Pretty much me at this point. I've had the same remote job for 9 years, and while I could work an office job at the time I was hired (I was 31 then), now at 40 and with a number of my chronic conditions rather a bit less background than they used to be. Not to mention that pretty much everything I have is either respitory, or one of the major comorbidities for COVID, which is still very much in circulation.
To give one example... about 2 years ago I had to spend about 10 months on near-total bed rest to get a healing-resistant foot ulcer to finally heal. I was able to work from bed for almost all of that. If I'd been working an office job it basically would have been a choice - keep my job, or keep my foot.
FMLA provides unpaid leave, and usually only up to 12 weeks. I'm not sure how well ADA would apply here, but my wife had a lot of trouble using ADA to even get her employer to use video meeting software with captions (she's deaf, and Zoom didn't have captions at the time.) It eventually worked but took something like 6 months.
I really wish more people would realize this about the ADA and other similar legislation in other countries - yes, a company is legally required to make reasonable accommodations... but they don't have to be happy about it or hop to it right away. They will delay as long as they can and try to avoid it like the plague if it's going to cost them money.
> They will delay as long as they can and try to avoid it like the plague if it's going to cost them money.
The worst part: It's a tax writeoff like all the other business expenses they're so happy to buy without question. Sometimes it's even covered by grant money.
Why wouldn’t it be a tax write off? Profits are taxed, not revenues. If revenues were taxed instead of profits, there would be even more powerful consolidation market forces to vertically integrate every single industry to avoid double-taxing revenue.
You can thank the existence of every single independent company to the existence of that tax writeoff you find so unfortunate.
My reading of GP was that it makes it worse because it means there's much less financial reason to avoid making accommodations - which would be somewhat understandable - and that implies they're doing so for other reasons.
The other thing with ADA it's always distinctly had the feel of the kind of thing that sure, they have to (eventually, maybe) comply with, but I can't help but feel it's the sort of thing that will implicitly count against you when it comes to things like promotions. Similar debate (also applicable to me) to "I have diagnosed high-function autism. Do I disclose?"
> implicitly count against you when it comes to things like promotions.
Illegal, if you can prove it. So functionally, legal.
> "I have diagnosed high-function autism. Do I disclose?"
Nope. There's zero reason to disclose until there is an actual barrier that can fall under ADA.
And ADA isn't a guarantee you'll get what you need, it is asking the employers for a modification, one which they don't have to grant if they have a legitimate reason.
I actually was just having to navigate that/short term disability as I'm coming off missing about 3.5 weeks from an extended period of extreme unpleasantness that ended in me getting my gallbladder 86'ed last week.
ADA potentially but a lot of my stuff basically boils down to "being out of the house and active is both physically and mentally draining and more likely to get me sick with some random thing". So the reasonable accommodation is basically remote work (I'm a software dev, which is about as remote-friendly a career as it gets).
FMLA also has a twelve week limit, and for "highly compensated" employees (a lot of software devs in the US would qualify) you can lose the right to return to the same, or equivalent, position as when you left.
"Reasonable accommodation" is a negotiation between you and the employer. There is nothing that defines what a "reasonable accommodation" is, up to and including remote work. The ADA gives potential examples, one of which is working at an alternative location.
An employer can legally deny WFH no matter how disabled the employee is even if the employee has already been doing the same job from home for years. To me, that means that legal protections are nonexistent in this regard and therefore practically meaningless.
I don’t think anything you said contradicts what I have been told, though maybe I didn’t explain it very well.
An employer can legally deny just about anything that they consider 'unreasonable', yes. If you injured your back and could no longer stand for hours at a time on a job that requires it and there is no alternative, absolutely you can be let go.
Picking out WFH as 'not protected' is largely meaningless. This is why it is called _reasonable_ accommodation, not _required_ accommodation.
As with any job, how you do your job, where you do your job, etc. can change based on the number of farts the CEO has passed today.
Yes, worker protections in the US are abysmal. You'll never find me arguing otherwise.
If an employer is required to allow “reasonable accommodations” but is never required to allow working from home, then logically it would seem to follow that working from home is not a reasonable accommodation … or so I had concluded, but technically that might be wrong in some way that’s not very interesting to people actually affected by these laws.
Any law that requires an employee to negotiate with their employer would seem to be a rather toothless law given the power imbalance involved. Maybe that’s the larger problem.
Something for those who are disabled and collect Social Security Disability (aka green check) or Social Security Income (gold check) and is pretty much mostly young and pre-retirement-age disabled folks: if your income goes over half of what you take in from Social Security, your eligibility will be "threaten" and re-evaluation WILL occur, often with reducing benefits until you earn twice what SSA gives you.
So, if the job doesn't pan out, you are going to be in a rather severe financial bind for quite a awhile until those re-applied benefit(s) restarts for you.
Hence, many disabled are looking for work that do not pay more than $800-1200/month (USD) ... just to avoid their re-evaluation trigger.
I don't know about SSI, but this isn't accurate for SSDI.
For SSDI, if your earned income is more than $1110 in a month (for 2024), then you consume one of your 9 trial work months. That $1110 threshold is regardless of your SSDI payment amount and it is adjusted annually. The trial work months are to allow disabled persons to attempt to return to the workforce without risking losing their social security benefits if it proves unsustainable for them.
(The specifics are a little more complicated than what I've described.)
I think that's the point. Supplementing up to a given minimum has counterintuitive incentives, causing the program to pay more in aggregate than if it had looser caps (and linear scaling) and let more people work and earn slightly higher incomes by reaping the benefits of the program.
