12 ms·

The general reasoning given by a lot of these companies is that WFH did not work. Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to

The general reasoning given by a lot of these companies is that WFH did not work. Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up. I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.

scarface_74 2y ago
Of course they are. It makes no sense for sales roles to be in an office for “collaboration”.
foobiekr 2y ago
I work for a company that made a big deal about how well it worked. The CEO and chief people officer both made a lot of public statements about it, during and just after covid. They did this claiming they had the numbers to back it up and said numbers but they basically made them up. It was PR and they were using it to aid recruiting into what was and is a company that young people avoided. What numbers they did have were mostly inertia and a side effect of lockdowns (people had little else to do); new projects and new teams floundered very visibly. Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it. I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
- tempest_ 2y ago
  This often just feels like bad management. They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff. Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
  - martinald 2y ago
    I don't know if it's bad management per se. I think some people are very well suited for remote; some people aren't. Probably a rough extension of introversion/extroversion in the people mix. If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general). Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan. The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse. My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.
    - missedthecue 2y ago
      yeah I feel like blaming management is like blaming teachers when students got bad scores during remote-schooling. You can give them all the resources they need to succeed, but if they'd rather go to the dog park in the middle of the day, there's not much that can be done. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.
      - tempest_ 2y ago
        The metaphor breaks down a bit when you consider that teachers don't generally get to pick their students while organizations get to choose their employees. Failing to choose the right employees is a failure of management.
        foobiekr 2y ago
        Unfortunately many of the employees _most interested_ in remote work are such because they want to do things other than work. Not all. I work with some remotes who are awesome. But the 24 year olds who want to work remotely from Thailand aren't getting their shit done.
- zanfr 2y ago
  after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic.... and the company you work for seems rather incompetent
  - MyPasswordSucks 2y ago
    > after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic.... The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza. "After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.
    - daxelrod 2y ago
      I don’t understand how that conclusion follows from that comparison. We also wouldn’t describe the current day as “after the flu”. Both are endemic.
      - MyPasswordSucks 2y ago
        The phrase you picked to describe them is "endemic", rather than "ongoing pandemics". There's a reason for that.
        zanfr 2y ago
        by that token; you can argue HIV is endemic and nothing should be done about it... people will understand wearing condoms but apparently can't understand masking... hmm... neither are very difficult to do, I'd argue that wearing a condom is more tricky in some aspects. the reason is simple: wearing a mask reminds people there is a risk and it doesn't "look good", despite its many advantages for many pathogens and pollutants; also acknowledging indoor air quality is crap is hard for businesses (and governments) to do since they would need to invest into better ventilation and filtration systems.
    - 2y ago
- bee_rider 2y ago
  If they were willing to lie to juice their metrics during COVID, why would any outsider believe them now?
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > Internally, it was very clear that it did not work If it was clear, they shouldn't have trouble showing the data. Otherwise it's a case of "The data shows X, but my gut clearly shows Y" I can certainly believe it didn't work for some companies/roles. But the burden is on the company to demonstrate it.
  - foobiekr 2y ago
    The company was publicly lying that it did because execs thought it would help us recruit younger people.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  > Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks. Funny joke. I needed a laugh.
osigurdson 2y ago
I think it is largely just rationalizing what is fashionable. WFH was fashionable for a while. Now WFO + AI replacement is cool.
- andrekandre 2y ago
  its almost as if they are not totally rational actors and instead operating on vibes...
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    Honestly I think nearly anyone would do the same. Going against the flow is the rare territory of the founder.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
They're bending the knee. The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office. Trump, Musk, and Ramiswamy were all ultra-gung ho about ensuring that as many people with federal jobs were as miserable as possible.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office. I don’t know that that is a reasonable take. More appropriate would be to acknowledge that different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    Apparently my role could be remote but the company took it away. I don't think we need to give their good wills. They are just using the economic reality to fuck us, and I'm sure many of us are considering fucking back when the stars are right.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    > different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc. At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all of the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.
    - diogoadrados 2y ago
      out of a handful of the largest companies in the world, in a thread about the specific company IBM and its policies, why do you avoid naming the company and CEO?
BurningFrog 2y ago
Non conspiracy explanation: It seemed to work at first, but over time it became clear it didn't.
- fazeirony 2y ago
  > but over time it became clear it didn't. are profits spiralling downward? are these businesses, overall, making less profit? because of remote workers? or is it closer to the truth to say that no amount of profit - or asserting authority over workers - is ever enough and since companies are in a position of power to squeeze blood from a stone, they will?
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    If that how advantageous you think running a company is, you should definitely start one!
    - givemeethekeys 2y ago
