8 ms·

Tech CEOs are backtrack on RTO mandates–now, 3% want workers in office full-time

95 points by t-writescode 2y ago

shishy 2y ago
https://archive.ph/mP9nT https://archive.ph/mP9nT
pocketarc 2y ago
It makes sense especially for tech; what difference does it -really- make if your engineers are working in an office cubicle or at their home office? It's all just sitting at a computer. I personally mourn the loss of a proper full-time office lifestyle, because I've always been remote, and now I will never know what it's like (hybrid is a joke because you're in the office but you still have to get on zoom calls). But I do understand it.
- flakes 2y ago
  We’re doing a three day in office, two day work from home split. I think it works out pretty well. I do see an advantage being in office with juniors and interns. I definitely learned a lot when I was junior being able to ask the senior staff questions without having to schedule a zoom meeting or wait slowly on slack replies. 5 day RTO would be insane tho.
  - alexchamberlain 2y ago
    Mentorship remotely is really tough; nothing quite replaces sitting next to someone, discussing the code and working on a solution together.
    - baq 2y ago
      ...and it shows in hiring. Experienced seniors can still find jobs, juniors... can't.
      - christhecaribou 2y ago
        For you two, maybe. Younger folks have zero problem mentoring online. They grew up online.
        baq 2y ago
        I grew up online and it isn't a problem if you have a process. You don't need a process if you're in the same physical place.
        t-writescode 2y ago
        I expect you have a process in person, too, it's just the process has been "obvious" to you :)
    - dijksterhuis 2y ago
      I do not share the same experience. I've recently mentored someone from knew nothing about git up to - what is version control [0] - good commits and good pull requests - working through pull request reviews [1] - merging my PR into their PR [2] - how to edit config files in a sane way (naming conventions are important) - how to debug a few weird Arma3 config file errors - how to deliver changes that satisfy some ... specific community constraints - ways to think about solving a problem, before actually trying to solve it, and why ... and a bunch more. All on discord. Direct messages. Audio only calls hanging out for a few hours talking / sharing screens, sometimes pair-programming. If I'm busy, I find some relevant documentation and ask them to read through it until I've got a chance to speak to them. A big mix of async and sync communication. Sometimes organised, sometimes ad-hoc. I've got workshops mentally planned out to upskill the rest of the game server dev team. I've got another mentoring project lined up where we'll hopefully be able to dive into some functional programming things [3]. Remote mentorship isn't tough. It just requires 1. Prioritising the DMs from the people currently being mentored. 2. Manually creating the "sit next to each other and work on something" opportunities by clicking like four buttons to start a voice call and jump into it. In essence, I make them the person sitting next to me in my online Discord office. ---- [0]: the "keeping a version of every single change in any tracked project file" lightbulb moment was fantastic to see. [1]: the "always expect someone else to find something wrong because you're a human being who inevitably gets tunnel vision" lesson. [2]: the "i'm going to make you responsible for merging into release branches at some point, so let's get you comfortable with it now" lesson [3]: the person wants to learn how to be a "scripter", whereas the previous person was a Arma3 3DEN Editor main.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      At the risk of being downvoted to goatse.cx territory, I get more useful "mentorship" out of ChatGPT than I ever got from colleagues. When one door closes, another often opens.
    - sirspacey 2y ago
      Assuming all learning happens at the moment of discussion, which is very much not the case in coding. Looms, pair programming, and Slack Huddles have worked great for us.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    I’ve just finished mentoring an intern at a FAANG fully remote. They were able to get me in chat whenever they needed, it never felt like communication was a problem. They were actually in the office, though.
- jhickok 2y ago
  I do sometimes miss working out of an office with my coworkers, but I don't miss the hour plus commute, the constant taps on the shoulder, spending too much money on coffee and lunch, etc. The collaborative nature of the office is hard to replicate remotely, though not impossible, and I think it's genuinely good for us to have human contact throughout the day.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >the constant taps on the shoulder To me that is way more tolerable than the constant pinging in chats and putting my headset ON & OFF to jump on calls several times per day. Hearing the ringtone of Teams/Slack today still gives me PTSD. A situation that can be figured out by a 5 minute face to face talk in person can end up as a 30+ minute back and fourth in the chat. You walk away from your computer for a second and you see 80+ missed texts in 3 Slack channels. The more people in the chat rooms, the worse it gets, as while one person is writing a long sentence explaining something, another is writing a long sentence asking about the thing that other person is just about to explain leading a lot of wasted time and effort with communication. The worse part is those super long bank-and-fourths in the chat rooms then become "the documentation". Why did you break this? Didn't you know we changed X because of Y? It was discussed in the group Slack yesterday. Didn't you read it[the 100+ message papyrus]? I much prefer WFH, but it can also be absolute hell, keeping up with the bombardment of chats that remote sync cooperation leads to. In my new job I'm mostly in the office and it's much less stressful.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      RTO is not synonymous with a single-site team. The benefits you describe are impossible to realize for any company with distributed offices.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        > The benefits you describe are impossible to realize for any company with distributed offices. Oh definitely, but where I live in this small European country, large SW companies with internationally distributed teams are not really a thing, it's mostly local small and medium enterprises where the whole company teams are under the same roof. Not every SW employer is a large multinational.
- aeonik 2y ago
