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80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

• pg_1234 3y ago
  basically because they picked a fight and lost no actual remorse
  • ramesh31 3y ago
    > basically because they picked a fight and lost Did they lose? Pretty sure the prevailing sentiment among the C-level has effectively become "Get back to your cube and shut up because we said so, or little Timmy won't be getting his braces." here in the US.
    • rabuse 3y ago
      In the long term, they will lose out. It's like Tinder vs your local dating pool. Why limit your options to a very small subset of people, when better options are just a tap away (ssh tunnel away)?
      • ramesh31 3y ago
        >Why limit your options to a very small subset of people, when better options are just a tap away (ssh tunnel away)? Employers like control. Relationships (your example) are pretty similar actually. Why would someone settle for a partner below their standards? Simple, they enjoy having control in the relationship. Why would an employer settle for a sub-optimal employee? Dependability and reliance.
  • notatoad 3y ago
    i don't think this is anything other than the intended outcome. C-Suites knew attrition would be high, and regardless of what the managers who had to implement the policy might have thought companies knew that return to office was just layoffs in disguise.
• bediger4000 3y ago
  They regret boiling the frog too fast
• mydriasis 3y ago
  > The sunk cost of unused office space has been a major factor in companies’ decisions to change their RTO approach, says Kacher. > In New York City, office space costs, on average, about $16,000 a year per employee, the New York Times reports. Oof.
  • ren_engineer 3y ago
    I knew from the start that this was a major reason so many companies want RTO, no executive wants to look like a fool in front of their board for wasting millions or more on office space. Even more so when you have bigger companies that have billions invested in real estate across major cities
    • WWLink 3y ago
      That's an unfortunate thing with how businesses operate. They shouldn't have to look like a fool in front of their board. Executives are not psychics. I get that their job is to foresee things like that, but sometimes you just.. can't. Having everyone work in the office all the time was an accepted norm that everyone was ok with. Nobody (really) saw this coming and if they did, everyone would've thought they were nuts. If the CEO decided "hey let's try WFH!" they probably would've been removed by the board. So it's pretty unfair for the board to be like "this guy's an idiot for not trying WFH in the past!" They could play it off as "wow turns out we were wrong about WFH, this is going to be great in the long term! Right now here's how we might use that extra space" - they could detail things like improving retention by bringing back private offices for people who want to work in the office, subletting the space, and other things.
      • paulmd 3y ago
        > they could detail things like improving retention by ... subletting the space nope, that's actually the root of the problem, nobody else wants to be in the office either so the commercial real-estate market is in slow-motion meltdown for the last 3 years. even if you fervently believe that WFH is the better path, you simply cannot exit your commercial real-estate investments right now without locking in big losses. at the landlord level the game is to simply let the office space go vacant rather than write down the notional value of the property (which is going to be based on X years of rents, and if you lock in a lower rent value you just dropped the value of your investment). But at the tenant level if you want out, it's not like you can just find someone else to sublet your space either, because the building is full of unoccupied offices already. Nobody wants to sign a deal that realizes the losses that exist on paper. So instead the move is to force everyone back to the office so it looks like there's value being generated from the property, as opposed to a white elephant standing empty, which is effectively what it is. And yeah, middle managers and CEOs have every incentive to push for people back in the office from their own ends too... the feeling of power/control and the facilitation of their own communication-focused work as opposed to the output-oriented work of the actual ICs. -- Anecdotally, my current employer has had some weird communication mis-steps where my manager clumsily relayed some "we really want everyone to be at the all-hands this month, in-person if you can!" and it came off as more of a "more layoffs incoming" tone when actually the problem was more that this was boardroom politics around being seen to be using the expensive building we just bought a couple months before the pandemic started. And this is a company that is all-in on remote work already, we have people everywhere (I and another coworker are at least 4 hours from the closest satellite office) and we're nearshoring some junior roles etc. We will never get everyone into an office because that's not the strategy, but even we are not immune to the "we bought the building and can't exit" politics. Last employer, same thing, but they are going all-in on forcing everyone back to office... despite having hired a bunch of people remote during covid for a project. Since the project crashed I guess they dropped all the contractors and are hiring from a bodyshop, and I guess maybe they're doing local hiring for that. But between IC turnover due to the project being a shitshow, and heads rolling in the team leads due to the project failure, and dropping all the people they hired on remote since COVID... I think they basically turned over the entire team that existed pre-covid minus like three people. So they are starting from (almost) scratch anyway.
• dumpsterlid 3y ago
  [dead]
• JohnFen 3y ago
  > and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted The poor employers. If only there was some way they could have gained that understanding. Without actually listening to employees and taking them seriously, of course. Don't let's be silly now.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  > Some leaders lamented the challenge of measuring the success of in-office policies, while others said it’s been hard to make long-term real estate investments without knowing how employees might feel about being in the office weeks, or even months, from now. In other words, the two most obvious objections to RTO turned out to be correct. That is, that when the leadership says that being in the office is more productive, they are speaking from desire rather than evidence, and that the sunk cost of a commercial lease had more weight in the decision than the employees' opinions did. Two things they could have avoided with one minute of reflection. On the other hand, I'm pleasantly surprised that 80% of executives were willing to admit they could have done a better job. I'd expect most of them to say it went flawlessly, in a voice which echoed off the cubicle walls of a nearly empty office.
