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‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy

61 points by cebert 3y ago

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Just genuinely don't see the point in this debate anymore, like some companies will want you to show up, some will be fine with you working from home. If your company is asking you to show up, time to just get another job if that's important to you. Thankfully it's an easy solve because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Workers have leverage and are using it. You don’t have to understand it for workers to work towards having more agency over their working arrangements. The NLRB is likely about to reinstate the Joy Silk doctrine, which will make it even easier to organize. Workers who want flexible work arrangements as a right should lean into that. Public support for unions exceeds 70%, the highest amount in almost 60 years. So strange to see people with the belief system “you just have to do what your employer dictates or go elsewhere.” Perhaps in the “before times”, but with structural demographics and a decent executive branch admin in charge currently, this is simply not the case.
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    >> “you just have to do what your employer dictates or go elsewhere.” Isn't that pretty much exactly the case? No one in software is going to go to the trouble of unionizing.
    - carapace 3y ago
      I used to think we didn't need unions and then it came out that dozens of the big tech companies were colluding with each other to limit wages and job mobility. https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com/tag/techtopus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com... The suits ripped off the engineers to the tune of US$8,000,000,000 (est.)
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Too early to tell if white collar is going to just roll over tbh. I’m more focused on lower income earned organizing at the moment due to the increased quality of life for those folks. It’s fairly straightforward to notify the NLRB you want to hold an election. Just drive forward the effort if you believe in not being held hostage by employers in the aggregate. Remember, those who don’t support unions are a small minority (30% in the US). I see parallels to when HN folks confidently expounded about Dropbox not being a real business as they went on their way to becoming a large enterprise. How? You ignore the talk and naysayers and instead, default to action. Why listen to people who can’t stop you? Your agency and quality of life is more important than their opinion.
    - Nullabillity 3y ago
      Found the VC alt.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      There certainly isn't a mass unionization movement in software yet, but there are some recent cases, it isn't "no one". Most recently Grindr formed a union, and company leadership retaliated by telling all software engineers to move to Chicago within the next couple months or quit. Alphabet and Kickstarter are other notable examples.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    I believe you meant "Joy Silk" doctrine. But in any case, it is laughable. The penalties handed down from the NLRB for union busting are the equivalent of seconds of profit for most of these companies.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Typo corrected, Thank you!
  - eru 3y ago
    No unions necessary, just move your job if you don't like it (or don't take one in the first place that you don't like). In a strong labour market that's a sufficient threat. And in a weak labour market, even a union can't rescue you.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  > because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway. Even if you like showing up, you will likely still have video calls. Most large companies have multiple office sites and you still need to collaborate with teams/employees in different locations.
  - eru 3y ago
    Yes, but whywhywhywhy is probably happier if there are fewer calls.
- dleslie 3y ago
  Video calls have existed since before the Internet. They will continue to be a part of office life.
- DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
  Approximately 100% of my meetings are video calls, even in office. It was that way before the pandemic too. That's what happens when your organization has multiple locations.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Not necessarily so. I worked at a large organization with offices across the US, as well as in London, Germany, and Canada. Approximately 100% of my meetings were in-person, many with a remote participant or two.
archo 3y ago
https://archive.is/w8dDf https://archive.is/w8dDf
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I fear that state governments will start imposing taxes on businesses which hire remote employees, but I also feel that will just drive businesses out of those states and into the midwest/south
- dleslie 3y ago
  It really should be the other way; they ought to tax office space punitively in order to coerce people not to commute at all. Commuting is a major source of emissions, personal health ailments, and encourages human-hostile urban design.
  - eru 3y ago