  I miss having an office with a door. I also really miss my lab. I used to run what could be summed up as a giant advanced makerspace: we had chemistry fume hoods, a machine shop, electronics, hydraulic lifts, cranes, etc ... it was a really fun environment. Cubes and open spaces suck.
- siva7 2y ago
  Hybrid is such a joke. I‘m seeing colleagues coming to the office to dial in to teams calls all day long and the rest of the day working quietly by themselves. Probably 10 minutes of social interaction in the office on a full work day. What’s the point..
  - d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
    It is what you make it. If you don't utilize the face time you have with people then you're leaving opportunity on the table. The world won't end or anything if you don't network, but you'll have a leg up on everyone if you do. I've had face to face meetings that cleared up 6 months of email/chat/zoom misunderstanding.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      Sounds like a critique of distributed teams. RTO doesn’t help clear up blockers when my team members are on another continent.
- mulmen 2y ago
  You have cubes? That sounds nice. I have been in an open floor plan for a decade. Now we don’t even have assigned desks.
- closeparen 2y ago
  We're hybrid and all have to go on in on the same days of the week - which management claims is in response to the "still have to sit on Zoom calls" complaint - but the reason it's all Zoom isn't because your US coworkers are at home, it's because 95% of the hires we've made in the last 4 years are at foreign sites.
figmert 2y ago
What's terrible is that some people I know are getting RTO mandate. The problem is, all of their team members are remote workers. No RTO for them, because they were hired far away from the office. So my mates (2 of them) have to go into the office just to talk to their colleagues over Slack. There is no logic in RTO for most tech workers. I'm glad they're backtracking. Edit: spelling
- tootie 2y ago
  This was my life before the pandemic. CEOs seem to have forgotten how hard they pushed for distributed teams and off shoring for the last 20 years. I'd be in the office on video calls with South America, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo. Then maybe get coffee or lunch with whoever was around from other projects. I could not show up some days and nobody would notice.
- skirmish 2y ago
  Same insanity at Google. Doesn't matter that you are the only team member at this location, it's 3 mandatory days per week in office, or else your VP starts getting notifications. A cherry on top, HR scripts don't properly account for partial vacation weeks, so if you have 3 vacation days in a week, you are still supposed to be in office 3 days a week, or else your VP gets notified.
  - ruined 2y ago
    let them get notifications
    - NewJazz 2y ago
      Create filter rule > skip inbox lol
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Interview for remote roles from the office.
  - faizshah 2y ago
metabagel 2y ago
The issue in my mind is that productivity is more a function of the individual and the culture than it is a function of working in the office vs remotely.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  If those managers could read, they'd be very upset.
siva7 2y ago
If you had colleagues you liked as friends then RTO is usually more fun. If not then there is no difference in productivity if your developer works from anywhere or in a cubicle. Mandating RTO comes usually from clueless managers who think they can get some control over the teams (hint: you won’t)
- cut3 2y ago
  More fun but less productive. Anecdotally my work friends and I do way more now that we cant distract each other constantly. We hang out on weekends now to waste time.
  - axpvms 2y ago
    I got a new job recently and came into the office for the first few weeks for the novelty of it as I hadn't worked in an office for years. There are few people who swear by the office and complain that they can't work without it, no kids either, I think they like having a chinwag every day. Now we're moving offices so they are going to a coffee shop so they can work together, sounds like hell, I won't go back.
- d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
  Well, you will get control over employees that show up. The rest are passed over until they leave. If I had a choice to manage a team hybrid in person or manage fully remote, I would always pick in person. I think it will naturally move back to more in person just because those are going to be the higher functioning teams with the higher functioning managers.
  - christhecaribou 2y ago
    What evidence is there that they’re “higher functioning”? You’re the exact type of manager I now screen for in job interviews.
    - d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
      If the whole team is remote then everyone is on the same level. However, If any are colocated then there's going to be a rift, guaranteed. As soon as the majority is colocated then the all of a sudden remote workers start unintentionally getting cut out of decisions. I've seen it happen every time. It becomes a lot of work for the manager to stop everyone from talking casually in the office. Next thing you know they're making hiring decisions based on colocation. So keep it all remote or all colocated is my advice. But if you have two teams, one colocated and the other remote, it's twice as much work for the remote team to do the same work as the colocated team. Not impossible, just really hard and a total waste of management brain cycles that could be spent thinking about strategy.
jordanb 2y ago
They've moved on to offshoring.
- closeparen 2y ago
  They haven’t moved on. They’re forcing the remaining US workers into the office just to Zoom with their mostly offshore coworkers.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
All this really means to me is that the major culling is approaching an end. If the company didn't have any huge real estate investments, the only other use of RTO is as a soft layoff without paying out severance (an inefficient one, but 2020's tech hasn't exactly even pretendeded to be efficient). The other underlying issue is outsourcing; it's a bit hypocritical to force an RTO while more of your workers are in another country. We're ramping up another phase of "let's try to hire cheaper workers overseas" as well as "nearshoring ", so the remaining people have less need than ever to come into an office.
- LiquidSky 2y ago