  • throwaway14356 3y ago
    if people quit you have the evidence
    • judge2020 3y ago
      Most employers instituting hybrid or RTO will have a way to apply for an exception, which is just a filter to keep high value employees (by approving their fully remote requests) while cutting employees without needing to write severance checks - a "soft layoff" if you will.
      • marcosdumay 3y ago
        You are assuming the employees will just accept their exceptional situation instead of using it to gain some time and jumping ship. You are also assuming the managers know beforehand who are high-value employees. I doubt either of those are true.
        • ilc 3y ago
          You are assuming managers want to keep high performing employees.
• NullPrefix 3y ago
  >We will be one of those 20% companies
• lnsru 3y ago
  My brilliant manager still has his home office day during team meeting. So the whole team sits with headsets on their desks and talks to the manager who’s sitting at home. That’s how return to the office plan works for the peasants. Good that I am leaving soon.
  • kzrdude 3y ago
    In that situation we would use a meeting room. The dynamic would make the manager feel like they are the outsider in that case, though.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      They literally are the outsider in that case though
    • wildrhythms 3y ago
      You seem to think these managers have even a shred of self-awareness...
      • sharts 3y ago
        Rule #1 for effective management from any reputable ivy league executive MBA program is to have less self-awareness than any of your subordinates.
  • ahi 3y ago
    The passive aggressive fix for this is to meet in the conference room and put him on the big screen. In the before times I worked on teams with just 1 or 2 remote and this practice was (unintentionally) awful for them.
    • justrealist 3y ago
      Make sure to mutter whenever possible, and make all decisions via 1-1 asides. If possible, have a whiteboard way at the back of the room where it's visible but incomprehensible. And order food! Have some cookies, croissants, pizza delivered right as the meeting starts.
• itronitron 3y ago
  >> The sunk cost of unused office space has been a major factor in companies’ decisions to change their RTO approach, says Kacher. I'm not sure that the author, or the company executives, know what a sunk cost is. Just to clarify, since there is a younger generation on HN now, 'sunk cost' is something you have spent money on that you can't get back. The 'sunk cost fallacy' is the mistaken belief that you have to use a resource you have already spent money on (sunk cost into).
  • suprjami 3y ago
    The sunk cost fallacy is that you should continue spending money on something you've already spent money on. Make a bad expensive investment but give it up and move on? That's fine. Make a bad expensive investment then keep pouring money into it because you've already spent so much and can't throw away all this money now? That's the sunk cost fallacy.
    • itronitron 3y ago
      Not just money. Any resource, time, or mental effort applied to use something because of it's initial expense when a better alternative exists.
      • rightbyte 3y ago
        Then there is the sunk cost fallacy fallacy. Where you throw away investments since making another investment would have been better in hindsight.
  • mschuster91 3y ago
    > I'm not sure that the author, or the company executives, know what a sunk cost is. Just to clarify, since there is a younger generation on HN now, 'sunk cost' is something you have spent money on that you can't get back. Depending on how long your office lease runs - and many run 5-10 years - it effectively is sunk cost because, short of a bankruptcy, you can't get out of that super expensive office space that's now sitting 80%+ empty if you don't find some other sucker willing to sublet from you. Best case is you find someone with a sublease, but with a heavy discount so all you're getting from that is a bit lower running cost.
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  I understand the merits of WFH and in-person work. One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee, and more so, employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person. 90% of jobs aren't people's "passions" and have no chance at becoming some big world changing venture. Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world. People just work because they need to. Claiming that WFH is bad because you can't bounce ideas off other employees and get into the real world-changing "deep work" is silly because that's just the employer overvaluing the importance of their company. Those companies do exist, but they're in the minority, and employers smart enough to have founded/run those kinds of companies usually are smart enough to see the merits of a hybrid policy.
  • smsm42 3y ago
    I get their fears about people slacking off WFH, but if they think that I will slack off WFH, but would work like a miner's horse because they are "supervising" me, these poor bastards are so deluded it's not even funny. There's no way they could supervise anybody to that extent, purely on numbers even. Nah, if somebody is prone to slack off because they failed to motivate and engage him, that'd happen in the office in the same way.
  • sharts 3y ago
    These very same employers will never take a pay cut for said “passion” that they have for their product (which they probably don’t even use much either). They want to only pay others per keyboard keystroke but can’t accept that often the most efficient/productive workers don’t need to be busy. They spend a lot of their time thinking so that they can generate more impact with fewer keystrokes. Treat people like adults and, surprisingly, get adult results. Set strategic goals, not daily quotas for minutia work.
    • atleastoptimal 3y ago
      There are two issues in the psychology of employers that keep them from doing this. 1. They care more about control than doing the right thing. 2. They don't get satisfaction from improvements that don't come directly from their doing Very stringent quotas, asinine team building activities, and of course, mandatory in-office policies construct a narrative for the company that no good thing that happens is from anywhere but the top-down. They can look at improvements in the bottom line and concoct a much more salient narrative that they were responsible for it; that their employees were nannied and hand-held to success. It's much more satisfying for an egomaniac to reckon with this conclusion than the still gratifying albeit less viscerally satisfying one that granting workers respect and independence will merit the best outcomes.
• system16 3y ago
  My company forced a three day a week hybrid, despite major pushback from the employees and a lot of resignations after it was implemented. They’re now trying to nudge people to come in every day. On Mondays and Fridays the CEO comes in, pacing around, unamused the big fancy space is sitting empty. All the executives want to force full time RTO but of course they come in late (if at all) or leave early whenever they want as nobody monitors their schedule. Rules for thee and not for me.