One way to look at this is that some conditions are less of a disability than they used to be. In the same way that medical advances can make some diseases curable or inconsequential so social changes can also make a disease irrelevant.
This is an important lesson, as it should alert us that there likely are other ways our society operates that make a disease into an impediment that could be changed. If you want to know what they are, go talk to disabled rights advocates!
> The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets. Or they can be caused by people's attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can't do certain things.
> The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people. Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people more independence, choice and control.
> Not everyone uses the social model and that’s ok. How anyone chooses to talk about their impairment is up to them.
I'm not trying to deny there are plenty of barriers for disabled people in society, and we should certainly try to reduce them... but I think even in an ideal society, being, for example, blind, or deaf, would still be very difficult. I think pretending that it's all about how society reacts to us is ignoring the reality of disabled people's lives.
That's why we have the disability / impairment distinction. Many impairments don't have to be disabilities. Some are, inherently.
I'd argue that deafness can be completely mitigated by societal improvements, for most purposes except birdsong etc. and certain genres of music. Blindness is more difficult (e.g. vision is useful for navigation, and we can't choose the surfaces in a forest to make echolocation easier), but in principle computer technology can help with that. (I'd say a decent automated audio description is still a hundred years out, but we'll only get it if we make progress.) Certain mental impairments (e.g. some depression, some sensory issues) have no known mitigations, even in theory, so remain disabilities in all circumstances.
You're focusing on mechanical issues and ignoring social issues. You mention birdsong, and certain genres of music... what about your partner's voice? Your child's laugh?
I count those in the same category as birdsong. You can see, and/or feel, laughter. There's an equivalent to "voice" in every mode of communication I'm aware of (speech, sign, romantic chess, oil-on-canvas…). There's the inherent disability of not being able to access those modes of sensory experience (and I'm not belittling anybody's desire to experience them who can't) but the social impact of the impairment is incidental and avoidable.
Perhaps these things are culturally significant, above and beyond their inherent social value, but that isn't intrinsic or necessary.
> even in an ideal society, being, for example, blind, or deaf, would still be very difficult
Correct. The technological model OP posited would involve technologies that let blind and deaf folks navigate the world. The social model hits a barrier at that point.
Sure, but then there's other conditions that for a lot of people are basically entirely social. E.g. ADHD. Having a fulfilling life with ADHD is pretty easy. Holding down a job to pay for that life less so.
That's very good. All the DEI brochures I have seen portrayed young good looking people of different colors. I hope we will get more diversity and inclusion for disabled people.
Yeah, exactly. And all of them smiling, laughing, being happy.
It's very unrelatable. I would like to see depressed, stressed and anxious people as well. People with crooked teeth and other normal things.
I don't understand how a bunch of happy, young attractive people is a diverse group at all.
Surprise, surprise making it easier to work allows more people to work.
Taking a phrases I read about the latest iPad. If they stop neutering the workplace by not allowing remote work then more people will work.
Sort of like how cities are neutered because they are car centric and not people centric.
And it’s not just the currently disabled but caregivers as well. I had a PM that was caring for aging parents and we could hear her feeding them as we were on calls trying to unbork a business process that wouldn’t let us give customers the software licenses they paid for.
This is a good thing but there are some people who hate the idea of remote work because they can’t comprehend a management style that isn’t their First Grade teacher’s.
> And it’s not just the currently disabled but caregivers as well. I had a PM that was caring for aging parents and we could hear her feeding them as we were on calls trying to unbork a business process that wouldn’t let us give customers the software licenses they paid for.
I fall into the caregiver bucket, and I'll present an argument I was hearing a lot on linkedin and those kinda places in favor of RTO: Some companies and bosses think that if you're on the clock you shouldn't be taking care of your family.
The reality is a lot more complicated. WFH means I can spend 20 minutes resolving a problem that would've taken me half a day before - driving home, resolving the issue, driving back, finding parking, getting back into the right mindset to do work, etc.
It also means I can join meetings that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to join. (like in your example, the coworker feeding their parents). Admittedly your coworker should probably invest in a mute button lol.
Anyway, yea, WFH is a huge enabler! But I guess some people are kinda ableist/unfair about it.
It's silly. Life goes on. We shouldn't be playing this game of competing on how hard we can lick boots.
LinkedIn has an agenda to push, for sure. Screw that website.
As for the, "if you're clocked in, you should be working," that would mean in-office employees are working 100% of the time they're clocked in. Have them prove that this is the case.
Then look at productivity during the pandemic vs now and let then explain how WFH hampered those numbers.
Just a ridiculous mindset by boomers who should have retired a decade ago.
> Then look at productivity during the pandemic vs now and let then explain how WFH hampered those numbers.
I thought in general it was widely agreed upon at this point WFH is at-least a 10% drop in productivity. Stanford has been doing plenty of research in this area. The argument in favor of WFH has for the most part moved on to now cost savings from not having offices lets you hire more people to make up for the loss in productivity.
> I thought in general it was widely agreed upon at this point WFH is at-least a 10% drop in productivity. Stanford has been doing plenty of research in this area. The argument in favor of WFH has for the most part moved on to now cost savings from not having offices lets you hire more people to make up for the loss in productivity.
I wonder if they covered that people working from home may get sick less and work longer hours.
Ye gods, I can concentrate better at home than I can in an open floorplan office lol :D
It's only inertia that makes 'remote' not default in this technological age.
Of course some prefer the office (some of whom from their own inertia), some jobs genuinely need to be or benefit from being done in a shared office space, but for the absolute vast majority of roles the office was always about needing to pass paper documents around, or needing expensive and fixed equipment that is a telephone line or computer.
