This is one aspect of the RTO discussion that's sometimes missed: there are plenty of people in the tech sphere (myself included) who've been comfortably remote for much longer than those who were pushed into remote work by lockdowns and pandemic response. We're not about to give up a whole lifestyle we've built over (in some cases) decades, on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the present time.
Prior to COVID, everyone understood that remote work was supported by some companies and not others. It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others.
As a result, everyone peacefully self-selected into their preferred employment relationships. Companies got the type of workforce they wanted and workers chose the type of environment they wanted. It was great.
Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. We should just return to the status quo before COVID: choose the type of company you want to work for that supports the lifestyle you want to have. If your employer wants to transition back to in-office work and you don't want to do it, switch to one of the thousands of companies that will hire you.
You have no obligation to stay at a company that is forcing you back in the office, and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.
Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"
I resent being lied to. Had they been more careful and put this out more as a "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed. That's not how they rolled and they didn't even have the guts to simply admit "Hey, we just made a mistake here, remote work isn't working for us"
> "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"
Pretty much exactly this happened at my company. They started touting these new offices they got for a steal, but in the all-hands said "our company has never required anyone to come in to the office and we never will". Three months later, they start encouraging everyone to come in once a week. Three months later, they changed it to 'we expect you to be in 4 days a week', and in the all-hands one of the founders went "We never said we wouldn't have you come back into the office. I love seeing people in person, that would be silly of me to say!"
Technically it's not a requirement, just an "expectation", so I still haven't gone in more than necessary. But I'm not expecting a great performance review next year because of it, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll stick around either (it does look like most other places are being even worse about it right now, though). I was so angry to hear that.
Not the only time they gaslit either. They also had a round of layoffs about six months ago while trying not to call them layoffs ("we let a bunch of people go today, it's not a layoff though, they just weren't performant enough to work here"), that really rubbed me the wrong way too.
If it’s not in writing, it ‘never happened’ - and even then, make sure you have a copy they can’t get at and know your odds of a successful prosecution under the law (and your ability and willingness to see it through).
Prosecution for what? Business leaders (and employees) are allowed to change their course of action anytime.
I would keep it anyway for your records, due to it helping your claim for unemployment benefits by establishing constructive dismissal as opposed to termination for cause. But it might not work even then.
For shitty companies, wage theft is a not uncommon scenario when things like this start to happen (as in the overall economic/industry shifts, not just RTO).
When changing direction results in actionable torts against employees, then employees are also entitled to be made whole (to some extent).
And I meant prosecution in the sense of ‘driving to an actual successful resolution including getting paid what you’re owed’ - which can be for breach of contract, illegal dismissal, constructive dismissal, etc.
There are a million ways for a company to fire someone without ‘firing’ them, which they’ll often use if they don’t want to pay out unemployment/owed vacation or the like. Many companies will target expensive employees first (age/seniority, expensive physical health issues, mental health problems, or they just think they ‘aren’t a team player’, or are harder to manager. etc.).
Then what? Okay you can prove them liars, but that won't surprise anybody and won't change anything in the course of the company. I don't even mention the likely personal repercussions from speaking truth to power: "not being a team player" and and and.
If one is already being fired or forced out due to broken promises, depending on their personal circumstances and how well documented such broken promises are it could be worthwhile suing them for it.
You are quite correct that continuing on with the company (or in that corner of the industry) may - well, likely will be - impossible afterwards. Few things say 'burnt bridges' like a lawsuit. That said, being fired because of a promise they broke is them starting the bridge on fire anyway.
Either way, the CYA handbook is - document, document, document. And keep it where no one but you has control over it. You have no power if you can't prove anything. And documents 'go missing' or get 'automatically removed' from company equipment all the time in situations like this.
knowing if you even have a case or complaint is also important - which is only going to be possible if you can see what was actually said (not what you remember being said) or written. Sometimes we hear what we want to hear, not what was said. Knowing that BEFORE you show up in court is rather important.
As I wondered in some other place: do you consider a promise made in a newsletter or an all-hands meeting a binding contract? Would a court consider it binding, or rather an information about the current course of the company? And changing that policy in the subsequent newsletter or all-hands, wouldn't nullify anyway whatever binding value the previous one had? (I'm not talking about employment contract changes, yes those are binding)
Generally[0] your contract references a living policy document covering the softer areas.
I see changes to these documents as similar to the change in T's & C's for any service I use; your continued use of the service denotes acceptance of the new terms. You're welcome to leave at any time.
If they actually put in writing ‘Remote is forever’, then later try to fire you for refusing to return to the office - what judge in the world is going to rule in their favor?
If course, they rarely actually say that. But some folks have definitely been dumb enough to do so.
The issue with contract law is that most folks never put things in writing, so it’s a pain to litigate many claims, which makes it uneconomic to recover damages.
But if it’s in writing? Sounds like an easy to show breach of contract to me!
Often it might be in writing as a company newsletter or communicated in a call, but not in writing as your employment contract. Mine was always vague on how much can be spent in home office (was never a problem, then or now) and I assume it might be often the case for other companies. Thus anything the management allows or requires is possible and no judge will decide on the basis of a newsletter. So I'm afraid in the end you only can vote with your feet.
If the general policy is updated to ‘remote is forever’, save a copy - that’s part of your contract too!
If it gets changed in a way that causes you injury, guess what - you can be and should be compensated. If you can prove these things, then it should even be relatively easy to do so.
Contract law is not just things that say ‘contract’ on them. It is about agreements between parties.
Also, talk to a lawyer so they can look over the fine print and applicable statutes. They matter.
When people say "talk to a lawyer" how does one go about finding a lawyer? Like in this case, would it be an employment lawyer, a contract lawyer? And what sorts of rates could we expect? Obviously it varies depending on the contract, but I always see people advise that people talk to a lawyer when doing XYZ which makes sense, but I never understood the exact process for this.
Very good question. If you ask your friends, a good reference can help. Most people don’t have any attorneys on retainer, let alone know if they’re good or not though.
Usually what I’ve done is brute force. Every State has a State bar that usually has listings. Google Maps searches for ‘employment attorney near me’ or ‘civil law attorney near me’ also usually gives a lot of matches.
I dump it all into a spreadsheet, and then go down the list taking notes and calling each one. Attorneys should give a free consult (anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour).
Try to learn as much as you can about the applicable law and the situation; and ask questions. Not just what is legal/not-legal, but their history in getting actual results for clients and what the courts will actually take seriously or not.
Don’t pick anyone right away. Call at least 3, preferably 10 in each speciality.
If you like them and they like you, they’ll either take you on contingency or ask you to give them a retainer (funds to be put into a trust they can bill against). Either way there will be some paperwork they’ll have you sign before they’re ’your attorney’.
Additionally, some things to look out for -
1) anyone that makes you pay up front for a consultation is bad news. Run away.
2) anyone that promises a result is bad news. Run away.
3) Anyone who takes a case without asking specific questions and arguing with you sometimes is bad news. Run away.
4) anyone who tells you something that seems wrong (and you can’t verify independently, even after you ask for a reference) is probably bad news. Run away if you even suspect it.
Employment law is its own speciality.
Contract law is generally a subset of civil law. Civil law is a huge umbrella, from ‘my neighbors tree dropped a branch on my house’ to ‘the mega corp. in my county has been poisoning the water for decades and I got cancer’. You’ll run across attorneys who handle many different areas, ask them what they do and what their style is.
I hope this helps!
P.S. most states and countries put their laws online. There is still usually case laws which modify it, and gotchas, etc. but you can figure out 95% of it if you find them and do your own research. Leginfo.ca.gov is the California One. When you’re talking to attorneys, feel free to ask them for applicable cases and/or codes to start looking at.
A hiring contract isn't Terms of Service or a EULA. Your job isn't a service to you, it's an employer. You make a deal with a company in which you offer your time and expertise for pay and amenities. That contract with the company binds them as much as it binds you.
Anything non-monetary that they take away from you should be offered in compensation and/or renegotiation. You should not be allowing changes to your employment contract without approval, especially ones where they are removing amenities.
Considering several of them were in between client projects through no fault of their own (a few of the people laid off I worked with personally and were only transitioned off my project because the client was trying to save some money and didn't really need graphic design work at that point), yeah I'd agree.
The company has already had to revise down their earnings estimates a couple times this year, and hasn't bothered to replace about 20-30 other employees that have quit in the months since then (despite several of them being star employees).
That's why it felt like gaslighting to me, claiming these people weren't good employees and that's why "it wasn't a layoff" (even if that were true, it's still a layoff).
> "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed
Ironically, during peak covid lockdowns, "this is only temporary" may have actually been seen as reckless and irresponsible. "There's a pandemic! We need to be remote for the foreseeable future, not just temporarily!1!1" (etc...)
During peak covid, a lot of people made decisions that they reneged or reversed later. I'll get downvoted if I empathize with the executives making these decisions, but all I'll say is that no one had a crystal ball in 2020/2021. I give a lot of people the benefit of the doubt that they believed what they were saying at the time they said it (even if they have since reversed their opinion).
I don't think anyone was expecting the tech bubble to burst until it did. I don't think anyone was expecting the degree of inflation which led to interest rates which led to big tech downsizing, etc. A lot of people made a lot of mistakes. One of the top mistakes a lot of companies made was hiring people outside of their HQ cities and they're trying to correct that now.
Edit: To be clear I'm a proponent of remote work. Our company has been remote since before covid. Pro tip for anyone in the job market: look for companies that were remote pre-Covid and be skeptical about WFH promises if the company was forced to go remote after 2020.
I remember a vocal group predicting the economic bubbles would burst while pointing to them growing for a while. The only real disagreement was on when not if.
While no one has a crystal ball it was known pre pandemic that bubbles were there and unsustainable and not far from being at bursting levels.
I know many in my circle were talking about when the dominoes would fall and which ones would topple which others in 2020-2022 as the pandemic raged on. The inevitable outcome of the social supports on top of the economic bubbles happening and then both likely ending at similar times was predictable in anyone thinking in longer terms than the next quarter and next fiscal year.
Meanwhile CEOs took advantage of conditions to go on insane M&A deals, hiring sprees and personal project schemes with little framework for any of that succeeding long term, and burning tons of cash with stock buybacks to keep up with the expected growth targets.
Once the 'Bubble' everyone saw about to burst met the realities of the pandemic and costs rippled through supply chains no one should have been surprised. Unfortunately the tech segment is way too much follow the leader/money right now and once the few big names start moving it happens regardless of it being good or bad.
It’s always when not if though. If you predict a bubble invariably you will eventually be right — in fact the more wrong you are (calling it too early) the more prescient you will appear!
I didn't know when the Fed/government might stop lying about it, but inflation was immediately obvious to me, and should've been to anyone with assets and who tracked those assets' value. My net worth in Mint grew 38% from Feb 2020 - Feb 2021 (so from the high before the big dip in March 2020) during a time when everyone was talking about supply chain disruptions, delays, lockdowns, etc. My manager and I would regularly talk about how crazy it was that such a huge wealth transfer to the rich was happening in front of everyone.
I bought a house as soon as I could once the interest rate drops happened. Prices were going up by more than my net income each month. Given that I make several times median, I still don't know how there haven't been riots over it.
I think this is where the "inflation is transitory" catchphrase was born.
"Yes, we see all of these price changes, but don't worry it will go back to normal after the pandemic" ... which people went along with for a while, until it was clear that prices weren't dropping back to normal.
That's because they are actually struggling to admit deeper problems with the company culture and processes that they don't know how to solve, and so they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things.
I think one thing which wasn't obvious to me early on is that halving the number of office days doesn't half the requirements for desk space. In my experience people have a strong preference for going in on similar days, particularly Tuesday and Thursday. So if you ask all of your employees to come in 2 days a week you end up needing desks for almost every employee.
The result in my experience is you have either fullish remote or you need just as many desks so very little saving from a company point of view.
Also, what's the point of going into the office if nobody else is there? My department had a hybrid model for a bit with a fabulous, newly built-out office. I liked seeing people in person a couple times a week. However, if I go in and nobody from my team is there or we need to still call in to meetings as if we were at home, what's the point?
Yeah, definitely. The only real value I've had from going in is when we've got some kind of social event planned (over teams / zoom this sucks) and when we've gone in with the specific plan of talking about a how we can implement a new feature which is complex and touches multiple teams (which also sucks to do online).
Yup, our commercial real was essentially fully vacant. So they rolled out these silly blended schedules (literally just electronically sign in to the office by physically being there once a week, no time req). Now they can say, hey our office space is 90% utilized on a weekly basis! I think commercial real estate investors are going to see right through this charade, but maybe I'm overestimating them.
You have several from major cities (NYC, SF, etc.) saying on the record that they are going to speak to CEO's and push for RTO so that downtowns, local businesses, and neighborhoods can go back to "normal."
Yeah, and what I find funny is people acting like that's a stupid thing for them to be saying.
Not everybody works or can work in an office. Not everybody can work in tech. Cities are symbiotic, they offer employment to both knowledge workers and non-knowledge workers.
Sorry but you can't just write off the needs of that 50% of the population that aren't techcels. Yes, you will come back to cities, yes, you will re-create thriving downtowns, yes, you will do your bit.
Service sector workers will not tolerate being turned into gigbots and stuffed into ghost kitchens so the PMC elite can pretend they don't exist.
You do realize that most of the service workers in major cities can't even afford to live in the neighborhoods that they work in right? They often have to commute from other cities or parts of the city which aren't at all close.
Perhaps this will make things go to how they should be, which means that you work locally because that's where the demand for your services is.
This is a big one. Entire tax bases are effectively drying up because people aren't driving in or are moving away.
Not just income or payroll taxes, but also regular traffic simulating the local bars, cafes, gas stations & oil changers, dry cleaning, late night pizza, you name it. If these folks can't make their nut then they can't pay rent, and end up moving away or going out of business. Then the problem snowballs.
And then there are the other sources of cash, i.e. speeding tickets, parking fines, and jaywalking citations.
Arguably this is the 'invisible hand of the market' doing its thing, but it's hard to run a municipality if your year-by-year tax base could change dramatically.
Valid is entirely up to the eye of the beholder. For them, they may be valid reasons even if you don’t like them.
It’s all about pros/cons and either sides approach.
One big one you didn’t list - it’s really hard to a manager to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems
fester.
Some (but not most!) employees may be burning out, or violating security or labor rules, or not following company policies, or whatever, and these would be trivial to detect in person, but nearly impossible to do so remotely. And almost definitely impossible to do anything about effectively while remote.
Having ineffective management ("it’s really hard to a manager (sic) to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester") is a leadership problem that is easily fixed by hiring competent and experienced leaders who have worked with remote teams.
Incompetent leaders cannot manage people remotely and they generally do a poor job when in person, but it's masked by their ability to micromanage and type-A the problem away.
(1) is a dumb conspiracy theory, the tech companies that pay rents
care about their own profits, not the profits of their REIT counterparties. The idea that evil capitalists sacrifice their own profits in order to boost other companies’ profits in the name of class solidarity is one of the sillier things people on the left believe. According to your theory of how capitalism works companies work Amazon and Walmart should be volunteering to pay their suppliers as much possible in order to boost their suppliers profit margins. Obviously that is not how the world works.
Maybe not this specifically, but the history of the last 200 years is littered with examples of capital owners cooperating together to elevate and secure their status as a class despite supposedly divergent individual interests. Perhaps the most obvious is how rich people who commit crimes are systematically saved by other rich people who happen to have the right connections.
Another very common reason is a technique to achieve a passive-aggressive round of layoffs. Announce RTO, lose some employees, and you don't have to pay any severance or take the morale hit of letting people go.
I've even heard of companies reversing the RTO mandate after the desired number of employees have left. Or just not actually enforcing it and soft-pedaling the whole thing.
changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said
I've come to view this as a personality type, the eager salesman (or less charitably, the habitual bullshitter). They will say whatever serves their needs at the moment, and never carries any long-term weight. When they say "we never said that", they actually mean it -- because what they remember were their unspoken motivations, not the words they spoke to achieve it. You can probably find them in the hierarchy of most organizations, as they're good with words and readily commit to changing strategies. They must be, because they need to have a new strategy ready for when the old one inevitably fails. Admitting to mistakes is not part of their personality, the most you will get (if anything) is that their idea was sound but the problem was in the execution or in unforeseen (by them) circumstances.
Learn to recognize the type. If their goals align with yours, they can be useful idiots, but always have a counter-strategy for when the winds inevitably turn.
I looked at a few financial statements for a few companies pushing RTO (Amazon and a couple of Wall Street firms). Granted, it wasn't comprehensive or scientific, but: They all made more money in 2022 than in 2019 (the last year before COVID).
WFH gave those damn individual contributors some agency and prevented dead weight middle management from Lumberghing. Pretty soon they start thinking they're people and having some work/life balance.
Private equity that owns companies also owns stakes in commercial real estate. If companies start breaking leases or renting less office space those private equity firms will lose money. The worst thing in the world is your economic betters losing money. How else will that money trickle down in warm little showers of gold?
A better acronym for RTO would be KYP: Know Your Place.
Here are a few things that aren't working out from a management perspective:
Social bonding is much harder, but important for reliable collaboration, especially when there are disagreements. I also believe that conversations are more likely to derail when they aren't in person. I've also been part of so many lunch conversations in the office that resulted in someone being able to help out someone on a different team with an issue they had solved themselves previously, learn about activities on another team that were relevant to them etc. There are ways to achieve similar things in a remote setup, but it's hard, especially to deploy across large companies with thousands of people. For the record, I've worked fully in person, hybrid and remote and think hybrid is by far the hardest to make work.
Communicating effectively on camera is a learnable skill, it's not one most people in tech have. But making sure people are trained to do a good job is a management challenge and it's incumbent upon management to make sure people are doing it. If, after two years, your team still has trouble having real conversations over a teleconferencing solution? That's a management failure.
"Lunchroom conversations" are arguably the hardest thing to foment in a remote environment for sure, but between things like cross-teams with breakouts and the like, you can do it. And some people are going to do it naturally; I know what most of my director's peers' teams are up to and I have contacts in all of them, while also touching base with them on a regular basis. If your teams don't have people who do this naturally, assign it. If you don't, that too is a management failure.
"It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.
There is something about in-person communication that's different for bonding. It's just human nature. Getting information across can be trained, but the social aspect will always be missing. That's ok if you make up for it.
Ones thing about meeting in physical space that I miss is directionality and locality of sound. If we are sitting with 4 people at a table at lunch, we can organically switch between having a single shared conversion or two different ones.
> "It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.
Agreed. Different from a power trip though. IMO it's just ineptitudes.
Just shifting from face to face to video conferencing won't cut it. You need to be efficient communicator in writing, which is harder to bullshit your through (or maybe requires different kind of bullshiting)
Also true. My current job has a lot of people whose survival mechanism to date has been "interminably long Zoom meetings where people tune out". Now that I have been on a "fewer, better meetings" kick, that is definitely springing some leaks.
