I do believe that 34% of polled workers said they would quit rather than return to the office, but I do not believe even a majority of them would actually go follow through on that threat. Especially if you filter out high paid/high job-security developers and similar people who might have the financial security to do so.
People, particularly Americans, are shackled to their jobs for many reasons and most people are risk-averse.
Despite myself being pro-remote, I think that we will see a sizable return to office-centric work culture over the next few years. The office may (hopefully) end up looking or feeling a bit different as an outcome. All the stories about the "end of the office" are overblown.
Once it again becomes beneficial for your career and/or social life to participate in office culture people will come crawling back. Not saying it's a good thing, but it's what will happen.
I'm just a sample of one but I literally did this. My employer started forcing us back into the office as soon as it was legally permitted. We were only allowed to be at 30% capacity, so management ensured that this quota was always filled.
We were all complaining about unnecessary risk to personal and public health. We couldn't even take advantage of the office, we were doing everything through Google meet anyway because meeting rooms were restricted to 3 people. Eating areas and water coolers were also out of bounds.
After a couple of months I landed a fully remote job and made sure management knew that this was why I was leaving. A couple of days after the CTO announced that fully-remote work will be allowed indefinitely for developers, and I'm quite pleased I was able to win that for my ex-colleagues.
Moral of the story: voting with your feet, it's a great way to balance power between employers and employees. Overall I think it's good for society to have this attitude.
I was interviewing recently, and I asked everybody explicitly about remote. Any places that have wishy-washy answers or seemed enthusiastic to get software devs back into the office, I didn't continue with.
I have no way to know if I influenced anybody's thoughts or actions, but I communicated to everybody involved that I'm only interested in remote work, and told them that others I have spoken to feel the same.
That's not strictly true, I do know some folks that are looking forward to getting back to the office, but I tried to do my part anyway.
I think in a couple years we will be back to a pretty high percentage of positions being onsite. Right now there is a small window of time to really drive home the idea that there is a sizable group of folks who will refuse to commute to an office, and hopefully at least influence the number of future remote opportunities a little bit more in our favor.
My SO's office made an announcement at the beginning of the year that they're going to be requiring everyone to be local and in-office as soon as it's safe. Since then they've lost 40 people (a little less than 1/3 of their staff) who explicitly said that that they were leaving for remote work.
Executive leadership is now eating their hat and holding a town hall next week to talk about reversing that decision.
Now if they can be so quick to demand either solution, my question is — is there any other reason for them to demand onsite work, except for being toxic micromanaging assholes? Does it really matter to them that much?
>I do believe that 34% of polled workers said they would quit rather than return to the office, but I do not believe even a majority of them would actually go follow through on that threat.
They can't. There's not nearly enough remote positions available.
>I do believe that 34% of polled workers said they would quit rather than return to the office, but I do not believe even a majority of them would actually go follow through on that threat.
I think the operative word in the survey results is "rather". That's a preference, not necessarily a decision.
I believe it because this is what I’ve seen around me. People willing to quit if they are forced to go back to the office. Now will they do it? I don’t know, although some have already bought houses elsewhere without even asking for permission.
I do believe that 34% of polled workers said they would quit rather than return to the office, but I do not believe even a majority of them would actually go follow through on that threat. Especially if you filter out high paid/high job-security developers and similar people who might have the financial security to do so.
People, particularly Americans, are shackled to their jobs for many reasons and most people are risk-averse.
Despite myself being pro-remote, I think that we will see a sizable return to office-centric work culture over the next few years. The office may (hopefully) end up looking or feeling a bit different as an outcome. All the stories about the "end of the office" are overblown.
Once it again becomes beneficial for your career and/or social life to participate in office culture people will come crawling back. Not saying it's a good thing, but it's what will happen.