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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 empl

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
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- 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.
  - lwkl 3y ago
    The person that wrote the blogpost was hired as remote worker and was required to move to an office after the pandemic.
    - cdchn 3y ago
      And they don't say who it is, so this falls short of the "precisely" qualifier.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Amazon[0], for one. But they're not the only ones -- it does happen occasionally, mostly when a company makes a blanket policy "no more remote work, everyone back to the office!" (which makes less sense for those employees who were never at any point in an office to begin with). The author of the linked article for this HN post wrote: > I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida. Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim). In the Re: Amazon article linked at the bottom of my post, the employee says: > Now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. I moved to this area 13 years ago. I own a house here. My partner has a career here. I've built a home here. 0: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over-return-to-office-mandate-2023-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over...
    - cdchn 3y ago
      So if we want to presume that the original linked article's author works for Amazon, we got 1: Amazon. Who else?
      - seattle_spring 3y ago
        Google, Lyft, Facebook
        3y ago
- lazide 3y ago
  This was always a risk at every company due to re-orgs, buyouts, or the whim of executives. Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah. Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare. It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Give it time. The (RTO) companies are on the wrong side of history. Ideally these mandates are something the (employment) market will never forget. It will be interesting to see in the near future how many of the RTO execs at these companies will be whining about their struggles finding talent and/or having to pay a premium to attain and return the level of talent they need. Of course few, if any of these execs will admit they got it wrong. That the root of the problem was their heavy-handed mandates and how they compromised the brand in the (employment) market.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Eh, people forget. Heard about Blackwater lately? Or was it Xe? Or Academi? And they always complain about stuff like that, even when they aren’t playing games!
      - chiefalchemist 3y ago
        Yes and no. What needs to be factored in is, does the best / top talent forget? Or are they ones with more focus and memory? Does their marketability allow them to be more selective? I think you see where this is going :)
        lazide 3y ago
        Oh I'm well aware. How many downturns have you lived through? It's rarely so easy when times get lean, but everyone has a different experience for sure!
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  > 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. No one is forcing you to sell your home. You could rent your home and move temporarily until you find a suitable remote replacement. Or, you could just quit outright.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  > 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. The standard advice is stay in the house at least five years. These people accepted permanent remote roles at companies that have been remote-friendly for only two years. The track record's not there; you can't reasonably assume that policy would continue indefinitely. It might, but it's clearly a risk.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Why would anyone find it acceptable for a company to hire a remote employee but later change the contract? That's a massive pay cut. It's weird how companies expect loyalty but cannot even keep their word from what they claimed during hiring.
cogman10 3y ago
> 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. Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?" I resent being lied to. Had they been more careful and put this out more as a "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed. That's not how they rolled and they didn't even have the guts to simply admit "Hey, we just made a mistake here, remote work isn't working for us"
- macksd 3y ago
  That's because they are actually struggling to admit deeper problems with the company culture and processes that they don't know how to solve, and so they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things.
  - garciasn 3y ago
    You give them entirely too much credit. They were told by others (primarily Wall Street) that they are to do this. It provides them with three things: 1. Real estate holding investment increases. 2. Control. 3. Silent layoffs. There's no reason for RTO. None. They're doing it to save money and regain control of their workforce.
    - VBprogrammer 3y ago
      I think one thing which wasn't obvious to me early on is that halving the number of office days doesn't half the requirements for desk space. In my experience people have a strong preference for going in on similar days, particularly Tuesday and Thursday. So if you ask all of your employees to come in 2 days a week you end up needing desks for almost every employee. The result in my experience is you have either fullish remote or you need just as many desks so very little saving from a company point of view.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
> and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore. Unless laws change to require them to [1], workers organize to require it be provided [2], or you've had the working arrangement codified in your offer letter or other contractual documentation so that requiring you to come into an office is constructive dismissal [3]. This whole "employers can do whatever they want" era can't come to an end quick enough. [1] https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislation-around-the-world/ https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislatio... [2] https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotely-you-and-your-coworkers-can-still-unionize/ https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotel... [3] https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urged-ignore-bosss-dealbreaker-1752554 https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urg...
RussianCow 3y ago
Many companies did a bait and switch, though. They made grand promises of remote and/or hybrid work being a first class citizen moving forward, then did a hard 180 and asked everyone to start coming into the office every day. Understandably, some people are upset about this, especially those hired remotely.
RC_ITR 3y ago
These kind of arguments have sort of eaten their tail in recent years as work culture has shifted. We (as has happened with a lot of things) basically have two camps of people and a culture that makes us believe we are only allowed to make "one-or-the-other" choices (I blame the rise of consulting, KPIs, and 'benchmarks'.) So two camps are arguing about their preferences but with the stakes that "my preference has to be the moral and logical choice," which will always just lead to nowhere.
obmelvin 3y ago
I don't think it's realistic to say things should just return to the status quo. The world was changed by the pandemic and even if that didn't happen, time continues to advance which always brings change as well. Yes, some companies will go back to hybrid or complete in person, but it is also clear that remote work can be done in a much wider context than it was before the pandemic.
hypeit 3y ago
> It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others. The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. Not everyone, but a huge number that had never been exposed to it before. Now if a business wants to stay competitive they need to tap into that labor market. The vocal resistance to RTO is expected, we'll never go back to having such a large percentage of the work force working in an office. It's just that a lot of managers haven't figured that out yet and/or are personally incentivized to keep up the charade.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. It's not even necessarily falling in love with working at home but just working not in shitty office environments. For most people "the office" is some miserable building in an office park in the middle of a food/service desert. Employees that need to commute to that office don't get paid for the hours of their life wasted in traffic or any financial expenses related to their commute. People with kids have to pay even more money for some child care if they can't be home when their kids get off from school. Working from home/wherever allows someone to save on those money and time costs. They can be home when their kids get off school. They can make a sandwich at 11:23AM because they're hungry. They can stop pouring dollars into a daily commute. Hell they can even live where they want instead of somewhere in commuting distance of a shitty office park. Many of the WFH challenges are the same as working in an office, like inconsiderate entities disturbing you or placating middle managers by attending meetings. At least you can bear those challenges in comfortable clothes in a comfortable seat. You can then take a break and shit in a bathroom you don't share with dozens of other inconsiderate coworkers. WFH isn't perfect and people don't need to love it to at least prefer it over the dystopian hell of offices.
