8 ms·

RTO: WTAF

88 points by tags2k 1y ago

varispeed 1y ago
People who have to be in the office should also object to RTO. Needless commuting clogs the roads and public transport. Fewer commuters mean less chance of being stuck in traffic and a better chance of getting a seat.
- hasperdi 1y ago
  Also... commuting is much less eco friendly
yladiz 1y ago
If the tone of the article wasn’t so flippant I’d maybe have read all the way through it. I’m not going to read an article that sounds like it’s written by a petulant child.
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  So don't? I like the humor in it.
- notadrian 1y ago
  [dead]
interpol_p 1y ago
We have some sort of hybrid policy. Every single time I have showed up at the office, I either end up socialising far too much and get nothing done (I find it extremely hard to work next to people without talking to them). Or nobody is there and I end up having driven (40 minutes each way) to the office to have Teams meetings with a wonderful view of the car park, under fluorescent lights, using a cheap low-resolution office monitor. When I could have been having those Teams meetings with a view of my garden and a much nicer monitor I have invested in
- badgersnake 1y ago
  > socialising far too much and get nothing done Alternatively, you networked, built useful relationships and shared knowledge.
  - interpol_p 1y ago
    Sure. I catch up with many of them on weekends anyway — we hike together, our families know each other, some live nearby etc. Regarding knowledge sharing, that happens equally well via Slack. (Actually, I'd say a screen share works better than over-the-shouldering someone else's screen in person)
  - gaws 1y ago
    "Hey, Bob." "Hey, Chip." "Catch the game last night?" "Yeah. What a snoozer." "Are you ready for that quarterly meeting? Heard Tracy will connect from the conference in Toledo. Hopefully I don't get a crappy seat in the conference room." "I'll take the meeting from the desk." "Nice. Lunch later?" "Yeah. Talk then." Wow. Another day of building relationships and sharing knowledge.
    - badgersnake 1y ago
      It depresses me how some engineers don’t realise how important this stuff is.
pjmlp 1y ago
And the worse of all, is that in most cases the work is exactly the same, and there is no collaboration on the office, because the team is geographically distributed anyway, so the only thing changing are the location of the video calls, and with whom to chat during coffee breaks.
- exitb 1y ago
  Exactly, before covid, I don't think I ever saw any serious efforts to shuffle team assignments to have them more geographically segregated. But now it's all about in-person collaboration for some reason.
- olex 1y ago
  This is a thing I've been constantly bringing up with our company. I _do_ think that local collaboration in the office is vastly more effective than remotely, _but_ only given that the entire team is co-located. As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.
  - oytis 1y ago
    But it's absolutely essential that you chat with HR and sales people at the coffee machine!
low_key 1y ago
It's cheaper than layoffs?
- gaws 1y ago
  Correct.
gabesullice 1y ago
I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by each role". I also found results suggesting flexible working policies had positive properties like higher employee satisfaction, retention , and a wider applicant pool. I'm not interested in hearing why the choir here at HN thinks companies are making these decisions, I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  It's a lazy and cowardly way to get people to cull themselves and save money on severance packages. It's not that deep.
  - oytis 1y ago
    Isn't it possible to just not give people severance packages?
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      Depends what sort of contract they have (and/or how much perceived leverage they have - firing high-income workers who have a public platform can make for messy PR)
    - deviation 1y ago
      Somewhere between 85% and 90% of all countries have some sort of mandated severance pay in the event of a layoff. A small percentage of countries also mandate severance even if the employee is fired (with cause).
      - oytis 1y ago
        US doesn't seem to be such a country though?
threemux 1y ago
> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.
- zeroonetwothree 1y ago
  You’re right for younger children but for older children in school you can definitely handle it while working remotely. You just pick them up from school and then they can mostly do stuff on their own the afternoon. But if you have to go in office suddenly that doesn’t work anymore.
  - pitched 1y ago
    To expand on this a touch, kids are only in school for 6 hours a day. For ages between kindergarten and grade 4 or so, it is generally frowned on to let them make their way home alone. A single parent with no child care cannot be in an office for 8 hours straight.
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  It depends on the age of the child - having a 7-year old return from school at 2pm and hangout at home with an adult present is fine and saves you the cost of afterschool care. A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.
- lbreakjai 1y ago
  My wife and I work remotely. Everyone in my team has children, so everyone's very flexible. We tend to work less during the afternoon, and pick it up later in the day. I start earlier when I'm not the one doing the morning drop-off. My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.
deviation 1y ago
I feel that the reason RTO is still such a wonderful topic to write about or debate online, is that the spectrum of human "experience" is so wide, that there will always be a significant number of people on either side of the fence. Personally, I can't count the amount of times I've switched sides, and I don't think I'm the only one. IMO, mandated RTO is (objectively) an effort by large organizations to make their "systems" more predictable in aggregate. The manner of predictability will be largely depend on the size of the organization (e.g. A startup vs. Microsoft) and their needs (productivity/reliability/consistency/etc), and we see this manifest in any number of the RTO announcements we've seen online.
mft_ 1y ago
I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list: * Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need. * Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership. * Extroverts: some people just prefer to be in an office, surrounded by and interacting with lots of people, rather than sitting at home in relative isolation. (I'm definitely not one of them, but I have good friends who are like this.)
- majorbugger 1y ago
  Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    > Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with. Yeah, me too. It's much harder for me to focus at the office, which is annoying as mentally it's great for me to get out of the house and see people who aren't my family (who are great, I just do better when i see and interact with more people).
  - array_key_first 1y ago
    The not so secret secret is that office jobs are 50% work and 50% politics. And that's in a good company. In a dysfunctional company, it's more like 80% politics. They have work to do, but then buckling down and focuses is probably worse than what they're doing. Unfortunately.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  > Ego We can give them bigger/more-prominent zoom portraits by seniority. Should make everyone happy. > Real estate Probably shouldn't still be gambling company finances on real estate, 5 years after a pandemic forced us all to go remote. > Extroverts Great! We can put all the extroverts back in the glass fishbowl, while the rest of us do actual work from home