I would stress the video capability, though, because that's the thing that impacts how people feel in pretty substantial ways. I have a weekly 90-minute meeting every Friday where my product teams bring questions to both ask me and to kick around with a group, and so far the feedback has been excellent--and a direct reason cited is that I'm not just letting the meeting wander but I am leading it, I'm standing up while on camera and projecting excitement and a reason to be engaged. When compared with the interminable-drone meetings the rest of the week, it really drives the point home that you have to talk to people like you want them to listen to you, and that is much harder on a camera but it is a totally learnable skill.
And managers ability to play dirty politics is greatly reduced. Remote is a big problem for managers who aren't actually competent and it's a problem for those who like to take credit for other's work.
This is what I do not get. Just give them some un-skilled people as placeholders, so there social anxiety doesn't fire. Sit the janitors into the open office or the team building guys.
I think it would be a great business opportunity to offer paid actors who would go into a business, walk around, maybe give a few of them clipboards, have them have water cooler conversations, maybe write some technical looking stuff on whiteboards, and generally move around looking busy.
This would simulate the thrill and "buzz" of managing a busy office for these executives to cosplay without having to drag unwilling employees back.
> the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.
Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be much more appropriate than firing “for cause”!
Companies have a right to fuck their employees over in all sorts of ways. "It's not literally illegal for them to do this to you" is the absolute weakest defence that can be made for any behaviour.
“Market Dynamics” is discussed as if it is a physics problem.
Markets are social creations - they are a human way to effectively allocate resources.
They are also constantly being manipulated and shaped to better achieve certain outcomes over others.
When these outcomes are bent to serve the benefits of the few, or to serve the benefits of a principle that isn’t human wellness, its is a pointless market.
The rules against oligopolies, monopolies, fraud and manipulation are to ensure the social purpose of the market is achieved.
By extension - a market that by nature forces RTO, when WFH is superior to the majority of humans, is a market that needs to be fixed.
A negligible % of firms include commute time as a part of your salary. WFH means that you can save nearly an hour every day, doing any number of things that add economic value to humanity.
Your statement seems to be one of 'should' due to social factors largely outside of the various actors control and/or self-interest.
Which in my experience tends to mean 'I wish was', not 'will be', let alone 'is'. Unfortunately. But pressure applied to various regulators, PR campaigns, etc. could change that! I wish whoever wants to spend the time and effort doing so the best of luck. When that happens, the factors will change.
In the end, labor markets only care about the wellbeing of participants as much as they have to - because labor will either actually not participate, or regulators will actually intervene, etc.
If someone is willing (and able) to commute 12 hrs a day to fill a job, and an employer is willing to employ that person at the rate they want, that will often happen barring better deals. Stochastically of course.
One can think of it in relation to energy states (when markets get above a certain size) if one was in the mood.
As always though, just as in said physics or chemistry problems, individual 'atoms' can and will end up in wildly different states from the median.
But that a single atom may be a movement/vibration rate equivalent to 100C doesn't mean the temperature of the solution isn't 25C (for example). Or that it won't average out over time for that atom as it collides/interacts with others.
Just a data point: When I was living in LA, it would have been nearly 2 hours a day for a good while. My boss, at the time, commuted nearly four hours a day on the worst days.
Give it time. The (RTO) companies are on the wrong side of history. Ideally these mandates are something the (employment) market will never forget. It will be interesting to see in the near future how many of the RTO execs at these companies will be whining about their struggles finding talent and/or having to pay a premium to attain and return the level of talent they need.
Of course few, if any of these execs will admit they got it wrong. That the root of the problem was their heavy-handed mandates and how they compromised the brand in the (employment) market.
Yes and no. What needs to be factored in is, does the best / top talent forget? Or are they ones with more focus and memory? Does their marketability allow them to be more selective?
Compromising in the short term to meet immediate needs isn't the same as forgetting. Once the tough times have passed, the memory rejuvenates and those who can do (i.e., leave).
Everyone leaves eventually, even if by retirement or death.
A great many people say they’ll leave ‘any day now’, or ‘after my next paycheck’ - but then somehow never do.
On the employer side, they care about output and costs, and the longer people stay (and keep producing) without need for raises or increased expenses, generally the lower their costs and the greater their output.
That might be true, but it's effectively a long-winded description of mediocrity. Mediocrity will only get you so far. Mediocrity means you're less competitive. Mediocrity means the only way to rise is if your competitor becomes even more mediocre. Mediocrity means to always live in fear that the "trick" isn't going to last much longer. And so on.
The point is, those environments, those cultures don't capture and retain top talent. Again, those who can...do (i.e., leave).
re: "Everybody leave..." Come on. You've got to do better than this. This isn't Reddit.
I’m pretty sure I don’t actually have to do better than this, actually.
And I’m going to have to quote Sturgeon’s law here. “90% of everything is crap”.
If 90% of employers are crap, (or 90% of jobs in an industry?), there is going to be a lot of competition for the 10% that aren’t with the crap employers or with the crap jobs. In conditions like we have today, many of the top 10% will even relax their standards (sliding closer to crap), since they just need to beat their competition not be perfect.
All they need to do to outrun the bear is run faster than the next guy, not be the fastest in the world.
So not everyone is going to get one of those nice ones, pretty much by definition no?
I wish you luck with finding one, and making the move if your current employer sucks.
Many won’t, for valid reasons. And employers are counting on that. For valid reasons (even if we all hate it).
Companies can do a lot of things that are morally reprehensible without fear of legal consequences. It doesn’t make it OK, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they have “a right” to behave that way.
While having a moral right to something (or not) is definitely important, when push comes to shove it’s the legal rights that come into play.
Legally recognized rights tend to underpin most definitions of ‘rights’ someone has, since if the legal system doesn’t recognize it, it’s nearly inevitable it will be stomped on at some point with no recourse.
And when that happens regularly, it’s hard to claim it’s a right anymore as practically it isn’t.
Companies are gonna fuck over their employees either way but I totally agree that's not the kind of thing they have a right to. The world isn't dystopian enough yet.
Who is doing this precisely? I've heard a lot of people bemoan that they moved during the pandemic and now are being required to return to the office but I haven't heard of any instances where previously remote employees-- remote from BEFORE the pandemic-- are being required to move to central office locations.
Amazon[0], for one. But they're not the only ones -- it does happen occasionally, mostly when a company makes a blanket policy "no more remote work, everyone back to the office!" (which makes less sense for those employees who were never at any point in an office to begin with). The author of the linked article for this HN post wrote:
> I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida. Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim).
In the Re: Amazon article linked at the bottom of my post, the employee says:
> Now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. I moved to this area 13 years ago. I own a house here. My partner has a career here. I've built a home here.
I haven't seen anything about them requiring pre-pandemic remote employees to relocate post-pandemic, only people who moved after the pandemic WFH movement started. I'm genuinely interested in if they're going after this.
This is exactly what happened to me. I worked from home for Wells Fargo for years prior to the pandemic. This year suddenly my status got changed and I was required to go into the office. First come first serve cubicles and none of my co-workers were even in the same state, let alone office. Years prior to the pandemic when I was in the office I had my own cubicle and could at least expect my chair would be the same and nobody had messed with the monitors on my desk. It's like working from an Internet cafe every day now.
For the past 10 years or so I've been doing "hybrid WFH" where I negotiate 3 days max in-office (when I'm working somewhere with an office close to where I live) and I always get it agreed upon in my employment contract. My guess (and bias) would be that companies that would pull this switcheroo on employees would be larger orgs with faceless HR machinery and most wherewithal to dominate their employees (ie Amazon)
> Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.
The standard advice is stay in the house at least five years. These people accepted permanent remote roles at companies that have been remote-friendly for only two years. The track record's not there; you can't reasonably assume that policy would continue indefinitely. It might, but it's clearly a risk.
Why would anyone find it acceptable for a company to hire a remote employee but later change the contract? That's a massive pay cut. It's weird how companies expect loyalty but cannot even keep their word from what they claimed during hiring.
Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't because remote jobs were few and far between. COVID finally gave them what they always wanted, but now it's being taken away, and remote jobs are getting harder to find again.
That's why there is resentment. There was resentment before too, but it was more below the radar because it was always shot down with "we work better in person" and there really wasn't much an argument to be had.
But now those people have hard data that they clearly work just as well at home or even better. So now they have data to back up their desires.
It goes much deeper than that though. It isn't just "they wanted it and couldn't have it, then they got it and now they want to keep it:" A lot of people, myself included, did not understand even if we wanted work from home, how life changing it would be. How it's better for us as people, better for us as workers, better for our pocketbooks, better for our planet, better for our lives, just... better. It's ALL better.
Literally the only people losing in this arrangement are the same parasites who win at literally every other juncture in our society and just, I'm sick to DEATH of it. I will DIE on this hill. I hope the commercial real estate market fucking craters. I hope every company doing this RTO shit dies on the vine. I hope it sucks for every single person in the parasite class who loses more than 2 dollars on everything. I hope it crashes the price of real estate in big cities and makes them affordable again. I hope it makes my home worth less because homes shouldn't be a fucking investment vehicle in the first place.
To borrow the bugs bunny meme, I wish every landlord a very happy get a real job.
I have a nice office at work, where I have less distractions than at home. I find that face-to-face meetings allow for better discussions and whiteboarding than video conferencing. I can commute by bike on a lovely route, thus getting regular exercise and fresh air. I can better compartmentalize work from leisure. I don’t have to spend my whole day within the same walls. I get to see other people and have random encounters with interesting technical and non-technical discussions at work.
So it depends on circumstances and preferences. Both modes should be possible.
There are a lot of us normal workers who dislike WFH and we're not parasites. It's perfectly valid to prefer WFH but it's also valid to prefer the office.
I'm ready to believe that remote work can be more productive overall, and definitely more cost effective, but I always have a really hard time with the "I'm just as productive, if not more productive remotely" data and argument. It's really easy to believe that folks with an existing network of colleagues and relationship, as well as a decent amount of company of industry know how can be more productive remotely. Fewer distractions, more flexibility, etc. It all makes sense.
But that doesn't solve for the folks behind us on the ladder; how effective are we being at mentoring and growing those people, how easily are they learning the small nuances that we picked up in hallway conversations, serendipitous meetings, and so on. For the company, this is a real concern, but it's harder to measure. To better advocate for remote work, I think we really need to pour more time and energy into this and call out techniques that can be more effective here. For example: having leaders write a weekly newsletter, or getting into the "Why's" much more intentionally when people are remote.
As a leader I did weekly department emails, weekly "office hours", fun video interviews with new hires to introduce them to the team and more. It worked pretty well, especially since the majority of the team had been working together for years. The piece I wasn't able to implement was getting the entire team in the same physical place every 3-6 months. However, I think even with all that, if I was a new hire, especially a junior, I'd still have a easier time learning the ropes in person. However, is that worth the massive constraint on hiring and impact on everyone else? I don't know. It's not a clear tradeoff.
> how easily are they learning the small nuances that we picked up in hallway conversations, serendipitous meetings, and so on.
You adapt. The hallway conversations are not some natural world order either. Do you want juniors to pick up skills? When you're starting work on something interesting, post "I'm doing X in (conference link), feel free to join." in a channel. Invite people for a lunch call.
Nobody is stopping you from having those interactions remotely. Encourage a culture whereby those people call you about these things, one where calls are not formal.
Set up scenarios where they literally just sit on remote video call with you sharing your screen for half the day. Calls don't need to be formal, leave the camera on and leave the desk for a break.
Analogy - this is like continuing to teach new drivers how to drive a stick-shift ( manual transmission) car when their city has adopted only automatic transmission or single gear EV cars for the future.
Humans are great at adapting to their surroundings. Mentoring/growing juniors will continue but in a different way that works better for modern work arrangements.
Yep! This is the crux of the problem. WFH has been battle tested and proven to be just as effective if not more than working at an office. But when execs try to throw all logic out the window and strong arm the employee for their gain they're shocked on the push-back (which never was before). COVID changed EVERYTHING. People saw firsthand how short life can be and reset their priorities.
Times change and so should companies. It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction.
Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting.
This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works, but are unjustifiably being told otherwise by people that don't actually know what works.
When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes?
An example of pride in their work: Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.
> It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction.
This. Finding the balance is challenging.
- It is often unhealthy to expect too much from work.
- most software/hardware tech employers ask employees to be more than contractors and to care more than just a paycheck
- at the same time we see corporate decisions that are largely shortsighted, and sometimes even self-defeating.
I don’t have a history of belonging to a union, nor promoting worker-owned cooperatives, but I am a student (so to speak) of public policy and history. To use political economy terminology, we often see misaligned incentives: people with a little technical experience, calling the shots on everything from where we work (office, remote, etc) to how we work (remember cubicles? They were better than open office for anyone like me.)
Software and hardware engineers have been a key differentiating factor for tremendous technological advancement and meteoric corporate growth. Why don’t we have more influence on how we work at the least?
One key aspect seems damning: could it be because for most of us, as we get successful, we don’t pay it forward? And where are the ‘politically active’ retired engineers? Many of us cash out and become investors ourselves. I suppose we get working on other interesting technical problems and treat the lack of workplace control as immutable? To some extent, I’ve seen the problem and it is us.
Or maybe the business world is structured so that being “just a worker” relegates you to a second class status. Maybe there’s no point in hoping even a group of 1,000 of the relatively wealthy of us (to throw out a number: let’s say we define that as having net worth over $2M in the USA) could’ve made a difference? But I know this isn’t true; I largely notice a gaping hole where collective organizing could be.
Of course, there’s plenty blame to go ‘round. Anyone who seeks venture-capital has to make a Faustian bargain, trading a blood infusion for improbable expectations of growth.
The tech industry has grown so rapidly, adding people at a breakneck pace, that maybe we don’t think of this as being important. New SW/HW hires at least get paid well, we tell ourselves, even if they don’t really get to shape or work places as much as we should.
Our negotiating power is not as strong as it once was, and it isn’t getting any better, in my view. Will we act? Soon? Ever?
You ask good questions. Historically, no, software craftspeople and technologists do not pay it forward. In my experience, my parents' generation of engineers were more of the "someday, I'll be that boot" variety. I see a little less of that in mine, but still plenty of it; that's how startups mostly operate today. But I have a little more hope for the next generation to mount more resistance to it.
There will always be toads, but there might be some people in there, too.
> It is often unhealthy to expect too much from work.
There is a famous prayer where one asks to be strong enough to change the things one can, humble enough to not requiring the changes you can't, and wise enough to know the difference. I don't remember it literally, but should be easy to find.
Anyway, work from home just got promoted from something you can change into something you can. As it happened, the healthy thing changed from not expecting it into demanding it (if you want).
That's a great point, misaligned incentives. And I'd add to that misaligned goals.
The engineer who wants to deliver their project in return for their salary, in contrast to the sociable c-suite exec, who wants to cosplay the work environment of yesteryear.
This applies to the wider corporate world and not even just the tech industry but I understand it's relevance as this is HN.
> Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.
> When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes?
My phones are 1) a VOIPphone, and 2) a mobile device. The former relies on the internet; the latter can't send a FAX. PSTN is 90's technology, fewer and fewer people have a PSTN line.
So you kept up with the times. Good for you haha.
I'm guessing there was some efficiency, simplicity in not going out and getting a PTSN line.
Much like remote work, same results whilst cutting out inefficient offices and convoluted commutes.
> some efficiency, simplicity in not going out and getting a PTSN line.
Yup - it was much cheaper, my previous phone connection was from a cable company, and I already had internet. And as it turns out, VOIP seems to be more reliable than PSTN. And my (boutique) ISP specializes in VOIP.
I wouldn't have even bothered with VOIP, and just relied on mobile telephony; but I don't trust mobile providers, and I wanted a landline-style local phone-number.
>They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works
If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office. There is a difference between making it through an event like COVID vs making forward business progress. Certainly there's a place for remote work but the higher you go in management the more you see the holes remote work creates. Realistically, employees should push hard for return to office and then no work out of the office. The reality is that as the job market tightens the expectation is going to be in office AND work from home. Vacation days will morph into work from home days. An expectation to answer emails after hours is already turning into an expectation to be online and available for zoom calls much later than normal working hours.
As part of the social contract, reasonable employees would agree with it if there were a solid case for it but this doesn't seem to be so. They're being offered ambiguous one liners such as the "making forward business progress" devoid of substance and which contrasts to actual measurable such as turnover, profits and other tangible measures that indicate otherwise (showing that remote work works).
I truly hope the line between leave and work doesn't blur.
If I was hired as a programmer and my employer decides they would rather I pickup dog shit all day, I'm damn-well going to complain about it.
Both TFA (and the comment you are replying to) are about people specifically hired for remote work prior to the pandemic; the status quo before COVID was those people working remotely.
It’s not that simple - it’s a stupid control thing.
When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive.
I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees.
Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Require that people live or be available at regional hubs monthly or quarterly. My aunt had an arrangement like this for a airline in the late 90s - they setup a router and PC in her basement and would have meeting or two a month at the office.
For me, top down dictates that remove business unit autonomy and don’t understand reality are always a net negative. WFH flexibility reduced sick and family sick absences by 60%. People who’d take an hour off to go to the doctor now take a half day.
Now, I have two employees reporting on this stuff instead of doing something productive. So I’m losing thousands of man-hours to absences and spending 3000-4000 more to figure out how many asses are in chairs in dozens of facilties across the world. Managing professionals like fast food employees is dumb. The only winners are the CRE and banking people.
I had a lot of people excited about having a space where we could deliberately meet for collaboration. Even more so about bringing everyone into a shared space for a week. However, the collaboration spaces never worked out in practice because you were always missing someone and now had to call in to a Zoom meeting regardless. This lead to the thing quickly dying because there so little was real value from coming in. That might be a company culture thing one could correct though.
I don't know, the hotel+collab spaces is pretty good (from my perspective) when you come into the office once or twice a month and have a group of people you want to meet with and an agenda you want to accomplish.
For more mundane day-to-day work I don't care for it, but I think it can be a handy supplement to mostly remote work.
People hate reporting to work every day where you need to fight for a chair. If you're WFH, you can gather adhoc, do your thing with the team and get out.
As a remote worker before the pandemic, I think the worst thing we could do is return to the status quo. I remember trying to find a new remote job before I moved across the country to Portland (pre-pandemic). I interviewed for a job in downtown Chicago, which would have required a 35-minute train ride to and from the city each day. I wasn't moving for a few months and I offered to work in the office before switching to remote. I even said "if you don't think I'm contributing enough value by the time I leave, and you aren't comfortable with me working remotely, let me know and I can stay with the company long enough to help you find my replacement". They still turned me down.
The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. I remember going to the dentist and telling the dental assistant that I work from home, and her response was "don't people think you're slacking off?" and my response was "no, because I'm an adult". There was an almost insurmountable stigma around remote work. As terrible as the pandemic was, it exposed an irrefutable truth about remote work: people can still do their jobs perfectly fine at home.