jedberg 3y ago
Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't because remote jobs were few and far between. COVID finally gave them what they always wanted, but now it's being taken away, and remote jobs are getting harder to find again. That's why there is resentment. There was resentment before too, but it was more below the radar because it was always shot down with "we work better in person" and there really wasn't much an argument to be had. But now those people have hard data that they clearly work just as well at home or even better. So now they have data to back up their desires.
- sverhagen 3y ago
  >Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't And then there's all the people that didn't know they wanted to work remotely, until they were forced to experience it.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  It goes much deeper than that though. It isn't just "they wanted it and couldn't have it, then they got it and now they want to keep it:" A lot of people, myself included, did not understand even if we wanted work from home, how life changing it would be. How it's better for us as people, better for us as workers, better for our pocketbooks, better for our planet, better for our lives, just... better. It's ALL better. Literally the only people losing in this arrangement are the same parasites who win at literally every other juncture in our society and just, I'm sick to DEATH of it. I will DIE on this hill. I hope the commercial real estate market fucking craters. I hope every company doing this RTO shit dies on the vine. I hope it sucks for every single person in the parasite class who loses more than 2 dollars on everything. I hope it crashes the price of real estate in big cities and makes them affordable again. I hope it makes my home worth less because homes shouldn't be a fucking investment vehicle in the first place. To borrow the bugs bunny meme, I wish every landlord a very happy get a real job.
  - ck425 3y ago
    There are a lot of us normal workers who dislike WFH and we're not parasites. It's perfectly valid to prefer WFH but it's also valid to prefer the office.
aidenn0 3y ago
If I was hired as a programmer and my employer decides they would rather I pickup dog shit all day, I'm damn-well going to complain about it. Both TFA (and the comment you are replying to) are about people specifically hired for remote work prior to the pandemic; the status quo before COVID was those people working remotely.
KoolKat23 3y ago
Times change and so should companies. It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction. Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works, but are unjustifiably being told otherwise by people that don't actually know what works. When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes? An example of pride in their work: Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.
- daveevad 3y ago
  > Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it. The compensation is correlated with confusion.
- hattmall 3y ago
  >They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office. There is a difference between making it through an event like COVID vs making forward business progress. Certainly there's a place for remote work but the higher you go in management the more you see the holes remote work creates. Realistically, employees should push hard for return to office and then no work out of the office. The reality is that as the job market tightens the expectation is going to be in office AND work from home. Vacation days will morph into work from home days. An expectation to answer emails after hours is already turning into an expectation to be online and available for zoom calls much later than normal working hours.
  - KoolKat23 3y ago
    As part of the social contract, reasonable employees would agree with it if there were a solid case for it but this doesn't seem to be so. They're being offered ambiguous one liners such as the "making forward business progress" devoid of substance and which contrasts to actual measurable such as turnover, profits and other tangible measures that indicate otherwise (showing that remote work works). I truly hope the line between leave and work doesn't blur.
cmeacham98 3y ago
Firstly, you make switching employers sound like as easy as changing your outfit. Not every job has thousands of companies hiring remotely ready to go. Secondly, companies that pulled this bait and switch deserve to be called out and loose reputation among workers for it. My current employer had recruiters and even the CEO bragging about our remote work policy, just to pull it out from under everyone.
Arainach 3y ago
>We should just return to the status quo before COVID The status quo was horribly broken, and it took a worldwide pandemic for many people to realize that things could be different and didn't have to be so awful.
- jfghi 3y ago
  Pre-Covid COL would be great too.
goodpoint 3y ago
No, management has been lying to employees with the "working in an office is more effective" for decades. Now the king is naked and yet companies are trying to manipulate people to return to offices.
DSMan195276 3y ago
> there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. You don't understand why people don't want to have to go job hunting to keep a WFH position? It's one thing to say "this is fine, get over it", it's another to say "I don't understand why people are resentful", I think that second part is pretty obvious.
codingdave 3y ago
I think the resentment comes from the assumption of: "We should just return to the status quo before..." If you look back at the history of work experiences, there were several old "status quos" that we no longer accept. We don't accept, manual labor for 60 or 80 hours a week. We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension. But society evolves. Assuming that something as disruptive as COVID should just be put aside without evolving how we operate in our world is exactly where the resentment comes from.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  >We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension I think that if private companies offered pension plans, reasonable raises and promotion paths, many people would accept it. I think the company hopping stuff is largely a response to the death of annual raises and internal promotions.
addicted 3y ago
> 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. I mean, this is a ridiculous argument supporting remote work because it works so much stronger the other way. You literally had companies change centuries worth of corporate work for overnight to switch everyone to remote work. If anything the people who want full time return to office have a much stronger argument that companies have suddenly changed everything on them, as opposed to the people who are complaining that now that things are normal companies are reverting the changes they made for a once in a lifetime pandemic.
- cableshaft 3y ago
  “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Vladimir Lenin Sometimes it takes a black swan event to reveal how broken something is and how things could be better another way. It used to be the norm in the US for children to be allowed to work in coal mines and factories too (apparently in 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were children under the age of 16[1]), but after some photos were taken of them exposing just how bad the situation had gotten, it helped shift public support to pass legislation barring child labor. Nowadays I doubt hardly anyone would be in support of that now.[2] [1]: https://www.history.com/news/child-labor-lewis-hine-photos https://www.history.com/news/child-labor-lewis-hine-photos [2]: https://energyhistory.yale.edu/child-labor-pennsylvania-coal-mines-gallery/ https://energyhistory.yale.edu/child-labor-pennsylvania-coal...
lokar 3y ago
A lot of big companies had full remote by exception. They built up a modest amount of these (generally senior, often specialist) over the years. Forcing these people to an office is not return to pre-Covid.
codelikeawolf 3y ago
