As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on.
Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?
I'm also in a supposedly "hardware" role. Early in March 2020, the people in my group were all watching the data that were becoming available. My boss came into our work area and said: "You guys can all see what's happening. Let's clear out of here, then we'll figure out what to do."
I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few days later the schools closed, and my family was all working at home. I already had some lab space at home due to my side business.
Now, I didn't really mind working from work. It's a few minutes bike ride from my house.
Oddly enough, things were happening so quickly that even being a few days or weeks ahead of the game meant that we were charting new territory within our company, which is a large multinational. For instance, with no specific location, we started collaborating beyond our original group. We improved our use of rapid prototyping services. We got a lot done despite, I think, having a more relaxed pace of work. Though I work in "hardware," what that means in this day and age is spending somewhere between 0 and 100% of your time programming. I spent a lot of time programming while looking out the window, taking a break and going for a walk, and so forth.
It was also comforting to go back, eventually. I like the people. It could get lonely at home. I'm definitely not a introvert.
I was in a role that did require a lot of talking, in a large health tech company. Oddly enough Covid was a great leveler for the org and I found myself reaching out to people across the world and learning about how Africa leads in certain market areas because of their straight-to-mobile attitude (midwives are fully mobile with cloud connected ultrasound devices in their backpack), I connected with India and that one guy in our team from the US promoted from on a laptop in a corner to a full meeting member. Shortly he was showing his home and we hung out after meetings.
For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.
And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 days a week.
The craziest thing I saw was a digitalization project that was on planning for months and scoped to take a year bwith a sizable team be realized by 3 people over the weekend.
True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.
Same here: I work on speech for a big company and working from the office is terrible. I had to squat the restroom 3 times yesterday so I could work (talk to my phone!)
At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.
Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)
I suggest you dispel of this notion that the players in this game have any sense of rationality or logic about this topic. There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that totally trump all productivity, health, and even the holiest of holy climate change benefits. I don’t think people quite understand the real order of priorities and issues related to remote working. The big corporations are under both pulling and pushing pressures from the government and interests that control it to “put butts in seats” in big commercial real estate. They don’t care about anything else and they are throwing around money and fear to whip everyone into shape.
Yes, there will be some pressure pushing back and dread by corporations stuck between the ol’ rock of competition and the government-favor hard place, but it is unlikely to win out at the corporate level unless some real independent competition rises that is putting on massive pressure by not having commercial real estate capital expenditures.
A small office in a city can easily cost $1M per year, sure there are tax benefits, but they’re not benefits if you are competing with someone that does not have those expenses at all or far fewer, even after paying for team meetups that also fund a family vacation.
I suppose I can imagine that there's C level pressure from their relationship with a mayor of, idk, Palo Alto for a headquarters, or a new build in Austin, but couldn't that also be offset by pressure from smaller governments in areas that are looking to do "digital nomad" revitalization?
Various aspects of the Taiwan government, including the national level, are engaging in big digital nomad pushes. Small counties like Taidong in particular have been actively exploring revitalization through incentive programs, exploratory "hacker house" type events, and engaging with NGOs in the field to advise on how they can get more digital nomads into their county.
Would you mind explaining what these commercial real estate interests are? How does a company or the government benefit from having "butts in seats", all else e.g. productivity, equal?
One is near retail and footfall, coffeeshops, restaurants etc. But it's the government that cares about that and I don't think there are many place where gov has meaningfully intervened in private company policy
I don't see how real estate companies can influence companies/tenants, they don't hold much power here since everyone is shrinking or cancelling their leases
Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty
I work in Finance and we recently decided to sell our building and just rent office space catered toward meeting rooms since hybrid has worked so well for us. I think it just depends on the company's culture and the pragmatism of its leadership.
Even if it's set up with the "right" incentives, internal cost allocation can cause bad unintended side effects at the firm level. I worked at at large bank during the financial crisis. Individual teams got charged an implied rent for the space they occupied to their P&L - sensible because it means you can get a better idea of how profitable they really are. However, they went further and the rent was also higher for "nicer" parts of the building (which the firm owned and did not sublet to anyone). So when lots of space became available as large numbers of people were let go, teams moved themselves to empty space which was "less desirable" so had a lower internal rent. The space they left was left unoccupied, so this didn't save the firm any money. Worse, an external contractor was used to move the stuff between desks so it actually cost the firm money while "saving" the team money.
> it actually cost the firm money while "saving" the team money.
Only in the short term. It left the desirable parts of the building empty. It might be possible to rent out this space. That's what happened when the company I worked for downsized the factory; they just partitioned the building and rented out the empty space.
> Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty
Same here. Leaders up the chain get a "use it or leave it" mail for office space and suddenly everyone is asked to keep those seats warm by coming in x days a week.
Hmm, that could explain what's happening, but this doesn't sound "Finance driven" to me. What those "bean counters" are doing is actually quite rational.
If leadership wants people to RTO instead of just giving up seats, then it's 100% on them.
If you buy 2 machines but only use them at 50% capacity, the only you might as well just buy one machine.
Problem is office space doesn't work like that when the entire team is in on 'office' days to collaborate, you need the all seats. If you right size down to 60% seats (3 days office, 2 home) and have people rotate, you lose the 3 in-office collaborative days because everyday it's likely 30% of people are dialling in from home. You save 40% rent but it's closer to full remote in terms of collaboration.
Because the real estates as well as all of the other business services that manage, maintain and cater to the office spaces and the commuters are owned by the same mega corporations that own a large stake in your business.
You buy land, buildings, out have a contract for these types of things. When there nobody at these locations it makes it appear that these were bad decisions rather than the fact that there was a black swan event that caused a paradigm shift. Some walnut will try to say that the writing was on the walls about covid or about the benefits of remote work but that's mostly contingent on post hoc analysis rather than is situ. And as they say: hindsight is 20/20...
Tldr: fear of looking bad because metrics are more important than actual results
Some responses approached the reason, but they are essentially the behemoth financial interests of the various pension funds of essentially all the state governments and corporations, high net worth family funds, institutional money like university endowments and REITs/IRA/401ks, even many foreign sovereign and pension funds like the Scandinavians, Dutch, Germans, etc.
As you may be surmising, this not only carries rather major domestic risks if pension and other domestic funds start crumbling, but it also has massive implications for foreign countries’ domestic financiers and social stability, but it also has geopolitical implications from it.
During the post housing fraud period, a rather understated change was implemented to encourage accounting to not mark real estate to market value, i.e., record what the market is willing to pay, but rather keep real estate on the books for whatever value one would like to keep it at by various methods and practices.
What that essentially affected was a cooking of the books to prevent on book from showing losses. It is essentially still going on, but especially in commercial real estate since the COVID happenings.
You now still have massive buildings essentially still totally empty, all still valued at full occupation valuation even though they are, e.g., only taking in barely enough to cover operating costs in a freeze state, i.e., minimal services.
This is where things like property taxes come in, as the properties are still assessed at fabricated values, and property taxes are used to fund the local governments, everyone with financial interests in commercial real estate (many, because it was considered very safe) are now crying for mom. It gets a bit off topic here, but I think you get the gist.
To keep property prices high across the board. If one part breaks, the whole front collapses. Meaning that the banks who own the government and own the population will loose their grip on power.
> There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that t
That theory is bullshit though. Yes, there are companies that stand to lose if office buildings clear out. But they're not the same companies that make the RTO decisions. The companies making those decisions could actually gain if they ditched the office buildings... facility cost is some absurdly large line item on the ledger for most businesses.
Without a clear connection between the two, I have to chalk this up to irrationality. Companies are still run by humans, and humans are irrational more often than rational. Especially with something like this, where there's no clear precedent to steer by.
Totally. A lot of corps are ruled by management and sales people. Those often really enjoy talking and connecting, and it is a form of control for them. Of lot of these people think they can't do their job well if the quiet people (IT, devs) disappear into their homes. And they often genuinely think the workforce needs to have meetings and show up to be accountable. They don't really think about what IT people actually need, or they do sometimes but it won't be a decisive factor in the end.
I've worked in places where sales people were seated next to programmers, and the sales people were shouting through their phones continuously. The programmers complained endlessly about all the noise - without effect. First lockdown we had showed an increase of at least 300% productivity - hard and reliable numbers because all output was tracked voluntarily by the team (management never asked for this). Number of builds, commits, releases...everything was way up. It was quite shocking.
As soon as lockdowns were lifted managers began talking about being in the office fulltime, because it was so good to talk to each other and align your work. I remember working in a team that did 1 day a week at the office, that day we couldn't get anything done because everybody was just chit chatting all the time. Even if you wanted to - it was just impossible to focus.
Our security officer (CISO) remarked how the lockdown enabled him to think seriously about a security issue for the first time in almost two years. Isn't that tragic?
Companies are as rational as consumer behavior. You can't make this stuff up. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'd be very interested to hear the perspective of your sales and management teams. Your view is obviously very biased and only tracks "productivity" from the programmers. "Number of builds, commits, releases" off-handedly does not sound like straight progress, typically fast direction changing (adapting to the business environment) from management and sales is what drives profit. Code is not an asset, it is a liability.
The loss of programmer productivity can easily be overshadowed by gains from other parts of the business. I know it's not always the case, and nobody wants to hear that their suffering is better for the company as a whole since it devalues your work, but I would be super curious to hear why the decision was made.
I'm not claiming what sales & management do is worthless, it's just lopsided (in this case). If you force programmers to sit in an open floor plan with people who are loud on the telephone, not once but every day, and not only expect them to perform but also ignore their complaints - it is incompetence and/or lack of empathy. In the end 80% of senior devs walked out and got another job btw, maybe that is telling you I'm not just making stuff up from my own tunnel vision.
Productivity is not progress, for sure. You can be very productive building the wrong thing. I've been there, wasting a year on some crap that was canned. But you need to be able to deliver and not actively frustrate your devs that want to get shit done. Otherwise the 'adapted to the market' is just a scam at best.
btw, not every dev is the same. Some actually do like being in the office, even putting on music and have lots of small talk. That's also fine, if it works for them. And I also see benefit of going to the office myself (once a week or so).
I'm pointing out the pattern of sales & management incompetently projecting their own needs and biases onto the whole company and treating devs as grunt workers, forcing them to comply with their rules and fulfill their needs regardless of how it impacts their ability to concentrate and deliver. Software development is not grunt work.
I see fulltime RTO orders as a reflection of this. Smarter management will understand what devs actually need and take that seriously. Usually this kind of management has a technical background. Office can be a part of that, sure, but wfh invariably is too, I'm convinced.
I've worked for dozens and dozens of managers in my career. Some will go out of their way to buy you the best laptop, even make you coffee and give up the best seat in the office just so that you can work in peace. Because they know that such investments in their staff will pay off. Then, others will loudly interrupt you, deny any small request out of petty resentment, and blame any and all problems on your laziness - that is if they actually show up to notice there is a problem.
The one thing I’ve seen are where companies have tax incentives tied to butts in seats. Usually like 0 property tax, with the government assumption that they’ll make it up in sales tax (lunch, gas, etc.) and taxes from employees that move to the town.
But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.
Companies like Amazon literally own billions in office space. Making that space valuable again with RTO policies, especially if you create an RTO trend, a way of enabling them to sell at their previous values.
Do they actually "own" it? I work for a large company who spent millions building a new office and then immediately sold it to a different company so they could lease it instead of owning it (apparently this looks better on the books!)
Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.
We do see this occasionally. You'll have some private equity group buy a restaurant chain like Red Lobster. They make RL lease the real estate from them after having RL sell the real estate to them. Sometimes it's not restaurants, I think this is what murdered Toys'R'Us (correct me on that if I'm wrong).
But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.
Amazon used to lease several buildings from Paul Allen for years but ended up buying them outright, and then going on a construction binge beyond that.
If I have to choose between "the owning class colludes" and "the owning class is acting irrationally, and just coincidentally happen to act in accordance with the interests of other members of the owning class", Occam's razor points me toward the first.
The first is a complex solution that would require many elements to work. The second requires nothing at all; it couldn't be simpler. Why would Occam's Razor point you to the first?
The simplicity of "it's all just a coincidence" is about the same as "it's all just magic". And you would be right about the collusion explanation's need for some elements to work, were it not for the fact that we see those elements working together in broad daylight. They attend the same universities, join the same clubs, they even have a town in Switzerland that's become synonymous with the owning class meeting up (Davos).
The people we're talking to don't really understand those concepts. Or possibly they just reject them implicitly (which would be an even stranger explanation).
Yes, evil rich people hiding in the woodpile, snickering while silently watching through their Monopoly Guy monocles... that's the only sane explanation.
The "owning class" consists of a bunch of companies managed by a revolving door of middle management and an even faster revolving door of upper management. And they don't own a damned thing.
Not coincidentally, it is because of their bias, not some hidden conspiracy.
Occams razor requires you to drop assumptions that aren't required to explain a thing. A conspiracy involves a lot of extra stuff, furthermore it is often hard to find evidence for - usually because they just don't exist. There are so many problems with them, it should really be a matter of last resort.
Conspiracies do exist of course, but I feel you should only use time to explain the world if you have sound evidence, and still be open to falsification.
It is not bullshit, though it does not apply universally either. In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.
That being said:
Deflating a real estate bubble is painful, just ask China. By artificially keeping up demand for office spaces through unnecessary RTO, banks and governments avoid having to go through that, at least for the time being.
And yes, with (partially government-guaranteed) mortgage-backed securities and all that, large-scale devaluation of commercial real estate is going to be a huge pain.
In NYC where the vacancy situation is particularly dire, politicians have been banging the RTO drum for a while.
> In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.
I find this argument uncompelling as everyone can obviously see that things changed since February 2020, and sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad. It could easily have been the correct decision to acquire more office space years back and it could just as easily now be the correct decision to divest that office space if more workers are remote, and it's not anyone's fault for not having seen into the future that there'd be a global pandemic.
Certainly nobody will blame managers for real estate decisions which were made prior to 2020. But a large number of companies revised expectations that workers would return to office as late as Q1 2023 and some even later.
> sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad
Sure. In a rational world, the office space costs are sunk and everybody just moves on. But seeing that RTO just decreases competitiveness for hiring without hard benefits to show for, this indicates that the decisions are not rational. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to fall for, and that is even before considering how business leadership roles attract narcissists who have a hard time taking blame for anything.
‘Be careful what you wish for’ - if remote work is the norm, there is all the sudden massive downward competitive pressure on salaries, as now people can work from much lower cost of living areas. Or even lower cost of living countries.
Either officially, or unofficially.
What globalization did to manufacturing, remote work is going to do to knowledge work.
And in most cases, if the bosses give up on RTO, they’re going to be explicit about this. Because why not?
I don't think that is an issue. Yes, companies which insist on RTO have to pay more, but as extra compensation in order to make up for the difference in time and money spent commuting.
But I'd argue what could be outsourced profitably has been outsourced already. And countries which welcome digital nomads who "work from home" while visiting on tourist visas are getting fewer also. In fact the Thai Government launched DTV which can be seen as precursor to measure and later capture (read: tax) some of the benefits of that for themselves.
Remote work means ‘outsourcing’ for a FAANG includes Ohio (prev. Sunnyvale), not just India.
And if you think this isn’t having an effect on offered labor rates, available positions in certain countries, etc. then you’re not paying attention to the current market.
There are massive shifts to offshore work at most FAANGs actively going on right now. But it takes time.
Are there attempts to crack down/extract extra taxes? Yeah. But most are ineffective and/or don’t meaningfully change the economics. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed/extracted from the super high peak of Silicon Valley comp (for one example).
A lot of folks in the US are just waiting to see what happens before they move, or are stuck with high mortgages.
The pension funds owning the org also own the office it rents. Could pay rent in shares or scrib..
You dont want to explain to a retiring generation of "scream it into relity"-babyboomers that there retirement plan is wonky, especially after investing fiscally conversative.
> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work!
Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".
I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I get to see people, move around more, and when I’m at home, it truly feels different from being at work. It’s been a game-changer for me.
I went remote a few years before Covid and I felt a bit isolated, but then I realized I had too much of my social life tied up in my job. Having hobbies and interests outside of work is so much better for my mental health and I wouldn’t swap it for anything, especially a 40 min commute.
I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.
Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.
As a layoff strategy, I would expect it to be counterproductive. The people most likely to quit skew toward high-performing individuals who feel confident in their ability to get a remote job elsewhere. And vice versa.
A lot of companies aren't trying to hire the "best" programmers. Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.
The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.
I work with an Amazon engineer who has been working on storage systems since 1990 (NT kernel) and is an absolute wizard. He could probably write a durable concurrent B-tree in an afternoon.
That's not always true. Layoffs can spur growth if you are dropping dead weight, for example by eliminating under performing business units, consolidating redundant functionality, or simply correcting previous bad decisions that led to over-hiring.
If you are looking for freeing resources that you can redirect, firing your "resources" won't help redirecting them... unless you think you don't need the people that are working for a while at your company and can get better ones by hiring.
But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.
Firing 50 employees with skillsets you don't need to hire 50 employees with the skillsets you actually need will very much help redirect your resources. It's pretty tough to transmute an accountant into an engineer.
Those aren't layoffs - at least as they're commonly implemented - they're performance based firings. Layoffs are done in a mass manner and tend to be highly inaccurate - they're often based off of BS kpis.
Performance based firings are when you fire individuals for their performance. Every example I gave is a layoff where large numbers of positions are eliminated and the employees let go regardless of their performance.
You have a point: the best engineers do tend to have an underdeveloped social life. On the other hand, the ones that love to suck up are the ones with the great social skills.
Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.
Oh, I'm certainly taking it with a giant pile of salt alright, because what you said was insulting nonsense pointed directly at remote workers. And you can't say don't draw generic conclusions when you tried to do exactly that.
The very first words of my initial message warned you I am talking strictly about my team.
I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.
Sheesh, why should it be unpopular. It's called having a preference/choice. Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice. Some like you may not mind, but for others it might be hell...
It's unpopular because the positions aren't on equal footing. In order to achieve the in-office scenario you HAVE to force people into the office. Because the office itself has no value - it's a building. The value is the people there.
That's not the case with WFH setups. WFH scenarios do not care where people are. They could be in the office, in a stairwell, or on the beach.
So one position is inherently one of control, and the other is one of freedom. Maybe that's controversial to say, but to me it's plainly true.
"If anyone has an office in a building, then everyone must have an office in that building and must be forced to work there."
And I just don't follow that. Why must it be this way? So that the office is full?
If so, then: If having the office full every day is an important metric and WfH interferes with that metric, then the problem is not that the people make choices.
Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
> Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.
The problem is literal vested interests in commercial real estate. Not just in the sense that the company itself owns their offices, but many of the local businesses around those offices are popular investments for upper management. (Amazon in particular isn’t a free-lunch workplace, so at least when I was there, there were tons of lunch spots scattered amidst the Amazon campus.) If people don’t RTO, a lot of money stands to be lost, especially since Amazon was investing heavily in both their expanded Seattle campus in the Denny Triangle and HQ2 when COVID hit.
I would agree, but I have to ask: where's the cutoff?
If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.
No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.
Perhaps extroverts who can only thrive when in the company of others should stick with careers that require the company of others, instead of those careers that can be accomplished hundreds of kilometers from society (in a cabin in the woods).
I don't think you should. I just think that the in-between is quite worthless. Why not have fully WFH and full RTO companies for people to choose from according to their preferences? I realize that's not the subject matter of the article.
Because it wastes a lot of money catering to extrovert inclinations.
If 10% of the workforce loves pizza and the other 90% is lactose intolerant should we order pizza for the office every day and just let 90% of it go to waste? This is only really a discussion because working in an office was the norm for so long.
I apologize for callously extending your argument. (I'm still recovering from too many years on Reddit.)
I have some thoughts: Things change. Or at least, things can change. Or at least, things should be allowed to be able to change. (Usually.)
There was certainly a time when a news reporter worth their salt would never be very far from the office unless they were engaged in field work -- after all, the office was where the calls/faxes/wires/twice-daily mail/walk-in stories showed up, where the archives and typewriters and other business machines happened to be located, and where the copy editors and printers also were located.
But these days: A news reporter can potentially assemble their story from wire sources wherever they are. They can get a whiff of a scoop and be on an airplane to get closer to the source rather quickly, and can even continue to write their story and communicate the whole time that they travel. Sending a draft for review or editing is as simple as sending an email -- and this can be done without wires from just about anywhere on earth.
They don't need to go to the office anymore to find a scoop, or to report the scoop -- extroverted, or introverted, or whatever, and that's been increasingly the case for a rather long time.
And that's a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, I think. (Now, if only regular news would simply cease just regurgitating stuff they found on social media and actually get a scoop for themselves...but I digress.)
So, in the past few years: For reasons, we've broadly discovered that some people can do much of the same with engineering tasks at home, and that some appear to even be able to be more productive (in a dollars-vs-quality-output fashion) at such things without ever (or at least, without regularly) setting foot in a centralized corpo office. Some even report an increase in the quality of their life in general when they have this freedom to work...from wherever.
I think that this is a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, too.
---
If an extroverted engineer requires people to be around in order to [try to] do their best work and live their best life, but some/most/all of their peers are working remotely because they found their own happy place, then: That's a conflict of goals.
Perhaps the correct resolution for the conflict is that the extroverted engineer should find a way to apply their abilities in tasks/careers where other people are both inherently and necessarily present, instead of one where other people may have broadly chosen to work in relative solitude or one where people are forced to be present in the office even when that isn't ideal for them.
I mean: Some of us introverts in many fields have been seeking increased aspects of solitude and freedom of movement for a long, long time -- and lately, we can achieve that more easily in a far broader selection of trades. That's good for introverts, and introverts are people too even if they're not necessarily very vocal about it.
But when that's incompatible with an extrovert's own proclivities, then: Perhaps things have simply changed, and perhaps the extrovert may need to change with them if they require people to be around to try to most-effectively live their own best lives.
You don't necessarily. Optional WFH or coworking arrangements let you come into the office if you prefer to, but let people who would rather WFH do so if they prefer to. They were pretty common even during the pandemic, eg. in my time in the startup scene probably 70-80% of founders worked out of a coworking office instead of their home.
Optional WFH is the one thing called "WFH" on the vast majority of cases. The few places that mandate you not to go to the office all make sure to make that position clear.
I’m currently job searching and I tend to just see (remote) or (hybrid). It usually requires me digging into the description to see if a company has an office I can go to.
Some that are hybrid optional list themselves as (remote), but do so fully remote companies.
Because it's really hard for a company to do both. Even if it's a remote first and the office is just a place to do zoom calls. Human nature will divide it into two camps with social bonds being stronger within the remote/on office groups than across.
Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.
So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.
Some coordinated office presence + some WFH is a good mix that reduces commute times, increases WFH productivity (because in-office interactions lead to pressure to deliver), and maintains face-to-face access.
Teams that are relatively co-located geographically can coordinate to come into a location regularly on the same days. That really didn't happen where I worked and, as far as I know, the company continues to shed real estate. I'm not sure the execs especially liked the shift but, starting from the base of a fairly remote-friendly company, COVID just largely shredded whatever in-office culture there was for better or worse.
So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)
Think this is like a lot of things that work in theory but don't work in practice. You think you'll get the best of both worlds but really you get the worst of both.
Simultaneously, when I was there, the other thing that was going on was that the company was basically not paying for off-sites any longer. So, latterly, I had immediate team Zooms but was pretty much disconnected more broadly.
There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.
totally depends on the job, team, and culture as well I think.
I thought I'd enjoy going back to the office, until 5 days a week was enforced and I was frequently getting interrupted.
As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home, you have to be deliberate about it. I felt the office just made it more convenient to hang out, but it never really happened because I was too burned out by the work.
I find nurturing a social life much easier when I'm WFH because I don't end each day dead on my feet from being overstimulated all day, being in uncomfortable clothes, etc. It also means I don't have to choose between chores and going out after work/on weekends. (A lot of my job is being available for issues and/or requires waiting on SMEs so I have downtime). And it means my social battery isn't drained by the 40 conversations about coworkers' kids that I don't care about (I participate to create a good social environment, but it's just not an enjoyable conversation topic for me) so I can spend my social energy on people and topics that actually fill my cup.
I used to get drained by uncomfortable clothes without noticing it until I got on the Vuori train. There are plenty of other brands now but the Meta pants and Strato Tech Tee are my go-to's. Sizing up helps too.
Not sponsored, I encourage you and anyone else who suffers from clothing-drain to try different brands too. Stretchy, breathable, and clean/crisp looking work best for me.
Weeeelll, one of the issues is that I'm female and am sensitive to pressure. Wearing a bra all day everyday SUCKS, especially since I'm a very strange size and shape so finding ones that fit costs hundreds of dollars and hours of my time. But God forbid men be aware that we have breasts and that sometimes they dangle or have nipples.
Sizing up also doesn't work for women - we look slovenly then unless we go tailor everything which is more time and $.
I prefer being able to work in a sports bra and sweatpants.
The primary reason females have to wear bras in professional environments is because men sexualize them. I find them horrifically uncomfortable.
I was using hyperbole as a rhetorical device to point out some of the absurdities of professional dress codes - I would have thought that was evident from context. Imagine a man who worked in a building that doesn't allow shorts even though it lacks A/C; he might make a comment along the lines of 'god forbid the customers know we have legs.' Or men who are in professions where they have to wear full suits in the summer.
I talked about it because my femaleness is directly relevant to why I feel uncomfortable in professional clothes since the biggest reason is bras, which men don't wear.
Dude, it was a direct response to a suggestion to try different brands of clothes. I simply responded by pointing out a different, unseen variable - that clothing requirements in professional spaces differ by sex and unfortunately there's not really an opt out for uncomfortable clothes in my case.
I'm a woman. I have breasts. They impact my life in some ways. Sometimes that impact is relevant to a discussion - in my case, it's a factor in why WFH is more comfortable. I have sensory issues that are probably familiar to the numerous people on HN and, since HN is generally full of curious people who have a cultural disdain for doing things 'just because' or following uncomfortable social norms for no reason, I shared a variable that may not have been considered because a lot of people here actually like being introduced to data they hadn't incorporated to their worldviews yet.
If you can't grok hyperbole, I'd recommend looking up some middle school Language Arts lessons.
Also, sexuality =/= gender, and mentioning that I have breasts and that they're a statistically unusual size isn't 'exerting' anything any more than Yao Ming complaining about clothes/shoe shopping would be. If you can't hear someone talk about their body without sexualizing them, that's a you problem.
Looking good and all tailored helps, but maybe you can contribute to the trend of women wearing comfortable, looser-fitting clothing. Seems popular with the youth, and doesn't always look slovenly. Can't beat the hoodie imo.
I'm a huge fan of Zoomer fashion and the minute they reach enough critical mass in the workforce for me to adopt it professionally, I'll be there. Or once I finally have enough wrinkles/am in my 40s so nobody mistakes me for one of the kids with all the attendant headaches that brings. (It's super interesting to me how generational fashion rolls into the workforce - I can wear skinny jeans or jeggings to work now because Millennials are a decent enough chunk of people writing the dress codes now. I remember when the only option were those stupid trouser pants, but I thank my lucky stars I wasn't working in the pantyhose era. Fuck. That.)
No, that idea has completely eluded me for the two decades I've spent in the workforce.
My bra size isn't even manufactured/sold in my country, and at one point in my life I was a size that was so rare one company in the world made it.
And this is without getting into non bra issues like my shoulders being much smaller than my bust by size and while some alterations are possible, changing the shoulders requires essentially redoing the entire garment if that can be done on a garment at all. Truly fitting professional clothing would essentially require bespoke or made to measure clothes and I'm not rolling in money. (And even if I was, I'd prefer to spend it on weird tinkering hobbies like the rest of you.)
The clothes that fit me best off the rack involve substantial amounts of stretch and are too casual for the workplace. (Mostly tops; skirts are very easily altered).
I’d just find it easier to make plans when I’m already in the city, rather than wrapping up and travelling into the city and arriving a bit later as a result.