I spent most of my career working in offices, until I went fully remote about 2 years before the pandemic. There are aspects of the office that I miss. I'm not vehemently against going back into an office, but it would come with some pretty big caveats: the office has to be relatively close, there are no fixed days or amount of days I'd be required to come in, and I'd have the flexibility to come and go as I pleased. I doubt many companies would agree to that arrangement, mainly because of the real estate costs, which is why I stick to remote work.
I don't want to go back to a world where I have to convince a company that a remote worker can still provide as much value as one in the office. I don't want to be forced to stay late at an office to finish something that I could knock out twice as fast at home. I can only hope that we don't spend the next few years going backwards to arrive at a status quo that was misguided and not grounded in reality.
> The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc.
In my last position (exclusively work-from-office), I had two co-workers (out of nine) that were seriously counterproductive: the rest of us had to work around them. I don't know why the bosses hired them, and I don't know why they kept them on - perhaps they thought they were somehow rescuing them.
At any rate, these guys weren't just less productive; they were seriously counterproductive. And this was a strictly office job; we were more-or-less forbidden to work after 5:30PM.
The bosses had some kind of "company culture" fantasy, that they could weld us together into a bean-bags-and-table-football crew of clones, who would both work and play together. Interestingly, neither of these bosses had ever done an office job in someone else's office...
I've always hated going into an office, I hate the drive, I hate the shitty coffee, I hate having to check which of the toilet seats ISN'T already caked in shit from the QA guys, I hate having to watch my smoking cowokers take the first 10 to 20 minutes off the start of every hour to smoke and the management allowing it because they also smoke. Then they bitch when I leave on time and they still have hours of work to make up. Now people can fuck up their own shit and I can just do work. Covid made it possible for companies to pull their heads out of their asses and offer WFH for more positions.
> there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.
You don't understand why people don't want to have to go job hunting to keep a WFH position?
It's one thing to say "this is fine, get over it", it's another to say "I don't understand why people are resentful", I think that second part is pretty obvious.
I can give several reasons there's resentment: One - if you were hired with the understanding work would be remote, then it's definitely a reason to be resentful.
Two, people love to handwave away the difficulties in "just find another job." This isn't trivial like switching toothpaste brands, somebody who's been with Acme Corp for 3 years has invested time with that employer, learned their ins and outs, and has banked some social capital there. Saying "oh, just find another job" is saying "just toss all that out and start over."
Three, if you do change jobs you have no clue whether the next company might get swept up in the RTO craze at a later date. When Acme Corp's pro-RTO CEO or another c-level person trot over to your new workplace, guess what? Now it's no longer remote-friendly.
We're not living in the same world we were pre-COVID and many of us see no reason to go backwards.
Firstly, you make switching employers sound like as easy as changing your outfit. Not every job has thousands of companies hiring remotely ready to go.
Secondly, companies that pulled this bait and switch deserve to be called out and loose reputation among workers for it. My current employer had recruiters and even the CEO bragging about our remote work policy, just to pull it out from under everyone.
> It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others.
The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. Not everyone, but a huge number that had never been exposed to it before.
Now if a business wants to stay competitive they need to tap into that labor market. The vocal resistance to RTO is expected, we'll never go back to having such a large percentage of the work force working in an office. It's just that a lot of managers haven't figured that out yet and/or are personally incentivized to keep up the charade.
> The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it.
It's not even necessarily falling in love with working at home but just working not in shitty office environments. For most people "the office" is some miserable building in an office park in the middle of a food/service desert. Employees that need to commute to that office don't get paid for the hours of their life wasted in traffic or any financial expenses related to their commute. People with kids have to pay even more money for some child care if they can't be home when their kids get off from school.
Working from home/wherever allows someone to save on those money and time costs. They can be home when their kids get off school. They can make a sandwich at 11:23AM because they're hungry. They can stop pouring dollars into a daily commute. Hell they can even live where they want instead of somewhere in commuting distance of a shitty office park.
Many of the WFH challenges are the same as working in an office, like inconsiderate entities disturbing you or placating middle managers by attending meetings. At least you can bear those challenges in comfortable clothes in a comfortable seat. You can then take a break and shit in a bathroom you don't share with dozens of other inconsiderate coworkers. WFH isn't perfect and people don't need to love it to at least prefer it over the dystopian hell of offices.
"We should just return to the status quo before COVID..."
Says the ownership class.
When we are given a rare and unique opportunity to shift our labor culture in the favor of those who provide labor, we would be beyond stupid not to seize that opportunity for everything it's worth.
Many companies did a bait and switch, though. They made grand promises of remote and/or hybrid work being a first class citizen moving forward, then did a hard 180 and asked everyone to start coming into the office every day. Understandably, some people are upset about this, especially those hired remotely.
I think the resentment comes from the assumption of: "We should just return to the status quo before..."
If you look back at the history of work experiences, there were several old "status quos" that we no longer accept. We don't accept, manual labor for 60 or 80 hours a week. We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension. But society evolves. Assuming that something as disruptive as COVID should just be put aside without evolving how we operate in our world is exactly where the resentment comes from.
>We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension
I think that if private companies offered pension plans, reasonable raises and promotion paths, many people would accept it. I think the company hopping stuff is largely a response to the death of annual raises and internal promotions.
> and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
Unless laws change to require them to [1], workers organize to require it be provided [2], or you've had the working arrangement codified in your offer letter or other contractual documentation so that requiring you to come into an office is constructive dismissal [3]. This whole "employers can do whatever they want" era can't come to an end quick enough.
Companies which were okay with having some remote employees before COVID, are now — for no rational reason whatsoever other than following a seeming business-management zeitgeist — not okay with having any remote employees.
Isn't "companies going crazy and forcing good employees into situations where they'll quit, when they could just as well... not do that", something to push back against?
A lot of big companies had full remote by exception. They built up a modest amount of these (generally senior, often specialist) over the years. Forcing these people to an office is not return to pre-Covid.
>We should just return to the status quo before COVID
The status quo was horribly broken, and it took a worldwide pandemic for many people to realize that things could be different and didn't have to be so awful.
> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.
I mean, this is a ridiculous argument supporting remote work because it works so much stronger the other way.
You literally had companies change centuries worth of corporate work for overnight to switch everyone to remote work.
If anything the people who want full time return to office have a much stronger argument that companies have suddenly changed everything on them, as opposed to the people who are complaining that now that things are normal companies are reverting the changes they made for a once in a lifetime pandemic.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Vladimir Lenin
Sometimes it takes a black swan event to reveal how broken something is and how things could be better another way.
It used to be the norm in the US for children to be allowed to work in coal mines and factories too (apparently in 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were children under the age of 16[1]), but after some photos were taken of them exposing just how bad the situation had gotten, it helped shift public support to pass legislation barring child labor. Nowadays I doubt hardly anyone would be in support of that now.[2]
Counterpoint: why would we EVER return to a born-crappy status quo?
No secret that the answer is: to privilege the anxious social needs of those uncomfortable working remotely. And those whose career is on the hook for over-investment in trophy real estate.
before, people weren't sure if it could be done, and if the productivity would be similar.
It's now been shown that it's possible and that productivity is very similar. So that's why companies forcing the return to work are resented, and why they don't even pretend to have numbers to back their decision. https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.
Because these companies hired a lot of remote employees in the interim. Also, many of the employees of these companies decided to buy houses in areas where they could afford to buy a house instead of continuing to rent - and now after several years these companies want to renege?
How can you not understand the resentment? This is the biggest FUCK YOU in the history of corporate America.
If you went back 20/25 years, it's probably fair to say that remote work wouldn't have worked in general. Had COVID happened in 1995, I expect that there would have been a lot more shrugging and getting on with business/school/etc. because there really wouldn't have been other realistic options.
I don't think it's realistic to say things should just return to the status quo. The world was changed by the pandemic and even if that didn't happen, time continues to advance which always brings change as well.
Yes, some companies will go back to hybrid or complete in person, but it is also clear that remote work can be done in a much wider context than it was before the pandemic.
"as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why."
They saw the light. Simple as that.
They also noticed, if more employees in the market demand remote, chances are higher that employers will allow it.
I don't think the free-market-solves-all-ails response really works here. The issue is that the CEOs of these companies act together, essentially as a cartel. Sometimes formally [1], other times informally [2]. Labor (at least in the US) does not have anywhere close to such a level of organization, and so top-down mandates like this can impact a whole sector, without a clear place for you to go.
No, management has been lying to employees with the "working in an office is more effective" for decades. Now the king is naked and yet companies are trying to manipulate people to return to offices.
These kind of arguments have sort of eaten their tail in recent years as work culture has shifted.
We (as has happened with a lot of things) basically have two camps of people and a culture that makes us believe we are only allowed to make "one-or-the-other" choices (I blame the rise of consulting, KPIs, and 'benchmarks'.)
So two camps are arguing about their preferences but with the stakes that "my preference has to be the moral and logical choice," which will always just lead to nowhere.
The market is really difficult right now, most people don’t have the option to just find a remote work company. A significant amount of people who were laid off can’t find any company right now
What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. At this point, it shouldn't be called RTO, it should be called STO (Switch To Office), because WFH is the default existing state. And the companies that want to STO, they admit there's NO DATA to support this:
The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.
> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH.
I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote.
Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.
Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed.
Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH.
Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
> Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH.
I think there's a bit of a selection bias. I believe many people can work effectively remotely and these likely applied to remote companies. But many people are less effective remote and these wouldn't succeed in remote companies. In the end I certainly think there's a space for remote only companies, but I'm not sure if it's a model useful for the whole IT sector.
> All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
In the end it doesn't matter. It's the managers calling the shots and carrying the responsibility. If their guts tell them office work is the right direction, it's their bet.
Talking to lots of middle and upper management, the primary complaints I hear are hard to measure - poorer communication, less alignment, less innovation, etc. None of this reduces the number of tasks being done, but reduces the utility of those tasks. Measuring directly is hard, but ultimately you'd expect it result in lower growth - which many companies are seeing (but it's hard to disentangle this from the macro situation).
I think the hard reality is that companies need to make a thesis on the level of flexibility in remote/in-office work and commit, then 5 years from now we'll get an idea of what works well.
* Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office
* Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge
* Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure)
* Able to hire from outside local metro area
None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And yet now vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations is enough to shift everything back to in-office?
Pre-pandemic, why would you risk testing out an unknown style of work and management that almost no one had experience with?
Now there's a significant portion of the labor market that expects WFH, companies need to produce a policy on WFH/RTO instead of treating it as a non-decision.
Data gives no clear insight into which is better, which makes this a judgment call, and everyone with >5 yoe has enough experience in both modes that they feel qualified to make that judgment. Many think requiring some in-office time is superior. You can try and dismiss those opinions as "vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations" but that's not going to actually convince anyone with the power to effect these decisions - even if you're right! You need answers to concerns like "virtual communication is too low bandwidth to build alignment on strategic shifts that are necessary for the company to grow to profitability" (quote to me from a director at a company with >1,000 employees).
My argument is basically: if you could have addressed those concerns, it would've happened during the pandemic. Manifestly, those concerns were not addressed in a satisfactory way. Therefore the only real resolution now is to wait 5-10 years to see if RTO/WFH is a meaningful differentiator for companies.
Wouldnt it be more likely that current Middle management isn’t familiar enough with a chat environments to maintain team cohesion.
I worked as a volunteer in an online team before the COVID years. I was FAR better at ensuring a team was cohesive online, than I was in person. You can make out whats going on based on how people talk, you can have one on ones, and diagnose issues.
"Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."
This line from the article "...in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes.." shows that this study is about a call center. A few points on this:
* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
>* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work.
2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study:
"Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office."
>* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
>The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest.
2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.
Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm interested in how you're able to measure "overall team productivity." I've found that to be a near-impossibility at any organization that I've worked at.
For many people it’s really just a gut feeling. That’s the issue with this debate; there isn’t really any data on either side of the aisle. Regardless, team productivity is both more important, and easier to measure than individual productivity; and most proponents of remote work are only focused on the latter.
Isn't bad communication a management issue, not a team performance issue?
Some articles have pointed out that the major driver (from executives) to return to office is simply underperforming real estate investments. In short, the attrition, decreases in performance and morale, and environmental impacts are simply not worth the massive losses that would be incurred from the innumerable empty office parks.
And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?
And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.
> And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?
Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it.
> And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them?
My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations.
Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
> Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
That's great until you are forced to come in on "anchor days" and there are no free meeting rooms left.
I enjoyed the flexibility of WFH but I still prefer working with local teams in the office. There are pros and cons to both, but it's silly to assume everyone has the same preference as you just because your preference is strongly held.
This is my response to both your comment and TFA. There is less consensus on this topic than the very-vocal WFH crowd would have you believe. I know plenty of other talented engineers that feel similarly to me. They aren't dogmatic about it, but they prefer working with their teammates in the office.
From what I observed during the pandemic, I sincerely believe that the only reason remote work is worse than working in person is how little effort teams tend to put into making remote work equivalent to in person work. The biggest thing I saw throughout the entire pandemic on multiple teams was zero effort to create a culture of meet on camera for quick ad hoc, hey I have a quick question on this, ah cool thanks bye, it's always have a big fat meeting with lots of people or we're all just poking each other on chat with long reply latencies, which works very poorly. The only solution that was tried at my company was taking attendance, which is crazy, anyone who's gone to school, which is everybody, knows that taking attendance does zero to create collaboration, it just marks down whether you were there. Ass in seat? Check, we're done, mission accomplished. To me if you're taking attendance you've already lost because attendance is table stakes.
I strongly feel a large number of people complaining about "lack of collaboration" have a dark pattern of not documenting things.
Sure, you don't need to write everything down - but how many times could someone have simply RTFM if people were more in the habit of documenting institutional knowledge among other things? Even just defaulting to email discussions would help keep track of things much better.
And yeah, when I'm working with other people, I make a point to hang out in a BigBlueButton or other similar instance, with a note with my phone number there, as well as putting in my email signature line my phone and a note that I'm available for videconference.
One of the problems associated with remote work is that synchronous communication is not guaranteed. People tend to work varying hours and even during their "work hours", they will make breaks to do various activities like household chores etc. So it tends to be more difficult to catch a co-worker for a quit chat. Then there's a feedback loop where you basically stop trying since it has such a low chance anyway.
To me, the work varying hours is part of the problem; if the remote work is expected to replace in office work, then similar hours have to be worked, in which case people need to be available throughout the work day.
To head off negative reaction to this, I'm not saying that remote should always be similar hours, I mean remote work positions that otherwise would have been in office before the pandemic, if that makes sense.
I just look at this situation and to me it looks like people are like, ohh noo, remote work isn't as good as in office work, well, yeah, you haven't even tried to make it anything like "in office work but thru a camera," you've almost allowed your domestic employees and contractors to work as if everyone's in different teams in different timezones, with all of the problems that come with that...
I feel the exact opposite. People should make an effort to make as much communication async as possible. Usually, I don't need a ton of 1:1 interaction, and if you really do feel there's something to discuss synchronously, you can schedule a meeting in advance. The situation where you're so completely blocked that you can't make progress on your own or switch to a different task (or where the house is on fire and something needs to be done now) are rare in my experience.
Of course, sometimes it makes sense to do check-ins (e.g. for onboarding) or a pairing session, but that can also be scheduled.
I also tend to forget things that were just said in personal interactions or meetings. If it's written down, I can look it up.
It's absolutely silly for the RTO people to force their preferences on everyone. The fact that RTO folks only consider it a win if everyone comes back, rather than trying to build out flexibile working conditions that make everyone happy, is the real problem.
People who want an office to work in are just as valid as people who want to work from home. It's the people who want to force RTO on everyone that are real assholes.
The thing is that there is no arrangement that works for everyone. Sure, those who just want a physical office space instead of their home will probably be ok collaborating remotely, but the others want to collaborate in person, and that requires everyone to be at the same place. Flexible conditions which make everyone happy is going to the office to spend large amount of time on video calls in cramped call booth - nothing too happy about that, whichever side of the debate you're on.
I don't understand why this argument (which is a popular one) makes sense. It's symmetrical. RTO folks want their colleagues in the office. WFH folks don't want to not have to do this. It would be obviously absurd if I criticized WFH on the basis that its proponents are trying to force their preferences on others.
I think RTO folks tend to care more for everyone on the team
to be in the office at least part of the time, whereas WFH folks tend to care less if their team colleagues are in the office or also WFH. So I don’t think it’s quite symmetrical. It’s better if the split is outside team boundaries, or between different companies.
It reduces commute time.
- This saves environmental and energy costs
- It increases worker productivity because now they commute time is recovered
- Commute time was not accounted for in contracts, and was a cost of doing business. It is no longer the case.
A common complaint is that Coordination costs have increased. However Data is missing for this. Further, Coordination activities are achievable online. Competitive firms will adapt and thrive. Bad firms will and should die.
Other benefits:
- Less money is spent on rent, Especially in high rent locations. This means that more money is available for R&D, or to give to shareholders
- Rent Money is now distributed across geographies - and will favor regions with lower costs of living. This spreads talent and wealth broadly, increasing chances for entrepreneurship and new businesses to flourish in those locations
WFH was considered infeasible, but COVID provided hard evidence not only was it feasible, it was feasible at scale.
The data has been updated, so our position has changed. Expanding the economic pie makes us all better off. WFH is probably one of the more interesting economic revolutions we will see in the developed world.
It’s difficult if you have teams split between WFH and RTO though. The compromise is for all team members to be in the office at least some days per week, or else to just have RTO companies vs. WFH companies. I agree that everyone should be able to choose their preferred mode of working, but you can’t just arbitrarily mix people with different modes and expect that to cause no issues.
Also, I've been in this industry for 17 years. Malwarebytes (VP), Vicarious (VP), Rad AI (VP), Explosion AI, Aptible, and now Comcast. Every one of those companies except Vicarious had a remote or hybrid culture, and it's worked great for all of them. You absolutely can "arbitrarily mix people with different modes" as long as you have good management.
Most people who claim to like work-from-home specifically rely on other people showing up at their workplaces -- restaurants, delivery drivers, grocery workers, cleaners, healthcare, dog walkers, etc.
Manufacturing buggy whips doesn't work if only five people own buggies. This is a problem for the buggy whip manufacturer to solve, not the people who bought a car or took the train.
There's a third option beyond forcing everyone into boxes in the middle of nowhere (old and busted) and everyone working from home (new old hotness).
People are allowed to have different preferences and lifestyles than the majority. I’m not a CEO so it’s not my place to decide what a company does or doesn’t do.
Right, I think it’s fine for people to have differences and differing preferences.
My point is that if 5/100 people want to work in the office and 95/100 don’t, that’s fine.
If 5/100 want to work in an office with 100 people, and force the others to return against their wishes that’s * not* fine.
They can have their preference, but it seems wrong to me for their preference to override the preference of others.
> I’m not a CEO so it’s not my place to decide what a company does or doesn’t do.
Funny, because I’m the owner of my company, but I don’t think employees should defer their decision making to a CEO.