As a remote worker before the pandemic, I think the worst thing we could do is return to the status quo. I remember trying to find a new remote job before I moved across the country to Portland (pre-pandemic). I interviewed for a job in downtown Chicago, which would have required a 35-minute train ride to and from the city each day. I wasn't moving for a few months and I offered to work in the office before switching to remote. I even said "if you don't think I'm contributing enough value by the time I leave, and you aren't comfortable with me working remotely, let me know and I can stay with the company long enough to help you find my replacement". They still turned me down. The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. I remember going to the dentist and telling the dental assistant that I work from home, and her response was "don't people think you're slacking off?" and my response was "no, because I'm an adult". There was an almost insurmountable stigma around remote work. As terrible as the pandemic was, it exposed an irrefutable truth about remote work: people can still do their jobs perfectly fine at home. I spent most of my career working in offices, until I went fully remote about 2 years before the pandemic. There are aspects of the office that I miss. I'm not vehemently against going back into an office, but it would come with some pretty big caveats: the office has to be relatively close, there are no fixed days or amount of days I'd be required to come in, and I'd have the flexibility to come and go as I pleased. I doubt many companies would agree to that arrangement, mainly because of the real estate costs, which is why I stick to remote work. I don't want to go back to a world where I have to convince a company that a remote worker can still provide as much value as one in the office. I don't want to be forced to stay late at an office to finish something that I could knock out twice as fast at home. I can only hope that we don't spend the next few years going backwards to arrive at a status quo that was misguided and not grounded in reality. Edit: Grammar
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. In my last position (exclusively work-from-office), I had two co-workers (out of nine) that were seriously counterproductive: the rest of us had to work around them. I don't know why the bosses hired them, and I don't know why they kept them on - perhaps they thought they were somehow rescuing them. At any rate, these guys weren't just less productive; they were seriously counterproductive. And this was a strictly office job; we were more-or-less forbidden to work after 5:30PM. The bosses had some kind of "company culture" fantasy, that they could weld us together into a bean-bags-and-table-football crew of clones, who would both work and play together. Interestingly, neither of these bosses had ever done an office job in someone else's office...
Spooky23 3y ago
It’s not that simple - it’s a stupid control thing. When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive. I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees. Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Require that people live or be available at regional hubs monthly or quarterly. My aunt had an arrangement like this for a airline in the late 90s - they setup a router and PC in her basement and would have meeting or two a month at the office. For me, top down dictates that remove business unit autonomy and don’t understand reality are always a net negative. WFH flexibility reduced sick and family sick absences by 60%. People who’d take an hour off to go to the doctor now take a half day. Now, I have two employees reporting on this stuff instead of doing something productive. So I’m losing thousands of man-hours to absences and spending 3000-4000 more to figure out how many asses are in chairs in dozens of facilties across the world. Managing professionals like fast food employees is dumb. The only winners are the CRE and banking people.
- snotrockets 3y ago
  Fast food employees are professionals as well (have you ever worked a fast food job? It's hard, and requires practice to excel at)
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    “Professional” has a meaning in the context of employment that’s not just “good at a thing that is not easy”.
  - redwall_hp 3y ago
    That's not what professional means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession Even skilled laborers, like plumbers and electricians, are not in a profession. They're members of a trade.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
Consultant32452 3y ago
I think it’s important to remember people had been subjected to literally decades of propaganda that remote work didn’t work. When everyone was forced to do it, many learned that it is not only possible but results in better overall life satisfaction. I’m sure some people learned they really hate remote work, but my guess is there were more converts the other direction. Also, the commercial real estate market is getting fuct. And a lot of big corporations hold commercial real estate in their portfolio.
- ghaff 3y ago
  If you went back 20/25 years, it's probably fair to say that remote work wouldn't have worked in general. Had COVID happened in 1995, I expect that there would have been a lot more shrugging and getting on with business/school/etc. because there really wouldn't have been other realistic options.
hagbarth 3y ago
Alright, but the post is about and pre-pandemic remote role getting swept up in rto - in what world does that make sense?
RIMR 3y ago
>We should just return to the status quo before COVID Why? People at my org had been begging for WFH before the pandemic, and the pandemic helped us win that battle. Why should we cede ground back to our bosses when we are happier and more productive now?
derefr 3y ago
Companies which were okay with having some remote employees before COVID, are now — for no rational reason whatsoever other than following a seeming business-management zeitgeist — not okay with having any remote employees. Isn't "companies going crazy and forcing good employees into situations where they'll quit, when they could just as well... not do that", something to push back against?
make3 3y ago
before, people weren't sure if it could be done, and if the productivity would be similar. It's now been shown that it's possible and that productivity is very similar. So that's why companies forcing the return to work are resented, and why they don't even pretend to have numbers to back their decision. https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-office-return/ https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
standardUser 3y ago
"We should just return to the status quo before COVID..." Says the ownership class. When we are given a rare and unique opportunity to shift our labor culture in the favor of those who provide labor, we would be beyond stupid not to seize that opportunity for everything it's worth.
aaroninsf 3y ago
Counterpoint: why would we EVER return to a born-crappy status quo? No secret that the answer is: to privilege the anxious social needs of those uncomfortable working remotely. And those whose career is on the hook for over-investment in trophy real estate.
jzb 3y ago
I can give several reasons there's resentment: One - if you were hired with the understanding work would be remote, then it's definitely a reason to be resentful. Two, people love to handwave away the difficulties in "just find another job." This isn't trivial like switching toothpaste brands, somebody who's been with Acme Corp for 3 years has invested time with that employer, learned their ins and outs, and has banked some social capital there. Saying "oh, just find another job" is saying "just toss all that out and start over." Three, if you do change jobs you have no clue whether the next company might get swept up in the RTO craze at a later date. When Acme Corp's pro-RTO CEO or another c-level person trot over to your new workplace, guess what? Now it's no longer remote-friendly. We're not living in the same world we were pre-COVID and many of us see no reason to go backwards.
downrightmike 3y ago
I've always hated going into an office, I hate the drive, I hate the shitty coffee, I hate having to check which of the toilet seats ISN'T already caked in shit from the QA guys, I hate having to watch my smoking cowokers take the first 10 to 20 minutes off the start of every hour to smoke and the management allowing it because they also smoke. Then they bitch when I leave on time and they still have hours of work to make up. Now people can fuck up their own shit and I can just do work. Covid made it possible for companies to pull their heads out of their asses and offer WFH for more positions.
k__ 3y ago
"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." They saw the light. Simple as that. They also noticed, if more employees in the market demand remote, chances are higher that employers will allow it.
taylodl 3y ago
> 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. Because these companies hired a lot of remote employees in the interim. Also, many of the employees of these companies decided to buy houses in areas where they could afford to buy a house instead of continuing to rent - and now after several years these companies want to renege? How can you not understand the resentment? This is the biggest FUCK YOU in the history of corporate America.
somsak2 3y ago
I don't think the free-market-solves-all-ails response really works here. The issue is that the CEOs of these companies act together, essentially as a cartel. Sometimes formally [1], other times informally [2]. Labor (at least in the US) does not have anywhere close to such a level of organization, and so top-down mandates like this can impact a whole sector, without a clear place for you to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... [2] "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin
FearlessNebula 3y ago
The market is really difficult right now, most people don’t have the option to just find a remote work company. A significant amount of people who were laid off can’t find any company right now

