I wouldnt change my job even with 30% increase if they werent offering remote.
If you do not offer remote, then you better be... idk NASA, Microsoft, Apple, Jane Street or some fancy shit or paying way, way more
If a company does not realize that 0% fully remote workforce is significant talent pool disadvantage then Im shocked.
>They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.
Yea, I do wonder how those complex, cross-geo products get built!
This is the same group of people who overhired so much they needed layoffs immediately after. There is no long-term vision here. There is corporate real estate and executive hubris and control. They live in entirely different worlds than most of us.
It's 95% self-preservation by management. Maybe 5% thinking about tax incentives.
Time will tell if shareholders reward or punish companies that force RTO. So far they don't seem to care. But this will play a role in whether this trend continues or reverses.
Yeah, the meme about an evil conspiracy of corporate CEOs also owning commercial real estate is really, really dumb. Maybe you could theorize that when Andy Jassy and Tim Cook were the only people pushing for RTO, but now more and more companies are doing it, and I assure you that the CEO of (insert random 100-person tech company here) doesn't have deep investments in commercial real estate.
Occam's razor: the simple fact is management thinks that people are more productive when in the office. They may be wrong about that, of course. But if the question is "why is management pushing for RTO," it's simply because they believe their teams will produce more and better output while in the office.
> But if the question is "why is management pushing for RTO," it's simply because they believe their teams will produce more and better output while in the office.
I strongly disagree.
Managers don't care how productive their teams are. They care about keeping their jobs. They care about hiring more people and building an empire and climbing the career ladder.
If your team is more productive working in Hawaii, but you'll lose your job, you're not going to recommend they work from Hawaii. You're going to recommend they be less productive and you keep your job.
The same way if your team doesn't need any more people, you're going to fight to get more people, because you don't care about the company, you care about climbing the ladder.
Of course, they don't see it like this.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Dont you mean the other way around? The primary motivation imo is keeping your job. If the team is productive even better no? I am not sure a manager wakes up in the morning thinking about productivity as much as what's gonna get in between them and their job (source: I've been there).
> Managers don't care how productive their teams are. They care about keeping their jobs. They care about hiring more people and building an empire and climbing the career ladder.
All true
> If your team is more productive working in Hawaii, but you'll lose your job, you're not going to recommend they work from Hawaii.
Huh? I don't see why a team being in Hawaii would lead the manager to lose their job. You still need management in a fully remote setting.
> it seems popular thinking that remote work could lead to less managers.
But.... why? A manager's work still stays the same whether their teams are in office or online. Really curious to understand why one would think otherwise.
This is like saying developers don't care about the software they work on and intentionally introduce tech debt for the sake of job security. True in some cases, not universally applicable.
The VAST majority of developers I've worked with couldn't give 2 shits about the business (as they probably shouldn't - the biz doesn't give 2 shits about them).
Most of them don't really care about self preservation, because if you're an IC - it's so much easier to get a job compared to a manager or a VP or an exec.
But most of them just want to build new things and use the hottest framework or drive some overly complex design just for the sake of it. At the same time, there's bugs that actually effect customers that no one is working on, because no one has time for that because they're too busy re-writing something in some new language or framework or whatever...
I hate to break it to you but people do exactly this in the form of grossly over-engineered solutions with fancy design docs that impress the right people at the right time.
Though in my 15+ year career as dev and dev manager I've only ever encountered one person who was intentionally building things poorly for job-related reasons. (Even then, that was for a company doing a federal government contract, so arguably building it in a way that encouraged expensive maintenance contracts was good for the business, in a perverse way.)
I've seen a lot of overengineered solutions with fancy design docs but they've always come from a good place, genuinely thinking that the hot new tool X or architecture Y is going to solve all of the problems. I've built some poorly overengineered solutions myself. But even if that road of overengineered solutions leads to hell, it's at least paved with good intentions.
> thinking that the hot new tool X or architecture Y is going to solve all of the problems
Wanting to use X and Y and finding a way to shoehorn them into usefulness is called "motivated reasoning." Does that look any different from "coming from a good place?" Heck, it could be both motivated reasoning and coming from a good place.
> Though in my 15+ year career as dev and dev manager I've only ever encountered one person who was intentionally building things poorly for job-related reasons.
I agree, I've very rarely seen this done by individuals. However, I've often seen it done by teams.
I think if anything, this shows that CEOs aren't any better at predicting the future than you or I.
Dead reckoning seems to be all they do. Things are great? Let's hire like there's no tomorrow that won't be even better. Things are bad? Let's layoff and cut costs like there's no tomorrow that won't be worse.
Teams around the world but also outsourcing. They had absolutely no issue working with people that didn't belong to the company, were less accountable, and couldn't be easily tested before being hired.
But now it's a big issue if I want to avoid traffic jam and work more in a peaceful environment.
