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They say this now. But in 12 months (or the next layoff period), they will move from hybrid to full RTO. Still a shitty move to mandate RTO. Most people (IT fo

by xyst 2y ago

They say this now. But in 12 months (or the next layoff period), they will move from hybrid to full RTO. Still a shitty move to mandate RTO. Most people (IT folks) have spoke with do this routine: 0) daily routine to prepare for day 1) 1 hr commute to shitty office 2) login to computer, do calls with cross regional (and international) teams over Zoom/Teams/Webex or whatever conferencing system 3) teleconferencing with boss or manager 4) teleconferencing with company stakeholders 5) work on features and push code to remote systems (VCS, CI/CD…) 6) eat shitty food at nearby places, or use the low quality vending machines or cafeteria 7) logoff 8) 1 hr commute back home There are _some_ roles which may require in-person. But those were mostly sales folks. Some IT folks that deal with physical assets did require RTO (ie, data center / network engineers).

MollyRealized 2y ago
No disrespect intended by this, but I'm a little confused. What makes a direct contradiction of what Google said a reliable statement? Is it just pessimism bias?
sbrother 2y ago
I think the worst part is 9) at night, do more work that requires focus time while no one is bothering you, since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.
- rewgs 2y ago
  There's no way in hell I'd agree to additional remote work if I'm being demanded to return to the office. Either it's remote or it's not.
  - derwiki 2y ago
    If you won’t, others will. That’s this job market.
- kentbrew 2y ago
  Don't forget 10) get your ass in bed by 10pm so you can haul it out at 5 to get to work again on time tomorrow.
- linotype 2y ago
  So stop doing it. It’s making it worse for everyone else who has boundaries and a life outside of work.
- macintux 2y ago
  Yep. Many of my days are 4-6 hours of meetings in the morning, 2 more hours of paperwork/email/coordination activities, go get dinner, then work another 2-3 hours. Thank goodness I can work from home. I know in some ways that makes my flexibility more damaging to my work/life balance, but the tradeoff is worth it to me.
  - sbrother 2y ago
    Yep that schedule is pretty familiar for me as well. I’m willing to do it when necessary; I feel like it’s fair given the flexibility and trust I’m given as a fully remote employee. When I’ve worked in the office in the past, the laptop stays closed as soon as I leave work at 5. They don’t get to have it both ways.
- ein0p 2y ago
  That’s how it was for me circa 2004-2005. The only way I could get anything real work done was from home, after hours. During the day all we did was sit in meetings and report status to each other and to the higher ups. Worse, then the higher ups decided that we don’t need a sustained engineering team for the past two releases (boxed software) and the team would context switch between building new stuff and patching what’s already out there, 2 releases back. I said fuck it and left.
- chii 2y ago
  > since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time. which is why you should not be doing overtime to meet expectation. Expectation (aka, productivity) needs to drop when RTO is mandated.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    the only thing I can do more efficiently in the office is socialize, so I assume that that's what they're talking about when they talk about collaboration and culture and all that shit, so how's the wife?
worstspotgain 2y ago
In the Bay Area, 1-hour commutes are generally for older and apartment people. Younger family people are in the 2+ range.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  When I lived in the Bay Area, my commute was ~2.5 hours each way. I would have killed for a 1 hour commute.
  - asyx 2y ago
    Damn I was ready to jump in front of a train after having a 2h commute to university by train. Can’t imagine doing that in a car where I have to be alert as well.
  - barsonme 2y ago
    That’s insane. 13 hours of work + commute. After 7 hours of sleep you only have 4 hours left in your day for literally everything else.
    - commandar 2y ago
      The push for the 8 hour work day over a century ago was often accompanied with slogans to the effect of "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours for what we will." 5 hours round trip commuting a day is giving up over half of your prerogative time to simply shuffling from one place to another. The Bay Area is lucrative monetarily and all, but there's just no world where that's worth it for me.
      - red-iron-pine 2y ago
        A lot of people had to literally fight and die for that 8 hour day too.
      - spacemadness 2y ago
        I’ve worked in tech in the Bay for over a decade and met a handful of people with that insane of a commute. It’s not normal.
Spooky23 2y ago
There’s a ton of fraud in this space. You need at least hybrid to keep that at bay. At a previous place, we chose hybrid RTO over intrusive surveillance. My opinion shifted from being a full remote advocate after I caught a half dozen folks with various schemes and scams. The straw that broke the camels back was a guy who lied about where he was living. He was going through a divorce and the ex-wife ratted him out to the state tax authority to get the reward. The company was fined by both states. The ex made like $50k.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
  Define “fraud”? If you get your work done in two hours and can’t progress until a teammate does their end, is it better or worse if you are scrolling HN in an office or at home? I run my own company, I do not give a single fuck how, where, or when people get their job done. I only care they deliver. Likewise, people who need to be watched over are not the employees I want in the first place. I’m not running a daycare for children. Adults can make their own decisions, if you need me over your shoulder to deliver you aren’t useful to me to start with.
  - grayfaced 2y ago
    And if you find out that your developers were actually in North Korea and you've violated sanctions, would you care then? https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-north-korean-remote-it-worker-fraud-schemes-through-charges-and https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-n...