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
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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.
- lwkl 3y ago
  The person that wrote the blogpost was hired as remote worker and was required to move to an office after the pandemic.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    And they don't say who it is, so this falls short of the "precisely" qualifier.
- reaperman 3y ago
  Amazon[0], for one. But they're not the only ones -- it does happen occasionally, mostly when a company makes a blanket policy "no more remote work, everyone back to the office!" (which makes less sense for those employees who were never at any point in an office to begin with). The author of the linked article for this HN post wrote: > I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida. Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim). In the Re: Amazon article linked at the bottom of my post, the employee says: > Now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. I moved to this area 13 years ago. I own a house here. My partner has a career here. I've built a home here. 0: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over-return-to-office-mandate-2023-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over...
  - cdchn 3y ago
    So if we want to presume that the original linked article's author works for Amazon, we got 1: Amazon. Who else?
    - seattle_spring 3y ago
      Google, Lyft, Facebook
      - 3y ago
lazide 3y ago
This was always a risk at every company due to re-orgs, buyouts, or the whim of executives. Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah. Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare. It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Give it time. The (RTO) companies are on the wrong side of history. Ideally these mandates are something the (employment) market will never forget. It will be interesting to see in the near future how many of the RTO execs at these companies will be whining about their struggles finding talent and/or having to pay a premium to attain and return the level of talent they need. Of course few, if any of these execs will admit they got it wrong. That the root of the problem was their heavy-handed mandates and how they compromised the brand in the (employment) market.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Eh, people forget. Heard about Blackwater lately? Or was it Xe? Or Academi? And they always complain about stuff like that, even when they aren’t playing games!
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      Yes and no. What needs to be factored in is, does the best / top talent forget? Or are they ones with more focus and memory? Does their marketability allow them to be more selective? I think you see where this is going :)
      - lazide 3y ago
        Oh I'm well aware. How many downturns have you lived through? It's rarely so easy when times get lean, but everyone has a different experience for sure!
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
> 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. No one is forcing you to sell your home. You could rent your home and move temporarily until you find a suitable remote replacement. Or, you could just quit outright.
dehrmann 3y ago
> 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. The standard advice is stay in the house at least five years. These people accepted permanent remote roles at companies that have been remote-friendly for only two years. The track record's not there; you can't reasonably assume that policy would continue indefinitely. It might, but it's clearly a risk.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Why would anyone find it acceptable for a company to hire a remote employee but later change the contract? That's a massive pay cut. It's weird how companies expect loyalty but cannot even keep their word from what they claimed during hiring.