  • dudul 3y ago
    We can slice it the way we want. We can talk about office space cost or "decreased productivity" or whatever. The real reason these execs are pissed at remote workers is because these filthy peons now get to enjoy a bit of the freedom/flexibility that was until then reserved to them.
  • MBCook 3y ago
    A friend of mine works at a company that keeps pushing full time RTO. One of the big arguments is the CEO is always there every single day. “Setting the tone“. For an hour or two. The rest of the time he works from home. You can guess what the employees think of that. It is absolutely not a secret. The big believer doesn’t follow his own rules.
    • nprateem 3y ago
      But even if he did, so what? Someone with skin in the game on life changing money or equity will have different motivations to someone just doing a job to get by.
• darth_avocado 3y ago
  They’re not regretting the decisions. They’re regretting the fact their poor decision making capabilities are on full display. Most of these “bosses” would still be caught doubling down on the RTO narrative and threatening people to show up to work. Bosses with Elon style of management, please take a warning. A weekly email threatening to fire people if they don’t show up in the office 5 days a week only works the first three times you send it. After a while, half the people leave and the other half don’t show up to work anyway daring you to fire them all the while laughing at how ridiculous you sound.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    Doe these threatening emails convey any kind of warning to prospective new employees? Not just in the WFH/RTO topic, but if they are this draconian in one area, would it not be safe to assume it would span other areas as well? Even if I was looking for a new job where the WFH issue didn't exist, I'd personally still be hesitant about working at a place managed by people doubling down like that
    • darth_avocado 3y ago
      You’re not wrong, but it’s not that obvious to people. Most people look at this from a perspective of “ohh I’m okay with RTO so I don’t care” or “ohh I like RTO and people should stop complaining and being so entitled”. What they fail to realize is that soon it will be your paid parental leave cut down to two weeks or medical plans moved to cheaper options with less coverage, what are you going to do then?
    • vntx 3y ago
      It would to me. Any employer who wouldn’t negotiate on something like this for a job that does not require being in-office is potentially toxic. Commuting can be expensive and even potentially dangerous. Car, insurance, gas, dangerous traffic, time wasted driving at least 2x a day. There’s also the potentially unproductive office environments: loud, annoying co-workers, constant interruptions, etc. RTO has costs, WFH has benefits and employers who don’t recognize that should be shunned. If the reason they require you to come back is because they wisely rented office space and didn’t even consult the employees on whether the workers would return, that should tell you how much you can trust management and how much they value you as an employee.
• adamkf 3y ago
  Here's the quote from the [actual whitepaper](https://envoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_Report_Final-Document-Envoy-230808-1.pdf https://envoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_...) from Envoy that this article references: > 80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making. Envoy's not exactly an unbiased source here, since they sell software to collect this data.
  • renewiltord 3y ago
    Interesting. While 80% said they would approach it differently, 66% felt they would have improved layout and space on-site and 52% would have improved amenities. That tells a different story.
  • jasonhansel 3y ago
    Envoy sells products for managing hybrid workspaces: https://envoy.com/ https://envoy.com/ So they clearly have something to gain here.
  • jaculabilis 3y ago
    So what this really says is that 80% of executives would have used a different approach if they had data about the subject. Which... is pretty lackluster? If you don't change your strategy in response to new data, you're bad at your job.
    • MBCook 3y ago
      It says they would change their approach. It does not say they would change their position. So while some may have been more open to letting employees work from home, others may have just decided they would’ve used different arguments against it instead now that they know the ones that used didn’t hold up (as widely forecast).
    • isaacremuant 3y ago
      I know for a fact that many HAD data on employee willingness and on Productivity and it didn't lead to 3 days in the office RTO but that followed interests in the retail value and government taxes due to "reviving" downtown and similar ideas of centralized economic growth (which only benefits the few who have investments in those dense office zones and actually damages decentralization, horizontal growth and environmental improvements).
• sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Things like this are starting to feel like they are requesting for people to Quiet Quit and jump jobs.
• hackitup7 3y ago
  The problem that I've observed is that far too many bosses made their decisions about remote based on emotion, despite the fact that it is incredibly obviously a decision that should be made based on logic. Not saying that one answer was right or wrong. Just that it has shocked me to hear otherwise smart people using subjective emotional decision making on this topic, when it's so clearly just an economic / incentive decision.
• curo 3y ago
  Fyi, CNBC (a news site) is citing a figure in a white paper by Envoy, an employee analytics platform, that leaders regret not having more employee analytics. > "73% workplace leaders believe that easier access to data would enable them to drive smarter decisions about their space, programs, and policies... " > "80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making. Here's the source: https://envoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_Report_Final-Document-Envoy-230808-1.pdf https://envoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_...
• evantbyrne 3y ago
  I was recently offered a long-term contract job that was double anything I would expect my salary to be. Why? Because the company instituted a policy of not hiring new remote employees. So the workaround to get the help they need is to hire contractors that aren't beholden to silly employee policies.
  • Nasrudith 3y ago
    Double what you expect your salary should be is to be expected for contracting from healthcare and other expenses alone. Never mind the instability premium.
