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Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

• randomburner99 3y ago
  [flagged]
• Two9A 3y ago
  This is one aspect of the RTO discussion that's sometimes missed: there are plenty of people in the tech sphere (myself included) who've been comfortably remote for much longer than those who were pushed into remote work by lockdowns and pandemic response. We're not about to give up a whole lifestyle we've built over (in some cases) decades, on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the present time. Props to the author for highlighting this.
  • x86x87 3y ago
    This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.
    • ericfrazier 3y ago
      And why should they?
      • x86x87 3y ago
        Exactly. Cat is out of the bag now
      • lizardking 3y ago
        Unfortunately many people are being strong armed into it. People coming out of lay offs are finding less wfh opportunities than existed just a year ago, as a percentage of the available jobs.
        • rgrieselhuber 3y ago
          Organization is always the key. The minute people are treated as isolated cases they are exploitable.
    • mc32 3y ago
      Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment. There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.
      • bacza2 3y ago
        Why it always need to be only about productivity and not what is better for people? I get that company need to make money but surly productivity is not dropping 50% and company makes significantly less
        • grogenaut 3y ago
          How do you objectively measure productivity? Same question for "better for people". The former can be somewhat measured by in-effective methods such as lines of code produced, revenue per emp in division, and other measures. The latter via surveys. A company's direct objective it to turn a profit. Their indirect objective is might be to do that via retaining productive workers, or they may take a churn approach. Is it surprising they'd put more effort and weight on the former (prod) than the latter (better for people)? What math function allows you to strike the correct balance between the 2 measures. For some employees you might make them maximally satisfied by paying them a lot to do nothing. For others they might want little to no money for socially rewarding work. It's not going to be the same for every person. So in your mind what's the right optimization function for this equation?
        • mc32 3y ago
          If one company were to hire all the slackers and the other all the busy beavers, one will be more likely to succeed vs the other. Unless being a slacker becomes a protected class companies will hire the productive people, given a choice.
        • jheriko 3y ago
          ask yourself that question and answer it. just what in the hell are you thinking?
    • DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      I enjoyed the flexibility of WFH but I still prefer working with local teams in the office. There are pros and cons to both, but it's silly to assume everyone has the same preference as you just because your preference is strongly held. This is my response to both your comment and TFA. There is less consensus on this topic than the very-vocal WFH crowd would have you believe. I know plenty of other talented engineers that feel similarly to me. They aren't dogmatic about it, but they prefer working with their teammates in the office.
      • ncallaway 3y ago
        Sure, but RTO is about… forcing the preference for in person work on everyone.
        • throwaway5959 3y ago
          RTO doesn’t really work if five people are back in the office.
          • Kye 3y ago
            Manufacturing buggy whips doesn't work if only five people own buggies. This is a problem for the buggy whip manufacturer to solve, not the people who bought a car or took the train. There's a third option beyond forcing everyone into boxes in the middle of nowhere (old and busted) and everyone working from home (new old hotness).
          • ncallaway 3y ago
            You see how that’s inherently about putting the preferences of the 5 people *above* the preferences of the rest of the office, yes?
            • throwaway5959 3y ago
              People are allowed to have different preferences and lifestyles than the majority. I’m not a CEO so it’s not my place to decide what a company does or doesn’t do.
    • brightball 3y ago
      There’s a flip side to this where you’re not observing the negatives coming to the company as a result. It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either. Just as an example, I see people complain (a lot) about “cameras on” policies. This is the result of a company trying to eliminate an issue that they are seeing from non-participation to potential instances of fraud. They want to do return to office, but this is a “let’s find a middle ground” step. And yet, people will act as if it’s the end of the world. The alternative is being in the room itself. You have to pick your battles.
    • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      I asked about WFH prior to the pandemic and was told 'oh it won't work for you, ask again when you're in a senior position; you'll never develop without peer-friendships and a senior worker a couple of desks away'. Then we were forced to WFH. Now, we're being told to do hybrid, but there's no peer friendships because it's hotdesking, and the senior personnel are no longer nearby (they're at home or on a different floor) ... so there's no "return", we're not going back to what we had, we don't have our own desks anymore. Management acknowledge that office days (we're hybrid) will be low in productivity, but no changes to productivity requirements. It's all about collaboration, except you're next to random people you've never met and you can't talk because it's open plan and you'll disturb everyone. None of the reasons given for return fit the reality (in my office), but they probably make sense for senior managers (who seem unable to see past the end of their own noses).
      • light_hue_1 3y ago
        And of course, you will spend all of your time in the office zooming with other people who aren't there. Time to get a new job.
      • taway1874 3y ago
        It's just stupid. How do these people get to such senior positions?
    • JeremyNT 3y ago
      > This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back. I mean this is true in the scenario where demand for their skills outstrips the supply of available workers with said skills. In a different scenario, where tech jobs are being reduced across the board (due to return to normal interest rates and VC funding slowing down), such an "aren't going back" ultimatum isn't necessarily going to be compatible with "I need a job." And of course, if you believe Microsoft, ChatGPT is going to start eating tech jobs left and right any day now. The economy runs in boom and bust cycles, and the winds are shifting. The tech environment from 2020-2022 was extremely weird, and the balance of power now is shifting back to management. Management knows that (at least some) workers highly value remote work, and they're not going to hand that out for free. The only certainty here is change, and as tech workers lose leverage, "remote work" moves from a default assumption to an item that must be negotiated for (perhaps in exchange for some total compensation) - if it's available at all.
  • throwaway290 3y ago
    Been remote for 15 years, recently started full time job, love going to office. No strict work hours but I come anyway, nice to chat with colleagues (and much more productive than those tedious calls or text chats). Also I was already making myself leave home at least daily for physical activity, so if I'm out why not travel to the office? There's a nice coffeeshop near there. Also the chair is comfy enough, desk is adjustable etc. So no, to say it's "bullshit and everyone knows it" is just pushing for some agenda. I wish everyone can have their way, if you don't want to come to the office then don't, employers should make it possible, but don't make it sound as if everyone hates it, it's just wrong.
    • and0 3y ago
      That's totally valid, also. I do sometimes miss the office, particularly from when I worked in a healthy office culture, but would want it to be optional.
    • variants 3y ago
      As someone who works hands on so I have to work at the office I really wish more people fight to stay home, the commute was so much nicer with people working remote plus the office was much nicer to work in without all the noise and distractions
      • grogenaut 3y ago
        I agree with this but the obvious outcome is that if you're 1 person in a 200 person office floor, your company will consolidate 200 floors into one and it'll get noisy again. The same cost function still exists for office space. I'm very with you on the commutes tho. I live in Seattle and Mondays and Fridays are like driving on Thanksgiving (a major holiday in the US when no one drives and even the roads in L.A. are clear), and Tuesday is worse than the before times. Wed/Thurs are a bit better than the before times though so I just go in on those days (that's also when we tend to have happy hours).
      • throwaway290 3y ago
        If you use public transport it works better (more cost efficient to run = more frequent) when more people use it, so my commute would not get better if people stayed home. But I agree on the last part, I prefer it when certain coworkers WFH. TBH some days I strategically choose my office hours so I overlap with them less.
  • rwmj 3y ago
    Remote since 2002!
    • TigeriusKirk 3y ago
      2011 here. Fully remote teams for more of that. It does take time and active effort to become fully productive in a remote environment. It's not something you're just born knowing how to do, it's a set of skills just like working in an office is a set of skills. You have to learn them.
    • enobrev 3y ago
      End of 2001 for me!
  • andrewmutz 3y ago
    Prior to COVID, everyone understood that remote work was supported by some companies and not others. It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others. As a result, everyone peacefully self-selected into their preferred employment relationships. Companies got the type of workforce they wanted and workers chose the type of environment they wanted. It was great. Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. We should just return to the status quo before COVID: choose the type of company you want to work for that supports the lifestyle you want to have. If your employer wants to transition back to in-office work and you don't want to do it, switch to one of the thousands of companies that will hire you. You have no obligation to stay at a company that is forcing you back in the office, and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
    • reaperman 3y ago
      > the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore. Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before. Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be much more appropriate than firing “for cause”!
      • idontknoworcare 3y ago
        [dead]
      • cdchn 3y ago
        Who is doing this precisely? I've heard a lot of people bemoan that they moved during the pandemic and now are being required to return to the office but I haven't heard of any instances where previously remote employees-- remote from BEFORE the pandemic-- are being required to move to central office locations.
  • dheera 3y ago
    Another aspect of the RTO discussion that's missed: People in long-distance relationships. I don't mind going to the office a fair share of the time but I don't want rules that require N days per week because that prevents me from visiting my partner. I generally work from my partner's place about 1-2 out of every 8 weeks. Going to the office as little or as much on other weeks isn't a huge issue (though admittedly I do work more efficiently from home, and have way better snacks and drinks at home than the office) but I want those 1-2 weeks to be respected.
  • bradly 3y ago
    I was a remote worker at Apple pre-pandemic and had no problems. After COVID I was told that moving states where I live would have to get some approval and is not guaranteed. I left Apple shortly after and have been contracting since. When I was in an office full time, I had to work my life around my work. When I have forty hours to fill out over a seven day period, I'm working my work around my life.
    • sys_64738 3y ago
      Why didn't you just move states and ask "forgiveness" later? Companies cannot tell you where and when to live and if they try it see who blinks first. I would certainly have ignored them and let them fire me or RIF me.
      • toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Learned appetite for that operating model. Have to have enough financial resources and grit accumulated first.
      • bradly 3y ago
        That just isn't really something I wanted to do. I was in a privileged enough position where I could choose to leave so I did when it became convenient. Not everyone can do that and the new policies may put them in a bind.
      • panzagl 3y ago
        There are a lot of differences between state labor laws and taxes, remote doesn't mean you can just change residences willy-nilly.
        • bradly 3y ago
          That's very true, even contracting I ran into different issues based on where I work from and where they are. Some companies required a business entity is certain states.
      • gamblor956 3y ago
  • jcims 3y ago
    Yep. Remote work since 2002.
  • chiefalchemist 3y ago
    > on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the present time. You're being too kind. Whims aren't the problem, lack of imagination is (and in leadership positions that should be unacceptable). The problem is, few of the RTO office execs have WFH long enough to understand it. They have no clue how to lead WFH. They have no clue how to manage WFT. And they're not interested in learning new tricks. They simply wield their power and reinstate the status quo. In a word...weak. The RTO v WFH debate (?) is an opportunity in the market. An opportunity where WFH is the new up and coming opportunity. RTO is all but a fax machine. Who would feel comfortable working at a company where the executives lacked imagination and are all but mandating "Bring back the fax machine"?
  • spacemadness 3y ago
    Yep. Management acted like none of us knew how to work remote and we were all learning. Actually folks, no, I’ve been working like this for a while. And now I need to listen to our leaders say we work better in person and remote folks don’t know how to collaborate. What an utter failure in leadership and communication. The author said it best: these people are assholes. I’ve been so frustrated since people started going back to offices with management trying to undo what I worked to put in place prior to covid under some guise I’ve been underachieving all these years.