cogman10 3y ago

> 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. Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?" I resent being lied to. Had they been more careful and put this out more as a "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed. That's not how they rolled and they didn't even have the guts to simply admit "Hey, we just made a mistake here, remote work isn't working for us"

macksd 3y ago
That's because they are actually struggling to admit deeper problems with the company culture and processes that they don't know how to solve, and so they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things.
- garciasn 3y ago
  You give them entirely too much credit. They were told by others (primarily Wall Street) that they are to do this. It provides them with three things: 1. Real estate holding investment increases. 2. Control. 3. Silent layoffs. There's no reason for RTO. None. They're doing it to save money and regain control of their workforce.
  - VBprogrammer 3y ago
    I think one thing which wasn't obvious to me early on is that halving the number of office days doesn't half the requirements for desk space. In my experience people have a strong preference for going in on similar days, particularly Tuesday and Thursday. So if you ask all of your employees to come in 2 days a week you end up needing desks for almost every employee. The result in my experience is you have either fullish remote or you need just as many desks so very little saving from a company point of view.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

> and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore. Unless laws change to require them to [1], workers organize to require it be provided [2], or you've had the working arrangement codified in your offer letter or other contractual documentation so that requiring you to come into an office is constructive dismissal [3]. This whole "employers can do whatever they want" era can't come to an end quick enough. [1] https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislation-around-the-world/ https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislatio... [2] https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotely-you-and-your-coworkers-can-still-unionize/ https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotel... [3] https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urged-ignore-bosss-dealbreaker-1752554 https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urg...

RussianCow 3y ago

Many companies did a bait and switch, though. They made grand promises of remote and/or hybrid work being a first class citizen moving forward, then did a hard 180 and asked everyone to start coming into the office every day. Understandably, some people are upset about this, especially those hired remotely.