I'm in the process of switching jobs, and when I'm offered less than 3 days of WFH, I increase my price but the recruiters still don't understand why. It's like COVID never happened and no one managed to adapt to this "old new thing" (because WFH is as old as the internet).
> How is an empty office that costs the same as a full one any worse on a balance sheet?
It isn't. The random companies are spending tons of money to bail out Property Owners meme is a nonsensical conspiracy theory some people have decided to latch onto.
How is an asset that costs to do nothing worse than an asset that costs to be productive?
HN readers really struggle with basic financial concepts. A lease or an owned building is an asset that is utilized for income. If it is not being utilized it is now a cost with no return. That is now unneeded cost when analyzing income and investment.
On top of that if owned it is marked down at its value and any real loss in value needs to be marked down as well.
This is the real analysis going on. This is not a conspiracy. This isn’t complicated. It’s really basic accounting. So please think before brushing everyone off.
Do you and everyone else who keeps repeating this really believe that no one in corporate management has ever heard of sunk costs. Plenty of companies are working to downsize their real estate footprint.
I think everyone is struggling to understand why the push for RTO is so strong. The reasons we're being given make no actual sense and contradict other corporate stances.
The cost of real estate is a possibility that is obvious from the outside, so of course people latch onto that. When you have no information, you speculate.
Among the reasons I've heard is that a lot of younger workers have struggled with remote, on-boarding them has generally been harder, company culture has probably fragmented some, there can be an energy to people getting together physically, etc. You can disagree with some or all of that but it came from the mouth of a senior exec who I think was genuinely trying to figure out how to get back some in-person advantages without forcing a lot of people back to the office on some schedule.
I've heard those reasons as well. The reason I don't believe them is that in the last couple of decades, every place I've worked has done all collaboration and communication online despite everyone being in the same office. So those purported benefits were nonexistent to begin with.
So, at least in my mind, those explanations explain nothing.
Like it or not, for some it’s also just their preference and they happen to have decision making power over it.
Not everything is a conspiracy and some people do actually prefer working from the office.
The problem is being offered that flexibility and then having it taken away, and people are well within their rights to protest that by walking out or putting themselves back on the market.
These same companies were eager to cut pay for people choosing remote work so it follows that they should be prepared to increase pay for bringing people back into the office.
I haven't been to the office and we agreed I'm remote first.
If recruiter messages me about "Hot company but onsite", I just ignore it. I honestly don't care about the company. At this point I care about 1-Remote 2-Money.
I had an interview for a SW dev position at a Austrian (Europe, not kangaroos) company that manufactures some high tech shit and they said it's 100% in office because if production workers need to be on the factory floor, then it's only fair that so does everyone else, no exceptions, including the SW devs.
I'm struggling to find companies that offer 100% WFH here. Every single company mandates you in the office at least a few days a week here and why I ask them I get the answer "because Covid is over so we're back to normal now and we're more productive when everyone is in the office".
> they said it's 100% in office because if production workers need to be on the factory floor, then it's only fair that so does everyone else, no exceptions, including the SW devs.
Did you ask them if everyone gets paid the same too, including the owners, and if not, how is that fair?
I'm in US. Remote is considered a part of the package for me.
Why should I care a factory worker or manager needs to be there? I did variety of jobs that required me to be onsite all the time, hence why I switched to computers/programming.
I might be switching to a hybrid model, where I go in for meetings as I will be taking a more of a leadership role. However, if I'm programming office is just not a good place to be, as it is harder for me to focus.
Same. Remote or hybrid is a given for many IT or Dev roles.
Factory, data center, and a few "owner" roles are expected to be on site. Makes sense for these to be on site, and they should have compensation and amenities (e.g. an office, or a nice cube, or whatever) to justify it.
The company I work for is currently evaluating return to the office five days a week. First thing I did is filed a request for two 4k monitors, “fancy” ergonomic keyboard and mouse (around £400), and an expensive ergonomic chair. Just in case they push back I also got the doctor’s prescription, that I need all that because of health issues, so they won’t be able to force me to work. My negotiation tactic is going to be “I have all that at home already”.
This is one of the big problems I’ve noticed as our company has went hybrid. The office environment in terms of equipment is generally much worse than what people had at home. Lots of requests for new monitors, better chairs etc. I think what makes this even worse is that quite a few companies I know transitioned from a private office to a “private” WeWork while they evaluate how many people are going to come in. It’s a significant downgrade in all cases. And you can’t even bring in your own gear because desks are booked and you’re not allowed to leave anything behind at the end of the day. Madness.
Quite the opposite, it's a perfect negotiating spot - you would see if the company gives a fuck fast. Surely, you should be in a position to fire the company, but it's not limited to 4k monitors.
I tought that idea had legs. Just looked at the price of carbon credits. It's around $ 15.0/tCO2e [0]. And on average a commuting employee emits around 4.96kg of C02.
The price is so low it's clear the market is underpricing the externalities massively. I have to admit, the market is the wrong instrument for this problem.