    I might agree with your policy aims, but the policy cure you proposed would be worse than the disease. If you don't like people driving, then tax that directly. Or better, for a start, remove subsidies for driving first, whether they be explicit or implicit. Only then think about levying special taxes. Eg remove mandatory minimum parking requirements for real estate developers, convert most roads to be paid for by their users via electronic tolls instead of by general taxes, etc. (And remove 'commuting allowances' that one can claim as a deduction on income taxes.) And if you still want to levy taxes, levy them on what you don't like, and not some imprecise proxy like office space. Eg directly on emissions or negative health externalities.
    - dleslie 3y ago
      > If you don't like people driving, then tax that directly. Canada is doing that with a carbon tax that impacts drivers directly, and it's become a hot target for populist outrage. Better to tax the owners of the office buildings and parkades, as it would cause less public outrage.
      - eru 3y ago
        Yes, public opinion is often idiotic.
    - 3y ago
bluefishinit 3y ago
It feels like RTO is quickly evaporating the leverage these big companies temporarily created with their mass layoffs. I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO. Well, it looks like the majority of the industry is calling their bluff and refusing to go back to the office regardless of the threat of unemployment. The tech job market seems to be rejuvenating so I think if people couldn't get RTO to work in this brief window of leverage, that it's an idea that's dead forever.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  > I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO. If we hit a major recession and unemployment spikes, corporations will be looking to downsize everywhere, including jettisoning more office space. And the Fed jacking up interest rates and trying to cap inflation and wage inflation is just what the Fed does, they're not caring about RTO. Volker didn't jack rates up in 1980 to force workers back into the office. There may be mangers/executives cheerleading all this, along with the cuts to headcount in tech, because they personally think that it'll result in RTO. But if the economy actually blows up then CFOs and boards will be telling them to cut costs everywhere and offices are a huge sink of money.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    To reply to myself: I guess I should say that what the Fed is doing is class warfare and a major unspoken reason for what they're doing is to remove bargaining power from the workers. They would be more concerned about pay and breaking the back of union organizing if they thought and talked about it more clearly. But they don't consciously talk about class warfare, they've got terms of art they use to talk about it like "2% inflation target" which is nice and ambiguous. However, "removing bargaining power from workers" is certainly a large enough bucket to stuff "remote work" into it as well. So they certainly do want to remove bargaining power, and some managers will think it'll be effective at enforcing RTO, but it isn't clear to me that the crude mechanism they've got will actually result in that. All they can really do is run the economy into a wall. The exact way that it breaks will depend on the push/pull of desperate workers willing to take office jobs again vs. desperate CFOs wanting to get out of office leases and crashing commercial real estate. The real driving force is just reducing worker bargaining power around pay and benfits and organizing though. The effect on remote work vs. RTO will have to play out to see how it happens. My own personal bet is that the cat is out of the bag when it comes to remote work, and that a recession will cause more companies to re-embrace full time remote work to cut costs to survive and flourish. And current RTO companies may start looking at their commercial office properties as massive boat anchors.
themaninthedark 3y ago
It's kind of funny to me that for a long time the people in cities looked down on rural people and life and touted the benefits of living in close proximity. When COVID hit, we saw a mass exodus from the cities and now people don't want to return.
- rottingchris 3y ago
  People who live in cities are not a uniform hive mind. Some people left but the vast majority stayed.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    "People who live in cities are not a uniform hive mind" We need more of this! It seems so much of our public discourse is worsened by putting people and their opinions into firm groups, then assuming that anything anyone in that group ever says is a core believe of that group and then vilifying the group for that believe.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Most office workers didn’t have a choice before. The jobs are in the city. A handful of software companies were fully remote but most businesses are still stuck in the industrial model of work
  - fullshark 3y ago
    It really is so outdated, this commitment where you spend 40 hours a week at your machine on the assembly line, pulling the right levers to produce products to sell. Some knowledge workers really are spending 90+ hours thinking about the various problems the company has and how to fix them. Of course some are lazy and just play politics to get ahead/avoid the axe. It's all so nebulous understanding who actually provides the value, at least when you have a 10000 foot view of the organization.
    - eru 3y ago
dsm4ck 3y ago
Any big sudden change will have winners and losers. Managers that have gotten by measuring butt in seat time and command and control can no longer rely on these skills, of course they would prefer to go back to the old way vs the much harder work of trying to figure out which team members are really providing the best results.