      There's a complication to starting a company. The execs answer to the board and investors. Since so many companies are unprofitable for so long, it is very difficult to start a company today without either being rich or being beholden. I'm going to guess that most people who start companies are beholden. The investors need people to RTO for some important reasons - real estate values, economies built on supporting workers, and of course - some amount of lifestyle differentiation (a luxury of having fuck you money is being able to spend more time with friends and loved ones than the peasant class). WFH is a one of the most disruptive cultural shifts ever - pushback was only expected.
  - Alupis 2y ago
    Profits don't have to spiral for something to become clear it's not working. Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before". Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.
jlarocco 2y ago
Having worked at a fully remote company before (and during) COVID, I'm surprised so many companies have stuck with it for so long. IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc. Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it's gone as well as it has, but it's also not surprising it's gone badly for a lot of companies.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Easier to force people back versus fix bad management, because bad management is everywhere. (there is $120B+ in remote enterprise market cap as of this comment, anyone saying it doesn't work is not accurately representing the situation; it might not work for them because they are unwilling to make it work, but the evidence is clear it can work, does work, and did work during the pandemic)
- conductr 2y ago
  IME, I'm a CFO so see every department this is not specific to software industry, it went well but it also ultimately highlighted how inefficient most company's office workers are. So once those people adjust to WFH, get caught up on a backlog of projects, etc. (the "being very good at WFH" phase) they eventually become unnecessary and headcount reduction becomes more obvious next step even though WFH "worked". But, there's also the part about why did the backlog of projects not continue to grow? What are we working towards now? etc. The response to this is making people RTO, because we feel that we broke something by going completely remote. The company isn't as connected, they're just coasting now pushing things forward, etc. These are the kinds of reasons that employee's and executive's see the RTO issue so differently. I've personally worked at 4 different companies since early 2020. Not everyone does WFH well. Many pretend they do, but don't. Even those that do it well, do better when they meet regularly in person (have some hybrid model). Some teams/departments/functions are better at it than others, but companies as a whole I think perform better when the people have personal connections and relationships across the org. In a remote WFH situation, over time, through natural attrition, new people are onboarded and never actually meet anyone in the company and this becomes a large portion of employees that are very loosely connected in terms of their interpersonal relationships/network and this weakens the organization. I can see how that is fine in a individual contributor role of SWE, but for most roles, in most departments, it doesn't play out well (or takes a very special/rare personality trait to actually do it well).
marcusb 2y ago
For b2b sales, as this IBM initiative seems to be focused on, I think there are a few things going on. This is all my opinion, based on first hand observation during the height of COVID WFH in enterprise sales, for a vendor that did very well during the lockdown period but which "returned to customer" as quickly as possible. First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc. Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road. And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I am not in sales and don’t travel nearly as much as our sales team. But I have been in a customer facing cloud consulting role for 5 years. I am the first technical person that the client encounters after the sales team. I’ve done my fair amount of business travel. The argument is not that face to face to build relationships with customers is not important. It’s that it’s dumb to have “field by design” roles be forced to be in an office when they aren’t on customers sites. Besides that, it is disruptive in the office because you are spending a lot of time with the customer on conference calls and how it often works is that the people doing the work are not in the office or even in the same country. Your client facing staff is US based. But US employees are too expensive to do the grunt work (unless you’re using one of the exploitive WITCH companies). AWS exempted their “field by design” roles from being in the office during the first few RTO mandates. But they eventually forced them to be in an office this year (after I left). GCP has in office requirements for their Professional Services staff now too - full time direct hire employees for both AWS and GCP.
dfxm12 2y ago
It is exactly it. It's a means to lay off a bunch of workers without having to go through the legal red tape of layoffs designed to protect workers, including the WARN act.
nelblu 2y ago
> Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up. I took a new job in 2022, at that time everyone was still working from home. My boss, who was a VP at that time, said isn't this amazing? We save on fuel, time, spend more time at home etc. Productivity has been amazing and all. Two years later in early 2024 when they started pushing RTO, same guy repeats the standard bullshit about - we need those sidebar conversations, we need to meet face to face and all. Not a single word of how it wastes fuel, or time etc. I realized he was powerless against the corporate policies, but just his hypocrisy was enough for me to find another (100% remote) job.
- nunez 2y ago
  It's likely that both can be true: he meant what he said in 2022 but _had_ to mean what he said in 2024.
  - ruraljuror 2y ago
    Also that somebody could change their mind after two years of experience.
- Alupis 2y ago
  Why is it not possible both are/were true? At the time, WFH was new for most organizations - and yes it feels pretty great. Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind. Certain tasks can be best done in solitude at home. Others... require collaboration. Collaboration that's scheduled in meetings or the dreaded video call are not the same as spontaneous collaboration or just popping your head into someone's office/cube and asking a quick question. There's trade offs to both... and if a company has decided WFH isn't ideal for them, then you can leave and find a job that believes WFH is ideal.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    What you call “popping your head in someone’s cube”, I call “distraction from doing deep work”. I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption. My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard. I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions. No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.
archagon 2y ago
In truth, tech workers hold all the cards and could easily push for permanent WFH if only they organized. Instead, they let management walk back their promises with barely a peep. Foolish.
paulcole 2y ago
> Same companies were telling is how well it worked Do you mean “same” or “some”? Either way do you not believe that different companies can have different outcomes or that one company’s outcomes can change over time?