  You're repeating the classic Hacker News mistake of assuming these actions have a rational basis. I very much suspect that a lot of this push for RTO is very vibes-based, as the kids say, which is why no one seems to be able to produce any concrete reasons or numbers justifying it. I think a lot of people, especially those at the top, have very set ideas of what "working" means and want to make their organizations conform to those ideas. For many people "working" simply means being in an office regardless of anything else or any consequences. It's why you see so many cracks about "they're working in their pajamas!".
- bradknowles 2y ago
  No, it’s just that the soft layoffs are coming to an end. You’re going to start seeing more Intel-style layoffs soon.
deedubaya 2y ago
As a 100% remote employer this has been a boon for our hiring as it has freed up highly skilled employees that can’t/won’t RTO.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  yeah, it's perfect. It does the opposite as well; grifters who cannot actually do what they were hired for but instead just talked and smooched their way around have no chance remotely. No one is entertaining them and after not so long you get a 'higher up' asking 'so what actually are you doing here?'. Had a project manager on friday: everyone thought he sucked (as a project manager!) while in the office but the c levels thought he was good as he was running around and talking a lot, but via chat he has nothing. So he is gone since friday.
jt2190 2y ago
Key Findings (1) 79% of Tech firms are Fully Flexible Tech has the highest concentration of Fully Flexible firms across industries. Only 3% of Tech companies require Full Time In Office for corporate employees. (2) Employee's Choice is the most common Tech policy 56% of Tech companies have an Employee's Choice model, meaning the company has offices but employees aren't required to to go into them. That's up from 38% of Tech companies having an Employee's Choice model in June 2023. (3) Fully Remote is decreasing in prevalence in Tech 23% of Tech companies have a Fully Remote model, meaning the company does not have any offices at all. That's down from 37% in June 2023. (4) Structured Hybrid Tech companies expect you in office 2-3 days per week 85% of Tech companies with a Minimum Days / Week requirement expect employees in the office either 2 days or 3 days per week. (5) Tech company office policy varies significantly by size 90% of Tech companies with 500 employees or less are Fully Flexible; just 7% are Structured Hybrid. On the other hand, 23% of Tech companies with 25k+ employees are Fully Flexible; 74% are Structured Hybrid. (6) Fully Remote adoption varies significantly by company size as well 42% of Tech companies with 100 employees or less are Fully Remote. That percentage drops to less than 4% for companies with 1k+ employees. All Tech company sizes have shifted away from Fully Remote since June 2023. “Flex Report 2024” https://www.canva.com/design/DAGLBzph2Ro/N8J1ayHcoxw4RjdoAHjz2A/view https://www.canva.com/design/DAGLBzph2Ro/N8J1ayHcoxw4RjdoAHj...
apwell23 2y ago
So real estate price in bumfuck, Idado will remain elevated ? :/
nyrikki 2y ago
This whole situation is been a real mess for years. 1) Quiet quitting is primarily the result of disengagement. It is typically an organization failure and not an IC problem. 2) More than a fifth of the workforce was laid off early in the pandemic, causing issues with teams. 3) The pivot to massive hiring during the pandemic tended to ignore the need to be careful about changes to teams and their need to gel. 4) There was an impedance mismatch between individual KPI's and business needs that had been building for years, mainly due to Goodhart's law that also caused disengagement. 5) While RTO mandates were bad enough, firing those who advocated for who they thought was important taught workers that speaking out was forbidden, leading to even more disengagement. 6) While CEOs are back tracking, very few are doing anything that helps an organization recover from this engagement problem. Obviously it is more complicated with activist investors, who sometimes had real estate interests forced the hand of some companies, but after seeing that it really failed as a tricky way to do a RIFF and had high costs that had a long tail, they are changing their story without any acceptance of their own role...same as it ever was. In my experience it takes way longer to get a company to start working as teams, with a shared purpose, than most people expect. Typically 2-5 years in my experience to get most of the org in that mindset. But that is without the very public and visceral impact of RTO related firings, with no communication from Leadership to say they changed course and that the efforts failed to align with core values etc... It is festering, not fading. I turned down two EA jobs in the past 6 months because, as a guardrail/runways EA, there was no way to stay aligned with the CIOs goal and build that sense of shared purpose that would provide value. I am sure that they ended up finding a ivory tower/cop EA, which will just exacerbate the problem. I am sure that there are some Quants in BSG/McKinsey like firms that will blamed for this in a pile of books in a few years.... But C*Os must have known that when they fired people advocating for RTO targets that were important, they must have known that employees would start to delegate up and become less engaged. We could use this crisis to help uplift Managers past their traditional role...as to be honest their need for new tools and tactics has been ignored for way too long. But while CEOs are backing away from RTO mandates, there is little to no evidence that many are making serious efforts to repair the damage. /rant
- jrs235 2y ago
  Sorry, I don't know what EA stands for.
bluGill 2y ago
a week before they told me to come to the offic, they decided there wasn't enough budget to pay for my trip to india. whatever value they expect from me in the office they obviously don't belive it as half the people I work with are in india. at least I moved to where I can bike to work so I'm in the best shape of my life. That is the major gain
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
benreesman 2y ago
Probably indicates downward rate sentiment?
sir-dingleberry 2y ago
Do these tech CEO's just cargo cult everything? Is that what they teach at MBA school? Just do what everyone else is doing.
- tmaly 2y ago
  Speaking with HR, most of the CEOs just copy the bigger companies
immibis 2y ago
IIRC RTO was an excuse to lay off workers without paying severance. If the layoffs have been completed, CEOs would be expected to not care any more.
_fat_santa 2y ago