One of those things where I’m happy to hang out with a friend for an hour so if I’m already out, but travelling there only to return after an hour is less attractive.
that’s generally what happens when you / the people you work with are socially awkward autismos. i hang out with several colleagues outside of work multiple times a week, and consider them friends
I'm very much a prefer-to-work-in-the-office-with-the-people-I'm-working-with person, but I've not made many long-lasting friends in my 24 years in the workplace since leaving full time education. Many short-term friends, yes, but not long-term, compared to the balance of people I've met in “hobby time” & similar.
I don’t think it is a problem at all though - I don’t look for friends at work. I have an active social life _outside_ of work with people whom I choose to spend time with.
> As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home
If you're happy with token interactions, sure. Your colleagues are right there (even talking to you while you try to work!). But IME, and from what I hear others say on HN and elsewhere, those aren't really "friends". The relationships are very superficial. How many of these people would help you move? With how many do you keep in contact when one of you changes jobs? I know exceptions exist, but those seem to be rather rare.
So, if you actually want a deeper relationship, you still have to look for it deliberately. Only now, you have even less time to do it, since you're stuck in the office for 8 hours a day and possibly a few more depending on your commute. Whereas if you're at home, if it's not practical to go have lunch with a buddy or something, at least you can deal with some of your chores that can be time-consuming, while not requiring you to interact with them continuously, like laundry, waiting for a delivery, slow cooking something, etc.
I think it’s a little condescending to call them token interactions. They can be, but they also don’t have to be. I’ve worked in teams which were like little families while they lasted. I’ve had co-workers become real friends whom I still see many years after we stopped being co-workers. I’ve also had co-workers who were token interactions at best. I think it completely depends on who you are as a person, and also who you work with. Even if you don’t become life long friends you can easily have valuable social interactions with co-workers. Just like you can grow apart from friends. It’s all depending on the situation, and most often on you. At least in my experience.
5 days on office places are silly in my book. They’ll lose anyone talented enough to get another job. I’m an in office person for the most part, but if you take away my flexibility I’m frankly just going to work for someone who gives it back to me. Why wouldn’t I want the ability to work from home when I need to pick up the kids early or similar? In my experience the best of both worlds is when you let people work where they want but try to staff your teams with half of each preference or with people in between and then label certain days as preferred in-office days. Notice how I said preferred and not enforced. I my teams it has usually developed sort of naturally, often depending on what is for lunch.
Agreed! At the end of the day, humans at work are still humans, and can form any level of human connection with their coworkers. Long-lasting friendships that persevere past being coworkers isn't super common, but that's because making those friendships isn't super common in general. I think the very real human connections we can make with coworkers is a large part of why it can be easy to confuse mutual loyalty between coworkers with loyalty to a company (which is effectively never mutual because companies don't operate in a way that incentivizes caring about the feelings of individuals).
That doesn't make it reasonable to _force_ people back into offices though. Companies requiring in-office work so that the workers can experience social interaction that they don't have time for outside work sounds pretty dystopian, and arguing for that for one's own personal benefit at the cost of others feels pretty selfish to me. To be clear, I think it's totally reasonable for a company to hire someone with the understanding that they'll be in-office, but the issue with what's going on now for me is that plenty of people who were hired with the understanding that they _wouldn't_ ever have to be in an office are now being told that they need to. I'd argue that forcing someone originally hired remotely to pick between coming into the office or resigning is effectively equivalent to firing without cause, and it's disappointing that it isn't viewed that way legally.
You've never had lasting relationships with co-workers?
A significant percentage of my social circle is former coworkers. I still meet up with some that I haven't worked with for over a decade. Or even several decades if you count pre-career jobs.
It'd be pretty weird for me to assume those interactions have to be token interactions.
I've been friendly with most of my co-workers, but aside from the two above, I wouldn't consider any of them "friends". As in we'd never randomly hang out outside of after-work drinks.
> Even more unpopular, you have a choice to work. To work at Amazon.
I had coworkers at Amazon who never lived near any office and were hired with the understanding that they'd always be remote. After several years, they were told to "return" to an office that they never worked in before hundreds or thousands miles away or to resign (without severance of course, since it's "voluntary", and of course refusing to quit or move would lead to firing "for cause"). Are you saying that this is okay because it's Amazon, and their employees don't need to be treated as fairly as anywhere else, or are you arguing that this should be allowed anywhere? I can't imagine why this would be reasonable at any company, but I can't tell if this is an anti-Amazon sentiment or just a consistent opinion that seems crazy to me.
Ex-Amazonian here, but outside the US. How come refusing to quit would lead to firing “for cause”?
Wouldn’t that be some constructive dismissal, or am I misunderstanding the US labor law?
When I was laid off through the PIP’s way just before the 2022 official layoffs, the first thing I questioned was if they were firing me for no cause, and I collected both Amazon’s severance and the government mandated severance for non-cause dismissals.
Correct. Every job that can be done remotely can equally be done very remotely. At home tech workers compete in a global marketplace. My job requires me to be in the office, not by anyone's choice. It's a legal requirement. That offers me protection should cuts ever come.
Hah. One of my clients is in German insurance tech.
They thought the same as you and started recruiting from around the world.
They said that German employees are just too expensive.
For comparison, a PHP software developer in Germany usually has a salary between 50k and 70k (between 31 and 42k after taxes), which is far from what's being paid in the US.
But of course, you can still get cheaper ones from other countries.
Well, it turns out that these specific German business cases, which are hard enough for the average German developer to understand, are even harder to explain to someone if there's an additional language barrier between them.
Most people using that software don't speak English, so there's always a proxy between the developers and the stakeholders.
I could write a lot about this (I actually deleted two very long versions of this comment here already), but I really would not recommend that any company recruit too many people from outside of its own country, apart from a few exceptions where that fits the business model.
Having some diversity in your team structure can help, but as with most things, too much is not good.
But many companies will have to learn that for themselves.
I have already seen some that did not survive that lesson.
Yes and no. Everyone on the team tries to be cognizant of time zones and coworkers availability. Trying to schedule meetings across multiple time zones quickly limits available working hours.
This isn't necessarily true -- language, cultural, and timezone barriers do exist and will come up, which makes it still advantageous to keep WFH employees domestic
The laws are just the embodiment of the requirement, not the requirement themselves. Many jobs involve information and processes that simply cannot be handled in a home office environment. For instance, there aren't any work-from-home air traffic controllers. Nor do many companies let certain trade secrets be discussed outside dedicated facilities.
Maybe not _equally_ but yeah, this is a key point. There's not a good way to place this bet, but I bet the day comes when the full-remote advocates will rue that advocacy, or at least, many of the Americans will.
At the risk of caricature, it seems like there are two camps:
1. WFH is amazing and just as good for productivity and back-to-office is just a flex by evil managers.
2. WFH is bad for global productivity and so we need back-to-office.
Seems pretty straightforward that if #1 is right, then full-remote companies will have a massive competitive advantage, and the issue should be adjudicated decisively once more companies implement b-t-o.
The game is rigged. There is always more behind the RTO. Examples include - political pressure to prop up downtown businesses (and real estate), easy ways to lay-off without having to announce it, hiring cheaper younger workforce as opposed to expensive senior workers, etc.
You’re assuming a fair world. It isn’t. As an employee the game is rigged against you.
I agree the world isn't "fair" for most definitions of the word. Unlike many, I don't attribute zero weight to human pettiness that desires a sea of toiling workers as a prestige accent to an executive's self-image.
But also unlike many, I believe that that weight, whatever it is, to be overwhelmed by the colder calculation of profit, growth, etc.
If our corporate overlords could get it done with 50% of the present workforce fully remote, they would, happily. Even better if they were in Bangladesh. Which is another reason to be careful what you wish for.
Yes and the profit in this instance is from resignation. That profit motive is also short term over longer term, who cares if it's not in the long term interest of the business, think of their bonus.
What about "whether WFH is more or less productive is irrelevant because people hired with the understanding they would work remotely shouldn't be forced to 'return' to an office they never worked in?" Sure, maybe it's more profitable for the company to have all of their employees in the office, but plenty of other things are more profitable that we also have decided as a society aren't reasonable, like paying below minimum wage or flouting safety regulations. If a company didn't think it could make a profit while employing remotely, they shouldn't have hired remote workers in the first place.
Most times I mention online preferring to not work remote I get people calling me some sort of corporate shill, or worse.
(Or the posts just get downvoted to oblivion by people who can't articulate their objection more meaningfully than that!)
> Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice.
The problem is that it is genuinely hard for a company to support both (and/or flexible mixes) well, and if you ask for a little of the old way it becomes a tribal binary us-vs-them thing. I work in the office most of the time because I prefer to keep work and home separate, and I find I work better that way, but I'm still working on a remote team because practically everyone else is remote. We have a day-per-week policy (well, more of a string suggestion) but most people ignore that.
> It's called having a preference/choice.
Unfortunately while people are usually all for being flexible when being flexible means doing things the way they prefer, being flexible in both directions is rarer than it should be. For instance: I dislike phone calls and video calls, to the point of significant anxiety, but trying to get people to just send me an email or IM instead has been an uphill struggle with some. Of course I'll clench my arse and take part in a call when it is the best way to deal with a situation (as it sometimes really is) or because there is no choice (perhaps it is dictated by a client, or those up high), or the dailies and other regulars (calls that are habit/routine are less of a problem) but otherwise I much prefer to communicate in person (“in person” in person, not virtual in person) or by text mediums.
If I leave this tech job, or lose it for any reason, I think I'll have to retrain for a different industry, even if that means taking a hefty pay cut, heck even if that means mind-numbing minimum wage work. Working on a remote team is not great for my mental health, and it very much seems to have become the norm. Luckily in current DayJob we have found some sort of balance that works well enough, and I've been here long enough (and I'm sufficiently good at what I do) to be inconvenient to dispose of, and the people who wouldn't take the hint about not wanting to take a call for a chit-chat are no longer here, but at some point that might all change.
The whole "us vs them" being manufactured in "remote vs onsite" is really suspicious to me. I have never actually heard from a single person who wanted to force remote people in, or a remote person who wanted to force onsite people out of the office. It feels like the owner class is trying to build a fox-and-the-grapes narratives around the people they've forcibly RTO'd to try to get some kind of grassroots-shaped support for their forced RTO policies.
It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).
But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.
Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.
But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.
An englishman, a scotsman and an irishman are marooned on a desert island. Afer a long year one of them finds a lamp, and when cleaning it up a genie appears.
The genie offers them one wish each
The Irishman says 'sure i'd give anything to be back in galway, stuck in a snug, with a pint of porter' and <poof> he's gone.
The scotsman is amazed and roars 'take me back tae glasgae!' and in a similar puff of smoke is gone.
The englishman, looks around and says 'I say, its going to be awfully lonely around here without those chaps around, can you bring them back please?'
Yeah, I'm not sure what the OP is talking about. There's definitely a sense of irritation at my office when you've got 4/5 people in office for a meeting and we have to dial in to talk to the 5th who is remote, especially when they could have come in.
It should not be. I work from home 100% now, but feeling alone is a very real issue for many of us. I have friends I talk to during the day via IRC or one the phone, regular chats and video calls with colleagues and managers, family is right around the corner and I try to get out every day and talk to people.
For some the isolation is wonderful. For others, like me, it's amazing for doing focused work, but I also need people in my life. For some problem arises when their sole social circle is people they work with. If you struggle to talk to people you don't know then coworkers quickly be an "outlet" for socializing.
I've been working primarily from home for 12 years now, and I can absolutely understand these feelings.
I don't think I'd enjoy it at all if I didn't have so much family and loved ones around, just sitting in an apartment all day by myself. What interaction you have with co workers with so much fewer social cues can hurt more than it helps, really.
I'll bet you many managers in favour of RTO feel exactly like this when they work from home, and base their decisions on the way they feel.
In office is a mixed bag. Sometimes there are genuine people there who could become true friends. On the other hand, there are those that talk through their smiles. The two are sometimes indistinguishable and it can be hard to determine whether those office relationships were hollow or not. In a best case, they are not hollow. In a worst case, you think you have a support network and friends and don't spend as much effort to find genuine community connection. Then when it comes time to leave, or change team - the relationship evaporates leaving you worse off than before (still isolated, but now also older and missed opportunity). It is a spectrum, true friends I believe are somewhat rare in the workplace.
Another dimension to that spectrum is a development of a working cohort. Essentially a half dozen people or more that hire each other at new jobs and move together from company to company. A true best case there us to meet a potential co-founder.
Though, I have had a remote colleague whome we spent days on video calls together working on a problem. I am not sure remote is in-office is actually mutually exclusive. The people willing to spend 5 hours on a call peer coding with you might be the same that you actually become friends with in office
> get to see people
> move around more
> feels different from being at work
I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?
Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
While I prefer remote it’s undeniable the vast majority of an adult’s socializing is done at work. Can you do it outside of it? Maybe, but probably not. Most of your friends will also work or they’ll have families and not be able to come out often.
Unless you have dozens of friends already the likelihood is you’ll often be alone after work.
Thankfully I’ve made my friends and have a family but if I was just starting out I don’t think I’d even have met the people that are close to me. My friends are mostly from work or work friends of my college friends.
People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
I think this WFH epidemic was an opportunity to enlighten a lot of people. There are many, many people (myself included), who were husks of human beings. Alive, technically, but not living.
We work, we eat, we sleep. We had money, but at the end of the day we were losers. I knew this to be the case when I realized what I looked forward to what dinner. Eating a meal was the highlight of my day, and the highlight of every day. And then the weekends I stayed in, exhausted from work.
When people lost the office, it was an opportunity for them to realize they had absolutely no life. No friends, no socialization, no passions, no desires. Some realized that and took control of their life, and others took offense to that realization and demanded the office back.
It was very much a matrix red pill versus blue pill situation. Live in lalaland on autopilot? It's tempting.
>People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
Not even close. Hobbies are done in groups, which can be stood up in your local area. This shit was figured out in the 1700s FFS, with no internet, with no online message boards to coordinate preferences, with no real choice in WHO they interacted with.