scarface_74 2y ago

Of course they are. It makes no sense for sales roles to be in an office for “collaboration”.

foobiekr 2y ago

I work for a company that made a big deal about how well it worked. The CEO and chief people officer both made a lot of public statements about it, during and just after covid. They did this claiming they had the numbers to back it up and said numbers but they basically made them up. It was PR and they were using it to aid recruiting into what was and is a company that young people avoided. What numbers they did have were mostly inertia and a side effect of lockdowns (people had little else to do); new projects and new teams floundered very visibly. Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it. I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.

tempest_ 2y ago
This often just feels like bad management. They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff. Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
- martinald 2y ago
  I don't know if it's bad management per se. I think some people are very well suited for remote; some people aren't. Probably a rough extension of introversion/extroversion in the people mix. If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general). Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan. The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse. My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.
  - missedthecue 2y ago
    yeah I feel like blaming management is like blaming teachers when students got bad scores during remote-schooling. You can give them all the resources they need to succeed, but if they'd rather go to the dog park in the middle of the day, there's not much that can be done. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.
    - tempest_ 2y ago
      The metaphor breaks down a bit when you consider that teachers don't generally get to pick their students while organizations get to choose their employees. Failing to choose the right employees is a failure of management.
      - foobiekr 2y ago
        Unfortunately many of the employees _most interested_ in remote work are such because they want to do things other than work. Not all. I work with some remotes who are awesome. But the 24 year olds who want to work remotely from Thailand aren't getting their shit done.
zanfr 2y ago
after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic.... and the company you work for seems rather incompetent
- MyPasswordSucks 2y ago
  > after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic.... The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza. "After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.
  - daxelrod 2y ago
    I don’t understand how that conclusion follows from that comparison. We also wouldn’t describe the current day as “after the flu”. Both are endemic.
    - MyPasswordSucks 2y ago
      The phrase you picked to describe them is "endemic", rather than "ongoing pandemics". There's a reason for that.
      - zanfr 2y ago
        by that token; you can argue HIV is endemic and nothing should be done about it... people will understand wearing condoms but apparently can't understand masking... hmm... neither are very difficult to do, I'd argue that wearing a condom is more tricky in some aspects. the reason is simple: wearing a mask reminds people there is a risk and it doesn't "look good", despite its many advantages for many pathogens and pollutants; also acknowledging indoor air quality is crap is hard for businesses (and governments) to do since they would need to invest into better ventilation and filtration systems.
  - 2y ago
bee_rider 2y ago
If they were willing to lie to juice their metrics during COVID, why would any outsider believe them now?
BeetleB 2y ago
> Internally, it was very clear that it did not work If it was clear, they shouldn't have trouble showing the data. Otherwise it's a case of "The data shows X, but my gut clearly shows Y" I can certainly believe it didn't work for some companies/roles. But the burden is on the company to demonstrate it.
- foobiekr 2y ago
  The company was publicly lying that it did because execs thought it would help us recruit younger people.
surgical_fire 2y ago
> Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks. Funny joke. I needed a laugh.