Companies have anticipated this argument. I’m not sure I believe them but apparently working in the office is more environmentally friendly in a lot of cases.
I would love to have that argument with higher-ups. In fact I would love to have them state their facts on public record. Just so historians have a paper trail to follow when they will try to answer the question , "what were they thining?" .
In practice you can't get away with that. It's like trying to argue that it would be a good idea to keep skills in house or objecting to some of the weird HR fads that go around like personality "tests"; you can't win.
They may be acting irrationally but they don't want about it.
The best thing, and probably the only thing, you can do is move to a job that treats you better. Remember though, the old company probably won't miss you because they're not interested in how retention affects performance.
It's best to be dispassionate about it. We're all just "resource" and jobs are just "work".
Disclaimer: I have worked fully remotely since 2016 and wouldn't go back to an office I couldn't cycle to in 30 minutes.
>apparently working in the office is more environmentally friendly in a lot of cases.
I would think you'd need very specific conditions. The office has to be climate-controlled in any case so any extra AC or heat used at home is incremental. (Other utilities etc. at home are probably pretty minor.) But to be a net negative, you probably have to assume you're not driving or you're only driving a short distance.
Open source projects are essentially all built in async, fully remote environments. Many of which have become essential backbones of the industry. So the argument that fully remote work promotes silos or is weak on coordination don't really hold up.
Besides, corporate silos are not a remote work problem. It has existed for as long as corporations themselves. Most big corps are not really building "complex" products but merely reinventing CRUD apps in-house.
I moved out of the bay area in 2020 for family reasons. Before Covid, I was expecting to take something resembling a 75% pay cut because of the move. Covid and increased availability of remote work meant that I got to keep my job with only a 15% pay cut. That was great.
But I'm never going back. No matter what. That 75% pay cut remains a good deal if it is the only available option. Just don't tell my employer I'm willing to take so little.
Man I feel out of sync with the hivemind sometimes. Young 20-something and work from home seems to effectively be the standard for most programming work, and it makes me wish I pursued a different career. I hate being stuck at home, video calling to endless pfps, and never seeing a single coworker’s face.
I like the office better, actually. Quite a bit better.
... I just don't like it enough to make it worth 5ish hours of fighting rush-hour traffic [edit: per week], right after getting the kids where they need to be (for the morning half, at least), not being able to do my mise for dinner over lunch or move some clothes to the dryer during the day, the gas & wear & tear on my car, the risk to life and limb, not being able to work-and-travel, and not being able to move somewhere far away without changing jobs. Plus I can greet my kids when they get home from school every day.
I don't prefer WFH per se—I prefer working in an office, especially in a nice area with cool stuff around, not so much in some soulless office park—but with that all factored in, it's not even a close call. WFH by a mile.
[EDIT] Oh, and child care costs in the Summer. That's ~$2.5-3k/kid of value alone, per year, in sheer cost savings. More, if your workplace is in-person and also not flexible enough that you can get home before 5 in the evening and leave late-ish in the morning—more like $6-8k/kid per year, in that case, since you'll need before-school and after-school care.
I'm back in the office after 3 years away. I've been listening to a coworker drone on at the top of his voice for the past 2 hours. Plus, I don't even work with anybody in this (satellite) office, my actual team members are all in different cities.
I think RTO would have been an easier pill to swallow for some if the US was less car dependent. I'd be the higher a proportion of the workforce in an MSA drives, the more they'll push back against RTO.
The world is more than the US. If you think everyone outside the US, just needs to walk down the stairs of their apartment, then down the street - stopping at a coffee shop on the way - to get to their office, then keep dreaming. I live in the centre of a small EU capital that has pretty good public transport, but it still takes 40 minutes taking two buses to get to the office...
Definitely an interesting hypothesis! I bet it's also true that people who are car-dependent are more likely to have houses (with home offices, yards, space, quiet, chosen partners instead of roommates, and so on).
You could test the relationship by looking at New Jersey and Connecticut: lots of people are relatively independent from cars for their commutes, but tend to have genuine houses (as opposed to their coworkers who live on the Lower East Side).
> You could test the relationship by looking at New Jersey and Connecticut: lots of people are relatively independent from cars for their commutes, but tend to have genuine houses (as opposed to their coworkers who live on the Lower East Side).
I'm guessing you mean the part of CT that's close to NYC. At least when I was growing up in the 70's / 80's, my part of CT had literally no public transportation, except for the occasional bus service for senior citizens.
When I lived within walking distance of a transit station I was going to the office twice a week after the initial lockdowns lifted. The change of scenery was nice as was being around people again. Now that I have moved, and would need to drive to a transit station, I go in maybe once every few months. It adds maybe 15 minutes each way to my previous commute, but the idea of getting in a car at all is really off-putting. Add to that the possibility of vandalism or theft while my car is sitting in the transit lot all day and it just doesn't feel worth it. Driving to the office is a non-starter due to traffic and expensive parking.