I'm one of them. Even when still in the hospital and rehab center -- Lost my lower leg to necrotizing fasciitis and sepsis -- I was able to keep working. (And I wanted to do something.) I thought I'd be going back to the office at some point; but, my supervisor and EEO office decided I'd work from home. when I got home from the hospital and rehab, there was a letter authorizing full-time telework.
I keep arguing I don't need to take our annual Workplace Violence Prevention training; but, I have to go online and take it every year. (I just took it a week ago.)
I’ve always liked that being disabled in America isn’t necessarily the death sentence it is in other countries that have no accommodation for disabled people.
It's not perfect, but gliding around in a few hundred year old American city is way more dignified than somewhere like Paris. It's not just the generously-sized sidewalks and curb cuts, but also knowing that you can go into almost any McDonald's or Starbucks and expect a toilet you can use (Parisian Sanisettes are great, but they aren't everywhere).
The internet is generally a huge boon for many people with disabilities.
If you write code, blog, etc. please do what you can to be compliant with online accommodation. A handicapped person who can use your widget -- say, a blind person -- will be thrilled and loyal. If they can't and are forced to try to go somewhere in person or something because the online option doesn't work, this may be a huge hardship and may outright cut them out of being able to do certain things at all.
Not really related to the article but I always tell myself that one of these days, I will dedicate more time working on something that improves the lives of a certain group of people with disabilities. The trigger was a single simple sentence that I read a year or two ago: “Everybody is just temporarily abled.”
Happy to see this. The push to RTO seems to just be a front for legal constructive dismissal of expensive employees. These jobs are immediately being backfilled by remote employees on the otherside of the world. The FTE to third-party ratio is growing exponentially, it's becoming way more common to see things like a 1:5+ fte to 3p ratio.
it makes me wonder if we should, in stead of retire have a second round of organized education around 45-55 to prepare for a job that doesn't involve physical acrobatics that one can do from home. With laws to accommodate the process. You could for example tap into the pension for the duration of the training.
This is great news. Allowing people access to high-quality jobs they were previously shut out of is objectively awesome.
I’m bored by the comment flamewars here every time this topic comes up, though. I get it, some people love remote work and some people don’t. Another expression of the wonderful diversity of humanity. I just did a job search and I’m happy to report that there are still many options for either in-office or fully remote teams. Pick one that suits you and stop getting your blood pressure up over this, seriously.
I’m excited that there’s so many different options! Right now I find it beneficial to physically colocate with my team. Maybe later in life I will want to earn a living while traveling, or living somewhere rural and close to nature, and if that happens I’ll be grateful for a thriving culture of remote companies.
Also I have friends who have great lives built around remote work and I wouldn’t wish for them to lose that!
> How can you not care when companies choosing to go fully remote means you have less options to find in-office jobs?
The world is not designed to be optimized for you, nor should it be. I think it is the height of selfishness to push for a world only suited to your preferences with no concern for those with other preferences or needs.
Try to stay optimistic. There are market forces in favor of remote work:
1) Employers who allow remote work will have lower office costs
2) Employers who allow remote will be able to poach employees from competitors who do not offer remote work
These are both strong incentives for employers to allow remote work. Obviously not all do, but over time employers who allow remote work will outperform their peers due to the two reasons above, which can help encourage other employers to allow it in order to stay competitive.
For (1) , that ship has sailed for any company that actually owns their offices -- and there are a ton of them. Unless they sell the property, which many never will for as long as company is in a good financial state, one desk not utilized is money thrown in the water.
(Interestingly Charles Schwab is a notable counterexample -- they were forcing people back into office, until the company's finance is in a bad shape, and they rushed to halt that and actually closed down many offices.)
How big a trend is that, though? Most companies are all too happy to do a capitalism and move office expenses into OpEx, to improve their return on capital by being a pure-play widget company instead of a hybrid widgets / real estate development and holding corporation.
Sure, there are some big sprawling HQs of the gigacorps who just can’t find enough space to rent otherwise, but that seems to be a minority of office employment to me?
3) Employers who are fully remote (as opposed to even 1 day per month in office) can hire in different locations. For many roles, you can find great employees in places like Eastern Europe for far cheaper than in Silicon Valley, for example.
It could work against you as a US worker. They would set up branches in Europe (and other places) and just hire there, instead of having headcounts in the US.
It depends on where you work and what industry you're in.
A majority of the leads I get from recruiters about dev work are from companies who now have hybrid or full on-site requirements. It's being outlawed like you say, but there is a push from certain companies to be back in the office.
The last three contacts I've gotten from recruiters always ask me if I'm ok being in the office three days a week on job req's they've contacted me about. So take solace in the fact more people are opting out of these kinds of jobs and recruiters are telling me the more companies require in office or hybrid, the smaller the pool of worthy candidates - regardless of whether they're disabled or now.
There is push to get people to go back into the office, but at this point, I'm not seeing a real willingness for people to jump at those jobs right now.
I can confirm that the market has gotten weird in that area. In Chicagoland, the recruiters outright told me that remote is not gonna happen for those roles. I declined based on remote part and the upper range. I am not sure who they are getting at those rates, but I wish them well in their quest to lower costs.
> I'm pretty terrified that the gears of capitalism will eventually lead to remote work being outlawed.
Unlikely. The current "RTO" push is simply executive management not wanting to take the write-down hit on all that unused office space that is a loss now that no one is working inside of it. Once they've either jettisoned the space, or taken the write-down anyway (because they were forced into this) you'll find all these RTO calls dying down.