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      They’re literally doing the work. They’re not accused of placing backdoors, they’re not accused of anything aside from the US government running an antiquated sanctions regime, and just doing the work. The US government isnt charging companies with OFAC violations, so there is no reason to care. North Koreans learned how to be a fake Staff Software Engineer and do non-fake things for real RSUs. Companies shouldnt burden the rest of their employees for social verification, for something that isnt a problem for the company.
stego-tech 2y ago
I mean, my experience says you’re right, but the red hot labor summer combined with Dell and Amazon _and_ Apple workers vocally opposing such mandates and leaving outright give me hope that maybe, _maybe_ leadership will accept this is a losing battle and embrace the new norms. Barring that, the younger working demographics have made it abundantly clear there’s a zero tolerance for the traditional corporate bullshit. When mandates first came down, they responded with “coffee badging” and the like; I don’t doubt there will be another adaptation, like arriving late and leaving early, baking the commute time silently into the work day. The writing is on the wall, and the modern worker knows how badly they’re being screwed over. I’d argue it’s a wiser decision to let the workers do their jobs from wherever, consolidate offices into continental HQs, and decentralize the workforce to disincentivize collective action. Workers get the flexibility they need to survive in the current cost of living/housing crisis, and companies don’t risk bleeding talent or earning the wrath of a Union election. Everybody wins except commercial landlords, but they’re not exactly the good guys here anyway.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Tech organizations are all overstaffed from the pandemic. Engineering is usually boom/bust. Likely outcome is recession and purge. The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    It depends on your perspective and context. I refuse to subscribe to the defeatist attitudes of "this is how it has been and therefore always shall be" that's in your post, because otherwise what's the point of participating at all if change is impossible? The engineering boom-bust cycle is a recent phenomenon (past fifty years) relatively speaking, and it doesn't mean it's a permanent fixture of civilization unless we choose to accept it as such. I reject permanence and advocate change, and so should you. Besides, "Gen Alpha" won't be in cube farms even with a RTO, because Glorious Leaders (TM) in tech threw out cubicles, personal identity, and privacy in favor of hotel seating and clean desk policies. A return to cubicles would be a marked improvement over the present status quo, if we could just figure out the right marketing buzzwords to trick the C-Suite into believing it's the Next Big Thing (TM).
whstl 2y ago
> There are _some_ roles which may require in-person IME when working in a Product role, it worked better from the office. Doesn't have to be every day, but being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings. Tech positions don't even need daily video calls IMO. My team experimented with a few days of written status updates and it was fine. But they chose to have a 10-mins stand-up mainly for socialization.
- dijksterhuis 2y ago
  > being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings i do not understand what people are talking about when they say things like this personA: hey @personB you got 20 mins to talk about XYZ? personB: yeah gimme 10 mins personA: k, i’ll grab a coffee personA: /zoom start that’s ^ not scheduling a meeting. that’s having the same direct conversation but with like one extra step (joining zoom). the rest of what your comment says is fair enough. i just see this mentioned a lot in anti-WFH leaning comments. often about how hard it is to mentor a junior. (i can’t remember the exact slack command but you hopefully get the idea).
  - whstl 2y ago
    Well, that's already 30 minutes instead of 30 seconds. And that's without taking what sibling poster said: sometimes people take 1h, 2h, 1 day to reply you on Slack. With face to face communication you convey more than "the message". This comes from personal experience: dealing with tech people with Slack-only communication is fine. Dealing with non-tech people is much different. For example, I just RIGHT NOW have to ask a Salesperson about whether a feature is ready to go into prod. I can just walk 10 meters to their desk and get an answer in 5 secs. OR I can write to them in Slack on email and get an answer Monday, because they have 20 unread Slack messages and 500 unread e-mails. You might call this "a bother" to them. To this Salesperson, which happens to be my buddy: this is how they prefers to work.
  - what 2y ago
    You might be leaving out the one hour delay between the first two messages.
skybrian 2y ago
Google had flex time for all the time I worked there, for a dozen years, well before the pandemic. I don't see any particular reason it wouldn't work for them now?
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  Google has always had the flexible working hours and didn't mind the occasional "plumber coming today" day, but before COVID it was very allergic to permanent WFH arrangements.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Yes, can confirm.
angmarsbane 2y ago
RTO for sales folks doesn't make sense to me either. Typically you want your sales folks on the road not in your office. I think sales is a good candidate for fully remote.
- DebtDeflation 2y ago
  You 100% want your sales folks at customers not in your office. Most roles can be hybrid/remote. Regardless of Tech, Finance, Marketing, whatever, if the job involves sitting in front of a computer or being on the phone all day it's a good candidate. If you were doing the job remotely from March 2020 through the end of 2021 and being effective, it's a good candidate.
  - bathtub365 2y ago
    Sales also has long established and standard ways to measure performance
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  Amazon is not mandating RTO for sales folks.
  - deagle50 2y ago
    Good, they didn't when I was in sales at AWS (well before Covid).
ghaff 2y ago
Inside sales maybe. But sales reps who physically meet with customers spend very little time in company offices in general.
bethling 2y ago