We invented "third places" like coffee shops, where average people could show up, buy a coffee, and chat with literal strangers, where you would often get into discussions about philosophy, politics, this newfangled "science" stuff, and all sorts of topics, usually involving people guessing about things they didn't even have a right answer to. But that didn't matter because the point was to interact with strangers.
The scientific method was literally a bunch of wealthy people exploring a brand new hobby by finding each other in "journals" (basically hobby magazines), sending each other snail mail, and chatting about their different experiments.
Companies have decided they can just stop supporting an open environment, and charge you for the right to exist, and now we don't have a third place in the US, because nobody has the time or money or energy to socialize after work, because work takes so goddamned much out of us.
So no, please do not force me, who has a perfectly functional social life and several great friend groups for life, just because you don't know any other way to meet people. That's not my problem and forcing me into the office so you can take advantage of the requirement that I am there to socialize with me is not an okay solution.
> We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
Well, anywhere I can be sure no external person can see what I'm doing on screen. So a cafe will work if I can sit in a corner with my back to a wall. And even then, I'm giving up my tooling to make work easier on myself and more productive, like a nice, large monitor. Coworking spaces let me alleviate the second part, but the first problem is even more pressing there: now, everyone around me must be expected to understand what I'm doing, and thus is a bigger danger to my companies data security.
I certainly understand your restrictions, but not all companies or jobs require policies that are this strict. I had jobs where that kind of over the shoulder snooping wasn't a concern at all. When you're coding something that doesn't process personal data, I don't see why anyone should care that much. A casual observer can't realistically figure out what you're working on, let alone any "secret sauce" from glancing over your shoulder occasionally. Listening in on a meeting would be far more enlightening.
That is true, and don't get me wrong, I'm happy if that works for you -- people should make use of that possibility far more often.
It's not for possible for everyone, though, and the bar is not "is any IP loss realistic" but rather "what are the policies my employer demands", independent of if they are sensible or not. Make sure you're not getting caught breaking company policy, kids :P
I had the same take when I lived in a large city where each area had a healthy community. People there were friendly, eager to engage in conversation, the city had a lot of recreational sports, clubs, and places where people congregated. It was lovely. I worked from home the last year I was there and I was just as social as I was in the office, just with different people. I even had a rule - I had to see at least one stranger a day, and it was never a problem.
Now I live on the other side of the province, and holy shit is it hard. I've been here for over 6 years and I haven't been able to maintain a single friendship. I could try harder, for sure, but that's my point. It was effortless before, and now it feels like being social takes serious work.
I still work from home, and I've settled into a quieter way of life. It's nice, I enjoy it. That said, I'm not surprised others don't.
I think its having the option and being able to choose. I like going into the office. I talk to people I wouldn't normally reach out to. But I also like being able to be home for deliveries and I know my friends with kids would struggle without it.
I also like the commute. I get in early to miss the rush. I end up walking more. I have the ability to switch from work to home on the way back. After work drinks also help.
That's all based on one 30 minute train that is extremely reliable, air conditioned, and getting a seat. I couldn't do it if I had to drive or take 3+ trains.
I think the main point is flexibility. And that's why many people on both sides of the issue (those with a hard preference for WFH as well as those for RTO) tend to break out the pitchforks: every decision from up high seems to strongly favor either position.
Maybe there are many companies who do allow for flexibility, in which case everybody is happy, so you don't hear about them, since they have better things to do than "not-complain" about their situation.
I'm lucky to work for such a company, and the main issue of discussion these days is whether we like or not the new office decoration. Managers are free to decide how often their teams have to come in, and, from what I hear, their underlings did have their word to say. Some people like coming in often, others less so. But basically, it all depends on who you're working with right now, and whether it makes sense to meet in person. This seems to work great for pretty much everybody.
I work for a remote-only company but use a workspace almost every day. I get to chose my own “office” and the people in it, I also pick the commute I want, this one is just 5 minutes away.
I have a 100% remote job. But my team have decided to go at least every tuesday to the office. We are not obligued, but almost everyone comes to the office once a week just to socialize and talk about our projects and sometimes even to take a beer or two after work.
To me, feels super refreshing to talk to people when Im at the office, and to be fair Im much much less productive in the office. But makes me appreciate when Im at home and when I dont need to be in the car for 1 to arrive my home, take everything and go to the gym.
It feels like, going from time to time to the office when almost everyone is there, gives to the remote working more sense and value. And viceversa.
"There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign." -- Mark Twain
You can come in every so often (weekly) without issue (or by choice).
When you're forced to come in every day, that becomes different.
I work in a similar setup, but we only have 2 office days a month. I still like this very much; you get to meet and socialize with all your colleagues, but you have basically all the advantages of home office and traveling for two days a month is easy.
I think you have touch on an interesting point here... When working remotely you really need to put an effort into keeping a healthy social life balance, otherwise you end up feeling exactly as you describe.
It's easy for days to go on with no "change of landscape", and that can send anyone straight to depression.
Yea, I’ve been working remote for 12 years and that was the first thing I had to solve.
There’s a local tech Slack in my area that I keep up and I have a text group that I’ve built up over the years that sometimes grabs lunch or hits the gym. Keeps me balanced.
I think employers with remote employees can also do a better job in many cases with getting people to socialize. It's definitely easier to socialize when in the office, but several remote jobs I've had didn't really do much for this even though everyone was remote. I feel managers of remote employees need to do more online social events, have a water cooler chat, etc. in order to get team members to talk to each other. I'm currently on a team that doesn't do this well, and it's very isolating to barely know and talk to your teammates.
That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.
That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".
It's not a matter of popularity. Some people need the interaction. Others like me hate it.
This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.
Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.
The issue is that folks like newbies on the team end up left out, and when everyone is off doing their own thing there is often no actual team - which shows up in a lot of non-obvious ways.
I observed this at $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER who wasn't normally a WFH shop. They had some really bad teething pains figuring out how to adapt to WFH at all, let alone keeping people socially engaged.
Not all offices are like that, though! It takes some awareness & outgoingness from leaders and experienced folks, but it is possible to cultivate a socially engaging remote work environment. At my current employer, there seem to be two ingredients: 1) management and mentors who will happily talk about stuff that isn't work-related, and 2) an annual retreat where you do get to meet all of your coworkers in-person, in an environment where bonding is the main purpose.
Nothing prevents them from making meetings to connect with / meet their peers. When you work remotely, you need to change your habits a bit. You have the same type of interactions, it just takes some initiative.
Sure, but sitting next to someone and being able to ask them questions is easy, quick, and natural. And often helps build relationships.
As is sitting in an area and seeing who everyone goes to ask questions, and even overhearing the discussions.
So someone can learn how to phrase questions, what are useful types of questions to ask, what types of questions get someone told to ‘do their own research’ vs gets in-depth help, etc.
For a junior, that is very valuable because they often literally don’t even know where to start.
For someone with more experience, they often either already know all these things, or know how to find them out pretty quickly even without the help of watching what is happening, yeah?
That’s a fault of the existing teammates. I always prioritize 1:1 with new members in my team or my sister teams and make myself available for any onboarding or technical questions.
Yeah I'm just totally not a team player anyway. I would avoid such interactions in the office too, by picking another floor. I'm not a mother hen. Other people are and they like to be that, so it's much better that they do it. They also do this over Teams by the way.
I always maneuver myself into such a place that I have something to work on for myself.
90 min commute time is insane to me. That is a massive amount of time to give to your company for free. If companies want people to come back to the office, they should pay for commute time.
@kwanbix: do you have kids? I feel that's one of the primary deciding factors for working from home. People without kids are much more flexible with their time, whereas people with (small) kids are severely more limited. Freeing up commute time and being able to do small chores like starting the washing machine creates significant happiness, which totally offsets the downsides of not seeing your co-workers (that) often.
Before kids I would also become depressed if I worked remotely full time. But today my "alone time" is already pretty much gone outside work hours so I don't mind being by myself during the day.
Before the pandemic it used to be commonly believed that even remote work shouldn't be done at home and you used to see coffee shops filled with people on laptops (and frustrating people who just wanted a table to drink their coffee and eat a pastry). Obviously during the pandemic we got used to working from home but as you say a big downside is that it removes all distinction between your work and home environment.
My problem is that i really hate flex desks and now you don't get your own office anymore.
But my problem is more with my home: I'm now buying a farm and i don't think it will feel the same way as it does at my flat. Its surprisingly hard to 'get out' to not feel annoyed by my flat. But i don't have a good outdoor view only a small window and i do not have a extra office space.
It's legit. Fully Remote can be seriously isolating/depressing.
Hybrid is probably the ideal; but even so I live 15m from the office and when I go in it's empty 90% of the time anyway. I don't know if I'd take a 45m commute until the kids can get themselves home from school (daily pickup/dropoff) - but I do miss 2h beer lunches on a Tuesday after closing a ticket to blow off stress.
The upvote brigade might disagree, but I certainly didn't mean my comment to yuck anyone's yum. If you want to commute, go for it! It's a free country and all that.
I did feel somewhat isolated when I first started working remote. I also moved to a new city at the same time, and I didn't have much to do... besides work. I had to force myself out into the world a bit, and it got a lot better. It helps that I found myself in a community where I could easily find things that I found appealing.
if you want to see people you can work in a coworking space near where you live without the commute. I dont understand people who want to commute more than one hour a day if they have the choice not to. And even more so if you consider the environmental impact and all the stress that goes with it.
It really depends on your commute. For me I take a 20 minute subway ride but could also choose an hour walk or a 30 minute bike ride. I definitely prefer my situation to working from home 5 days a week. But if I were driving an hour in traffic I'm sure I'd prefer to be remote.
Same. I can't stand working in my home office at this stage. Somethings are easier when you don't have the distraction of a busy office, but many things are a lot easier / more efficient. On-boarding new staff is so much better in person.
Similarly, in the old days when I had jobs where I was expected to wear a shirt and dress reasonably smart to the office, I enjoyed getting changed into other clothes afterwards. It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
I actually try to dress 'properly' even when working from home. I know most people find it silly, but I feel I work better when wearing 'work' clothes.
I'm lucky in that my company closed the office far from me, and consolidated on an office about 15 minutes' drive / 25 minutes' bike ride from my house.
Now, when I weigh 30 minutes of commute versus being cooped up in the same room I was in for the whole pandemic and almost lost my mind, it's easy: office whenever I can.
That said, I'd be very loathe to _have_ to come in to the office. There are whole weeks where it just doesn't work out logistically, and it's nice to be able to work from home.
There is a nice feeling that can come from having a new job, but if I suddenly had to be on the road 7-8 hours a week, I would find that very stressful.
I think this is completely fine. Some people like working remotely, other people don't. I fully expect to see a gradual trend of companies going on way or the other over time, because hybrid really is the worst of both worlds with nobody really being happy.
At first I enjoyed going into the office a day or two a week...but nobody else goes in, and it's even weirder being in a giant office building with just a couple people on each floor than it is staying at home.
It's probably because you don't have much to do outside of work and that is where you get your only human interaction. People who have families and friends typically do better in a remote environment.
I also get depressed being in my home all day every day which is why I go to coworking spaces, cafes and parks. There is endless variation that still doesn’t have to chained to a certain commute.
I experience that as well. But the way I see to combat it is that working from home gives me more energy to go out on my own terms like taking classes, volunteering, etc.
I understand the need for human contact and to get out of the house. But you can achieve that working "from home", too, albeit with some consideration for confidentiality requirements[1]. Usually the place you must work from isn't defined. I work "from home", but once a week I work in the same room as a bunch of locals who also work from home.
A few advantages: 1) you have a wider pool of people to choose to co-work with, since they can have other employers, too; 2) you can choose who you want to co-work with; 3) you get to (mostly) choose which and how many hours you wish to co-work; 4) no stress about being late due to a commute or childcare commitments, since co-working hours are optional.
[1] I deliberately arrange to work on things that aren't confidential on co-working days.
So in office is better for you. What irks so many of us is that companies point to people like you and mandate EVERYONE be like that, because the C suite, whose entire lives and career have been built around having people around them assumes or decries that everyone either is, or should be, like them.
Or worse, the middle management is given authority to give these mandates, and are in their highest level of incompetence and use it as a "power move".
I find it crazy that this isn't the case in the US every time I see this topic come up. You always hear about all the benefits of working for a FAANG, but they're too cheap to even cover cost of transport?
In the Netherlands, and probably a lot of other EU countries, transport to work has to be compensated by your employer. If you live within biking distance this means providing you a bike (usually via a service like Swapfiets these days), and otherwise you get your train/public transport costs or fuel costs if you drive a car completely covered. It's even tax-deductible I think, though I've never bothered looking into that option since I just take my own bike to work.
FAANG pays very well, and money can be exchanged for goods and services.
I know that having benefits like a free bike feels good, but the total compensation you are getting is much lower than that of people that work for big tech and pay for their own transportation.
Well I don't have to pay for any transporation, 'cause my employer can't decide on a dime to force me into the cage 5 times a week ;) I also only live a 15 minute bike ride away, rather than a 2 hour car ride as seems to be the case for many people in the US.
But even ignoring all that, money isn't the be-all, end-all. Having worked in the US for a stint, I'll take my "low" pay in the Netherlands any day of the week over rotting away in a soulless US megacorp headed by legitimate psychopaths, where they can decide to fuck you over at a moment's notice for any reason and you have no recourse.
After all, what good is money that you can't spend? If you gave me a trillion dollars but it meant I had to spend 12 hours of my day dedicated to work, what use is that? I'll take my sane working culture I have at the moment despite me earning marginally less (if you ignore literally all the other benefits of living in the Netherlands, that is) all day, every day.
well, in the netherlands, the median income is roughly 1/2 what i was making at my first job out of college.
considering i also got free lunch everyday, 24 days of PTO, monthly stipends for gas and app subscriptions, 6 month parental leave, it’s pretty hard for me to look at the european market and see the government mandated some of those benefits but to pay for it i’d make roughly 1/3 to 1/2 what i make in the US, and subsidize the poor performers to boot. literal fucking joke to compare europoor salaries with american lol
You are being crude about it, even though you have a good point. The problem with this perspective that I used to also share is that either advantages are largely in the process of collapsing at the moment, i.e., more money in the US and more quality of life in Europe.