  • hintymad 3y ago
    Teams big companies are already distributed across time zones, effectively forcing their employees working remotely. It's quite common for an org to have office in NYC, in Bay Area, in a tech hub in Europe, and in an Indian city. Meetings are conducted over video conference, and communication is mostly asynchronous in writing. I don't see how that is different from WFH. Of course, local office for employees to bond and having face-to-face discussion is really nice, but there are different ways to handle that.
  • npsimons 3y ago
    My brother was 100% remote for 13 years before the pandemic. I was 100% remote way back in 2001. It took the pandemic and WFH to remind me how much better it is, from every conceivable angle. I'm never going back, and have shut down plenty of recruiters and headhunters with one simple phrase: "100% remote."
  • bit_logic 3y ago
    What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. At this point, it shouldn't be called RTO, it should be called STO (Switch To Office), because WFH is the default existing state. And the companies that want to STO, they admit there's NO DATA to support this: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-return-to-office-rto-aws-2023-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re... https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-office-return/ https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic... The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.
    • The_Colonel 3y ago
      > Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote. Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.
      • bit_logic 3y ago
        Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed. Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH. Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • downrightmike 3y ago
    It is missed on purpose because leadership wants it to be missed and they get visibly upset if you ask them. Such thin skins for people cracking a whip.
  • ricardobayes 3y ago
    Before the pandemic it was almost unimaginable to be employed fully remotely, at least in Europe. Top achievers got a day per week, working from home as a perk or as a "hiring condition". In my 10 year career before the pandemic I basically never had a coworker who had been working from home on a regular basis. That said I love remote work, and I think it's one of our biggest workplace inventions in this century.
  • jzb 3y ago
    Most of my career has been remote, excepting a stint with a hosting company (being on location was logical, no complaints there), and a brief dalliance with being in-office while I was with a company that was fine with me being remote. Tried the cube life, didn't like it, company happily re-allocated my veal fattening pen to another drone during the heady pre-COVID days when such real estate was scarce. There are too many social, economic, and ecological reasons to put a stake in the heart of requiring people to be in a specific location unless there's an honest to goodness requirement.
  • caseysoftware 3y ago
    When I worked for Bay Area companies from Central Texas, I used my remoteness (+2 hr timezone diff) to my team's advantage very visibly and on purpose. - The UK team wants a noon (their time) meeting? Sure, I'll do it at 6am my time vs the SF team doing it at 4am. - That NYC customer wants us to present at 9am ET? Sure, I'll do it at 8am my time vs the SF's team at 6am. - Need someone to cover that meeting in Atlanta/DC/Dallas/Houston/Chicago? Sure, you can take a 3+ hour(+2-3 timezone) flight to cover it or I can just hop over in a fraction of the time. After a while, I got ALL of the East Coast and European calls simply out of convenience.
  • somsak2 3y ago
    Not clear to me why the requirements should differ if you have been doing 5 years vs. 3.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • bromuro 3y ago
    I work remotely since 2006. To me, working remotely is the best - if no the only - way to keep myself mentally and physically healthy.
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Aye, been remote since 2015. Small but niche market for remote folks, mostly who you know and specialized gigs, but could make it work reasonably well. now the market is packed with applicants and the backlash is making it harder.
• covermydonkey 3y ago
  I was asked to "find reasons" to get the teams under me back in the office.
  • syndicatedjelly 3y ago
    What reasons did you find?
  • devin 3y ago
    “To discover how tall their coworkers are in person”
• ramon156 3y ago
  This post both says "I was most important at the company" And "I was easily dismissed". Can a CEO really be that disconnected from their company?
  • hef19898 3y ago
    Not the CEO, because everybody is replaceable. Heck, even Steve Jobs was.
    • kleiba 3y ago
      > Heck, even Steve Jobs was. Replaceable or replaced, which one are you referring to?
      • hef19898 3y ago
        Both.
    • zamalek 3y ago
      > everybody is replaceable Usually at a higher cost: 1. Employees seek new employment in order to increase their compensation, usually for the same amount+type of work. The replacement will likely be negotiating higher than what the original employee achieved through regular promotions and pay raises. 2. Software - and many other cognitive industries - are not like an assembly line (another CEO fallacy). You can't just slot in a replacement and expect things to continue as normal. Deliverables will suffer, either through quality or expediency. You might also find it difficult to find a replacement that is as talented as the employee you lost. Someone calling your ultimatum means that they are confident in their ability to get re-hired (or in this case didn't struggle to get re-hired while they towed the line). Oops, you just lost rare talent.
      • hef19898 3y ago
        Two observations: Talent is one of the most overrated things I onow, and it nothing without preserverance and discipline. And being to function in a specific team. I say specific, because one teams toxic idiot can be another teams rockstar. Assembly lines require much more skill and discipline than you may realize.
• skrowl 3y ago
  [dead]
• mattlondon 3y ago
  Its only bullshit if you want to work remote. I want to be in the office. Working remote is the most stressful thing I've ever done.
  • Exoristos 3y ago
    Thank you for speaking up. I have to say for me it's the same.
  • tock 3y ago
    It's BS because its unilaterally telling everyone to come back to office without data supporting the move.
    • j-a-a-p 3y ago
      Was the remote working 'movement' then based on data? Or was it covid?
      • icedchai 3y ago
        Remote work was supposed to be temporary. Remember "2 weeks to slow the spread"?
  • andersa 3y ago
    There's nothing wrong with wanting to work in an office. The issue is trying to force everyone to work in an office.
    • r053bud 3y ago
      But then these office lovers have no one fun to talk to!
      • throwaway5959 3y ago
        No, they’ll have people willing to commute 30 minutes a day to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to talk to. Ask service workers what their commute is like and how many days they have to be “in the office” for. Edit: found the people that have never worked retail or restaurant
• TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  There are so many “habits” left over from industrial work. On an assembly line everyone needed to be in sync but this generally isn’t true for most office work. You need to be present at the factory to do the work, hasn’t been true for office work for awhile now. Yet we still operate synchronously. Everyone commutes through traffic/crowded public transport and risk catching the latest novel virus, to arrive at work at the same time. Everyone has lunch at the same time so it’s crowded as heck and we get even more mortal danger.
  • grumblingdev 3y ago
    > an assembly line Now imagine working on an assembly line on your feet all day versus your office day job. The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world. I personally hated going into the office, but the morale effect is real. I think the main thing is people cannot be trusted to honestly tell you if they work better from the office. It's a nicer life working from home but whether you get more work done is debatable. And there is always too much to lose by speaking the truth.
    • blastro 3y ago
      real for you
    • diogenes4 3y ago
      > The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world. I'm guessing the most spoiled people in the world wouldn't be working at all. This sort of contempt is a very specific and odd attitude to have.
      • grumblingdev 3y ago
        Imagine being an Amazon delivery driver. Monitoring to the extreme. Constant boring shit all day. Running up apartment stairs. Then imagine an office worker... It's a world of difference and puts things in perspective. People take things for granted too easily.
• grumblingdev 3y ago
  Video conf still sucks. It's literally the same as 10 years ago. Does anyone have a workplace where it is really seamless, high resolution, and just works? Or is using any of these new technologies? Maybe VR will help... But not being in-person for collaboration/morale is miles apart. I wonder if employees would personally cover the cost of a one week meetup once per month if their other option was move city and office all the time.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • duke_sam 3y ago
    If you work for a company where your whole immediate team are co-located it can be great. In my experience I end up spending most of my time working with people in disparate offices so I get the worst of both worlds, constant in-office video calls (and all the meeting room shuffling that goes with it).
  • dinkblam 3y ago
    > Video conf still sucks Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
    • freedomben 3y ago
      They did get crystal clear on landline. Then we moved to cell phones where quality is still abysmal and the phone app barely works... It's aggravating to me
    • tayo42 3y ago
      I don't understand why audio quality is so bad on every device. Phone calls are hit or miss whether it'll be clear or not. This happens alot with places like call centers, the whole point of its existence is to be on the phone communicating with voice and the quality is to the point where it's hard to understand.
• dsm4ck 3y ago
  I am beginning to think, somewhat uncomfortably, that due to industry consolidation most big corps don't have to worry about having great talent anymore. They are squeezing more money out of an established business model in a market that no longer has real customer choice, as long as they have good enough people to keep things going it's not a problem.
  • thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    That's fine, they will eventually have their lunch eaten by companies that can execute with all the talent they refuse to hire. It takes time, but the wheel turns.
    • ballenf 3y ago
      These wheels often take a generation or more to fully rotate. And I have no idea whether any collective or group action can materially accelerate the timeline.
      • great_psy 3y ago
        I would agree historically, but I think innovation and change is happening much faster now. 10 years ago, nobody seriously thought about taking on Google in terms of search engine. Now we are going though a phase where we are questioning if LLMs can take over that market share. Same with Facebook in social networks, but TikTok took over pretty fast.
      • asynchronous 3y ago
        Arguments such as this one make accelerationism look attractive in all reality.
  • softwaredoug 3y ago
    I totally agree These companies know they could lose a lot of excellent talent, and backfill with mediocre talent. Their employer brand names will remain strong carry them through, with enough junior candidates that will backfill the "industry expert" and mostly nobody will notice.
• strict9 3y ago
  >If I had to give only one bit of advice to anyone ever faced with an ultimatum from someone with power over them (be it an employer or abusive romantic partner), it would be: >Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum. This is such great advice. When you are given an ultimatum it is very revealing. Pretend to comply as the author advises, then find something else. Your sense of self-worth is more valuable than salary or position prestige. If you comply long term, you lose a part of your self and persona.
  • j-a-a-p 3y ago
    Nice to read this confirmation! I like working in the office, but I also received the ultimatum of working in the office and decided to look elsewhere.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    That's just...weird advice. "Honey, playing WoW 12 hours a day is a dealbreaker for me." "You must enter your information into our new HR system."
    • throwanem 3y ago
      Well, yes. Advice given to address one circumstance often does not apply in another, wholly different circumstance.
      • alex_lav 3y ago
        But...the advice is about ultimatums...
        • vorpalhex 3y ago
          Which the counter examples here are not.
      • paulddraper 3y ago
        > Never choose the one giving you an ultimatum
• gardenhedge 3y ago
  In the company I work for, we're "hybrid" now and they're still trying to get people in 2 days a week. No-one really complains about it though..
• SSJPython 3y ago
  I don't understand why there can't be compromise on this? If you want to go to the office, go. If you want to work from home, then work from home. Why is it that remote workers never insist on everyone working from home, but RTO people want every single person to RTO? Just leave it up to the individual worker.
  • Ericson2314 3y ago
    The point of being in the office is the other people being in the office. Unfortunate, but also true. I totally by this might be a CEO power trip, but that doesn't also mean its an individualist ("I'm a star IC nothing else matter") brain rot. Star ICs do not a functioning org make.
  • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    You don’t think there can be compromise until both sides admit their faults. Count the times you see someone arguing WFH while admitting any degree of abuse like we all know it is. To hear people here tell it, they would never do the things we all know happen.