I don't know if that will happen. A lot of the cloud heavy offices moved to shared desks for engineers, so there's only a desk for 2 days/week, so they don't have enough space available for everyone to return full time. It's still possible, but I don't think would be as easy as an annoucement.
yegle 2y ago
At least Google's offices have nice perks: free gym, healthy and nutritious meals, healthy and tasty snacks. Personally those perks are enough to negate the terrible commute. I was told Amazon's offices has none of these.
nostromo 2y ago
You're forgetting that a lot of people still have to WFH, they just do it now before or after going to the office - so it's even worse than you're stating. I know some folks that work from the west coast with customers on the east coast, and they regularly are taking meetings at 6am from home, then commuting in, and getting home late. If we return to the office, we should not also be expected to work long hours when we're at home. It's the worst of both words.
- technick 2y ago
  I was told at a previous job I couldn't work from home but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened. My response was I couldn't work from home and just left my laptop at work.
  - chii 2y ago
    > but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened. which is called being on call, and it needs to be paid. Otherwise, you're right, you cannot be expected to work (at home or not) in off hours.
- deciplex 2y ago
  >It's the worst of both words. And it's quickly becoming the status quo. They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?
- jerlam 2y ago
  West coast seems like the worst time zone to be remote. You have to get up early for meetings with your coworkers, and they can get your immediate feedback on their problems. But when you have your own problems, it's often too late for them to help you.
BeetleB 2y ago
I think if you're required to RTO, you should insist on not having Zoom/Teams/Webex on while in the office. "Come to my cube if you need me". Way before the pandemic, I almost never had those tools running on my work laptop - unless it was for a (rare at the time) cross-geo meeting. A coworker once sent me a screenshot of how I appeared in the IM tool - Last seen 120 days ago. Sadly, that went away once we hired our first remote person.
- deciplex 2y ago
  If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.
  - lbreakjai 2y ago
    You have to fully lean into it. Or at least pretend to. My company implemented RTO, citing the usual collaboration and culture, and I've suddenly turned into the biggest in-person sycophant every time they try to organise workshops online "because it's much easier". We have offices on both sides of the Channel. It means travelling, which is expensive, hard to align, and really disruptive, but since the RTO mandate I suddenly realised _how valuable_ those in person interactions were, and how much more creative we were thanks to those watercooler chats. I'm interviewing elsewhere, so I'm having a bit of fun seeing how far I can push the malicious compliance.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  No one else is in the office on the same days. I recently seeked out a job that was in-office. It was just a reminder that the model is dead beyond repair. These boomer CEOs can't be gone soon enough. I'm full remote now and the engagement, interaction and team comraderie are FAR better.
- closeparen 2y ago
  In the best case you might have all the engineers rolling up to the same line manager sitting in the same office, but those above entry-level are expected to spend a good portion of their time collaborating across teams (and therefore across sites).
hintymad 2y ago
> shitty office I'm not sure this applies to Google. Their offices and food are pretty nice. And their gyms are top-notch. If you stick with the salad bar, I'd venture to guess the freshness and nutrition variety will be better than most IT guys can get at home. Of course, this does not mean RTO won't suck.
- closeparen 2y ago
  Tech office amenity spaces are visually impressive, but then your actual workstation is just a desk in an ocean of desks, where you have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to hear yourself think.
slashdave 2y ago
> But those were mostly sales folks. So, are there really so few biotech / hardware people here? Hard to do lab work from home.
- casion 2y ago
  > mostly Yeah, but here's an exception!
deanCommie 2y ago
You're making it sound as if working from home was something that everyone did eternally, and not something that started in 2020 out of necessity. Going through your routine: 1) Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office. In fact in the beforeCOVID times, people made an effort to live closer to where they work. Sure many can't afford to, but we're not talking about baristas here, right? But highly paid IT staff. In the cases like Google the office is far from shitty. In the cases like Amazon, the offices are more mid, but located central to where people live in cities. (We'll come back to this) 2/3/4) Legitimate problem, that exists SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF HYBRID. If everyone RTOs 5 days a week like Amazon did, it's no longer an issue. 6) If it's a nice office like Google the food isn't shitty. If it's a mid office like Amazon, it's downtown surrounded by the best restaurants/cafes the city has to offer.
- chii 2y ago
  > Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office > made an effort to live closer to where they work sacrificed a lot to live closer, out of necessity, pre-covid. Then, it turned out that WFH can be made to work, with little to zero loss in productivity (if not gained productivity).
- surajrmal 2y ago
  If you work on a distributed team, then you were already talking to a screen in the office almost constantly. It's only gotten worse since covid.
- rewgs 2y ago
  > You're making it sound as if working from home was something that everyone did eternally, and not something that started in 2020 out of necessity. Err...what? Let's not rewrite history here. Plenty of people -- especially in tech -- worked remotely before Covid. Yes, the numbers increased dramatically, but don't make it sound like it was unheard of before the pandemic. Also: tons and tons of people have no choice but to live far from the office. Rent is cheaper and more plentiful the farther out you get from metro centers, simple as.

