Not without a significant amount of money. Also to get something out of the way, anyone who would "quit" because their employer mandated RTO is an idiot. Let them fire you and collect unemployment.
I moved from SF to Utah in ~2018, and managed to buy a few rental properties since then, and despite my "income" not keeping pace with my peers in the city my wealth is exceeding them. So the first thing is, the money argument is holding less water every day that goes by.
Second, say I went back for more income. The city is not the same city that I left, in fact it's gotten much worse. Why would I want to live in a place where you wake up to sirens, human feces, a government that hates you, and wants to extract every dollar for their failed social experiments? Especially during COVID when they decided to take any shred of trust I had left, set it on fire, and then threw lighter fluid on it.
So my answer is somewhere between "Hell No" and "Maybe for a wheelbarrow full of cash"
Don't know where you live. But here you wouldn't get unemployment for being fired with cause. Declining to do part of your job for no protected reason isn't a valid reason to collect.
Its not that cut and dried. Whether or not you were fired for cause depends on whether its reasonable to ask you to return to office or whether that would be considered forcing you to accept inferior work. An employer cannot arbitrarily change the terms of your job and not pay unemployment if you quit.
Well, but underperforming and coasting could be enough to tip the scale in favor of making the employee redundant.
Not sure about America, but another option could be voluntary termination, which wouldn't give you severance but you'd be allowed to collect unemployment for some time.
> I moved from SF to Utah in ~2018, and managed to buy a few rental properties since then, and despite my "income" not keeping pace with my peers in the city my wealth is exceeding them. So the first thing is, the money argument is holding less water every day that goes by.
This is hilarious. You don't have to worry about the financial aspect of your job when you can collect extra income every month as a landlord.
It doesn’t mean I don’t have to work, but it does mean I could take a job working at Wendys, continue to save money, and not be financially ruined. When your only source of income comes from one place your employer has a great deal of leverage.
I don't give a crap about the industry. I'm only interested in remote jobs at this point for any industry. I guess I understand the reasons people give, wanting to leave the house, interact with co-workers, whatever, but the health benefits for me have been tremendous. Most of the spine and joint problems from not moving around enough gone. I run every day. I lift every day. I cook all of my own food from scratch and have eaten the healthiest I've ever eaten for years now. I sleep better. The quality of life impact is tremendous. My schedule is far more consistent. I get to sleep on time, wake up without an alarm, don't have to adhere to the schedule of other people.
Thankfully, as it stands, it would make no sense for me to go an office anyway. My company is 100% remote and the only "office" they have is a co-working space six states away from me that seats 10 people. But I'm a consultant anyway. I work for customers everywhere in the country. Where I'm physically located is irrelevant. I'm not going to move my entire family every few months to be where the next customer is, so remote is the only arrangement that even makes sense.
And it's not like this is some kind of new concept. I remember before I started doing this work, I was still in the Army and my last job was in the 1st CAV division headquarters. At the time, we had units in Estonia, Afghanistan, and Korea, and had to coordinate and meet with all of them. Obviously can't be in four countries at once. This happened from the division operations center, but it was still remote collaboration. When I first got, much of my early work was classified, so I worked from a SCIF. Had to go to the office, but many of the people I worked with were still not physically co-located. The were military and intelligence officers posted all over the country in different installations. We managed to work together perfectly fine even though I never met any of them.
Am at a fully remote position after years commuting from the East Bay to SF. Don’t miss BART, don’t miss the commute to the office, and won’t go back. I am remote only from this point forward. It works well for our team and if I decided to switch roles I would absolutely prioritize orgs that have figured out how to be effective remotely. It is absolutely possible and honestly feels like a useful filter when assessing how adaptive an org is to changing circumstances. Clinging to an in office approach feels distinctly horse n carriage to me at this point.
Returning to office, for me, would mean 2+ extra hours per day away from the family due to the commute, plus two hundred bucks a month in gas, and it removes the option of moving to a more affordable location, which I'm looking into now. On top of all that, I don't feel more productive in the office as it's about 50% non-work-related chitchat, though that may be specific to where I work.
All of which is to say I wouldn't be totally opposed to returning to office if the compensation or opportunity made it worthwhile, but otherwise I'd much rather stay remote.
On the other hand, it's pretty rough out there – I currently can't afford to be unemployed, but I sure would start looking (either for a remote position or one that more) if I were forced to return.
I am one of the few people, it seems, that actually prefers on-site to remote work. I’ve never felt more isolated and commoditized than I have when working fully remotely.