Inflation from money printing and immigration is eating away higher salaries and lower costs that made suffering the corporate hell tolerable for many people; and in Europe money printing and immigration is going to collapse the social welfare and quality of life fabric of society.
i’d argue the US is too business friendly relative to pretty much everywhere for us to get worse at a pace faster than EU, which means relatively, we’re always doing pretty good. until another global superpower comes along
If you are unhappy while wealthy you would probably be unhappy without wealth as well, perhaps more so due to the financial stress. Either way, I would rather be unhappy with money than without.
The Netherlands does not have transport cost compensation by law. Various unions have negotiated it for their members and a lot of people have it as part of their compensation package, but it's not mandated by law that a company should pay you for your travel cost.
A company is also not mandated by law to provide you with a bicycle.
You also do not get your cost fully covered if you drive by car. Currently it's capped at 23 cents per kilometer which is not enough for most cars.
It's not a tax deductible, it's just (income) tax free.
That's my mistake then, since I've never worked at a company here that didn't compensate you and assumed it was a given! I can no longer edit my comment unfortunately, otherwise I'd point this out there as well.
I am pretty sure the poster you reply to talks about time not money.
Most tech companies compensate for costs. My current employer doesn't blink paying ~$60 per day for my parking and lunch on days I come to the office, but that still means I spend 50 min each way getting there. My 2c.
It’s all relative. FAANGs have been very high compensation (and good work environments) by US standards, and frankly in comparison to most global standards.
But they aren’t perfect, and they’ve been good relative to other employers.
Having transportation covered is an extremely rare benefit in the US.
Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.
In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.
Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.
Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.
> Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff.
That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.
In hiring threads there's disconnect people have because the employer's goals and the potential employee's goals are different. Candidates often think the employer wants the best employee so will bemoan things like whiteboard coding because some people don't do well in that situation. They're correct about that but wrong about the employer's goals.
The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.
It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.
If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.
The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.
Also 2 x 60m commuting + 15-45m (depending on circumstances) of preparation for the office before leaving. So much waste of one's life!
I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.
Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.
Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )
Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!
Ok, so why is that. I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it. Especially considering that data absolutely does not seem on the side of RTO. What's your theory?
Because they measure the wrong things or is completely driven by sentiment.
Sort of similar, a friend of mine was fired. Ostensibly for not bringing in enough revenue/profit in a consulting business. Very few of his hours where billable, so he looked unprofitable. The issue: He was working on internal tooling, building systems that everyone else rely on to do their jobs effectively. His value was hidden in the work of others, but that's not measured.
When looking a "work from home", you rarely see companies measure job satisfaction, stress levels or even do proper exit interviews. The sort of things you need to keep on top of the keep people long term. Many customers won't report back to your boss that because you sat a your desk at home you where able to help them after your normal working hours, saving time the next day. In consulting tracking billable hours is normal, but if you don't track when and where those hours are worked, you're not going to see that some work better at the office, while others have a skyrocketing productivity boost at home.
Other times you have bosses that wants "butts in seat" because they don't trust their employees. Hell, we had a sister company where the employees sat in a fucking horseshoe configuration at the office, on the "inside" of the horseshoe, so the owner could sit at the open end at check that people where working at all times. Do you think that fucker is going to let people work from home?
I knew someone that didn't trust their employees (small business). In the past they ran a different small business where their own employees would steal from them (not money; inventory) and this lead this person into a life-long distrust of people in general.
The problem though is their new small business employed mostly office-type workers yet they still had that hourly/retail employee mindset. Treated their employees very poorly and had high turnover as a result. Then COVID happened and suddenly everything got better for everyone.
He was forced to trust his employees working from home and they loved it. He, of course, was high anxiety all the time worried that his employees were slacking off. I asked him, "are they not getting all the work done?" and he was very adamant that was completely irrelevant. From his perspective, if an employee was doing anything other than "work" while on-the-clock they were stealing from him. It was a pretty clear message.
As soon as COVID was over he forced everyone to come back into the office... And shortly thereafter he had to sell his business because he couldn't find anyone to work for him anymore. No idea what he's doing now but I still see people with his attitude everywhere (in varying degrees from mild to extreme).
On the plus side that guy would never ever bother his employees after work hours. Which is quite a step above employers that treat their employees as always-available serfs.
The latter means you are positing management incompetent enough that they do not understand that sunk costs should be ignored? I am not saying you are wrong, BTW.
Even worse, in many cases the costs are not entirely sunk. You might be able to get out of a lease with a penalty, if you own the buildings you can sell them. In either case its cheaper to keep a building unused than to run it as an office.
In fact I used the key phrase "sunk cost" directly to imply that, since that's entered the lexicon as a common reasoning error
While business leaders want to think of and portray themselves as these hyper-rational actors whose every choice is either made from ingenuity or total necessity, this is obviously false and I think the prestige and optics of office spaces heavily play into the priorities of managers, especially as compared to people who do any other kind of work
> you are positing management incompetent enough...
Those people are world-class politicians or born super-rich. When you put a selection filter that exclusive in a population, you force every other attribute extremely close to the median.
And the median of competence on any field is much smaller than the mean.
This opens a new avenue I'd never considered: that some of the RTO pressure is perhaps due to keeping real estate prices up. Maybe there is somehow pressure from commercial landlords towards the tenants to keep the building occupied, or as you stated places that own the building don't want it to be devalued by appearing (or actually being) abandoned for years.
>I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it.
The companies already know all about the positive time savings from not sitting in traffic commuting. But they believe that benefit is negated by employees getting less work done at home. My previous comment about employees "saving time" by working from home isn't seen that way by companies mandating RTO : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929902
One colleague, years back, got somewhat famous by negotiating that work would pay for his commute one way. His argument was: "I don't stop thinking about work just because I leave the office and I frequently solve issues on my way home and that's not free".
For some regions, where salaries don't match housing cost, I don't think it's unfair to ask your employer to pay half of your commute. Either you pay a salary that allows relocation, or you pay at least some of the commute time. Again it's not as if work stops just because you leave the office, if you're a developer at least.
And yet all the studies suggest that remote workers tend to work longer hours (presumably guilt over those commute time savings cause them to get rolled into working hours), and can find at best marginal declines in productivity...
1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.
2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.
3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.
Not the parent poster, but companies want people who will deal and cater to their needs, not people who will whine and complain about (even very real) issues.
And employees will typically want companies that will cater to their every whim and pay them very well to be catered too.
Where the two meet is the labor market.
Conditions are changing, and ‘hard’ force is being applied again.
The employee demands are usually simpler: They want their employer to pay the most and inconvenience them as little as possible. "cater to their every whim" is nonsense. Nobody expects that.
Employees know what the job will entail 99% of the time because it's their career focus. For that reason they don't really need much from their employer other than the tools necessary to do their jobs (e.g. a computer).
‘Cater to their every whim’ - have you not seen FAANG benefits and benefit culture?
If you think employees in tech have just been asking for computers and money - for well over a decade and a half - then you’re living in a completely different industry than I have been.
they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day
When my employer tried to make us come back to the office, I flat out told them - school dropoff is at 8:30, the next train is at 8:50, so the earliest I can be in the office is 10, if every train arrival is precisely synchronized, which it never is.
And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.
So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.
Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.
The people who care for your child should themselves tell their employer, in ire, that the earliest they can be at the office is 10, and that they have to leave by 3 at the absolute latest, since they have train commutes themselves.
I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is, and the little voice clip that plays "Next Stop: Braintree" or what have you.
It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).
> I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is
Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?
Great question! The short answer is "Beats me, ask your local transit authority." They're generally the ones who call the shots on what actually gets shown on those displays, and we are the folks who implement that downstream.
When I say "local transit authority", I mean organizations like the BART for the Bay Area, the MTA for Chicago, or the MBTA for Boston, my home town. The graphic designers in those places are often responsible for surprising amounts of the look and feel of a city's public transport, so I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback.
I'm extremely curious about the nationality and residence of a person who uses Braintree (a town in Essex UK with a silly name) as an example but purchases things in dollars
Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)
Limiting it to this sort of context (deliberately excluding web stuff, where there may be more argument): I don't believe there is anything nice the ads are paying for.
Maine has no billboards for several decades now, and miraculously our state has not suffered existence failure, and we still build and sell a bunch of nice stuff.
Never believe a marketer telling you that you NEED marketing. Life will go on even with very limited marketing. You and your neighbors do not need it. Capitalism does not fall apart if it gets more expensive to force someone to learn about your product when they do not want to.
The (almost) same thing happens near Boston's South Station. There are some TVs that show timetables of upcoming trains/buses, except that they added ads. So, if you want to know how many minutes you have to catch a train, wait 30 seconds for the ads to be over first.
The subway system I'm most familiar with has two systems:
1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.
2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.
The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.
But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.
Not that they couldn't reserve on the ads screens a narrow (let's say 100-200 pixels tall) band at the bottom of the screen to show the path with the green and red lights like the (good) ol' system.
Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children and cannot work through Amazon’s meat grinder or do things like support brutal on call cycles. They’re also the ones with bigger commutes and other barriers to RTO, since they probably live away from city cores to buy houses and have space for a family. Meanwhile young people who live in the middle of downtowns in apartments that are near their work probably are unaffected by this kind of change.
Career focused younger people have also been adversely affected by wfh for the last few years in a big way. All the mentorship and networking opportunities have withered. The non career focused younger people are living it up though.
I think they’re adversely affected only if their managers or companies make no effort to find an alternative. Many have no issue. This just seems like the weak justification Andy Jassy has repeatedly pointed to.
It’s not bullshit. It’s perhaps exaggerated, and many of the “work from a desk in a specific building” people are the ones who can’t mentor them anyway, but there are benefits in
It doesn’t have to be, you can mentor people in a fully remote environment, but it’s far harder for most ok both sides - especially for young people and people on HN that think WFH means you don’t actually have to work.
Why is it harder to mentor people remotely? Just call them, have a chat, share your screens, drink some tea. It's not rocket science, and I have done it many times with colleagues.
One could even have the occasional face to face meeting, at the office, at either party's home, at the lab, the shop floor, at a co-working space, or even just at a cafe or bar.
This is exactly it. The few years I had in office were an amazing foundation for my career. I see the same in those who started around the same time I did. Most of my team who was hired remotely are struggling.
The realities of how humans interact. Going for a cup of coffee and asking a colleague to join is a different act than asking a colleague to join you in a Zoom call.
It just doesn't happen, and chatting over VC isn't the same as meeting people in real life anyway. In the office, I'll randomly bump into people I've known from years back and have small chats, but I never in a million years would have specifically scheduled to do so (sometimes I don't even remember their names, just what they look like!).
The office broadcast conversations can be a mali and boni. Sometimes you get updated by a background conversation- sometimes you get distracted by a conversation. It would be great if you could auto-flag a conversation you have on teams as relevant for others or not - and it would just start playing merged into the music of others remote, one way.
This wouldn't work for me because I don't listen to anything when I'm working. You're making the assumption that everyone is just constantly listening to music, but I focus best with silence and with my ears unencumbered. I suppose it would be doable with desktop speakers that would only play something when remotely triggered, but then there's the secondary issue that I'm not always at my desk, vs in the office people can obviously see who's there and who's listening in (and easily go grab someone else to join in as necessary). There's just way less friction to conversations when people are in the same room.
As long as we understand that "true bonding" is preciously close to "no true Scotsman galaxy" :-)
Let's stop pretending that remote work is new. I've worked remotely on and off from the beginning of my career. Majority of my mentors have been remote, at least two of whom I've never met "on real life" - one of whom shared tremendous technical experience over 18 months we worked together three provinces away, other who has taught me corporate life and consulting skills from four provinces away (I'm in Canada, think states:).
I've spent four years as ops manager recently on a troubled project and I agree thay extreme situations under shared duress can build a specific, very strong kind of bond (not the only kind, mind you!). It's just that physical presence is completely orthogonal to it.
I have a hard time believing all this concern is for "young generation and their social and mentoring opportunities". Young generation grew up with remote and social networking infused in their lives (for better or for worse, separate conversation :)! If a senior person doesn't know how to mentor or communicate remote, let's be upfront on that and discuss it openly and coach them. But let's not blame the "juniors" for that :-).
> It works to an extent. True bonding comes from being shoulder to shoulder in extreme situations under shared duress.
People say this, but "this is the kind of true bonding experiences with which I'm familiar" isn't the same as "this is the only way true bonding can occur." I'm certainly old enough to remember the dismissive scoffing in the '90s that true friendships are made only in person, not with people online.
Personally, I have been in these situations remotely too (everybody in a call, screen shared, parallel things going on). I don't get why it has to be physical.
What you are describing is "trauma bonding" - maladaptation of human brain that makes us stay in bad conditions/situations. It is evolutionary adaptation in life and death situation you can not escape, but what you described is not that.
Seriously? I mean to a certain extent you are correct that it's just an excuse...
But if you really think there is no difference between these two things then you are living in a fantasy world.
Proximity does a lot to encourage socialization between super senior people and super junior people.
Without proximity, it's much easier for either side to put off or brush off things that would be good mentorship opportunities. You don't have to go into work the next day and see your coworker face to face to explain why you ditched them on that pair coding session or whatever it may have been.
How do we know there would be a selection for younger people? Someone with a family is perhaps less inclined to change jobs. Someone older is more likely to have health issues or a dependent with health issues, which is an even stronger disincentive to change jobs. It is still not a great job market AFAIK, quitting at the moment is not going to guarantee a new job is available.
Perhaps something of a corollary of the saying, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The Amazon senior folks making these decisions almost certainly have reasons. If people quit, maybe they just don't care who it is. I really wonder if they AB tested RTO. Given it is Amazon, I would put a small wager they have.
Further, the impact between middle managers and individual contributors is uneven in remote work. The article mentioned there was a desire to reduce management. Remote work was an interesting experiment IMO to show the (lack of) effectiveness of middle management. Perhaps the impact to ICs is negative, but the middle management can be more effective. Arguably that would give greater "focus" on the specific KPIs desired by the VP level. Again, would be super fascinating to know the data used by Amazon here, of if this is a rare decision truly made by fiat alone.