    • asynchronous 3y ago
      Such as? If RTO is happening I want every company to take back every “great job staying productive through the pandemic” email they sent over the last several years. Either we met the standard for productivity or we didn’t, it can’t be both.
  • boring_twenties 3y ago
    RTO people don't want to be in an empty office by themselves.
  • fullshark 3y ago
    In office people don't care about just themselves being in an office, they want everyone in an office. Being in an office to take video conferences is pointless, they want that collective environment that they thrived in pre-pandemic.
• jjtheblunt 3y ago
  My super noisy family makes me decree the title is not universally applicable
  • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    It's definitely a thing: with a young kid that emits distracting screeches at the seemingly perfect timing to disrupt deep concentration, office work is a lot more appealing for productivity. And a lot of management is older folks with kids. A lot of programmers in the age-discriminatory field of tech is ... younger people. But at the same time, my old job was a cattle pen of open floor concept. That sucked too. Now, right after COVID restrictions were lifted but no one came to the office, man I loved going to the office. No one was there, I could concentrate really well.
    • jjtheblunt 3y ago
      i'm jealous. and i know exactly what you mean.
• ramraj07 3y ago
  If I start a company tomorrow, this is what I would want to do: 1. Hire within a general metropolitan area (2 hour commute max). 2. WFH for 28 days a month. 3. 2 days a month the entire org convenes in a ballroom or something and works together, have some progress reports, happy hours and hackathons. In this model, everyone’s remote most of the time. Yet everyone gets FaceTime with each other IrL. Seed ideas and brainstorms. Everyone’s happy. I think. Curious if anyone has a critique.
  • some_furry 3y ago
    That would work great for people that want to live in a single metro area. As a remote worker, I'm perfectly happy travelling every so often for in-person meetings and offsites. That's not a problem for me. There are no large tech companies within 30 minutes of where I live. I don't want to move away from my house or the people I share it with (whose jobs are not portable).
  • blitzar 3y ago
    Offer a work location as well, give people the option to have somewhere to go to work if / when they want.
  • virtuous_sloth 3y ago
    You'd require people to work 30 days per month?
    • freedomben 3y ago
      Even in February
      • SpaceNoodled 3y ago
        Especially in February.
        • peterleiser 3y ago
          We work, on average, 365.25 days per year. But we're not heartless, leap seconds are always PTO.
• rwmj 3y ago
  > definitely don’t accept any relocation assistance (since you’ll have to return it when you split) Is this true? I've never heard of conditional assistance like this.
  • convolvatron 3y ago
    its not uncommon to put a time bound on it - like 6mo or a year. never heard of it being indefinite
  • BigRedDog1669 3y ago
    I've received relocation assistance and signing bonuses where it was stated I would need to return if I left within a certain time (a year I think)
  • rout39574 3y ago
    If you accept relocation assistance and then don't relocate it, I'd expect the lawsuit to be open and shut.
  • delecti 3y ago
    Can't speak for anywhere else, but it was clearly established at Amazon that any relocation assistance had to be returned (prorated) if I left before 1 year. I don't imagine that's terribly unusual, but many companies might not make it as obvious if they don't have the same high turnover rates as Amazon.
  • kstrauser 3y ago
    That sounds like bad financial advice, and that you’d be be better to accept it and put it in savings for however many months. If you don’t stay the required amount of time, return the money. If you do, ta-da, it’s yours. Ask your tax person first, of course.
    • thinkharderdev 3y ago
      Not sure how it works everywhere, but in many cases it's not just money they give you. They basically reimburse you for particular moving expenses.
• bwestergard 3y ago
  I'm a union software engineer at NPR, and we just won guaranteed remote work for three years (pending a ratification vote by the membership). Glad I don't have to worry about shifting fashions among executives on this subject. https://nitter.net/WeBuildNPR/status/1707916820928241801 https://nitter.net/WeBuildNPR/status/1707916820928241801
  • graublau 3y ago
    Let's be real — NPR executives are more concerned maintaining their agitprop operation than employee productivity
    • loteck 3y ago
      That's not "being real," that's being insulting (regardless of whether you're right).
    • simbolit 3y ago
      What is the value of your comment?
      • aparticulate 3y ago
        NPR is a demonstrably corrupt media org
        • simbolit 3y ago
          [flagged]
• zwieback 3y ago
  Obviously WFH works better for some individuals and it only works for certain job description. What's less clear is whether WFH productivity is relatively high because it leverages structures and relationships that were established pre-pandemic, when working from the office was the norm. It'll be interesting to see what the results of studies a few years down the road show, when there's more data and better metrics.
  • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    > What's less clear is whether WFH productivity is relatively high because it leverages structures and relationships that were established pre-pandemic, when working from the office was the norm. Hasn't there been a massive amount of turnover since the pandemic began?
    • zwieback 3y ago
      Good point. Not where I work (big corporation) but certainly in a lot of other companies. I think it's also the larger companies that are now forcing a return to office.
• Consultant32452 3y ago
  This is happening at the company I’m contracting with. Employees, not contractors, must RTO. Two people on my team literally moved to different states with no company offices during the multi year period of not going to the office. It’ll be interesting to see how this is handled.
• CPLX 3y ago
  I think Poe's Law applies here. I can't tell if this is satire of a prickly programmer with zero social skills or understanding of business context or an actual person. OK you want to work remote. Great, do that. Literally, it's great for you. Some people might not want that, some people might want to run companies where that doesn't happen. Don't work at those places. But then you get to gems like this: "If I had to give only one bit of advice to anyone ever faced with an ultimatum from someone with power over them (be it an employer or abusive romantic partner), it would be: Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum." Sure thing buddy. Are we talking about an ultimatum not to send creepy as fuck text messages to female colleagues, or not to start endless flame wars in the slack channel over minute technical bullshit that doesn't matter? Or just this topic? I thought we were generalizing. "Conversely, if you let these assholes exert their power over you, you dehumanize yourself in submission." Are we 14? Of course your employer has power over you. You also have power in the equation as well, and you're both very free to walk away or pursue other opportunities. How about just being an adult and negotiating for what you want?
  • sdfghswe 3y ago
    Are you suggesting that they might not have social skills and send creepy text messages to female colleagues because they're a furry?
    • Tainnor 3y ago
      There was nothing in GP's post that indicated they thought this (and for me personally, that doesn't even compute, as I see no connection).
      • sdfghswe 3y ago
        There's nothing to suggest that they would have no social skills, or send creepy messages to their female co-workers either.
        • Tainnor 3y ago
• bhouston 3y ago
  I think that many people struggle at home (group A) while others don't (group B). RTO helps those who struggle at home (group A). And is a major inconvenience to those who excelled at home (group B) but it doesn't significantly degrade them. Thus RTO improves group A performance while not affecting group B performance so it looks like a win overall and in a sense it is. But it is penalizing group B, making their lives inconvenient, and increasing their expenditures. Working from home is objectively better if your employees are in group B: (1) better for the environment [less transit], (2) leads to better work-life balance [no time lost to commute, more flexible work hours], (3) is more cost efficient [no need to rent offices in high cost areas, remote employees can be cheaper as their COL is often lower], (4) lets employees have better homes [because you don't need to be near the downtown core]. I think if you start remote and you measure performance of your employees, you can ensure that you get most group B employees and you can stay remote. The issue is if you started in the office, you have a mix of group B and group A, and RTO will improve the average employee performance, so it makes sense.
  • Ericson2314 3y ago
    > Working from home is (1) better for the environment Note that this is not necessarily true. US cities were for a while "NIMBYism vs mandatory commutes". To the extent that one is solved but not the other, we get more car-centric spraw. People commuting less can be offset with them doing more pleasure driving. (Obvious this depends on the metro area, more remote work in Phoenix Arizona is definitely net good, in NYC not so much.) Once we solve the NIMBY problem, I'll be a lot more comfortable with the society-wide implications of remote work, but for now it is reducing the impetus to solve a problem that needs to be solved anyways.
  • tedivm 3y ago
    This seems like a lot of conjecture without any numbers or facts to back it up. You assume that making Group B return to office won't affect their productivity, while making Group A work from home will. However, I know for me personally I'm far more productive when I work from home. I know I'm not the only one where this is the case. Forcing me into the office would drop my productivity considerably.
  • 3y ago
• purpleblue 3y ago
  I really enjoy being in the office for so many reasons. The irony is that my job is remote in the sense that my team is in another city, and I only show up to the office because I want to be around people, get free lunch, etc. Previous to this I worked at a "remote-first" company, and despite being focused on remote work, I was never so unproductive because I spent most of my time waiting to connect with other people. However, I understand why many people do like WFH. I don't understand why this isn't a conversation between the employee and her direct manager? If the direct manager can point to problems with being WFH then I can understand forcing RTO. But if the employee is verifiably productive with good performance ratings, why should she be forced to return to the office? And this recursively applies all the way up the chain. If a director sees that a manager is falling behind in productivity, then she can drill down on the manager's performance and the performance of the team. But if performance reviews are good, why dictate that someone should be in the office? It's pretty stupid.
• SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I’ll know this “counter argument” isn’t bullshit when people finally admit they know full well a large portion of people abuse WFH. Until I see honesty on this, I am uninterested. No one ever admits: - I basically work 20-30 hours a week! - They have no idea when I’m actually working. - I was going to quit but I’m going to let them just keep paying me. - I have at least one side job and I won’t be able to do it if I need to go back in. I know YOU would never do these things. But we all know they occur, frequently. It’s not a discussion or well reasoned refutation if you are just going to pretend that the issues don’t exist. EDIT: No. I do not accept “they don’t work in the office either” as a valid argument. For the obvious reasons that at least in the office there is at least a chance to see it. For less obvious reasons like it’s still a body there, and seeing people work around you might make some people want to work. We are pack animals. All you are doing with the argument that they “don’t work anyway” is telling me they shouldn’t be allowed to WFH or even be employed in the first place. It’s not a good argument.
  • prosqlinjector 3y ago
    Everyone was posting on twitter about all the "projects" and video games they were working on during the lock down, despite supposedly still having full-time remote jobs. They also had time to move all across the country.
    • kjkjadksj 3y ago
      Kind of on management for being so ineffectual than an indictment on the principle.
    • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      “I’m growing my YouTube channel” “My fitness routine for Instagram is “like” a full time job” “My side-hustle brings in 8k a month” Totally common, and not said done by people with in office jobs. I let a guy go at the start of covid for leaving his office workstation on while he mined ETH. He got a full remote job, “worked” 12-20 hours a week and went really hard on buying GPUs for his home mining rigs. The thing is, this wasn’t uncommon. I let another guy go for not making it to 40 hours ever. Insisting that he was just as productive at 30-32 hours a week. Which doesn’t even remotely make sense. I love that some people have WFH, but I hate the liars that paint the argument in a completely faultless way.
• gonehome 3y ago
  This is a classic HN post that will get a lot of positive attention here playing into the HN cognitive bias zeitgeist, but I think is mostly bullshit. The market will settle it in the end, but at least for startups being colocated is a competitive advantage.
