Don't hesitate to look. There are offers out there. This was me until recently.
I was at my limit of nonsense unrelated to the job... then unclear RTO policies started appearing.
I put my foot out of the door and raised my concerns.
Management then, in a panic, told me it's being used as a wedge. Platitudes like "Enforcement isn't likely" or "not worth thinking about".
They were right... but not the way they intended. I chose new employment that doesn't play these games.
The market has decided I'm worth an extra $70k/year (with 200k in RSUs) and can work remotely. I now make more money, am officially remote, and have less stress.
By picking up a new job I've actually shed about seven. It's incredible how much burden one can carry.
This isn't even some fancy dev role, just SRE/keeping lights on.
I hope the good people I left behind (or those reading this) recognize the game.
It's the cheapest way to lay people off, get them to leave. The nefarious thing is it costs you, too.
Their attempts to retain were repulsing. I was assured that because of "who I am", I didn't need to worry. That validated the choice for me.
> It's the cheapest way to lay people off, get them to leave. The nefarious thing is it costs you, too.
And best of all, the hidden costs don’t show on the balance sheet for many many quarters, hopefully after the CxO has left and it’s someone else’s problem. It really is a victimless crime!
I firmly believe that management doesn't, or shouldn't mind this. I think a successful company is not necessarily built on top talent, but rather on people whose behavior can be managed - and on managers that are similarly competent. Similar to how on a building site, extraordinary bricklayers are not necessary, only a specific kind of adequacy is.
The other thing is that people who have something extraordinary also ask for something extraordinary in return, and that's not surprising either, it's just power dynamics. Similar to how powerful celebrities can have ridiculous backstage requests - what are they going to do, cancel a show?
This is an interesting perspective. I almost agree, in that many or most companies out there will be more or less fine with mid-tier talent. Not every company or product requires the best talent out there. But I still think there will be downstream effects to driving out strong performers, and time will be the judge there.
>many or most companies out there will be more or less fine with mid-tier talent.
Indeed. As my years go by, I value reliability more than talent, possibilities, records. For example when playing games, I always leave a good buffer so that the card delivers the 60 fps in the most complex scenes too. I value that more than beautiful, but sometimes choppy performance.
A lot of offices in London closed their gyms over the pandemic and never brought them back. I always thought that was pretty stupid. A lot of people who could WFH even before then used to come in for the free gym at least.
When I worked at a company with a gym, people would finesse their workout into their working day, so they weren't spending additional time in their day working out. That's the perk imo, the time savings and convenience, not saving on a gym membership.
Part of the perk is also avoiding the question "is it worth it for me?". There's way less friction when something is free, even when compared with a somewhat negligible price.
You might even say that they were trying to lay off an overaccumulation of senior "talent" without having to pay them off. RTW is probably mostly covert layoffs; you won't see these people replaced, and in a year or two these companies will have significant numbers of employees working from home again.
Since there are a lot of founders here, I'm curious about what your positions are whether you have any guides/references to creating a good environment.
My own experience has been that with junior talent, they don't gel with the team and don't have anything in common with the rest of the employees outside of the project they're working on.
I have been a remote employee (starting years before the pandemic) at a number of companies. The biggest thing I've noticed is the importance of communication. More specifically, you need a chat-first workforce. Seeing some places that were awful at remote and some that were really good, it really comes down to how comfortable people were communicating via chat.
If I were building a remote company I would hire people out of chats. I would rather hire someone off of IRC than off of LinkedIn, because I know the people on IRC can communicate (and argue!) via text. This may mean Discord now. That's my strongest opinion.
Following that is managerial. I have had places that did not have 1:1s with your direct manager, just bi-weekly or daily 15 minute standups with everyone. That is a good way to sabotage your company. Employees have nowhere to air problems besides in front of the whole group, so problems don't get mentioned until they are breaking (e.g. I have been working on other stuff for 2 months waiting for this guy to deliver something, but I need it now).
Being good enough to know what needs to be done, and being able to hire good talent and then trust them to get that stuff done. I have seen non-technical founders being run around by a D-tier CTO. You need good people to get good people as well. That place had a very difficult time landing talent.
Finally, pay well. I think the standard early startup pay range (180k + 1%) will not get you the technical talent you need. Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenges many companies face, but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.
> Finally, pay well. I think the standard early startup pay range (180k + 1%) will not get you the technical talent you need. Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenges many companies face, but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.
