's about the position (unless the person identifies that they should not do X because they are easily distractible, but then, that's where the business case comes in). If a position is deemed able to be WFH, then the position is WFH. If a position is not, then it is not. Based on duties and expectations. Management is about setting expectations and measuring outcomes while providing appropriate support for staff. If the expectation is that you can work from home and produce at a consistently acceptable level, then that's great. And when the easily distractable person falls behind, you either develop them, or get rid of them. That's not heavy handed management. It's just management. If it's too heavy handed to measure how productive people are in some fashion, then what even is the point of management? The thing you said just seems like avoiding measuring someone's output and avoiding confrontation. It sounds toxic.

asdff 4y ago

IMO the cat is out of the bag at this point. People know that working from home is a compelling benefit, even worth taking a salary hit for. Management knows workers want this. Recruiters know it. All it will take is one major company to say "screw this, lets offer wfh and reap the rewards" and then they win the title of best company to work in that sector and well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them. Employees who have had experience working from home are like a dog thats gotten a taste for blood at this point. They will always be a flight risk if they don't have it. This is the new world.

RestlessMind 4y ago
> well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them. When I asked "well qualified candidates" what they prefer, there was a split between hybrid, remote and in-office with hybrid winning a plurality. People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming. Much easier to tackle complex design over a whiteboard than trying to do so over zoom. In-person beats video when it comes to transferring thoughts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 4y ago
  > People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming. Hands down. But I'd like to see approaches like "two weeks a month" rather than "three days a week". Start the month off with planning, brainstorming, collaboration, integration, then end it with heads-down focus.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I wonder what the breakdown would look like flying an employee in on a $250 airline ticket and renting a conference room for a day vs paying for an office that sits unused half the month? I think it would also be interesting to see what ends up happening when cal hsr is finished. Now you can live in merced and could end up in sac, la, sf, san diego, anaheim, population and job centers all over the state really for a lot less hassle and cost of flying. Trains are generally more spacious and comfortable for getting some work done on the laptop as well, maybe you can bake the train commute into your working hours since you'd essentially be in an office that moves at 220mph around the state.

tootie 4y ago

Did't Github just close all their offices permanently? I think this is going to be a crazy push-pull for a while longer.

shostack 4y ago

Also, they may need additional voluntary attrition and this is one way to increase it.

danwee 4y ago

> They know that due to layoffs, people are likely to stay. Not really. My company announced return to office 100%. All the IT department complained. Executives reconsidered their decision... now it's hybrid mode for non-IT folks only. A few key engineers already set their green labels "open for work" on Linkedin and that scared upper management a lot. Western Europe.