EmilStenstrom 1y ago
Sigh This debate has been going on for years now. Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers) Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.
- _petronius 1y ago
  I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote. Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software. Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
  - olex 1y ago
    RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
  - sublimefire 1y ago
    > many teams actually perform better the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research
birdalbrocum 1y ago
What RTO and WTAF means? Who knows. I clicked on link to find out but looks like website blogs my IP range. I will never know this important information..
- luaybs 1y ago
  Return to Office. What the Actual F***.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Macha 1y ago
  WTAF: WT Actual F RTO: Return to Office
- gaws 1y ago
  You couldn't take the 30 seconds to do web search for those acronyms?
pheggs 1y ago
It's indeed one of the most stupid decisions a management could make. People will be more tired once they arrive in the office. From a companies perspective skilled people will just leave to another company. And you can't hire the best people from everywhere if you need to have an office present. And obviously there are a lot more drawbacks. From a society perspective it contributes to traffic jams, it contributes to overfilled public transport, and it puts needless stress on infrastructure. In general, it's just not efficient at all. Sadly many big corporations are lead by narcissists who care more about their ego, who need to feel like they can control other people, rather than their well being or having a positive impact. Some may use it to get rid of people, but that, truly has to be the most stupid way to get rid of your best employees.
bonoboTP 1y ago
It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location. You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent. If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person social interaction, your cultural capital will also lose value. There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech. Americans seem unaware, but if you insist on remote work, you'll lose that advantage quick. If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
- ajjahs 1y ago
  [dead]
- phrotoma 1y ago
  > you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many. You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.
- dboreham 1y ago
  If the entire organization is offshore then fine, but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration. South America is ok but there aren't many software developers there.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    > but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration This is definitely part of it, but if you have east coast or central teams, this is totally doable. In fact, often the European employees get more done as they get a whole morning before the US based pings/meetings start.
- 1y ago
5350-uiop-1130 1y ago
> You will cause untold mental, physical and financial upheaval for many employees who now have to spend money on commuting, childcare, pet care, to name but a few. as if they care.
Yizahi 1y ago
RTO is way to force people work for two more hours per day for the same pay (1 hour typical commute one way). Hence it is done to suppress wages and make people leave voluntarily. It's not that hard to deduce.
- sublimefire 1y ago
  But it is not, people work more when remote. It is harder to disconnect from work. This kind of bothers me because it seems RTO will reduce the hours spent working (on average) which should affect the output, but somehow companies expect the inverse.
  - gaws 1y ago
    Yizahi is right. RTO is mostly about reducing headcount.
5350-uiop-1130 1y ago
they're just tightening the noose. don't you feel like everything is getting worse in some ways? the delusion is to think you're special because you work for a big evil company.
EverydayBalloon 1y ago
[dead]
cjs_ac 1y ago
Everyone has their own explanations for why businesses do these things, and I see merit in many of them. Here's my contribution to the list. All these complaints about poorly-thought-out RTO policies come from big corporations. If you're a senior leader in a organisation with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, it's very difficult to keep in touch with the people who actually do the work in making or providing the product or service that the business brings to the market. As a consequence, leaders come to believe that the routine of their work day - ingesting reports, engaging in discussions, and communicating decisions - is representative of what's going on in the organisation. Ultimately, I think it's a limitation of human psychology: the organisation is larger than Dunbar's number, and so starts to become opaque to its members. My solution is to only work for businesses that are small enough for everyone to know everyone else.
roenxi 1y ago
> “We don’t think people do their best work from home”: Prove it. It isn't the corporations job to prove it, they're paying the salary because of their own internal calculations about what is valuable to them. It really in't that much of a stretch to say companies are serious about their motivations here - there are much easier ways to do layoffs than moving everyone into an office. "Your company didn't collapse during COVID" isn't much of an argument. It is like saying someone didn't die of COVID so they can handle being sick 24x7 for the rest of their life. Just because something is survivable or even tolerable doesn't mean it is desirable.
sublimefire 1y ago
These are weak arguments in the post. It is not the commute which is the problem. In my experience (tech specifically) office is unnecessary because I do less work, and it is more depressing because you still talk with the same people over the chat and calls. There are issues with the shortage of phone booths, and listening to every conversation does not help concentrate. Then there is poor old hardware, not many will buy Herman Miller for their subordinates. Another thing not mentioned is the total show of appearances over outcomes. Not to mention geographically distributed teams. At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.
dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
"but it’s a sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees. " That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)
- krackers 1y ago
  >sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.
phyzix5761 1y ago
A 50 mile commute can be like 3 hours one way in Redmond
Esophagus4 1y ago
This is more of a rant than an article.
0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
We have a similar push for RTO here in Germany as well where the usual U.S. centric reasons don't apply (tax break law has not changed; we're still semi-ZIRP at 2%, no H1B visas, outsourcing is not a major trend either as many companies want German speaking employees). I think the reason is simple: Lock-in for employees. Moving for your employer demonstrates dependence and highlights your inferior bargaining position. If you have to move again to switch jobs it will be quite painful so you'll likely accept a lower salary instead.