I wonder if that equation balance would change if we all took a leaf from Joel Spolsky and gave everyone a private office in the office?
To me it wouldn't, I live in the middle of no where near my family, I couldn't work for big tech and stay here. But I bet it'd shift a lot of opinions.
It would probably make some difference at the margins. But I'd be willing to bet that, for the majority of people who don't want to go into an office or at least go in frequently, the driving factor is probably a commute. I'm pretty much fully remote but, if I would walk 15 minutes to our downtown office rather than drive >30 minutes to our suburban office, I would probably drop in semi-regularly for the change in scenery.
People have different preferences, but I will never, ever, ever again in my life voluntarily commute hours every day in standstill traffic to a bland, lifeless corporate hellhole of an office to have disinterested polite banter with random people I have nothing in common with to do a job that is entirely based around sitting at my computer. Not when I can work comfortably in the peaceful surroundings of my own home office, decorated and set up exactly how a I want, or even at a local coffee shop (or halfway across the country while visiting family for a month), eat lunch with my wife, walk our dog mid-day, and spend my mornings and evenings peacefully getting household stuff done and relaxing.
The improvement to my quality of life that remote work has produced is so monumental that it's hard to even envision how I coped most days before.
This is good, but also many people do not have comfortable and peaceful homes with nice offices, partners, dogs, etc and basically never leaving their apartment or room in their apartment is a nightmare and socially isolating in a profound way.
True. Then again, maybe masking that problem with some relief from daily commutes to work is not really a great solution. Recent layoffs in the industry were a good reminder for me that it's easy to be overly emotionally tied to your work.
I think we just have to accept that some people like an office, depending on the office, the commute, their job, their personality, phase of life, and current circumstances.
I totally agree and everyone should be able to work in their preferred way. I'm very wary of any efforts to entice more people back into offices, though, as it's absolutely not being driven by a desire to offer more flexibility.
I'll be dragged kicking and screaming back into an office, and would only ever consider an in-person role as a stopgap measure while I job hunt.
That's fine, I think clearly the labor market is shifting toward people demanding more WFH.
I just also think its fine for a company to say "look, the way we work is [remote/office], and if you want to work a different way find a different company if that's a deal-breaker".
thats why god invented coffeeshops, libraries, coworking spaces. hell, my local Uni offers free wifi for guests for up to an hour, so I've gotten planted in some of their buildings and knocked out simple tasks
It is not hivemind. People are simply split on this and I believe (no data to back it; just an assumption) that a majority of us are pro-WFH. I work for FAANG. Even the middle management folks, who said something along the lines of "I went to the office the other day and it was nice to quickly chat up with a coworker to agree about something" a month before RTO was mandated, don't show up the minimum required 3 days a week at the office these days. One of them has been using excuses like "childcare emergencies"; another one has been using excuses of feeling unwell (I wonder why they said what they said ~2 months ago). In the meantime, the head of the division (the VP) is nowhere to be found in the office (asked coworkers who go back to the office reluctantly).
I have a remote exception for now, but I think they will take it away soon and when they do, I'm leaving. I don't want to waste 2 hours of my life commuting either by public transit (less bad) or by driving (really bad because it is very dangerous to drive in the metro area I live). I am 100% productive working alone or coordinate with coworkers remotely (in fact, I spend on average 9 hours a day working when WFH). I will NEVER go back to the office. If the company doesn't have fully remote roles, I'll skip applying for them happily and it is their loss.
I'm one of the few people in my FAANG company with exemptions to work fully remote as well and I see the same thing you do... I wonder if we work at the same place.
I see some really crazy cognitive dissonance with RTO. Some of them say they prefer the new hybrid RTO policy and champion its benefits, but literally every week - without exception thus far - they've made an excuse to not show up at least one day. I think some people are just too nervous about not seeming to "drink the Koolaid". You'd think the seasoned people would be more immune to that kind of behavior, but here we are.
Managers are fundamentally involved in signaling -- arguably a primary job function. Signaling statuses up, signaling messages from leadership down.
They probably 100% agree with WFH, or hybrid, but their job is to signal, and those RSUs depend on their willingness and ability to conform to corporate culture.
People saying things that they don't really mean (seen it with RTO, 100% unit-testing coverage, 100% going all in for microservices, and all kinds of trendy stuff that I came across in my 14 years of professional programming). That is one of the reasons we haven't made human life easier/simpler.
This RTO thing is b.s. and I'm not afraid to air my grievances in front of my colleagues. In fact, I started looking for fully-remote jobs so that I can leave soon and can write a letter to that VP, who said he likes working from office better, asking him to come to the office often. :D
Keep in mind most folks needed to suffer through open office plans and terrible commutes for years until remote was an option. If you had to go through school during the pandemic then enter the workforce remotely immediately after that is going to definitely give you a different perspective. I feel bad for young folks that had to do most or part of their college years remote—that is really unfortunate. I’m sorry if that happened to you as that is really unfair.