  • Ericson2314 3y ago
    The blog post is confusing the nature of policy changes being bullshit with the in-office being bullshit. Star ICs crushing it at remote work doesn't mean star teams; and if their coworkers are avoiding them in reviews it does sound like there are communication issues at play.
    • fardo 3y ago
      Teams avoiding security reviews are common cross-industry. Incentives everywhere are “dodge” - the expected outcome for managers and engineers is missed deadlines and reschedulings on prior promises, frequent blame-focused meetings and late nights; and low prestige, high effort work unsuitable for making the company money, getting promotions, or maintaining agility in the future, as most security work is extremely mercurial and often only very marginally improves security, if at all. Most “security fixes” at large firms are built on inscrutable black-box internal tooling which becomes a massive single point of failure and is rarely as hardened as implied, gets re-shuffled on what constitutes “best practices” every 12 months such that a feature team can spend literally all their time doing security work the team will be throwing out next year, are often not intelligently scoped to handle “this issue doesn’t specifically apply to my component”, and aren’t even the weak link when most hacks are > An insider replied to the wrong email, or put a zip file into a thumb drive then ran off with everything his computer had downloaded, which was a lot. Most teams grit their teeth and implement, but if the benefit isn’t there, just the requirement, teams remember and get a lot slower to pick up the phone.
  • amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    I bet the percent of people working at startups is tiny though.
  • 3y ago
• hedora 3y ago
  We’re hiring for an extremely specialized position, remote-only. I can confirm that big tech companies are operating like wile-e-coyote after he has run off the cliff, but hasn’t looked down yet. Some are even de-resourcing non-HQ offices (full of impossible to replace specialists, especially if you limit the search to the HQ city). So, some teams were forced to return to office, but will never receive additional headcount or backfills. Rest assured I’m keeping track of which companies are doing this (I live in an HQ city), and won’t consider interviewing at them in the future.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• tschellenbach 3y ago
  The discussion here tends to ignore the posts about people working multiple jobs or not working 40 hours a week remotely. Can't have your cake and eat it too
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Turns out you can do that in an office too
    • hotnfresh 3y ago
      … and nearly everyone does.
  • shortcake27 3y ago
    If you’re more concerned with how long a software engineer sits in front of a computer, opposed to the work they actually get done, you’ve already lost. Edit: if you’re going to downvote me that’s fine, but please explain why “number of hours spent at computer” is at all a useful metric. It’s a genuine question; I’m not being facetious. I’ll get nothing done all day then wake up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem. The amount of time I spend coding doesn’t really correlate with business value.
    • yellow_lead 3y ago
      Software is a creative process that requires brain effort. You can't always force progress. Work also happens when we aren't in the chair.
  • amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    I really don’t understand this. If the company isn’t getting the productivity they expect, they should deal with that. If they can’t tell, what difference does it make?
    • renewiltord 3y ago
      It appears they are dealing with it by asking people to come in to the office.
• lxe 3y ago
  I was wondering why remote work didn't become the golden standard even in the 2000s. Imagine fully-remote Internet dot-com era companies that don't require any hardware, can hire from anywhere in the country or the world, don't need any real estate investment, and can pass the savings onto competitively hiring best talent. There hasn't been any compelling reason for most internet-only companies like yahoo, google, facebook, etc to have ever waste billions into huge office campuses. And no, the reason isn't "video conferencing bad".
  • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I suppose it is a cultural thing, and American or Western European firms simply expected people to come into the office. I was active in the Eastern European/former USSR backpacking and travel-as-lifestyle community, and eventually quite a few of my peers with programming skills managed to get remote positions already in the first decade of the new millennium. Some companies in the region didn't care whether the work got done from a beach in India or a resort town in the Andes, as long as it got done. This was truly transformative for some Eastern European programmers' lives. Doing the work from a developing country where you could get by on 5-10€/day, but making a relatively elite salary, allowed them to begin investing in real estate, which has brought great prosperity and security.
• cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I would love to go back to an office. But not the new offices and workplaces that have shaken out in the post-COVID era. Reserving floating desks. Insufficient office space for the number of employees (because they overhired in 20/21). Declining quality of local employer options generally. A more hostile environment overall. Before I left Google it was clear that the rather nice environment we had before was never coming back. So without the perks, and the pleasant... why stay other than money? I decided I'd rather just cut spending. (Obviously others don't necessarily have these options) I don't actually like working remote (though I don't miss the commute). But the only way to get meaningful work and work that pays decently for me now is remote. I think many employers doing mandatory RTO are overplaying their hand and they will suffer for it. Or they are giving a clear signal of the values that actually hold in their workplace, and so basically telling picky and probably higher quality senior talent to stay away.
• birdyrooster 3y ago
  They took our offices away while we were gone and got us to return to cubicles. It’s some cynical bullshit. I hate my job now because of it.
• jetcopter 3y ago
  While employers can ultimately do whatever they want, people hired remote prior to covid should remain remote. I think its sad when remote hires are caught up in the return to office drag net. These individuals were typically hired due to a lack of a local skill pool so the employer hired remote to find the talent. Its simply counter productive to try and make them move local and will result in the same problem eventually and the employer will be forced to hire remote once again. Having said all that, the author misses the point on tax incentives being the driver of this. I know of many situations where the employer could care less about tax incentives and the overall cost of the return to office mandate. If they cared about money, they would sell or tear down their corporate HQs like many have. For some, its about what the c-level believes will make them successful. You can argue they are right or wrong in their belief, I'm in the wait and see camp of what this looks like in five years to see what we learn by trying different things.
  • Whatarethese 3y ago
    I know of some workers that were hired remotely in states that dont have offices that were then required to either move to an office or quit during the return to office.
    • jetcopter 3y ago
      Sounds like they are trying to make people quit to avoid layoffs/paying severance which is another dimension of this...
• tgma 3y ago
  Remote "work" is fine (with pros and cons). The problem is lots of people don't "work" remotely. Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.
  • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    It’s so rare to see anyone admit the truth on this topic. That’s how I know it’s BS on both sides. No one has ever admitted they exploit it - but we all know it happens.
    • cultureswitch 3y ago
      One could also argue that dedicating 100% of your scheduled work time to the service of an employer down to regulated pee breaks is exploitation and should not be how employment contracts are legally written or generally understood. Besides, it is absolutely not clear that home workers "waste" more time than office workers. The number one reason people who prefer the office cite as a reason for preferring the office is that it surrounds them with other people. That is, working in an office surrounds you with distractions and occasions to "waste" one's time.
      • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        Then take a job that you agree with. No one is forcing you into slavery.
  • fullshark 3y ago
    What's the problem if they get the tasks required of them done? A lot of employers don't want just that, they want a control of the employee's time. Remote means they might not respond to that urgent request immediately like they need to in a face to face conversation. I believe that is the main thing that is so disturbing to these employers that lament remote work, not that productivity is affected.
• bloopernova 3y ago
  WFH: No commute. Disabled people can work. Less micro plastics in the environment from car tires. Potentially lower greenhouse emissions. No office means no costs from rent, heating/cooling, cleaning, furniture, etc etc. Spending time around your family. (Although on that last one, I really dislike kids screaming in the background of conference calls) Edited to add: I wonder how to compare energy usage or emissions? You have less road and office use, but more home use. I'm puzzled by the people in this thread that seem to be saying "everyone must RTO because I want to". It's great that you personally want to work in an office and I wish you every success, but why drag people to the office if they want to work from home?
  • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Why didn’t you list the negatives? And in a John Stewart Mill way, list the negatives in their most sincere and effective forms by the people that truly believe them. Not just your take that you happen to easily to refute. Steelman RTO from the point of a company dealing with WFH abuse and I’ll think you are more serious.
    • nerevarthelame 3y ago
      I manage a team of 20 people who are fully remote. We conduct audits of their work to ensure it's up to par. It's the same thing I'd be doing if they were in the office. I don't have any notable issues with WFH abuse. My old boss ran a drop-shipping company with staff, multiple warehouses, and millions in revenue during the working hours of his primary job at the company we both worked for. What's your point? Can you explain some of the WFH abuse you think is rampant, and how those problems wouldn't also be relevant in an office environment?
    • bloopernova 3y ago
      Why are you so invested in saying people "abuse" WFH? You've made several comments in this thread stating as such. What is your definition of abusing WFH? How much time do you think a person should work each week?
• m3kw9 3y ago
  I think a company is entitled to choose how much they allow wfh and so is the person working to choose if they want to stay at the company, so strong arming goes both ways if the OP is complaining
• rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion but people under appreciate seeing the humanity of their coworkers especially in reducing conflict. It’s so easy especially for coders (and I imagine other knowledge workers) to get into flame wars debating things when you’re only typing things out. Video calls help a little but not everyone wants to turn on their cameras and it’s easy to eventually get used to seeing people as mere tiles in a screen. People tend to be more careful when there’s a real human in front of them.
  • makestuff 3y ago
    Yeah, everyone can act tough over email/slack, but when you see them in person it is alot easier to sympathize with people. I was all for WFH at the start of the pandemic, it was awesome. I have switched my feelings on it to realize that 3x per week is a good compromise. I get the commercial real estate conspiracy, which I am sure has some impact on it, but I also think a lot of people have a similar view that I do. I don't think my view is revolutionary that in office collaboration has tangible benefits.
  • The_Colonel 3y ago
    I keep being surprised how much this is true. Sometimes my conversations start in chat / PR, but once there's some disagreement, I tend to postpone them until I see the person face to face, because it's way easier to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution this way. I think it's possible to avoid unnecessary conflict even over text, but it takes special care, sometimes even extra (social) skill.
• siliconc0w 3y ago
  It's clear remote can work for at least some people and companies. So by going full RTO you're really leaving a lot of talent on the table. IMO an ability to hire is the hardest part about building an engineering org so you're really playing on hard mode. I generally think remote companies will out compete in-person ones given a competitive landscape (which unfortunately doesn't describe a lot of marketplaces).
• jdlyga 3y ago
  The RTO push for 3, 4, or 5 days a week for devs is simply unreasonable. The company I work for encourages (but doesn't mandate) 1 day per week, which works great for us. You can then spend more time helping junior coworkers, having in person discussions, and happy hours for that day. It's a good minimum to feel connected. Obviously, it all depends on what type of role you have.
• ulfw 3y ago
  Unless you work in a company that only has one office in one locale, it's frankly pointless. Going to an office to sit in a meeting room with two other people so you three can video call with 12 other people in other offices is ridiculous.
• hcks 3y ago
  > Every company that issued forced relocation ultimatums to their pre-pandemic remote workers will not only lose most (if not all) their top talent in the next year, but they will struggle to hire for at least the coming decade People have been saying that over here on HN too. It’s what they WANT to happen, but not at all what will happen. It’s a feel good narrative based on the fact that engineers want to believe they are “top talent”, that their skills alone will be enough for them to do well economically, that in the end the people that don’t respect the tech will suffer consequences. Sorry, “top talent” isn’t that scarce or NEEDED at all in software engineering. Even FAANG is more than happy to churn on 20 something college grads with no deep expertise. In fact, engineers with deep expertise who wants to work on challenging technical problems often have to take pay CUTS to be able to do so. With no unions and no solidarity between workers, the future is clear: come back to the office or take a pay cut.