- supertrope 3y ago
  The bigger the organization the more bureaucratic it becomes. High quality performance coaching and just maintaining internal communication is hard to scale. Big organizations tend to fallback to easy to measure butts in seats and lines of code.
  - bratbag 3y ago
    Big organisations will have already learned the hard way about the value of institutional knowledge and how difficult it is to pass that on remotely.
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      Based on my experiences at companies ranging from 75-5000 employees, I would dispute that. I don't think any type of company is particularly good at passing on institutional knowledge.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
And it's not my responsibility to foster in-office collaboration for the whole company either! My current employer seems to believe that collaboration will magically happen when people get smooshed together in the office.
- bratbag 3y ago
  Depending on your seniority, it may be your responsibility to foster collaboration for more junior members of your team. Conversely it may be their responsibility to ensure they are available to collaborate with you. It doesn't happen magically, but it does happen spontaneously once people are close enough to talk without having to open a chat tool. Thats why we stabilised on a happy 1-day-a-week in the office, and instead of using it as a dump day for meetings, its a day for people to work while near others. And unsurprisingly mentoring and onboarding has drastically improved outcomes.
imgabe 3y ago
Offices per se aren’t necessarily terrible. Commutes are terrible. Open floor plans are terrible. Companies don’t seem interested in fixing these things, though.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Yep. Ask any remote worker if they’d go back to the office and most would say no. Ask them if the office was within walking distance and most probably wouldn’t mind.
  - marssaxman 3y ago
    I have certainly found this to be true. When I took a job with a remote-first startup last year, I lived on the opposite side of North America from its headquarters. My family has since moved (for almost entirely unrelated reasons!) and we now live within walking distance. I come into the office almost every day, even though it is mostly empty, because the walk is pleasant and the quiet office is a good place to get work done. If I had to drive here, or take the bus, I would almost certainly stay home instead.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Walking distance with a private office, maybe. I wouldn't even walk to the offices I've actually had to work in, not now that my home office is a viable option.
  - goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
    My office is 7 minutes on my bicycle. I work from home where I have a better screen setup, privacy, instead of having to shuffle into a cubicle to make calls. I cycle to the office to have a beer with some colleagues every few weeks on an agreed date and we meet there when we have to do some deep planning. Day to day my house is so much better
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      You can't get a good screen setup at your office?
glitcher 3y ago
“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home,” Sounds to me like more households get to retain more of their income (and time) as a result. And that extra money will end up back in the economy albeit in different ways, so it's not like the money just disappears. Businesses and governments will just have to adapt to change, and I have no sympathy for their sob stories and stubborn instincts to resist change.
- dangus 3y ago
  Most of these examples don’t even suffer very much. Roads don’t “suffer” from disuse, their maintenance costs go down. People who work at home still need child and sometimes even pet care, working from home doesn’t mean you’re magically able to watch your children and work at the same time. People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers. Dry cleaners are already on their last legs due to changing fashion tastes and new materials that can be taken care of at home. You can buy suits that don’t require dry cleaning or ironing. Public transportation was already too downtown focused and should be re-developed to better serve non-commuting usage anyway. Since the USA has almost no rail anyway this is a simple matter of changing bus routes. Office leases suffering isn’t a problem. An entire thriving residential and entertainment district in Cleveland with some of the highest property values in the city is built in disused industrial buildings and land.
  - chomp 3y ago
    I agree with all of your points except: > People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers. On some level, my most of my routine hygiene was due to having to go into the office, including getting my hair cut. I'd likely have skipped a couple hair cuts if I never had to face people.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    Id say it differently: Money moves from centers to outside
seydor 3y ago
The workers won't have a lot of leverage in the end. Especially in tech, it has been shown that companies can do fine with much much fewer employees. Corporates can use RTO as an excuse for further belt-tightening as needed, even if most workers end up (over)working remotely. The office has truly no reason to exist anymore, but as long as capital is still concentrated in a few cities around the world, it will have leverage
