29 ms·

We forced our company to allow work from home again

• athorax 3y ago
  ...and then everyone cheered? But seriously, this just doesn't add up. I could see the company folding once they realize that they were dependent on the tribal knowledge of those leaving, but claiming to not get any applications is absurd.
  • curiousllama 3y ago
    eh, this feels like a miscommunication/exaggeration. More realistic is that it took time for HR to communicate up the chain what was happening; they posted the jobs in the interim; the ads didn't get enough applicants to confidently turn over ~50% of IT in 1 week (obviously); OP interpreted this as "they got 0 applicants and folded"
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    You're in California or Washington I'm betting. I'm in Texas, in a part of the state that definitely leans towards being "fly-over" more than it does towards being the title of a well-known 1980s prime time soap opera. We could definitely do that, and not receive any local applicants for a week. Maybe longer. The few we might receive would be woefully underqualified. If they're in (or just outside of) some minor midwest city, the same's true for them too. Everything I've said is true a hundredfold if there's no university in that minor city.
    • adrianmonk 3y ago
      From that Reddit account's comment history, they're probably in Portugal. I don't know what the tech scene is like there. It might be OK, but I don't think it is known as a tech hub.
      • marcosdumay 3y ago
        Portugal is famous by the situation where all local workers that can try very hard only to work remotely for a company in some other country. So yeah, something like that could happen there.
  • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >But seriously, this just doesn't add up. Please do take everything you read on reddit with a pinch of salt. Reddit stories are more like Netflix documentaries, regulare stories, that are over-dramatized for the sake of views.
  • terminous 3y ago
    it's a typical reddit creative fiction
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  story seems a bit fantasy to me. not sure if it's really plausible. they all resigned together but the company couldn't find anyone to replace them on linkedin. doesn't correlate with my experiences. in any case would be interesting to know if something like this did happen. i think maybe only in smallish companies where employees have some leverage. in my experience it seems they started treating remote as a more of a one-off privilge, or as a reward. it's no longer seen as a permanent benefit.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Any job opening seems to get a billion weird applicants, so if they really got NONE they either are lying (everyone clapped) or they mean "zero qualified" but even that seems unlikely.
    • jstarfish 3y ago
      It reads like a rehashing of the pretext for hiring H1-Bs instead of domestic employees-- they're trying to use RTO resistance as the reason now.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > they all resigned together but the company couldn't find anyone to replace them on linkedin. I would believe that they got zero real applications if the company was underpaying and had a decent number of skilled people who were there out of inertia, which would also account for them all being able to find other jobs quickly. It takes a particular culture, but I've seen things close enough to believe that that could happen.
  • ryanSrich 3y ago
    > they all resigned together but the company couldn't find anyone to replace them on linkedin. doesn't correlate with my experiences. Yeah this was a clear sign the post was fake. Even entry level posts on LinkedIn will get a few hundred applicants in day. Leave it up for a week and you might have over 1,000. This is the case for anywhere in the US. Could be the smallest most rural town in the US. If you make a job post requiring in office work there you’ll still get hundreds of applicants.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• chasd00 3y ago
  I help a team that just this week was ordered from on-high to come into the office 4 days a week. Their product is on time and they just released v1 to rave reviews while working remote. Every single person on the team is now actively looking at other offers (they're good and their skills are very in demand). I've never seen an unforced error like this, total self destruction. I've been besides myself all week, never seen such a poor move by leadership ever. The entire project is going to be in serious trouble in about 3 weeks. It makes no sense. /I'm not aligned to their organization (i'm just an SME/liason on the project) so the return to office order doesn't affect me or i would be doing the same.
  • paulusthe 3y ago
    I think it's personality differences. The people who love being in the office probably do best in that environment and likely got promoted into leadership as a result of their interpersonal skills / ability to navigate office politics. Those people cannot fathom why others would dislike going into the office, because it's so natural and normal for them, and they tend to think people complaining about it are just being kind of immature children. After all, the office has been great for them, so it's gotta be great for everyone! I think it's an introvert extrovert split, primarily, with extroverts more likely to be in leadership roles and therefore dictating to everyone else to live like they do.
    • joelfried 3y ago
      Personality differences are certainly a piece of it, sure. But if the folks On High do not realize what the people doing the actual work value about their current position, that seems like a pretty big failure of leadership. If you don't understand the needs of those following you, you're not doing a good job leading.
      • tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
        If only some people are doing “actual work”, why even have the others around? Why hasn’t everyone done their own thing? Are you telling me that with all these jeans and hoodie wearing teeny boppers starting startups that go big, the people that aren’t doing the “actual work” have somehow managed to slide in despite bringing nothing to the table? Occam’s razor would suggest that it’s more likely that you have a pretty self-centred view of what “real work” is.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  on the other side of this, I’ve only been considered after the technical interview at the one company I did an onsite with. Something about me doesn’t come across in remote interviews. But my “culture fit” and competence distortion field still works in person. Just like pre pandemic My current job was “once or twice a week onsite” but has been once or twice a month
  • gedy 3y ago
    > Something about me doesn’t come across in remote interviews. If you don't mind me asking, are you physically attractive? People do behave differently around nice looking folks, especially in person. I have the opposite problem of I look better on (zoom) camera than in person (not really in shape, etc).
    • yieldcrv 3y ago
      > are you physically attractive? If I brag about my intimate experiences with women, people say its because I’m 6’1” tall, lean, nice jawline and everything that has nothing to do with what I did. If I complain about any aspect of my relationships with women that I found frustrating, people say I’m an incel, “yikes”, not physically attractive enough compared to a more extreme scarce version of man, and also critiquing everything that I did whether I specified or not. So, you tell me. I don’t have much consensus since my experience is invalidated by default.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Just curious, did in-person vs. remote interviews correlate with the position being in-person vs. remote? I could believe that for a fully remote position, you're competing with a much larger applicant pool.
    • yieldcrv 3y ago
      in person interview for hybrid role. I began pushing for onsite interviews on a hunch I can think of a lot of quantum reasons, but more importantly I wasn’t getting job offers and couldn't find anybody to relate (most discussion I found was about not getting a call back, I pretty much always got to technical interview and then got unceremonious rejections) So I pushed for onsite and did a classic whiteboard technical interview, the first one sent me an offer. I answered as well or as poorly as every other procedurally generated technical interview. After dozens of other companies all I have is the 100% correlation to going onsite. Is what it is. Might help someone else.
• Workaccount2 3y ago
  I feel like the work from home conversation gets weird? different? when you are talking about tech jobs, and makes it a totally different situation. It's easy to make a case for WFH when your job is basically "Work alone for 90% of the time hitting keys on a keyboard". Hell there are tech workers who are going on 20 years of remote work. WFH is an old concept in tech, because the work is almost custom tailored for it. HN is out here hitting softballs in the battle over retrun to work. However, the overwhelming majority of white collar workers are not tech workers, and do jobs that require way more human interaction. This is where the actual strain between workers and employers is.
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    A lot of office workers have jobs that are mostly talking on the phone plus data entry. Lots of those are, if anything, even easier to do remotely than most tech jobs. And much easier to measure productivity! Those employers also tend to be pushing RTO.
  • ebiester 3y ago
    It's not as different as you think it is. Most people got used to zoom meetings and async interactions, and they too liked it more than open offices. Big companies have it worse - they have the cubicles/open offices and their coworkers are in other offices throughout the country. This is all too common, and WFH made life much easier on everyone. This was less true for executives, who were suddenly on 10 hours of zoom calls a day, and whose jobs are most affected. I truly think they forgot that ICs have a very different life than them.
    • michaelteter 3y ago
      Perhaps the problem for execs is their focus on meetings. I would bet that at least 25% of meetings don’t have to be live, multi person events. Async communication can be more effective when it causes people to think a bit before talking.
      • ebiester 3y ago
• kklisura 3y ago
  WFH introduced during covid really tip the scales of power dynamics between employees and employer.
  • chii 3y ago
    Just like the black plague did too. Silver linings?
• 1270018080 3y ago
  The WFH conversation, especially on HN, has been beaten to death. I’ve heard every viewpoint 1000 times. There is nothing else to say let’s just ban the topic.
  • Blackthorn 3y ago
    While you might be the main character of your own life, you are not the main character of the world.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    I kind of agree, but this story was about a new (alleged) data point. Personally, as a job seeker, I'm interested in any new changes to the WFH landscape.
• Invictus0 3y ago
  No one would just go on the internet and tell lies, would they?
• hkt 3y ago
  The workers united will never be defeated! Good for them. They should unionise really, but actions like this are incredible and admirable. It is very heartening to see any group of workers defend themselves and their working conditions like this.