RC_ITR 3y ago

These kind of arguments have sort of eaten their tail in recent years as work culture has shifted. We (as has happened with a lot of things) basically have two camps of people and a culture that makes us believe we are only allowed to make "one-or-the-other" choices (I blame the rise of consulting, KPIs, and 'benchmarks'.) So two camps are arguing about their preferences but with the stakes that "my preference has to be the moral and logical choice," which will always just lead to nowhere.

obmelvin 3y ago

I don't think it's realistic to say things should just return to the status quo. The world was changed by the pandemic and even if that didn't happen, time continues to advance which always brings change as well. Yes, some companies will go back to hybrid or complete in person, but it is also clear that remote work can be done in a much wider context than it was before the pandemic.

hypeit 3y ago

> It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others. The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. Not everyone, but a huge number that had never been exposed to it before. Now if a business wants to stay competitive they need to tap into that labor market. The vocal resistance to RTO is expected, we'll never go back to having such a large percentage of the work force working in an office. It's just that a lot of managers haven't figured that out yet and/or are personally incentivized to keep up the charade.

giantrobot 3y ago
> The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. It's not even necessarily falling in love with working at home but just working not in shitty office environments. For most people "the office" is some miserable building in an office park in the middle of a food/service desert. Employees that need to commute to that office don't get paid for the hours of their life wasted in traffic or any financial expenses related to their commute. People with kids have to pay even more money for some child care if they can't be home when their kids get off from school. Working from home/wherever allows someone to save on those money and time costs. They can be home when their kids get off school. They can make a sandwich at 11:23AM because they're hungry. They can stop pouring dollars into a daily commute. Hell they can even live where they want instead of somewhere in commuting distance of a shitty office park. Many of the WFH challenges are the same as working in an office, like inconsiderate entities disturbing you or placating middle managers by attending meetings. At least you can bear those challenges in comfortable clothes in a comfortable seat. You can then take a break and shit in a bathroom you don't share with dozens of other inconsiderate coworkers. WFH isn't perfect and people don't need to love it to at least prefer it over the dystopian hell of offices.

jedberg 3y ago

Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't because remote jobs were few and far between. COVID finally gave them what they always wanted, but now it's being taken away, and remote jobs are getting harder to find again. That's why there is resentment. There was resentment before too, but it was more below the radar because it was always shot down with "we work better in person" and there really wasn't much an argument to be had. But now those people have hard data that they clearly work just as well at home or even better. So now they have data to back up their desires.

sverhagen 3y ago
>Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't And then there's all the people that didn't know they wanted to work remotely, until they were forced to experience it.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
It goes much deeper than that though. It isn't just "they wanted it and couldn't have it, then they got it and now they want to keep it:" A lot of people, myself included, did not understand even if we wanted work from home, how life changing it would be. How it's better for us as people, better for us as workers, better for our pocketbooks, better for our planet, better for our lives, just... better. It's ALL better. Literally the only people losing in this arrangement are the same parasites who win at literally every other juncture in our society and just, I'm sick to DEATH of it. I will DIE on this hill. I hope the commercial real estate market fucking craters. I hope every company doing this RTO shit dies on the vine. I hope it sucks for every single person in the parasite class who loses more than 2 dollars on everything. I hope it crashes the price of real estate in big cities and makes them affordable again. I hope it makes my home worth less because homes shouldn't be a fucking investment vehicle in the first place. To borrow the bugs bunny meme, I wish every landlord a very happy get a real job.
- ck425 3y ago
  There are a lot of us normal workers who dislike WFH and we're not parasites. It's perfectly valid to prefer WFH but it's also valid to prefer the office.

aidenn0 3y ago

If I was hired as a programmer and my employer decides they would rather I pickup dog shit all day, I'm damn-well going to complain about it. Both TFA (and the comment you are replying to) are about people specifically hired for remote work prior to the pandemic; the status quo before COVID was those people working remotely.

KoolKat23 3y ago

Times change and so should companies. It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction. Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works, but are unjustifiably being told otherwise by people that don't actually know what works. When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes? An example of pride in their work: Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.

daveevad 3y ago
> Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it. The compensation is correlated with confusion.
hattmall 3y ago
>They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office. There is a difference between making it through an event like COVID vs making forward business progress. Certainly there's a place for remote work but the higher you go in management the more you see the holes remote work creates. Realistically, employees should push hard for return to office and then no work out of the office. The reality is that as the job market tightens the expectation is going to be in office AND work from home. Vacation days will morph into work from home days. An expectation to answer emails after hours is already turning into an expectation to be online and available for zoom calls much later than normal working hours.
- KoolKat23 3y ago
  As part of the social contract, reasonable employees would agree with it if there were a solid case for it but this doesn't seem to be so. They're being offered ambiguous one liners such as the "making forward business progress" devoid of substance and which contrasts to actual measurable such as turnover, profits and other tangible measures that indicate otherwise (showing that remote work works). I truly hope the line between leave and work doesn't blur.

cmeacham98 3y ago

Firstly, you make switching employers sound like as easy as changing your outfit. Not every job has thousands of companies hiring remotely ready to go. Secondly, companies that pulled this bait and switch deserve to be called out and loose reputation among workers for it. My current employer had recruiters and even the CEO bragging about our remote work policy, just to pull it out from under everyone.

Arainach 3y ago

>We should just return to the status quo before COVID The status quo was horribly broken, and it took a worldwide pandemic for many people to realize that things could be different and didn't have to be so awful.

jfghi 3y ago
Pre-Covid COL would be great too.

goodpoint 3y ago

No, management has been lying to employees with the "working in an office is more effective" for decades. Now the king is naked and yet companies are trying to manipulate people to return to offices.