I work for an SMB as a manager and we were told from the top that employees near the office need to come in at least 3 days per week and that managers would be responsible for monitoring and reporting any violations to HR / higher ups. Only problem is that me and all the other managers responsible for this are fully remote and live across the country. The higher ups don't seem to care about this detail nor do they seem to pay attention to the fact that we have had 100% attendance in the office since the policy got implemented, me and the other managers are most definitely not just fudging the numbers and giving everyone a 100% score for office attendance!
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  Honesty and integrity be damned!
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    Honesty must be earned by the receiving party, because honesty is risky. Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching, or if you get caught you would be in trouble. Neither honesty nor integrity are on the line here.
    - bugbuddy 2y ago
      Honesty and integrity only when it is convenient! What a great concept!
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        Does the work get done? Yes? Well, that takes care of the "honesty and integrity" thing.
        bugbuddy 2y ago
        Justifying dishonesty is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
dpkirchner 2y ago
One of these days we're going to read an article about someone killed while commuting the first day after being ordered to RTO. Seems inevitable, anyway. I wonder what the execs involved will say?
- nidnogg 2y ago
  They will say nothing because there is no correlation - they could've been killed on their way to a doctor's appointment under a remote work policy. I'm 100% in on full-remote, but these warnings against crime when discussing RTO are a bit too privileged for my liking. It's not like you're safe and locked against all evils inside your home if you're working remote, you're still a human being and you'll eventually be required to leave your dungeon and do something in your life sometime.
gpopides 2y ago
I was working remote at my company for 2 years. Suddenly our CEO decided that we should be working more in the office, out of nowhere. Problem is, we were literally 2 engineers available to attend the office while the rest (~8 people) were remote. Eventually i resigned and now (while i was the person with the most technical and product knowledge of the company) the rest of the engineers are following, there is a risk for the company that will leave them with literally 2 or 3 engineers, while they need at least 10. To this day, i still can't fully understand what was on his mind that he essentially broke apart something that was working and delivering and now he may end up with no engineering team at all.
- linotype 2y ago
  Probably just read it in Forbes or Bloomberg Business.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  To this day, i still can't fully understand what was on his mind that he essentially broke apart something that was working and delivering and now he may end up with no engineering team at all. It might be interesting to ask him.
- sys_64738 2y ago
  Always got to be tinkering. Idiots like this don’t grasp things work despite you interfering, not because of you interfering. Most C-level idiots are dumb as a bag of rocks.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
IMO Drew Houston's quote in the article really hit the nail on the head: "They keep hitting the go-back-to-2019 button, and it’s clear it’s not working." I personally am sympathetic to the idea that most people are more engaged and more productive when they are working together, in person. While I certainly don't miss the commute or office politics, I do miss seeing colleagues in person, and I felt I would often learn things faster when it was easier to have impromptu discussions with others. I also just kinda felt like I cared more. But the point is, while I sometimes wish I could hit the "return to 2019 button", that world simply does not exist anymore, and it never will. Like some of the comments here point out very well, I know lots of folks who have been forced into RTO, and then just spend the majority of their time in the office on Zoom calls because many colleagues are still remote - the whole thing is nuts. Enlightened management just needs to realize that as much as they may want to "wave that magic want", it ain't gonna happen. The world has changed, and it's much better to accept the reality of remote work than pretend you can do a "Superman spin the world backwards" trick. At the same time, I think employees should realize the risks with remote work - after nearly a quarter century in this business I've finally seen a real explosion of off shoring since the pandemic, and I think it (obviously among many other factors) is having a real downward pressure on software engineering salaries in the US.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  > downward pressure on software engineering salaries in the US And hopefully an upward pressure elsewhere! I think it's not too bleak for you guys tbh - a lot of remote US jobs aren't really available to most of the world because they have timezone restrictions. You'd just better hope South America doesn't get its shit together!
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    I think South (and Central) America kinda has gotten its shit together though. I've personally worked with great devs from Costa Rica and Argentina. Lots more offshoring to Eastern Europe as well because there are still a good couple hours of overlap during the business day where it's easy to communicate.
wikibob 2y ago
Unpaywalled https://archive.is/2024.08.02-162144/https://fortune.com/2024/08/02/tech-ceos-return-to-office-mandate/ https://archive.is/2024.08.02-162144/https://fortune.com/202...
ridiculous_leke 2y ago
Hopefully, some of these corps would sell their real estate in the future.
gtvwill 2y ago
Need to change heading RTO to return to office. RTO has always stood for rostered time off, its an industry standard term. It makes it confusing if you repurpose these terms for incorrect items/uses.
- rvbissell 2y ago
  There are only so many TLAs...
agata4151 2y ago
[flagged]
stranded22 2y ago
I thought it was more that they wanted to cut costs without announcing layoffs.
luke-stanley 2y ago
The title is different from what the article current title is, and the grammar of, "are backtrack" is wrong.
- t-writescode 2y ago
  Looks like I didn't correctly proofread all the shortening I had to do to make it fit within Hacker News' title size limits :) I tried pretty hard, though.
tmaly 2y ago
My company has 3 days a week in office required with first business day of week being mandatory. If we don’t follow policy you get docked your paid time off and your year end bonus is affected. They track everything, when you swipe the door, when you sign in on the computer. How long your signed in for.