Others have mentioned Amazon's real estate holdings. I kinda think that is likely. Amazon made huge investments to stop leasing offices and to build and own their own offices. If nobody is there, the surrounding neighborhood is devalued, in turn devaluing the offices further. It would be s considerable loss on paper. ICs perhaps are about as effective in office under a whip compared to remote, and if some quit - then maybe all the better to reduce head count.
My previous job actually had nice offices, and a pretty cohesive team culture. I still think work from home 2-3 days a week would have been better just to avoid the commute.
I could see it be the other way around, or various factors balancing each other out. From my experience the current young generation is more willing to trade money for QoL , and quit when they feel QoL is bad, than the previous one.
> Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children
How did the last 40 years of tech do it? Were the boomers that invented all this stuff resigning left and right or not have children? Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
I would fully support going back to offices with doors. Unfortunately the tech companies and newer generations brought us open plan offices (because they're more social!) and made secretary an offensive word. Now I live in a world where you don't know how to properly address the lady that books your travel.
I am in the lucky situation having worked more years in offices than open floor, last time 2018. The doors were only shut before 1995, never after that. I was typically the only one who turned his desk towards the door, so I could chat with people coming in and also show that people can come in. It was so much more productive to work as a developer compared to open space.
Nowadays I go to the office (open space) only during evening hours when at most 2 hackers are there. Working from home probably not productive when you have smaller kids. Maybe good for the kids though.
> Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
Yes, Bill Gates worked like a maniac and didn't see his family. His wife took care of the kids. I think that's a terrible example to set (I wouldn't want to do it) but each to their own.
Same here. I can do all my family errands when I want and plan around them. The best part, at least with the company's interest, is that I work when I feel most productive. Usually 3 hours in the morning, along with a few hours in the evening, I even often work weekends like this. And guess what? During these programming periods, I'm at my most productive. Force me into an office where I'm forced to synch with the office's schedule, and met with constant noise and interruption from others, and my productivity is maybe half.
Same for me, and my mood is worse from having to reset when I'm thinking through a tricky architecture problem and Foghorn Leghorn in the next office is talking at the top of his lungs on speakerphone.
Same here, thanks to me working from home my wife has been able to return to work (she's a teacher) which has given us more income (and less costs!) and massively improved our financial position!
I'm a game dev and traditionally console devkits were the most guarded secret in the world, you had to have special locks in your office, only keep them away from the windows with areas with controlled access etc etc etc. Luckily during the pandemic the requirements have relaxed and I can work from home and have console devkits at home, turns out it's not such a big deal. Devkits just brick themselves if they don't have regular access to home servers anyway.
Instead of announcing mass layoffs, tech companies use RTO orders.
They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on.
My friend's job pays him enough he could lease his own office near where he lives.
He has all the "toys" he needs, space for his own research and he doesn't have to waste time to commute.
My view is that offices were a thing because there was no technology to do otherwise and back then equipment was too large / expensive to be kept at employee's place.
Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.
Often the owners also have shares in the business and influence this return to office aka sustain my property portfolio nonsense
> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.
Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office.
The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.
My "office" is a converted deep (e.g. bedroom) cabinet, with a sliding keyboard tray and some shelves sawed out. My chair rolls in and fits within it, so the whole thing can be closed off when not in use. And that's because I want a large fixed screen. I think as people stay WFH, people will find ways of packing office spaces into smaller spaces. But people will also take advantage and move further out to get more space.
I know of some start ups where employees got paid local co-working spaces, so they can go to any nearby where they live if they don't have space at home or don't want to work at home, but don't want to commute. There are solutions in between.
What all these discussions about home vs office work largely miss (I’ve seen a few tangential mentions) is that so much of this debate has a far different priority driving it than people think, it’s both capital investments and system pressure to keep the house of cards standing that is driving all meaningful measure of this issue and corporations/CEOs are willing to sacrifice the aloneness and even productivity and profitability of their employees in order to maintain the overall system and serve the central planners in the government that are pressuring them to get the commercial real estate house of cards stabilized by utilizing the floor space … even climate change and destruction of the planet’s climate (if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard) be damned.
It’s time to shut up and “toe the line” as I’ve been told from regarding this kind of matter. If it chokes down to it, you could even be a specialized and expert in the field that they absolutely need; if you defy them, at least be ready to move on or even be laid off. In this kind of authoritarian system, nothing else takes priority over obedience … no matter how much your corporate “family” would be cutting itself deep in the flesh. I know this from experience and repeated observation.
If that were true, I would expect a lot of smaller CEOs hiring away talent that likes to work remotely.
But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.
Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".
I think the conflicting idea is that the ‘messaging’ is that we simultaneously need to reduce carbon emissions by whatever means possible, and at the same time we must maintain a labor force that spends hours in traffic each day emitting more Co2.
I love a conspiracy but I dont see how the incentives align.
Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)
They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.
Telematics HW during peak pandemic. Went from an Group office who's top eNPS opportunity was remote work requests - It went from not letting the Services guys telecommute in once a day to the hardware guys orchestrating a lab move to a new office location and enabling remote connectivity to test benches while shipping out 3 new products polling in test data from vehicles across the 50 states.
I'm in the same situation, though I design more hardware - I stopped going in most days of the week and avoided those commutes when my son was born, that allowed me to spend more time with him as a toddler. When he started highschool we left the US, he's mid 30s now and I've just retired.
COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
> COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.
> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?
I think I saw it mentioned in an old HN thread once, but I'd like to see a study between the WFH desire and its relationship with (a) commute times, and (b) commuting method: walking, cycling, driving, urban transit, commuter rail, etc.
If your commute was a 15-30 minute (one-way) bicycle ride, how different would you feel about going into the office more often?
I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter. I'd much rather take public transit, since then I can read a book or daydream.
> I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter.
I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work everyday from March to December (rain or shine, as long as the streets were clear).
See perhaps the video "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
I'd say one counter-argument to bringing stuff home, outside of the obvious one like it being a supercooled quantum computer, is if it's valuable stuff; say you've got 100K of gear at home, who is responsible / whose insurance gets billed if it gets stolen or damaged? Does the insurance require additional security measures on your house to insure it? Who pays for that?
Anyway that depends entirely on how specialized your specialized equipment would be. I had a quick browse of your profile, it looks like you're a firmware engineer so I assume what you have is a few thousand worth of electronics hardware like oscilloscopes and that other magic stuff that firmware people have so nothing that would break the bank or fall outside of your homeowner's insurance, but you get what I mean.
That said, most non-hardware IT people have laptops nowadays that they are expected to take home, I've got two current-day macbooks so that's at least six grand of hardware sitting at home, plus the rest. I should double check my insurance <_<. At least the macbooks themselves are covered by my employer's insurance.
It's almost as if human creativity thrives when you create a low stress environment that caters to the individuals needs. I'm thinking some thing like like Jacque Fresco's - The Venus Project, but instead of radically changing how we interact with the environment through architecture. We create creative environments where humans can freely tinker, create and experiment... Some thing worth exploring further.
Yep, I'm doing firmware work from home too; I have a create with the hardware with me which I bring with me when I go to the office, which is basically never. Weird to think this was considered 'impossible' before by many.
ah-hah, but have you considered the executive's perspective on this? that perspective is "no."
the only reason executives really dislike remote work, is because as "face people" they have never had a place for it. It doesn't benefit them in any way, so how could it possibly benefit anyone else? they have never had a position like yours. they both deeply understand that no one is like them, and bizarrely believe that everyone works like they do and benefits from working in the office.
I have worked closely with executives throughout my career and the only common thread between them all is the intense hatred for telecommuting. I have never met an executive which understands it well enough to understand its place in their work environment. These same executives frequently called me after hours asking for work to be done immediately; work that could only be done in the office because that's where all of my digital tools were located and where the network connectivity was, etc. Zero recognition that one of those things could solve the other.
Well, it's that, or they just want to be dicks and give out orders. That could be it, too.
It's probably 50% of each. "executives get benefits, plebes do not."
similar situation here, I'm also a firmware engineer for the most part, and I thought it's very hard to make remote job to work(e.g. comparing to web developers,etc) since I need hardware access. Turns out all I need is a home lab with a few basic equipment(scopes,etc) and a few boards, worked well so far. The key is to get the job done.
If there's a $100,000 oscilloscope, then it's there to get used. Specifically, it's there to allow the >$100,000/year engineer to get their work done more quickly. And the engineer is there because the company thinks they're giving >>$100,000/year in value.
Yes, the scope can be taken home. That is both physically possible, and there's plenty of rational employers who would rather have the lab equipment at home with the WFH engineers adding value than in the lab collecting dust. Even if it means some of the equipment needs to be duplicated.
And taking lab equipment home doesn't mean sneaking it out in Jonny Cash's big lunchbox [1]. For some employeers it can be as simple as "hey boss, can keep the logic analyzer at my home office?" while others might have a more formal sign-out process. There are no doubt other employers where the answer is always "no", but in general it's completely possible to take equipment home without stealing it.
The idea of taking expensive things home isn't limited to the tech sector either. Consider trucking - it's common for employee truck drivers to take their $500,000 trucks home.
The thing is, when it's taking millions of dollars in equipment to fit out a lab, many engineers are all sharing that equipment. It would cost many tens of millions of dollars to buy duplicates of all that nice equipment for every single engineer to have at home, plus many of those engineers won't even have space for the equipment at home anyway! I live in a relatively small apartment with my girlfriend. We struggled during the pandemic because we don't even have space for two proper work desks. We definitely don't have a bunch of extra space for lots of lab equipment.
There’s also a calibration cycle for much of that equipment that can run high hundreds for simple equipment to several thousand and often is done annually. That’s another cost that is snowshoed out across the multiple employees using a shared lab.
Things are pretty specialised and RF before you need a 100K oscilloscope.
I have a 500MHz DSO, 16 channel logic analyser, 10 digit GPS locked frequency counter, 5 digit bench multimeter and a 2GHz AWG and I think it's not even 10K.
(I'd love 250K of test equipment all the same LOL).
Funny - in my case, I owned a nicer oscilloscope than my company was offering me anyway. Neither is worth more than a couple grand. I acknowledge that more expensive equipment exists, but I'll come back to that.
> There are insurance considerations too - your house burns down with $250k worth of test equipment inside, who is paying for that?
My employer already has insurance on their equipment, and I already have insurance on my equipment. I see no problem here.
Even if there was a problem, why do you expect ME to be saddled with the burden of a problem that clearly exists between my employer and their insurer? Why should I (and thousands of others) pay the cost of 20 hours a week in commuting, when my company and the insurance provider could spend a couple hours to fully think through their terms?
> There is a lack of critical thinking when it comes to extreme WFH arrogance.
I recognize that not everyone can work remote. At the time the shutdowns began, I was working for a defense prime in an airgapped lab. Obviously, I couldn't bring my equipment home. But, in that case, there was a reason for onsite work - national security. For most devs, there simply isn't a similar justification for onsite work.
None of what I said in my toplevel comment is intended to disparage anyone with a job that demands onsite work.
Note how I never disparaged anyone in that situation, nor did I disparage anyone who runs a company where people are in that situation. I merely stated how much I like my situation, with some quiet jabs at companies too stubborn to afford the same benefits to themselves and their employees. Develop some reading comprehension before you start slinging accusations of poor critical thinking.
So I see it the exact opposite way. I see a staggering level of arrogance in Amazon's move to sequester thousands of people in an office who simply don't need to be there. It's detrimental to the workers' health and happiness, it's a needless cost on Amazon's behalf, it pollutes our environment, and it does jack to improve their product. It's just a power move.
You’ve come up with the most extreme scenario to make a point. Surely most of HN is not doing cutting edge electronic engineering that requires a $100K oscilloscope as a everyday tool.
The parent described the equipment as "fancy" and "specialized" which is not translated as "$500 garbage off AliExpress". There is nothing extreme about that scenario. It is in fact extremely commonplace anywhere that does serious engineering.
But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.
Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
HN is not the majority. But we've seen many studies that say tech WFH has either no/minimal efficiency loss, or even has better productivity. Most tech companies in fact made record revenue (maybe profits, but hard to say) over COVID, so the business logistsics do not imply a loss in production.
>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.
I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are
1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back
2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).
It could be. I sense that it's simply because the overall productivity/creativity is down but HN posters are disproportionately pro-WFH. This creates an echo chamber where people here are constantly confused why RoT is a thing.
If that was the case these execs would be sharing the data so it was harder to argue against. They will share any data that backs up their decision and when they don't share any data you can know it's because they don't have any that supports them (or doesn't support their public position. The data probably shows that people voluntarily leave because of RTO mandates, but that's not their public argument) but they've decided to do something anyway.
They're not going to share that data because it's confidential. Imagine Amazon sharing data that their employees are less productive... their stock price would tank and they'd garner a ton of bad PR.
Why would they not share that data as a justification for this decision to return to office for five days a week? That would give investors a reason to believe that Amazon productivity and share value will increase soon.
No company is going to publicly admit that its productivity has been bad. It'd also destroy morale more than it does. And the PR backlash. And what kind of data would they release? Data for productivity will always be imperfect. People will scrutinize it. Disagree with it. Competitors might be able to use it to their advantage.
They would absolutely show data that shows productivity was down during the pandemic years of full remote if they had it. It's several years in the past at this point and everyone in the world had an excuse, but studies show that productivity increased or stayed about the same instead.
They would also show data for increased productivity from ending full remote and going back to the current 3 days in office if they had it, instead they claim it's the case but won't let you see the data. It's just bullshit corporate talk
They wouldn't show it. Zero reason to show it. PR backlash. Employee backlash. Distraction from main business. Mainstream media is very pro-WFH.
No company wants to show confidential metrics on employee productivity to the world. Yet, many companies have recalled employees. Maybe you think every single of these companies are incompetent and stupid? Or the HN go-to conspiracy theory that executives own real estate and want it to recover?
You often hear about HN posters complaining that when they do go into the office, they’re just having Zoom calls in the office instead. That’s what Amazon is trying to fix here. Everyone in office 5 days a week.