The vast majority of office space is rented. My conspiracy theory is the executives that are pushing RTO are the demographic that have millions of dollars invested in commercial real estate in general, not because the company owns their own office buildings.
The Market, as in the free exchange of goods and services, should be happy to get more work out of another person.
For Capitalism, as in the system wherein the means of production are privately owned, it might be a toss-up. A person who works from home isn’t going around the world providing as much value to the landlord class.
After years of companies insisting that working without being physically in the office 5 days a week was impossible, it was the government saying "Your offices are closed" that made remote work at all common. I know remote work existed as a small niche before that, but I can't give capitalism credit for normalizing it.
Disabled people have been begging for years to have more flexible working arrangements, and have been constantly told "sorry it's impossible." But then covid shows up only for everyone to discover it's been possible the whole time.
Covid didn't invent remote work. I had been working remote for almost 10 years before Covid arrived. It merely accelerated a force that was already in motion.
> I know remote work existed as a small niche before that
You have to distinguish not physically being in the office from "working from home." A LOT of jobs (e.g. many sales job, on-site consultants, even my oil delivery guy) didn't involve being physically in the office much but weren't WFH.
Government and capitalism are terms that ultimately refer to people. In this case, given the context of caitaliso-democratic America, the very same people.
I actually love capitalism, but I also have a healthy mistrust of those who have mastered it. I can foresee the real estate and commercial implications of mostly remote labor leading to legislation. In the US, we have a huge problem with private equity firms buying up companies, and if they own the IT companies and the restaurant companies, it might behoove them to lobby for RTO legislation to drive more traffic through their brick and mortar businesses.
I don’t see any particular need to assume the ownership structure implies something about remote work. We could easily imagine that in a market socialist system people might be more willing to have WFH policies that benefit their co-workers.
Civically we allegedly care about these topics, and note their solutions via remote work
- disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from people we know in this situation
- finding some method for a dramatic enough state change in environmental conditions as to back up from disconcerting climate change barriers we’re pushing into: I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets
- preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
- accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.
- affordable housing space: office space conversions are starting.
The longer the debate goes on about hybrid/wfh and the above tangible proven benefits vs RTO for “The Collaboration” and “My Socialization Needs,” the more I speculate our society doesn’t actually care about the above topics, at all.
Or, if we do care, this should be called out over and over and over. Bc it’s not getting discussed this way.
> - accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.
Flexibility for parents is great. I've worked remote for a long time and having additional flexibility to take care of sick kids and still get some work in while they're asleep and later in the evening is great. Much better for everyone than forcing another PTO day just to stay home.
However, I've also been seeing remote work and parenting being pushed way too far since COVID. One of my friends cancelled daycare for their 3 year old, thinking they'd just watch him at home while they worked. Didn't take long to realize that they weren't getting much work done while tending to the demands of a 3 year old, and it became impossible to hide when the child would interrupt every meeting multiple times over.
One local company I'm familiar with went remote during COVID and had significant problems with quality of work and communications. The kind of quality problems that impacted customers (not a traditional tech company, their product required employees to do specific work for each customer). When they started narrowing down on the problem employees, one of the top causes they uncovered was parents of young children trying to do the job while watching their kids. It can work with a 13 year old home for summer break, but it just doesn't work for very young kids who need a lot of attention.
> - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work. Employees communicate outside of official channels, in voice meetings that aren't recorded, and in chat rooms you don't control. Some people get extremely difficult to work with when they're arguing with a screen name instead of talking to a person face to face.
- so, again, no luck for parents of young children? Ship the parents back to the office and those issues you mention which have some sort of root cause forcing the home-rearing just… go away/out of sight out of mind? As I said, a mindset out of the 1950s. Also, hiring/firing is still a solution, wfh or not.
- I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine, and still better than “closed office door + handsy VP” which has plagued the workforce for years and years.
- you mention conflict resolution as the remote challenge examples. I mentioned sexual harassment and ageism. Very different.
> Ship the parents back to the office and those issues you mention which have some sort of root cause forcing the home-rearing just… go away/out of sight out of mind? As I said, a mindset out of the 1950s. Also, hiring/firing is still a solution, wfh or not.
I think you didn't read my comment. The problem was parents cancelling daycare because they thought they could take care of kids and work simultaneously without impacting their work.
They literally had daycare, cancelled it, and brought the problem on themselves after WFH was instituted.
> I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine,
You are deluding yourself if you think none of your employees are using their personal phones to talk to each other, or that groups of employees don't gather in personal Discords and chat app groups.
If you find out that parents have no form of daycare, and are taking care of their child while doing their remote job they should be fired, end of story.
As a parent, taking care of a child is itself a full time job. Your friend is either an idiot or was banking on his work being stupid enough to let it slide.
Oddly, while I think the approach is overly restrictive ( and it would drive a good chunk of parents out of the market ), there are some benefits to one parent doing some actual parenting. I think your characterization is harsh, but I am biased.
It may, and I guess not every job has the same requirements. And 2 parents could technically split the care time evenly and squeeze out 8 hour days by using 16 hours of the day and maybe working all night while the child sleeps. Good luck structuring all your team's meetings around one person's schedule though.
One parent cancelling daycare during covid one year (lets assume they went back the next year) seems like a solved problem (they tried didn't work for them and went back to other method).
Parents leaving work early and not staying late because of kids is an office problem you didn't mention.