osigurdson 2y ago

I think it is largely just rationalizing what is fashionable. WFH was fashionable for a while. Now WFO + AI replacement is cool.

andrekandre 2y ago
its almost as if they are not totally rational actors and instead operating on vibes...
- osigurdson 2y ago
  Honestly I think nearly anyone would do the same. Going against the flow is the rare territory of the founder.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

They're bending the knee. The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office. Trump, Musk, and Ramiswamy were all ultra-gung ho about ensuring that as many people with federal jobs were as miserable as possible.

andsoitis 2y ago
> The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office. I don’t know that that is a reasonable take. More appropriate would be to acknowledge that different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  Apparently my role could be remote but the company took it away. I don't think we need to give their good wills. They are just using the economic reality to fuck us, and I'm sure many of us are considering fucking back when the stars are right.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  > different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc. At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all of the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.
  - diogoadrados 2y ago
    out of a handful of the largest companies in the world, in a thread about the specific company IBM and its policies, why do you avoid naming the company and CEO?

BurningFrog 2y ago

Non conspiracy explanation: It seemed to work at first, but over time it became clear it didn't.

fazeirony 2y ago
> but over time it became clear it didn't. are profits spiralling downward? are these businesses, overall, making less profit? because of remote workers? or is it closer to the truth to say that no amount of profit - or asserting authority over workers - is ever enough and since companies are in a position of power to squeeze blood from a stone, they will?
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  If that how advantageous you think running a company is, you should definitely start one!
  - givemeethekeys 2y ago
    There's a complication to starting a company. The execs answer to the board and investors. Since so many companies are unprofitable for so long, it is very difficult to start a company today without either being rich or being beholden. I'm going to guess that most people who start companies are beholden. The investors need people to RTO for some important reasons - real estate values, economies built on supporting workers, and of course - some amount of lifestyle differentiation (a luxury of having fuck you money is being able to spend more time with friends and loved ones than the peasant class). WFH is a one of the most disruptive cultural shifts ever - pushback was only expected.
- Alupis 2y ago
  Profits don't have to spiral for something to become clear it's not working. Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before". Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.