- lolinder 3y ago
  I think it's way too early to call either way. There are a lot of companies that have embraced remote work post-COVID—my own company is about to start a massive downsizing of their NYC headquarters, for example—and I believe that these companies will have better outcomes in the long run by respecting their workers' dignity. We'll see which way it goes over the next few decades.
- bratbag 3y ago
  Another growth period will see that leverage flow the other way again.
- candiodari 3y ago
  "it has been shown that companies can do fine with much much fewer employees" Has it? Twitter has lost most of its employees ... AND most of its income. I doubt this makes for a net positive for them.
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
Why not let the foreign investors launder their money in office buildings exclusively instead of residential properties like they do now?
davewritescode 3y ago
I think full time work in the office is 100% dead and buried. It's never coming back for people who have enough skills to leverage that kind of arrangement. I think the first place we need to start is there. Most of us are NEVER going back to 5 days a week in the office. However, most of the folks complaining about return to work I've noticed are senior people who have enough skills to perform their job and don't require constant attention. What I've noticed is these kinds of workers absolutely thrive remotely, however younger employees greatly benefit from in person learning and mentoring. I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely. I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming. If I ask an intern to fix a bug that's 2 lines of code and I hear furious typing over the walls for extended periods of time, that's probably a good time to ask how it's going and offer some help. I don't have the answers here but I don't think it's fair to be so dismissive of face to face time in the office.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  > I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely. I've done this a bunch over zoom. > I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming. Ask them in standups? Have an "open door" policy towards them pinging you to hop on a zoom? You also probably don't need to be hovering over them making certain that they're never struggling, that's a form of micro management. Gotta let the kids fight with problems for awhile before jumping in and fixing it for them[*]. [*] and really don't fix it for them, teach them how to fix it. poor phrasing.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  > return to work Return to office.
- 3y ago
amathyst 3y ago
There seems to be such a strong anti-RTO/pro-remote sentiment on HN. I don’t hold that against anyone: if you prefer working from home, then I’m happy for you! But here’s another take: I’m a software engineer and I love working from the office. I enjoy my 40 minute commute (on sunny days I ride a bike and on rainy days I read a book on the train). I enjoy the separation in my life between where I work and where I live (often I don’t take my computer home). Eating lunch with my colleagues is often the highlight of my day. Many of my current and former colleagues have become lifelong friends. If my company went fully remote permanently, I’d look for a new job.
- twic 3y ago
  I like working in the office too, for similar reasons. I do think that as years go by, more people will come to realise what they have lost by working from home. But i don't think the vigorous antipathy to working in an office is an HN thing. I think it's that many people who don't like working in an office really don't like working in an office, and so mission post about it, in a way that office appreciators don't.
- DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
  I understand feeling this way if the company actually closed the office so you literally could not go in. But even remote-friendly places typically have an office which is big enough for the people that go, so you'd still have company even if plenty of people were remote. I understand why some people like RTO (even though I'm not one of them), I don't understand why they have such hostility towards the WFH folks.
  - harshalizee 3y ago
    I don't it's hostility per se. If a company closed down their office, then it's certain that they are now remote-only and the RTO aficionados will have no choice but to find a new employer that shares their preference. But if only a subsection of employees work remotely in a "hybrid" or RTO setting, and the person in the office still has to sit in on Zoom calls all day then the whole point of being in the office is redundant. They're just working remotely from the office.
SKarasu 3y ago
“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home” That sounds terribly similar to a "you" problem
zingababba 3y ago
Have any companies tried renting out space in major metro areas to accommodate RTO vs. demanding everyone come back to HQ?
ericfrazier 3y ago
RTO also kills business. I had a thriving business out where all the workers were working from home, in the ground floor of a massive apartment community where many of the tech workers live. I had so much foot traffic business I didn't have to advertise. Amazon and Microsoft RTO'ed and my business dried up overnight and I can't get it back even with advertising and the foot traffic is paltry compared to what it was.

