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Companies Requiring Full-Time In-Office Are Struggling to Recruit New Employees

• sleepybrett 3y ago
  Hold the line.
• wmichelin 3y ago
  Headline might as well be: "Water is wet".
  • deprecative 3y ago
    Obligatory: ackshually water makes things wet it is not itself wet.
    • b800h 3y ago
      But can water make water wet?
      • deprecative 3y ago
        I don't know but it makes me wet inside and out and that's what's important.
        • scp3125 3y ago
          Wet is a relationship between a surface and a liquid, based on the liquid's viscosity and adherence to the surface. Where this came from, and how the conversation got this far without this point being made... I don't know
          • b800h 3y ago
            A random online dictionary says it means "(fully or partially) covered with water" and I hereby declare that this means that only singular water molecules are not wet.
          • deprecative 3y ago
            Jokes are hard and sometimes they don't make the splash we intend.
  • WJW 3y ago
    Companies everywhere are "struggling" to hire as many people as they would like at the wages they would like.
• 2023throwawayy 3y ago
  Recently had a phone screen. The job posting said "Remote". The person on the line said "Actually, we don't offer remote, the job posting was wrong. We're hybrid, in office 3 days a week." I did not pursue the "opportunity".
  • vorpalhex 3y ago
    That's either a very wasteful mistake or a series of poor decisions by that company. They are going to have a lot of candidates who are unhappy and waste a lot of time on screening.
  • also23throwaway 3y ago
    My company is telling everyone they hired remote over the last few years that they have to become hybrid now if they’re within n miles of an office. I’m exploring other “opportunities.”
    • Jcampuzano2 3y ago
      My company is starting to do this. People are actively leaving, and the company is just doubling down even more and just added an additional day of required office time, slowly clawing back to full time in office. I literally told my boss if this happens for me I both won't come in anyways and will actively start seeking other opportunities. Engineers who have been called back have already started leaving, but they seem to just hinge on hopefully surviving the storm. Additionally we are already a global company, anybody who comes into an office will be on zoom meetings with other team members riddled across the country anyways.
    • mprovost 3y ago
      My company did the same which led to lots of questions to determine the exact value of n so folk could move n+1 miles away and stay remote.
    • sys_64738 3y ago
      My company did this too but I just ignore it. I’ll stay until the pay stops shrug
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• mydriasis 3y ago
  It's been three years of fully remote programming work for me. I don't see myself ever going back to an office.
  • icedchai 3y ago
    After 3+ years, I find remote completely and utterly depressing. Too bad I live in the middle of nowhere wasteland where there are few software jobs.
    • refulgentis 3y ago
      I feel your pain, I moved to Boston from Buffalo due to this in 2017, and now I have 3x the rent, for 1/4 the space, and a non-existent social sphere due to perma-WFH.
      • MarkMarine 3y ago
        That really sucks, I moved out to the Bay Area and most of my friend group here came from places I worked at, take them away and I’d have like 2 people in the area. Would be very isolating. You didn’t ask for help but I’m going to offer: there are some great options in Boston for expanding your friend group. There is a maker space in Somerville, there are kickball leagues, trivia nights, a race track in NH, dirt biking or mountain biking all around. That’s how I met my friends in Boston when I moved there. Takes a little extra work rather than organically happening at work, but it’s better than playing video games inside all weekend.
    • mydriasis 3y ago
      You could move back to the city -- we moved out to the countryside and enjoy the solitude and fresh air. Different strokes, you know?
    • dijit 3y ago
      What I find brilliant is that there now is a diverse array of companies; full remote, full in office and variations between. Much better to my mind than the monoculture we had before, where remote was extremely exceptional.
• technick 3y ago
  I won't even apply for a job if it has compulsory office attendance. I'm okay if there's a physical office I can visit of my own free will, if the mood strikes. I'm in my employers office at least twice a month currently.
• gtirloni 3y ago
  If I ever have to climb Mount Everest, I'll try crawling instead of walking. That should help.
• zactato 3y ago
  I know that this is not a popular opinion here. I think its hard to put the genie back in the bottle, but I also think a tremendous amount of innovation happens in person. Existing companies will probably continue to operate just fine, but the next wave of game changing companies will be small and in person.