Employees using a personal discord sounds positive. Work relationships are building remotely. When employees in person become close they call personal cells and go to bars to discuss how clueless leadership is. Leadership isn't capturing those conversation why is it suddenly a problem if a discord is used?
If we are both in the office, and I start using my phone to send you text messages that are harassment, and/or messages to our coworkers that make fun of you, is that the companies problem?
If we are now both working from home, does that qualitatively change the situation? When working from home, what even is "outside of work"?
Eh, some companies ( financial institutions, brokerages and so on ) may have regulatory requirements that puts onus on those organizations[1]. That is mostly the argument for keeping personal and work life separate, but that ship has sailed a long time ago.
>You are deluding yourself if you think none of your employees are using their personal phones to talk to each other, or that groups of employees don't gather in personal Discords and chat app groups.
This is very common, even when working in an office. Has nothing to do with working from home
> I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work.
*reported
It could be that people felt more empowered to report incidents, but the reality is probably just that the nature of harassment has changed and is just different from how it was like in-person.
> It could be that people felt more empowered to report incidents,
Or it could be that the number of incidents actually just went way up? I don't understand why everyone tries to inject alternate explanations to wave away inconvenient situations.
This discussion started with a hypothesis based on a second hand anecdote.
For all we know, it could be worse. Given the fact that a lot us have trouble separating work and home when we work remotely, maybe there is more pressure to let coworkers in that space more.
It’s a lot easier to report a problem when you have screenshots.
Will HR do anything about a handsy VP in a he-said-she-said situation? Maybe. Will they do anything when you send them screenshots of a VP’s icky chats? You bet.
Dismissing uncomfortable things becomes so much easier when you can make up an alternate explanation (without any knowledge of the details) and declare them both equally likely.
The parent commenter was absolutely trying to dismiss the core of the story by injecting an alternate reality into it.
> If they're not equally likely, I'm sure you'll have no problem demonstrating that?
The situation I'm referring to was not a simple reporting change. It involved employees quitting over bullying, and in one case there were issues severe enough that law enforcement became involved.
So, not, it was not a simple case of people reporting things differently. These problems did not exist pre-WFH at this company.
But if you're dead set on finding ways to reject this and substitute your own reality, I suspect even this won't convince you.
> But if you're dead set on finding ways to reject this and substitute your own reality, I suspect even this won't convince you.
I really don't know why you're so aggressive. You did not include the context in your original comment that you did with this one, and so someone put forward a very reasonable explanation as to why reports may have went up.
Lots of the daycares and preschools shut down during COVID. It was a shitty time and not exactly comparable to normal remote work for a lot of reasons.
Your friend, however, is an idiot. I know lots of people who have worked remotely for 10+ years, and none of them tried to work their job while taking care of a 3 year old - except maybe during COVID (because it was either that or quit).
> I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work.
Note that your HR friends is not a good measure of harassment. Maybe more people filed HR complaints because asshole and abusive behavior was easily documented over chat, etc. Whereas before, you had abusive behavior, for example, inappropriate touches but no witness that a person might not feel comfortable bringing up to HR especially if the abuser is somebody important.
Everyone knows that HR basically exists to protect the company. Unless you have ironclad proof, you may not want to involve them. Remote work would leave more of an undeniable paper trail.
While childcare can be expensive, a "mother's helper" type nanny would be a better option if one parent can work from home. You still need to pay them a competitive wage but it's one person rather than all the admin and facilities overhead that a daycare has.
Plus according to Jonathan Haidt in Happiness Hypothesis, commuting, noise and lack of control are among the most significant things that make people unhappy. All of them are manageable at home. And also these are rarely taken into the discussion.
If you are going to quote Jonathan Haidt, I suggest you take a look at his latest book, the Anxious Generation published in 2024. My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
> My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
This is an extremely common problem for juniors in the mentoring program where I volunteer: They graduate college, take remote jobs, and then slide into depression while working from home. It takes a while to work with them to get to the bottom of their issues, but often they'll realize that they're much happier in the weeks following company on-site meetings, then they slowly decline again.
Remote work doesn't work for everyone. Many people struggle in remote environments, especially juniors. The way remote work gets pushed as being perfect for everyone can be very confusing for people who discover that they don't like it.
It's even harder because the internet tends to be very hostile to these people rather than supportive. The correct answer, obviously, is that some people do better at different types of jobs. Yet every time this comes up, people come out and try to criticize the person, blame it on their lack of hobbies, blame it on something else, and refuse to allow that some people need face-to-face coworkers to thrive.
It's a real phenomenon that gets downplayed on the internet.
I think -- on the basis of this same argument playing out for years at this point -- it's because the 2 views are talking past each other.
Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.
But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.
If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.
> If everyone can work how they prefer then great.
The problem with this is that people's work preference doesn't always match up with the environments where they actually work well.
I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down that they're much more productive working remote.
The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their preference for where they work best. They're expressing their preference for where they want to be. When it comes to low performers and difficult employees, they almost universally don't want to be at the office.
That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work according to their preference.
Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking people what they prefer.
What about based on performance? Pre-covid, my company required ridiculous amount of politics to have remote approved. Eventually, one guy cracked the code ( basically be too hard to replace ) and just told the management he is staying remote. And I can see that management would love to get that carrot ( remote ) back to something that is either very rare or non-existent.
<< Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
It is all true, but it points to crappy management. You want to fire people, fire them. You can't keep them motivated, you failed as a manager. I keep saying this, but management class has gotten really used to easy approach to motivation ( pizza and threat of firing ).