An employee can have an opinion, and even demand their preference. CEOs can’t actually make a unilateral decision on this. Labor absolutely gets a say. If the CEO says “RTO or you’re fired”, and 95/100 people say “okay, bye”, then that company won’t RTO.
Just about this. We've seen again and again that they will.
I don't understand what is happening well enough to explain CEOs destroying their companies before conceding this to the employees, but this is clearly a thing common enough for it to be the default expectation.
And that's my main criticism of the article. Those CEOs clearly are not doing some random bullshit. They are doing some completely intentional and heavily desired thing. IDK what is their reasoning or if it's aligned with the company's goals, but they do have the intention.
I never said that employees shouldn’t have preferences (I explicitly stated otherwise in another comment) and shouldn’t have a say in the matter. I was just saying that ultimately the CEO makes the call on RTO (at least that’s what it seems to be at megacorps), whether it’s the right or wrong one isn’t my call.
> I was just saying that ultimately the CEO makes the call on RTO (at least that’s what it seems to be at megacorps), whether it’s the right or wrong one isn’t my call.
This is the part I was disagreeing with. The CEO does not make that call. The CEO and labor negotiation over that call.
If you view it as just the CEO's decision, you've ceded a tremendous amount of power.
But, actually, it's a shared decision between the CEO and the entire body of workers. If the body of workers all reject the CEO's decision, then...that decision will get reversed.
Hypothetically, would you still feel this way of it turned out that everyone being in the office (remember this is a magical hypothetical) has a significant and demonstrable improvement in productivity?
This is more of a level-setting question than any sort of disagreement.
> Hypothetically, would you still feel this way of it turned out that everyone being in the office (remember this is a magical hypothetical) has a significant and demonstrable improvement in productivity?
Yes, in a particular scenario.
If it improved productivity so much that it exceeds the work required to commute to the office, and the employer is willing to pay for that commute (both in cost and employee time), then sure. If the productivity gain is so large that if offsets the cost/time of the commute, and the employer is willing to pay for that time, then I think RTO makes sense.
I will prioritize my own needs, my own life, my own comfort, over the "productivity" or profit of a company every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
And frankly, so should we all. This obsessive focus on enabling companies to make more money, regardless of what it means for us regular workers as human beings, is utterly ruinous and needs to stop.
I don't understand this response and it come off as incredibly rude.
What I'm asking is whether it ever makes sense for a firm to do something against the preferences of employees if it demonstrably increases productivity.
> You have to decide for yourself and your team/company if RTO is what is best, and don't take other's lived experience as your own.
I genuinely think you might be responding to the wrong comment or something. Where did I "take other's lived experience as your own"? Am I misinterpreting your response?
I've already said in this thread that I'm open to both arrangements. I'm not a zealot on either side of this conversation, and it bothers me that you're assuming I am. There's pros and cons to both. You put forward a scenario that for whatever reason inspired me to present a hypothetical situation because I was curious what your response would be.
I am not trying to be rude, but the way you asked the question "Hypothetically, would you still feel this way of it turned out that everyone being in the office (remember this is a magical hypothetical) has a significant and demonstrable improvement in productivity?" is leading to a yes or no answer to a hypothetical question with a lot of missing quantifiers (the lived experience). Neither answer is wrong, and neither answer is right.
A better question would have been: "_Have you_ experienced a demonstrable improvement in productivity from being in the office in yourself or others?" Personally, I have not. Going to the office wastes a lot of my day getting ready to leave the house (unhooking laptop and charger), commuting back and forth, etc. The only time being in the office is a net positive is when I need to get like 6+ people into a conference room for a few hours and get them all to agree to something. These type of meetings only happen every few months.
> You put forward a scenario that for whatever reason inspired me to present a hypothetical situation because I was curious what your response would be.
For the record, you're talking to different people. You asked the question to me, and I responded. guhidalg is a different person in the conversation.
It may not work for the five people in the office, because it’s not the environment they enjoyed if the 95 other people are not there. This is particularly true if teams are split that way.
Nobody should be forced to anything, but that doesn’t mean that an arbitrary mix works.
I echo this sentiment completely. I do 2-3 days a week in my office and I am personally mentally better off for it.
That said, personally is the key word. I manage a team. I love seeing employees together and aligning on things in person where possible - but totally understand if this does not suit their schedule that day or week. It often does not work with mine.
It's the small human mistakes that are innocent and spontaneous - like inevitably spilling coffee on myself - that keep us humble.
Some fit the remote world entirely never wanting to see the inside of an office again, some thrive off rubbing shoulders with colleagues. I found it difficult to not have social engagements outside of family during the darker periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also found myself working longer hours, not having solid disconnected time or neglecting my health physically and mentally.
I believe we still have a lot to learn about how to work best remotely. Businesses should invest in making this as normal as possible - for example enforcing a work-from-desk policy for calls has helped normalise communication. I do worry slightly about those younger graduates coming into the industry now that have never had the experience of working in an office.
> I also found myself working longer hours, not having solid disconnected time
To the frustration of my then boss, I noticed that I (and a lot of other coworkers) used RTO as a way to reduce our hours to ~40/week and not spend our nights and weekends with our work laptops open nearby.
I enjoy going to the office from time to time, and if you establish no rules, I'm pretty likely to go to the office about 2-3X per week and coordinate those days with others, because I'm also a social human being.
I also enjoy being able to see my partner for a week here and there. Some have a "4 week work-from-anywhere policy", but if you're in an LDR you know 4 weeks per year is really not enough.
I don't know anyone that is advocating for forcing everyone to work from home but instead "office available for anyone who wants it."
There's a mile wide difference between "my preference is to be vegetarian" where people will get out the stops to provide accommodations and "my preference is everyone must keep vegetarian."
There are definitely companies (and individuals) who are making the decision that "the benefits of RTO emerge from/rely upon our entire workforce being mostly in the office".
I don't personally hold that view, but I know people (including individual contributors) who do and, depending on why you think in-office work is good, it's an entirely reasonable view for some people and some companies to take.
> the environmental benefits of vegetarianism emerge from/rely upon our entire population being mostly meatless.
I understand the argument, I still don't think it's valid. Companies are made up of heterogeneous individuals with not only different preferences on how to work, but different work styles, different flexibility needs, different energy cycles. One of my current teammates has Crohn's and is a fantastic programmer but there's no way he could work 8 hrs in an office. For myself, I have really bad ADHD and working in the office means I will be completely dependent on stimulants instead of being able to work around it most days.
You can't put the cat back in the bag that made the whole world collectively realize that for most jobs being in an office building wasn't the real requirement we all thought it was.
Some believe the benefits of RTO are closer to the ability of an entire team to eat from the same crock of chili at a potluck.
There are discussions and topics that just work better in-person. If you think you have (or could arrange to have) 0% or 3% those types of conversations, you're fine to work fully remote. If you think you have 70% or 90% those types of conversations, you're logically going to want to RTO to whatever extent you're prioritizing company outcomes.
You may be right, but there should be more concrete evidence than arbitrary percentages and "just work better" before I'll be convinced to make the enormous life changes for RTO.
What is the value differential--in dollars--of these in-person conversations? All I'm seeing are vague speculations.
People and companies who want to associate in a certain way should be allowed to.
People and companies who want to associate in a different way should also be allowed to.
That lets some people and some companies choose RTO, others choose hybrid, and others choose remote-only.
I shouldn't be able to force my beliefs onto you, nor you onto me (we probably largely agree; I'm pro-remote overall); to the extent that there's an imbalance in supply and demand, there's a lot of room for prices to adjust the balance. If companies need to pay a premium for RTO, they can choose that.
They already are allowed to. And I am allowed to voice my disagreement with widespread RTO mandates, just like some others are voicing that they prefer RTO. We are all allowed to do these things.
I think the right model for management to adapt to is “let your workers work the way they work best.” It’s a false dichotomy that it’s either everyone in the office or everyone work at home. In my entire career of over 30 years most meetings were held with some remote person in some other location as most companies of size have many locations already. I don’t see a huge difference between that model and a “work how you work best” model, other than the knowledge the other people aren’t in a corporate supplied human Habitrail but are in their natural environment.
Ultimately the argument is about control, extorting and coercing compliance under threat to some will. The alternative is a relaxing of control. In that model no one tells you to work in the office, and no one tells you to not. Instead of management exerting coercive control their job would become ensuring productivity given a lack of control.
Tax advantages are part of the story, but the other part of the story is most managers aren’t very good at managing people. They’re in their job through some career twist, either under the delusion that management gives them scale of influence or because they don’t really like computers that much and went to CS for a career. The easier policy to enforce is the coercive one because it requires no thought, and it’s uniform in its application. The harder one for management is figuring out how to adapt to a changing environment and maximize productivity by understanding their people and how they work and smoothing the landscape for them.
This challenge extends not just to the line managers but to the CEOs and everyone between. None of them are usually very good people managers. Often senior management are better at strategy and manipulation of the organization. They are perplexed by ambiguity, and when you’re used to being in control being perplexed is uncomfortable. And when you feel like you’re in charge you don’t have to feel uncomfortable alone, you can make it someone else’s problem. Layoffs, resignations, turmoil are all issues they are used to. But a changing work environment that fundamentally rethinks the structure of corporate engagement that’s focused on lack of control in exchange for productivity and reduced operating expenses and freeing up of capital? That’s scary stuff, and they don’t need to feel scared - it’s easier for them to make you feel scared.
Anyway - tax agreements expire, leases lapse, cultures adapt, management learns new playbooks, and things change. In 5 years the cold hard dollars will win - eventually no board will accept hand waving culture arguments when confronted with an improved EPS, freeing of cash flow, and reduced capital commitments coupled with improved morale and productivity and the “Bring your own office” moment will be here. BYOD saves a few million a year, BYOO will save dump trucks of money. It will happen.
Disclaimer, I just quit my cushy senior exec job at a mega cope over RTO and joined a forward late stage startup with a mixture of remote and in office “work the way you work best” structure.
I asked about WFH prior to the pandemic and was told 'oh it won't work for you, ask again when you're in a senior position; you'll never develop without peer-friendships and a senior worker a couple of desks away'. Then we were forced to WFH.
Now, we're being told to do hybrid, but there's no peer friendships because it's hotdesking, and the senior personnel are no longer nearby (they're at home or on a different floor) ... so there's no "return", we're not going back to what we had, we don't have our own desks anymore.
Management acknowledge that office days (we're hybrid) will be low in productivity, but no changes to productivity requirements. It's all about collaboration, except you're next to random people you've never met and you can't talk because it's open plan and you'll disturb everyone.
None of the reasons given for return fit the reality (in my office), but they probably make sense for senior managers (who seem unable to see past the end of their own noses).
There’s a flip side to this where you’re not observing the negatives coming to the company as a result.
It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either.
Just as an example, I see people complain (a lot) about “cameras on” policies. This is the result of a company trying to eliminate an issue that they are seeing from non-participation to potential instances of fraud. They want to do return to office, but this is a “let’s find a middle ground” step.
And yet, people will act as if it’s the end of the world. The alternative is being in the room itself. You have to pick your battles.
Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment.
There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.
Why it always need to be only about productivity and not what is better for people? I get that company need to make money but surly productivity is not dropping 50% and company makes significantly less
How do you objectively measure productivity? Same question for "better for people".
The former can be somewhat measured by in-effective methods such as lines of code produced, revenue per emp in division, and other measures. The latter via surveys.
A company's direct objective it to turn a profit. Their indirect objective is might be to do that via retaining productive workers, or they may take a churn approach. Is it surprising they'd put more effort and weight on the former (prod) than the latter (better for people)?
What math function allows you to strike the correct balance between the 2 measures. For some employees you might make them maximally satisfied by paying them a lot to do nothing. For others they might want little to no money for socially rewarding work. It's not going to be the same for every person.
So in your mind what's the right optimization function for this equation?
I always point out that most "productivity" numbers assume the costs of commuting hours/fuel are $0, because it measures from the perspective of employer costs, and it assumes the employer has used their bargaining-position to force all those variable-costs entirely onto the employees.
So we've got (A) a misleading "productivity boost" sometimes being used to rationalize (B) one-sided policies which are (C) probably not sustainable in the long-term anyway.
Tying my ability to work remotely, and thus plan and live my life accordingly, to some kind of arbitrary performance mechanism installed by Initech's latest up-and-coming executive star, will result in me immediately leaving. I have the skill to back that statement, but I won't employ it just so that some patronizing manager can get a kick out of it.
A level of productivity is part of the package that the employer buys from the employee. Some people might be less productive WFH, but if the WFH perk is important enough to them that it is a deal-breaker, then… that’s what’s for sale, the company can take it or leave it.
If you already have a set of employees, and you demand they all come in, you are selecting against people who know they can sustain their lifestyle by moving to another company.
Only problem with low enough productivity enough to be bumped down to becoming totally unemployable don’t get the choice. These also are the people who are most likely to follow an in-office mandate. It seems like a bad filter to apply.
Productivity increased exponentially for many years in line with technological advances. We were supposed to have flying cars and personal robots by now. The least they can do is allow us to reap our meager earnings from our own hovels.
When I work from home, I watch 8 hours of Twitch and get 0 work done. When I work from the office, I watch 0 hours of Twitch and get 8 hours of work done. I simply don't have the self-control to effectively work from home. That's all the data I need.
Ultimately only people's immediate managers have insight into this either from managing them or from their co-workers. People eventually will let you know who isn't pulling their weight (obviously people will forgive others if they know they have a temporary issue in their life --but not if its unwarranted).
Simply saying "people will know" is a deflection that doesn't really help this point.
If you (royal you - anybody who wants to make this claim) really want to claim that many people are measurably more productive at the office, we'll need studies to counter those done which show WFH is more productive than working from the office.
Doing studies on this is difficult for many reasons. However, I bet there's a lot of people who noticed a drop in productivity from certain colleagues after the switch to WFH. I personally noticed that the productivity of colleagues with young children dropped significantly, for example.
I really don't think it's a controversial statement that some people work better from home and some people work worse from home. In fact, I'd be extremely surprised if the opposite was true (everyone works better from home, or everyone works better in the office), I'd almost say that's impossible.
> This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.
I mean this is true in the scenario where demand for their skills outstrips the supply of available workers with said skills.
In a different scenario, where tech jobs are being reduced across the board (due to return to normal interest rates and VC funding slowing down), such an "aren't going back" ultimatum isn't necessarily going to be compatible with "I need a job."
And of course, if you believe Microsoft, ChatGPT is going to start eating tech jobs left and right any day now.
The economy runs in boom and bust cycles, and the winds are shifting. The tech environment from 2020-2022 was extremely weird, and the balance of power now is shifting back to management. Management knows that (at least some) workers highly value remote work, and they're not going to hand that out for free.
The only certainty here is change, and as tech workers lose leverage, "remote work" moves from a default assumption to an item that must be negotiated for (perhaps in exchange for some total compensation) - if it's available at all.
Unfortunately many people are being strong armed into it. People coming out of lay offs are finding less wfh opportunities than existed just a year ago, as a percentage of the available jobs.
I was a remote worker at Apple pre-pandemic and had no problems. After COVID I was told that moving states where I live would have to get some approval and is not guaranteed. I left Apple shortly after and have been contracting since.
When I was in an office full time, I had to work my life around my work. When I have forty hours to fill out over a seven day period, I'm working my work around my life.
Why didn't you just move states and ask "forgiveness" later? Companies cannot tell you where and when to live and if they try it see who blinks first. I would certainly have ignored them and let them fire me or RIF me.
That's very true, even contracting I ran into different issues based on where I work from and where they are. Some companies required a business entity is certain states.
An employee in a state exposes the employer to legal, regulatory, and tax jurisdiction. Many employers are not set up to handle compliance in states other than where they are located, and even many multi-state employers may not be set up to handle compliance in a particular state.
Not all states are understanding about this either; many states are notorious for penalizing employers for failing to comply with compliance requirements they didn't know they had because an employer moved to a state without telling them.
Prior to COVID, many companies considered this grounds for for-cause termination. Even post-COVID, some companies still consider this grounds for for-cause termination.
That just isn't really something I wanted to do. I was in a privileged enough position where I could choose to leave so I did when it became convenient. Not everyone can do that and the new policies may put them in a bind.
Yep. Management acted like none of us knew how to work remote and we were all learning. Actually folks, no, I’ve been working like this for a while. And now I need to listen to our leaders say we work better in person and remote folks don’t know how to collaborate. What an utter failure in leadership and communication. The author said it best: these people are assholes. I’ve been so frustrated since people started going back to offices with management trying to undo what I worked to put in place prior to covid under some guise I’ve been underachieving all these years.
> on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the present time.
You're being too kind. Whims aren't the problem, lack of imagination is (and in leadership positions that should be unacceptable).
The problem is, few of the RTO office execs have WFH long enough to understand it. They have no clue how to lead WFH. They have no clue how to manage WFT. And they're not interested in learning new tricks. They simply wield their power and reinstate the status quo.
In a word...weak.
The RTO v WFH debate (?) is an opportunity in the market. An opportunity where WFH is the new up and coming opportunity. RTO is all but a fax machine. Who would feel comfortable working at a company where the executives lacked imagination and are all but mandating "Bring back the fax machine"?
Before the pandemic it was almost unimaginable to be employed fully remotely, at least in Europe. Top achievers got a day per week, working from home as a perk or as a "hiring condition".
In my 10 year career before the pandemic I basically never had a coworker who had been working from home on a regular basis.
That said I love remote work, and I think it's one of our biggest workplace inventions in this century.
When I worked for Bay Area companies from Central Texas, I used my remoteness (+2 hr timezone diff) to my team's advantage very visibly and on purpose.
- The UK team wants a noon (their time) meeting? Sure, I'll do it at 6am my time vs the SF team doing it at 4am.
- That NYC customer wants us to present at 9am ET? Sure, I'll do it at 8am my time vs the SF's team at 6am.
- Need someone to cover that meeting in Atlanta/DC/Dallas/Houston/Chicago? Sure, you can take a 3+ hour(+2-3 timezone) flight to cover it or I can just hop over in a fraction of the time.
After a while, I got ALL of the East Coast and European calls simply out of convenience.
My brother was 100% remote for 13 years before the pandemic. I was 100% remote way back in 2001. It took the pandemic and WFH to remind me how much better it is, from every conceivable angle.
I'm never going back, and have shut down plenty of recruiters and headhunters with one simple phrase: "100% remote."
Been remote for 15 years, recently started full time job, love going to office. No strict work hours but I come anyway, nice to chat with colleagues (and much more productive than those tedious calls or text chats). Also I was already making myself leave home at least daily for physical activity, so if I'm out why not travel to the office? There's a nice coffeeshop near there. Also the chair is comfy enough, desk is adjustable etc.
So no, to say it's "bullshit and everyone knows it" is just pushing for some agenda. I wish everyone can have their way, if you don't want to come to the office then don't, employers should make it possible, but don't make it sound as if everyone hates it, it's just wrong.