by xyst 2y ago

MollyRealized 2y ago

No disrespect intended by this, but I'm a little confused. What makes a direct contradiction of what Google said a reliable statement? Is it just pessimism bias?

sbrother 2y ago

I think the worst part is 9) at night, do more work that requires focus time while no one is bothering you, since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.

rewgs 2y ago
There's no way in hell I'd agree to additional remote work if I'm being demanded to return to the office. Either it's remote or it's not.
- derwiki 2y ago
  If you won’t, others will. That’s this job market.
kentbrew 2y ago
Don't forget 10) get your ass in bed by 10pm so you can haul it out at 5 to get to work again on time tomorrow.
linotype 2y ago
So stop doing it. It’s making it worse for everyone else who has boundaries and a life outside of work.
macintux 2y ago
Yep. Many of my days are 4-6 hours of meetings in the morning, 2 more hours of paperwork/email/coordination activities, go get dinner, then work another 2-3 hours. Thank goodness I can work from home. I know in some ways that makes my flexibility more damaging to my work/life balance, but the tradeoff is worth it to me.
- sbrother 2y ago
  Yep that schedule is pretty familiar for me as well. I’m willing to do it when necessary; I feel like it’s fair given the flexibility and trust I’m given as a fully remote employee. When I’ve worked in the office in the past, the laptop stays closed as soon as I leave work at 5. They don’t get to have it both ways.
ein0p 2y ago
That’s how it was for me circa 2004-2005. The only way I could get anything real work done was from home, after hours. During the day all we did was sit in meetings and report status to each other and to the higher ups. Worse, then the higher ups decided that we don’t need a sustained engineering team for the past two releases (boxed software) and the team would context switch between building new stuff and patching what’s already out there, 2 releases back. I said fuck it and left.
chii 2y ago
> since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time. which is why you should not be doing overtime to meet expectation. Expectation (aka, productivity) needs to drop when RTO is mandated.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  the only thing I can do more efficiently in the office is socialize, so I assume that that's what they're talking about when they talk about collaboration and culture and all that shit, so how's the wife?