Why not hire people who have proven they have done something by themselves like an open source project or business? Seems like something that's easy to filter for. Asking someone can only tell you things about their judgement not if they actually can do it.
If you have by yourself done something you can assume they can do something else on their own. The on their own is the important pieces.
Yeah people forget that when you graduate college you go from an environment where you're surrounded by hundreds or thousands of potential social contacts who all have lots of free time and lots in common to being surrounded by whoever is on your block, and, if you commute, by your co-workers. I'm a remote worker but the only reason I make this arrangement work is because I'm married, have a family, and have things to do with my time outside of work. If I did this in my 20's I would have been totally unprepared to deal with it.
When I take a junior or mid-level on I try to make sure that we talk about remote work during one-on-ones and that I make sure they have stuff outside of work to focus on or at least that they have a handle on this type of arrangement. In the first year I started doing this in 2018 I tried spending a couple of weeks just working and not leaving my apartment and by the end of it I had gone pretty toasty.
People forget that just as individuals have to work differently to do remote work, managers have to manage differently to do it too. To truly transition will require different habits of mind and a good understanding of what we actually need as people to survive.
That's because the quality of juniors has changed. 20-25 years ago a junior was a self taught senior with no resume experience. Companies would throw you into something and you sank or swam. You were just happy to work with a computer all day. Most of the developers back than were men and you had to leave work to meet the opposite sex. Work was never going to meet all of your social needs.
Is the debate wfh is worse for these juniors or these types of juniors didn't exist before and won't with the rise of llms. Why cater to them now? Aren't they a product of over inflated salaries and expanding the industry too rapidly so quality of candidate drops? Isn't that correction going on right now?
These people should maybe go to co-working places then. Can still work without the butts-in-seats managers over looking every move you make while also getting the social aspect.
I don't want to work next to random people. I want to work with my co-workers. I don't want to have to come in every day for no good reason. I want to be able to come in to a shared space with my coworkers and have a productive day with them. Trying to bring a group of people into a coworking space doesn't work if there are more than 2 people.
Yeah but you can't force people who don't want to come to the office to come there just because you prefer it that way. And in any case, I'm sure there would be more than just 1 person who'd prefer a social aspect / whose home life prevents them from being productive at home, in which case you could most likely band together into the same co-working, no? Most co-workings I know also rent out entire rooms for companies, not just individual desks.
Unless we're talking remote and international, in which case that obviously wouldn't work, but I assume you wouldn't apply to those jobs anyway.
That way you can get your office and some coworkers, and others can do what is best for them, and the company doesn't have to lease a huge office space. Win-win-win?
Ahh, but you see, as a certain communist era anecdote goes:
A: What if people could choose whether they want to live in decadent West or socialist paradise?
B: Problem is, we want those who want to live here and ones that don't.
And that, in a nutshell is the issue with WFH. There are people who think they know better and feel obligated to enforce that view.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way until I got a car, then it dropped to 1 hour.
10-15 hours per week = 6-9% of my life - including time asleep.
Taking 16 hours of waking time per week, that gives me 112 hours to work with. Now that commute eats 9-13% of my conscious time.
Let's assume a standard 40 hour workweek - 35% of my waking time. Add in those compulsory daily highway joyrides, and conscious time spent on work rises up to 48%. Depressed yet? This includes the weekend. During the workweek you'll spend between (8 + 2) / 16 and (8 + 3) / 16 = 62.5-68.75% of your waking moments on work.
Now consider that car ownership + fuel + insurance could eat up to 30% of an average person's post-tax income.
Fuck all of that, a lot.
Employees can get together at quarterly / monthly off-sites, and juniors should be encouraged to get involved in community activities straight out of college. I'm not sacrificing my life and family time so you can stare at my grumpy face in the next cubicle.
That's a good point. Eliminating commute let me play with my children after school. Even started to have a pizza together for lunch. Started to have lunch almost every day with my wife, instead of my colleagues or looking at our phones in the canteen.
If you’re going to imply the office saves that, worth noting there’s a lot of non-forced organic face time from wfh available from your neighborhoods and communities, and that “Anxious Generation” screen time probably refers to teens and adults piping their lives into a phone, and not the important tradeoffs of staring at a screen in an office park or starting at a screen in your home.
Constantly the office is treated as the only existing socialization source and it really makes me wonder what people’s lives at home are out of work.
Work is half of your waking day 5 days out of 7 - it’s probably your primary source of face time whether you like it or not. You might have more valuable face time elsewhere (family, friends, hobbies) but those 40-50 hours should probably be taken more seriously than they are.
There's a lot more noise from leafblowers and construction that penetrates my noise cancelling headphones at home, than I have ever experienced in an office. There is more in-office noise, yes, but that seems to be better managed by aforementioned headphones.
(FYI: A noise-cancelling headphone works best for hums and other "repeating" noise; construction noise is much less predictable for the headphone to get ahead)
>> I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets
That was more because half the planet was told not to leave their homes. Sure, stopping commutes had an impact on pollution, but the roads were literally empty in major cities - that wasn't because people could suddenly WFH.
One could argue that in an ever so slightly better society all jobs wouldn't require commuting because you could live near where you work. Most of commuting comes down to the other side of the remote work problem, people can only find affordable housing that's so far from their jobs that it requires them to commute.
The hypocrisy is that my company boasts about eliminating carbon emissions with all the solar panels and carbon credits, yet ask people to come in to work three days a week, some of which drive one hour one-way, as if that has nothing to do with the company (it's actually in the so-called "scope 3 emission").
Ha yeah, my previous company had some "most green employee" award, and praising people who biked in or took transit to office - I was told I wasn't eligible because I worked from home..