  • glimshe 3y ago
    A tremendous amount of innovation happens in person and not in person. Alone and working in teams. The next wave of game changing companies will be the ones to hire the best people. I find it very unlikely that being 100% in person will be a competitive advantage versus companies that can simply hire the best and ask them to work in the way they consider the most productive.
    • azemetre 3y ago
      Some of the most important software I use in my day to day work (neovim, git, alacritty, plus all the CLTs that assist me) are all created in distributed teams around the world. How do we know that saying in-person innovation isn't a post hoc justification? You can't mandate innovation, you can't order innovation, innovation only comes from individuals; I doubt they would have been less innovative if they worked in person or remotely, and we'll unlikely ever know since we can't run a perfect experiment to verify this. The next wave of game changing companies will be solely due to individuals being at the right place at the right time, whether that's remotely or in person I doubt that one aspect would be critical.
    • itronitron 3y ago
      For many companies, innovation means doing something that was established years ago as industry best practices.
    • rcme 3y ago
      We have lots of examples of in-person companies that have succeeded. Genuinely curious, what are the best examples of remote-only success?
• Blackthorn 3y ago
  If you listen really closely you can almost make out the sound of the world's tiniest violin, playing a sad song.
• Euphorbium 3y ago
  Villains determined to bake the earth struggle to find henchmen.
• benjaminwootton 3y ago
  At the same time, anecdotally it seems like the worst job market in tech since 2008. For instance, we had the ex Meta employee yesterday who had applied for 2500 roles. What’s going on to stop the market from clearing?
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    I'm guessing that it's the double whammy from the layoffs: fewer (attractive) positions, and now more people competing for what remains. I got laid off for the first time ever a few months ago, and I've been surprised how hard it is to find a job that will pay the bills. (I'm also surprised by how badly I've done on live coding tests. Apparently it's a skill that needs practice.)
  • Aloha 3y ago
    Everyone is hiring, but HR uses very exactly keyword reviews, related, HR wants a top performer (based on some meaningless resume heuristics), but wont pay for it.
    • the_only_law 3y ago
      > but HR uses very exactly keyword reviews The thing is, people have told me HR has been doing this for years. Hell I remember people doing crap like keyword stuffing the bottom of their resume and just making the text color match the background color (not that this is a great strategy) But this is the first time I’ve ever struggled to find a job in my career. I had a much much easier time when I was 18 and didn’t even have any real experience.
      • Aloha 3y ago
        The other part of this is "meaningless resume heuristics" - If you have the skillset for it, and are looking - look for software jobs outside of the traditional tech sector, in telecommunications for example. I had a friend who made this transition, and hes much happier now.
    • ryandrake 3y ago
• lxe 3y ago
  WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000. For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware.
  • Aloha 3y ago
    IMO, it wasnt really until 2015 that we had the bandwidth available everywhere to do widespread WFH.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      You mean widespread remote meetings? Because there's more to work than meetings. Developers have been very productive in remote-only teams since the 90's.
      • Aloha 3y ago
        Remote meetings are just one problem, I cant imagine trying to run SMB (or even the somewhat lighter NFS) calls over an 144 kbit ISDL or ISDN connection, even on an ADSL connection with a 384 or 768 upstream would be painful. Maybe remote over connections that slow is fine if you're using version control - checking out the changes to the source tree, making changes, and checking them back in - its not okay if you're trying to open/change/save multi-meg excel files, things where you cant make incremental writes to. tbh, the most common way I saw people working remote in the 90's and early 00's was Citrix or similar other remote work tools. The broad thing is, the size of say.. software or scripting when I'm doing that, is a fraction of the size of my project docs, and are often stored to the server asynchronously - when I have to make drawings, its a different world.
  • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    I wish upper management would understand that some of us need silence to work due to sensory issues and the office doesn't provide something of that nature. Sound blocking headphones don't solve everything.
• marssaxman 3y ago
  Whether one actually wants to work from home or not, "requiring full-time in-office" has become a signal of unpleasant corporate culture.
• sam0x17 3y ago
  Yeah, it's officially dead
• marcosdumay 3y ago
  The data is perfectly compatible with the "return to office" mandates being hidden layoffs, and there being no actual difference besides this. Personally, I'm having a hard time explaining the cause being on the direction implied on the title. The number of available candidates does not usually constrain the number of people hired, and the entire thing is too recent for any difference in competence to have that large impact.