  • throwaway5959 3y ago
    Totally agree. Why should someone in Orlando, Florida be paid the same as someone living in NYC or SF? The PPP pay would be way different.
  • The_Colonel 3y ago
    Agreed. Unfortunately it's very difficult to have an intellectually honest conversation about remote work. People have very strong feelings about remote (because it's very beneficial for their personal lives), but that creates a lot of wishful thinking / motivated reasoning. I'd love to be able to work remote as well, but I can still see some rational reasons why my employer wants us to stay in the office ...
• martindbp 3y ago
  There are things I love about remote, but there are also advantages of an office. Before we see the next Google or OpenAI being founded as fully remote we'll never know of it actually works. My instinct tells me it's hard to build new great company with the current remote tech we have even if it's possible to sustain mature companies that way for some time. With VR/AR that will change.
• yanderekko 3y ago
  I mean, yes it's bullshit to try to apply RTO policies on remote workers that were hired as remote workers. It's not even a "return" in that scenario, properly understood. And IANAL but I wonder if that could be considered a constructive dismissal that mandates severance rather than a "soft" one. That said, this article flirts with the often-made argument that RTO is some sort of way of boosting commercial property prices or tax incentives. I've never bought this and would be curious to see the argument steelmanned, since I don't think large corporations are going to easily fall into this sunk cost fallacy style thinking. If remote work boosts productivity and allows them to lower the costs of having offices, companies should embrace this even if they made prior investments in having offices.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    In general, max unemployment in many/most states is pretty trivial compared to engineer salaries in general so, while maybe getting $500/mo for a while isn't trivial, it isn't a world of difference for people making $150K+/year.
  • hemloc_io 3y ago
    I think a better argument could be made for tax incentives. Large employers, think Amazon in Seattle, often have special agreements with the city for taxes. Without the employees coming in and supporting local businesses there's a decline in tax revenue and local govt threaten to take them away. (As well as play less ball with the larger employer on other things like permitting etc.) For these large companies they want political power as well, and maybe want it more than a marginal boost in productivity from remote work.
    • yanderekko 3y ago
      I mean, if that were truly the case we'd see companies hovering around RTO numbers that just barely guaranteed these benefits - so far I haven't seen any stories to this effect, so it seems sorta hand-wavey to me?
• radium3d 3y ago
  Yeah, I have been developing websites for thousands of clients 100% remotely for the same company over the past 8 years, well before the pandemic. No need to drive to an office to code websites, or many other development positions. And no, Elon is 100% wrong on this one-- we work just as hard from home, if not harder than developers who work in an office environment, partially due to the fact that we can pick up and work at a moment's notice. I'm surprised he hasn't picked up on this aspect, it's similar to how he sleeps at the factory and can be ready at a moment's notice. I feel like it's causing Tesla to miss out on extremely talented developers who are not located near one of their office locations. They are blowing it big time.
• confidantlake 3y ago
  Management would gladly taker lower company productivity in exchange for more personal power.
• NoblePublius 3y ago
  wow long covid references and furry gifs. You must be fun at parties
• throwaway5959 3y ago
  Spare me. If someone is willing to pay someone $500k per year as I’m sure someone like the author is able to get, if the CEO wants them in the office three days a week, so be it. It’s stupid, everyone knows it’s stupid, I agree with the author on that, but tech workers sound _incredibly_ entitled when they write pieces like this. There are people making 1/5th what the author is making and somehow surviving in VHCOL areas.
  • sebstefan 3y ago
    Or they can find another CEO that'll pay them $500k per year and not ask them to be in the office three days a week
    • throwaway5959 3y ago
      And good luck to them in doing so. That’s not the other CEO’s problem.
    • alex_lav 3y ago
      If they can, they should! This is true for all things related to employment.
  • sg47 3y ago
    As someone getting paid twice that, I don't like being in the office 3 days a week especially because it's mandatory and there's also sorts of tracking going on.
  • otter-in-a-suit 3y ago
    I despise this "entitlement" argument. Just because other people have it worse doesn't mean criticism of people who have it better is invalid. Historically, violent conflicts notwithstanding, only people in already relatively comfortable positions are able to improve conditions for themselves and others, such as normalizing WFH, since the people stuck with 4hr commutes that can only pray that they can afford a full tank of gas that day won't have the time or energy to do so. The author explicitly says they're not going to uproot their life to move to some expensive city, which presumably is much more than a cost of living argument.
• aidenn0 3y ago
  I prefer in-person work; I have great respect for those who were able to maintain their productivity when suddenly forced to WFH. It makes a great deal of sense for managers to check in with each employee for which remote is now the new normal. Perhaps either formalize the remote work as part of the job description or come up with a plan to return on a case-by-case basis. It's absolutely bonkers to force people who were specifically hired as remote-workers prior to the pandemic to relocate.
  • ehsankia 3y ago
    I don't understand why both sides are getting screwed. Remote people are forced to come in, and on the other place, at many companies, people who do want to come to the office every single day are forced to hot swap desks. Just let people do what they find the most productive and let their productivity speak for itself. If you can't properly measure productivity, then that's the issue you should focus on.
    • aidenn0 3y ago
      Oh, I am very in favor of "everyone should have their own desk, preferably with walls and a door," and I wonder how many of the people who like WFH are because they didn't have that in the office. I really don't get the whole open office idea; I thought it was a cost-saving thing, but where I work they converted a large conference room into small offices and the per-office cost wasn't that bad. If you're really penny-pinching, I think if you asked programmers if they wanted to skip an upgrade cycle on their workstation in exchange for an office, you might get a few takers...
      • ehsankia 3y ago
        It depends. If someone is only coming in 1-2 days a week, then I'm fine with them not having a dedicated desk. It does feel wasteful to give every single person a whole desk or even office if they're gonna just use it one day a week. But if someone comes in 4-5 days, they definitely deserve their own dedicated desk. The issue is that they try to treat everyone exactly the same. I don't understand why it's so hard to have 2-3 different modalities, and let people pick whichever works best for them.
• gadders 3y ago
  The thing that amuses me is that I know of companies that are trying to a) commit to being a net zero company, reducing business travel etc and b) encouraging people to commute to the office more often.
• underlipton 3y ago
  I recommend everyone involved in this discussion pick up a book called "The Overworked American" by Juliet Schor. It was released almost 3 decades ago, yet remains an eye-opening account of the history and current reality of "middle class" work patterns. There's a part early on about piece-work (which was done in the home, before and at the advent of automation), and I think readers will find the attitudes of the companies that employed these workers to be familiar to anyone fight RTO. Over a century later, the issue remains the same: NOT productivity, but control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overworked_American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overworked_American
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  I don't see what the issue is, if you don't want to return to office you're welcome to work elsewhere that is fine with remote. The people who want to work in person can do so and be happy and you can work remote and be happy. It's weird to demand from your employer when you're in control of where you work.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  I work in-office as does 100% of the team. This works great for us. My friend runs a startup with a geographically distributed team. That works for them. There's enough employment available in both areas. You can select what you want.
• neilv 3y ago
  Two collegial conduct nits on this piece (one from company and/or team perspective, and one from fellow-human/colleague perspective): > It’s perfectly okay to pretend to comply to buy time while you line up a new gig somewhere else. The context of this was the writer receiving an ultimatum, and perhaps feeling that the employer was being abusive, so maybe it was OK then. But I'd hope people don't take that assertion of "it's perfectly okay to pretend to comply" as blanket advice. For example, imagine a team that, although some coked-up CEO did something obnoxious, the team believed the key teammate who said they were relocating. Then later the team learns the person was lying to them, which they relied upon, so they were left in a bad spot that could've been avoided. > Many of them admitted that they were actively looking for new roles; some of them for the first time in over a decade. Many of them already have new gigs lined up, and were preparing to resign too. Some of those already have. OPSEC. You can act in good faith with your employer and not loose-lips-sink-ships your colleagues on their own delicate situations. Maybe better trust among colleagues on delicate things like this would've helped avoid the other problem: there would be less motivation to "pretend", if the person could trust their colleagues not to rat them out when they don't say anything rather than lie, or when they even hint at their plans.
  • verall 3y ago
    Anybody can give their 2-weeks notice at any time, and a forcible relocation obviously increases the risk. A competent manager knows how to ask their employee what their plan is while giving them enough wiggle room to leave lines to be read between, and also would have been considering possible contingency plans even if the employee said "I 100% without a doubt would love to move to this new location and RTO". I think the chance they are sinking their buddies is unlikely. It sounds like this is already some time in the rearview and it's not like they exposed any direct info by saying "I've heard from other engineers"
• j-a-a-p 3y ago
  These kind of blogs do not help remote work argument, it is polarising the discussion. Especially when the advice is to sabotage the company while drawing your own plan. BTW, I completely understand remote workers and I have no issues with the remotes in my team. Take the argument of working in a cheaper state or country. These kind of perks that only IT people have, can easily turn into envy with the majority of the other workers who do not have this. They may need to commute hours every day and still need to pay grand villa rent for a basement room.
  • very_good_man 3y ago
    Let's bring the rest of workers up to earning like this rather than promulgating envy.
  • Kye 3y ago
    As someone not in a big money industry with lots of friends in tech (including the author of the post I submitted!), friends wanting to be treated right doesn't cause me any envy. I correctly recognize them as being in the same boat even if they get a slightly better view while the person who owns it shoots holes in the hull.
• rednerrus 3y ago
  Anybody have any real insight into why this has become a thing all of the sudden? My company is doing RTO after claiming WFH was the new normal. We haven't seen any decrease in productivity. Is it because WFH gives employees too many choices?
• idontknoworcare 3y ago
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• tiffanyh 3y ago
  Tax Abatement What doesn't get discussed enough is the huge financial incentives that cities give to corporations to attract big businesses. Those incentives (like no corporate taxes for 10-years) are based on companies literally having people physically in-office. Cities don't want corporations to move "on paper" their HQ. Cities want the economy benefits of more local jobs, which equals more income & home taxes that follow. So cities structure corp incentives to having people physically in-office that way it aligns their interests with the corp interest. As such, companies are forced to bring people back into the office as a result to maintain those tax incentives.
• Tainnor 3y ago
  I understand the sentiment (I also now enjoy doing WFH, even though it took me a while to get used to it), but this post comes off as whiny and entitled. A C-level executive making some sort of change without any good reason always sucks, but one should really know better than to call the CEO of one's previous company an asshole in public. It's unprofessional and will reflect badly on you. Plus, the advice about never taking an ultimatum is... weird. The author doesn't even seem to notice the apparent contradiction between stating this and them later commenting on immigrants not being able to be as picky.