I tend to see a lot of managers calling for it. I see some workers calling for hybrid (which is perfectly reasonable) but not full RTO. Just my impressions though.
Hybrid is a worst of both worlds in that you still have to live in a VHCOL but also spend half your weekdays in the kind of place you can afford there.
I doubt you'd see many workers calling for in the office every day, no exceptions for in-office workers, which was mostly the norm (outside of travel and customer visits) for many professionals in, say, the 80s. However, there is a subset today that would like to see co-workers with a regular office presence.
Yes, hybrid work is a reasonable position to take, I think. One cannot deny the benefits of occasional in-office meetings/socialization while accepting the benefits of WFH.
Or because the conversation is being driven by the banks that provide liquidity to the S&P500 and, coincidentally, own most of the commercial real estate.
Anecdotal data but UHG one of the largest health care companies in the world had a huge stake in commercial real estate pre-covid. They owned virtually every building their employees worked out of all over the country.
Once covid hit, they saw the writing on the wall and have been liquidating their real estate holdings over the past 3 years or so. I live in Minnesota and they've sold five of their buildings here alone, including one of their older main HQ buildings.
They now have one HQ which is a three building campus and have gone to an almost 100% WFH model with an optional office arrangement where you can reserve a desk if you know you need to be in the office.
Many of the downtown Minneapolis buildings have also changed hands including the Wells Fargo and Capella towers. If anything, what you're seeing is a lot of the S&P 500 companies are divesting their commercial real estate holdings since it doesn't appear as though in office time is going to increase or be anywhere near what it was pre-covid.
It's the same thing as everything else. Everyone cares about those things conditional on business going well. Do I care about Somalian kids starving? Yes. But conditional on my not starving. If I'm starving, and I have just enough money to eat, you bet I'm not sending shit to that kid in Africa. He's going to die. You can bill that as "This guy doesn't care about starving African kids" if you'd like.
>can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
Huh? Yes you can. Probably easier, but in different means. In the office it's much harder to sexually assault someone and get away with it. If you mean it's physically harder to sexually assault someone, well duh.
If someone says they care, observe their actions. This is the revealed intent. The words are meaningless, and cost nothing to speak.
If it is clear someone is being dishonest due to action speech delta, say so, loudly and in a manner that leaves a durable paper trail. Accountability dies in the darkness and silence.
Employers systemically illegally discriminated against employees by falsely alleging that accommodating them with work from home was an undue hardship, and would just point at other employers not doing it to demonstrate this.
COVID forced WFH for business reasons and thus employers are no longer as easily able to illegally discriminate against their disabled employees since it's patently obvious that the accommodation is possible and it doesn't present some existential threat to a business to provide it. It's also that employers are simply more geared up to allow work from home and it's less of an actual burden in time and money.
The entire US business culture, which extends deeply into US culture as a whole, puts employers over employees at almost every turn. What protections workers in the US do have, businesses try to circumvent all the time, not to mention many things, such as the ADA have no concrete definitions for things like what a reasonable accommodation must be (they do have examples of generally accepted things, but it isn't a decree) which allows for all kinds of ways of non compliance.
Not to mention, its unfortunately common that exercising any rights workers have will often work against you, being passed up for promotions etc.
Its strange how much power we give employers over employees, and how regular people defend this, even when its actively working against them.
Average is really skewed though, because the top end is very very high and the more important metric would be net income, not gross income (which PPP does not account for)
If you look at net disposable income, the US is ranked 33rd[0]
You are correct. US is 33rd alphabetically and first by the disposable income.
What I find amazing is you have to really count the rows to get that US is 33rd (alphabetically) as the rows are unnumbered. OP did that and didn't realize the rows are sorted alphabetically.
I have also yet to see a single WFH advocate explaining how to square their replies to objections (usually "managers should find better KPIs") with their theory of the firm (you don't just rely on KPIs, unless you are as good as Bezos at what he does you can't just treat employees as replacable cogs that might as well be replaced by KPI driven freelancers and subcontractors).
> Its strange how much power we give employers over employees, and how regular people defend this, even when its actively working against them.
"Because, one day, I will be a rich person, and I will be able to be cruel to the little people. I don't want to prevent me being able to abuse people if I'm in that position!"
Also, "I am fundamentally smarter/better/more diligent than my fellow employees. My employer might recognize that with more compensation, but my fellow employees will not. They will drag me down and promote the unworthy."
Pitting employees against each other is a classic.
COVID acted like a coordinated forcing function. So it's unfair to claim that things would have been just as easy to move to WFH before COVID. Even the FAANGs of the world had to do a LOT of work to make smooth WFH happen, from working on optimizing capacity for teleconferencing software to actually making their corp networks work smoothly remotely at scale.
There is a difference between having one or two people work from home and have a large percentage of the company working from home. A company needs to be changed both culturally and with infrastructure to make it work well.
I think that’s a harsh take. Your last sentence is where the balance of the truth lies: COVID was a watershed event that ushered in new technologies and practices that have made WFH more viable and generally acceptable.
I worked from home before covid. The only thing that really changed for me was that they increased the VPN bandwidth and started consistently adding video calls to all meetings. The technology and practices already existed.
Zoom and Google Meet existed before COVID. What COVID did was force employers to choose between letting people work from home or shut down. Suddenly, what was impossible a few months ago became totally fine.
It didn't make WFH more viable or acceptable, it exposed the hypocrisy of employers.
You don't think that things are any easier now that most of the workforce has practical experience with video conferencing and how to coordinate with people in the same office?