As someone who works hands on so I have to work at the office I really wish more people fight to stay home, the commute was so much nicer with people working remote plus the office was much nicer to work in without all the noise and distractions
I agree with this but the obvious outcome is that if you're 1 person in a 200 person office floor, your company will consolidate 200 floors into one and it'll get noisy again. The same cost function still exists for office space.
I'm very with you on the commutes tho. I live in Seattle and Mondays and Fridays are like driving on Thanksgiving (a major holiday in the US when no one drives and even the roads in L.A. are clear), and Tuesday is worse than the before times. Wed/Thurs are a bit better than the before times though so I just go in on those days (that's also when we tend to have happy hours).
If you use public transport it works better (more cost efficient to run = more frequent) when more people use it, so my commute would not get better if people stayed home.
But I agree on the last part, I prefer it when certain coworkers WFH. TBH some days I strategically choose my office hours so I overlap with them less.
I've enjoyed both environments. Having an in-person, highly engaged, collaborative environment is fantastic. Having a remote first, well-considered remote team is great.
But having a mostly in-person, and some-people remote setup, where the remote folks are left out of the hallway conversations sucks. Having an "in-person" setup, where your team is distributed between building locations and remote sites, and you can't ever schedule conferences rooms and you are working in a cube-farms/open-office sucks.
The key is finding a way to be engaged with your colleagues remote or local, and figuring out how to scale that.
I was in a remote office from the main one before and about 30% of the time people would forget to dial in, and another 20% of the time the AV setup would be broken. They ironically got that all fixed during the pandemic, and it's great now. At the minimum the default is you will be on VC now and so it makes it much better for everyone, and everyone has the hardware all figured out.
We had a large onsite last week and a ton of the young engineers said to me "people told me stuff immediately in person that I've been trying to find out for months". Humans are still kinda humans.
It definitely takes discipline and a little culture change. I work for a company where teams are spread across many offices, so the company culture is: there's a video conference for every meeting. Period. End of story. When you walk into the conference room, you press one button and the VC starts. Everybody does this, and it's engrained. So, thanks to this discipline, remote workers are never left out.
Same goes for the "hallway conversations." You just got to get out of that company-habit where major decisions and information transfers happen in this ad hoc way. It takes discipline (often on leadership's part) to properly document and communicate. Again, where I work, we would never consider "Oh, I talked to Director Xyz in the hallway and he said our focus is on the Foo project rather than the Bar project now" to be any kind of official guidance. Totally unacceptable.
In-person, same-air is objectively different experience from a video or audio call—higher bandwidth, unmediated, spontaneous, visceral… not something one can “get out of” as if it was just a habit.
Perhaps some find IRL distracting, so they suffer less and have easier time compensating for the difference between in-person and remote. Meanwhile, some others are good communicators who thrive with and make the most out in-person, and for them it’s more of a challenge to WFH. I personally suspect many of those who want to WFH are naturally not that great at remote communication without realizing so.
I personally had insightful office conversations that started as tangents from semi-idle chance chats and would be impossible remotely, since in an online meeting you must be mindful of others’ time because you don’t know how busy they are (IRL you can sense if a person would rather be doing something else, but you know it can be perfectly faked remotely—so you will never have a chance convo; meetings must have agendas—culture!—and once the agenda is over, everyone gets to be free). Such random conversations can easily alter the course of whole projects.
I don’t see WFH vs. RTO as a black-and-white, high culture vs. lack of culture, good vs. evil sort of battle; more like people have different natural tendencies, life circumstances, desires, and everyone wants it to work best for them.
Yeah we didn't even have that one button integration until 2019 and it didn't work well and the mics were all broken. They started leaving usb jabra mics in the conference rooms to supplement the very expensive cisco setups. That's mainly fixed now.
Interesting on the hallway conversation thing. I have no idea how I'd handle that.
Sounds Nice.
If my office was within 15 minutes of home I would be there frequently. Dropping in and out for chit chat and activities.
But it isn't.
The only housing within 35 minutes of my downtown office is small, expensive, high-rise apartments and condos. And there literally are not enough of those to serve the abundance of offices in that area, so it is literally impossible to provide even that meager standard to everyone.
Similar here, been doing part time remote since '06, full time since '11. There's ups and downs to both sides.
I get "more done" remotely, in that I can usually have more time for deep focus. But then it's harder to get high-bandwidth knowledge transfer sessions, and overhear when someone has some particularly bad ideas (or roads you've already been down, etc).
I think I still prefer the remote side, and it's probably a better deal for the biz, but I would like to spend a few days here and there with like minded people on shared problems.
You probably like people and are comfortable with whatever you excelled at. And you probably don't have an inner voice comically second-guessing everything you are about to say, causing you to act timid and awkward around others.
It depends on my mood. Some days I say hi and then only keyboard noise. I probably look like a robot then. Other days may talk more. And second guessing is a thing, but feeling good after social interaction is also a thing...
But it's a small open office. Probably in a big open office it can be worse if many coworkers are distracting. I can see how I would hate that and it would hamper work.
That's totally valid, also. I do sometimes miss the office, particularly from when I worked in a healthy office culture, but would want it to be optional.
Exactly right, the real title should be "my employer sucks and working conditions are not reasonable".
But no, the writer titled "return to office is bullshit and everyone knows it", which phrased like that is patently false.
Return to office can be a problem if some other conditions are true, like your office sucks, you are made to clock in clock out at inflexible hours, commute is inconvenient, etc. Why not talk about that.
Another aspect of the RTO discussion that's missed: People in long-distance relationships.
I don't mind going to the office a fair share of the time but I don't want rules that require N days per week because that prevents me from visiting my partner. I generally work from my partner's place about 1-2 out of every 8 weeks. Going to the office as little or as much on other weeks isn't a huge issue (though admittedly I do work more efficiently from home, and have way better snacks and drinks at home than the office) but I want those 1-2 weeks to be respected.
Most of my career has been remote, excepting a stint with a hosting company (being on location was logical, no complaints there), and a brief dalliance with being in-office while I was with a company that was fine with me being remote.
Tried the cube life, didn't like it, company happily re-allocated my veal fattening pen to another drone during the heady pre-COVID days when such real estate was scarce.
There are too many social, economic, and ecological reasons to put a stake in the heart of requiring people to be in a specific location unless there's an honest to goodness requirement.
Teams big companies are already distributed across time zones, effectively forcing their employees working remotely. It's quite common for an org to have office in NYC, in Bay Area, in a tech hub in Europe, and in an Indian city. Meetings are conducted over video conference, and communication is mostly asynchronous in writing. I don't see how that is different from WFH. Of course, local office for employees to bond and having face-to-face discussion is really nice, but there are different ways to handle that.
It is missed on purpose because leadership wants it to be missed and they get visibly upset if you ask them. Such thin skins for people cracking a whip.
It does take time and active effort to become fully productive in a remote environment. It's not something you're just born knowing how to do, it's a set of skills just like working in an office is a set of skills. You have to learn them.
Aye, been remote since 2015. Small but niche market for remote folks, mostly who you know and specialized gigs, but could make it work reasonably well.
now the market is packed with applicants and the backlash is making it harder.
>If I had to give only one bit of advice to anyone ever faced with an ultimatum from someone with power over them (be it an employer or abusive romantic partner), it would be:
>Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum.
This is such great advice. When you are given an ultimatum it is very revealing. Pretend to comply as the author advises, then find something else.
Your sense of self-worth is more valuable than salary or position prestige. If you comply long term, you lose a part of your self and persona.
Relationships, be they personal, business, or otherwise, include dealbreakers. When a dealbreaker arises, there are two ways to handle it: unilaterally end the relation, or present it to the other party.
The latter is an ultimatum, there's no way around that. Whether or not the ultimatum is reasonable depends entirely on the specifics, especially in the workplace, employers have expectations which they need to have met.
It's especially distasteful to bake in the assumption that a romantic partner setting conditions to stay in a relationship is automatically being abusive. If someone is presented with an ultimatum to quit problem drinking or lose their partner, which is more likely: that the partner is abusive or that the other partner is an alcoholic? It's certainly not automatic that it's the former!
A policy of never meeting an ultimatum is one way to live your life, I prefer to consider whether the demands are reasonable and proceed on that basis. For me it shows a stronger sense of self worth to consider this kind of thing on the merits, rather than pre-committing to stick to my guns, which is in effect a counter-ultimatum. Sometimes that's the right move, sometimes it isn't.
I think you are both right. An ultimatum can be a demand for someone to stop destructive behavior, but it's more often a demand to fall in line, with the idea that you are replaceable if you don't.
I think the latter is what OP referenced, if someone is telling you "it's my way or the highway" and they are OK with the highway option, you should listen. They are telling you exactly how much you are valued (or not), as well communicating that they feel they are in no uncertain terms above you.
The sentence you quoted didn't say an ultimatum is abuse, it said to reject an ultimatum if from "an employer or abusive romantic partner" with "power" over you.
As you say, an ultimatum isn't necessarily abusive. We all have things we want in life - and some of them are deal-breakers for a relationship. But if you read the sentence as written, I think it's solid advice - don't agree to something when someone is leveraging "power" over you if you can avoid it. That is abusive.
People who've been in abusive relationships can read the difference between a "this is make-or-break for the life I want, you need to make a choice" and "I'm abusing this situation to make you agree to something you don't want to do / is bad for you."
I think it's assumed that it's within reason and in situations where the ultimatum has the purpose of pushing you into a situation you would prefer not to be in. The WoW example is an example of dysfunctional behavior and the HR example is a routine process and not unexpected from the recipient nor is the cost of filling it in extreme. Your examples don't apply and it should be obvious why.
I assume all sweeping advice I’m given also comes with a dose of Aristotle’s “golden mean”, or the Greek maxim “nothing in excess”.
Yes, you can construct situations where the ultimatum is reasonable. Yes, you shouldn’t blindly apply this advise all the time without any consideration of the circumstances.
But still, on balance it’s good advise. We all tend to lean too far towards respecting ultimatums from people in power (even when it’s harmful for us). We should collectively shift that balance, and move our default more towards being skeptical of someone giving an ultimatum.
But, yes, when someone gives you advice that comes with a “never” or “always”, it’s usually worth assuming there’s a silent “almost” in there, unless they’re explicit that they mean no exceptions could apply.
Or someone who compromised too much in their lives.
I think the bigger point is that corporations don't value "you" (royal "you") and these days are becoming a lot more blatant about it. Any ultimatim made by someone with power over you isn't a good one to take long term.
There's definitely a gray-line there, not just about how unilateral it is (which is what you are saying), but also about norms and expectations.
"Fill out this HR form or leave" is expected for the first day of work.
Similarly "Not playing WoW for 12 hours a day" is probably expected in a committed adult relationship (unless of course this was a norm during courtship).
RTO might well be a norm for people not hired remote. But forcing those hired as remote workers to relocate seems outside of the norms. It's the difference between "Do your job, or your fired" and "Switch to this different job, or your fired."
[edit]
I think there is a third leg to making something an ultimatum, and it's about the degree to which the move is (or is perceived to be) about imposing ones will on another.
"I don't want to be married to someone who plays WoW for 12 hours a day," is a different tone from "Quit WoW, or I'm leaving you," and it's natural for someone to respond differently to those two statements.
I'm looking through the responses, and this makes the most sense.
The difference between saying that '12 hours is too much', depends on how it is said and what is open to negotiation to keep both sides happy. The thing is that 12 hours may be too much, but 4 hours, for example, might keep both sides happy. Also saying '12 hours is too much' is also an opening gambit that states what the issue is, and opens the door to how two people might come to an agreement.
Ultimatums tend to come in the form of offering a binary choice, one of which is full acceptance of a proposal made by one person. Ultimatums don't come with a 'or we can negotiate something that works for us' addendum, they are usually all or nothing.
While the first type of communication / boundary may well lead to a divorce if it can't be resolved, it isn't necessarily presented as an ultimatum.
unless you’re actually in that very rare category of “i can’t believe i get paid to do the thing i love” (all of the job — not just the fun parts), then how is taking any job not you accepting the ultimatum of “either i work for someone else, or my landlord kicks me to the curb”?
author’s advice, if taken literally, is to homestead? not that i don’t get the appeal — i just don’t think very many are actually cut out for that.
Every moment in your life is an ultimatum because you can not do two things at once.
So while I like the concept of this advice, its hard to execute in practice. I'd adjust it to "never choose the one who is unwilling to discuss and come to a compromise"
Nice to read this confirmation! I like working in the office, but I also received the ultimatum of working in the office and decided to look elsewhere.
A lot of people are in a position that they don't deserve. The max value is coming from the company that gave them the ultimatum.
If you are quitting your job as coach of the New England Patriots during your losing season don't expect to get $20/million year at your next job after you did your worth searching.
There are so many “habits” left over from industrial work.
On an assembly line everyone needed to be in sync but this generally isn’t true for most office work. You need to be present at the factory to do the work, hasn’t been true for office work for awhile now.
Yet we still operate synchronously. Everyone commutes through traffic/crowded public transport and risk catching the latest novel virus, to arrive at work at the same time. Everyone has lunch at the same time so it’s crowded as heck and we get even more mortal danger.
Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity.
Perhaps if everyone working from home were constantly available to screen-share/video chat it wouldn't be as bad, but my experience with WFH is people get distracted by kids/pets/etc and half the time I wait hours for a response required for me to continue my work. At one point during the pandemic I had 6 cascading tasks going in parallel based solely on needing something to do while I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online (we charge by the hour, so I can't just be idle and charge it). In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management.
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.
This is an example of a local maximum. This form of communication is better for the person doing the walking, but worse when looked at through most other frames:
- worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted
- worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment.
- worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition
- ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices
And all that's before considering the "worse" that comes from having your staff spend 5 hours a week (average in the US) commuting to the office.
In effect, the person walking over is burdening the other party and the organization rather than spend a little more time to craft a question in writing. Weak written communication skills are at the root of why so many organizations are bad at remote work. If oral communications is all that works at your org, then remote is going to be really tough for you (and your inter-office communication is also probably terrible and you should put the whole company in a single building).
> - worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted
Generally, only in terms of personal output. I find that the organization benefits overall. Of course, this is problematic when performance/compensation is tied strictly to personal output, but that is a separate discussion
> - worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment.
Which is why working at the office is important.
> - worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition
Somewhat true, but this is completely unavoidable. I know of zero cases where all institutional knowledge is recorded and not siloed in humans. Of course there are degrees.
> - ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices
This is why teams exist, why hierarchical organizations exist throughout history, and proper separation of work is crucial.
>> - worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment.
> Which is why working at the office is important.
What about the guy who just walked over to someone else, now both parties were absent in eachothers conversation.
This is actually a good example of: Falls flat if everyone starts doing it. So many times I walk up to someone in the office to ask him something, but he is doing the same so I can't find him.
You highlight another reason people are unavailable for synchronous conversations: they are in other meetings! The strength of writing is that it spans location as well as time. I find it odd that thousands of years after its creation, leaning on the written word can still be a competitive advantage.
> Which is why working at the office is important.
I'm so glad you opened up this avenue for follow-up. Even when working at the office, people are not at their desks 100% of the time. People are still human beings and are out of the office for any number of legit reasons that have nothing to do with remote working: dental appointments, work travel, interviewing candidates, vacation, sick leave, etc. Regardless of how you organize your workplace or what mandates you set, people are going to be out all the time. So your knowledge sharing is among the best who are available right now, not necessarily the best sources.
> Somewhat true, but this is completely unavoidable. I know of zero cases where all institutional knowledge is recorded and not siloed in humans. Of course there are degrees.
The key again is the degrees. An organization can choose to bias toward using modern tools or not. "Modern tools" here also broadly includes "writing" because it provides so many advantages over synchronous conversations for knowledge sharing.
> This is why teams exist, why hierarchical organizations exist throughout history, and proper separation of work is crucial.
Here I call your attention to geography. There are any number of reasons for staff to be located where they are, and staff don't typically work on a single project over their careers. This means they will change teams from time to time. Combine these facts and you're going to end up with teams composed of people who live in different places, where it might not make sense to relocate staff (e.g. project only lasts a year).
An example might be: implementation consultants for a software company based in Chicago working onsite at a client in Germany. I suppose you could move the whole software company to Germany, but that only scales to one client. Which also highlights that people are often on multiple teams at the same time.
These concerns are most salient in the most hierarchical organizations, which tend to be the largest and have the largest geographic footprints.
You describe what sounds like slow moving places. When rapid reactions are required then even just being able to hear commotion a few rows of seats away can be quite valuable. Doesn't mean people cannot write questions well, but sometimes forcing attention now matters.
What urgent outages are you having that can't be circulated with a quick "hey is ___ down for you" in a shared org channel? Also, you still have to get up and walk over to the hubbub to find out what's happening, then walk back before digging into the issue - in that time you could have just read the slack message and been fixing.
You're inventing solutions to a problem that actually worsen the issue.
edit: also, automated alerting solves literally all your problems here - and that should be an investment even if you're at a company with 100% RTO. Your first line of alert will still be digital in that case. If you're waiting to hear panicked seatmates to solve issues you're sure not worried about immediacy.
It would be nice to know every failure mode or possible reason for intervention in advance, but not always the case.
I find it interesting that there is this strong belief that how people organize and work together in certain businesses is generally done wrong. How would you know? A lot of critical interactions might not be tech-tech, but tech-business, for example.
I'm not saying people shouldn't go to the office. I'm just saying there are a number of downsides to encouraging walking over to someone's desk to ask a question as a primary mode of knowledge exchange. These downsides have been enumerated at length in The Discourse. On the other side of the ledge is mostly "qualitative" arguments lacking in specifics.
The main thing is there are real trade-offs for the staff and organization, and those tend to get overlooked in favor of lifestyle or sunk RE cost arguments.
>there are real trade-offs for the staff and organization, and those tend to get overlooked in favor of lifestyle or sunk RE cost arguments.
Employees are given some power and time back for the first time in decades after the opposite relationship ended up with being overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated as they are dropped at a moment's notice. So yea, I'm not surprised people aren't sympathizing for the companies who boasted about making record profits over the pandemic and suddenly they need to "downsize". burning decades of trust and goodwill has consequences.
Also, extremes rarely help. I'm not a manager, so even in office there are only people on my immediate team or a specific person or 2 I am working directly with on another team that I would do that with. When it is expected and we have the same tasks in mind. Even then it's better to get stuff in writing where possible so I'd rather send a message, even if it's just so I can give them 10-15 minutes to think over before I walk to them.
Do you think soldiers in battle should send well crafted emails instead of shouting or just acting on observations? Not sure things are just "qualitative"...
Absolutely wild to take a discussion about "Return to Office" and pivot to soldiers in battle. Solid B for trolling. Would be A-caliber except effective militaries write a lot and use written words as a key part of their command and control. (I will escalate your "soldiers in battle" and ask whether you think launch command on a nuclear submarine would launch nuclear missiles solely on the basis of a quick call?)
I know, actually, but any place relying very strongly on formalised communication over dynamic approaches tends to underperform anyway (and militaries relearn that every so often), so all this stuff will resolve itself over time anyway. The non-social crowd will lose out, just give it time.