88 points by tags2k 1y ago

People who have to be in the office should also object to RTO. Needless commuting clogs the roads and public transport. Fewer commuters mean less chance of being stuck in traffic and a better chance of getting a seat.

hasperdi 1y ago
Also... commuting is much less eco friendly

yladiz 1y ago

If the tone of the article wasn’t so flippant I’d maybe have read all the way through it. I’m not going to read an article that sounds like it’s written by a petulant child.

MarcelOlsz 1y ago
So don't? I like the humor in it.
notadrian 1y ago
[dead]

interpol_p 1y ago

We have some sort of hybrid policy. Every single time I have showed up at the office, I either end up socialising far too much and get nothing done (I find it extremely hard to work next to people without talking to them). Or nobody is there and I end up having driven (40 minutes each way) to the office to have Teams meetings with a wonderful view of the car park, under fluorescent lights, using a cheap low-resolution office monitor. When I could have been having those Teams meetings with a view of my garden and a much nicer monitor I have invested in

badgersnake 1y ago
> socialising far too much and get nothing done Alternatively, you networked, built useful relationships and shared knowledge.
- interpol_p 1y ago
  Sure. I catch up with many of them on weekends anyway — we hike together, our families know each other, some live nearby etc. Regarding knowledge sharing, that happens equally well via Slack. (Actually, I'd say a screen share works better than over-the-shouldering someone else's screen in person)
- gaws 1y ago
  "Hey, Bob." "Hey, Chip." "Catch the game last night?" "Yeah. What a snoozer." "Are you ready for that quarterly meeting? Heard Tracy will connect from the conference in Toledo. Hopefully I don't get a crappy seat in the conference room." "I'll take the meeting from the desk." "Nice. Lunch later?" "Yeah. Talk then." Wow. Another day of building relationships and sharing knowledge.
  - badgersnake 1y ago
    It depresses me how some engineers don’t realise how important this stuff is.

pjmlp 1y ago

And the worse of all, is that in most cases the work is exactly the same, and there is no collaboration on the office, because the team is geographically distributed anyway, so the only thing changing are the location of the video calls, and with whom to chat during coffee breaks.