I think we both learned how broadly possible it was, and also trained the whole workforce in how to do it.
Transition the whole team, and paying for a video conferencing software, to accommodate one person who can't come into the office is exactly what an "undo hardship" is.
In pre-Covid times didn't companies face this same insurmountable hardship when opening a second location? What do you call your co-worker that works in a different office if not "remote"?
I get that some people really like working in close proximity with others even if their job doesn't really require it - but this really seems to be the case of controlling employers demanding their troops trudge into to an office to demonstrate their value in person - pandemic or disability (or just the general annoyance of commuting to work and all that that entails) be damned.
> In pre-Covid times didn't companies face this same insurmountable hardship when opening a second location? What do you call your co-worker that works in a different office if not "remote"?
Teams were normally organized so you'd need the least amount of cross office communication as possible because it was recognized how inefficient it was. So yes they were "remote" but everything was organized to make sure you need to communicate with them as little as possible.
COVID was undue burden on most businesses, a lot of them needed PPP and other programs to survive.
I don’t think it showed remote work was not an undue burden ,it just showed that for many organizations that remote work is possible, not that it is fungible with in-office work.
> But there's nothing illegal nor discriminatory about companies having their workforce be in the office.
Basically, this is the disparate impact argument. You could make a similar argument about having the office only be accessible by climbing a flight of stairs.
>Given the absolutely massive disadvantages WFH imposes on an entire company it's almost certainly going to continue to be considered a unreasonable burden.
I've seen a company spend 10 grand to make a specific door automatically open for a guy in a wheelchair only for that person to move on to a different office 2 months later. So this guy would, get up, shower daily, fling him and a wheelchair into a modified car and get out of the car twice a day, drive over an hour round trip, navigate poorly made sidewalks without curb cuts, go up an elevator, just to eventually arrive at the button on the door so we could of course, celebrate the equality with which they are treated. Oh yeah, and he also had to do a bunch of extra work every day of his life in other ways. But a lot of these problems were related to time he was technically off the clock, so on paper, he was treated equally.
I sort of think it's completely mad the unreasonable burden disabled people have stoically shouldered for so long. I am really happy that COVID has really changed people's perceptions enough that more people seem to be asking for and being permitted accommodations and are generally less stigmatised for doing so. I'd really like to see the research that allowing the disabled specifically to work from home imposes a massive burden on the entire company.
I don't accept the argument that the fact that the majority of the population is not working from home, means we shouldn't allow a minority of the population to work from home. The whole point of disability accommodations is that the accommodations are NOT the norm.
> I really doubt that. Given the absolutely massive disadvantages WFH imposes on an entire company it's almost certainly going to continue to be considered a unreasonable burden.Comments like these make me realize just how much of a insulated bubble a lot of hackernews lives in. Less then 15% of the countries works fully remote and it's trending down.
How am I propagating falsities? If anything you're just confirming my bubble point. I say a very small percentage of the country works fully remote you link to a tech company just outside of Austin having a lot of remote workers and somehow think you're not living in a bubble?
> I say a very small percentage of the country works fully remote you link to a tech company just outside of Austin having a lot of remote workers and somehow think you're not living in a bubble?
Dell is a traditional company, not a modern tech company. It wasn't able to push RTO, and that's telling.
And why the hell the average labor statistics of a country outside the tech sector and office work would be relevant to WFH? There isn't a way to do construction work, mining, transportation etc through remote work yet, so they have absolutely no relevance to this discussion - which makes aggregate labor statistics irrelevant.
Please don't propagate irrelevancies: that link is about a single tech company is Austin TX and has nothing to do with claim about aggregate labor statistics for the country.
The latest BLS data is here:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/telework.htm#data
From the look of it WFH is somewhere between 10-20% depending on how you count full vs hybrid WFH.
Dell is a gigantic, traditional company. If it wasn't able to push RTO, that's significant.
> aggregate labor statistics for the country
Why would that be relevant? There are still physical jobs that require people to go to places to do things. All these discussions related to WFH pertain to the tech sector and office jobs that can be done remotely for the time being.
The parent made a claim about the aggregate rate and its trend. You asserted that this claim is false and then provided a citation that is irrelevant and contains nothing to debunk the original claim (which appears to be true based on BLS data).
You're now trying to change the terms of your original disagreement to be about the tech sector alone. This is fine, I guess, but I would really appreciated it if this conversation would provide actual data instead of an anecdote from a single firm that may or may not be representative of the broader trend.
> You're now trying to change the terms of your original disagreement to be about the tech sector alone
I didn't say only tech. I said tech and office work that can be done remotely. And which of the discussions at hackernews is not related to tech? 0.1%? The proposition doesn't make sense.
That is really freaking cool. Creating a platform that's location independent really helps people with disabilities.
I do think LLMs by enabling people to work indepedently (in adiditon to remote) should add degrees of freedom that would help people with disabilties.
LLMs should enable this by easing creation of work contracts (ie allow more accomodations by changing contracts), automation of most of most business operations, ability to quickly get to "average level" on a lot of business concepts, automation of finances (eg: using Runway).
Hopefully the creative piece of building a business will no longer get drowned out by the operational pieces.
Your assertion that it is unrelated is true, but doesn't explain why someone would take time and effort out of their day to press an arbitrary button. If one was concerned with the conversation, that time and effort would have logically gone into actually adding to the conversation.
Except it's not a comment, it's a question. Personally I find citing the guidelines to be the most boring thing of all. Surely you can't think you're actually presenting something interesting here yourself.