  • kortex 3y ago
    Going from hybrid - pre-covid, and hiring as such - to 100% onsite is an asshole move and should be called out as such. > apparent contradiction I don't understand what you mean. Where's the contradiction? OP saying "never take an ultimatum" isn't absolute - there's an implied "in your best interest" there. If a cop tells you "freeze or I'll shoot!" do you ignore that ultimatum? Of course not, context matters. Obviously an H1B trying to support a family is going to most likely choose to comply with the ultimatum in the best interest of their quality of life. It's just unfortunate they have far less negotiation room.
    • Tainnor 3y ago
      No, changing a work policy isn't an "asshole move", no matter how much you like it or not. If you want to prevent that sort of thing, unionise. But usually, tech workers have an easy enough time finding a different job. There's enough other things that tech companies do that are morally wrong, such as exploiting all our data or manipulate us through dark patterns. This is not one of them.
• zoogeny 3y ago
  > Conversely, if you let these assholes exert their power over you, you dehumanize yourself in submission. I normally like strong opinions even when I disagree with them. It is usually refreshing to hear people share their true feelings in an unfiltered way. This, on the other hand, feels bitter. It seems to be coming from a place of hate. By all means, stand up for yourself and your ideals. Sometimes you have to make difficult choices to maintain your own integrity. But, conversely, deciding to make the choice to return to an office is not "dehumanize yourself in submission". Many people, perhaps most, will just go back to the office because they aren't convinced that they are locked in a life-long struggle to free themselves from some imaginary battle between the oppressors and the oppressed. They will realize that a job is an offering made to them, the conditions of which may change from time to time. Some will actually relish the idea of hanging around the office with likeminded coworkers. This is a cancer of our times: to see every single thing that happens as one side being an asshole exerting power and the other side being dehumanized into submission.
  • labria 3y ago
    I think you missed the point here. They were not talking about _making the choice_ to return to the office, but rather about _accepting the ultimatum_. There’s nothing wrong with deciding you want to work from the office, it’s the ultimatum part that’s important IMO.
    • zoogeny 3y ago
      What is the difference between "making a choice" and "accepting an ultimatum" in the case of an employee working at a company where an RTO policy is enacted? The only point of a invective like the original article is to try to make people who are perfectly fine commuting into an office feel like they are traitors to some fictitious worker solidarity organization. Like some red-eyed Sauron entity with no motivation other than pure evil in their soul is threatening to steal the food from their babies mouths unless they comply. The blackness and whiteness of this moral viewpoint is extremely toxic. If you have a strong preference to work from home and your employer springs an "ultimatum" on you then what you actually have is a choice. How you make that choice should be much more nuanced than "asshole exerting power" vs. "dehumanized submission". And if the balance of factors, whatever they may be, lead you to decide to go back to the office - don't let some ideological zealot turn that decision into some moral absolute.
• JofArnold 3y ago
  There's so much to unpack here. Firstly, I think it's ok that some companies are 100% remote, some are 100% office, some are mixed; potential employees choose based on their wants and needs. Personally I like mixed. I'd never do 100% remote or office again for sure. Second, I think this "choose the company who isn't giving you the ultimatum" makes sense only when there's a choice. For a long time developers have had a huge amount of leverage as the market was so they the ones making the ultimatums. I can see that not being the case in the near future.
• secondcoming 3y ago
  This is becoming less true. In my workplace people are increasingly requesting at least some face-to-face interaction, both for business and social reasons. I've even had interview candidates request a desire for some sort of direct social interaction.
• itsthecourier 3y ago
  If you are in a top tier team, super competitive, with superb colleagues, share office is a pleasure and you should be super well compensated for the intensity of it (e.g. Rentech) If your work is clerical, repetitive, stable, you may sacrifice some pay, work happily remotely and sacrifice serendipity and mentoring if you're starting your career It's a tradeoff.
• fgsfds028374 3y ago
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• hintymad 3y ago
  I personally enjoy RTO, but I don't buy the reason of RTO, as cited by many companies, being that employees would slack off when working from home. I mean, isn't the art of managing output is to set the right OKRs or KPIs or whatever measuring process? With the right measurement in place, simply punish the slacker and reward the effective people, and the company can focus on fostering a culture that supports WFH. If the management can't ensure productivity of remote workers, it says a lot about the incompetence of the management instead of the ineffectiveness of WFH.
• varelse 3y ago
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• mlhpdx 3y ago
  I’ll just repeat what I’ve said before: it’s not about people, it’s about real estate valuation and taxes. The folks making the RTO mandates (CEOs) are, as a whole, completely uninterested in employee preferences compared to the value of their homes and buildings. They are influenced by others in the same boat.
• momirlan 3y ago
  good for you if you can hold out. i am close to retirement, and don't care much for "office productivity", or "team spirit", or collectivist management bs. i can do all my work remote, and will not willingly return to a commuter life. in my youth i enjoyed the energy of a team, hanging out with colleagues, and generally never resented the office environment. physical collocation will still be valuable for many younger people. it really depends on one's working style, experience, life stage, etc
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  what irritates me is the label "Return to Office (RTO)" like we are all lost packages that need to be delivered to right address. It's not framed as a debate but an expectation, and an overdue one at that. zu must return to ze office and zu must sit in ze pod for 8 hours or zu vill be fired!
• major505 3y ago
  Wife used to work at google. you think that if a company had the structure to help people work remote, it was google with its colaboration suite. Turns out that google alread paid for the fancy offices, so it might as well make you use it... I dont work from office anymore. At most, in a hybrid way. But if I can avoid steping in a office, I will.
• tabtab 3y ago
  I don't understand why co's don't simply give "in office" bonuses and let employees decide their ratio? Why do so many co's make it all or nothing?
• jheriko 3y ago
  i cba to make an intelligent response to this drivel, so instead: what the fuck is this?
• JackFr 3y ago
  Please no more articles about RTO.
• morsecodist 3y ago
  I have been a remote worker since before the pandemic as well and I am lucky enough to have been able to remain in that position. I have worked at an in person company, a hybrid company, and a fully remote company. I think what we are witnessing here is more of a labor negotiation and businesses navigating new trade offs they have to make. It is difficult to measure employee productivity and in particular how productive employees will be after years of remote work. From my subjective experience, remote work is worse from a productivity standpoint and it is hard for me to imagine how it could not be. The communication bandwidth in person is just so much higher. Logistics around scheduling and communication are just way easier. I notice participation in and meaningful discussion in meetings is significantly higher in person. Psychologically, it is easier for me to be motivated and pay attention in person. I have heard others report this but it may just be a matter of personal preference. That said, I like living where I live, I have connections here, and being asked to move for a job and start over is a massive ask. The older I get the more massive it will become. I would quit my job before relocating if that meant a pay cut. So my employer and I have conflicting interests. They would get more productivity from me if I relocated, but I don't want to. I am not saying that I am valuable in particular, but there is a significant group of people like me that are part of a remote talent pool. This pool grew quite a bit during the pandemic giving us more leverage. By being willing to hire from this pool companies open themselves up to new talent, often at a better price than they could get in areas where talent is in higher demand. This is not just top talent but also affordable, solid talent. Some employees want to be able to work remotely and if you as a company are willing to deal with the challenges of remote work this can essentially be another form of compensation so you can hire talent you may not be able to otherwise afford. Right now people are still experimenting and feeling around this new landscape. Companies are testing the water to see what they can get away with. There will probably be some growing pains before we reach a new equilibrium.
• ahallock 3y ago
  I'm torn. While I think there are benefits to working from home -- no time wasted on a commute, more quiet, less stress -- it's a little bit unfair to those who must work on-site by necessity. There's also a social aspect of hanging out with co-workers that you'll never get over video chat.
• mongol 3y ago
  What I have noticed after a few years of hybrid work is that I have less strong bonds with my colleagues. I feel more lonely, more isolated. Every day I work from home is convenient and comfortable. I can sleep in, save time in commutes etc. But I miss the camaraderie I used to have. I am only an anecdote in my own life, but I miss some things with office work that is not about working in an office and more about working together.
  • pramsey 3y ago
    100% agree. I've been a remote since 2009 (!!) and although it is entirely my "normal" I do remember that it was nice to have co-workers and the rhythms of standard work day. I am a much lonelier person than I was before.
• JSavageOne 3y ago
  Companies seem to be under the delusion that return-to-office mandates will increase productivity, and I think this is absolute nonsense. Return-to-office mandates will demoralize your workers and make them seek greener pastures. Workers will become less happy and loyal, and top talent will leave for employers that provide greater flexibility. Executives that mandate return-to-office are crippling their workforces in the long-term. If a company wants to increase productivity, then they should provide greater ownership and autonomy to workers, as well as better incentives such as profit sharing. If an engineer knows that they'll get a cut of the cost savings or profits of some project idea they have, then you can bet that many employees will take advantage of that to get valuable work done. If I were running a company, I'd hire remotely from the global talent pool, and more importantly ensure that my employees are actually incentivized to get things done via ownership and profit sharing. It's a shame that executives at big tech companies are opting for the authoritarian approach, and I firmly believe that that will be their downfall. There certainly is value to in-person collaboration, but forcing it via threats is absolutely not the right approach. A better way to incentivize workers returning to office would be via positive incentives (eg. more money, subsidized housing, free transportation) as opposed to negative threats (eg. firing people for not obeying the lord's commands)
  • thibran 3y ago
    > If an engineer knows that they'll get a cut of the cost savings or profits of some project idea they have, then you can bet that many employees will take advantage of that to get valuable work done. I'm not so sure that this would work. The goal of your employer is to keep you working. If the workforce participates to much, you could run into the Tesla problem, a.k.a. your early employees become millionaires and stop working (in case of Tesla because of company stocks).
    • JSavageOne 3y ago
      Did Tesla employees quit because they became millionaires, or because there was no further direct upside to their additional labor? I explicitly mentioned profit sharing because that is different from simply owning stock in your company. Owning stock / options, although better than nothing, is not a meaningful incentive for most as the value of it is generally so far removed from your individual labor unless your company is just a handful of people (at which point your equity is useless unless there's a liquidation event in the future, which your employers can rob you of anytime by firing you before they vest or diluting it through further fundraising). By profit sharing, I mean literally giving workers a cut of their direct contributions. This is how sales people get paid, and most sales people won't quit after making a few million if they can continue to make more millions in the same fashion by being directly compensated for the money they bring in. This is not analogous to a Tesla engineer in a massive corporation with thousand of employees finally getting exit liquidity on their stock options. Of course it's harder to measure direct contribution of an engineer compared to a sales person, but I don't think that difficulty means that it's not worth trying. Of course for this to actually happen, employers would have to start trying this out and proving its success - which may be a tall order in a job market where employers already wield such enormous power.
• jksmith 3y ago
  Remote work is deprecating the Bill Lumbergs. RTO is driven by a mediocre middle management layer that most orgs can do without. If Musk tells me to come back to work, well ok. But I've done lots of work for F500s and my response to them is "do you deserve having me in the office for more than just paycheck leverage?" Maybe, but in my experience not really.