    • evantbyrne 3y ago
      Absolutely. Working on 1099 means paying significantly higher taxes, doing so as quarterly estimated payments, zero benefits, business expenses, and a lot less legal protection. It needs to be a decent margin just to break even. I was more commenting on how counterproductive RTO policy is.
• ChuckMcM 3y ago
  I had lunch, not too long ago, with a senior executive of a silicon valley tech company that was moaning about how much of a pain it was to get people to come into the office and how it felt like things would never return to the way they were. And I told them I actually knew of a way to get 100% of their employees to return to the office happily. When they asked what this magic bullet was I said, "Go back to offices, with doors." It isn't that complicated. Even if you have to work out of your bedroom when you are home you can close your door and focus, that just isn't the same in open plan office space.
  • alfalfasprout 3y ago
    that would require folks moving back to the bay area. No way in hell I'd want to do that. That would require sacrificing my wife's career and our quality of life significantly.
  • tester756 3y ago
    So, you found simple solution for very complicated dynamic and you actually believe you solved this problem? I don't care about offices with doors. Sure, they're better, but still it doesn't solve my issues - I care about commute - time and money, especially time. I've been commuting like 3h / day before WFH and I don't want to go back unless you pay me at least 2.5x
    • dt3ft 3y ago
      Only this would make me consider going back to the office: a 5 hour workday, paid as 8. The 3 remaining hours would be compensating for the commute, which includes the time to get dressed. Commuting costs and food should be compensated as well. Nothing else. Even with the above, I would still prefer a hybrid or remote positions as long as I have a choice. Standing on a crowded train is not something I want to do every day (once a week is plenty), there is simply nothing the company can offer to make me reconsider.
      • laserlight 3y ago
        > which includes the time to get dressed Thanks for mentioning this. It drives me crazy how people think of commute time as the time their engines are running, whereas the overhead of doing so is relatively significant.
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Not necessarily saying this is invalid, but this is a submarine article: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jurassic 3y ago
  I like that for the present moment there are a diversity of approaches and people can somewhat self-select into a work culture that fits their preferences and needs. If you make abrupt changes I don’t like, rest assured I will be using my new time commuting on the train to prospect new job opportunities. But good for those who want and prefer an in-office culture. Voluntary association is a wonderful thing. I mainly reserve scorn for companies issuing abrupt ultimatums to employees they hired remotely that they must relocate long distances or be fired. Nobody established in an area with a partner that also works, potentially has family nearby or kids in school is going to accept that. That move signals a toxic brew of tyranny and cowardice from execs who don’t want to take responsibility for doing a real layoff. Grindr, looking at you this week.
• faeriechangling 3y ago
  Return to office is a massive sink cost fallacy and effort for executives to save face after strangling their companies profitability by signing long unnecessary leases. Rather than shrugging at what COVID wrought and going “meh, act of god, this unused office space is a write-off” fart huffing executives want to bend reality to their will by declaring work from home a huge problem and return to office the only way to save their companies. In doing so, they replace an understandable situation in which the were blindsided by an extremely low probability act of god, with an intentional hoisting upon their own petards. It’s incredible to me how many people have OPENLY cited how much they’re paying for office space as a reason for their return to office policies. The US government accountability office framed unused office space as an environmental and financial problem. Not the office space itself but the fact it was unused is clearly the problem. So of course the solution is to have your workers burn a whack of oil during an oil shortage, burning through their own money, to “save” the environment and government finances by making them commute to these offices so they can’t be say converted to residential housing or something useful. The true costs of such idiocy are hidden by shoving a large portion of the costs onto the workforce who are expected to ask for no additional compensation for the extra unpaid work and uncompensated expenses they’re taking on. This doesn’t actually work because workers actually vote with their feet. Or they simply don’t comply with policy knowing that nobody is either paying attention or has the guts/inclination to actually fire them. How much do you really expect people to do this performative labour for executives that COSTS them money when non-compliance or finding a different job can make such a difference in their financial well being and quality of life?
• throwaway892238 3y ago
  I decided I will never again work in an office, for the rest of my life. It's a lifestyle choice. I refuse to put up with the B.S. anymore. I'm lucky that I've had a long career and my skills are very much in demand, so I will always be able to find a remote job somewhere. People doing jobs with more qualified candidates in the pool will probably have a harder time, and that sucks. For them, I hope they can band together as a union and force companies to hire them remote. There is no excuse anymore about it not working, because the whole planet did it through a friggin' pandemic, and work actually improved. We just have to stick to our guns, because the suits will continue to try to ruin our lives as long as it benefits them.
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  • gumballindie 3y ago
    > and work actually improved Not just work but also profits (except of course where profits depend on people’s physical custom, such as restaurants, but that is no longer an issue). So basically a lot of these digital product and service companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Also not commuting meant fewer expenses meaning more disposable income. Essentially a free economic boost.
  • floucky 3y ago
    Don't you think full remote is kind of selfish? I mean, I also love it, but what about new hires and junior? How are they going to learn and improve if each time they have a question, they need to post it on slack and just wait...
    • notnmeyer 3y ago
      fully remote requires rethinking collaboration and working together to some extent. if slack is the only way remote companies communicate, they’re doing it wrong imo.
• downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  I think a lot of weak tech leaders took their RTO clues from Elon. When Elon took over twitter he started a very successful anti-programmer propaganda campaign, calling us spoiled, overly pampered, overly paid, etc.