61 points by cebert 3y ago

Just genuinely don't see the point in this debate anymore, like some companies will want you to show up, some will be fine with you working from home. If your company is asking you to show up, time to just get another job if that's important to you. Thankfully it's an easy solve because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Workers have leverage and are using it. You don’t have to understand it for workers to work towards having more agency over their working arrangements. The NLRB is likely about to reinstate the Joy Silk doctrine, which will make it even easier to organize. Workers who want flexible work arrangements as a right should lean into that. Public support for unions exceeds 70%, the highest amount in almost 60 years. So strange to see people with the belief system “you just have to do what your employer dictates or go elsewhere.” Perhaps in the “before times”, but with structural demographics and a decent executive branch admin in charge currently, this is simply not the case.
- osigurdson 3y ago
  >> “you just have to do what your employer dictates or go elsewhere.” Isn't that pretty much exactly the case? No one in software is going to go to the trouble of unionizing.
  - carapace 3y ago
    I used to think we didn't need unions and then it came out that dozens of the big tech companies were colluding with each other to limit wages and job mobility. https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com/tag/techtopus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com... The suits ripped off the engineers to the tune of US$8,000,000,000 (est.)
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Too early to tell if white collar is going to just roll over tbh. I’m more focused on lower income earned organizing at the moment due to the increased quality of life for those folks. It’s fairly straightforward to notify the NLRB you want to hold an election. Just drive forward the effort if you believe in not being held hostage by employers in the aggregate. Remember, those who don’t support unions are a small minority (30% in the US). I see parallels to when HN folks confidently expounded about Dropbox not being a real business as they went on their way to becoming a large enterprise. How? You ignore the talk and naysayers and instead, default to action. Why listen to people who can’t stop you? Your agency and quality of life is more important than their opinion.
  - Nullabillity 3y ago
    Found the VC alt.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    There certainly isn't a mass unionization movement in software yet, but there are some recent cases, it isn't "no one". Most recently Grindr formed a union, and company leadership retaliated by telling all software engineers to move to Chicago within the next couple months or quit. Alphabet and Kickstarter are other notable examples.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  I believe you meant "Joy Silk" doctrine. But in any case, it is laughable. The penalties handed down from the NLRB for union busting are the equivalent of seconds of profit for most of these companies.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Typo corrected, Thank you!
- eru 3y ago
  No unions necessary, just move your job if you don't like it (or don't take one in the first place that you don't like). In a strong labour market that's a sufficient threat. And in a weak labour market, even a union can't rescue you.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway. Even if you like showing up, you will likely still have video calls. Most large companies have multiple office sites and you still need to collaborate with teams/employees in different locations.
- eru 3y ago
  Yes, but whywhywhywhy is probably happier if there are fewer calls.
dleslie 3y ago
Video calls have existed since before the Internet. They will continue to be a part of office life.
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
Approximately 100% of my meetings are video calls, even in office. It was that way before the pandemic too. That's what happens when your organization has multiple locations.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Not necessarily so. I worked at a large organization with offices across the US, as well as in London, Germany, and Canada. Approximately 100% of my meetings were in-person, many with a remote participant or two.

archo 3y ago

https://archive.is/w8dDf https://archive.is/w8dDf

shortrounddev2 3y ago

I fear that state governments will start imposing taxes on businesses which hire remote employees, but I also feel that will just drive businesses out of those states and into the midwest/south