Btw., depending on country and situation, nuclear missile submarines can actually have wide latitude on decisions.
If I'm forced to commute to and work in an office 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, then I will be more miserable, lament my job, and thus be less productive towards my day job. I will feel more like a wage slave worker bee who has little autonomy over their work, having to regress to the humiliating dynamic of having to ask my boss for "permission" to work from home. As a night owl, I'll be forced to conform my sleep schedule to the CEO's, and still show up bright and early on days where I didn't get enough sleep, and look busy until 5:30pm+ - maybe stretching out work that could've been done in a few hours to an entire work day because when you're stuck in an office there's little incentive to work faster since you're trapped their all day regardless. When I'm finally sick of it all I'll accept the offer for that remote-friendly company that doesn't care what time I wake up, what hours I work, or where I work, just that the work I produce is high quality.
If I have the flexibility to WFH, not waste hours/day commuting, and live wherever makes me happiest (as opposed to the city my company happens to have an office in, which is probably a city like NYC or SF which may not be my preference), then I will be happier with my employment arrangement, more productive, and more loyal. Also I personally find it easier to accomplish deep work when working under my own conditions, as opposed to some open office with no privacy, constant chatter, and the drudgery of wage slaves who clearly don't want to be there but have no choice.
There are far too many variables at play to be able to make that kind of blanket statement with such confidence.
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.
The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not.
If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different.
I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers.
[edit]
> I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online
I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time.
I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.
Yeah I guess the difference is that at my workplace there's a lot of tribal knowledge. Even when there is a design document it often hasn't been updated or requires nuance to interpret that's only really in one or two peoples' heads. Often the question/discussions is about engineering priorities, some discovery was made during coding that would alter the design, and half the time simply bringing up the topic with them for 5 minutes brings new information to bear that produces a superior result.
I try not to waste their time and develop my questions as much as possible on my own, but I'm not going to risk several hours of wasted work going down the wrong path when a 5 minute discussion with a SME would confirm something.
And it is an RTO discussion, because in the office they're available to some degree. WFH that availability drops off a cliff, and these are questions about the inner-workings of proprietary software, if the answers were on Google there would be legal action.
That again sounds like a problem with your company's knowledge sharing culture, not with the industry at large. Silos exist even when every butt is in an office seat, that's a well-known issue that far pre-dates pandemic remote work moves. The answer isn't "make everyone defenseless to random interrupts from other people" but "learn how to actually document things so you're not a company full of points of failure".
It seems like what you really want is for others to treat your emergencies as theirs. They're not, they're yours. If you can't wait 15 minutes for a ping back without being completely stuck, you aren't planning your work correctly. That's nobody else's fault.
So this is such a good example of why the office is actually a major liability. Being in person allows you to get away with creating a culture where documentation doesn't really exist and that tapping people on the shoulder is more efficient. Everyone will be better off if instead knowledge is shared efficiently.
A good analogue is the culture of "the smoke break"(see the Friend's episode The One Where Rachel Smokes for a funny example). It's easy to say "the best decisions are made during smoke breaks therefore smoking is necessary for efficient businesses." Clearly that's absurd. It's not the smoking that makes good decisions, nor does the ability to tap people on the shoulder make for good documentation. Depending upon an accidental formation of office culture is never going to go well in the long run.
> Being in person allows you to get away with creating a culture where documentation doesn't really exist
Viewed a different way, it allows a team to spend less time documenting and more time on other things. Increased documentation could be seen as one of the costs of working remotely.
Increased documentation is a cost you pay no matter what, you just pay it later in other formats when in-office - when the SME you treat as a guru finds a better-paying gig you have to scramble to rebuild their expertise from nothing or hope they are nice enough to do a thorough knowledge transfer. That kills productivity far worse and for longer than taking 30m at the end of your day updating some shared wiki.
All this to say, the trade-off you're proposing doesn't exist. You're arguing for paying twice instead of paying once - twice in the sense that you lose productivity now via random interrupts, and in the future when your siloed knowledge leaves you high and dry. Hope the "other things" you got done instead of documenting were worth it in that scenario.
This a 1000%. Electronic communication means instant "paper trail" for free. Talking face to face is by its very nature ephemeral, OP seems to have missed that point.
You seem to have missed my point that all of those options require someone to actually be at their workstation and available. With WFH, half the time people aren't. In the office they are.
If WFH is going to be the future, then there should be uptime requirements with associated penalties so that someone is as available as they would be in the office. Software development is a team sport, you don't get to walk off the field whenever you feel like it just because you're home.
lol what are they doing? Staring at the ceiling? What makes them always available in the office and not always available at home? How is this still a thing being discussed? Perhaps, at home, they are actually able to get some work done.
Again, this is my office. I'm sure there are some offices where people legitimately aren't doing much of anything at home. Statistically, that just has to be true. Maybe this is the wrong company?
> What makes them always available in the office and not always available at home?
I remember, way back in like 2012? 2015? Not sure when exactly, but we visited the office of a contractor we were working with, and they had a flatscreen on a stand in a public area with their lead developer on webcam, working from home. I don't know how everyone gets so utterly myopic that they forget you can just login to a videoconference (or IRC in the olden days) and just be available for these "quick chats" Bonus, if you need uninterrupted deep focus time, you can turn it off at your end.
And email, did we suddenly conveniently forget about that? LKML and countless other FLOSS mailing lists are proof positive that 100% remote can indeed build any scale of software.
> Software development is a team sport, you don't get to walk off the field whenever you feel like it just because you're home.
Some of the most widely used software in the world (e.g. Linux) was developed without any such developer “uptime” requirements, with developers scattered around the planet, working on what they wanted, when they wanted.
This is obviously a very different thing than running a for-profit business. But there are countless examples of companies embracing the necessities of remote work to great success: GitHub, Automattic, Kinsta, Namecheap, Basecamp, GitLab, YNAB, Zapier, etc.
I think you're the one who missed the point. Yes they are at their workstation, but they don't want to be available for constant interruption. To turn your story around. You don't get to interrupt my work whenever you feel like it just because we're at the office.
Maybe when we walk off the field and we're home, we can focus in peace on our work and be more productive?
> require someone to actually be at their workstation and available.
No guarantee people will be at their office desk either to be frank. They could be hiding in the toilet, loitering at the water cooler, out on smoke break, getting coffee, ... etc.
Sure, but those activities typically won't last for hours. I've had to put tasks on hold because the SME wasn't available for several hours, without explanation or any communication whatsoever, to make a fundamental design decision in their area of expertise. And it wasn't a one-off or just one SME. People, at least my team, were getting constantly distracted. They essentially imposed their irregular and unpredictable schedules on the rest of us, despite being in positions of relative authority. I had to work nights I didn't plan to work because someone decided to respond at 8pm to a question asked at 1pm. That kind of delay would never happen at the office even if someone was slacking off.
Which goes back to the principle that WFH is more beneficial for senior devs than juniors. If you lack the knowledge or authority to work independently for extended periods, then instead of everyone being on the same objective schedule the junior people are forced onto whenever the senior people want to work, and more specifically when they want to be available to answer questions that only they can answer. It's like only being able to do homework during a professor's office hours.
I am hearing a ton of issues with your company’s culture that have nothing to do with WFH. I genuinely hear your concerns as sincere, but, from the outside, all I see are warning lights. Anecdata, but I don’t know where my people, my boss, and any of my thousands of coworkers are, but I rarely wait long for a thoughtful reply, unless it’s “hey I am tied up but will get back to you EOD. Does that work?”
Surely you’re capable of scheduling a meeting if you need to talk to someone or share a screen. Scheduling a meeting is far preferable to interrupting someone who is busy, in the office or not.
Did you mean "team managers" in-metaphor? As in non-players, non-coach excess staff? Totally agreed if so, didn't want to rebut unless you actually meant 1st-line managers of teams of players (which I'd place as "coach" in this metaphor).
Being interrupted while I work because someone walked over to talk to me, when they could have sent a message to request to talk to me, is the second strongest reason I refuse to work in an office. The first is that I am not paid to commute, and commute time is non-trivial.
Having multiple tasks on the go is good. I did it even when I worked in an office; it seems common practice to have many active repos hot on disk.
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity.
Nope! All this does is break the concentration of the person you're interrupting. This is precisely the "bullshit" viewpoint called out in the headline.
I commonly find these sorts of views espoused by people who can't type very fast. For most people who aren't Really Good With Computers, it's much easier for them to speak to someone than it is to type to someone.
I make all of my staff that don't know how to touch type learn to type their first week. It's essential.
When I need to talk to someone, it's easy enough to message them requesting a quick video call and screen share to discuss "X" and if it's inconvenient, we just setup a time for later and it's done. The rest of the time, we've got a nice, quiet environment to work in. Ideal, if you ask me.
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.
Hard disagree. That not only distracts that person, but also the six+ sitting around them. Most questions are fine as a chat message. We found people starting asking more questions to colleagues when Covid wfh started because they were afraid to earlier, communication actually improved.
The office is imo necessary for quite some things (onboarding new people, coaching juniors, people without a good place to work at hone, people who like the social aspect of the office) but walking up to someone for a quick question isn't it.
> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity.
If that’s the standard then the commute time should be billed to the employer. That way they can weigh the full benefits of the productivity gain of in person communication, against the dramatic efficiency loss of 100 employees commuting to work.
If employers want the productivity benefit of in office communication, they can pay employees for their drive/walk/transit time.
If you are on salary (as most devs are), I think it's pretty reasonable to include commute time in "workday" and not assume 8-9 hours in office on top of that.
I guess it depends how load-bearing you are for your organization/team. If I and everyone else worked in the office in 2 out of the last 3 jobs I had, I'd have an interruption at least every once an hour, and maybe a queue at times.
And yes, I should stop working with people that barely know how to work Git or Bash or the package manager for the language they use (even those I don't even use; if I indulge a request for help I often just become a glorified interface to Google). People just don't seem to value my time over their convenience a lot of times.
Platform engineers are for some reason always implicitly responsible for every engineering question that's not specific to the company's product.
> People just don't seem to value my time over their convenience a lot of times.
A good tactic is to ask them about rubber duck debugging when they come to you with a problem. If they don't know what that is, have them Google it. If they still come back after that, hopefully they actually have a problem worth more than one person's attention. Otherwise, they should find another job.
Quite often it's just a mix of laziness and knowing that I probably know better. I'm not sure if that's better than them building broken pipelines and custom kubernetes shenanigans that I have to catch later anyway.
For instance, we recently found some developer started using some very traefik-specific annotations and CRDs in our clusters (and they can only deploy manifests that don't pass through our renderer with a hack anyway). While we were migrating ingress controllers...
It just seems like there's quite a shortage of developers, so hiring standards aren't the greatest. Or maybe I should have a higher tier job. But I already have to work 4 days a week because while I get more done than my peers, I absolutely can not work for more than 1-2 hours a day if I get bored. And fixing people's shitty designs tends to be only somewhat engaging.
In person I can walk by the person and see if they are available for a quick chat. Typing a novel is a pain when a water cooler chat will work. IF the person is busy then you dont shoulder tap.
This is so weird to me. I’ve worked in wildly successful global companies to which I have contributed wildly successful work collaborating with people I have never once met in person, over years of working with them. I am, emphatically, not questioning your perspective, but I have literally never, over 3 decades, found a need for in person collaboration that could not be satisfied electronically. If anything, post-COVID norms such as Zoom/Teams replacing conference calls have improved my daily work immeasurably, even with much less shared space work.
I actually go to the office a fair amount but, far from a shared collaboration space, it’s largely a refuge for people who specifically want not to be bothered (by the dog, the kids, the neighbor’s leaf blower, etc.).
> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity.
Depends on the type of work you do. In my last job almost all communication was remote via video call (except a meeting with the CEO every two weeks). Commuting just to sit in front of a computer to talk to others made no sense -> I lost way too many hours of my life to driving needlessly around.
I'm all for meeting in person, if there is a clear benefit. Otherwise it's like with all the other bullshit, stop doing it!
>> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.
Says who? And for whom?
I personally dislike being subject to disruptions on the whims of others. If they need something, they can ping me on Slack and I’ll respond when I feel like. If it’s truly urgent, they can call me over Slack (and I’ll answer if I feel like).
It sure doesn’t stop these same leaders in shipping jobs all over the planet for cheaper wages though where face to face contact isn’t happening without jumping on a plane.
Have you seen some of the virtual reality from FB? I think it's getting close to the point where it's just as good as talking to someone in person, with the obvious benefit that not everyone has to be in the same physical office.
Debatable. For example, software mediated interaction can transcribe, store, and share the results of conversations with little or no effort on the part of their participants.
You could of course wire up your workplace to do the same thing. But that would be creepy and intrusive.
Now imagine working on an assembly line on your feet all day versus your office day job. The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
I personally hated going into the office, but the morale effect is real.
I think the main thing is people cannot be trusted to honestly tell you if they work better from the office. It's a nicer life working from home but whether you get more work done is debatable. And there is always too much to lose by speaking the truth.
> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
It's not a matter of being spoiled or not. I'm talking about what is necessary to get the job done and the elimination of redundant rules that serve no purpose.
You can make that point about literally anything. People in X situation have it worse than people in Y situation, therefore Y situation is actually fine. It's a deflection without any actual merit.
If this were a widespread attitude surely the office workers would be paid less than physical laborers (and, frankly, they probably should be). I do a lot of physical work (that's my two primary jobs) and people don't spend their time fuming over people with soft hands—that's kind of a "loser" thing.
At the same time, that office worker has to take time out of their free time to get exercise while the Amazon driver gets paid to exercise on the job. There's a lot of health risk with not getting daily exercise.
The morale effect might be real for you, but for a large group of workers, their morale has improved since WFH. On my team of 24, only one chooses to work in the office...
Individual morale and team morale are separate. I have no doubt that their individual lives improved a lot (e.g., being able to freely do personal chores), at the expense of team morale (feeling like a part of a team at work).
>>>> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
That's been part of workplace culture even when most people were in-office. The "office" and "factory" people had noticeably different working conditions. Moreover, the remote workers were largely invisible -- if we dealt with them at all, it was through their boss, or some kind of ticketing system.
> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
And farmers working hard manual labor from before sunrise to sundown, in heat and UV exposure would look upon factory workers as spoilt. So what? Are you against progress? You aren't one of those "I had it hard, so these damn kids should too!" boomers are you?
> Everyone commutes through traffic/crowded public transport and risk catching the latest novel virus, to arrive at work at the same time. Everyone has lunch at the same time so it’s crowded as heck and we get even more mortal danger.
Something I never see mentioned is that business leadership is rarely just in it for the money. For some people, power over others isn't a responsibility. For some people, the power they feel from managing people is THE goal of work.
So yeah, of course corporate politicians want RTO. Exercising power in a WFH company, even when they still hold power over someones life, is an abstract, intellectual thing. But the people who need power, need it at an emotional, visceral level. They need those IRL interactions to satisfy their ID. It's gross, but it needs to be said because some people are sweet and naive to the nature of those who pursue power.
And even grosser, men specifically often pursue careers of power with an additional motivation: They get something out of their professional relationships with women that they can't get from their non-professional relationships with women. They can get this without breaking the law, upsetting HR, or even do something worthy of being canceled. I'm glad we live in an era where most of these sharks are afraid to prey, but throwing young people in a shark infested waters is still... well, quite a bit more than just bullshit. IMO, pandering to these mediocre monsters is morally indefensible. Especially accounting for the environmental impacts (doubling of personal co2 emissions.)
Mackenzie did NOT worked for him. She worked in same floor for different department. She fell in love with his laugh, because she would heard him laugh in the meetings in the meeting room taking place near her office. That's when she noticed him. Do watch her interviews, they are free on youtube. She's the one that pursued him, if you want to talk about a strong woman and showing initiative. The idiot downgraded, showing having brain to get money != than having brain to get women.
Form the source of the wikipedia you quoted above:
"MacKenzie Tuttle, an aspiring novelist, met her husband at D. E. Shaw, a New York hedge fund where Mr. Bezos, a computer scientist by training, had become a senior vice president.
She told Vogue that she took the position of administrative assistant to pay the bills while she worked on her novels, but she soon found herself enamored with the laugh of the man who worked in the next office over. As Ms. Bezos put it in a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose: “It was love at first listen.”
SHE pursued him, and the wikipedia is wrong in saying that she worked for him. Nowhere in the article says that. As I was saying before, she was working in the same floor, but not for him. There was never a power dynamic there, just a woman who fell in love with a man.
The blog post is confusing the nature of policy changes being bullshit with the in-office being bullshit.
Star ICs crushing it at remote work doesn't mean star teams; and if their coworkers are avoiding them in reviews it does sound like there are communication issues at play.
Teams avoiding security reviews are common cross-industry.
Incentives everywhere are “dodge” - the expected outcome for managers and engineers is missed deadlines and reschedulings on prior promises, frequent blame-focused meetings and late nights; and low prestige, high effort work unsuitable for making the company money, getting promotions, or maintaining agility in the future, as most security work is extremely mercurial and often only very marginally improves security, if at all.
Most “security fixes” at large firms are built on inscrutable black-box internal tooling which becomes a massive single point of failure and is rarely as hardened as implied, gets re-shuffled on what constitutes “best practices” every 12 months such that a feature team can spend literally all their time doing security work the team will be throwing out next year, are often not intelligently scoped to handle “this issue doesn’t specifically apply to my component”, and aren’t even the weak link when most hacks are
> An insider replied to the wrong email, or put a zip file into a thumb drive then ran off with everything his computer had downloaded, which was a lot.
Most teams grit their teeth and implement, but if the benefit isn’t there, just the requirement, teams remember and get a lot slower to pick up the phone.
I'm not so sure -- the in-concert RTO hardline from FAANG has a very "collusion" vibe to it. Those CEOs probably got together specifically to undermine the labor market's natural incentives. It'd be great if the DoL looked into that like they did when these CEOs colluded to keep salaries and comp down across Silicon Valley.
And don't forget that these companies all have policies of not hiring high-level ICs from the outside. So if you're at that level, your options to jump ship can be quite limited unless your current employer is truly toxic. Again, a practice designed to keep comp at the top IC bands down.
remote-first means hiring the best-fit people for your company at the time and them working precisely when they're ready to be productive, zero commute, zero overhead.
good luck competing with that.
source: 25 years and 8+ companies working remotely.
8+ companies in 25 years? Seems like being remote first makes it very easy for your employees to jump ship, be taking interviews on the job, or even working multiple jobs.
I think it also presupposes that the market is good and the industry has spots available. It's just not that simple though. The advice the blog gives isn't necessarily wrong on it's face but what if you can't get another job quickly? What if the market is bad and people are trying to scramble for a job?
People who can just easily get another job and are just engineer interview ready at all points aren't exactly the majority.
remote-first means hiring the best-fit people for your company at the time and them working precisely when they're ready to be productive, zero commute, zero overhead.
good luck competing with that.
source: 25 years and 8+ companies working remotely, and obliterating competitors stuck in the old ways.
