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Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers
- markus_zhang 2y agoOK looks like the end of the golden era of remote IT. Probably won't happen again in the feasible future or something bad happens.
- cue_the_strings 2y agoThis is actually excellent news. A startup can now afford hiring better talent at lower costs, because people value remote work so much. Remote doesn't necessarily mean working from home. There are people in situations (having babies / toddlers?) where their productivity would improve from working outside the home, so startups should offer to pay for a local coworking space or a similar arrangement.
- paulluuk 2y agoUnless startups with remote talent can't get funding, because investors look at big companies and thinking that if Uber, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google think having in-office employees is better, there must be a good reason for it. But I don't know if that's how investors think?
- cue_the_strings 2y agoDon't underestimate investors' intelligence. Most of the RTO reasons barely make sense for investors investing in startups, but may for established companies. Things like this RTO push rarely happen without a reason. Off the top of my head: - tax cuts if you're operating in a certain area, maybe even historical ones, political connections like - legacy of lobbying local politicians in said area to get some benefit - conflict of interest from the owners (private or major shareholders) also somehow owning commercial real estate or businesses that rely on its vitality - management having reasons to prefer RTO: simple preference for in-person management, fear of loss of control or being perceived as useless, misalignment with a personal-connections-over-merit advancement; these things are mostly misaligned with the owners' interests
- agos 2y agothe startup I'm working at is doing exactly that, not really optimizing on the cost but we're getting some exceptional talent and we have an incredible leverage
- markus_zhang 2y agoDefinitely not good news for workers, especially parents you mentioned.
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoThere still are tons of remote jobs available.
- markus_zhang 2y agoVery few in my area I think (Quebec). US might be still good.
- owebmaster 2y agoonly if the golden era was during Covid but I have been working remotely for the past 20 years. I'm sure there are more jobs available now than there was before Covid.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoI have been worrying about remote work going away because I really don't want to go back to offices I don't want to go back to being limited by my local labour market, and I don't want to go back to commuting daily and all the other stuff So I'm really determined to stay fully remote, and glad to hear that people have been doing it for much longer than just since COVID Any tips for maintaining this? I have been thinking that it would be easier to stay remote if I start contracting instead of being an employee
- owebmaster 2y ago> Any tips for maintaining this? None that will make you happy. The market changed a lot, I myself not sure if I will be able to find contracts (I'm a contractor) for the next 20 years. The alternative isn't terrible tho: you gotta create your own job, contracting and then creating your own business online. The best way to prove remote works is to create jobs and hiring remote. Nobody should think they are entitled for a great remote job forever.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> Nobody should think they are entitled for a great remote job forever. I definitely do not feel entitled to it, but it is such a benefit for my life and mental health that I am willing to work to maintain it I am willing to accept lower salaries and a lower promotion ceiling to maintain fully remote work, for instance
- pllbnk 2y agoIt's reassuring to know there are more people that feel that way about remote.
- FreebasingLLMs 2y ago[dead]
- pelagic_sky 2y agoI interviewed with Uber last year and they wanted me in the office two days a week so I could remote in with the rest of the team scattered throughout the US.
- franktankbank 2y agoI'm sorry but how else is your manager going to monitor your uptime via spyware from their office?
- SSJPython 2y agoCan someone tell me what the point of RTO is? These companies made insane profits during the pandemic and when everyone was WFH. Why rock the boat? Is it just corporate real estate prices? Is that all it comes down to?
- owebmaster 2y agoSoft layoffs. Now with most of the software "done", big tech doesn't need an army of engineers. Revenue is not going to go up strong anymore so only way to increase profit is cutting cost.
- know-how 2y ago[dead]
- pm90 2y agoexec ego mostly. There’s been no real effort to show supposed benefits of rto, just platitudes(“we work better as a team from the same location!”).
- trollbridge 2y agoAnd usually from executives who seem to be away on "business trips" more often than not and when they join a Zoom, they're obviously in their home office.
- steveBK123 2y agoOr have “offices” built down the block from their home with seating for 2 (gotta include their admin).
- ryandrake 2y agoThe hypocrisy of telling your employees they need to work in the office… via Zoom, from your third home in Aspen.