DSMan195276 3y ago

> there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. You don't understand why people don't want to have to go job hunting to keep a WFH position? It's one thing to say "this is fine, get over it", it's another to say "I don't understand why people are resentful", I think that second part is pretty obvious.

codingdave 3y ago

I think the resentment comes from the assumption of: "We should just return to the status quo before..." If you look back at the history of work experiences, there were several old "status quos" that we no longer accept. We don't accept, manual labor for 60 or 80 hours a week. We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension. But society evolves. Assuming that something as disruptive as COVID should just be put aside without evolving how we operate in our world is exactly where the resentment comes from.

cool_dude85 3y ago
>We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension I think that if private companies offered pension plans, reasonable raises and promotion paths, many people would accept it. I think the company hopping stuff is largely a response to the death of annual raises and internal promotions.

addicted 3y ago

> 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. I mean, this is a ridiculous argument supporting remote work because it works so much stronger the other way. You literally had companies change centuries worth of corporate work for overnight to switch everyone to remote work. If anything the people who want full time return to office have a much stronger argument that companies have suddenly changed everything on them, as opposed to the people who are complaining that now that things are normal companies are reverting the changes they made for a once in a lifetime pandemic.

cableshaft 3y ago
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Vladimir Lenin Sometimes it takes a black swan event to reveal how broken something is and how things could be better another way. It used to be the norm in the US for children to be allowed to work in coal mines and factories too (apparently in 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were children under the age of 16[1]), but after some photos were taken of them exposing just how bad the situation had gotten, it helped shift public support to pass legislation barring child labor. Nowadays I doubt hardly anyone would be in support of that now.[2] [1]: https://www.history.com/news/child-labor-lewis-hine-photos https://www.history.com/news/child-labor-lewis-hine-photos [2]: https://energyhistory.yale.edu/child-labor-pennsylvania-coal-mines-gallery/ https://energyhistory.yale.edu/child-labor-pennsylvania-coal...

lokar 3y ago

A lot of big companies had full remote by exception. They built up a modest amount of these (generally senior, often specialist) over the years. Forcing these people to an office is not return to pre-Covid.

codelikeawolf 3y ago

As a remote worker before the pandemic, I think the worst thing we could do is return to the status quo. I remember trying to find a new remote job before I moved across the country to Portland (pre-pandemic). I interviewed for a job in downtown Chicago, which would have required a 35-minute train ride to and from the city each day. I wasn't moving for a few months and I offered to work in the office before switching to remote. I even said "if you don't think I'm contributing enough value by the time I leave, and you aren't comfortable with me working remotely, let me know and I can stay with the company long enough to help you find my replacement". They still turned me down. The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. I remember going to the dentist and telling the dental assistant that I work from home, and her response was "don't people think you're slacking off?" and my response was "no, because I'm an adult". There was an almost insurmountable stigma around remote work. As terrible as the pandemic was, it exposed an irrefutable truth about remote work: people can still do their jobs perfectly fine at home. I spent most of my career working in offices, until I went fully remote about 2 years before the pandemic. There are aspects of the office that I miss. I'm not vehemently against going back into an office, but it would come with some pretty big caveats: the office has to be relatively close, there are no fixed days or amount of days I'd be required to come in, and I'd have the flexibility to come and go as I pleased. I doubt many companies would agree to that arrangement, mainly because of the real estate costs, which is why I stick to remote work. I don't want to go back to a world where I have to convince a company that a remote worker can still provide as much value as one in the office. I don't want to be forced to stay late at an office to finish something that I could knock out twice as fast at home. I can only hope that we don't spend the next few years going backwards to arrive at a status quo that was misguided and not grounded in reality. Edit: Grammar

denton-scratch 3y ago
> The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. In my last position (exclusively work-from-office), I had two co-workers (out of nine) that were seriously counterproductive: the rest of us had to work around them. I don't know why the bosses hired them, and I don't know why they kept them on - perhaps they thought they were somehow rescuing them. At any rate, these guys weren't just less productive; they were seriously counterproductive. And this was a strictly office job; we were more-or-less forbidden to work after 5:30PM. The bosses had some kind of "company culture" fantasy, that they could weld us together into a bean-bags-and-table-football crew of clones, who would both work and play together. Interestingly, neither of these bosses had ever done an office job in someone else's office...