• nektro 3y ago
  lol go figure
• syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  Stories like this make me glad to not work for some prestigious MAANG that makes something or another self-important tech
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  Shocking how the CEO of Evoy could come up with that result. (and then getting to present it on global tv) I believe the company is trying to help companies shrink their physical offices. I am not 100% sure since the website for Envoy seems like satire. ""Envoy Workplace is the only fully integrated workplace solution for all your workplace needs. Join thousands of companies that rely on Envoy to efficiently manage hybrid workplaces, so everyone inside can connect, collaborate, and thrive. In today’s world, it’s almost impossible to optimize space without smart space technology. Reducing your office footprint cuts costs. Smart space solutions help you understand how your space is being used, so you can decide if and where you can cut. """ I am pretty sure if tomorrow they have on a CEO of company making their living off of renting out as much office space as possible he will have a survery with a different result.
• nforgerit 3y ago
  Would be fun to see the whole system going down because most nerds decide to quit all this shiny disneyworld of plastic and do weird tech things again.
• xracy 3y ago
  I can't figure this out, but there seems to be some monied interests in people returning to work because of corporate real estate... That part makes sense to me, the part I don't understand is why every other corporation seems to want to continue buying into that when they could, for example, stop and save money on their current corporate real estate...
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Perhaps it's like stocks? "It'll bounce back", and land is traditionally one of the safest investments to make. It's a weird whiplash to hear about empty office buildings on the enterprise side, while also hearing that the real estate market for private citizens is absolutely exploding. I've had some real estate agent come to my door every month this year asking about trying to sell my house. Maybe enterprise wants to be ahead of some future office gold rush (that may or may not happen)
• lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Most (tech) jobs involve huge amounts of co-ordination and creativity. This is waaaay easier in person, so having all the people needed in the same location makes a huge difference. But the "same location" is almost an inverse square law. Same room - great. Really strong. Same floor. pretty good. Same building. Well that's starting to hurt. Different building, different town, different time zone. At the different time zone level the "gravitational interaction level" is something you need LIGO to pick up. If you have a "team" of people answering first line support calls, spread them across the globe and get them to read off the same wiki. If you just launched a 10M dollar project to fix "something vaguely defined that the board know is important but cannot agree on", welcome to hell. It's possible if you lock the best tech and rising business stars in the same room. Good luck otherwise.
  • dudul 3y ago
    Where do you get that coordination and creativity require in person time? I would argue that most creative activities are better done alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods. And I coordinate just fine with tools available online.
    • lifeisstillgood 3y ago
      I think you might be mistaking the kind of co-ordination that is possible with CI/CD tools to the co-ordination possible with shouting at each other in a room or having coffee or just being part of human interactions If you are emailing people and co-ordinating that way you are already part of the political in-group. If so then co-ordination is fine. But who is part of the political in-group, especially for constantly evolving projects and setups is a human activity and those are best done in person, walk bye, conversations that just happen. Maybe your company culture does everything over email utterly in the open. Maybe the linux mailing list is the right way to do things. Maybe I am missing something
      • dudul 3y ago
        I was not talking about CI/CD tools, but things like slack, tickets, wiki, shared calendars, etc. I "shout" at my coworkers through slack and I feel like it achieves the same result as if we were in an open office. Better even since they can wait until they reach a stopping point in their current activity to answer me. I do not believe in the magical "water cooler" conversation. I worked almost 10 years in an office before going full remote 6 years ago and I've never seen or heard this amazing conversation over coffee during which the next Gen product is discussed. Just my empirical experience, but lunch conversations are usually about batching about the clueless PM, or deciding where to get a drink after work, or stuff like that.
• closeparen 3y ago
  I have a new conspiracy theory on RTO in Big Tech. Much has been said about commercial real estate. But I think getting highly capable people to work hard for you is a difficult problem & something tech executives put a lot of thought into. If you don't pay people enough, someone else will. But if you pay them too much, they'll become financially independent. Mid six figures is an objectively life-changing amount of money that an engineer would be insane to walk away from & that few companies can match. But because it's contingent on living in places where the "working rich" are on the lower half of the housing market totem pole, housing will always place significant pressure even on an obscene income, and your home will never be quite satisfactory. It keeps you on the treadmill working harder and longer, worrying about the stock price, chasing the next promotion or refresher so that you can afford a little more light, a little more space, a little less commute time. And that's right where they want you. Location independence means people could actually get their fill of "TC" which would make it difficult to keep them sweating over such uninspiring projects.
  • mattgreenrocks 3y ago
    Yep. Hence the economic alarms about salaries being “too high”: remote work enables geo-arbitrage, which removes a significant portion of employer leverage. If employees could buy their way out of the system, then, by definition, capital is leaving power and money on the table. And it absolutely loathes that.
    • evantbyrne 3y ago
      They get what they pay for. Companies that offer remote jobs will be able to pick from and retain a wider gamut of talent. I suspect a lot of this RTO is related to the tech market just generally being down. Once things heat back up, recruiters will be knocking down doors to get people to interview for remote gigs just like before. It may take some time to get to that point though, because there are a number of factors at play currently that could prolong the depression in tech.