> when they do go into the office, they’re just having Zoom calls in the office instead. That’s what Amazon is trying to fix here.
Not really. At a company the size of Amazon teams are often in other buildings, if not other cities or countries entirely. The zoom calls continue unabated.
I'm not sure about Amazon, but in some of these large companies the team is still distributed even when they are "in-office". So everybody is still on zoom calls.
> But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.
> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.
I don't work there anymore, but when they introduced 3 days/week RTO I just said 'Nope, fire me if you want. Also, I want a 15% raise'. I got the raise and continued working fully remote until I got a better offer. It's amazing what you can get when you have self-respect you're not focused on deepthroating the boot all day long :)
Now, I think you might want to take your own advice :)
Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.
The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.
Hardest job I had was a part time job working the cash register. Standing in one spot for hours on end, extremely repetitive, mind numbingly boring when not handling people, it was torture for me. I still get irrationally angry how most supermarkets don't give their workers a seat.
It's crazy how in the US we make our cashiers suffer by forcing them to stand up all day for no reason, while meanwhile in Europe, they're mandated to have access to seats by their unions.
I was a cook at Sonic who occasionally helped with carhopping. I couldn't skate but tried to learn. It's hard work! I raise a cherry limeade in your honor.
For me it was newspaper delivery kid. You worked 7 days a week with only Xmas off - rain/snow didn’t matter. I got the papers at 5am, folded them and bagged them and was on my route by 545. Delivered them on my bike and then rode to school at 7am. And then once a month had to go door to door to collect the money, which was a pain. But no other way to make $100/month at age 11.
Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.
For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.
Let's also spread human feces around every workplace. It's only fair, because sewage workers also have to deal with feces.
Every worker should also be submerged in freezing water for hours each day, because commercial divers also do that.
er... you're not really following the logic of the parent comment.
Parent comment asked, should people who can't work from home be paid more?
Which seems like a specific case of the more general "we should pay people more if their jobs are more difficult", so your examples would more accurately be expressed as
"should we pay sewage workers more because they deal with feces" and "should we pay commercial divers more because they are submerged in freezing water for hours each day"
Is it so hard to understand the frustration of people who can't work from home, when the work from home people celebrate the joys of WFH including 2 hours not spent commuting (I used to sit on a bus 1.5 hours each way to work in retail).
If all the WFH people got this sudden improvement to their lives, what will society do to help out the people that can't? Is fairness and equality not important when it comes to the working class?
The disrespect to the lower classes from this community is unreal.
Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.
I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.
I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.
It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.
A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.
I would argue so what? There are low and high paying jobs that require people to be in person and low and high paying jobs that can be fully remote. Why should it matter to one group where the other group works? I'm sure the pediatric surgeon isn't complaining about having to work from the office.
The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.
I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.
Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.
So what? Society needs a variety of roles to be filled to maintain civilization and there should be a fair distribution of benefits, and the positive changes should not be hoarded by a specific class of workers.
Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".
>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.
In my country it is already visible. New entry level corporate white collar jobs are scarce, and they pay like half or one third of entry level blue collar jobs, which there are plenty of. Just a few years ago it was the other way around.
Why? There's no option to work from home in those positions, so there's no need to pay them extra to work on site. Seems kinda like a roundabout way of asking for better wages for non-office workers.
I keep seeing this line of "reasoning". You realize that me being at home makes your life marginally _better_, don't you? There's one less car on the road creating traffic and pollution. There's one less guy in the line at starbucks. There's more real estate opening up for purposes besides mindlessly filling offices. But you'd rather make your own life marginally worse as long as it makes mine significantly worse.
Name 1 major employment shift that rolled out to everyone, across all industries, across all modes of work, across all tiers of employees, and across all geographic areas regardless of socioeconomic status — simultaneously.
We couldn’t even do it during a global pandemic, deeming all sorts of people “essential” without meaningful compensation.
Your assertion is not based in any feasible reality, at least in America.
The tone of this comment makes it sounds like the poster thinks the parent poster should have refrained from posting their comment. As if the point is invalid because of these facts. But how could one get that to change unless they suggest alternatives?
If anything, it’s a whataboutism, but still an interesting question to consider. What do you think about offering better compensation to in-person service employees?
Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote.
> The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.
So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless.
Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.
Take this with a grain of salt but I read on a similar Reddit post the return to office is mainly due to the tax incentives the city/county/state provided Amazon for having their offices located there. The Reddit user made a claim which Amazon could only receive those tax benefits if their workers actually worked in person at the location.
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I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
> I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.
The executives must look out and see a bottomless supply of cheap engineers. And I doubt they plan on training anybody at all. It’s just a race to the bottom at this point.
They'll be gone in 3 years. This will juice the stock price as investors will be happy with gaining additional tax benefits. By the time the problems bubble up from a weakened foundation it'll be the next guy's problem.
As long as shipping in whole floors of indians is a viable strategy it will continue. As soon as they cannot shio them in, they will ship the jobs to India. We need tariffs and controls to maintain quality of living standards above the global median
> but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit.
This gets repeated a lot online but statistics don’t really support it. They will lose some number of employees but the significant majority of people just go along with RTO policies.
All of the headlines claiming employees will quit if their companies mandate RTO are based on self-reported surveys where people are asked hypothetical questions. When reality hits and people are forced to choose between their large FAANG comp or quitting, it turns out barely anyone quits.
The people who are there to solve interesting problems quit [0]. The people who are there for the cash stay.
The vast majority of any large organisation are in the second category, so your statement is 100% correct.
Whether the organisation loses something because the first category leaves, is open to debate. I think they would.
[0] because they now have the experience (and option at other organisations) of working from home full-time, which reduces their exposure to corporate bullshit and pointless meetings.
It’s a job, if you’re not there for the pay, you’re also hurting every other worker by reducing the market price for similar labor.
The people who are there to “solve interesting problems” are there to do so for pay. But, they can also get paid by other employers, who can offer more sensible employment terms.
Even if you don't "prefer" remote, the sheer cost savings of gaining an hour or two a day (or the cost savings of lower cost of living) is pretty hard to deny.
My commute is ~15 mins each way fwiw. I do pay a premium to live nearby, but that is what the high compensation is for. Not even close to all of the extra compensation is eaten up by rent increase though.
On the other hand, stats supporting the idea that working from office increases productivity are dubious at best, I've seen one which said 10% better productivity, but that could be offset by the lower costs of remote work. Maybe you can provide some research that convinced you otherwise?
It probably depends on whether there have been hundreds of thousands of severances in the industry in recent years or not... People would probably quit if they didn't have to compete with an insane amount of people to get a job at this time.
It's a very reasonable argument. And even if it isn't something now (where Amazon gives Seattle the bird... wait, that's San Francisco that got the bird from the bird), it is something that would impact their ability in the future to negotiate tax breaks with cities.
There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...
So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.
It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."
Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.
So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).
I'm sure that the numbers indicate that, but it's quite a leap to pin WFH as the driving reason that the juniors not moving up and the seniors not moving into management. It's a good story, and I'm sure that's the sort of thing that top leaders in big tech are using. Except for the reporting that 60-80 CEOs got together and just decided to move, and that they aren't willing to share those concerns of low IC improvement in the communications.
If the story were true, then that'd be a reasonable thing to share in broad terms and would reduce the impact to morale as there's at least some shared, reasonable argument. Instead we get vague reasoning about energy of the workforce and spreading the corporate culture.
Everything I've seen aligns on three pillars:
* Real-estate strategy (lots of contracts and promises to commercial real-estate as well as local governments)
* Quiet layoffs (if they leave on their own, then we aren't firing!)
* Disconnection with reality (upper-management's job is harder remotely or they're bad at it, and having face-to-face conversations is really important for politics, their primary job)
I think that's a pretty plausible idea, but it has one flaw. If it was true, then companies would be announcing this as the cause. They'd be shouting it from the rooftop if they had any data to support it.
There's very different metrics when dealing with a team of mostly mid and senior devs at a small shop that can carefully mentor / manage their handful of junior devs ... and one that is working on the scale that Amazon is working on.
The org with a few teams and 100 devs total works and mentors differently than how Amazon operates.
I'm seeing this in personal experience. Interns and juniors are just totally lost between Zoom meetings. They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
> They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
Have you had the time to do anything to assist? Have you brought this up with the folks who should be mentoring or managing these people? Mentoring is still mentoring, whether or not one happens to be breathing the same air as the fellow one is mentoring.
IME one HUGE benefit of moving what would be one-off watercooler chats to one-off chats in a '#watercooler' channel (or whatever) is that one no longer has to be on-site and socially connected in order to get most of the benefits of the rumor mill. Making all that side chatter searchable across the whole company does WONDERS for cross-team functionality and awareness.
Of course there's mentoring 2-3 times per week. The rest of the time they're just staring at their screens trying to figure out wtf is going on.
People don't feel confident jumping in to a chat stream. In real life you see a newbie standing around and a normal human tries to actively include them and explain things. Nobody looks at the thousands of idle chat handles and tries to explain what's going on to all of them.
That’s on the more senior workforce, and especially their managers to fix. Their incompetence to do so shouldn’t be solved by worsening the working conditions.
Yes, but it's a huge strain on senior workforce. A summer intern becomes a curse where no work gets done because you're trying to actively include digitally what's being done for free via office osmosis.
Usually the tax incentives are relatively minor and are long term as well. The more important thing with the real-estate strategy is that there's a lot of capital and personal clout wrapped up in these massive building projects and investments. Amazon recently had 2 shiny new buildings built in Arlington, VA. They have a bunch of buildings that were built in Seattle. There's definitely tax incentives involved, but those tax incentives are tiny compared to the billions of capital poured into the buildings.
If anything there are tax penalties. SF makes companies pay a tax per person in a seat working in SF, so it incentivized companies to move offices elsewhere and go remote
There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories online trying to explain return to office policies, when the simplest explanation “managers like being in the same room as employees” has sufficient explanatory power.
Did they provide any links or evidence at all? Reddit is a hotbed of misinformation and claims like this proliferate and grow on Reddit with little basis in reality all the time. Unless someone can find compelling evidence that this is both true and a substantial tax credit, I would assume it’s just another product of the Reddit misinformation machine.
Even if it is true, the majority of the RTO is a transition from hybrid to 5 days onsite. I doubt they would have allowed hybrid to begin with if it impacted some hypothetical giant tax breaks.
It isn't necessarily about the historical tax credits... but also those potential ones in the future. Notice Seattle not having tax credits for 2022, 2023, or 2024.
Yep. The plan to enforce this in January, after Q4 when people are busy at work (with Amazon’s Q4 peak retail sales period) and with the holidays, makes it clear that Andy Jassy intends to make this an impossible change. He just wants to force people out - maybe to do a layoff without paying severance. Or maybe it is a way to select for young people that live in downtown cores near Amazon offices, and get rid of older people or people with families. You know, people that live away from city centers, have commutes, and cannot deal with an abusive RTO policy. I hope they face lawsuits and also that talent flees.
The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.
It is in many countries, and I'm not American but I understand the WARN act provides defacto severence as few employers are willing to risk keeping an employee after they have been notified.
As I understand it, WARN requires either two months of notice or two months of severance, to include benefits during that period (based on https://lipskylowe.com/what-is-the-worker-adjustment-and-ret...). It's not nearly as much as companies tend to provide, but that additional severance usually comes with strings attached (such as a non-disparagement clause).
I think you got the messaging here wrong. He's not saying that you have 3 months to move houses, he's saying you have 3 months to move jobs.
Productivity has cratered since he implemented RTO, so to believe that this is anything but a way to get rid of employees without severance package is extremely naive.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. Aside from that, Amazon decided to convert their workforce to work from home rather quickly, and shelled out the money and the effort in order to actually achieve that.
> Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes.
If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
> If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
This is being mandated for a number of employees who were hired remote as well.
Separately, why not? I generally have an expectation that I won't have to move across the country from one office to another. Especially not without some good reason. Especially not without literally any reason. Especially not if I'm going to have to foot the bill for switching houses, either disrupt my spouse's career or spend time apart, switch kids' schools in the middle of the year, .... Employers are (often) within their rights to do so, but the knowledge that Amazon does this sort of thing frequently is precisely why I work elsewhere.
This is not necessarily true. I have had a labor attorney successfully argue constructive dismissal when remote was written into the employment agreement in an at will state (employer and employee were both in Illinois, attorney represented them on my dime, I was the one who told the employee to have the remote clause inserted into the offer letter when they were hired).
Importantly, speak to a labor attorney, depending on your situation.
They received a substantial settlement under threat of litigation. Unemployment would’ve been received regardless.
Never trust HN for legal advice. Not an attorney, not your attorney. I highly recommend engaging an attorney, both prior to and during acceptance of an offer, and when separated from an org. If you don’t, you’ve already lost, and I write these comments so others don’t lose.
Constructive dismissal. Not a protected class. Caucasian, male, under 40.
The job was offered, in writing, remote; rto was a material change to the agreed upon working arrangement. While labor rights and protections in the US are flimsy, they do exist.
I was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the rest of life.
I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.
Commute really is key. When I used to have a 15-minute bike commute, I voluntarily went to the office five days a week. The 30 minutes spent each day is just good exercise.
Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now I'm only going to the office three days a week.
Most trains I've commuted on (in the Netherlands and Germany this is) weren't like that 9 out of 10 days. How well you can work differs per line, year, time of day, and type of train, but overall I'd agree more with GP than with your experience. Both exist, of course
Sure. That's a very biased way of looking at things. RBs/REs, and even S-/U-Bahn are likely to have ample seating even during "rush hours" in most of Germany. But it sounds like you've never seen cities like London during rush hour? Tubes are tightly packed with people. Even if you get a seat, it's unlikely you'll feel comfortable bringing out your laptop. I've got a friend who does indeed commute ~50min to Cambridge by train and gets some work done. But that's rather the exception for a city like London. Many people will have similarly long commutes just being stuck inside the tube with little space to maneuver.