I may be completely wrong, but I'm in France and it's mostly older people (from the age of 30 or 35) who want WFH. Young people don't know they can ask for a higher salary, and, apparently enjoy working in an office or open-space.
Older developers wants personal time, and some want to take care of their kids and family which is way easier if you're at home.
At my last interview, the boss asked if full-remote wouldn't be a problem for me, hinting that it may cause loneliness or psychological issues. I told her that I had friends and could see them whenever I wanted which is why I don't miss offices.
I think a lot of the younger generations wanting in-office work comes from living alone. I did WFH for a ~2 years recently and found that even when I was visiting with friends most days, those 8 hours spent alone, in my bedroom (the only place a desk would fit in my apartment) were really isolating.
I wound up switching to a coworking space - a local alternative to wework. Didn't directly interact with people there most days but just having a space outside my small apartment and being _around_ other people made a huge difference for my mental health.
Of course, if you have family at home or even roommates, this may be much less of a concern for you.
I run a progressive online coworking community that I don’t want to try monetizing until I started asking why I’m unable to get a better career job (I can’t do Leetcode and buckle under interview pressure when non straight forward things are asked.
I was thinking of asking for donations to cover my own coworking physical spot. The reason I thought maybe it doesn’t help is because the last time I was there I wasn’t talking to people really. I thought that meant it wasn’t for me. However the decent ~12 min drive, getting away from the house, being around people, it was really nice.
The online coworking on Zoom suffices sometimes but not when I’m already on there all the time helping manage it.
—
I have people at home but the negatives outweigh the positive when I’m there all the time instead of only a couple hours a day outside sleep.
As a young person, I can afford to live alone. I'm definitely privileged in this regard (and don't live in NYC or SF) though.
Even living with one roommate I felt the isolation, since my office was still my bedroom. Placing my work desk in my bedroom was probably one of the worst moves I've made for my mental health; if my apartment had space to make a shared office I may have had a difference experience and therefore a different opinion.
I think a 15 minute walk to a low-commitment workspace was a good fit for me, but obviously I can't speak for everyone.
I'm sorry my 200 word anecdote-based comment did not account for 100% of possible personal circumstances. Please contact customer service if you'd like to request a refund.
Or maybe younger/less experienced people feel anxious about competing with everybody in the remote market so they don't even bother and go for the less competitive in-office market.
You're not the only one. One job I worked, one of my coworkers left the job, even though he liked the work and it was a great opportunity, because he couldn't stand not having coworkers to run into at the water cooler.
I have a family, so I prefer being able to run into them at the water cooler when I leave my office room.
When the industry adopted open office plans as the norm I almost changed careers. Spending 6 years in that soul crushing environment after having spent the previous couple decades in either regular offices or cubes was not fun. I have no desire to ever return to that. WFH is definitely not optimal, but given the alternative, I’ll take it.
I prefer either being in-office or being completely isolated and having complete freedom if working from home. Working from home and having to work by a schedule and do daily video calls feels like taking the bad parts of both options.
I see people talking about video calls all the time in the USA when working remotely but I don't understand if it's a social or cultural thing.
I'm French and I never did video calls, ever. It's always audio calls using Teams and we just show the relevant part of the screen to the audience (aka Screen sharing or something).
Pretty much the same. At moderately large East Coast company, big (usually optional) informational meetings, non-presenters usually have their cameras off. Small team meetings and 1:1s, cameras are mostly on though no one will object if someone has to shut theirs off for some reason.
It varies company to company in the US. Ditto video on vs video off being the norm.
I've seen companies that dealt with a ton of business travel before WFH got big, prefer actual dial-in-on-a-phone conference calls for meetings, even when all parties happened to be in offices at the time, well into the Zoom era. It weirded me out at first, but I think they may be on to something. If you don't need to screen share, not every call needs to be a video call. Don't need to install anything—anyone with a phone, which is everyone, can join. Easier to join on-the-go. Reliable Internet connection not required. If your phone has signal, you can join the call. Can even join from a wired desk phone.
Other companies, every call's a video call and you'll catch shit if you keep your camera off. Remote cultures exist on a spectrum between those. (and, of course, open source projects with distributed teams are often highly productive with little more than IRC, email, git, and an issue tracker)
> I see people talking about video calls all the time in the USA when working remotely
I work in the US for a company that doesn't allow WFH.
All of our meetings are via video calls, even though we are all in the same place. This has been the norm in my experience for over a decade now.
The place I worked before my current employer did the same, but allowed people to keep the video off if they chose. Everyone chose to keep the cameras off, except most of the management.
I’m in the USa, and I’ve been remote for over a decade. Until the pandemic I almost never did a video call. Then everyone went remote and it suddenly became the norm.
It seemed to start because managers who weren’t used to remote wanted to keep tabs on their employees.