dleslie 3y ago
It really should be the other way; they ought to tax office space punitively in order to coerce people not to commute at all. Commuting is a major source of emissions, personal health ailments, and encourages human-hostile urban design.
- eru 3y ago
  I might agree with your policy aims, but the policy cure you proposed would be worse than the disease. If you don't like people driving, then tax that directly. Or better, for a start, remove subsidies for driving first, whether they be explicit or implicit. Only then think about levying special taxes. Eg remove mandatory minimum parking requirements for real estate developers, convert most roads to be paid for by their users via electronic tolls instead of by general taxes, etc. (And remove 'commuting allowances' that one can claim as a deduction on income taxes.) And if you still want to levy taxes, levy them on what you don't like, and not some imprecise proxy like office space. Eg directly on emissions or negative health externalities.
  - dleslie 3y ago
    > If you don't like people driving, then tax that directly. Canada is doing that with a carbon tax that impacts drivers directly, and it's become a hot target for populist outrage. Better to tax the owners of the office buildings and parkades, as it would cause less public outrage.
    - eru 3y ago
      Yes, public opinion is often idiotic.
  - 3y ago

bluefishinit 3y ago

It feels like RTO is quickly evaporating the leverage these big companies temporarily created with their mass layoffs. I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO. Well, it looks like the majority of the industry is calling their bluff and refusing to go back to the office regardless of the threat of unemployment. The tech job market seems to be rejuvenating so I think if people couldn't get RTO to work in this brief window of leverage, that it's an idea that's dead forever.

lamontcg 3y ago
> I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO. If we hit a major recession and unemployment spikes, corporations will be looking to downsize everywhere, including jettisoning more office space. And the Fed jacking up interest rates and trying to cap inflation and wage inflation is just what the Fed does, they're not caring about RTO. Volker didn't jack rates up in 1980 to force workers back into the office. There may be mangers/executives cheerleading all this, along with the cuts to headcount in tech, because they personally think that it'll result in RTO. But if the economy actually blows up then CFOs and boards will be telling them to cut costs everywhere and offices are a huge sink of money.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  To reply to myself: I guess I should say that what the Fed is doing is class warfare and a major unspoken reason for what they're doing is to remove bargaining power from the workers. They would be more concerned about pay and breaking the back of union organizing if they thought and talked about it more clearly. But they don't consciously talk about class warfare, they've got terms of art they use to talk about it like "2% inflation target" which is nice and ambiguous. However, "removing bargaining power from workers" is certainly a large enough bucket to stuff "remote work" into it as well. So they certainly do want to remove bargaining power, and some managers will think it'll be effective at enforcing RTO, but it isn't clear to me that the crude mechanism they've got will actually result in that. All they can really do is run the economy into a wall. The exact way that it breaks will depend on the push/pull of desperate workers willing to take office jobs again vs. desperate CFOs wanting to get out of office leases and crashing commercial real estate. The real driving force is just reducing worker bargaining power around pay and benfits and organizing though. The effect on remote work vs. RTO will have to play out to see how it happens. My own personal bet is that the cat is out of the bag when it comes to remote work, and that a recession will cause more companies to re-embrace full time remote work to cut costs to survive and flourish. And current RTO companies may start looking at their commercial office properties as massive boat anchors.

themaninthedark 3y ago

It's kind of funny to me that for a long time the people in cities looked down on rural people and life and touted the benefits of living in close proximity. When COVID hit, we saw a mass exodus from the cities and now people don't want to return.

rottingchris 3y ago
People who live in cities are not a uniform hive mind. Some people left but the vast majority stayed.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  "People who live in cities are not a uniform hive mind" We need more of this! It seems so much of our public discourse is worsened by putting people and their opinions into firm groups, then assuming that anything anyone in that group ever says is a core believe of that group and then vilifying the group for that believe.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Most office workers didn’t have a choice before. The jobs are in the city. A handful of software companies were fully remote but most businesses are still stuck in the industrial model of work
- fullshark 3y ago
  It really is so outdated, this commitment where you spend 40 hours a week at your machine on the assembly line, pulling the right levers to produce products to sell. Some knowledge workers really are spending 90+ hours thinking about the various problems the company has and how to fix them. Of course some are lazy and just play politics to get ahead/avoid the axe. It's all so nebulous understanding who actually provides the value, at least when you have a 10000 foot view of the organization.
  - eru 3y ago

dsm4ck 3y ago

Any big sudden change will have winners and losers. Managers that have gotten by measuring butt in seat time and command and control can no longer rely on these skills, of course they would prefer to go back to the old way vs the much harder work of trying to figure out which team members are really providing the best results.