95 points by t-writescode 2y ago

https://archive.ph/mP9nT https://archive.ph/mP9nT

It makes sense especially for tech; what difference does it -really- make if your engineers are working in an office cubicle or at their home office? It's all just sitting at a computer. I personally mourn the loss of a proper full-time office lifestyle, because I've always been remote, and now I will never know what it's like (hybrid is a joke because you're in the office but you still have to get on zoom calls). But I do understand it.

flakes 2y ago
We’re doing a three day in office, two day work from home split. I think it works out pretty well. I do see an advantage being in office with juniors and interns. I definitely learned a lot when I was junior being able to ask the senior staff questions without having to schedule a zoom meeting or wait slowly on slack replies. 5 day RTO would be insane tho.
- alexchamberlain 2y ago
  Mentorship remotely is really tough; nothing quite replaces sitting next to someone, discussing the code and working on a solution together.
  - baq 2y ago
    ...and it shows in hiring. Experienced seniors can still find jobs, juniors... can't.
    - christhecaribou 2y ago
      For you two, maybe. Younger folks have zero problem mentoring online. They grew up online.
      - baq 2y ago
        I grew up online and it isn't a problem if you have a process. You don't need a process if you're in the same physical place.
        t-writescode 2y ago
        I expect you have a process in person, too, it's just the process has been "obvious" to you :)
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    I do not share the same experience. I've recently mentored someone from knew nothing about git up to - what is version control [0] - good commits and good pull requests - working through pull request reviews [1] - merging my PR into their PR [2] - how to edit config files in a sane way (naming conventions are important) - how to debug a few weird Arma3 config file errors - how to deliver changes that satisfy some ... specific community constraints - ways to think about solving a problem, before actually trying to solve it, and why ... and a bunch more. All on discord. Direct messages. Audio only calls hanging out for a few hours talking / sharing screens, sometimes pair-programming. If I'm busy, I find some relevant documentation and ask them to read through it until I've got a chance to speak to them. A big mix of async and sync communication. Sometimes organised, sometimes ad-hoc. I've got workshops mentally planned out to upskill the rest of the game server dev team. I've got another mentoring project lined up where we'll hopefully be able to dive into some functional programming things [3]. Remote mentorship isn't tough. It just requires 1. Prioritising the DMs from the people currently being mentored. 2. Manually creating the "sit next to each other and work on something" opportunities by clicking like four buttons to start a voice call and jump into it. In essence, I make them the person sitting next to me in my online Discord office. ---- [0]: the "keeping a version of every single change in any tracked project file" lightbulb moment was fantastic to see. [1]: the "always expect someone else to find something wrong because you're a human being who inevitably gets tunnel vision" lesson. [2]: the "i'm going to make you responsible for merging into release branches at some point, so let's get you comfortable with it now" lesson [3]: the person wants to learn how to be a "scripter", whereas the previous person was a Arma3 3DEN Editor main.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    At the risk of being downvoted to goatse.cx territory, I get more useful "mentorship" out of ChatGPT than I ever got from colleagues. When one door closes, another often opens.
  - sirspacey 2y ago
    Assuming all learning happens at the moment of discussion, which is very much not the case in coding. Looms, pair programming, and Slack Huddles have worked great for us.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  I’ve just finished mentoring an intern at a FAANG fully remote. They were able to get me in chat whenever they needed, it never felt like communication was a problem. They were actually in the office, though.
jhickok 2y ago
I do sometimes miss working out of an office with my coworkers, but I don't miss the hour plus commute, the constant taps on the shoulder, spending too much money on coffee and lunch, etc. The collaborative nature of the office is hard to replicate remotely, though not impossible, and I think it's genuinely good for us to have human contact throughout the day.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >the constant taps on the shoulder To me that is way more tolerable than the constant pinging in chats and putting my headset ON & OFF to jump on calls several times per day. Hearing the ringtone of Teams/Slack today still gives me PTSD. A situation that can be figured out by a 5 minute face to face talk in person can end up as a 30+ minute back and fourth in the chat. You walk away from your computer for a second and you see 80+ missed texts in 3 Slack channels. The more people in the chat rooms, the worse it gets, as while one person is writing a long sentence explaining something, another is writing a long sentence asking about the thing that other person is just about to explain leading a lot of wasted time and effort with communication. The worse part is those super long bank-and-fourths in the chat rooms then become "the documentation". Why did you break this? Didn't you know we changed X because of Y? It was discussed in the group Slack yesterday. Didn't you read it[the 100+ message papyrus]? I much prefer WFH, but it can also be absolute hell, keeping up with the bombardment of chats that remote sync cooperation leads to. In my new job I'm mostly in the office and it's much less stressful.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    RTO is not synonymous with a single-site team. The benefits you describe are impossible to realize for any company with distributed offices.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      > The benefits you describe are impossible to realize for any company with distributed offices. Oh definitely, but where I live in this small European country, large SW companies with internationally distributed teams are not really a thing, it's mostly local small and medium enterprises where the whole company teams are under the same roof. Not every SW employer is a large multinational.
aeonik 2y ago
I miss having an office with a door. I also really miss my lab. I used to run what could be summed up as a giant advanced makerspace: we had chemistry fume hoods, a machine shop, electronics, hydraulic lifts, cranes, etc ... it was a really fun environment. Cubes and open spaces suck.
siva7 2y ago
Hybrid is such a joke. I‘m seeing colleagues coming to the office to dial in to teams calls all day long and the rest of the day working quietly by themselves. Probably 10 minutes of social interaction in the office on a full work day. What’s the point..
- d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
  It is what you make it. If you don't utilize the face time you have with people then you're leaving opportunity on the table. The world won't end or anything if you don't network, but you'll have a leg up on everyone if you do. I've had face to face meetings that cleared up 6 months of email/chat/zoom misunderstanding.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    Sounds like a critique of distributed teams. RTO doesn’t help clear up blockers when my team members are on another continent.
mulmen 2y ago
You have cubes? That sounds nice. I have been in an open floor plan for a decade. Now we don’t even have assigned desks.
closeparen 2y ago
We're hybrid and all have to go on in on the same days of the week - which management claims is in response to the "still have to sit on Zoom calls" complaint - but the reason it's all Zoom isn't because your US coworkers are at home, it's because 95% of the hires we've made in the last 4 years are at foreign sites.