In the US today video calls are pretty common for work, don’t think you’re missing anything. I worked remotely pre pandemic and only ever just used a phone and webex. Poor audio, sometimes odd behaviors, especially around the world (the zones did not always perfectly combine, so you could tell it was an India based call vs a US one) but basically functional. Today I do video calls, the audio is far better, but the video makes me feel like a psychopath, and completely emotionally drained after a long meeting. It’s weird.
Yes, because you're the one who's the most impacted by this; your prospects will be limited by the career ladder stasis which remote work is causing. You'll also never really be able to form any bonds or trust with your coworkers. People who are more advanced in their careers, depending on their strategy, won't care about these things as much, and have families that take up their time.
You're not alone. The WFH supporters just seem a bit... louder. I've stopped discussing this topic at length because how emotional many get in discussing the reasons and supposed motivations of those they disagree with.
What's probably true is that a lot of people who want to be remote really want to be remote. They also recognize that remote hasn't been anything like the norm for office workers until COVID.
Whereas, a lot of the people who want to (mostly flexibly) come into an office, more mildly prefer the change in scenery and mingling with co-workers. While some might prefer more of their co-workers to come in, they may well work with people at other sites anyway so it's not really a big deal is all/most of their co-workers come it.
> video calling to endless pfps, and never seeing a single coworker’s face.
I've worked for two remote-first companies, and both had a culture of at least turning on web cams. My former company took it a step further and would have an annual gathering of the whole company in February, and regional gatherings in August.
I enjoyed it for a year, but I started to hate it too. I am not a social type at all, but some exchange with others at work is nice.
That said, I do have a 5 min commute, I get better food at work and have an office for myself. If that would be significantly longer, I certainly would prefer to WFH too.
coworkers aren't your friends they're "work friends", and your job isn't your life.
join a club, go places, talk to people. even working from home I walk to local coffee shops and chat with the people there. 6am there is always the same old guy and he reads the whole damn newspaper before 7am -- and is keen to talk. Old-timey, but a nice guy.
I'm on a softball team. there are a few meetup.com groups I like to hit, esp. the local LUG. there is a local non-profit art center and my wife sits on that board -- get to go to a few art events.
the problem is you're stuck at home. get out more, killer.
Remote work with lots of PTO available (no questions asked) is an order of magnitude more important to me than salary. I'll happily settle for a medium-sized company with a decent tech stack that offers freedom and flexibility.
There is (almost) no salary level that would make me trade the current setup remote work and lots of time off.
I am more motivated to work and be productive than when I worked in an office. And I'm happier about what I do.
Flexibility is the name of the game. I've had offers (non-tech) that are roughly twice my current salary, but at institutions that are VASTLY less flexible than my current employer.
I haven't worked a full week in nearly 12 years, and that's how I want it.
Money is nice, but I can, quite literally, always get more money. Time is the one commodity that I absolutely cannot find more of.
The weird thing with the back to office push is how consistent it is across companies. It has to be a McKinsey consultant or something, because all companies that push going back in are doing the 3 days in office hybrid basically. Its too uniform.
That sounds plausible, it sure seems management consulting (McKinsey, Bain, etc.) are involved in someway. The companies all over hired around the same time, laid off staff at the same time, and are doing the back to office at the same time.
It’s because RTO is the last straw holding up commercial real estate. Either consultants or CEOs got together and realized that there’s no back, so they started to force it.
Completely agree how much collusion between companies there is though.
There is definitely tax breaks for business who are "anchor tenants" in cities. Texas attracted tons of bodies to places like Austin via big tax breaks, for example. The idea being that the loss of Corporate Tax is made up by all of the people living, eating, shopping, travelling, etc. nearby.
Whether you prefer WFH or rather be in the office, I would be truly suspicious of a company that claims RTO is necessary. The reasons for RTO don't seem to be backed by rationale/logic. That should be immediately concerning to any individual contributor.
For example:
1. Some flavor of "water cooler conversation is important for innovation!" Just... what?
2. "Collaboration is suffering" without any evidence offered.
3. "Productivity is suffering" without any evidence offered.
4. "How can we know if people are slacking off or not". Well how did you determine that in the office setting? Was it their physical presence from the hours of 9 to 5 that convinced you?
Remote work is nice, but the biggest advantage I've have at a small company is picking my own hours. I work with teams across the world, So I can take a 2 hours break after lunch to go biking, and then come back. I want freedom in daylight hours to do things.
My new job only gives me ten days off per year. This means I'll have to start looking for a new job immediately... Because that's being trapped in a cage.
Never let a company know. You're always currently working and have 2 weeks notice. Also don't put up with that kind of bullshit. 20 minutes into that line-by-line CV review and you're out.
I’ve definitely noticed this recently. In the past, I’ve always had a job when searching for a job, but since being laid off, I’ve had some of the most hostile interviews I’ve ever seen.