supertrope 3y ago
The bigger the organization the more bureaucratic it becomes. High quality performance coaching and just maintaining internal communication is hard to scale. Big organizations tend to fallback to easy to measure butts in seats and lines of code.
- bratbag 3y ago
  Big organisations will have already learned the hard way about the value of institutional knowledge and how difficult it is to pass that on remotely.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Based on my experiences at companies ranging from 75-5000 employees, I would dispute that. I don't think any type of company is particularly good at passing on institutional knowledge.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

And it's not my responsibility to foster in-office collaboration for the whole company either! My current employer seems to believe that collaboration will magically happen when people get smooshed together in the office.

bratbag 3y ago
Depending on your seniority, it may be your responsibility to foster collaboration for more junior members of your team. Conversely it may be their responsibility to ensure they are available to collaborate with you. It doesn't happen magically, but it does happen spontaneously once people are close enough to talk without having to open a chat tool. Thats why we stabilised on a happy 1-day-a-week in the office, and instead of using it as a dump day for meetings, its a day for people to work while near others. And unsurprisingly mentoring and onboarding has drastically improved outcomes.

imgabe 3y ago

Offices per se aren’t necessarily terrible. Commutes are terrible. Open floor plans are terrible. Companies don’t seem interested in fixing these things, though.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
Yep. Ask any remote worker if they’d go back to the office and most would say no. Ask them if the office was within walking distance and most probably wouldn’t mind.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  I have certainly found this to be true. When I took a job with a remote-first startup last year, I lived on the opposite side of North America from its headquarters. My family has since moved (for almost entirely unrelated reasons!) and we now live within walking distance. I come into the office almost every day, even though it is mostly empty, because the walk is pleasant and the quiet office is a good place to get work done. If I had to drive here, or take the bus, I would almost certainly stay home instead.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Walking distance with a private office, maybe. I wouldn't even walk to the offices I've actually had to work in, not now that my home office is a viable option.
- goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
  My office is 7 minutes on my bicycle. I work from home where I have a better screen setup, privacy, instead of having to shuffle into a cubicle to make calls. I cycle to the office to have a beer with some colleagues every few weeks on an agreed date and we meet there when we have to do some deep planning. Day to day my house is so much better
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    You can't get a good screen setup at your office?

glitcher 3y ago

“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home,” Sounds to me like more households get to retain more of their income (and time) as a result. And that extra money will end up back in the economy albeit in different ways, so it's not like the money just disappears. Businesses and governments will just have to adapt to change, and I have no sympathy for their sob stories and stubborn instincts to resist change.

dangus 3y ago
Most of these examples don’t even suffer very much. Roads don’t “suffer” from disuse, their maintenance costs go down. People who work at home still need child and sometimes even pet care, working from home doesn’t mean you’re magically able to watch your children and work at the same time. People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers. Dry cleaners are already on their last legs due to changing fashion tastes and new materials that can be taken care of at home. You can buy suits that don’t require dry cleaning or ironing. Public transportation was already too downtown focused and should be re-developed to better serve non-commuting usage anyway. Since the USA has almost no rail anyway this is a simple matter of changing bus routes. Office leases suffering isn’t a problem. An entire thriving residential and entertainment district in Cleveland with some of the highest property values in the city is built in disused industrial buildings and land.
- chomp 3y ago
  I agree with all of your points except: > People don’t get their hair and nails done to please coworkers. On some level, my most of my routine hygiene was due to having to go into the office, including getting my hair cut. I'd likely have skipped a couple hair cuts if I never had to face people.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Id say it differently: Money moves from centers to outside

seydor 3y ago

The workers won't have a lot of leverage in the end. Especially in tech, it has been shown that companies can do fine with much much fewer employees. Corporates can use RTO as an excuse for further belt-tightening as needed, even if most workers end up (over)working remotely. The office has truly no reason to exist anymore, but as long as capital is still concentrated in a few cities around the world, it will have leverage