This was my view, too, but I've been trying the 'fewer, better' route for a while now and seniors seem to be only marginally ahead of the curve, if at all. Now I wonder whether hiring twice as many juniors and aggressively promoting the ones who prove themselves wouldn't be more effective. (This isn't a good idea for other, pragmatic reasons, but I do wonder if it would work.)
I worked at a company whose business model was hiring students for internship. Not even juniors, just students. The place was bad, the product was bad, everything was bad, but they're still in business, which means that this model does work. I checked their website and they even started offering IT outsourcing services.
Komarch (a very large Polish IT company) is famous for this. They don't have any products of their own, they specialize in box-ticking, contract work and winning tender offers from the government. Because of how tender offers work, anything which cannot be measured doesn't matter, and any system which fulfills the pre-established requirements has to be accepted, no matter how bad it is. This usually means terrible UX and terrible code quality.
There's even a "law of Komarch", "anything that can be done by one senior can also be done by 50 interns."
I second this. Worked for a large retail operation and people used to sometimes move between departments. These had very different communication styles: one group had communal rolling chats about all sorts of stuff all the time. Others only chatted if they had planned to do so, or created a specific private chat for a topic. Far easier to work in the department in which you could just fling out a question or comment any time and people would get back to you almost instantly and hash things out.
> but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.
Where are these 360k jobs posted? I never see anything close to that.
Major metro big tech, toward the senior side of things. Check out [1]. Salaries in the 200s are very realistic. 300s is senior or long tenure with stock appreciation. It is worth grinding leetcode for a few months.
Common misunderstanding. RSU grants at public companies vest regularly. At Google I had no cliff and my shares vested monthly. With auto sell it was just another ~10k of cash per month. Smaller grants would vest quarterly.
FWIW I consult now and make more than I ever did at a company, so also find a niche and raise your rates.
Yeah that's my plan right now. I've thought about going back to full time every now and then but it is often too hard to advance and many companies with high growth end up failing. I have a lot of freedom where I'm at now (transitioned to a consultant with more pay and mostly choosing my own hours) and it was hard work to earn it at that company. Sometimes you get in too early and get burned out, sometimes you get in too late to make a difference. Big corporations aren't really for me either and I don't want to move back to a major coastal city, it ends up costing more than the difference in pay.
The company I'm currently with is doing pretty well too and I have a lot of time there so there's always a possibility of advancement there too. Though if there were jobs with 300k cash salary or more that didn't require relocation I'd have to really think about it. There's always a risk that the new job doesn't work out for whatever reason and I've been burned badly by that before. Never fully recovered from the 2016 move to Palo Alto!
> don't have anything in common with the rest of the employees outside of the project they're working on.
I fail to grasp this part. How is this negative? I often have nothing in common with the rest of the guys in my team but it doesn't affect my work in any way.
First I worked at a small company that was oriented towards remote work. At the beginning I would show up in the office, but the company had a policy "instead of talking to me, can you write a message on public Slack channel, or even better, make a github issue I'll get back to later?", which made me furious because I'm a naturally talkative person. So I spent two years working remotely. Not gonna lie, that was amazing, I had work on one screen and porn on the other at all times.
Then I moved to a much bigger company that's remote-friendly. I make a point coming to the office every day, although never for full 8 hours, more like 3, and I'm slowly making some friends. There's people I can talk to beyond "howareyou howareyou", which is a huge thing, because we're social animals and as an immigrant, I just don't have the out-of-office social network most people do.
What I have noticed is that I'm always on much better terms with people I actually talk to, and in the office it's much easier to have these random chats about everything and nothing. These chats are incredibly important because they allow us to see coworkers as human beings rather than API calls.
A friend of mine lives with her boyfriend who's working fully remotely, the company doesn't even have an office in his area. She complained to me about the guy just not doing well in general. His entire social life is her, and that's not a healthy dynamic.
"instead of talking to me, can you write a message on public Slack channel, or even better, make a github issue"
Right because context switches are very expensive, and you are just one person. If everyone did what you did, the other end would be busy talking and not doing.
Instead, file your bug/report and give some indication of criticality. I understand why you don't like this approach but think of it from the other side's perspective.
The more senior the person being asked, the more likely they're working on something complex enough such that the delay incurred by an interruption is non-trivial.
* Is the person asking actually blocked?
Often times, people get into a mode where they will interrupt others to ask questions they could have answered themselves with a little additional research.
* How important is the blocked task relative to the delayed task?