I've been remote for over 10 years, far before the pandemic, when the competition for remote positions was extreme.
At the time, I decided I wasn't going back to an office again if I could help it. Then the pandemic hit and suddenly everyone is remote and the whole thing flipped upside down.
Now it's a battle with return to the office or "flex". Thankfully, I am immune to this.
And I have taken a substantial cut in pay in the beginning for it to stay this way. I prefer the freedom and flexibility over more money, but that's just me.
I've been permanent remote since 2015. I will never take a job that forces me into the office. That said, I think I benefited greatly from being in an office with more senior people when I was starting out. The only argument in favor of RTO/Hybrid that's ever carried water with me is that remote work makes it harder for junior staff to succeed and learn, because there are less opportunities for collaboration and guidance/mentorship. That said, my experience in open source projects shows you can still learn as a junior person as long as you're willing to put in extra effort to do so and kind of dig for the information/knowledge you need. It's definitely an additional barrier of entry though that makes it more difficult for people who aren't obsessive about tech (and whether that's good or bad is debatable).
Remote isn't new. There have been systems to support remote connectivity since the 90s, and it's been realistic for a tech worker to be permanent remote essentially since Git existed. There were a lot of workers who didn't realize they could do their jobs remotely, and now they do, it's been possible for decades. That cat is never going back into the bag. At least for me, it's been great and made it possible for me to change jobs during the pandemic easily without needing to be as fine-grained in my search as there's many many more remote opportunities now.
I envision a world where a portion of senior workers -- 40%, I would guess, based on vague approximations of folks who prefer in-person or hybrid work -- work in office, with mentorship representing a huge portion of their responsibilities. Junior workers probably ought to spend at least a year or two in office to acclimate to office job life; high performers can escape once they've proven their abilities.
That being said: I wonder how much of remote work preferences are actually a result of affordability and quality of life issues in cities, especially in the USA. I would have no problem working a hybrid or even full-time in-person gig in an office... if I could afford to buy a house, walk or bike to work, and live in a quiet, clean, interesting neighborhood. Being paid a decent salary in tech that should be possible, but it's really hard to manage in the USA at the moment for most definitions of quiet/clean/interesting. And before anyone claims that cities can't be "quiet" or "clean", I've spent enough time in nice European cities that do satisfy all three criteria to know that I'm not just being overly picky. Even if I had a million dollars, I doubt I could satisfy those criteria in the USA.
Anyway, as long as we're stuck with an imperfect housing market, remote work is such a blessing. I'm sure it's helpful for some junior workers, too -- if you don't have to move to a $2k+/mo apartment in a major city straight out of college, you'll have a much easier time paying off loans and saving up money early in life. I suspect that's opened a lot of doors for folks who previously couldn't work the most prestigious tech jobs.
IMO the top talent will always be remote going forward.
My opinions of those who are forced to work in the office with no physical requirement to be there, is that they are lower quality applicants with poor negotiation power and an inability to successfully pass interviews for the vast majority of companies in the world offering remote jobs, and thus they can only lean into their one positive attribute: a willingness to get dressed and commute to and from an office everyday.
It's good to have a range of options for employees and a new advantage for startups to utilize. In the next few years we will hopefully know how different approaches affect productivity and outcomes.
I initially thought Google's work research teams would study this but I guess that was just a zero interest rate phenomenon and now they're also just another groupthink employer.
Big companies are typically older. They were created and grew in an environment that knew nothing _but_ the office. Having amazing(ly expensive) offices were prized social signals for them and were huge attractors of great talent, especially when residential Internet sucked so hard in comparison.
They also employed tons of people in the area outside of tech (property managers, facilities, janitorial staff, accounts, etc.) and were embedded into their communities.
Also, their DNAs were built _around_ the office. I can easily sympathize with them saying that collaboration happens easiest when everyone's in the office; the leaders saying this likely can't imagine another way of working!
Asking a company as big as Google to simply give all of that up and rent WeWorks isn't impossible, but is a huge, huge ask. While some groups can easily switch to a remote workflow, as companies, they just aren't mentally or physically equipped to do that without a significant number of breaking changes.
That said, _my_ problem with how they are going about it is that they are walking back on their incredibly enthusiastic support for remote work during COVID-times _without saying why_.
Nobody's going out there and saying "So we were super excited about remote work, but after seeing a 30% drop in "productivity" year-over-year, we knew it couldn't be sustained." (This is a fake reason; I have no idea what the numbers are). They also aren't saying "We can't give up our office spaces without significantly wrecking the community that formed around us." Instead, their giving platitudes like "collaboration happens best in the office" and leaving us to conjecture the change of heart.
I love the fact that smaller companies are making remote work work for them, but I'm afraid that so long as big tech gets bigger, the effect is temporary at best.
I think the real reason is because going into an office to just end up sitting alone and joining meetings remotely is worse than just working remotely. It's a chicken and egg problem; they think that once there's a critical mass, people will want to RTO, but they can't hit the critical mass without some top down "incentive" to kick start it.