worstspotgain 2y ago

In the Bay Area, 1-hour commutes are generally for older and apartment people. Younger family people are in the 2+ range.

ryandrake 2y ago
When I lived in the Bay Area, my commute was ~2.5 hours each way. I would have killed for a 1 hour commute.
- asyx 2y ago
  Damn I was ready to jump in front of a train after having a 2h commute to university by train. Can’t imagine doing that in a car where I have to be alert as well.
- barsonme 2y ago
  That’s insane. 13 hours of work + commute. After 7 hours of sleep you only have 4 hours left in your day for literally everything else.
  - commandar 2y ago
    The push for the 8 hour work day over a century ago was often accompanied with slogans to the effect of "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours for what we will." 5 hours round trip commuting a day is giving up over half of your prerogative time to simply shuffling from one place to another. The Bay Area is lucrative monetarily and all, but there's just no world where that's worth it for me.
    - red-iron-pine 2y ago
      A lot of people had to literally fight and die for that 8 hour day too.
    - spacemadness 2y ago
      I’ve worked in tech in the Bay for over a decade and met a handful of people with that insane of a commute. It’s not normal.

Spooky23 2y ago

There’s a ton of fraud in this space. You need at least hybrid to keep that at bay. At a previous place, we chose hybrid RTO over intrusive surveillance. My opinion shifted from being a full remote advocate after I caught a half dozen folks with various schemes and scams. The straw that broke the camels back was a guy who lied about where he was living. He was going through a divorce and the ex-wife ratted him out to the state tax authority to get the reward. The company was fined by both states. The ex made like $50k.

fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
Define “fraud”? If you get your work done in two hours and can’t progress until a teammate does their end, is it better or worse if you are scrolling HN in an office or at home? I run my own company, I do not give a single fuck how, where, or when people get their job done. I only care they deliver. Likewise, people who need to be watched over are not the employees I want in the first place. I’m not running a daycare for children. Adults can make their own decisions, if you need me over your shoulder to deliver you aren’t useful to me to start with.
- grayfaced 2y ago
  And if you find out that your developers were actually in North Korea and you've violated sanctions, would you care then? https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-north-korean-remote-it-worker-fraud-schemes-through-charges-and https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-n...
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    They’re literally doing the work. They’re not accused of placing backdoors, they’re not accused of anything aside from the US government running an antiquated sanctions regime, and just doing the work. The US government isnt charging companies with OFAC violations, so there is no reason to care. North Koreans learned how to be a fake Staff Software Engineer and do non-fake things for real RSUs. Companies shouldnt burden the rest of their employees for social verification, for something that isnt a problem for the company.

stego-tech 2y ago

I mean, my experience says you’re right, but the red hot labor summer combined with Dell and Amazon _and_ Apple workers vocally opposing such mandates and leaving outright give me hope that maybe, _maybe_ leadership will accept this is a losing battle and embrace the new norms. Barring that, the younger working demographics have made it abundantly clear there’s a zero tolerance for the traditional corporate bullshit. When mandates first came down, they responded with “coffee badging” and the like; I don’t doubt there will be another adaptation, like arriving late and leaving early, baking the commute time silently into the work day. The writing is on the wall, and the modern worker knows how badly they’re being screwed over. I’d argue it’s a wiser decision to let the workers do their jobs from wherever, consolidate offices into continental HQs, and decentralize the workforce to disincentivize collective action. Workers get the flexibility they need to survive in the current cost of living/housing crisis, and companies don’t risk bleeding talent or earning the wrath of a Union election. Everybody wins except commercial landlords, but they’re not exactly the good guys here anyway.

