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My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wi

My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least). It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher. And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight. And this excerpt... > Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently. If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.

christhecaribou 1y ago
What a bootlicking moron.
darth_avocado 1y ago
Amazon isn’t that great and Oracle especially OCI isn’t that bad.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  Amazon isn't great and Oracle is typically worse. For AI, I'd go to IBM before Oracle.
tkiolp4 1y ago
As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones. I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  > I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
  - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker. Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
    - ghthor 1y ago
      Hire this person!
  - const_cast 1y ago
    > Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that. Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!
    - fwip 1y ago
      If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary. Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.
      - 1y ago
themafia 1y ago
I think companies see WFH as a huge employee benefit and expect that they'll reduce their wage expectations accordingly. I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available. It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder. It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.
- grahameb 1y ago
  Here's a quote from that book, 'The Road Ahead': > Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers." I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
koyote 1y ago
> the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero". Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc. Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office. When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets. Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance. The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in. If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  I should have realized that my comment relies on too much nuance for the average person who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance of what it actually says. If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of: - why offices work - that offices work for everyone (it claims the opposite) - that no one does better at home (it claims the opposite) - that no org can make WFH work (it claims the opposite) - that performance issues shouldn't be dealt with All it says it that empirically (and of course, limited to my experience and experiences shared with me), a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH. "WFH" makes this special because it's organization wide, in massive orgs: like I specifically mentioned "significant WFH" and "large headcount" in the same sentence, can I really spoon feed this any harder? I think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
torben-friis 1y ago
care deeply enough about the mission? Talk about drinking the kool aid. Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that? Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares. And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.
anthem2025 1y ago
They did it and it worked fine. Do you have any evidence for this or is it just you trying to justify what you want?

christhecaribou 1y ago

What a bootlicking moron.

darth_avocado 1y ago

Amazon isn’t that great and Oracle especially OCI isn’t that bad.

BoorishBears 1y ago
Amazon isn't great and Oracle is typically worse. For AI, I'd go to IBM before Oracle.

tkiolp4 1y ago

As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones. I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
- brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker. Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
  - ghthor 1y ago
    Hire this person!
- const_cast 1y ago
  > Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that. Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!
  - fwip 1y ago
    If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary. Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.
    - 1y ago

themafia 1y ago

I think companies see WFH as a huge employee benefit and expect that they'll reduce their wage expectations accordingly. I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available. It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder. It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.

grahameb 1y ago
Here's a quote from that book, 'The Road Ahead': > Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers." I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?

koyote 1y ago

> the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero". Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc. Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office. When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets. Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance. The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in. If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.

BoorishBears 1y ago
I should have realized that my comment relies on too much nuance for the average person who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance of what it actually says. If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of: - why offices work - that offices work for everyone (it claims the opposite) - that no one does better at home (it claims the opposite) - that no org can make WFH work (it claims the opposite) - that performance issues shouldn't be dealt with All it says it that empirically (and of course, limited to my experience and experiences shared with me), a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH. "WFH" makes this special because it's organization wide, in massive orgs: like I specifically mentioned "significant WFH" and "large headcount" in the same sentence, can I really spoon feed this any harder? I think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.

torben-friis 1y ago

care deeply enough about the mission? Talk about drinking the kool aid. Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that? Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares. And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.

anthem2025 1y ago

They did it and it worked fine. Do you have any evidence for this or is it just you trying to justify what you want?