figmert 2y ago

What's terrible is that some people I know are getting RTO mandate. The problem is, all of their team members are remote workers. No RTO for them, because they were hired far away from the office. So my mates (2 of them) have to go into the office just to talk to their colleagues over Slack. There is no logic in RTO for most tech workers. I'm glad they're backtracking. Edit: spelling

tootie 2y ago
This was my life before the pandemic. CEOs seem to have forgotten how hard they pushed for distributed teams and off shoring for the last 20 years. I'd be in the office on video calls with South America, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo. Then maybe get coffee or lunch with whoever was around from other projects. I could not show up some days and nobody would notice.
skirmish 2y ago
Same insanity at Google. Doesn't matter that you are the only team member at this location, it's 3 mandatory days per week in office, or else your VP starts getting notifications. A cherry on top, HR scripts don't properly account for partial vacation weeks, so if you have 3 vacation days in a week, you are still supposed to be in office 3 days a week, or else your VP gets notified.
- ruined 2y ago
  let them get notifications
  - NewJazz 2y ago
    Create filter rule > skip inbox lol
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Interview for remote roles from the office.
- faizshah 2y ago

metabagel 2y ago

The issue in my mind is that productivity is more a function of the individual and the culture than it is a function of working in the office vs remotely.

Rinzler89 2y ago
If those managers could read, they'd be very upset.

siva7 2y ago

If you had colleagues you liked as friends then RTO is usually more fun. If not then there is no difference in productivity if your developer works from anywhere or in a cubicle. Mandating RTO comes usually from clueless managers who think they can get some control over the teams (hint: you won’t)

cut3 2y ago
More fun but less productive. Anecdotally my work friends and I do way more now that we cant distract each other constantly. We hang out on weekends now to waste time.
- axpvms 2y ago
  I got a new job recently and came into the office for the first few weeks for the novelty of it as I hadn't worked in an office for years. There are few people who swear by the office and complain that they can't work without it, no kids either, I think they like having a chinwag every day. Now we're moving offices so they are going to a coffee shop so they can work together, sounds like hell, I won't go back.
d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
Well, you will get control over employees that show up. The rest are passed over until they leave. If I had a choice to manage a team hybrid in person or manage fully remote, I would always pick in person. I think it will naturally move back to more in person just because those are going to be the higher functioning teams with the higher functioning managers.
- christhecaribou 2y ago
  What evidence is there that they’re “higher functioning”? You’re the exact type of manager I now screen for in job interviews.
  - d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
    If the whole team is remote then everyone is on the same level. However, If any are colocated then there's going to be a rift, guaranteed. As soon as the majority is colocated then the all of a sudden remote workers start unintentionally getting cut out of decisions. I've seen it happen every time. It becomes a lot of work for the manager to stop everyone from talking casually in the office. Next thing you know they're making hiring decisions based on colocation. So keep it all remote or all colocated is my advice. But if you have two teams, one colocated and the other remote, it's twice as much work for the remote team to do the same work as the colocated team. Not impossible, just really hard and a total waste of management brain cycles that could be spent thinking about strategy.

jordanb 2y ago

They've moved on to offshoring.

closeparen 2y ago
They haven’t moved on. They’re forcing the remaining US workers into the office just to Zoom with their mostly offshore coworkers.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

All this really means to me is that the major culling is approaching an end. If the company didn't have any huge real estate investments, the only other use of RTO is as a soft layoff without paying out severance (an inefficient one, but 2020's tech hasn't exactly even pretendeded to be efficient). The other underlying issue is outsourcing; it's a bit hypocritical to force an RTO while more of your workers are in another country. We're ramping up another phase of "let's try to hire cheaper workers overseas" as well as "nearshoring ", so the remaining people have less need than ever to come into an office.