More often, the person asking the question is more junior, making it likely they're working on more trivial tasks. The person being asked, often more senior, is more likely to be working on more valuable tasks. It's possible even a slight delay in the latter's task is a greater cost to the business than leaving the former person's task blocked.
As an extreme example: you don't want an intern interrupting someone trying to resolve a downtime event just so the intern can get unblocked on a throwaway project.
The problem is, having a well-organized and cooperative team massively outweights having a bunch of rockstar developers each pulling in their own direction, unless we're talking about the tiniest of organizations. And I'm not going to be on friendly terms with someone I'm not allowed to talk to.
> which made me furious because I'm a naturally talkative person.
Huh. Every “I’ll just come over” or “can we hop on a quick call?” for something I’m 90% sure can be sorted out within 20 messages makes me want to go take a walk instead. Writing’s great because I can refer back to it. If it’s in a channel with the rest of the team, it keeps them up to speed on what’s happening. Unless we really need to screen share or something (it happens!) turning a few messages into a call or an at-desk conversation drives me nuts.
I think the companies cited in this article might be weird to compare.
Apple is very RTO heavy because they’re an old school hardware company. Hardware work is easy to demand in office work because: (1) apple secrecy and prevention of leaks and (2) access to lab equipment. #2 likely holds true for spaceX as well.
Adding Microsoft to the mix is weird as nobody I know there actually RTOs.
I think people need to actually specifically measure which roles (senior? engineering?) in tech we are discussing RTO about here. I agree that for most software engineering it backfired. But if you’re an apple hardware engineer, there aren’t many places in town that’ll pay you as much so you’ll accept whatever horrible RTO hand you’re dealt. Companies apply these rules to everyone which is very, very stupid IMO.
I think the most interesting part about this being on the inside is the rationale behind RTO. It’s always the same citing culture, collaboration, or other fuzzy things. It is never quantitative. Are you telling me that the people making these decisions are doing so without data? I think that’s unlikely, it’s just that the data isn’t in their favor and execs are smart enough than to let remote versus not remote become yet another bargaining chip for an employee, let alone senior ones.
TLDR, I think senior vs not senior in tech is likely too much of a generalization. But the people with the actual data aren’t speaking up probably because discussing the results don’t benefit them.
I'm not seeing this at my workplace. People are doing what they are told, and they are returning to the office. Maybe because losing a job is risky right now, given the current job market.
edit: don't get me wrong, I don't want RTO. I'm just saying that I'm personally not seeing people quit over it.
I have my LinkedIn "Open to offers" at all times while I'm employed, and once a week I go thru and respond to recruiter messages, and do a couple of "Quick Apply" so it keeps me fresh in the algorithm. Takes about 7 minutes of my time.
The fact that the y-axis of this graph starts at 60 instead of 0 makes it seem way worse than it actually is. We seem to be at ~70% the value pre-pandemic.
What are you talking about? It's an index. The data starts proportional at 100%. Says so on the scale. Did you not read the page? 0 would imply there is no dev jobs anywhere in the country. The industry could go through the worst crash of all time and still get nowhere near that value. Saying it's not at zero contains no useful information. 70% of normal operations is pretty dire for switching jobs compared to ordinary expectations is the point I was obviously making.
Senior engineers are the new mid-level, or you graduate to management. Maybe YOUNG "senior engineers" seem to have the power, the Sr. Engineers pushing 50 and 60 need to prove their worth against younger and cheaper work, domestic or offshore/remote.
If you're working for an organization with such incompetent technical leadership to believe this then you should jump ship immediately, because they're doomed regardless.
I don't know why this was downvoted - i would agree that by and large people are falling in line and daring to speak up less than I've ever seen in 10+ years...
I am at my current job due to my previous one demanding RTO. As soon as they started taking attendance in the office, I walked out. I know a number of others who did the same, at a number of companies.
Then the layoffs started and this paused as people were scared. Now that hiring is picking up again and many feel that the worst is behind us, multiple people from former workplaces that are in full-on RTO mode have already reached out asking how things are at my current workplace and whether we are hiring for remote roles (we are).
Disclosure: In October 2021 after 10 years working at Apple I left to join Microsoft, so I’m not totally unbiased.
I love the sentiment this article is expressing, and anecdotally the thesis holds in my experience: senior engineers have lots of opportunity, so they can (and will) leave if they disagree with office policies.
That said, the article is not good journalism. Its own cited data doesn’t actually represent the conclusion it draws.