• ganner5 3y ago
  The fact that this person is so angry shows one thing: They do not understand that the employer/employee relationship is purely transactional. Employers can fire you at any time, and likewise you can quit at any time. Only when you accept this, will you understand that employers never owe you anything. Therefore they can’t disappoint you either.
• tganner5 3y ago
  The fact that this person is so angry shows one thing: They do not understand that the employer/employee relationship is purely transactional. Employers can fire you at any time, and likewise you can quit at any time. Only when you accept this, will you understand that employers never owe you anything. Therefore they can’t disappoint you either.
• Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  Unless the daily tasks rely on collaboration, cooperation, or diagnostics. In general 2 site meetings are needed to talk with business ops, and pair up on key challenges. Remote work becomes less productive with time. People re-discover the 7% rule in text communication (93% of meaning is nonverbal). Also, video chats are about as productive as conferences... fine for 1-to-n instruction... but terrible for n-to-n collaboration. Admittedly, I'd likely bail too... if forced to go to an office 2 hours away for something non-fun... lol =)
• Exoristos 3y ago
  Maybe what the WfH crowd should really be doing is organizing politically to gain cash benefits for Americans who don't choose to work at all.
• Aaronstotle 3y ago
  Nothing in this article besides the authors feelings are used for why its BS. Being in the office does have benefits (e.g. if you're a more junior employee or have trouble focusing at home) Of course it has cons as well,it's up to an individual person whether or not the pros outweigh the cons
• J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  Something I never see mentioned is that business leadership is rarely just in it for the money. For some people, power over others isn't a responsibility. For some people, the power they feel from managing people is THE goal of work. So yeah, of course corporate politicians want RTO. Exercising power in a WFH company, even when they still hold power over someones life, is an abstract, intellectual thing. But the people who need power, need it at an emotional, visceral level. They need those IRL interactions to satisfy their ID. It's gross, but it needs to be said because some people are sweet and naive to the nature of those who pursue power. And even grosser, men specifically often pursue careers of power with an additional motivation: They get something out of their professional relationships with women that they can't get from their non-professional relationships with women. They can get this without breaking the law, upsetting HR, or even do something worthy of being canceled. I'm glad we live in an era where most of these sharks are afraid to prey, but throwing young people in a shark infested waters is still... well, quite a bit more than just bullshit. IMO, pandering to these mediocre monsters is morally indefensible. Especially accounting for the environmental impacts (doubling of personal co2 emissions.)
  • myroon5 3y ago
    Honestly surprised I haven't heard that reasoning before now that you mention it: Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer all married subordinates, and Elon Musk had children with an employee
    • unnouinceput 3y ago
      Erm, which subordinate was the one Bezos married?
      • myroon5 3y ago
        Mackenzie worked for Jeff at D.E. Shaw
        • unnouinceput 3y ago
• DrScientist 3y ago
  There is one element ( elephant ) of remote working that I don't see being much discussed. If the job can be done remotely and async - it potentially can be done from anywhere. Potentially this means you are competing globally for that job. And I suspect for most of the people on these boards there are lots of places which have both the talent and much lower costs. So in a completely free market you might find that choosing where you live is no longer an advantage of remote working - to compete you'll need to move to a country that has lower costs.... So there is an element of being careful what you wish for.
  • dalyons 3y ago
    its discussed literally every time a remote work/rto post comes up on this site. And then the usual responses about how international offshoring has been tried before various times and it mostly doesnt work for XYZ reasons etc etc
    • DrScientist 3y ago
      So the interesting question is - are those reasons XYZ - also reasons against remote working per se?
      • dalyons 3y ago
        Sort of - the outsourcing problems are usually described as in descending order: cultural differences, timezone differences, language challenges, general communication overhead and talent availability. All those could be true with remote, but that’s probably why most companies limit remote to same culture (eg nth am) , close timezone, same language. You’re left with “just” general communication overhead in that case.
        • DrScientist 3y ago
          You could collapse all those to communication - apart from talent availability. So remote working increases talent availability and increases communication overhead ( through one mechanism or another - language, timezone, shared culture ). So the right balance then depends on how important communication is for the particular role versus talent, factored by how good the talent is at communicating. One of the things I've heard about remote working is it helps people stay focused on task and hence be productive. These people like the reduction in communication ( noise ). The other side I've heard is that it atomises the organisation to those headline tasks, but loses the element of the sum being greater than the whole - the stuff that happens off task. If you truly believe in remote working, then you could argue that companies shouldn't exist in terms of perm employees - you contract everything out on a per task basis. The idea of minimising communication overhead being central to the existence of companies comes from the work of Ronald Coase. eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Social_Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Social_Cost
• rdtsc 3y ago
  It seems as if all these tech companies's CEOs colluded and decided to do this at about the same time. I guess we can't call it conspiracy, if they haven't all flown to some remote island to play golf, and came back with this idea. But they can plausibly just watch and copy without others' behavior without actually coordinating with each other. Real estate investment and the idea that large corporate share owners also invest in office real estate has been mentioned as the reason. But to me it mostly feels like a “soft layoff” tactic. There were waves of layoffs already, but it wasn't enough, so they all noticed that RTC can be another kind of a layoff, and they don't have to worry about severance or inventing performance improvement plans and so on. It's fascinating that they do it and have to lie why they are doing it. Nobody can say it out-loud. Not a single line in the internal chat or emails, especially no comment publicly. But everyone can read very well between the lines.
• DustinBrett 3y ago
  The idea of being as productive at home is also bullshit. It's too bad that to keep WFH we have to fight for it like it's the best option. A balance is needed but as a society we can't have nice things.
  • great_psy 3y ago
    Honestly I don’t think we are less productive at home, but being away from the distractions of the office shows you how unproductive you were to start with. At home I know if I actually focus, I can finish my tasks in less time, and I can enjoy the rest of the day/week. I’m the office, I am incentivized to drag out work to fill the 8 hours because I need to be in the office that much anyway.
• charles_f 3y ago
  > I woke up every day excited and motivated What would I give to get that feeling... > Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum. This is very good advice. Related, never trust a retention offer. The leverage you have to influence the change that it represents vanishes the moment you accept it > don’t accept any relocation assistance The number of people I've seen getting in trouble because they burnt a signing bonus before the minimum retention period, or forgot about the lawyer fees for their immigration paperwork and switched jobs too early. It's fine taking any of these as long as you accept that you're selling out for a couple of years... But read your contracts > This outflow of money does hurt the local economies of said cities, including the ones that big tech companies are headquartered in. In some cases, this pain has jeopardized a lot of the tax incentives that said companies enjoy. This is an explanation, others also related to financial incentives, some related to trust (a lot of managers don't trust that people are working when they can't directly see their screens). I think there is also an argument to be made that wfh is not for everyone and everything, and that collaboration can work better in person. It's harder to build a team when most of your relationships are built in meetings. Seeing people once in a while is good to build trust, and I can get why some companies can take the position that this is a must have in their employment conditions. Not that I would be interested to work for such a company though.
• macrael 3y ago
  I've been fully remote for 6 years. I know people who's primary criteria for their next job is that it be in person. I think remote work is here to stay and there are so many people who are discovering that remote work is their preference thanks to the pandemic, but I don't think in person work is going to die, there are also lots of people that prefer that. I know that I made a lot of my first friends in SF at work and that would have been impossible if I had worked remote then. How that plays out at companies remains to be seen. I can imagine big companies divvying up workers by team. Some remote teams some in person teams. Smaller companies will likely need to make a more total choice. Acting like there are no benefits to in person work is silly. One of the first things we did as a company going remote was to say that if anyone is on zoom in a meeting then everyone in the meeting needs to be on zoom even if many were physically in the same place. I don't think anyone would ever choose to sit in a conference room with 5 other people all on zoom together. Everything is tradeoffs. Remote work just got a huge profile boost which is going to give a lot of people the opportunity to live life differently from how they did before. Now the pendulum is swinging back but it'll never get as far as it did before.
• softwaredoug 3y ago
  This IMO is about companies finding it easier to manage to mediocrity rather than managing towards excellence They don't need innovation anymore. They need general competence to maintain a business model. At the large scale company, a cryptography dept can live without an amazing expert. They'll hire some middling crypto people, and they'll generally be fine. These companies have some massive moat, and dethroning them from that moat would be a multi-generational effort. So when he says "My Prediction" > Every company that issued forced relocation ultimatums to their pre-pandemic remote workers will not only lose most (if not all) their top talent in the next year, but they will struggle to hire for at least the coming decade. Their brands as big, stable companies will let them continue to hire boring, mediocre, but good-enough employees willing to relocate. That's my prediction.. Nothing big will really change. Optimistically though the companies that need excellence over mediocrity are startups, and I'm hopeful it'll drive talent into that space to truly innovate beyond Amazon or whomever's latest TPS report
• deleted 3y ago
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• standardUser 3y ago
  This is not about remote versus non-remote. It's about worker power versus owner power. A unique set of circumstance temporarily shifted power in favor of workers and we should not willingly cede what little ground we have taken. Of course our employers love unpaid commutes - commutes that we actually pay for ourselves! What a racket.
• 123sereusername 3y ago
  I hope you are right. I think you probably are.
• TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback. Dutch proverb Being Dutch: I don't think it is? I've never heard anything that might remotely translate to this.
  • some_furry 3y ago
    I dunno, that's what Google told me it was from
    • TheRealPomax 3y ago
      Turns out it's a quote. Admittedly, a good quote, used by the most important politicians in modern Dutch history (Johan Thorbecke, who basically wrote our constitution), but it's just a "quote by a famous person", it's very much not a Dutch proverb or saying ;)
• sneak 3y ago
  > That’s what I did. Just don’t start selling your family home or looking at real estate listings, and definitely don’t accept any relocation assistance (since you’ll have to return it when you split). If it's less than what it costs to sue you, you won't even have to do that.
• bjourne 3y ago
  > By early 2021, I was considered to not only be a top performer, but also a critical expert for the cryptography organization. My time ended up split across three different teams, and I was still knocking my projects out of the park. But more importantly, junior employees felt comfortable approaching me with questions and our most distinguished engineers sought my insight on security and cryptography topics. Beside this humble brag is the realization that the author is atypical. That is, their experience with remote work and return-to-office experiences may be very different from that of the typical American tech worker. If everyone knows that return-to-office is bullshit why is there no data? If remote work is a great idea then why did so few companies adopt it after being forced to implement it during the pandemic? Virtually every company with offices in one form or another required their employees to show up at the office regularly (including my place of work). I don't have any data, but I'm assuming that most of these companies must have seen some productivity decrease or something or else they would have closed their expensive offices for good and let everyone work from home. At the very least the pandemic was not enough to demonstrate the "obvious" benefits of work from home over work from office.