I felt the same way, but at this point I think it's just that the reality distortion machine shut off when we all went remote. I went back onsite after COVID and it's not the same, because the true nature of the relationship became apparent, we ARE commodities (at least if the company is large enough). Human resources if you will.
RTO all by itself didn't make me quit. But it does eat up a whole lot of headroom in terms of how much other nonsense I'll put up with before quitting.
No, only interested in in-person gigs after too much WFH the past few years. Of course, everyone has their price -- for enough money I could be convinced to do it for another couple years
"Only interested in remote only jobs" is a somewhat misleading phrase.
All other things being equal, I'd definitely prefer a remote job, or at least one that afforded some reasonable flexibility.
That said, I'd take a job with less flexible conditions for a significant boost in pay that makes up for the hour commute each way, and extra expenses such as transportation and lunch.
Imagine you're an employer, now you have to give people a pay increase AND spend a lot of physical offices. Those critical water-cooler discussions warrant it though.
I had a pretty cushy, 100% WFH job at a big company and was probably getting promoted to senior within the next year. I liked the company, I liked the position, I liked my team, I liked what I did, and I was making pretty good money.
I hated the location though, and I'd been renovating my house to get it ready to rent so I could move. My manager was fully onboard with me working from anywhere within the lower 48.
Then, after nearly three years of fully remote, they called us back into the office with the usual "collaboration is better in person" justification, but no data of course. My manager allowed me to continue to work remotely, but it was a hassle. I could feel that I was now at a disadvantage, and it was painful to deal with meetings where 80% of the team was onsite, in some conference room, speaking through outdated teleconferencing equipment, watching someone draw on a whiteboard through someone else's laptop camera pointed at it (seriously). I started making plans to leave, and lo and behold, they offered a buyout, which I of course accepted.
I firmly believe that remote is the future of work, but rather than adapting onsite processes to remote work, the processes need to be built around remote work. It takes time to do this, but it's clearly possible to achieve similar levels of productivity remotely as onsite, as evidenced by the many companies who were fully remote before the pandemic, and still are.
Employers are pushing back on remote work now, but with the USA's long-term structural skilled labor shortage and climate change bearing down on us, I would be very surprised if remote work doesn't become the norm (where possible) in a decade.
I'm currently working on a master's degree and I have enough money to coast for a while, so I'm being very picky. I'll only consider hybrid or fully onsite in specific geographic areas (west coast), and compensation has to increase significantly to make up for the increased hassle and decreased mobility. 95% of non-remote roles don't make the cut.
I faithfully respond to every recruiter on linkedin who contacts me with an onsite or hybrid position with the same line:
"Thank you for reaching out, but I'm only considering remote work at this time. Please keep me in mind if a fully remote position opens up which fits my skillset. Thanks!"
I would urge everyone who feels as I do about remote work to do the same.
My current employer "requested" everyone within 1 hour of the office to come in 2 days a week, and did it with integrity and powered by data. They spent significant time and money making sure things like meeting room technology accommodates remote attendees.
I'm ~3 hours from the office, still have never been in, and can honestly say it's been great.
It's 100% possible to do hybrid WFH/RTO, but it takes intentional investment from the business to succeed.
This is a really good point. There are lots of companies that I wouldn't work for because of their location (I'm not willing to be in SV or SF, for instance). With many of them, if I could work remotely for them, then I'd consider it.
I'll take a lower salary for fully remote because I can live in a lower COL area and save on commute (plus my quality of life/commute time isn't worth nothing). If you want me physically in an office, you better be 30%+ more than the WFH alternative. Problem is companies are arrogant enough to think they can 1:1 fully remote and win, and they cannot.
Somewhat tangentially ... I'm not hearing about startups focused on being fully remote and directly competing with establish orgs who are demanding RTO.
Considering the savings of not having to rent expensive downtown office space and having a much greater pool of prospective staff, you would think the economics would favor such an approach.
I would let the company fire me. I will never work in an office again. The benefits of remote work far outweigh the drawbacks.
I believe startups and other smaller companies see this and have started to capitalize on the work from home trend. I hope interesting to see how large tech companies maintain in office work over the next decade.
I've been fully or nearly fully remote for over a decade. My prior role, we traveled for things (pre-covid) and would meet up in the office maybe a week to a week and a half (total) each quarter. We would also work with customers on site at their location maybe a week a quarter. Otherwise, fully remote - team widely distributed.