LiquidSky 2y ago
You're repeating the classic Hacker News mistake of assuming these actions have a rational basis. I very much suspect that a lot of this push for RTO is very vibes-based, as the kids say, which is why no one seems to be able to produce any concrete reasons or numbers justifying it. I think a lot of people, especially those at the top, have very set ideas of what "working" means and want to make their organizations conform to those ideas. For many people "working" simply means being in an office regardless of anything else or any consequences. It's why you see so many cracks about "they're working in their pajamas!".
bradknowles 2y ago
No, it’s just that the soft layoffs are coming to an end. You’re going to start seeing more Intel-style layoffs soon.

deedubaya 2y ago

As a 100% remote employer this has been a boon for our hiring as it has freed up highly skilled employees that can’t/won’t RTO.

anonzzzies 2y ago
yeah, it's perfect. It does the opposite as well; grifters who cannot actually do what they were hired for but instead just talked and smooched their way around have no chance remotely. No one is entertaining them and after not so long you get a 'higher up' asking 'so what actually are you doing here?'. Had a project manager on friday: everyone thought he sucked (as a project manager!) while in the office but the c levels thought he was good as he was running around and talking a lot, but via chat he has nothing. So he is gone since friday.

jt2190 2y ago

Key Findings (1) 79% of Tech firms are Fully Flexible Tech has the highest concentration of Fully Flexible firms across industries. Only 3% of Tech companies require Full Time In Office for corporate employees. (2) Employee's Choice is the most common Tech policy 56% of Tech companies have an Employee's Choice model, meaning the company has offices but employees aren't required to to go into them. That's up from 38% of Tech companies having an Employee's Choice model in June 2023. (3) Fully Remote is decreasing in prevalence in Tech 23% of Tech companies have a Fully Remote model, meaning the company does not have any offices at all. That's down from 37% in June 2023. (4) Structured Hybrid Tech companies expect you in office 2-3 days per week 85% of Tech companies with a Minimum Days / Week requirement expect employees in the office either 2 days or 3 days per week. (5) Tech company office policy varies significantly by size 90% of Tech companies with 500 employees or less are Fully Flexible; just 7% are Structured Hybrid. On the other hand, 23% of Tech companies with 25k+ employees are Fully Flexible; 74% are Structured Hybrid. (6) Fully Remote adoption varies significantly by company size as well 42% of Tech companies with 100 employees or less are Fully Remote. That percentage drops to less than 4% for companies with 1k+ employees. All Tech company sizes have shifted away from Fully Remote since June 2023. “Flex Report 2024” https://www.canva.com/design/DAGLBzph2Ro/N8J1ayHcoxw4RjdoAHjz2A/view https://www.canva.com/design/DAGLBzph2Ro/N8J1ayHcoxw4RjdoAHj...

apwell23 2y ago

So real estate price in bumfuck, Idado will remain elevated ? :/

nyrikki 2y ago

This whole situation is been a real mess for years. 1) Quiet quitting is primarily the result of disengagement. It is typically an organization failure and not an IC problem. 2) More than a fifth of the workforce was laid off early in the pandemic, causing issues with teams. 3) The pivot to massive hiring during the pandemic tended to ignore the need to be careful about changes to teams and their need to gel. 4) There was an impedance mismatch between individual KPI's and business needs that had been building for years, mainly due to Goodhart's law that also caused disengagement. 5) While RTO mandates were bad enough, firing those who advocated for who they thought was important taught workers that speaking out was forbidden, leading to even more disengagement. 6) While CEOs are back tracking, very few are doing anything that helps an organization recover from this engagement problem. Obviously it is more complicated with activist investors, who sometimes had real estate interests forced the hand of some companies, but after seeing that it really failed as a tricky way to do a RIFF and had high costs that had a long tail, they are changing their story without any acceptance of their own role...same as it ever was. In my experience it takes way longer to get a company to start working as teams, with a shared purpose, than most people expect. Typically 2-5 years in my experience to get most of the org in that mindset. But that is without the very public and visceral impact of RTO related firings, with no communication from Leadership to say they changed course and that the efforts failed to align with core values etc... It is festering, not fading. I turned down two EA jobs in the past 6 months because, as a guardrail/runways EA, there was no way to stay aligned with the CIOs goal and build that sense of shared purpose that would provide value. I am sure that they ended up finding a ivory tower/cop EA, which will just exacerbate the problem. I am sure that there are some Quants in BSG/McKinsey like firms that will blamed for this in a pile of books in a few years.... But C*Os must have known that when they fired people advocating for RTO targets that were important, they must have known that employees would start to delegate up and become less engaged. We could use this crisis to help uplift Managers past their traditional role...as to be honest their need for new tools and tactics has been ignored for way too long. But while CEOs are backing away from RTO mandates, there is little to no evidence that many are making serious efforts to repair the damage. /rant

jrs235 2y ago
Sorry, I don't know what EA stands for.

bluGill 2y ago

a week before they told me to come to the offic, they decided there wasn't enough budget to pay for my trip to india. whatever value they expect from me in the office they obviously don't belive it as half the people I work with are in india. at least I moved to where I can bike to work so I'm in the best shape of my life. That is the major gain

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

benreesman 2y ago

Probably indicates downward rate sentiment?

sir-dingleberry 2y ago

Do these tech CEO's just cargo cult everything? Is that what they teach at MBA school? Just do what everyone else is doing.

tmaly 2y ago
Speaking with HR, most of the CEOs just copy the bigger companies

immibis 2y ago

IIRC RTO was an excuse to lay off workers without paying severance. If the layoffs have been completed, CEOs would be expected to not care any more.