- ThinkBeat 2y agoI have not searched for a new job for a long time so I have little feel for what the job market it these days. I do know that many companies have let devs go for various excuses. We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity. Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it thye company would tank since all the devs would quit. Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions on working from home?
- itchyjunk 2y agoThey creep it up. Like frog in boiling water, not much to be done. 1 day a week with 1 optional day for the social butterflies. 2 days mandatory with 1 day optional for social butterflies. 3 days mandatories + some extra mandatory days like all hands and Q-end. Next up is 5 days mandatory with 2 optional days for social butterflies.
- pllbnk 2y agoDuring COVID WFH peak I naively thought that the government, especially the EU, will take the growth of remote working as an opportunity for its Green Deal the bureaucrats love so much talking about. It started falling apart quickly when they started subsidizing restaurants, albeit that was the national government prerogative. To this day I still wonder why there are no parties that tout this as part of their election programs. It's the way to reduce pollution and stimulate less-populated regions which have been dwindling as cities have been growing and getting so expensive.
- lucyjojo 2y agothere are lots of people out there who don't like remote work. that said, you won't put me back in an office anytime soon, changing job next month because of that.
- mvdtnz 2y agoThat might work for an organisation that only recently implemented remote work so has a great deal of their staff anyway in the same city as HQ. For fully remote workers there's no creeping. I live thousands of kilometres from my office, there's no practical difference for me between a day a week in office or full RTO.
- trollbridge 2y agoI generally view these moves as simply a soft layoff to cut down on costs. Uber doesn't really have any way to grow. They can't exactly start charging more. They can't pay their drivers less, who already are paid poorly. The market for expensive taxi rides isn't going to expand, either. So now they have to be in a cost-cutting mode. The app already exists, so they don't need a large staff of highly-paid technologists.
- _mlbt 2y agoUber bet incorrectly that we would have widespread self driving robo-taxis by now. The idea was to lose money gaining massive market share and then replace the human gig economy workers with AI.
- trollbridge 2y agoWhich seemed like an iffy bet. Someone who invents self-driving robo-taxis isn't going to want to give away their profit margin to Uber. Why would they? You can just open up the Waymo app and order, well, a Waymo.
- dymk 2y agoUber, for a long time, was trying to build their own, not buy third party
- trollbridge 2y agoYeah, and building their own... seemed like a classic mistake where they confused the talent to replace the taxi dispatch telephone number with the talent needed top make a self-driving car, which are two very different things.
- radlad 2y agoI missed that Uber sold off ATG in 2020: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uber-sells-atg-self-driving-business-to-aurora-at-4-billion-idUSKBN28I0A3/ https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uber-sells-atg-self-dr...
- yawgmoth 2y agoI don't mind the end of remote work, as long as the "cool office" actually comes back. Here in Ann Arbor it feels like the tech scene died with remote work and all the jobs are remote. From my perspective, wages have increased faster elsewhere, and there are far more remote jobs than local ones. The whole reason I moved to Ann Arbor for work was because UMich had created a little startup scene that I could aspire to. I expected the scene to grow, not fade. It really seemed like the beers on tap, foosball table tech job fantasy for a few years there.
- creaghpatr 2y agoGot to enjoy a National Championship though
- trollbridge 2y agoThat's too bad. The little tiny "hip" area of town seemed pretty neat, as did the fledgling coworking spaces attached to a neat coffeehouse in an old brick building. Of course, in my own operation it would be very hard to justify to building out some "cool office". Our workers simply seem to prefer other things. They sure aren't interested in forced socialisation.
- walthamstow 2y ago> Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work. When you want to hit remote working, you can make anything into a stick
- ryandrake 2y agoIs what cases is hiring an expensive taxi to get to work and back every day cheaper than the all-in cost of owning, fueling, maintaining and insuring your own car?
- sokoloff 2y agoI don’t know, but anecdotally, I took a bunch of Uber Pool rides when I was on a business trip with people who were clearly using it to commute to or from their job. Some of them were fairly long rides as well (downtown San Diego to Poway was the most common where I’d go with someone commuting). Maybe parking is expensive/impractical?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bluefirebrand 2y agoHonestly, in the cases where you have to pay for a parking spot near your work That is very expensive in most big cities, so if your workplace doesn't have dedicated parking and they don't comp your parking spot, you wind up spending thousands per year on parking On top of the other car stuff, it becomes prohibitive
- recursivecaveat 2y agoI plugged a used 2022 Camry w/ a short commute in CA into AAA's tool: they estimate $850 TCO per month. So at say $18 an uber in SF, you can make ~24 round trips to the office a month. That assumes you can park the Camry for free I think. On the other hand if you need a car to get groceries and stuff, the math starts to tip dramatically. Also assumes you value your time waiting for an Uber at $0 I suppose.