I'm sure you can find more big-name examples like London but that some of the biggest cities out there are packed neither invalidates everyone else's experience nor should be a major surprise methinks. Probably more biased than looking at how the remaining 95% of the system runs? Of course, either extreme is biased
And anyway, saying you can be productive in a 30 minute train ride comes from the same mentality that says you can knock out some work "between meetings" when your calendar is a swiss cheese of meetings.
It's not nothing, I guess, but it's sure not any kind of productive focus time, even in the best of scenarios.
It's really more complicated than this, because often commute has an inverse relationship with cost. The longer you commute, the more you save.
Sure, you could say going to office isn't too bad if you're 15 minutes away. But at 15 minutes away you're paying double for housing than if you were 90 minutes away. So even in the ideal scenario, RTO can be perceived as a huge pay cut.
Right, I'm articulating one cost of RTO people often don't consider. For many, it could easily be the equivalent of a 20%+ salary deduction due to cost of living.
How is any number 0-5 based on your preference not the best compromise in your opinion? Do you gain anything when someone who would choose not to be in the office ever is there?
All the people who want to socialize at work get the office, everyone who wants the flexibility of remote work get to enjoy that. From experience, making a remote-first team work in office is just working-remote but next to one another. Once you get used to all your processes being in-chat and having 5-10 async conversations going at once while working having to like stop and have only one stream of thought is like an adhd rug pull.
Commuting over an hour each way, if you're not exageratting, is so much an outlier that it makes these discussions difficult to talk about. Same way the real estate conversations on Reddit always devolve into "sounds good from my perspective in [New York|San Francisco].
Your comment makes my point and then demonstrates it. I understand that hour+ commutes happen, but its the outlier or the tail of the bell graph, but in these discussions it's made to seem like every American is forced to commute an hour. SF demographics and infrastructure are also nuts, so I see it as another outlier in these discussions. I don't know how to make this point without sounding so dismissive, so I do apologize about this.
But yea, if we are talking about the impact of commuting on the individual, and the rhetorical example is a 90 minute commute in the bay area, I roll my eyes. A better example would be a HR generalist commuting 25 minutes from one Memphis suburb to a business park closer to town. Choosing a random example.
I usually read or sleep on the commute because I can take the train. It never really bothered me much because I like to sleep and read. Are all these negative comments about the commuting because you have to drive to work?
Or walk. Can't sleep or read when walking :( Podcasts are okay but doesn't fully engage me and so it's still just passing time and enduring the weather
Taking one bus and being forced to take a 30-minute break (usually reading for me) was fine, but now walking 25 minutes additionally to that same bus trip after the office moved to a new location is rather a pain. Tried taking an electric kick scooter but that slides all over the place and doesn't fit at the foot end of a bus seat so to cut down on walking I'd have to stand and babysit the device the whole ride (forfeiting the relax time); not exactly an improvement
Car is by far the quickest (about as fast as the waking time alone) but I'm not doing that on most days for climate reasons
Same. But that's ALL you can do. At its best, hybrid or full remote opens up a whole world of healthy, fun lifestyle options - which cost a company ... NADA (unless they're shitty companies)
I can sleep in my bed and I can read everywhere at home. Being forced to commute is not an advantage just because I can do both of those things in a worse way than at home.
Even if I had access to public transit, I'd be driving every day because I'm on immunosuppressants and public transit is a germ pool. Same reason I'm not a fan of working in person with parents of small children.
I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia.
The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.
It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.
From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.
> Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels
It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time.
Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of total property tax revenues.
You either death spiral downtown property prices by keeping taxes steady while values decline, or you increase tax everywhere else to make up the difference.
Either of those options leads to a bad time for politicians.
Here in Canada the federal government has started forcing federal public servants back to the office. Everybody thinks it's just to prop up the capital city businesses and commercial landlords. Their union has actually called for them to buy local in their neighborhood rather than in downtown. Ottawa has a pretty terrible downtown with many businesses having awful hours like 8a.m-2p.m M-F because they got so used to relying just on civil servants.
That same federal government, who wants to put tens of thousands of employees on the road in commutes to their offices, is simultaneously communicating to the public that carbon fuelled climate change is an existential threat and that carbon consumption is immoral and wrong, thus requiring end use carbon taxes, and even going so far as the current party's health minister saying that families taking summer road trips is sacrificing "the future of the planet". [1]
The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad
This is such corporate welfare BS. I especially don’t get it for tech companies whose employees eat lunch on campus.
With big tech, I think it has more to do with real estate holdings being part of the portfolio and they would have to write down the value. Then the hedge funds where executives invest would also have to write down their real estate holdings and lose value.
I am dying for commercial real estate to be written down so hard in the US that the Federal Housing Administration buys it and converts it to public housing.
The irony of setting up a '“Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous decision making about where & how to work.
This is not the first "we're starting a committee to figure out what to do about there being too many committees" I've seen in my ~7 years here. Makes me laugh every time.
A long time ago I joined Deloitte to set up a local software dev. practice.
A few days in I was invited to join a "bureaucracy reduction taskforce". Someone handed me a literally 12 inch thick stack of paper I was meant to read up on before the first meeting. I gave my regrets and withdrew from the taskforce (there were no repercussions - apparently a few others had noped out as well).
I choose to believe that was a strategy. Invite everybody so they feel included, weed out almost everybody so it's a small group and can maybe get something done
From first principles, it is the only way for these workers to have more agency and not be treated as disposal feedstock, and as a high empathy human, I would like them to have more agency and be less controlled (if they would like it; the choice is theirs).
> I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions.
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
By setting minimum work conditions, rather than exact or maximum work conditions? Every SAG actor from George Clooney to video game VAs benefits from residuals, for example.
> How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
> No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.
I know personally companies that laid off a major percentage (50% in one case) of their software engineers to replace them with cheaper foreign and visa workers. I don't know if you've tried to find a job recently, but it's as bad as it's ever been regardless of level of experience.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
> working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
The FTC decision has already been halted by a Texas court nationwide. It's probably going to make it's way to the Supreme Court eventually, but given the courts recent rulings I suspect the FTC rule won't survive.
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
Lina Khan is like 90% of the reason I'm enthused by Biden (now Harris) and it would be an even bigger tragedy than when Google kicked her out of New America. I sincerely hope they don't do that, given I'm far from alone in admiration of Lina
i'm a visa worker and i've seen people in my country say that visa workers are prejudicial to the country's work environment.
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
1) we get higher salaries to compensate, that's in fact why SWE's are often "exempt" (as well as most jobs making over $80k iirc. We should probably raise that ceiling)
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
They correlate somewhat. The more money and demand you have, the less you need to collectively bargain with businesses for basic survival. Unions tend to form out of desperation, rather than some long form insurance plan.
Mine is: "Why negotiate alone? Your employer has an army of lawyers and HR types to prepare your contract. If you and a bunch of coworkers pool your resources you can benefit mightily by hiring someone to sit on the other side of that table."
Incorrect, as you have no leverage as an individual employee. The less resources you pool together, the less negotiation power you have.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
Unfortunately, your "real life" experience is worthless because it's at odds with reality.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
I feel I may be wasting my time by pointing out that “real life” == “reality”.
At any rate, I disagree. I don’t like the idea of someone controlling my work prospects for a tiny bump in pay. I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay.
Fact is, I have enough leverage to be happy with where I’ve gotten in life and I think there’s enough like-minded people like me that (hopefully) we’ll never have to put this theory to the test.
Mama’s special laborer will keep on doing this own thing.
You're not, you've merely deluded yourself into believing it. What I'm telling you about leverage isn't an opinion, it's objective. You, objectively, factually, have significantly less leverage by yourself.
> I think there’s enough like-minded people like me
Unfortunately, you are correct. There exist swaths of people at the intersection of selfish and delusional. The unfortunate thing is, you're not even particularly good at being selfish. If you were, you'd recognize often the best way to propel yourself forward is to help others too.
You believe that, by depriving other's of money, there will be more for someone as special as you. Even a few years in corporate America will prove, without a doubt, this isn't the case.
Your peers aren't the ones making nine figures and buying yachts and vacation homes off the results of the work you're doing. Look up, not sideways, to find the mis-allocated resources that you're after.
I see no misallocated resources. I enjoy exploiting the system that enables the yacht-havers, because then I too can have a yacht.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
It's an interesting follow-up, though I will say that addressing this or pretty much any other counterpoint pushes me over the three sentence limit that was requested :)
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
Look at how well you're being treated now without a union. Look at how well union workers are treated versus their no union worker equivalents. Imagine how much better you'd be treated if there was a union versus your current no union status.
Allowing people to work from home, and then yanking that back even after studies prove happier workers and better productivity is mistreatment in my opinion. Especially when it's malicious and arbitrary when they do it in hopes that you will quit. Our quality of life plummets when we're dragged away from our families and forced into long shitty commutes to sit on zoom in a cubicle all day.
I'm pretty confident that the vast majority of union workers are expected to work from their employer's business premises. Workers should unionize if they're being mistreated, but it's not a magic wand that means I can get whatever working conditions I'd like.
US government agencies still have some of the lowest RTO rates in the country (compared to other employers) precisely because of federal employee unions.
I don't understand why this has been so downvoted – although it might be true for now, there's a deeper truth that it's true that any union benefit has to be fought for and constantly defended between negotiations. (Which is why unions usually have legislative and political advocacy arms to codify these benefits – so they don't have to waste barganing power on them.)
"A union of Software Engineers lets us collectively bargain for better working conditions, such as flexible working locations, reducing PTO request denials, and work-life balance conditions."
control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and real power, which any free person should prefer over sitting in a golden cage.
My company tried at the start of the year to get everyone back in the office. The worker's council (which is not entirely a union, but very close to it) negotiated for the everyone a three day a week RTO.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
So you think unions are greedy, but want to abolish the professional management class...with nothing? Have you considered that, without some sort of organization, you are powerless and have no ability to effect change?
Also, have you considered that unions aren't greedy, but simply negotiating a fair value for their labor, and your mental model reacts negatively for some reason due?
I don't think they can objectively measure the fair value for their labour. I think I trust the Biden administration way more on this, and they have made it clear that the economic situation of every single American is better today than it has ever been in the past for any country in the world. That to me seems significantly more objective.
Good point, I think we need more unions for child labourers, we need to stop child labour in Asia, Africa and South America. If you start that union I will be the first to sign up, I will gladly not go to work for that cause.
> striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world
Isn't this the best time to do it? It seems like if workers did the opposite you'd be complaining that they were striking when conditions were bad and hurting the company!
This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
How about I look at actual unions in software, like the NYT tech union that immediately started undermining merit, making illegal demands, and discouraging high performance.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Would also note that sports' (and Hollywood's, to a lesser degree) models rely on tightly controlling distribution to a near-monopoly degree. Which, as it happens, describes big tech to a tee.
> Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
I think your model of how unions work has been heavily influenced by negative publicity.
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
> For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
> Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
For a long time I'd have a reflex "uh oh" response when unions were mentioned in HN discussions, because they arguments would get too snarky and contentious, but I appreciate the tone you've set. Or maybe the HN crowd is getting older and a little less likely to spend time on snark, too.
> I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
That’s not patronizing. Thank you.
Honestly, I expected to simply be dunked on and downvoted into a dead comment, so I think it’s great that there are at least some folks who are willing to engage in good faith and have the conversations most would rather not have! That’s how we all grow.
Sure. The motivation of forming a firm over a collection of contractors “is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism” of the market [1]. Put another way, it’s the power of intra-firm communication and trust. That’s what you’re getting at in celebrating camaraderie and flexibility at start-ups.
When a firm is small, i.e. below Dunbar’s number, that intra-firm communication is implicit. Above that, however, at least some communications must be mediated. Unless one wants pure fucking chaos, that mediation requires formalised communication. We call that system bureaucracy.
Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions. They need the power to act, but ones with a trigger finger will put their companies (and themselves) out of business. The question is whether they’ll do it faster than the current crop of founders and VCs. Given the current state of Silicon Valley, I’m up for giving it a try.
> Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
> The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
This was helpful. Thank you. I have some more thoughts, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
> Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions.
I’ve always gotten the vibe that unions are inherently antagonistic, but that’s just my view as an outsider who’s never had to deal with one personally, so I could be entirely wrong about that.
> ...I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
Respectfully: who the fuck cares how far the current topic in a subthread has diverged from the original one? Let the conversation go where is interesting to the folks having it and trust in folks reading the conversation to nope the fuck out if they lose interest.
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
> it existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
I mean, I know some 10x-ers. They are super super rare, yes. Becuase you don't just take a 3 month bootcamp and start working in fields like graphics, compilers, HPC, etc. Jobs that require very strong math fundamentsl and an ability to not just reason with software but understand the limits of hardware as well.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
Right and I think people believe this myth that unions flatten everyone down to a seniority level and there's no room for the rare, brilliant 10xer or genius. In reality, in any unionized industry there are still the Brad Pitts and John DeLorean's who break the mold.
It's certainly possible, especially for an empathetic or simply very long game individual. But I do feel that the short term incentive isn't there because those people can do all the union stuff without paying union dues.
And ofc if you give someone special treatment in a union (and they aren't a leader themselves), you kind of ruin the whole point of a union and are just a middleman.
Hi! I worked at US Engineering, an MEP subcontractor. This means that when you're building a building, they will hire a general contractor (GC), and that general contractor will be responsible for the overall building and rake in the big bucks—but they'll bid out the MEP -- whether Electrical lines or Mechanical ducts or Plumbing out to a subcontractor, and those margins can get pretty thin, like 5% profit. That needs to cover all of the overhead of office jobs, it needs to cover legal because the final phase of construction is inevitably litigation, etc.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)
> Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?
There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?
Unions have their own incentives, and they expand slowly using existing union shops as leverage. Can't really hold much power over any one company if it's 2 people are shop A, 10 and B, and 200 at C. A would just drop them and only hire non-union, while B would make negotiations hard.
The union could flip hiring by making finding good candidates easy for a company by having their members pre-vetted, eliminating the need for vetting interviews completely. Hiring is a huge pain point and addressing it would, IMO, go a long way. And they wouldn't necessarily need to focus on employer negotiations as their members would find job hoping easy due to skipping all the vetting interviewing giving them leverage as individuals.
Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?