On that note, I also did not understand the post about H1B workers. Ostensibly a primary reason for the existence of the visa category in their first place is to fulfill the need for foreign talent that needs to be PRESENT in the US.
But if the work can be done fully remote, why does the person need a visum to be in the US? Why not work remote from abroad without visa requirements and probably with lower cost of living?
I'll concede this point - it is primarily about communication.
In theory you can resolve this (I'm at a remote company now and think gathertown is a great tool for this), but the lift is high and I suspect the majority of remote companies are operating at a net negative vs. colocation because of this.
Even with these tools, some natural amount of human communication/interaction is lost. It mostly hurts spontaneous collaboration and junior engineers - the threshold for these (comms/collab) is higher than in the office even in ideal remote conditions. Normal human team bonding/relationship building stuff is also lost (and useful for building a high performance culture).
This is also assuming you're at least within mostly the same or close timezones, add that into the mix and it gets even worse.
Other people replying don't understand what I mean by the market solving this. If remote is truly advantageous then startups that are remote first should out compete those that aren't. Empirically this appears to not be true and at least in SF and AI (the sector with the largest return likely in the next decade) people are going back to being colocated because of its advantages (primarily around communication and cycle times).
Mostly I see motivated reasoning primarily as the argument in favor of remote being better. I get it, I work remotely - there are nice quality of life advantages, but I still think it's competitively worse for companies in almost all cases.
The competitive disadvantage RTO companies have is trying to hire locally.
We have the pick of the best engineers from around the country (in some cases, world) because we pay bay area (startup adjusted) salaries regardless of where you live. The team is top notch - probably the best I’ve ever worked with.
So yeah - a cost to maintaining comms culture, but the payoff can be pretty nonlinear.
My counter argument would be that a lot of the world’s best people move to hubs anyway to intentionally be around other great people.
So being located in the Bay Area gets you the world’s best people without the negative tradeoffs of remote.
That said, I think your point is valid for startups located outside of hubs. If your company would otherwise be located in rural South Dakota (or even a decent sized non-hub city), then yes - remote is more compelling for the reasons you state. Whether that’s a competitive advantage on net given the downsides is not clear to me.
> "The market" is a bunch of rich assholes that act in their own self interests.
For instance, demanding that people commute to the RE they've invested in before their investments fall through the floor in valuation.
Lot of naysayers here claiming illegitimate "bias" when people point out their increased productivity when working from home (just the lack of interruptions and forced writing down of institutional knowledge are worth it), but will they admit there is plenty of bias from corporate officers owning real estate in the downtowns where offices are, or just managers at all levels feeling power to micromanage and lord over people slipping through their fingers?
A vanishingly small proportion of business owners or managers have any investment in commercial real estate beyond the office lease they're holding. Virtually none of them own their commercial premises.
> Virtually none of them own their commercial premises.
Of course this is probably the case; but how many people in higher positions are invested in REITs that invest in commercial RE? I bet it's a fairly large proportion. Hews to the old adage espoused by Buffet and others of "only invest in what you know."
Just because they don't have skin in the game on that particular building they are bossing people around in doesn't mean they don't have vested interest in seeing office space being rented in general.
I think that many people struggle at home (group A) while others don't (group B). RTO helps those who struggle at home (group A). And is a major inconvenience to those who excelled at home (group B) but it doesn't significantly degrade them.
Thus RTO improves group A performance while not affecting group B performance so it looks like a win overall and in a sense it is.
But it is penalizing group B, making their lives inconvenient, and increasing their expenditures.
Working from home is objectively better if your employees are in group B: (1) better for the environment [less transit], (2) leads to better work-life balance [no time lost to commute, more flexible work hours], (3) is more cost efficient [no need to rent offices in high cost areas, remote employees can be cheaper as their COL is often lower], (4) lets employees have better homes [because you don't need to be near the downtown core].
I think if you start remote and you measure performance of your employees, you can ensure that you get most group B employees and you can stay remote. The issue is if you started in the office, you have a mix of group B and group A, and RTO will improve the average employee performance, so it makes sense.
> I think that many people struggle at home (group A) while others don't (group B).
As someone who has worked remote long before COVID, there's another layer to this issue: Many of the people who think they are in Group B (work well from home) are actually in Group A (struggle at home) but they are resistant to recognizing it.
Prior to the pandemic, remote companies all understood that not everyone who wants to work form home can actually be productive at home. For some reason the pandemic WFH push made everyone forget that, and we started assuming that anyone who wants to work from home is good at working from home. Predictably, a lot of companies saw a huge increase in issues, panicked, and force every to RTO.
It's a challenging issue because the problems aren't immediately obvious. We had some very productive programmers who just couldn't WFH because they were hostile in text chat but very cordial in person. Others would spend entire works grinding away at problems in isolation that could have been solved with 1 hour of communication because they think WFH == freedom to isolate from others.
Many of these things can be trained out with good management and mentoring, but only when it's introduced gradually. The pandemic WFH push opened the floodgates to everyone, with predictable results.
I hope we go back to wide acceptance of WFH, however with the understanding that it's not for everyone. Some people can't handle it even though they like it.
Having gone remote in 2020, I’ve noticed similar to things to what you mention. Or, it’s almost like there’s a set of soft skills that develop when working from home. Writing styles change, and people speak/listen in a different cadence during videoconference.
Once you learn it, you can become very productive and endearing, but it takes time. It’s not for everyone like you mention.
This seems like a lot of conjecture without any numbers or facts to back it up. You assume that making Group B return to office won't affect their productivity, while making Group A work from home will. However, I know for me personally I'm far more productive when I work from home. I know I'm not the only one where this is the case. Forcing me into the office would drop my productivity considerably.
> Working from home is (1) better for the environment
Note that this is not necessarily true. US cities were for a while "NIMBYism vs mandatory commutes". To the extent that one is solved but not the other, we get more car-centric spraw. People commuting less can be offset with them doing more pleasure driving.
(Obvious this depends on the metro area, more remote work in Phoenix Arizona is definitely net good, in NYC not so much.)
Once we solve the NIMBY problem, I'll be a lot more comfortable with the society-wide implications of remote work, but for now it is reducing the impetus to solve a problem that needs to be solved anyways.
If I start a company tomorrow, this is what I would want to do:
1. Hire within a general metropolitan area (2 hour commute max).
2. WFH for 28 days a month.
3. 2 days a month the entire org convenes in a ballroom or something and works together, have some progress reports, happy hours and hackathons.
In this model, everyone’s remote most of the time. Yet everyone gets FaceTime with each other IrL. Seed ideas and brainstorms. Everyone’s happy. I think. Curious if anyone has a critique.
You're throwing away the biggest advantage for the company allowing remote work -- hiring talent from anywhere. WFH has a lot of advantages for employees, but also for the employer. The main one being a diverse workforce.
What I've seen work, which I think still hits your goals of occasional face time, is to have a quarterly offsite for the whole company. Everyone works remotely, but once a quarter you find a nice location that is easy for everyone to get to, pay for their flights and hotels (and if you're really nice, their family too, or at least child care at home while they are gone), and then have a couple of days of quarterly planning, hacking sprints, and general social activities that don't involve alcohol or strenuous physical activity (but if people want to organize that for themselves they are welcome to do so).
Remember that for a US-based startup, the "hiring talent from anywhere" is easier said than done.
You've got to register your business in every state you have somebody working, get unemployment insurance and workers comp set up there, make sure you understand the local labor laws, etc., etc., etc. That's not even considering hiring outside the US.
It's a total pain in the butt and may not be worth it for a small company with limited person-power.
Oh I know. And I hate it. I run a remote company and have dealt with it.
I wish there was a company that existed to handle this for me. I just tell them I want to hire someone in state XXX and they set me up with whatever I need in that state. There are a bunch of companies that will get me 1/2 way (set up payroll but then tell me I'm on my own for insurance, for example).
But still, for the right person, it's worth the hassle. But this is also why some companies limit their remote work to certain states -- so they only have to do that stuff a few times.
I even think a quarterly off site is too much. Yearly is fine. Organizing flights, pet care, etc every 3 months is such a damn hassle, and I don't even have kids.
My friend did the math for a high-falutin position at a San Fran tech company requiring 3 days a week in office, and flying from New York to Cali every week was cost competitive.
It's 10+ hour differences that can be rough for everyone involved--async communication is low bandwidth, and it can be brutal and erosive for either party to get up early or stay up late just to have some common work hours.
To me, the key component of remote work is that I can choose where to live according to the needs of my family. If I need to come in to work every month then I still need to live within commuting distance. Some people can tolerate taking a work trip 12 times a year, I suppose, but that'd be a huge downside for me.
I actually prefer to be in the office if I live near the office. But being able to live in the city that lets me support my spouse's career is non-negotiable for me.
They've created artificial scarcity through overhiring and bullshit layoffs. The total pool of workers is shrinking thanks to the pandemic and we still haven't seen the full impact of that. Future COVID waves will shrink it further. The employers are massively fucking up right now in thinking they have the upper hand. They're just igniting the kindling for tech unions, which they _really_ won't like.
Also, India didn't replace you in the 90's and AI isn't replacing you now.
I don't know. I just got hired on somewhere using this criteria, and I leave behind a remote-only position that I excelled in for the past four years. And I excelled in several more remote-only positions before that one.
I don't have a degree or any certifications either, due to the same disability that prevents me from going into an office.
It is an employers' market and the employers that create arbitrary barriers of entry for talent will find themselves recruiting from a pool of desperate talent, which may be by design because desperate talent also costs less.
However, I'm not desperate and the managers that hire me find out why that is pretty quickly.
I've wondered about the DEI thing, but there's no way to know really. Nobody is going to tell me if that was considered. I suspect not, though.
I find that specific experience doesn't really matter because every job I've gotten has been a complete reset stack wise.
I have a lot of varied experience, but I think what sets me apart is that tech is actually fun for me. My work/life balance naturally tilts towards work. I'm not just looking to climb a ladder, get more money, or protect my job by making myself irreplaceable. By that, I mean that I document everything I do like I'm going to die tomorrow, and like I care about the DX of whomever takes over my role.
I also don't care if I look dumb. I ask dumb questions and I don't try to hide that I'm human. I've done this my entire life, and it's really paid off. I learn more quickly than my peers most of the time, and this is exactly why -- I lean into the impostor syndrome and own it.
Why is this getting downvoted? The parent asked for critique and they got critique.
I worked for a company that did something similar to this, most of the day was spent “team building” and it was painful. The fun bit was going to the pub after.
I’d say the best thing to do is to not organise any activities and just make time and space for people to hang out. The people who want to come will come, and for the people who don’t, you aren’t gaining much by forcing them to attend, so why bother.
I hate the team building stuff so much. Every ounce of enthusiasm always feels incredibly fake to me, no matter what. It feels like sales people trying to include the engineers because they see them in a corner trying to avoid being included, and don't realize that it's their preference.
Honestly, as someone that actually likes in-office work, I would hate this. Nothing I care about with in-office will happen in those 2 days.
I like the fun of being able to just joke around with coworkers around you. I obviously don’t want to bother anyone that prefers uninterrupted focus though. The ability to choose WFH or office self selects for people like me to come in. Makes for a much more fun office environment post-COVID IMO.
Forcing everyone into the office, even for 2 days, means you’re going to have 75% of people just annoyed they have to come in for 2 days. What have you gained? Everyone is unhappy.
Single metro area destroys a lot of the benefit to workers of WFH. It's not about not going to the office. It's about breaking real state.
You're also losing a big benefit to the employer: the ability to hire the best talent from a pool of 300+ million people instead of those in just one metro area.
This plan gets you the downsides of WFH, namely that it's harder to casually communicate, without the upsides to either yourself or the employee. Go all-in on remote or don't.
BTW the difference in real estate cost between say the SF Bay Area and most of the rest of the USA is so great it'd be cheaper to fly everyone to SF every 30-60 days than to pay the salary premium to afford housing there. (... and it's not like employees are pocketing that salary... it all goes to real estate.)
This is somewhat similar to the model we do at my current employer: ~4-5 days in office every 4 months.
I would say it's definitely way preferable for me vs having been fully remote without yearly gatherings.
This is very close to what I’d do, but with the addition of enough office space for anyone who wants it, and less frequent “required” gatherings rather than once a month. It’s really counterintuitive, as suggested by all the other replies so far, but I really think it’s the best setup:
1. Individuals and teams can work in whatever way is most productive for them.
2. On a day to day basis, everyone who’s in the office is there because they want to be there, not because their boss requires them to be there. Speaking from experience, this leads to way better energy at the office.
3. Yes, you’re restricting hiring to a single geographical area. But for a small startup in a tech hub that’s not an issue, there’s plenty of talent around, you just have to convince them they should work for you.
4. People will want to work for you, because they’ll appreciate not only the flexibility, but the fact that you’re treating them like adults who can manage their own working practices. I’ve told several recruiters this year something to the effect of “I’d only be looking to move for a role with more scope and autonomy, and if I can’t be trusted with a decision as simple as where to work from, this role probably doesn’t offer the level of autonomy I’d be looking for.”
At a larger scale you might have to branch out to multiple hubs, but I think having departments or at least functional teams colocated but with flexible work arrangements is a huge advantage over the alternatives.
It sort of is with the inevitable team dinner and social activity etc. Although I have a closer office I literally never go into, I do go into our urban office now and then for customer meetings. It's 90 minutes each way, it's barely doable, and if I have 2 days of meetings in a row, especially with a dinner in-between, I book a hotel room if at all possible.
2 hours each way is doable I guess. But I'd probably end up coming in late and passing on any after-5 activities.
I don’t see why a hotel would be a problem, 2 hour range so if someone wants to go back to family they still can.. I personally see no real good coming from trying to make people socialize late at night anyway.
This is roughly what we have now. Twice a month we organise a company wide update/demo session on Friday afternoon with drinks and food afterwards. Most work in the office that day and use the day for larger in-person meetings.
Some people come in a few days a week in other weeks as well. Some really only come in those two days. A small number of people nearly never come in (always dial in). It doesn't seam related to travel time, more to personal preference for being out of the house / in an office.
Are you planning on hiring low quality applicants that need their hand held every step of the way? If not, I question why you've already planned #3 instead of letting team figure out what actually works for them. Offer a budget that can be used to help enhance the team dynamic, perhaps, but that's all you need to do. You have hired other people so you don't have to worry about such things; so that you can focus on the business.
I personally believe that people need to collaborate in person for truly innovative ideas to come out. I also acknowledge that most no one truly wants to come into office every day and that they are actually more productive working from their home most times. This is the compromise I can think of.
If the job is merely finishing tickets in a jira board you’re right it can just be a fully remote org. I believe if you want to do cool shit then this is not sufficient. In fact I’m yet to see a truly innovative successful company that was fully remote from start.
> I personally believe that people need to collaborate in person for truly innovative ideas to come out.
Understood, but why do you already think the rest of the team disagrees? You haven't even hired them yet.
After all, if they did agree, then they would plan collaboration excursions using the budget you've given them as they find most beneficial. And their solutions will almost certainly be better than yours as they will live and breathe it, not just watch it from afar while working on things like marketing, customer acquisition, bookkeeping, and business development.
That would work great for people that want to live in a single metro area.
As a remote worker, I'm perfectly happy travelling every so often for in-person meetings and offsites. That's not a problem for me.
There are no large tech companies within 30 minutes of where I live. I don't want to move away from my house or the people I share it with (whose jobs are not portable).
Critique is technically everyone isn’t happy since it’s not fully remote. In addition, I don’t really want to give up two entire days including my evenings to the company every month which is what “hackathon and happy hours” means to me.
I'm a union software engineer at NPR, and we just won guaranteed remote work for three years (pending a ratification vote by the membership). Glad I don't have to worry about shifting fashions among executives on this subject.
My issue with every piece of commercial software I’ve used is the lag. Slack, Google Meet, Zoom… All have noticeable delay which make conversation unnatural and painful.
I’ve been using FaceTime Audio to communicate with family on the other side of the world and it’s incredible. Zero latency and great audio quality. It’s an extremely underrated piece of tech. Not sure about FaceTime video as I’ve never used it, but I bet it’s equally impressive.
Amazing that no one else was able to solve this problem considering the demand for such software during the pandemic. Not my area of expertise, but I assume it must be quite difficult.
I can't speak for FaceTime, but I've found much better success with all of these platforms if everyone in the meeting is wearing headphones. A lot of the latency is from echo cancellation, and that turns off if there's no echo.
At my last company, I let everyone on my team expense comfortable headphones with a boom mic, and it made a huge difference on Google Meet. I've found Zoom to be similar. I can't speak to Slack's latency issues.
I'm also a big fan of Tuple[0] (the pair coding app) for extremely low latency screen sharing / pair coding and that was a huge advantage too.
I’ve used these tools on all sorts of network configurations and there’s always lag.
One thing I will say is that this was all within Australia. Surely the packets aren’t going overseas, but perhaps whatever servers they use in AU just aren’t optimised for ultra low latency.
Lag is one of the issues I've never had with any of those services. I think they all have their CDNs built up enough so thats not a real problem for the vast majority of people.
I agree totally. It makes having conversation between multiple people very awkward with many pauses, then suddenly people all talking over each other, then again awkward pauses. It feels like online meetings are way more "centralized" in the sense that only a couple of people speak, and most other people remain silent. There are other technical problems to video conferencing, but lag is one of the biggest.
Agreed, people keep trying to push Teams, Zoom, WebEx and others, and everyone complains about how rubbish video meetings are. Google Meet work, and it works well every single time.
Not that I enjoyed using Google Chat much, but it did have one awesome feature: Click and the you where having a video meeting/call with the people you where just chatting to. The absolute simplicity of either planning or just setting up a spontaneous meeting using Googles solution is fantastic. I really don't get why more aren't using it.
I worked at Google for 4.5 years. If you are video calling into a meeting from MTV where other people in MTV are in person, you are probably not doing real work. It's not seamless and it's orders of magnitude less productive. Meetings take longer and rarely produce useful follow-ups if you're remote.
Mind you, I didn't say it was the same as in person. Just many common frictions of video conferencing -back then- were already eliminated. The room knew which video conference to join, noise cancellation was good, screen sharing was trivial...
> But not being in-person for collaboration/morale is miles apart.
I do agree that collaboration is much more productive when remote.
Nearly all of my exciting office "collaborations" end up feeling great then they're happening, but in retrospect, almost always fizzle out after a small window of time. I like onsites for the energy and socialization, but even then I always find most of the work happens back in the hotel room at night, and real planning happens after everyone is back at home. I can't imagine working that way all the time.
Whereas all of my remote collaborations are well documented while they're happening. Typically we have some kind of shared note taking, and writing code collaboratively, etc. Doesn't feel as social sometimes, but tends to be a much larger impact.
Likewise Open Source software has been largely written by remote people since long before the advent of even video conferencing. Git was originally written with the design intention that kernel hackers could work on a plane (per airplane wifi) without requiring a centralized server to communicate with.