Spooky23 3y ago

It’s not that simple - it’s a stupid control thing. When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive. I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees. Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Require that people live or be available at regional hubs monthly or quarterly. My aunt had an arrangement like this for a airline in the late 90s - they setup a router and PC in her basement and would have meeting or two a month at the office. For me, top down dictates that remove business unit autonomy and don’t understand reality are always a net negative. WFH flexibility reduced sick and family sick absences by 60%. People who’d take an hour off to go to the doctor now take a half day. Now, I have two employees reporting on this stuff instead of doing something productive. So I’m losing thousands of man-hours to absences and spending 3000-4000 more to figure out how many asses are in chairs in dozens of facilties across the world. Managing professionals like fast food employees is dumb. The only winners are the CRE and banking people.

snotrockets 3y ago
Fast food employees are professionals as well (have you ever worked a fast food job? It's hard, and requires practice to excel at)
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  “Professional” has a meaning in the context of employment that’s not just “good at a thing that is not easy”.
- redwall_hp 3y ago
  That's not what professional means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession Even skilled laborers, like plumbers and electricians, are not in a profession. They're members of a trade.
cool_dude85 3y ago

Consultant32452 3y ago

I think it’s important to remember people had been subjected to literally decades of propaganda that remote work didn’t work. When everyone was forced to do it, many learned that it is not only possible but results in better overall life satisfaction. I’m sure some people learned they really hate remote work, but my guess is there were more converts the other direction. Also, the commercial real estate market is getting fuct. And a lot of big corporations hold commercial real estate in their portfolio.

ghaff 3y ago
If you went back 20/25 years, it's probably fair to say that remote work wouldn't have worked in general. Had COVID happened in 1995, I expect that there would have been a lot more shrugging and getting on with business/school/etc. because there really wouldn't have been other realistic options.

hagbarth 3y ago

Alright, but the post is about and pre-pandemic remote role getting swept up in rto - in what world does that make sense?

RIMR 3y ago

>We should just return to the status quo before COVID Why? People at my org had been begging for WFH before the pandemic, and the pandemic helped us win that battle. Why should we cede ground back to our bosses when we are happier and more productive now?

derefr 3y ago

Companies which were okay with having some remote employees before COVID, are now — for no rational reason whatsoever other than following a seeming business-management zeitgeist — not okay with having any remote employees. Isn't "companies going crazy and forcing good employees into situations where they'll quit, when they could just as well... not do that", something to push back against?

make3 3y ago

before, people weren't sure if it could be done, and if the productivity would be similar. It's now been shown that it's possible and that productivity is very similar. So that's why companies forcing the return to work are resented, and why they don't even pretend to have numbers to back their decision. https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-office-return/ https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...

standardUser 3y ago

"We should just return to the status quo before COVID..." Says the ownership class. When we are given a rare and unique opportunity to shift our labor culture in the favor of those who provide labor, we would be beyond stupid not to seize that opportunity for everything it's worth.

aaroninsf 3y ago

Counterpoint: why would we EVER return to a born-crappy status quo? No secret that the answer is: to privilege the anxious social needs of those uncomfortable working remotely. And those whose career is on the hook for over-investment in trophy real estate.

jzb 3y ago

I can give several reasons there's resentment: One - if you were hired with the understanding work would be remote, then it's definitely a reason to be resentful. Two, people love to handwave away the difficulties in "just find another job." This isn't trivial like switching toothpaste brands, somebody who's been with Acme Corp for 3 years has invested time with that employer, learned their ins and outs, and has banked some social capital there. Saying "oh, just find another job" is saying "just toss all that out and start over." Three, if you do change jobs you have no clue whether the next company might get swept up in the RTO craze at a later date. When Acme Corp's pro-RTO CEO or another c-level person trot over to your new workplace, guess what? Now it's no longer remote-friendly. We're not living in the same world we were pre-COVID and many of us see no reason to go backwards.

downrightmike 3y ago

I've always hated going into an office, I hate the drive, I hate the shitty coffee, I hate having to check which of the toilet seats ISN'T already caked in shit from the QA guys, I hate having to watch my smoking cowokers take the first 10 to 20 minutes off the start of every hour to smoke and the management allowing it because they also smoke. Then they bitch when I leave on time and they still have hours of work to make up. Now people can fuck up their own shit and I can just do work. Covid made it possible for companies to pull their heads out of their asses and offer WFH for more positions.

k__ 3y ago

"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." They saw the light. Simple as that. They also noticed, if more employees in the market demand remote, chances are higher that employers will allow it.

taylodl 3y ago

> 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. Because these companies hired a lot of remote employees in the interim. Also, many of the employees of these companies decided to buy houses in areas where they could afford to buy a house instead of continuing to rent - and now after several years these companies want to renege? How can you not understand the resentment? This is the biggest FUCK YOU in the history of corporate America.

somsak2 3y ago

I don't think the free-market-solves-all-ails response really works here. The issue is that the CEOs of these companies act together, essentially as a cartel. Sometimes formally [1], other times informally [2]. Labor (at least in the US) does not have anywhere close to such a level of organization, and so top-down mandates like this can impact a whole sector, without a clear place for you to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... [2] "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin

FearlessNebula 3y ago

The market is really difficult right now, most people don’t have the option to just find a remote work company. A significant amount of people who were laid off can’t find any company right now