lolinder 3y ago
I think it's way too early to call either way. There are a lot of companies that have embraced remote work post-COVID—my own company is about to start a massive downsizing of their NYC headquarters, for example—and I believe that these companies will have better outcomes in the long run by respecting their workers' dignity. We'll see which way it goes over the next few decades.
bratbag 3y ago
Another growth period will see that leverage flow the other way again.
candiodari 3y ago
"it has been shown that companies can do fine with much much fewer employees" Has it? Twitter has lost most of its employees ... AND most of its income. I doubt this makes for a net positive for them.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

Why not let the foreign investors launder their money in office buildings exclusively instead of residential properties like they do now?

davewritescode 3y ago

I think full time work in the office is 100% dead and buried. It's never coming back for people who have enough skills to leverage that kind of arrangement. I think the first place we need to start is there. Most of us are NEVER going back to 5 days a week in the office. However, most of the folks complaining about return to work I've noticed are senior people who have enough skills to perform their job and don't require constant attention. What I've noticed is these kinds of workers absolutely thrive remotely, however younger employees greatly benefit from in person learning and mentoring. I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely. I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming. If I ask an intern to fix a bug that's 2 lines of code and I hear furious typing over the walls for extended periods of time, that's probably a good time to ask how it's going and offer some help. I don't have the answers here but I don't think it's fair to be so dismissive of face to face time in the office.

lamontcg 3y ago
> I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely. I've done this a bunch over zoom. > I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming. Ask them in standups? Have an "open door" policy towards them pinging you to hop on a zoom? You also probably don't need to be hovering over them making certain that they're never struggling, that's a form of micro management. Gotta let the kids fight with problems for awhile before jumping in and fixing it for them[*]. [*] and really don't fix it for them, teach them how to fix it. poor phrasing.
pseudalopex 3y ago
> return to work Return to office.
3y ago

amathyst 3y ago

There seems to be such a strong anti-RTO/pro-remote sentiment on HN. I don’t hold that against anyone: if you prefer working from home, then I’m happy for you! But here’s another take: I’m a software engineer and I love working from the office. I enjoy my 40 minute commute (on sunny days I ride a bike and on rainy days I read a book on the train). I enjoy the separation in my life between where I work and where I live (often I don’t take my computer home). Eating lunch with my colleagues is often the highlight of my day. Many of my current and former colleagues have become lifelong friends. If my company went fully remote permanently, I’d look for a new job.

twic 3y ago
I like working in the office too, for similar reasons. I do think that as years go by, more people will come to realise what they have lost by working from home. But i don't think the vigorous antipathy to working in an office is an HN thing. I think it's that many people who don't like working in an office really don't like working in an office, and so mission post about it, in a way that office appreciators don't.
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
I understand feeling this way if the company actually closed the office so you literally could not go in. But even remote-friendly places typically have an office which is big enough for the people that go, so you'd still have company even if plenty of people were remote. I understand why some people like RTO (even though I'm not one of them), I don't understand why they have such hostility towards the WFH folks.
- harshalizee 3y ago
  I don't it's hostility per se. If a company closed down their office, then it's certain that they are now remote-only and the RTO aficionados will have no choice but to find a new employer that shares their preference. But if only a subsection of employees work remotely in a "hybrid" or RTO setting, and the person in the office still has to sit in on Zoom calls all day then the whole point of being in the office is redundant. They're just working remotely from the office.

SKarasu 3y ago

zingababba 3y ago

Have any companies tried renting out space in major metro areas to accommodate RTO vs. demanding everyone come back to HQ?

ericfrazier 3y ago

RTO also kills business. I had a thriving business out where all the workers were working from home, in the ground floor of a massive apartment community where many of the tech workers live. I had so much foot traffic business I didn't have to advertise. Amazon and Microsoft RTO'ed and my business dried up overnight and I can't get it back even with advertising and the foot traffic is paltry compared to what it was.