My current role - classified as and fully remote. I made an effort to go to the office (while on vacation) to meet my boss and a peer (at the time) since I was in the metro area they worked out of. I've also met a few more people for the first group get together in 1.5 years. That was for two days.
Given the teams I work with are distributed, given most open work spaces are NOT friendly to getting engineering work done. Why sit somewhere (not at home/place of choice) if just on slack or google meet and headphones in all day?
I'm in no rush to return to a job that demands I stay in-office. I'd consider any offer, but non-remote positions will usually get back-burnered for me.
Many people, when given a hypothetical scenario, say what they daydream about doing not what they would actually do. It's a subtle brag saying something like "If my boss asked me to do X, I would quit on the spot!" In reality you might have bills to pay or worries about being able to find a new job quickly so you won't be so eager to quit when you have to put your money where your mouth is.
Me? Of course I would love being able to choose where I want to work from. The ideal would be a hybrid arrangement where I can come and go as I please to the office (although going to the office to sit in virtual meetings is silly).
I've had remote work as an option since 2010 minus 1.5 years at 2 employers.
It's most valuable when I spend extra weeks with my my aging parents, or spend the time traveling and spending mornings and evenings exploring.
Even for short international stints where I can effectively travel twice as long because I'm working too. My wife can't travel internationally and work from home, and it's slightly frustrating for her even though it would only impact us a few days a year on average.
I wouldn't quit without a job, but I'd quickly put my resume out there.
My current commute to the office is 2.5 hours each way, minimum, so more often than once or twice a week is impractical.
So, yes, if required to be in the office 3+ days per week, I'd likely look for a different job that was fully remote (or request an exception to the policy).
Remote work is the main reason I've stayed in my current job. So yes I would probably quit but not to retain my remote status (I'm resigned to working on site in my next job) - it would just be that the cost/benefit calculation would have shifted.
I would take a good job in my area if it meant going in to the office a few days a week. I would take one within a few hours drive if it meant going in once a week or less. It would need to be a great offer at a great company for me to come in five days a week, and even then if the commute is over a half hour or so I probably wouldn't do it.
98% chance I won't move for a job right now. It would need to be an absolute dream job with next level compensation. Wife/kids/family/house all here and happy and that's a huge deal. Once you're settled down moving for jobs is an entirely different ball game than when you're young.
Remote work allowed me to afford a house. Since 2020 I have turned that house into a Home. I am 60-90mins away from "The Jobs" now.
In order for me to RTO, a company must accept the burden of my commute rather than put it on me. This means, if I have 2-3hrs of round-trip commute; that time comes out of my ~8hr workday.
These companies have no loyalty to you. Any loyalty begins and ends with your grounds for establishing a valid lawsuit. Do NOT care more about the company than the company cares about you. (Spoiler: they don't care about you. You are a resource to exploit and render profit.)
I prefer in -person jobs. I would take a remote job for a substantial wage increase wherein I can afford a bigger space/ an extra room to work from, along with an additional premium.
Imo. Best engineers will almost always work in office/person. Small number of them but they’ll be making the big decisions.
Auxiliary engineers can be remote. They just need to smash tickets, not necessarily drive any innovation.
The former will be rare and probably make a lot of money and have decent stake. The latter might be outsourced and commoditized especially with AI in the mix making developers more efficient.
I haven't seen a correlation between the quality of an engineer and their preference for or against remote work. The two best engineers I've ever met have both been working remotely for over 20 years.
Yeah I think this makes sense too, all or nothing. Go to the office to have zoom meetings with remote workers and struggle to concentrate in an open office just makes you feel like a jackass.
returning to office only for a top 1% compensation package, especially in tier 1 cities, even across europe, salaries are failing to keep up with cost of living. So the only way around is either move to a lower CoL city and get a lower paid remote job or move back to a higher CoL city and get a good paid onsite job.
I moved from SF to Utah in ~2018, and managed to buy a few rental properties since then, and despite my "income" not keeping pace with my peers in the city my wealth is exceeding them. So the first thing is, the money argument is holding less water every day that goes by.
Second, say I went back for more income. The city is not the same city that I left, in fact it's gotten much worse. Why would I want to live in a place where you wake up to sirens, human feces, a government that hates you, and wants to extract every dollar for their failed social experiments? Especially during COVID when they decided to take any shred of trust I had left, set it on fire, and then threw lighter fluid on it.
So my answer is somewhere between "Hell No" and "Maybe for a wheelbarrow full of cash"