> Video conf still sucks. It's literally the same as 10 years ago.
I still marvel at this. I've been working remote for nearly 15 years now and I honestly don't feel that video conferencing has improved noticeably.
My brother is looking at a new position that does 2d/week hybrid. He is thinking of laying it out this way:
* * W R F
M T W * *
So that he has wed to wed where he doesn’t go in.
Also some workers stagger their schedules and share rent on an apartment that is a “crash pad”, so they can live farther from the metro and then just commute for the two day office visit in one trip.
Pretty interesting seeing how people adapt to this.
Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
> Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
So this is a funny one because its definitely solvable but it's kind of a classic principal agent problem. There's a number of things that are going into 'clear audio quality'.
1. Receiver's audio output quality - This is rarely if ever the problem. People usually use their speakers/headset to listen to stuff besides corporate meetings, so they're motivated to have something at least good enough that they can enjoy their music, talk shows, whatever.
2. Bandwidth allocation - This... this really shouldn't be an issue, but it is because the user isn't paying for the bandwidth, whether that's classic cellphone calls, Teams voice, whatever. And so its in the company's best financial interest to compress the audio as much as is tolerable. This isn't really an issue if #3 isn't a problem and the user is in a place without too much background noise, but with open-plan offices, it is a problem if there's a lot of people talking.
3. User's mic quality - So in gaming communities, people will generally tell you if your mic sucks, because you're just some random stranger. And if your mic sucks and you want people to listen to you, you will probably buy a good mic eventually, tweak the settings etc. In a business context, my experience has been that the audio quality has to be pretty bad before anyone even says anything to the speaker. And then it's up to that person to either try to get it replaced by IT or pay out of pocket for a good quality mic. And this is assuming that they're technical enough to be able to pick out a good mic to begin with or even realize that its something they can solve.
I dabble in live audio. There's a huge amount that still could be done in the audio input space. Mic quality could be greatly increased for not much money, but most manufacturers stuff the cheapest component then can find into any headset <$150. Also, there's a lot which could be done with DSP (digital signal processing) before the mic even hits the computer.
You do see high quality mics and signal conditioning on the higher end systems, usually north of $250. And even then, it feels like that's a knock-on of paying for more headphone quality.
This is all overkill, solvable with the cheapest trash <10EUR pre-covid, setting up Mumble, and using push-to-talk. With moderation this even works for a few hundred people. Otherwise it's perfectly usable for about up to two dozen people, which should suffice for most meetings?
They did get crystal clear on landline. Then we moved to cell phones where quality is still abysmal and the phone app barely works... It's aggravating to me
More like it de-materialized. Unless there was a physical line problem, regular old phone calls over copper lines ("POTS") worked well. They were circuit switched, not packet switched. You essentially had a dedicated path provisioned, end to end. Today, POTS is all but gone. Almost nobody has a real landline. Most phone calls are transported over IP. I converted my landline to VOIP almost a decade ago. It's fine.
You are right, but at least the quality was reliably poor! Today, you'll spend several minutes ask someone to fix their microphone. Eventually they realize it's not even connected to their computer.
I don't understand why audio quality is so bad on every device.
Phone calls are hit or miss whether it'll be clear or not. This happens alot with places like call centers, the whole point of its existence is to be on the phone communicating with voice and the quality is to the point where it's hard to understand.
AIUI, one of the worst cases of interoperability legacy I've ever seen. If even one thing in the pipeline is compatible with POTS ("plain old telephone service", i.e., land lines in all their 3KHz glory), the whole call degrades, and since the whole call is going to be degraded anyhow, almost everything written to handle voice calling just drops straight to the POTS lowest common denominator. Which in a digital world can be even lower than POTS due to our ability to just set a number on our lossy compression codecs with all the regard for how much money bandwidth costs and no regard for quality.
This includes hardware too, e.g., microphones that work fine in the POTS frequency regimes but don't produce high quality audio, speakers chosen just to work well in the old frequency regime, etc.
So, despite the fact I have to imagine the odds of a call hitting the actual physical POTS system approaches zero today, and that in general in 2023 a high-quality phone call wouldn't actually be that expensive, the odds of a call traversing something that lazily fell back to POTS-level standards for whatever reason is still quite high.
One could write a brief sci-fi story in a Star Trek-inspired universe in which galactic war is started because the video call to High Command in the year 2642 is still running on POTS audio quality standards and some words are fatally compromised....
To be fair to POTS, it at least made up for frequency response with near zero latency. What you describe is worst of both worlds -- latency of commodity packet switching plus bandwidth of POTS.
Personally, I'd always choose zero latency over audio fidelity in a two-way communication medium.
Audio calls are fine on FaceTime and Teams (and, I suspect, most other products). But if you and (especially) your team are still talking to your screen instead of using a real headset, then yeah, the quality is going to suck. One doesn't need use the pricey headset and mic I normally use for music production, just something that doesn't have the software DSP constantly trying to filter out background noise while still picking up your voice.
But if you're referring to cell calls, yeah, we lost a lot of quality when we ditched landlines.
Encoding is fine now. Microphones are bad though. Megacorps cheap out on providing some semi-decent headphones to the employees, that's why audio can be bad.
> I wonder if employees would personally cover the cost of a one week meetup once per month if their other option was move city and office all the time.
Nah employers paying out of pocket makes so much more sense for this arrangement, just pay the remote worker less and make it clear they need to come in for one week a month. It's basically the same thing.
One week per month in-person is probably too much. Either have short monthlies or longer for a couple times a year.
It doesn't really make sense to have the employee pay because some who are fairly close by will come in and cut the day short and those who have to pay for a flight/hotel will either shrug it off as essentially a commuting cost or will deeply resent it.
Some people make enough and are mostly fine with the mental accounting to pay for certain business expenses out of pocket but a lot of people absolutely are not--especially if it's required.
I know this is personal preference, but in the past 10 years I've used Google Chat, HipChat, Slack, and Teams, at 3 different companies, and I honestly feel they're all "good enough" to collaborate and get work done. Not once have I thought, "We'd be more productive if this screenshare were higher resolution."
Video conf indeed sucks sometimes. That's when that "video" part is mandated. Actual work meetings where people look at someone presenting something or simply listening in background and working meanwhile are just fine. As long as some lowest rung PM is not mandating turning on cameras, "video" conf is great :)
Really? Video conferencing seems dramatically better to me than 10 years ago. Zoom is pretty great and various tools for screen sharing are much more prevalent now. And the one thing I really missed about working in an office (being able to whiteboard something) is mostly solved now with an iPad + Apple Pencil.
If you work for a company where your whole immediate team are co-located it can be great. In my experience I end up spending most of my time working with people in disparate offices so I get the worst of both worlds, constant in-office video calls (and all the meeting room shuffling that goes with it).
Proprietary telepresence systems have been around for a long time and they are good enough for keeping international relations going between country's governments, so they probably would be good enough for your company. They are more expensive than you might think they should be until you get into the engineering and understand what it takes to make it seamless and reliable.
The question is, does your organization actually know the value of communication between remote parties? Companies that actually run the numbers on the value of remote collaboration can pretty easily figure out if it's worth it.
We had a Cisco conference setup for two joined conference rooms back in 2014? It was like $500K per site. It was terrible, picture quality was 1080i with bad sound, but something an exec would love cosplaying as a member of the NSC. The thing couldn't easily handle conferees using webcams etc. Got torn out when the support contract ended and converted into a traditional conference room.
Is your contention here that the technology to make this seamless and reliable experience doesn't exist, or are you agreeing with me that it's not trivial to implement?
I think that unless you're a nation-state with huge budgets, creating a seamless and reliable experience is relatively non-existent. We've tried all the major vendors for conference rooms, and they all have sharp edges that give you continual paper cuts. The same is true for tech for remote users (Teams, Slack, etc etc.). That doesn't mean they're not good enough, but they definitely still suck.
I agree it sucked Pre-Covid, but now it just works. We mostly use Teams. We are RTO 2 days a week, but most work meetings are still in Teams. Demoing is way easier because you can simply share your screen rather than carrying your laptop to the various meeting rooms.
Why do so many want to video conf specifically when audio is all you need? Hell, of these, text chat is all you need and is more practical most of the time.
Because audio-only or, worse text-only, is throwing away >90% of the bandwidth of human-to-human communication. Studies show that relatively little of in-person communication is the words themselves. I don't think emojis solve this.
I am beginning to think, somewhat uncomfortably, that due to industry consolidation most big corps don't have to worry about having great talent anymore. They are squeezing more money out of an established business model in a market that no longer has real customer choice, as long as they have good enough people to keep things going it's not a problem.
That's fine, they will eventually have their lunch eaten by companies that can execute with all the talent they refuse to hire. It takes time, but the wheel turns.
These wheels often take a generation or more to fully rotate. And I have no idea whether any collective or group action can materially accelerate the timeline.
I would agree historically, but I think innovation and change is happening much faster now.
10 years ago, nobody seriously thought about taking on Google in terms of search engine.
Now we are going though a phase where we are questioning if LLMs can take over that market share.
Same with Facebook in social networks, but TikTok took over pretty fast.
These companies know they could lose a lot of excellent talent, and backfill with mediocre talent. Their employer brand names will remain strong carry them through, with enough junior candidates that will backfill the "industry expert" and mostly nobody will notice.
> Conversely, if you let these assholes exert their power over you, you dehumanize yourself in submission.
I normally like strong opinions even when I disagree with them. It is usually refreshing to hear people share their true feelings in an unfiltered way.
This, on the other hand, feels bitter. It seems to be coming from a place of hate.
By all means, stand up for yourself and your ideals. Sometimes you have to make difficult choices to maintain your own integrity. But, conversely, deciding to make the choice to return to an office is not "dehumanize yourself in submission".
Many people, perhaps most, will just go back to the office because they aren't convinced that they are locked in a life-long struggle to free themselves from some imaginary battle between the oppressors and the oppressed. They will realize that a job is an offering made to them, the conditions of which may change from time to time. Some will actually relish the idea of hanging around the office with likeminded coworkers.
This is a cancer of our times: to see every single thing that happens as one side being an asshole exerting power and the other side being dehumanized into submission.
I think you missed the point here. They were not talking about _making the choice_ to return to the office, but rather about _accepting the ultimatum_. There’s nothing wrong with deciding you want to work from the office, it’s the ultimatum part that’s important IMO.
What is the difference between "making a choice" and "accepting an ultimatum" in the case of an employee working at a company where an RTO policy is enacted?
The only point of a invective like the original article is to try to make people who are perfectly fine commuting into an office feel like they are traitors to some fictitious worker solidarity organization. Like some red-eyed Sauron entity with no motivation other than pure evil in their soul is threatening to steal the food from their babies mouths unless they comply. The blackness and whiteness of this moral viewpoint is extremely toxic.
If you have a strong preference to work from home and your employer springs an "ultimatum" on you then what you actually have is a choice. How you make that choice should be much more nuanced than "asshole exerting power" vs. "dehumanized submission". And if the balance of factors, whatever they may be, lead you to decide to go back to the office - don't let some ideological zealot turn that decision into some moral absolute.
It does bother me when that hate is directed at anyone who might make the decision to return to the office when faced with a RTO policy from their employer. The author is plainly saying such people are dehumanizing themselves.
I would hate to see that kind of contempt for others spread, especially for a compromise that a large majority of people will probably make.
I'm not a saint myself, but I would prefer if popular articles on the subject urged us to look at others with empathy.
I did not infer any contempt from the author towards everyday people who are forced to capitulate. The author empathized with the hardest hit victims in this target: h1b workers. Those who cannot simply 'play chicken' without risking deportation. There was no contempt or hate in these words or I feel like the sentiment would have been 'they are getting what they deserve... '
I agree completely with this author about the dehumanizing nature of these rto mandates. They completely forbid and outlaw natural human development/growth without risk to your career. Did anything in your life change? Well, I guess you need to start looking for a new career even though you've demonstrated over x years that you can accomplish your work remote.
It's so obvious the majority of these mandates are for dehumanizing purposes to force people to quit, gain tax incentives, impress power upon subordinates, or benefit commercial real estate holders. Hate and contempt towards the selfish leaders here is totally warranted. Disdain towards fickle middle managers lacking backbone would also be understandable in my opinion.
There it is again. As if it isn't possible for people to just, you know, decide that it is fine and move on with their lives? Are they really "forced to capitulate"?
I recall working in an office building for a small software company. Due to the growth, the company had people working in hallways. Soon after I joined the company moved offices so they could have more space. The new building was on the other side of town. That would increase the commute for a lot of workers, like adding one hour plus to their lives. Some opted to leave the company.
Was everyone else "forced to capitulate"?
> I agree completely with this author about the dehumanizing nature of these rto mandates.
You don't agree with the quote I pulled. The author isn't calling the "nature of these rto mandates" dehumanizing. He is explicitly saying that the people who submit to this are dehumanizing themselves.
>As if it isn't possible for people to just, you know, decide that it is fine and move on with their lives?
You seem to be insisting on a bad faith reading of the post despite people pointing out there is a good faith reading that doesn't make the author himself out to be the asshole. The HN guidelines, may I remind you, guides you to assume good faith when responding to what people write.
The post is specifically addressed to people who prefer remote to RTO, and who feel completely trapped because of the ultimatum. This is understood in the way he emphasizes how remote in these companies was in fact possible pre-pandemic, but ironically is no longer an option post-pandemic due to the ultimatum. You do realize the the people who prefer the office are already...at the office? hence there is no ultimatum directed at them at all? Hence no way for them to be dehumanized by an ultimatum that wasn't addressed to them in the first place?
After I posted this, it made the front page of Hacker News and was subsequently posted in quite a few places. After reading some of the comments, I realize a few subtleties in my word choice didn’t come across, so I’d like to clarify them.
When I say “RTO is bullshit”, I don’t mean “office work is bullshit” or anything negative about people that prefer in-person office work. I mean “the forced relocation implementation of transitioning a whole company to never-remote (a.k.a. RTO) is bullshit”.
If working in an office is better for you, rock on. I don’t have any issue with that. The bullshit is the actions taken by company’s leadership teams in absence of (or often in spite of) hard data on remote work versus in-person work. The bullshit is changing remote worker’s employment agreements without their consent and threatening “voluntary resignation” as the only alternative (even though that’s pretty obviously constructive dismissal).
When I discussed ultimatums above, I’m specifically referring to actual ultimatums, not colloquial understandings of the word. If you can talk with the person and negotiate with them, it’s not a goddamn ultimatum. What I was faced with was an actual ultimatum: Comply or suffer. I chose freedom.
Hope that helps.
"""
I still agree completely post-addendum. I'm not sure if you've been faced with RTO/RTT, but I have, even though I had exclusively negotiated with my employer for full remote. They've done nothing but coerce compliance to their new RTT/RTO mandates and it's absolutely dehumanizing. The corporate overlords demand full and total capitulation or else you are fired. It doesn't matter I negotiated specifically to be full remote prior, have RSUs vesting part of my compensation, or that I pivoted my entire life and career to be here! In essence, 'capitulation' is the perfect word to use for this nonsensical regression of workplace flexibility because people are being coerced. So what, you had a successful in-office experience prior to covid, its irrelevant here in all honesty. This greater discussion at hand has little to do with workers indifferent to or in favor of returning to office workspaces.
Where are you coming up with this? The author is not hating anyone that returns to the office. They called tech leadership assholes, so what? I think that’s fair game. The reasons why are explained well enough.
>This, on the other hand, feels bitter. It seems to be coming from a place of hate.
Of course is bitter. Dude said it clearly. Was hired as WFH before COVID, had challenging work, enjoyed it and then some asshole higher up, one day, decided to RTO indiscriminately for everyone.
And I didn't felt any hate, just disappointment. He was disappointed that he had to resign. Hence his rant. I would rant too in same shoes.
I don't understand why there can't be compromise on this? If you want to go to the office, go. If you want to work from home, then work from home.
Why is it that remote workers never insist on everyone working from home, but RTO people want every single person to RTO? Just leave it up to the individual worker.
In office people don't care about just themselves being in an office, they want everyone in an office. Being in an office to take video conferences is pointless, they want that collective environment that they thrived in pre-pandemic.
Agreed. As long as we’re also clear that this applies to anyone who wants to work at a fully remote company. And as long as we’re clear that there’s nothing wrong with this.
The issue you’re missing is that for many people who prefer office work is that they prefer in-office work with other people in that office, not being in an office while a bunch of people are remote.
The remote workers’ cry of “We can work at home and you can work in the office” or “I don’t care where you work” is forcing the in-office coworker to do something they don’t want to do — work in an office with people who aren’t there.
Getting the exact work environment you desire isn’t a guarantee at work. And again, this is absolutely fine. It’s fine to love remote work and it’s fine to hate it. It’s fine for a business to make everybody come into the office, it’s fine for a business to make everyone work at home, and it’s fine to go hybrid or whatever.
The point of being in the office is the other people being in the office. Unfortunate, but also true.
I totally by this might be a CEO power trip, but that doesn't also mean its an individualist ("I'm a star IC nothing else matter") brain rot. Star ICs do not a functioning org make.
If everyone is honest/genuine it could probably work.
If the in-person team doesn't like working remotely because they prefer to communicate and make decisions in-person, those conversations/decisions will have to be propagated to the remote team, for the company to function.
My gut feeling is that at some point, an important decision will be made in-person and not propagated, leading to confusion, lack of coordination, etc. Then, politics will ensue because the in-person team might feel like they're making concessions to the remote-team, and that the remote-team is always lagging behind, that the bulk of the decision-making responsibility are on the in-person team's shoulders, etc.
The reason there's little compromise is that there's only so many profitable workplaces to go around. So how they get managed is a resource decision allocation problem like most other things.
I think for people in the Bay Area maybe this might not be the case. But other places in the world don't have the same kind of plethora of options.
For me, it's work remote, or take a massive paycut and work on far less interesting and satisfying work. But I also don't like working remote. So, yeah...
Such as?
If RTO is happening I want every company to take back every “great job staying productive through the pandemic” email they sent over the last several years. Either we met the standard for productivity or we didn’t, it can’t be both.
> Why is it that remote workers never insist on everyone working from home
They do insist that all meetings have some video conferencing on. Also, to avoid side conversations, many of them ask that everyone in the meeting - even those sitting the same office - sign into the video conferencing software.
Companies seem to be under the delusion that return-to-office mandates will increase productivity, and I think this is absolute nonsense. Return-to-office mandates will demoralize your workers and make them seek greener pastures. Workers will become less happy and loyal, and top talent will leave for employers that provide greater flexibility. Executives that mandate return-to-office are crippling their workforces in the long-term.
If a company wants to increase productivity, then they should provide greater ownership and autonomy to workers, as well as better incentives such as profit sharing. If an engineer knows that they'll get a cut of the cost savings or profits of some project idea they have, then you can bet that many employees will take advantage of that to get valuable w
Props to the author for highlighting this.