- saos 2y ago2-3 days is reasonable tbh. I've personally enjoyed the connection to my colleagues. I can't get that WFH 100%
- happytoexplain 2y agoThat doesn't follow. Clearly it should be whatever works best for each individual, with some coordination to try to be in on the same days.
- ryandrake 2y agoAlmost no companies that allow work from home are forcing you to work from home. You have always been free to come in those 2-3 days whenever you want, no?
- m000 2y agoIt's reasonable if they already have an office where you live, and the office comes with perks (e.g. good food, gym) that save you the time you spent commuting there. Relocating without even having a fixed contract from day 1, just to be able to go to the office, is a bet many (talented) people won't be willing to take these days.
- walthamstow 2y agoSad that you've been downvoted, it's a perfectly OK opinion to have.
- happytoexplain 2y agoIt's downvoted because the rationale doesn't make sense logically, and also it implies that forcing people to do things that don't work for them is OK. It's not downvoted because the parent gets a benefit personally from being in an office.
- miek 2y agoI'm at a Fortune 500 that cut back nearly all of its remote work. I prefer remote work, and I thrive at it. However, it can't be denied that there are some drawbacks. A few: A) Training new hires, B) bonding (while those in-office chats often detract from raw work-time, they also contribute to relationships. Positive relationships are a worthwhile lubricant when make requests of others), C) increased friction for chatting, which is often a net positive, but does have the potential to block progress that is born from impromptu chats. Yes, you can try to work around these and other challenges, but working around long-evolved brain firmware that, for many cases of interaction, favors in-person communication, is tough. Of course many people prefer to stay at home, as do I, but there is a huge increase in the level of connection I feel when I go back to the HQ and hang out with everyone (a handful of times each year).
- ryandrake 2y agoIt certainly can be denied--or at least argued. Are there actually studies that show these things are significant drawbacks which are worse in the balance after also accounting for the benefits of remote work? Proponents of both in-office and remote work are just spouting feelings and vibes rather than actual evidence that it really makes a difference.
- miek 2y agoThere is research supporting the benefits of remote work (less distraction, increased productivity, etc.), and there is research appearing to confirm the negatives. One excerpt from a study at MS[0] "Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts." Gallup [1] found that far fewer workers felt respected while remote during the pandemic. I thought it was wild to see the huge uptick (31%) year-over-year in SEC whistle-blowers. [2] Research of this type is challenging, especially because it's difficult to source the volume and quality of data needed from businesses. I'm sure we could find weaknesses in any study for or against. Hybrid might be the best of both worlds per HBR, see [3] Honestly I'd love to see a solid refutation of the benefits of in-person work, so that I could use it for leverage the next time my remote job is at risk of being converted back to in-person. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 [1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/657629/post-pandemic-workplace-experiment-continues.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/657629/post-pandemic-workpl... [2] https://www.proskauer.com/blog/bloomberg-sec-receives-record-number-of-whistleblower-tips-from-remote-employees https://www.proskauer.com/blog/bloomberg-sec-receives-record... [3] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-063_639195cc-e7b5-47d3-9281-62d192c5b916.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-063_639195cc-...
- cruzcampo 2y agoCapital is getting cocky again and is trying to worsen the living conditions of workers to prop up its investments. We as tech workers need to fight this. We need to finally unionize so we can strike and shut down production if necessary. The tactics of the industrial revolution still work in the digital age - labor is still the source of all revenue.
- flyoverdev 2y ago[flagged]
- flyoverdev 2y ago[flagged]
- goldenbite9 2y ago[dead]
- OutOfHere 2y agoManagement is completely clueless about how noisy and distracting offices are due to other coworkers, also how contagiously sick people make each other sick. Management sitting in their private offices are far removed from the ground reality, and the worse part is they never solicit direct feedback either from 2-3 levels down.