• nixpulvis 3y ago
  Can this culture war please be over. I’m sick of it.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    In what sense do you mean "culture war"? Just asking because people usually use the term specifically for conservative vs. liberal belief clusters. So I'm not sure if you're saying WFH is tied into that culture war.
    • nixpulvis 3y ago
      That’s another one that would be nice to mello out.
• aaomidi 3y ago
  This is when you form a union too. So they can’t take that away from you randomly in the future. You’re already nearly there too!
• eddtests 3y ago
  There’s a fun anecdote about Bell Labs where an electrical engineer, Nyquist, was found to be one of the connecting points for patent output in the company. Having lunch with him seems to have outputted greater numbers of patents. I know there’s going to be so many other factors but I know I’ve learnt a lot from hanging with colleagues over lunch or at the pub, what’s the replacement to that? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist
  • milesvp 3y ago
    I know a guy like this. He was once employed to wander around talking with other engineers of different specialties. He has a habit of looking at things from first principles. And talking to him would invariably get you unstuck on some problem, often by sidestepping it completely. At the very least they’d end up with interesting directions to spend effort on. He’s an absolutely fascinating person to talk to.
• iwonthecase 3y ago
  I don't understand why companies can be so self destructive when it comes to this kind of stuff. I had a brief stint at a place that mandated a full RTO early 2021, started time tracking people, publicly screamed at coworkers that showed up five minutes late, wrote up employees for wearing masks, fired people that made ADA requests, etc. Cult-y startup, but still.
  • richie_adler 3y ago
    > wrote up employees for wearing masks That would have been my cue to start polishing my CV.
    • eddtests 3y ago
      Or suing for a nice pay check - I am not the most Covid-conscious person, but if I had time tracking AND a potentially illegal activity I’d sue
• afavour 3y ago
  Wasn't it just yesterday that a bunch of HN folk were saying they didn't see any reason for tech workers to belong to a union?
  • ryanSrich 3y ago
    I’d much rather the free market figure this out. If I want to change my company from being remote to in office I should have that power. Employees should have the power to quit, which they already do.
    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      A union is a manifestation within a free market. A bunch of employees get together so they can quit with more impact.
• skadamou 3y ago
  Lately, I've come to the conclusion that WFH tends to benefit older devs with more experience at the expense of their younger colleagues. If you are established/experienced and already have a strong network in your field, working from home is great because it gives you more flexibility and less distractions from your work. If you're a junior dev however, working from home creates a higher barrier to asking questions/learning from more experienced folks on your team and also negatively impacts your ability to network/meet people in your field. I'm sure that this is super situational dependent but on the whole I think it negatively impacts junior devs but I would love to hear some other people's thoughts.
  • wink 3y ago
    Yes and no. I personally don't see a lot of difference in pairing remotely over sitting next to each other, as someone with a non-standard keyboard and layout I actually find it a lot easier, because I can watch and do some doc reading/research/tickets during that. If you are more hands-off and don't engage with your younger colleagues, then yes, absolutely. I don't really know how you would just magically absorb knowledge and not wasting all your time if you listened to everything that everyone in your physical vicinity says. (Including cursing, talking about sportsball results, etc.pp) But maybe people who are good at listening while doing something else see this differently. What I do miss are the coffee break conversations, hopefully also with people from other teams and not only your own, but I think this can be remedied by going to the office occasionally, certainly not something I need on a daily basis.
• comte7092 3y ago
  At the end of the day, wfh is a serious benefit for workers. “Return” to office can’t just be seen as a return to “normal”, it’s effectively a pay/benefit cut. If you’re going to cut my pay for non performance related reasons, you better know that you’re completely destroying your credibility with me. The merits of the gains to productivity, whether true or not, don’t really matter. Cutting salaries across the board benefits the company similarly. You can’t spin that as a positive to the individual employee.
• scopeh 3y ago
  If you went back to the office, then would you rather an open planned office or your own cubicle? If its the latter, your own cubicle, then why the hell are you going back to the office? Open planned offices are a pain the arse for distractions. I for one couldn't imagine going back, far more productive WFH.
• avgcorrection 3y ago
  When employers force employees to upend their lives or get fired: no one blinks When an IT department forces a small (?) company to do something by quitting: That seems way too fantastical to be true. (Personally... yes, seems a bit too good to be true!) And HN wonders why some people want unions.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507458