  • sidewndr46 3y ago
    I don't know if it has been popular recently, but my dad told me that when companies he worked for wanted to do a layoff they just transferred positions to offices on the other side of the country.
    • ssttoo 3y ago
      “Corporate” is a good, dark-ish French movie along those same lines
• iamcasen 3y ago
  As a founding engineer for a pandemic-era company, I can see both sides of this argument. We've had a very challenging time hiring and maintaining teams across the company. People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen. Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack. IMO Seed-stage teams should spend lots of time together so that trust and understanding is built in-person. Hiring should be done very carefully, and people should be onboarded again, in-person. Once trust is there, and good work flows are established, teams can go 100% remote, but I still think it's good to get together at least once or twice a year.
  • walrus01 3y ago
    > People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen. I don't fully disagree with you but this is also something to put some long, hard thought into by the C-level whoever is running the company, if it's something new, how to put in place the communication methods, chat groups, information sharing SOPs and such to prevent isolation from happening in the first place. Deal with it as a structural/business operation and methodology issue first. Get the SOPs set up before you start adding more than a couple of team members.
    • moshun 3y ago
      100% agree, just left a highly functioning, high performance org that I led at one of the big tech companies and strongly feel this “bonding problem” is a feature of piss poor management. It’s not as easy, and it’s not the same, but running remote teams well means that you really don’t have people defecting every 15 minutes, accountability is high and (assuming compensation is fair) so is employee satisfaction. A lot of these leaders are trying legislate away the impact of their unwillingness to evolve and adapt to a market that has fundamentally changed. Two of the tech giants I was at during the pandemic saw at least a 20% jump across the board in key productivity metrics and in some orgs as high as 30%. Other than Zoom/meeting fatigue and work/life issues that are pretty easily solved, it’s a win-win. *unless your company has heavily invested in commercial real estate and you need to force employees back into it, to avoid losing a ton of value.
• can16358p 3y ago
  In 21st era, why should I spend time and effort and money to go to an office when I can work from comfort of my home? I never understood why WFH is not the norm for the past 15 years or so anyway. Good, resist going to the office and they will eventually give up on this policy.
• darth_avocado 3y ago
  I recently left a FAANG adjacent tech job because of RTO. In the job search here’s what I found on what companies are requiring: 1. RTO with no exceptions 2. RTO, but allowing exceptions for some roles 3. Limited RTO, 2-3 days a week 4. No RTO, but office availability 5. Fully remote I ended up joining a company with #4, but I was surprised with how much that ended up being a factor in my final decision, because I do like going into the office and I still do. I left a lot of money on the table despite actually being okay with RTO because the freedom it brings with it. Waking up one day and just working from home because you can is just priceless.
  • freitzkriesler2 3y ago
    Have an office be optional is the best. You get the novelty of a commute and a visit without being forced.
  • tomatocracy 3y ago
    There's a lot to this. Where I am (not tech) we are generally in the office 3-4 days/week (some of us 5 days) but I have the flexibility to WfH close to whenever I want, on the day (barring having an external meeting and work travel). The flexibility is worth way more than the number of days, to me and many of my colleagues.
  • theshrike79 3y ago
    I'm on level #4 too and I think that's the sweet spot for me. Everyone on the team has the ability to come to the office when needed. Most never do. Some are there every day. I usually go to the office when the alternative would be endless zoom meetings all day, I'll rather do those live if possible and gather them all in one day. (Or if I want to catch a movie after work at the IMAX that's near the office)
  • mcast 3y ago
    I don't think companies in #4 are safe, mostly because commercial real estate is expensive. Consulting firms will advise them to either not renew building leases or have a hybrid/RTO policy as one of the first cost cutting measures.
• juujian 3y ago
  I'm more curious about difference in wages. On the one hand, I would imagine that if two jobs pay is roughly in the same neighborhood, folks would choose based on WFH policy. On the other hand, offering remote work should really help in attracting great (high salary) talent who have the freedom to choose what they want to do with their life.
• temende 3y ago
  There are too many companies offering fully remote for it to be even worth interviewing for a non-remote job. At this point I'll happily accept 10-15% lower total compensation if it means fully remote.
