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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
by 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 agoThis 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 agoSame 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 agolet them get notifications
- NewJazz 2y agoCreate filter rule > skip inbox lol
- toomuchtodo 2y agoInterview for remote roles from the office.
- faizshah 2y agoSame at Amazon, 0 teammates out of the 100+ on my product work at my office or in my timezone but I have to badge into it because they don’t allow virtual positions anymore. So now I have to spend 2.5 hours commuting, worse mood, I'm less flexible for meetings… If you’re wondering why I stay, it’s cause Amazon was my first real Software job, I started as an intern in 2020 and was always remote. I’m on a team that rapidly grew during covid and I happen to have been on the team the longest so it’s hard for me to find a position with an equivalent staff level scope with my level of experience.
- VectorLock 2y agoPay somebody to badge in/out for you. If none of your team mates are in the office, who will notice?
- glimshe 2y agoGoogle is installing face recognition on some offices to prevent this trick.
- mandeepj 2y agoSo, you are asking OP to get a dupe badge or ship their badge to someone else? If latter, what if OP needs their badge? Proxy entries can be easily validated through camera. It’s all asking for a trouble for a small short term benefit
- VectorLock 2y agoSaving 2.5 hours a day I wouldn't classify as a "small short term benefit."
- ridiculous_leke 2y agoIsn't that ID fraud?
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
- sidewndr46 2y agoThat's understandable after all. It's an advertising company, not a tech company. Small details like vacation aren't really something they can account for.
- thn-gap 2y agoMost teams in Europe either don't care, or can't use the badging data to affect performance because whatever local laws. I'm glad that for once they didn't fully enforce policies worldwide because some VP in the US is butthurt that their reports don't want to show up at the office.
- polotics 2y agoWhat about the coffee-badging? That is, turning-up for one hour or so at a convenient time of those three days, maybe getting lunch with colleagues, and working the rest while in commute or at home...
- bradknowles 2y agoThey are also tracking when you badge in for the first time in the day, and when you badge out for the last time, and all the times in between. Because of course you have to badge out and back in again to go to the bathroom or the cafe. This tracking is reported all the way down to your immediate manager on a weekly basis. Or, at least it was back when I worked at Amazon.
- polotics 2y agoOk but this is only Amazon's SOP of mistreating employees as a trauma-bonding technique, right? I don't think this is industry-wide at all.
- bradknowles 2y agoAmazon is certainly not the only company to do RTO. Nor are they the only company to do stack ranking. Nor are they the only company to do “hire for firing”, which is what unregretted attrition is basically about. So far, they do seem to be the only company I’ve heard of so far that is doing the forced co-location with your management, specifically for people who were hired as remote and promised that they could stay remote. I’m sure they have some other practices that may be common amongst other companies, and probably some that are not common amongst other companies. But in terms of the main ones I mentioned, there is a great deal of overlap.
- forinti 2y agoI have to go to the office once a week and besides communicating with my colleagues over IM, I have to connect over RDS to my machine because it sits in another room. I go to the office and I'm still remote!
- Rinzler89 2y ago>I go to the office and I'm still remote! Management doesn't care you come to the office just to do your work remotely anyway since your other coders are not in the same geographical location as you, they just want you in the office because they are also in the office because the CEO also wants them in the office.
- progbits 2y agoIt's a good signal of incompetent management. Even if you like going to the office and would go there anyway, you should take this as a warning that they will be making other stupid decisions not based on reason and logic, and fighting them will be frustrating.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoI am an employee of a subsidiary of a publicly traded company. We have team members who were purposefully moving further AWAY from the office so that they didn't have to comply with the policy. I simply have ignored the policy altogether. My manager and his manager both agree that it's silly (both of them live outside the range as well). My day is full of too many impromptu meetings that require me to be on zoom, and the environment at the office is utterly counterproductive to having those conversations or getting real work done. If I had to stop what I was doing and find a conference room every time I needed to communicate with a remote co-worker, I'd spend half my day walking to and from a room.
- sys_64738 2y agoI don’t comply either but still get paid. One day I won’t shrug
- varispeed 2y agoThere is logic though. RTO mandates are lobbied by landlords and shareholders who also hold stocks in commercial property. Empty offices lose value and the push is to use workers to artificially prop the value of offices. At very least those who come to office should be given share of capital gains.
- crystal_revenge 2y ago> There is no logic in RTO The logic of RTO has always been about two things: 1. A desperate attempt by investors higher up the food chain to salvage the commercial real-estate market. 2. A "work force reduction" technique that avoids too many negative headlines. Anytime you see RTO the logic is always coming from one of the above, and has nothing to do with productivity. Reduced push for RTO in tech is primarily because the commercial real-estate market is increasingly looking doomed regardless of efforts to get people back into office buildings.
- crummy 2y ago> A desperate attempt by investors higher up the food chain to salvage the commercial real-estate market. So how does that work - CEOs are being pressured by, not their VCs I assume, but like... hedge fund managers?
- bugbuddy 2y agoPretty sure rich people network is pretty strong.
- nemomarx 2y agoI think in some places companies got tax breaks predicated on having so many people commute and spend money in a city or etc?
- gamblor956 2y agoBasically this... though generally the tax breaks just require local hires within a city or county. Most of them don't have office mandates attached.
- joquarky 2y agoIt seems like they didn't do a comprehensive risk analysis. So why must the employees who had no say in the matter directly pay for the incompetence?
- crystal_revenge 2y ago
- linotype 2y agoIt’s just a stealth layoff.