      • closeparen 3y ago
• whack 3y ago
  > Their plan was put on pause through the end of the year as Covid-19 cases ticked up once again throughout the U.S., so EY leaders used that time to ask employees about their reluctance to come into the office. Common threads stood out to Frank Giampietro, EY’s chief wellbeing officer for the Americas: Employees weren’t sure what to do about pet care or child care. > In response, EY announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care and dependent care costs for each of its 55,000-plus U.S. employees. The fund, which is ongoing, had an immediate positive impact on employees’ in-office attendance, Giampietro adds. Since EY first rolled out this benefit in February 2022, EY has seen a 150% uptick in office attendance across the U.S. “It didn’t take a complete rehaul of our return-to-office policies to make employees happy,” he says. “We just needed to listen to our people and understand what, specifically, was problematic for them, and offer resources to address that.” This is hilarious. $800/year comes out to ~$70/month. That's a tiny fraction of commuting/pet-care/childcare costs. And that's peanuts compared to the average salary for someone working at a big-4 company. We're supposed to believe this is responsible for a 150% uptick in office attendance, as compared to any number of other factors in play in early 2022? I have to admire the the "Chief Wellbeing Officer"'s chutzpah. I suppose that's the kind of PR spin that lands you a plush C-suite job
  • smeej 3y ago
    I came here looking for this exact comment. That offer would feel more like an insult to me than an incentive.
    • MBCook 3y ago
      Add a zero. Then it’s a real offer.
      • Sylamore 3y ago
        And make it monthly then it's a real offer
• markus_zhang 3y ago
  RTO is fun when I'm the only one working in my section. I get a quiet and large workspace, good coffee, free lunch and some snacks. But it's going to be bad if everyone starts coming back and I have to get in a long line to grab lunch...
  • asielen 3y ago
    Same, I've been going into my office a couple times a week and usually I am one of a couple dozen people there in an office that fits hundreds. I love it. However last week there was a company event and the office was full all week. It was terrible, couldn't get anything done.
  • rjsw 3y ago
    I have new neighbours, I wish they would RTO, hearing the noise of someone else's Zoom calls all day is really distracting. When I did work in an office it was a 15 minute commute, against the flow of traffic.
• rebeccaskinner 3y ago
  For me, there's no money or perks or flexibility that will get me into an office. I haven't had covid, don't plan to get it, and it's honestly a lot riskier today than it would have been in 2020 since we've collectively given up on precautions. I need my brain to work effectively, and the risk of cognitive impairment caused by long covid is just too high to be worth the risk.
• Ancalagon 3y ago
  $800 dollars per YEAR was enough for people who had childcare and pet care concerns? That’s a drop in the bucket!
• ggm 3y ago
  The article mentions NY costs of $16,000 p.a. per person-space. This is the underlying problem: Listed Property trusts are facing massive write down of value, and many industries at scale are partially invested in property assets. Deciding to unwind a lease has consequences all round. Getting staff back "in" may be logistically simpler for the CFO and risk committee of the organisation. HR comes second.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• gedy 3y ago
  My honest opinion after 20 years in industry is in-office meetings and "collaboration" is mainly to cater to people who don't communicate very well. They have low reading comprehension and/or patience, and they require a lot of repetition the same thing when in meetings. In person works a bit better for them with the extra body language and not having to hand off audio in online meetings.
• kylixz 3y ago
  I did software work for most of my career and am a huge fan of remote and hybrid arrangements. But having started a hardware robotics company… it does seem more difficult to run the team remotely. When we get together in person, everything moves faster. We have more equipment. EEs can fix things on the spot. Perception engineers can perceive their algorithm’s behavior in front of their face. We can mitigate safety concerns with proper protections. I wish we could all be remote, but I think the team does need a component of hybrid to pool resources and move faster. I only say this as there’s a lot of “C-suite bad they just want to micromanage” and I feel like it’s not that simple for many businesses.
  • x86x87 3y ago
    Don't feel bad. Working/developing with real hardware seems to me a legitimate case where wfh might not work. This does not mean that the constraints you have apply to everyone and most places that are forcing RTO are actually optimizing for other things like CRE.
  • cableshaft 3y ago
    Not every job can reasonably be done remotely. Working with specialized and expensive hardware is an area that seems to me to have a reasonable expectation that people work in the office, at least when they need to test on actual hardware. Also why I'm avoiding such fields personally, despite thinking they're pretty neat.
• wonderwonder 3y ago
  My [very big] company just mandated return to office 3 days a week. My employment contract, signed a little after covid stipulates fully remote so I am exempt. I am also very far from an office. Its really the people that have been working here a long time that are taking the hit. All of these loyal people are going to have to start paying for after school care again, tolls, gas, lunch, etc. with no raise to compensate them. This is after already getting hammered by inflation. I genuinely feel bad for them.
• hindsightbias 3y ago
  If everyone is WFH why is the freeway bumper to bumper. This all reads as privilige to me.