  • nerevarthelame 3y ago
    > If everyone knows that return-to-office is bullshit why is there no data? If remote work is a great idea then why did so few companies adopt it after being forced to implement it during the pandemic? Virtually every company with offices in one form or another required their employees to show up at the office regularly (including my place of work). I don't have any data, but I'm assuming that most of these companies must have seen some productivity decrease or something or else they would have closed their expensive offices for good and let everyone work from home. You're right, no one is sharing that data. But I think it's a pretty significant assumption that the decision to return to the office must therefore be being made based on some secret data and informed analysis that supports it. There's a tremendous amount of momentum to maintain the pre-2020 in-office status quo. That's the world that the people making these decisions know. Every member of the C-suite at my typical Fortune 500 company instead cites vague concerns over spontaneous connections and corporate culture. It certainly doesn't seem like it's based on data, but rather their desire to keep thousands of people working in the environment they happened to have thrived in.
• hnburnsy 3y ago
  Are new companies and new start ups eschewing office space? I would imagine so and that over time fully remote will be the way.
• thegrim33 3y ago
  Isn't it interesting that the millions and millions of people with the opposite opinion never get their thoughts shared via articles like this? If there was legitimate, rational, discussion on the topic, wouldn't you expect to see people with differing opinions on the topic get their thoughts promoted in a similar way?
  • mullingitover 3y ago
    Perhaps there actually aren't millions and millions of members of the commuting enthusiasts community?
  • Kye 3y ago
    There is absolutely nothing stopping them. In fact, the dominant view of the people most willing to exercise their power (employers) is in their favor. All incentives align toward sharing! If they exist in such numbers, they should be all over the business press. And yet...
• threesevenths 3y ago
  We must all remain forever vigilant and be prepared to stand our ground against tyrrany, irrespective of the cost we will have to pay. I wish a social assistance service existed for tech workers where we pay a small monthly amount in and receive support for bills if we are fired for refusing RTO and being laid off. Such a group service would seriously blunt the sharpness of the sword at our throats by these bosses who think they have all the power.
  • BigRedDog1669 3y ago
    That service is called unemployment, but unfortunately the state unemployment agency defers to the company for the reason of termination rather than what you say. So if they say you quit voluntarily rather than because they violated their promises or OSHA rules, you don't get anything.
• ursuscamp 3y ago
  The author hand-waved away the whole "exception" thing with "good luck getting C-level approval in time!" But if he was really as valuable as he claimed, all he had to do was just say "No" and he would have gotten C-level approval.
• ricardobayes 3y ago
  The most interesting thing to me is a new kind of jealousy towards fully remote workers. I feel quite a good number of people turned a bit sour after tasting WFH then needing to go into the office.
• pjdesno 3y ago
  1) Ironically, just before COVID a decent number of companies decided to transition to "hot-desking" policies where employees aren't in the office 5 days a week, and rather than having an office or cube, you have to sign up for a random desk each day you come in. The cognitive dissonance when these companies impose "return-to-office" policies is huge. They already made a decision that it's not worth renting enough real estate to have employees in the office 5 days a week, so most of their arguments for the value of in-person work are transparently hypocritical. 2) in some cities (I live in Boston) the commute has gotten much worse than pre-COVID, at least on Tuesday through Thursday. Return-to-office policies aren't asking employees to return to their prior mode of working - they're asking them to spend an additional hour or more commuting than what they originally signed up for.
• kitanata 3y ago
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• jimt1234 3y ago
  I was on a Zoom call (~300 employees of a F500 company) a while back, when the "return to office" push began. An executive asked everyone how "return to office" was going. A few brown-nosers commented about how happy they were to return to the office, followed by uncomfortable silence. Then, an employee spoke up, saying that she returned to the office recently, but still doesn't understand the point - "I had to sit in traffic for almost an hour to come to the office and do the exact same thing I've been doing from my house for 2 years." A week-or-so after that meeting I heard that she no longer worked for the company. She'd been an employee for over 10 years.
• joaodlf 3y ago
  Maybe this is just a symptom of working in a field with plenty of work opportunities, or the fact that I am not American, but the idea of a company demanding that I relocate in order to be closer to an office is comical at best. I can't imagine a quicker "kthxbye".
• jrsj 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • yawgmoth 3y ago
    The author is a furry. Being a furry is pretty common and I bet even more people would be willing to engage with it if it weren't for comments like this.
    • jrsj 3y ago
      ehhh...I think it only seems common because it's amplified by the internet. Still, it's weird, many are perverts, and I don't really think most people want business advice from someone who's basically announcing to the world that they jerk off to cartoon animals
      • yawgmoth 3y ago
        You are misinformed. There's a lot more to furries than that. If you want to learn more, Mastodon has some good SFW instances that are very tech focused.
  • Kye 3y ago
    >> "it's going to be really difficult for a lot of people to take it seriously with all this." Putting off people with an aversion to furry art is a great way to filter out the most tedious sort of people. Try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one.
    • jrsj 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • dang 3y ago
    "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• Banditoz 3y ago
  I'm curious how HN ranking works. This has 674 votes over 2 hours but is #45 at page 2.
  • cycrutchfield 3y ago
    Admins here have a lot of editorial control over what appears on the front page, when it serves their interests.
  • some_furry 3y ago
    A lot of people flag the things I write out of a reflexive dislike of anything furry. That is certainly a factor too. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741797
• pcl 3y ago
  > Unfortunately, there is a class of people that work in tech that will bear the brunt of the ensuing corporate abuse: H-1B visa employees, whose immigration status is predicated on their ongoing employment. Their ability to hop from abusive companies onto lifeboats is, on the best of days, limited. This comes up a lot around here in discussions about uncomfortable employer decisions. The H-1B visa is certainly restrictive, but it is by no means the indentured-servitude visa that people make it out to be. I’ve hired a fantastic employee who was at the time in the US on an H-1B visa. The process was straightforward. I was at a small startup at the time, so we didn’t have a big hiring team to lean on or anything. There was some friction — we needed to do more paperwork, and that pushed things out by maybe a week or two. And we had to pay lawyers and some filing fees — perhaps $10-15k. Which isn’t nothing, but also is fine if you get a great employee out of the deal. My understanding of the H-1B visa is that it requires that the visa holder maintains a job matching there description that the visa was issued for, and in the case of a job loss, the visa holder has a (painfully short) 6 weeks to find new employment. So, stressful for sure, but workable, especially with a little planning, as this article suggested in any case. The L-1, in contrast is (mostly) non-transferable, and the limited transfer options require the original employer to initiate. I bring this up not to dismiss the stress imposed by the 6-week H-1B unemployment scramble, but rather to remind everyone here (employers and employees alike) that H-1B status doesn’t impose all that much of a hurdle. If you are in the US on one, don’t hold back from applying for new jobs! If you’re hiring, don’t be afraid if you see that a candidate is in the US on a H-1B!
• adamsb6 3y ago
  > and continue pocketing record profits–which drive inflation–while their workers’ wages stagnate Inflation does not work that way!
• dreamcompiler 3y ago
  I think the covert strategy here on the part of companies is to reduce staffing cost. The author alludes to the fact that H-1B visa employees will bear the brunt of these policies; the top performers (i.e. the expensive ones) will quit because they have other opportunities. And I suspect this is exactly what the managers want: Decrease headcount and decrease average salaries to make the company look good next quarter. That's what they get rewarded for. They don't get penalized for decreasing the collective talent or productivity of the company in the long term; they get rewarded for decreasing costs in the short term. So that's what they're going to do in the guise of an RTO policy.
• lsedgwick 3y ago
  Not to say companies should or shouldn't RTO etc, but the shocking freedom and flexibility of remote work in tech is such a gigantic class marker and insane lifestyle luxury that I'm surprised it's not more often identified a such. How few people in history have been able to travel to exotic places or visit far-off friends and family, while still making decent money, and do this almost as much as they want (supposing lifestyle and relationships that allow this, which is true for many people). I mean, people in tech who vacation in tropical climes then spend cherished time with parents and siblings and friends living thousands of miles away, and don't worry about running out their vacation time: dozens of weeks of cherished traveling, if that's what you want! Along the way developing fundamentally different types of family relationships or accruing worldly sophistication. Forget about little medical or technological things that mark a break from the past: lots of people can afford tylenol and iPhones and Spotify. This is a class marker of epic proportion. This is a way of life that Tolstoy ascribed to the very wealthiest of Moscow's aristocratic families and bachelors (most certainly not even all of the aristocratic class).
  • 121789 3y ago
    in reality I think this flexibility is overrated. traveling for long periods of time sounds exciting but will eventually for most people be isolating (you won't materially be a part of the local community, and other travelers will leave) and logistically annoying (e.g. dealing with wifi at your 3rd airbnb). most companies have restrictions on this, and there are generally only limited places you can work from. visiting family without concern about impact to work is nice, but eventually you just really want a consistent place where you can be productive
• bee_rider 3y ago
  I really think some people are actually more productive in the office (myself included) (others are more productive at home, or lose enough productivity at home to make it a worthwhile trade off). By now, though, a company has no excuse for not having sorted out who needs to be in the office in order to remain employed. It isn’t everyone, it needs to be handled on a case by case basis, and if a manager can’t figure out if their employees are producing anything after 3 years, what are they managing?
• jlev 3y ago
  You can tell that this author knows their shit because the blog post is entirely illustrated with furry memes.
• datacruncher01 3y ago
  I think the cat is out of the bag, didn't suffer in productivity from WFH and in fact many companies posted some of their best quarters. They got giddy on the returns and overhired and overspent, now credit is expensive and they are tightening back. Enforcing RTO is an easy way for most companies to cut 10% or more of the workforce. Realistically these companies are going to lose out to companies that have embraced remote work. The benefits of not having that expensive downtown real estate and being able to hire talent from anywhere are too good.
• Pr0ject217 3y ago
  I will likely never go back to an office - it would have to be so ridiculously lucrative for me to consider it that it's basically never going to happen.
• Fredmacco 3y ago
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• fennecfoxy 3y ago
  I have a "who's flying this thing?!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3oYnlPfBvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3oYnlPfBvI) theory. That a large number of CEOs/Executives/management etc are actually useless and achieve nothing; the impact that they have on the business is incredibly minimal and sometimes they are even a detriment to overall function. Look at your typical CEO of a large-ish company: what do they actually do? The business has presumably hired many clever employees with various skills and they already know how to do their jobs well. The CEO is only there to solve fabricated problems, such as one business only doing deals with another if the two CEOs went to a private boarding school together so they can shake hands after a three martini lunch. Of course because people are people I have to include "of course this doesn't mean _all_ CEOs & management" (duh), but certainly a very large number of them. Eyyyy, article author is a furry, too! :3
  • Kye 3y ago
    >> "Eyyyy, article author is a furry, too! :3 " He's not a fennec fox, unfortunately. Can't all be perfect.
    • some_furry 3y ago
      No but I have fennec friends ^w^
      • fennecfoxy 3y ago
        + you gain a portable friend - you will get tinnitus
    • fennecfoxy 3y ago
      https://media.tenor.com/zzxhtiVQDYAAAAAC/fennec-fox-why.gif https://media.tenor.com/zzxhtiVQDYAAAAAC/fennec-fox-why.gif
• Randomizer42 3y ago
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• aizyuval 3y ago
  Kudos for grabbing the balls! I like your attitude towards life.