• brazzledazzle 3y ago
  I think there's some concerns about commercial real estate and office leases driving some of these attempts to put the genie back in the bottle but for a lot of employers I think the biggest issue is the change in the power dynamic, particularly in the US. So many things gave the employer the lion's share of power like unhealthy work-life balance, lack of safety nets, dependency on your employer for healthcare, accruing decent vacation time, etc. Work from home opened a lot of eyes and shifted a small amount of power back to employees and made them start questioning things.
• gregd 3y ago
  WFH for the past couple of decades, gives me the choice to live where I want to live (internet dependent and time zone dependent of course). I can make a West Coast salary and live in the midwest if I so choose. Having lived in PDX and commuting there, what would sometimes take me a 30 min drive early in the morning, would be a 2-3 hour drive coming home. Absolutely absurd and guess who it was costing? Certainly not my employer for sitting in traffic for 2-3.5 hours each day... I cannot even begin to tell you how much my work/life balance has evened out since I stopped having to be in an office. Additionally, I get far more hours of singular concentration at home versus an office.
  • kulikalov 3y ago
    How do you form your peer group remotely?
    • gregd 3y ago
      I have conversations all the time over Teams with any peers that I'm interested in having relationships with outside of work. This gives me the opportunity to be selective in doing that because I'm not interested in being friends/pals with everyone at work. Also when we lived in the same city, we would meet in physical locations for a beer and a burger. Now that I don't even live in the same state, we make plans to fly to each other's cities and get together. We'll also carry over convos to Slack or Telegram and phone calls.
    • Jcampuzano2 3y ago
      Peer group as in friends? Or peer group as in coworkers? I'm friendly with my coworkers, and some I may even call friends, but I certainly don't need my job to be able to make friends wherever I live. I can do that without the company stepping in to do the decision making for me. Companies all argue we should all be family, and my coworkers should de-facto be my friends, which is wrong to assume. If you mean peers as in coworkers, well usually most people are just assigned to teams. So you meet people through that and eventually get to know them, remotely or in-person, doesn't really matter imo. I'm relatively close with plenty of my coworkers whom I've only met a couple times in person over the course of 2-3 years.
• jedberg 3y ago
  It no longer makes sense to require people to be in the office if your company has more than one office. Your people will sit on conference calls all day anyway. If you have a single office, it might make sense to have everyone come in, because you can't deny that the collaboration and camradarie are better when everyone is in the same building. When every meeting is fully in person, a lot more gets done.
  • olyjohn 3y ago
    I dunno, we used to sit around the first 10 minutes waiting for everybody to show up. Spend time fucking with hooking up to the sound system and projector...wait for all the chatter to quiet down. Talk productively for 10 minutes, spend another 10 chatting on our way out... then two people with more ideas would go off and talk on their way back to the desk, and the rest of the team gets left out of that one.
    • drewcoo 3y ago
      I see almost exactly the same patterns with remote work. Everyone, especially "important people," gradually wander in. This happens even when the meetings are scheduled for 5 after the hour, to try to avoid lollygagging [edit to describe behavior, not people]. There's the small talk. Unlike in-person work, I get weather reports from different places on the planet. There's always the "can you hear me," "your audio is off," "you're breaking up," and "how do I share this on whatever meeting app we're using" time once we're all there. An actual meeting often occurs. We still often run late, just like in-person meetings. A few people will connect more directly, excluding the rest of the group, often not telling us at all until afterward. They tell everyone it's "more effective," just like in-person work, meaning they didn't want anyone else's input. This is just what happens with badly-organized (or unorganized) meetings.
• 01100011 3y ago
  Full-time remote now and planning an exit out of CA in 3 months now that I have a baby on the way. One thing I think we should all consider is that the WFH sea-change is, in large part, enabled by the continuing tech boom. If we hit a recession at some point(and who knows if/when that will happen) we may see unstoppable pressure to return to the office. Just something to keep in mind.
• zeroCalories 3y ago
  I always see people complain in these threads about how much more productive they are doing wfh, but I doubt a company would force people back in if it wasn't to their benefit. At this point it's clear to me that wfh is a zero sum game between employer and employee.
  • rybosworld 3y ago
    > I doubt a company would force people back in if it wasn't to their benefit Don't assume that companies act 100% rationally. Personal agendas emerge and triumph all the time - some for better and some for worse.