• archsurface 3y ago
  Not only is the company I work at not returning, it's getting rid of the office entirely.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kkfx 3y ago
  The real reason behind RTO is the management needs of a soviet-alike economy in cities now, and tomorrow a slave-based service economy. The today need is the fact that offices keeps up many related activities, as a proof look at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/20/bowser-biden-federal-workers-washington-dc-00078677 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/20/bowser-bid... who have no economical meaning for the society but are the sole activity of many people, like soviet adage of digging holes today, fill tomorrow and dig again to state there is no unemployment issue. The tomorrow need is well depicted by https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... witch means "how to make people owning nothing?" well, living in an expensive high-density city means need to earn much just to pay their cubicle-based life. More inflation, more people seeking owning less to spend less, so are more reliant on third party services. Cars too expensive? Well, go for the public transport. Homes too expensive? Go for smaller and smaller apartments. Not enough room to store and cook food? Go for ready made food, possibly delivered directly to you. No room for a washing machine? Go for public washing machines services and so on. In the end: people living a stressful life not to live but to pay services, without enough time to think, but with a vague idea of having still much thanks for the availability of such services. Both today's and tomorrow needs of such small cohort of humans who profit form pasturing the masses can't be satisfied if people start to spread. In a mild density living economy is mostly made by SME, not much by giants with few exceptions possible, and people own, know the value of owning, so have enough asset backups behind their back to be not so easy to steer using the genital garrota of the economy.
• noam_compsci 3y ago
  I’ll never understand why people think an office is important for any reason other than monitoring time at desk. The office is a sea of noise cancelling headphones. Globalised workforces mean any meeting ends up on Zoom anyway. Random chit chat is usually frowned upon by management so “water cooler inspiration” is a unicorn - usually it’s just a distraction.
• jonjon16 3y ago
  I think I’m in the majority when I say that I prefer WFH but honestly, working ONLY from home is not something I like. I can work for a week or two in remote but then gotta spend a day or two in office. Naturally, it depends on a number of variables, like personal character and the relationship with the other employees but in general I think most people fall in my category. Having the option for both is the best possible solution.
  • cableshaft 3y ago
    Maybe. For me personally, I'm glad I had the experience of what it was like to work in the office for two weeks when I was in between projects recently, because it helped reconfirm that yeah, I hate going to the office. It was good to see people in person, but everything else was a pain in the ass, and the office is such a sterile and boring place (pretending it's not, with an arcade machine, shuffleboard, a small stack of board games, and a ping pong table -- none of which anyone ever uses), with lighting that seemed to suck the energy out of me. I'm going to the quarterly party in two weeks (for the first time since I started working a couple of years ago), but I feel like I'm really forcing myself. It's just so inconvenient to head downtown from the far suburbs.
• esskay 3y ago
  I keep getting recruiters send me messages on linked in with very vague details about the job, often omitting if its work from office or home. So I always ask, and often get "The employer offers a great flexible hybrid system" or some such nonsense. When you dig further its almost always a max of 1-2 days at home per week or in some cases per month. One of them was incredibly persistent and I told them I was only interested in remote opportunities. Their reply - "This is remote! They allow you to work from home one day a week". Er....ok then. Any employer enforcing ANY length of time in the office is going to lose out at this point. Thankfully my current employer has adopted a "dont care, do what you want" approach, so long as you get your work done they dont care if you're in the office, at home or abroad.
  • shoulderfake 3y ago
    [dead]
• jasfi 3y ago
  I think that hybrid is the answer. You get the benefits of both working in the office and WFH in a balanced way. The only thing that doesn't work with hybrid is that with WFH you can live anywhere in an acceptable region (e.g. a country).
• zamalek 3y ago
  > In response, EY announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care and dependent care costs I can understand dependant care being considered an "employee problem" in the strictest causal sense, so it's amazing that this is considered. That being said, childcare can cost up to $3000/mo - so $800/yr is woefully inadequate. Commute costs are another story entirely. If I were to entertain RTO (which I wouldn't), my commute time would be paid time. If being in the office is considered a job function, then by definition I should be paid while performing that function. Me doing that for free effectively cuts my salary by 20% (for a 2hour commute on top of 8hours). Furthermore, $800 is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of fuel and maintenance - another free benefit that employers enjoy. $800/yr doesn't cut it, not even close - especially if the employee is using that benefit for all the purposes listed.
  • ngetchell 3y ago
    I don't see why my employer needs to cover 100% of my expenses for the benefit to be useful. They are paying me extra money to try to convince me to come into the office. Especially when they can just change their policy to force me to come in without the added benefit. Tuition reimbursement doesn't cover the total cost of college classes but I'm still glad they provide it!
    • iteria 3y ago
      It's even cover a month of daycare and it pays out over a year, so it's beyond useless. This would cover 3 months of aftercare for me, which I'd only need to have because I was going into the office. Why would I opt into that extra expense, especially when it's significant.
• sandworm101 3y ago
  To even have a return-to-work policy one has to be a businese that was able to work from home in the first place. But a great many of us work in fields that never really had that option. So data about working from home being better or worse is inherently biased as it comes from only that subset of businesses that can easily make such a move. I propose that the people/jobs who can even consider the debate represent a minority and so any percieved advantages should not be automatically applied to all. No blanket statements. I say this at 0530 saturday morning as i check my email before driving to my office. (No busses in my town on a saturday morning.)
  • Waterluvian 3y ago
    Wouldn’t it be more biased to include data from those who don’t have a choice? Breathing air is overrated, says all fish. Amphibians bias the data and should be omitted.
    • sandworm101 3y ago
      More like dont make statements such as "all workers should be allowed standing desks" or "nobody should work saturdays" when clearly such things do not apply to enormous blocks of the population. We all need to remember that most people do not work similar jobs to ourselves, that our own experience is rarely ever applicable to the larger workforce.
      • Waterluvian 3y ago
        Fair. I think as a non-American I’m just already used to re-qualifying most of what people say on here when they speak for “all” of us.