This is a bad take. Large companies have often team collaborating across the globe so they're used to partial remote already. My company (Microsoft) turned mostly remote, teams that started through COVID have never seen office. Also the company doubled through COVID so a large portion of the company is remote first.
Also.. Offices cost a lot whether you're big co or a start-up.
People like Harrigan, at Columbia's business school, are perpetuating old mythology about what constitutes professional management. They also pretend to think that they know what investors want, or prefer.
>>And professionalism to them means butts in chairs.
What this really means is NOT what they said ("...bigger stuff needs more in-person coordination, blah, blah,blah...").
It is actually the phenomenon found by a long-ago study of remote vs in-person management (I wish I could locate it). It found that teams under good managers are actually made better by remote work, and teams under bad managers were made worse. The good managers focused on results, while the bad managers focused on indicators of work (time spent in chairs, at screens, in meetings, etc.).
In short, remote work amplifies the differences in management quality.
What this study shows is that larger companies have overall lower quality and far larger quantity of bad managers.
What they really need for performance is not more office time, as that will only paper over the problem of bad managers. What they need is far greater investment in good management (methods, training, etc.).
I wish I could afford to change careers at the moment.
I'd love to create / work-for a company that builds out WFH office spaces. I.e., that specializes in all the success factors:
- workspace soundproofing* / acoustics
- HVAC
- networking
- electricity
- collaboration technology (esp. the ultimate prize for software developers: a viable replacement for in-person whiteboard collaboration, that's also compatible with corporate network security needs)
- ergonomic furniture
- features that help with mental health: natural light, sufficient artificial light, etc.
- "HOW-TO" guides for dealing with other residents. I.e., policies and/or tools to make it clear when the workers can be interrupted, etc.
- consulting with employers to make sure all of the above can work in harmony with the rest of the company
* I mean "soundproofing" in the colloquial sense, i.e. good-enough psycho-acoustic improvement.
Seems like this is based on a lot of broken metrics. When working for a big company in an office there were often days when key contributors were off their peak for days at a time because of a commute that had a big crash delay or a road rage incident. Then there was a prolonged time during which key developments stalled because a critical contributor dropped his bike in the fast lane. He did recover, but still does not remember what exactly happened. And all of this super powers development and the bottom line? Some spreadsheet really needs a bigger externalities line item.
Work From Home let me move closer to my retiring parents, who live nowhere near any of these tech hubs. There were two emergencies during COVID where I was critical. All these RTO incentives, perks, and threats all say the same thing to me: "You won't be here when something happens again."
> “Bigger companies, more complex companies, are more likely to be looking for more professional types of management,” said Kathy Harrigan, a professor of corporate management at Columbia University’s business school. “Investors expect that.”
hmmmm...
> And professionalism to them means butts in chairs. Harrigan says in-person work is necessary to coordinate the complicated, varied businesses these tech conglomerates now operate. The move to AI has only made in-person coordination more of a necessity, she said.
> “They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.
[Bernie Sanders Voice]: I am once again asking Management for evidence [0].
> “In the face of volatility and uncertainty, it is human nature to want to revert back to something that is a known quantity,” said Caitlin Duffy, a research director at Gartner, about the push to return to the office. “And so there might be some psychological things happening that may be overriding the evidence in front of them.”
> The evidence, she says, shows that offering flexibility in where people work makes them happier and, by extension, more productive and innovative. Accounts to the contrary were “unfounded.” What’s worse, Duffy said, is that arbitrarily calling people back to the office might actually hurt workers’ productivity and innovation by driving fatigue and burnout.
Well that's a refreshing turn of events! But can I see the evidence?
I think the RTO thing is a lot more nefarious and high level than just middle managers wanting to keep their jobs, or boomers wanting the old way, or trying to prevent moonlighting, etc. This is the same story since the industrial revolution. It's just new to many.
The capitalist class is not happy to have their proles to have the freedom of movement and choice of where they work. Much like how America ties expensive healthcare (and high risk of bankruptcy) to working for The man, forcing the white collared proletarians into the office shows power and importance of work over life. This also explains why it seems to be the CEOs pushing for it (in reality it is probably the board of directors i bet)
Officer workers almost always were insulated from the bloody history of workers rights and strikes, and I don't think there's a single white collar union in America, but I was surprised to find out how always on guard european engineers/white collar workers are about the employer trying to take advantage of you.
(They did eventually do 3 day hybrid, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people come in 1 or 2 days)
If you do not offer remote, then you better be... idk NASA, Microsoft, Apple, Jane Street or some fancy shit or paying way, way more
If a company does not realize that 0% fully remote workforce is significant talent pool disadvantage then Im shocked.
>They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.
Yea, I do wonder how those complex, cross-geo products get built!
Teams across US, EU, Asia - how do they do it??