    • zeroCalories 3y ago
      I don't disagree. But when the most competitive and data driven companies go in one direction, I would be surprised if the evidence wasn't pointing in one direction. Don't assume that hacker news / reddit anecdots are 100% honest, generalizable, and not self serving delusions.
      • surgical_fire 3y ago
        > Don't assume that hacker news / reddit anecdots are 100% honest, generalizable, and not self serving delusions Especially those praising in-office work
        • zeroCalories 3y ago
          Good thing I'm not offering anecdots ;)
  • itronitron 3y ago
    >> I doubt a company would force people back in if it wasn't to their benefit. "We Will Watch Your Career With Great Interest" (every HR director everywhere)
  • alemanek 3y ago
• faeriechangling 3y ago
  What? Companies with incompetent managers who can't keep up with change anymore are suffering? But I thought that by getting everybody back in the office we would get that spontaneous creativity that would crush the competition? How could such vague intangible benefits not be worth the tens of thousands of extra expenditures yearly both employers and employees shoulder in order to sustain office culture? Vague benefits are SO much more important than dramatically ballooning costs. How did anybody think that managers who were pushing for full time RTO were going to last more than 5 years before being fired or losing their shirts? They're managers who can't manage lol.
• Apocryphon 3y ago
  Wish employers were more open to experimenting. They could try offer incentives to make it slighter more appealing: * four day workweeks * more vacation time If in-office is really that much more productive than WFH, then they should be able to do more with fewer employee days at work, no? * actual individual offices - just get rid of open offices entirely to improve upon the pre-pandemic status quo
• kulikalov 3y ago
  For the engineers who have many years of experience working both remote and on site - how do you compare the pace of learning from your peers and forming meaningful bonds?
  • orwin 3y ago
    Depends. Pace of learning, remote is definitely faster than open space, because regular 1 on 1 are needed often for the first 2 months imho for a good onboarding, and you cannot have deep 1 on 1 in open space. If you have a real office, probably the same? Bonding depends very much in the characters. One of my current coworker has a personality that reminds me of one of my best friend. I guess I could attribute the fact that we bonded faster to 4.5 WFH days compared to 2.5 at my previous company, but that would be disingenuous. One benefit though is that I can invite my coworker/friend and his SO to spend a week at my place, in a coastal city and bond over catamaran outings rather than around a beer.
    • kulikalov 3y ago
      Learning remotely is faster? I thought it’s the same as remote plus extra experience from having work related conversations over the lunchtime
      • orwin 3y ago
        I'm not a junior dev. I do not benefit a lot from lunchtime conversations about python 10 implementation of match case or why react FP tools are more efficient than it's OOP tools. What I benefit from is going deep into the 'why' and 'how'. Sometimes it's just a clarification (I try to package them to avoid multiple interruptions), sometimes it require a two hour dive, starting dev Ec2s and plunge into a DB. I'm going on-site twice a month, so I know it's way easier to learn something w/o distractions. I tried to keep working on a complex task two months ago while in office, the loudness made me a X0.1 dev. It managed to get me really angry for the first time in months, without my gym or to work it out. Nowadays I only take documentation/boilerplate or easy coding tasks that doesn't require to read code for 3-4 hours straight when going to the office. It's too inefficient otherwise. I think I prefer working while in the train tbh.
• tennisflyi 3y ago
  Give me a list so I can apply.
• bravetraveler 3y ago
  I've turned a few former colleagues away with offers because of this office thing. It's becoming a frustrating flag to plant. I've been WFH for the better part of a decade, yet since COVID, it's some new phenomenon? Hardly. I don't want to work anywhere that won't work with me. Or at least their hiring management, giving them the freedom to negotiate
• ochronus 3y ago
  Of course, they are. We want flexibility. Make the office appealing, cater for my work style, and I'll go from time to time - I do like the social aspects of it. See https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/ https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  FTIO signals a company doesn't care about the needs of their employees, is passively push people out in-lieu of more rounds of layoffs, and/or treats their employees like children. FTIO = NOGO
• landosaari 3y ago
  I had three rounds of interviews. 1 hour pre-screen 20 min stating this was not WFH 2 hours tech maybe 30 min stating how they work at the office. 1 hour with the CEO again 20 min stating this was not WFH I spent more than 25% of the interview time reassuring the staff I would be willing to come in the office. Just to have them say I am overqualified, and were going to leave the position open. Is this type of game normal?