5 ms·
5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessa
by randycupertino 1y ago
5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
- pllbnk 1y agoIn most companies this mythical collaboration doesn't exist unless it's between actual decision makers who steer the product's direction. In the end, most office employees just do their work, ask a question or two from their colleagues and participate in some, often unnecessary, ceremonies.
- konfusinomicon 1y agoSir David Attenborough is gonna make bank on the documentary featuring these animals engaging in these most unnatural of corporate environments
- bubblethink 1y agoThat may be the point of the 5 day RTO. Make 3 days attractive. You start with 5 so that everyone warms to the idea of 3 days.
- rufus_foreman 1y agoI work full remote. If they ask me to RTO, I quit and retire. Game over, man. But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet. Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
- utyop22 1y agoIts not RTO is bad per se. Its the fact that the policy doesn't work in a shitty culture!
- kkfx 1y agoNo days in offices could be accepted because they are a useless waste of resources. Simply. Few days/hybrid is a gift to try bribing people in the office, not something to be accepted.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago[flagged]
- xboxnolifes 1y agoOnly if they can't find a job.
- kevindamm 1y agoIt shouldn't be about hours in a seat, it should be about deliverables met and actions & communication around those that couldn't be met. For knowledge work and creative tasks, at least. I would really be surprised if Amazon didn't allow their top performers a day or two of WFH per week in pre-pandemic days. Other FAANGs basically had that policy before the pandemic. If they're really saying 5-day RTO for everyone, yeah, there are a lot of people who would legitimately decline those terms.
- charcircuit 1y agoThis logic fails to account for priorities changing. If priorities change Friday morning it could mean all the work you did that week was worthless. Should one spend their whole weekend working to finish some deliverance or should it be limited by the expected hours? Similarly if someone front loaded 40 hours Monday through Friday and priorities change on Friday or a critical bug comes in people will have to wait until Monday.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kevindamm 1y agoIf priorities are being made after code is written then it won't matter if the code took a day, a week or a month, or whether it was done under the company's florescents or a sunny back patio. Decisions about near-term objectives should be made before work is underway, or interleaved with experiment development and analysis. Your last statement actually supports my point that it shouldn't be about hours served but about objectives met. Admittedly, it is much more difficult to clearly define work expectations when they aren't in terms of hours, and doing so fairly across team members is especially difficult. And things like on-call rotations complicate that even further. But it's also very easy to game a system that is hourly-based and often results in schedules slipping, or worse: some team members doing heroic efforts near deadlines to make up for other team members that think they've done their work because their timesheet said so.
- api 1y agoAny days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth. If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators. It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
- gertlex 1y agoI wonder what the relative fraction of those doing software development that also have to touch hardware is.
- ekianjo 1y agoMoving hardware to your door is cheaper than moving a dev to your office
- gertlex 1y agoDepends somewhat on if your hardware moves around or not :)
- AlotOfReading 1y agoYou can do a significant majority of hardware work remotely. Throwing boards in the mail was pretty straightforward until recently and even egregiously wasteful overnighting is a hell of a lot cheaper than a single desk's worth of commercial real estate.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoThe company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce. I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
- ascendantlogic 1y agoAny days in office just to spend most of it on zoom calls is too many.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- goalieca 1y agoThis is why many see it as babysitting. In larger orgs, many or even all meetings l, depending on your function and seniority, are going to all be online and spanning multiple time zones.
- phil21 1y agoI don't understand why companies don't "get" this bit of it. I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career. If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot? If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
- anthem2025 1y agoEveryone I work with is in other states. They love a distributed office but don’t want employees to have a decent balance.
- brianmcc 1y agoIronically, screen sharing on zoom whilst all colocated can be less bad than sitting round a gigantic TV type screen for calls where screen content is needed :-|
- konfusinomicon 1y agoits collaboration in glorious 4k! err 1080p!
- technion 1y agoI have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office. I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
- sporkland 1y agoBefore that people just took flex days and it was fine. With RTO enforcement and measurement it's made it less flexible
- 15123123aa 1y agoI think before that, we just postpone making this appointments until our home issue became much worse ( health, house maintenance, child-care, etc... ). I notice my house smelling much nicer just due to weekly cleaning instead of every 2-3 weeks.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office The quality of offices was also much better in the past like a single office for for 2 to Max 6 people. Now it's crowded open space hot desks offices with 40+ people.
- Izkata 1y agoSome of us never knew that world, even when we were going in every day for years.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoMaybe it's for the best. If you work fully remote now then you you haven't missed much but if you go to a shitty office now the you missed a period where workers had some value.
- renegade-otter 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- theshrike79 1y ago5 days a week at the office is not happening for me unless they pay mid six figures. And I live in Europe, we don't get Facebook AI team salaries here :D Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
- toomanyrichies 1y agoQuestion- how common are fully-remote software engineer gigs in Europe? I'm considering a relocation from the US (currently fully-remote) and this will be a huge factor in my decision.
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoThis is much less. We say of the US that remote is "tradition" over there and it was used to explain why they can and we can't. Covid changed things but they're is still a song mentality of in office work, especially in big older companies with an older middle management.
- messe 1y ago> Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year. Probably the same here. This week might actually be my first 4-day in office week this year, come to think of it. Next week, I'll be in office at-most 1.5 days, because I'm going to be taking a day off in the middle of the week and then working from the other side of the (admittedly small) country for Thu/fri.
- pjmlp 1y agoI am also hybrid, currently we can still distribute the monthly count as we feel like it, the moment they start pushing for more is when I will remind them of my remote work clause on the work contract, and then lets see, maybe I'll be again on the job market.
- classified 1y agoLet them fuck it up royally. At least this way the idiots get to pay for their stupidity when top talent quits because of that.
- konfusinomicon 1y agooh they are paying, but shit rolls down hill and those who will ultimately pay are in the flood zone
- teeray 1y agoWhy is 3 seemingly always the minimum? Why not 2? I did 2 days in-office for 2 years—it was a great balance. All the meetings ended up on Tuesday/Thursday and M/W/F was solid get-shit-done time at home. You also never started or ended the week in-office.
- madcaptenor 1y agoIf everyone agrees on 3 then you can't work two jobs at once.
- integralid 1y agoMy whole team (it's a large one) is doing one day in the office per week. It's the same day for everyone. I personally like calmness of the office, so I usually go two times. I don't see any fundamental problems with that arrangement.