SpaceX took an extremely draconian return-to-office policy and they suffered for it, but they also suffered for Musk being insane, so I’m not sure the causation is 100% there.
Apple actually took the next most draconian policy (required 3 days in the office per week from every employee), and in fact Apple’s enforcement of the policy has been extremely draconian. An acquaintance of mine got in trouble for hopping on a plane to visit their dying parent and not filling out the HR form to use their allowed “two weeks per year” of remote working. One of my former departments at Apple has management checking badge in and out times to enforce the policy. That’s insane!
Microsoft’s policy has been the most liberal of the three (which isn’t shown in the data). I left Apple in 2021 in the face of being forced back to the office for a fully-remote role at Microsoft on a team that transitioned from fully in the office in 2018 to fully dispersed in 2021. Articles like this (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/microsoft-rto....) don’t properly capture Microsoft’s official return to work policy. Microsoft effectively left decisions about returning to the office up to managers and teams, and the corporate leadership incentivized managers to be more liberal by allowing teams to grow more if they hired more remote workers. At one point my team was told that 50% of all new hires were required to be fully remote.
The drama day of Microsoft’s policy taking effect which was cited in some articles was really a nothingburger. All you had to do was check the HR website to make sure it properly reflected if you were remote, in-office, or hybrid.
> One of my former departments at Apple has management checking badge in and out times to enforce the policy. That’s insane!
I keep in touch with a few of my co-workers who still work there, and they tell me there are a non-zero number of people still giving their badges to their RTO'ed buddies to "badge them in" on the right days. I'm sure that's strictly against multiple policies and they'll probably get caught at some point, but... people find a way.
I’m kind of curious why people are under the impression that people don’t do this in the office too.
I’ve known people to do full time online masters degrees during office hours. I’ve played a heck of a lot of video games in office. Certainly read a lot of books at the office.
Offices are not some magical “go find work” hypnotic environments.
I can do nothing from anywhere: Hundreds of hours of KSP, hundreds of hours of factorio. The former in an office, the latter from home.
If anything, in an office there's always an excuse not to work. And if you accidentally enter the zone and get something done, soon you are interrupted by inanities.
Unless, as some have suggested, it's a deliberate tactic to cheaply reduce headcount. (No need for severance/redundancy payouts if people self-select to leave).
If your only remaining employees are desperate sycophants, they're probably not the sort of top talent that actually knows what they're worth. Maybe I'm wrong though.
The freedom to just up and move jobs isn't equally available for everyone.
Anyone who doesn't have a permanent right to work (eg on some kind of visa) can find it hard to switch jobs.
If you live in a place where Healthcare is tied to your employer, then that can cause problems, too, if you/a family member have some kind of chronic/ongoing medical issues.
If your salary package has some kind of deferred portion, then that can also make switching difficult.
I find that stepping away from my desk for a little while is the fastest way for me to solve a problem I’m struggling with. Kind of like how Dr House always solves his cases while doing other random stuff.
I have frequent 5-15 min slots throughout the day between meetings and during builds. There's only so many valuable things I've found to do with those, and they're usually finished by 10am.
I suppose being blatantly obtuse and extremely literal worked as an argument this time, pray it'll work again for you the next time you want to employ this argument.
A company that would be worth caring about would also care about its employees. Companies that actually care about its employees exist, but they’re mostly pretty small. You might care about a company, but the company often sees you as a replaceable part and they’ll throw you to the curb if it suits them.
Yeah, no. The only people who care about the company are the execs who own enough stock to care and green newbies who haven't been burned yet by companies who do not care about them at all.
There used to be pensions - those people still cared deeply about the company after they left.
Nobody has pensions anymore, and as long as your 401k is in an index you don’t care if the building collapses after you walk out the door.
It’s been interesting to watch this dynamic in defense. There’s a lot of weird niche shit that’s absolutely critical and takes a really long time (and the right environment!) to become an expert in, but the turnover rate now is crazy. There’s an “old guard” (that has a pension) that kinda keep things running, but a LOT of them are retiring about now.
I would say your position is the cynical one. Encouraging the people who don't tie their identity to their workplace to leave so that you are only left with the ones who "care" is manipulative. It reminds me of the time I went to a real estate scam seminar. At the halfway mark, they encouraged everyone who wasn't ready to sign a check on the spot not to come back from intermission.
This concept of "caring" is just a new coat of paint on "we're not just a workplace, we're a family," a strategy to get your employees to volunteer for more responsibility in exchange for kudos (rather than the pay or title they would demand if asked directly).
