
Ask HN: Why certain companies are ending working from home? - bsvalley
A lot of companies in the Bay Area are still trying to end one of the most critical benefits for employees - working from home.<p>Usually these are big companies like yahoo, apple, IBM, etc. Why executives still don&#x27;t understand that the average commute time in the Bay Area is the worse in the country? From 1 to 1.5 hours a day. Are they using the fact that a lot of people are still sending them Resume every year?
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jph
There's debate about this and I've seen a range of ways during my consulting.
Some companies and teams strongly believe that all core teammates must be in
the same room. Some companies and teams strongly believe in location
independence.

One of my clients has a very powerful example of how location independence
helps scale many microservices, across dozens of developer locations, many
timezones, and five worldwide SRE hosting centers.

Surprisingly the success has little to do with mitigating commute time, nor
working preferred hours, nor any of the usual claims. Instead, the success is
mostly to do with enabling good asynchronous tooling such as chat, workflows,
domain driven design ubiquitous language, and the composability of
microservices ecosystems.

After seeing this success and the careful management of it, and replicating it
at my other clients, I'm a strong advocate of location independence and
investment in the tooling to make it successful.

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chrisbennet
For IBM and Yahoo at least, I think it was a head count reduction strategy.
They _wanted_ it to be inconvenient enough that employees would quit.

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mattbgates
My company moved me across the country just so I could work in an office. They
claimed that "communication" was the most important reason for bringing all
their employees into an office. However, I pretty much sit in a private
cubicle and do not talk to anyone, really. So yeah, I don't think they really
moved us here for that.

They had even hired me as a "full-time employee" with full benefits, paid me
to move across the country, and I was able to negotiate a very nice raise.

Before that, I was working remotely as a "contractor" with no benefits, no
vacation time, no 401k. Nothing. I also was happy to log on to my computer for
my shift a half hour early and I even stayed late without complaint. My
company would have a move-it-or-lose it policy during this new move of
eliminating remote workers. Basically, you move from wherever you were living
to the two main headquarters, located in two different states. Those that did
not move would get laid off. I know of only one or two people who managed to
bypass this rule and keep their jobs and work from home. At the same time,
Marissa Meyer of Yahoo was also doing this same thing, "come work in an office
or get out of our company", so I thought the "higher powers" were certainly
highly influenced by her actions. They claimed otherwise.

Unfortunately and fortunately, I was able to do it and moved. I love where
they moved me. My life is far better than it was where I was living. Cost of
living is cheaper and access to the country is better, but I do miss my
family. However, they are only a plane ride away, so I try to go see them once
a year or every other year.

So I probably cost the company less money as a contractor, but they preferred
to give me all benefits and pay me more if I came into an office. So why not?
Anyways, I did later find out that, at least in the state I chose to move to,
the state itself was giving the company tax breaks for the employees it hired,
so I can only guess that whatever money they saved in taxes, they ended up
giving to me. Win!

Do I miss working from home? Absolutely. Do I see the importance of having to
go into an office that is literally 5-10 minutes from where I live for 8-9
hours a day? Not at all. I don't think it improved communication one bit. If
anything, my boss can now directly yell at me in person, instead of doing it
via phone call. I'm sure he loves it. But every Friday, I go into the office
for 3 hours and then I get to work from home the remainder of the shift, since
me and only two others are in the office in the evenings on Friday nights, so
my boss was nice enough to just say: "Just go home every Friday after 6 PM."

There are reasons FOR and AGAINST why companies are doing it. I won't list
them all here... because companies have their own reasons. Contractor working
at home with no benefits, no health insurance, no sick days, and no vacation
time--NOTHING vs. Full-time employee with a 401k, health insurance, vacation
time, company parties, etc. Apparently, costs of employees were not really an
issue for the company.

I could weigh the benefits of working with no benefits: you create your own
vacation time, take your computer with you... which is great, and no immediate
boss constantly looking over your shoulder was nice. But all the costs of
trying to get anything else were more expensive. It was a catch 22: Obamacare
said I was making too much money, but after taxes, I could barely afford my
rent. And at the time, the penalty for not having health insurance was still a
year or two in the works, so it had not affected me to the extent where I
needed to have some health insurance.

On the other hand, having the benefits of the company healthcare had shielded
me from the effects of Obamacare. Having official company vacation time and
sick days are awesome. Seeing the benefits of whatever happens in the office
-- including raises, company shared success (everyone gets a small % of the
profits every year if the company does well), and yearly (once or twice a
year) company parties is a nice benefit to actually working "for" and at the
office.