_fat_santa 2y ago

I work for an SMB as a manager and we were told from the top that employees near the office need to come in at least 3 days per week and that managers would be responsible for monitoring and reporting any violations to HR / higher ups. Only problem is that me and all the other managers responsible for this are fully remote and live across the country. The higher ups don't seem to care about this detail nor do they seem to pay attention to the fact that we have had 100% attendance in the office since the policy got implemented, me and the other managers are most definitely not just fudging the numbers and giving everyone a 100% score for office attendance!

bugbuddy 2y ago
Honesty and integrity be damned!
- from-nibly 2y ago
  Honesty must be earned by the receiving party, because honesty is risky. Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching, or if you get caught you would be in trouble. Neither honesty nor integrity are on the line here.
  - bugbuddy 2y ago
    Honesty and integrity only when it is convenient! What a great concept!
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      Does the work get done? Yes? Well, that takes care of the "honesty and integrity" thing.
      - bugbuddy 2y ago
        Justifying dishonesty is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

dpkirchner 2y ago

One of these days we're going to read an article about someone killed while commuting the first day after being ordered to RTO. Seems inevitable, anyway. I wonder what the execs involved will say?

nidnogg 2y ago
They will say nothing because there is no correlation - they could've been killed on their way to a doctor's appointment under a remote work policy. I'm 100% in on full-remote, but these warnings against crime when discussing RTO are a bit too privileged for my liking. It's not like you're safe and locked against all evils inside your home if you're working remote, you're still a human being and you'll eventually be required to leave your dungeon and do something in your life sometime.

gpopides 2y ago

I was working remote at my company for 2 years. Suddenly our CEO decided that we should be working more in the office, out of nowhere. Problem is, we were literally 2 engineers available to attend the office while the rest (~8 people) were remote. Eventually i resigned and now (while i was the person with the most technical and product knowledge of the company) the rest of the engineers are following, there is a risk for the company that will leave them with literally 2 or 3 engineers, while they need at least 10. To this day, i still can't fully understand what was on his mind that he essentially broke apart something that was working and delivering and now he may end up with no engineering team at all.

linotype 2y ago
Probably just read it in Forbes or Bloomberg Business.
CamperBob2 2y ago
To this day, i still can't fully understand what was on his mind that he essentially broke apart something that was working and delivering and now he may end up with no engineering team at all. It might be interesting to ask him.
sys_64738 2y ago
Always got to be tinkering. Idiots like this don’t grasp things work despite you interfering, not because of you interfering. Most C-level idiots are dumb as a bag of rocks.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

IMO Drew Houston's quote in the article really hit the nail on the head: "They keep hitting the go-back-to-2019 button, and it’s clear it’s not working." I personally am sympathetic to the idea that most people are more engaged and more productive when they are working together, in person. While I certainly don't miss the commute or office politics, I do miss seeing colleagues in person, and I felt I would often learn things faster when it was easier to have impromptu discussions with others. I also just kinda felt like I cared more. But the point is, while I sometimes wish I could hit the "return to 2019 button", that world simply does not exist anymore, and it never will. Like some of the comments here point out very well, I know lots of folks who have been forced into RTO, and then just spend the majority of their time in the office on Zoom calls because many colleagues are still remote - the whole thing is nuts. Enlightened management just needs to realize that as much as they may want to "wave that magic want", it ain't gonna happen. The world has changed, and it's much better to accept the reality of remote work than pretend you can do a "Superman spin the world backwards" trick. At the same time, I think employees should realize the risks with remote work - after nearly a quarter century in this business I've finally seen a real explosion of off shoring since the pandemic, and I think it (obviously among many other factors) is having a real downward pressure on software engineering salaries in the US.

IshKebab 2y ago
> downward pressure on software engineering salaries in the US And hopefully an upward pressure elsewhere! I think it's not too bleak for you guys tbh - a lot of remote US jobs aren't really available to most of the world because they have timezone restrictions. You'd just better hope South America doesn't get its shit together!
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  I think South (and Central) America kinda has gotten its shit together though. I've personally worked with great devs from Costa Rica and Argentina. Lots more offshoring to Eastern Europe as well because there are still a good couple hours of overlap during the business day where it's easy to communicate.

wikibob 2y ago

Unpaywalled https://archive.is/2024.08.02-162144/https://fortune.com/2024/08/02/tech-ceos-return-to-office-mandate/ https://archive.is/2024.08.02-162144/https://fortune.com/202...

ridiculous_leke 2y ago

Hopefully, some of these corps would sell their real estate in the future.

gtvwill 2y ago

Need to change heading RTO to return to office. RTO has always stood for rostered time off, its an industry standard term. It makes it confusing if you repurpose these terms for incorrect items/uses.

rvbissell 2y ago
There are only so many TLAs...

agata4151 2y ago

[flagged]

stranded22 2y ago

I thought it was more that they wanted to cut costs without announcing layoffs.

luke-stanley 2y ago

The title is different from what the article current title is, and the grammar of, "are backtrack" is wrong.

t-writescode 2y ago
Looks like I didn't correctly proofread all the shortening I had to do to make it fit within Hacker News' title size limits :) I tried pretty hard, though.

tmaly 2y ago

My company has 3 days a week in office required with first business day of week being mandatory. If we don’t follow policy you get docked your paid time off and your year end bonus is affected. They track everything, when you swipe the door, when you sign in on the computer. How long your signed in for.