There's nothing cynical about my position. It's better to be naive and go from one corporate family to another with a caring attitude, attempting to make a difference, committing to hard work, and having your heart broken, than becoming a sorry bastard like you guys.
You don't need to "volunteer" anything, or do unpaid labour—to care. All this attitude of "the world/company/country owes me big-time" is poisoning your soul, man.
You might be surprised to hear I actually do care deeply about my work and my colleagues, and have spent many a late night firefighting in production, shown up when it wasn't necessarily expected, et cetera.
It's not about entitlement, is about healthy boundaries around working life. There is no virtue in burning yourself out. Your manager who tells you that you're "part of the family" is not being honest with you. When your interests and your employer's interests diverge, it will turn out that it was just a workplace, after all.
Nothing in any of my messages indicates that I'm condoning "burnout", or any other things that you choose to draw lines in the sand around. And yet, you keep lecturing me on values of work-life balance. I care, some of my coworkers do, too. We all know who doesn't.
> Nothing in any of my messages indicates that I'm condoning "burnout"
Actually you literally advocate for burning yourself out, you just use slightly different terminology.
> It's better to be naive and go from one corporate family to another with a caring attitude, attempting to make a difference, committing to hard work, and having your heart broken, ...
Burnout is the cumulative effect of "having your heart broken" over and over again. It's better to make a commitment you can sustain than to work yourself to the bone. It's not cynical to recognize that your employer will not return the favor.
> [Y]ou keep lecturing me...
Respectfully, you can't call me a "sorry bastard" who's "soul is being poisoned," joke about getting the sibling commenter fired for disagreeing with you, and then complain that I am the one being patronizing.
I was being sincere when I encouraged you to ask your coworkers what they thought. I think we're talking past each other and that you're filtering what I'm saying through a combative lens. I think if you heard it from someone you respected, it would make more sense.
I'll add, I do see the sibling commenter was being rude and that I wasn't sticking up for you, and I have experienced that myself and understand it's not easy to disentangle those conversations and see that I wasn't calling you childish or condoning it. It's not acceptable, and they shouldn't have done that. I could've said something in your defense, but I didn't, because I felt you had bent the conversation in that direction with your "trembling" comment. But two wrongs don't make a right and I should've said so. My apologies.
I didn't call him childish. I told him to stop being childish. Can you really argue his "how cynical! I'm trembling." reply isn't being childish?
Then he responded with an absurd response about how he should get me fired and I said he sounds like a child. Again, not a personal attack but a characterization of his tone. Which I don't see how anyone could take issue with. I'm being far more civil than him.
He gave me nothing substantial to respond to. All i can do is ask him to stop behaving like a child.
There's no daylight between this and calling them childish. But I fully acknowledge they were also at fault, particularly the thing about getting you fired, and the reason I didn't make any defense of or apology to you is that it didn't seem to be getting under your skin.
I would say that response fails to demonstrate maturity, and wasn't an appropriate response to your question. You don't have to take the bait. Two wrongs don't make a right, you shouldn't respond to a bad comment with another bad comment, etc.
If someone isn't giving you something substantial to respond to, you can choose not to respond rather than responding inappropriately.
Disagree with you 100%. "You sound like" is specifically addressing what he is saying, not calling him names. I think you are being completely unfair to me.
Feel free to ask a friend you trust to be honest with you whether I was unfair, and whether there's a material difference between saying someone is childish and saying they "sound like a child," telling them "don't be childish," and saying they "behave like a child."
I think we should take the time to get in touch with your employer, and let them know that you DON'T GIVE A FUCK, & some more about how "caring" is for <s>pussies</s>, or should I say greens/grifting executives.
You did come after me. The point is he is saying nothing of substance and behaving like a child. I called him out on it and you give me crap for that. You're being absurd.
I reminded you that you shouldn't be rude. You don't need to be rude to get your point across. I was arguing in favor of the same perspective, I was insulted by the same person, but I managed it. Frankly I find it absurd for you to say this person is "behaving like a child" and then, when challenged on your behavior, to turn around and say "they started it."
I don't think there's more to say; have a good day.
You realize lame responses like this are functionally an admission that your point was baseless right? When you resort to silly responses like "I'm trembling", anyone with half a brain reading that knows you have no rational response so you're falling back on playground taunting.
Lifers tend to not take risks and be average, but not top performers. Good "workhorses" as they say, but rarely the people who brings in the most innovation.