jlarocco 2y ago

Having worked at a fully remote company before (and during) COVID, I'm surprised so many companies have stuck with it for so long. IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc. Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it's gone as well as it has, but it's also not surprising it's gone badly for a lot of companies.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Easier to force people back versus fix bad management, because bad management is everywhere. (there is $120B+ in remote enterprise market cap as of this comment, anyone saying it doesn't work is not accurately representing the situation; it might not work for them because they are unwilling to make it work, but the evidence is clear it can work, does work, and did work during the pandemic)
conductr 2y ago
IME, I'm a CFO so see every department this is not specific to software industry, it went well but it also ultimately highlighted how inefficient most company's office workers are. So once those people adjust to WFH, get caught up on a backlog of projects, etc. (the "being very good at WFH" phase) they eventually become unnecessary and headcount reduction becomes more obvious next step even though WFH "worked". But, there's also the part about why did the backlog of projects not continue to grow? What are we working towards now? etc. The response to this is making people RTO, because we feel that we broke something by going completely remote. The company isn't as connected, they're just coasting now pushing things forward, etc. These are the kinds of reasons that employee's and executive's see the RTO issue so differently. I've personally worked at 4 different companies since early 2020. Not everyone does WFH well. Many pretend they do, but don't. Even those that do it well, do better when they meet regularly in person (have some hybrid model). Some teams/departments/functions are better at it than others, but companies as a whole I think perform better when the people have personal connections and relationships across the org. In a remote WFH situation, over time, through natural attrition, new people are onboarded and never actually meet anyone in the company and this becomes a large portion of employees that are very loosely connected in terms of their interpersonal relationships/network and this weakens the organization. I can see how that is fine in a individual contributor role of SWE, but for most roles, in most departments, it doesn't play out well (or takes a very special/rare personality trait to actually do it well).

marcusb 2y ago

For b2b sales, as this IBM initiative seems to be focused on, I think there are a few things going on. This is all my opinion, based on first hand observation during the height of COVID WFH in enterprise sales, for a vendor that did very well during the lockdown period but which "returned to customer" as quickly as possible. First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc. Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road. And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.

scarface_74 2y ago
I am not in sales and don’t travel nearly as much as our sales team. But I have been in a customer facing cloud consulting role for 5 years. I am the first technical person that the client encounters after the sales team. I’ve done my fair amount of business travel. The argument is not that face to face to build relationships with customers is not important. It’s that it’s dumb to have “field by design” roles be forced to be in an office when they aren’t on customers sites. Besides that, it is disruptive in the office because you are spending a lot of time with the customer on conference calls and how it often works is that the people doing the work are not in the office or even in the same country. Your client facing staff is US based. But US employees are too expensive to do the grunt work (unless you’re using one of the exploitive WITCH companies). AWS exempted their “field by design” roles from being in the office during the first few RTO mandates. But they eventually forced them to be in an office this year (after I left). GCP has in office requirements for their Professional Services staff now too - full time direct hire employees for both AWS and GCP.

dfxm12 2y ago

It is exactly it. It's a means to lay off a bunch of workers without having to go through the legal red tape of layoffs designed to protect workers, including the WARN act.

nelblu 2y ago

> Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up. I took a new job in 2022, at that time everyone was still working from home. My boss, who was a VP at that time, said isn't this amazing? We save on fuel, time, spend more time at home etc. Productivity has been amazing and all. Two years later in early 2024 when they started pushing RTO, same guy repeats the standard bullshit about - we need those sidebar conversations, we need to meet face to face and all. Not a single word of how it wastes fuel, or time etc. I realized he was powerless against the corporate policies, but just his hypocrisy was enough for me to find another (100% remote) job.

nunez 2y ago
It's likely that both can be true: he meant what he said in 2022 but _had_ to mean what he said in 2024.
- ruraljuror 2y ago
  Also that somebody could change their mind after two years of experience.
Alupis 2y ago
Why is it not possible both are/were true? At the time, WFH was new for most organizations - and yes it feels pretty great. Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind. Certain tasks can be best done in solitude at home. Others... require collaboration. Collaboration that's scheduled in meetings or the dreaded video call are not the same as spontaneous collaboration or just popping your head into someone's office/cube and asking a quick question. There's trade offs to both... and if a company has decided WFH isn't ideal for them, then you can leave and find a job that believes WFH is ideal.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  What you call “popping your head in someone’s cube”, I call “distraction from doing deep work”. I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption. My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard. I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions. No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.

archagon 2y ago

In truth, tech workers hold all the cards and could easily push for permanent WFH if only they organized. Instead, they let management walk back their promises with barely a peep. Foolish.

paulcole 2y ago

> Same companies were telling is how well it worked Do you mean “same” or “some”? Either way do you not believe that different companies can have different outcomes or that one company’s outcomes can change over time?