exitb 1y ago
Exactly, before covid, I don't think I ever saw any serious efforts to shuffle team assignments to have them more geographically segregated. But now it's all about in-person collaboration for some reason.
olex 1y ago
This is a thing I've been constantly bringing up with our company. I _do_ think that local collaboration in the office is vastly more effective than remotely, _but_ only given that the entire team is co-located. As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.
- oytis 1y ago
  But it's absolutely essential that you chat with HR and sales people at the coffee machine!

low_key 1y ago

It's cheaper than layoffs?

gaws 1y ago
Correct.

gabesullice 1y ago

I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by each role". I also found results suggesting flexible working policies had positive properties like higher employee satisfaction, retention , and a wider applicant pool. I'm not interested in hearing why the choir here at HN thinks companies are making these decisions, I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.

MarcelOlsz 1y ago
It's a lazy and cowardly way to get people to cull themselves and save money on severance packages. It's not that deep.
- oytis 1y ago
  Isn't it possible to just not give people severance packages?
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    Depends what sort of contract they have (and/or how much perceived leverage they have - firing high-income workers who have a public platform can make for messy PR)
  - deviation 1y ago
    Somewhere between 85% and 90% of all countries have some sort of mandated severance pay in the event of a layoff. A small percentage of countries also mandate severance even if the employee is fired (with cause).
    - oytis 1y ago
      US doesn't seem to be such a country though?

threemux 1y ago

> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.

zeroonetwothree 1y ago
You’re right for younger children but for older children in school you can definitely handle it while working remotely. You just pick them up from school and then they can mostly do stuff on their own the afternoon. But if you have to go in office suddenly that doesn’t work anymore.
- pitched 1y ago
  To expand on this a touch, kids are only in school for 6 hours a day. For ages between kindergarten and grade 4 or so, it is generally frowned on to let them make their way home alone. A single parent with no child care cannot be in an office for 8 hours straight.
ricardobeat 1y ago
It depends on the age of the child - having a 7-year old return from school at 2pm and hangout at home with an adult present is fine and saves you the cost of afterschool care. A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.
lbreakjai 1y ago
My wife and I work remotely. Everyone in my team has children, so everyone's very flexible. We tend to work less during the afternoon, and pick it up later in the day. I start earlier when I'm not the one doing the morning drop-off. My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.

deviation 1y ago

I feel that the reason RTO is still such a wonderful topic to write about or debate online, is that the spectrum of human "experience" is so wide, that there will always be a significant number of people on either side of the fence. Personally, I can't count the amount of times I've switched sides, and I don't think I'm the only one. IMO, mandated RTO is (objectively) an effort by large organizations to make their "systems" more predictable in aggregate. The manner of predictability will be largely depend on the size of the organization (e.g. A startup vs. Microsoft) and their needs (productivity/reliability/consistency/etc), and we see this manifest in any number of the RTO announcements we've seen online.

mft_ 1y ago

I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list: * Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need. * Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership. * Extroverts: some people just prefer to be in an office, surrounded by and interacting with lots of people, rather than sitting at home in relative isolation. (I'm definitely not one of them, but I have good friends who are like this.)

majorbugger 1y ago
Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  > Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with. Yeah, me too. It's much harder for me to focus at the office, which is annoying as mentally it's great for me to get out of the house and see people who aren't my family (who are great, I just do better when i see and interact with more people).
- array_key_first 1y ago
  The not so secret secret is that office jobs are 50% work and 50% politics. And that's in a good company. In a dysfunctional company, it's more like 80% politics. They have work to do, but then buckling down and focuses is probably worse than what they're doing. Unfortunately.
swiftcoder 1y ago
> Ego We can give them bigger/more-prominent zoom portraits by seniority. Should make everyone happy. > Real estate Probably shouldn't still be gambling company finances on real estate, 5 years after a pandemic forced us all to go remote. > Extroverts Great! We can put all the extroverts back in the glass fishbowl, while the rest of us do actual work from home

EmilStenstrom 1y ago

Sigh This debate has been going on for years now. Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers) Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.