• alpaca128 3y ago
  > they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted They knew what their employees wanted, they just didn't anticipate consequences. Aside from it almost being impossible to not have noticed everyone's opinion on this, if a manager actually doesn't know what their employees want maybe they should try to communicate with them? Or, more realistically, not willingly ignore them.
• xivzgrev 3y ago
  Poor executives! If only there had been some way to know employees would be unhappy about it /s On another note, I found this note curious - this would imply that offices should be 70-80% full not half full. May be a bias in their survey data! “59% of full-time employees are back to being 100% on-site, while 29% are in a hybrid arrangement and 12% are completely remote, according to new data from WFH Research. Offices are still only half full compared to their pre-pandemic occupancy.“
• lucidguppy 3y ago
  A portion of office space needs to become more fungible. Work office pods of 4-8 offices or desks that are lockable if needed. Small satellite offices that don't need big commutes would probably bring in more people. I like the idea of a small office that I can come into if I want - I just HATE commuting. I also hate open office spaces - its anti productive.
• hunterhod 3y ago
  False title. The article states that they would have approached their plans differently. Regret is a much stronger emotion, but I guess we wouldn’t have clicked on the title without it.
• hkon 3y ago
  I remember in covid times, everyone was on remote, we would just call each other, hang out in teams, discuss work, really collaborating. Low threshold for doing some ad-hoc discussions etc. With the "hybrid" solution, when I am at the office "no-one" else is, can't really get everyone together anymore, some will be in office, others at home. People in the office busy with talking to other non-project colleagues etc. Must schedule everything etc. Also, for international teams, going to an office in a country where maybe none of their closest co-workers are located, really make no sense at all. Yet due to some company policy people must clock-in, and will generally be less available to their respective teams.
• gorbachev 3y ago
  "A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted" sigh The problem here isn't RTO or anything else relating to where people sit when they're working. These idiots didn't even talk to their employees before making grand decisions affecting their work situation. This is, btw, exactly what's happening in my workplace right now. I guess more accurately they are talking to employees, but just straight up ignoring what they're hearing.
• JackFr 3y ago
  Can we stop promoting workplace consultant marketing masquerading as research to the front page? No one reads the article. They see the headline and jump in make to make the same comments which might have been fresh and interesting on the first 20 return-to-office “research” pieces but now are simply tired and tiresome.
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  I think Work From Home vs Return To Workplace is now a pendulum. I wonder if it will swing back and forth, spurred on by radicals in both sides, until it goes out of control, or if it will come to rest at a central location?
• pessimizer 3y ago
  I don't think that return-to-office is driven by executives, I think it's driven by owners. They simply have a religious belief that a slave you can't see is an indolent slave. They think that WFH is an "obvious" inefficiency that they can pull back from and be rewarded with "free" productivity. The scare quotes around "free" are because they know that returning to work is done at the worker's expense rather than the company's, so they're running literally no risk even if it doesn't improve a thing. Return-to-work is essentially giving everyone a pay cut based on an ideologically-based wager that it might help the bottom line. It's gambling for yourself, staked with employees' personal time and money, because you can.
• Ms-J 3y ago
  I've noticed that CEO's who forced people back to the office really regretted it after the senior engineer's and related all quit. They offered to make it remote again but by that time all of their talent left so at least two companies I know of. There is no amount of money that would get the best and most talented to go work in an office. Productivity suffers immensely in an office as opposed to working from home.
  • footy 3y ago
    This happened at my old job. I left because of RTO (after trying to come to a reasonable agreement with my manager). Between the day I put in my two weeks' notice and my actual last day, there were at least seven farewell emails from other devs. The company was about 500 people, so that's >1% attrition in two weeks. The CEO spoke to me for the first time ever trying to get me to stay, offered me a gigantic raise, etc. Leaving was the best thing I've done for my career.
    • Ms-J 3y ago
      Wow! I'm glad that everyone joined in your cause as well and the CEO offered you so much to stay. The best thing you could have done (and did!) was leave. Very happy for you.
• kmbfjr 3y ago
  I had to do a day in office for the first time in over a year. The only positive was a feeling of engagement, which would quickly go away because my commute was turned into an hour ordeal each way. Seems the city made a lot of changes to encourage bicycling, which is great for residents but it really f’ed up traffic. So while the day in the office did recharge a bit of team enthusiasm, doing that daily with the new traffic patterns on my own time and dime, would wear thin quickly. I would find a different job if forced. If I can be paged and forced to crack open the laptop and work whenever needed, (and I am), it really does not matter where I do my work, engagement be damned.
• black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
• twobitshifter 3y ago
  I found it very surprising that Zoom itself would about face on remote work. Even if they’re seeing real problems, keeping remote work will give them a meaningful incentive to fix those problems, and likely add up to a better product.
• deterministic 3y ago
  Companies that doesn’t provide flexible WFH will simply be less competitive in the jobs market. Ending up with candidates that aren’t good enough to work for WFH flexible companies.
• jononomo 3y ago
  Now that I'm working from home I voluntarily go to a co-working space. Interestingly, it has an open-office plan for the basic membership (although you can pay 6x and get a private office if you want). I find that I really like going there and I can concentrate fairly easily if I'm in that gear. The problem with working from home is that although you can have a private office with a really nice set-up, you really are completely by yourself. I am single and do not have roommates or pets, so it is just me and the furniture here. That's fine for a while, but there is something nice about just having other people walk past you once in a while.