Spooky23 2y ago
Tech organizations are all overstaffed from the pandemic. Engineering is usually boom/bust. Likely outcome is recession and purge. The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  It depends on your perspective and context. I refuse to subscribe to the defeatist attitudes of "this is how it has been and therefore always shall be" that's in your post, because otherwise what's the point of participating at all if change is impossible? The engineering boom-bust cycle is a recent phenomenon (past fifty years) relatively speaking, and it doesn't mean it's a permanent fixture of civilization unless we choose to accept it as such. I reject permanence and advocate change, and so should you. Besides, "Gen Alpha" won't be in cube farms even with a RTO, because Glorious Leaders (TM) in tech threw out cubicles, personal identity, and privacy in favor of hotel seating and clean desk policies. A return to cubicles would be a marked improvement over the present status quo, if we could just figure out the right marketing buzzwords to trick the C-Suite into believing it's the Next Big Thing (TM).

whstl 2y ago

> There are _some_ roles which may require in-person IME when working in a Product role, it worked better from the office. Doesn't have to be every day, but being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings. Tech positions don't even need daily video calls IMO. My team experimented with a few days of written status updates and it was fine. But they chose to have a 10-mins stand-up mainly for socialization.

dijksterhuis 2y ago
> being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings i do not understand what people are talking about when they say things like this personA: hey @personB you got 20 mins to talk about XYZ? personB: yeah gimme 10 mins personA: k, i’ll grab a coffee personA: /zoom start that’s ^ not scheduling a meeting. that’s having the same direct conversation but with like one extra step (joining zoom). the rest of what your comment says is fair enough. i just see this mentioned a lot in anti-WFH leaning comments. often about how hard it is to mentor a junior. (i can’t remember the exact slack command but you hopefully get the idea).
- whstl 2y ago
  Well, that's already 30 minutes instead of 30 seconds. And that's without taking what sibling poster said: sometimes people take 1h, 2h, 1 day to reply you on Slack. With face to face communication you convey more than "the message". This comes from personal experience: dealing with tech people with Slack-only communication is fine. Dealing with non-tech people is much different. For example, I just RIGHT NOW have to ask a Salesperson about whether a feature is ready to go into prod. I can just walk 10 meters to their desk and get an answer in 5 secs. OR I can write to them in Slack on email and get an answer Monday, because they have 20 unread Slack messages and 500 unread e-mails. You might call this "a bother" to them. To this Salesperson, which happens to be my buddy: this is how they prefers to work.
- what 2y ago
  You might be leaving out the one hour delay between the first two messages.

skybrian 2y ago

Google had flex time for all the time I worked there, for a dozen years, well before the pandemic. I don't see any particular reason it wouldn't work for them now?

teractiveodular 2y ago
Google has always had the flexible working hours and didn't mind the occasional "plumber coming today" day, but before COVID it was very allergic to permanent WFH arrangements.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Yes, can confirm.

angmarsbane 2y ago

RTO for sales folks doesn't make sense to me either. Typically you want your sales folks on the road not in your office. I think sales is a good candidate for fully remote.

DebtDeflation 2y ago
You 100% want your sales folks at customers not in your office. Most roles can be hybrid/remote. Regardless of Tech, Finance, Marketing, whatever, if the job involves sitting in front of a computer or being on the phone all day it's a good candidate. If you were doing the job remotely from March 2020 through the end of 2021 and being effective, it's a good candidate.
- bathtub365 2y ago
  Sales also has long established and standard ways to measure performance
teractiveodular 2y ago
Amazon is not mandating RTO for sales folks.
- deagle50 2y ago
  Good, they didn't when I was in sales at AWS (well before Covid).

ghaff 2y ago

Inside sales maybe. But sales reps who physically meet with customers spend very little time in company offices in general.

bethling 2y ago

I don't know if that will happen. A lot of the cloud heavy offices moved to shared desks for engineers, so there's only a desk for 2 days/week, so they don't have enough space available for everyone to return full time. It's still possible, but I don't think would be as easy as an annoucement.

yegle 2y ago

At least Google's offices have nice perks: free gym, healthy and nutritious meals, healthy and tasty snacks. Personally those perks are enough to negate the terrible commute. I was told Amazon's offices has none of these.

nostromo 2y ago

You're forgetting that a lot of people still have to WFH, they just do it now before or after going to the office - so it's even worse than you're stating. I know some folks that work from the west coast with customers on the east coast, and they regularly are taking meetings at 6am from home, then commuting in, and getting home late. If we return to the office, we should not also be expected to work long hours when we're at home. It's the worst of both words.

technick 2y ago
I was told at a previous job I couldn't work from home but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened. My response was I couldn't work from home and just left my laptop at work.
- chii 2y ago
  > but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened. which is called being on call, and it needs to be paid. Otherwise, you're right, you cannot be expected to work (at home or not) in off hours.
deciplex 2y ago
>It's the worst of both words. And it's quickly becoming the status quo. They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?
jerlam 2y ago
West coast seems like the worst time zone to be remote. You have to get up early for meetings with your coworkers, and they can get your immediate feedback on their problems. But when you have your own problems, it's often too late for them to help you.