_petronius 1y ago
I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote. Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software. Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
- olex 1y ago
  RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
- sublimefire 1y ago
  > many teams actually perform better the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research

birdalbrocum 1y ago

What RTO and WTAF means? Who knows. I clicked on link to find out but looks like website blogs my IP range. I will never know this important information..

luaybs 1y ago
Return to Office. What the Actual F***.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Macha 1y ago
WTAF: WT Actual F RTO: Return to Office
gaws 1y ago
You couldn't take the 30 seconds to do web search for those acronyms?

pheggs 1y ago

It's indeed one of the most stupid decisions a management could make. People will be more tired once they arrive in the office. From a companies perspective skilled people will just leave to another company. And you can't hire the best people from everywhere if you need to have an office present. And obviously there are a lot more drawbacks. From a society perspective it contributes to traffic jams, it contributes to overfilled public transport, and it puts needless stress on infrastructure. In general, it's just not efficient at all. Sadly many big corporations are lead by narcissists who care more about their ego, who need to feel like they can control other people, rather than their well being or having a positive impact. Some may use it to get rid of people, but that, truly has to be the most stupid way to get rid of your best employees.

bonoboTP 1y ago

It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location. You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent. If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person social interaction, your cultural capital will also lose value. There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech. Americans seem unaware, but if you insist on remote work, you'll lose that advantage quick. If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.

ajjahs 1y ago
[dead]
phrotoma 1y ago
> you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many. You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.
dboreham 1y ago
If the entire organization is offshore then fine, but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration. South America is ok but there aren't many software developers there.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  > but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration This is definitely part of it, but if you have east coast or central teams, this is totally doable. In fact, often the European employees get more done as they get a whole morning before the US based pings/meetings start.
1y ago

5350-uiop-1130 1y ago

> You will cause untold mental, physical and financial upheaval for many employees who now have to spend money on commuting, childcare, pet care, to name but a few. as if they care.

Yizahi 1y ago

RTO is way to force people work for two more hours per day for the same pay (1 hour typical commute one way). Hence it is done to suppress wages and make people leave voluntarily. It's not that hard to deduce.

sublimefire 1y ago
But it is not, people work more when remote. It is harder to disconnect from work. This kind of bothers me because it seems RTO will reduce the hours spent working (on average) which should affect the output, but somehow companies expect the inverse.
- gaws 1y ago
  Yizahi is right. RTO is mostly about reducing headcount.

5350-uiop-1130 1y ago

they're just tightening the noose. don't you feel like everything is getting worse in some ways? the delusion is to think you're special because you work for a big evil company.

EverydayBalloon 1y ago

[dead]

cjs_ac 1y ago

Everyone has their own explanations for why businesses do these things, and I see merit in many of them. Here's my contribution to the list. All these complaints about poorly-thought-out RTO policies come from big corporations. If you're a senior leader in a organisation with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, it's very difficult to keep in touch with the people who actually do the work in making or providing the product or service that the business brings to the market. As a consequence, leaders come to believe that the routine of their work day - ingesting reports, engaging in discussions, and communicating decisions - is representative of what's going on in the organisation. Ultimately, I think it's a limitation of human psychology: the organisation is larger than Dunbar's number, and so starts to become opaque to its members. My solution is to only work for businesses that are small enough for everyone to know everyone else.

roenxi 1y ago

> “We don’t think people do their best work from home”: Prove it. It isn't the corporations job to prove it, they're paying the salary because of their own internal calculations about what is valuable to them. It really in't that much of a stretch to say companies are serious about their motivations here - there are much easier ways to do layoffs than moving everyone into an office. "Your company didn't collapse during COVID" isn't much of an argument. It is like saying someone didn't die of COVID so they can handle being sick 24x7 for the rest of their life. Just because something is survivable or even tolerable doesn't mean it is desirable.

sublimefire 1y ago

These are weak arguments in the post. It is not the commute which is the problem. In my experience (tech specifically) office is unnecessary because I do less work, and it is more depressing because you still talk with the same people over the chat and calls. There are issues with the shortage of phone booths, and listening to every conversation does not help concentrate. Then there is poor old hardware, not many will buy Herman Miller for their subordinates. Another thing not mentioned is the total show of appearances over outcomes. Not to mention geographically distributed teams. At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.

dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago

"but it’s a sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees. " That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)

krackers 1y ago
>sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.

phyzix5761 1y ago

A 50 mile commute can be like 3 hours one way in Redmond

Esophagus4 1y ago

This is more of a rant than an article.

0x000xca0xfe 1y ago

We have a similar push for RTO here in Germany as well where the usual U.S. centric reasons don't apply (tax break law has not changed; we're still semi-ZIRP at 2%, no H1B visas, outsourcing is not a major trend either as many companies want German speaking employees). I think the reason is simple: Lock-in for employees. Moving for your employer demonstrates dependence and highlights your inferior bargaining position. If you have to move again to switch jobs it will be quite painful so you'll likely accept a lower salary instead.