BeetleB 2y ago

I think if you're required to RTO, you should insist on not having Zoom/Teams/Webex on while in the office. "Come to my cube if you need me". Way before the pandemic, I almost never had those tools running on my work laptop - unless it was for a (rare at the time) cross-geo meeting. A coworker once sent me a screenshot of how I appeared in the IM tool - Last seen 120 days ago. Sadly, that went away once we hired our first remote person.

deciplex 2y ago
If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.
- lbreakjai 2y ago
  You have to fully lean into it. Or at least pretend to. My company implemented RTO, citing the usual collaboration and culture, and I've suddenly turned into the biggest in-person sycophant every time they try to organise workshops online "because it's much easier". We have offices on both sides of the Channel. It means travelling, which is expensive, hard to align, and really disruptive, but since the RTO mandate I suddenly realised _how valuable_ those in person interactions were, and how much more creative we were thanks to those watercooler chats. I'm interviewing elsewhere, so I'm having a bit of fun seeing how far I can push the malicious compliance.
datavirtue 2y ago
No one else is in the office on the same days. I recently seeked out a job that was in-office. It was just a reminder that the model is dead beyond repair. These boomer CEOs can't be gone soon enough. I'm full remote now and the engagement, interaction and team comraderie are FAR better.
closeparen 2y ago
In the best case you might have all the engineers rolling up to the same line manager sitting in the same office, but those above entry-level are expected to spend a good portion of their time collaborating across teams (and therefore across sites).

hintymad 2y ago

> shitty office I'm not sure this applies to Google. Their offices and food are pretty nice. And their gyms are top-notch. If you stick with the salad bar, I'd venture to guess the freshness and nutrition variety will be better than most IT guys can get at home. Of course, this does not mean RTO won't suck.

closeparen 2y ago
Tech office amenity spaces are visually impressive, but then your actual workstation is just a desk in an ocean of desks, where you have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to hear yourself think.

slashdave 2y ago

> But those were mostly sales folks. So, are there really so few biotech / hardware people here? Hard to do lab work from home.

casion 2y ago
> mostly Yeah, but here's an exception!

deanCommie 2y ago

You're making it sound as if working from home was something that everyone did eternally, and not something that started in 2020 out of necessity. Going through your routine: 1) Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office. In fact in the beforeCOVID times, people made an effort to live closer to where they work. Sure many can't afford to, but we're not talking about baristas here, right? But highly paid IT staff. In the cases like Google the office is far from shitty. In the cases like Amazon, the offices are more mid, but located central to where people live in cities. (We'll come back to this) 2/3/4) Legitimate problem, that exists SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF HYBRID. If everyone RTOs 5 days a week like Amazon did, it's no longer an issue. 6) If it's a nice office like Google the food isn't shitty. If it's a mid office like Amazon, it's downtown surrounded by the best restaurants/cafes the city has to offer.

chii 2y ago
> Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office > made an effort to live closer to where they work sacrificed a lot to live closer, out of necessity, pre-covid. Then, it turned out that WFH can be made to work, with little to zero loss in productivity (if not gained productivity).
surajrmal 2y ago
If you work on a distributed team, then you were already talking to a screen in the office almost constantly. It's only gotten worse since covid.
rewgs 2y ago
> You're making it sound as if working from home was something that everyone did eternally, and not something that started in 2020 out of necessity. Err...what? Let's not rewrite history here. Plenty of people -- especially in tech -- worked remotely before Covid. Yes, the numbers increased dramatically, but don't make it sound like it was unheard of before the pandemic. Also: tons and tons of people have no choice but to live far from the office. Rent is cheaper and more plentiful the farther out you get from metro centers, simple as.