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Comment by saos | Hacker News Reader

Thats really good. I wonder how UK companies will respond.

Sample size of one, but my employer have significantly shifted their view of remote work from being something that's only really accepted in extreme circumstances (or in some cases such as my own, grandfathered in from the early days). All our offices are currently closed with everyone working remotely, and have been since late February, but even once they reopen its already been stated that they expect the new normality to be most people working remotely 2-3 days a week.

I suspect that shift has mostly come out of the fact they couldn't really play the usual management cards of "collaboration will suffer", or "its harder to manage people remotely" after multiple months of nobody at all being in the office and work continuing more or less as normal. My fear going into this is that it would be the nail in the coffin of remote work, with companies going into it unprepared and everything falling apart for an extended period - at least in our case the transition took all of a week or so before everyone got used to it, and if anything productivity is higher than it was with everyone working out of the office.

You said it, "more or less".

They largely won't unless forced to.

Management in the UK by and large sucks.

> Management in the UK by and large sucks.

I don't necessarily disagree but I have to say that it's miles worse in Spain.

I might've been lucky but I've only had a bad boss and even he treated me far better than the best bosses some of my friends in Spain had treated them, so clearly YMMV. (obviously anecdotal evidence)

I wouldn't count on it. The aversion to WFH always seemed to be the risk, but now they've already been forced into it and mostly handled it quite well, the unknown isn't unknown any more.

> The aversion to WFH always seemed to be the risk

I always thought it was the loss of perceived control

A little bit idiotic, if you ask me, as people can and do little in the office too if they are so inclined but there you go

I always wonder how people come up with these statements, is it just anecdotal?

To add my own, my company was shifting to working remotely for the development team gradually, but now our CEO has been impressed with how well we adapted to working from home and has told us that our office will not be open until September at the earliest.

From CEO perspective they shift all accommodation [overhead] costs to employees with no increase in wages. Even with slightly lower productivity then financially surely wfh for dev roles and the like is going to get them a bigger bonus and/or more profit.

Sure it might just be cleaning/utility costs/stationary for now, but longer term expansion won't have stepped accommodation costs. And if locations can be done away with ...

I can't see why workers would be happy without higher wages? I want at least to afford a house big enough to have an office space (I'm working out of my bedroom, my line-manager is in their kids bedroom, their line-manager is in a utility room (storage and laundry room)). 5-10% increase in wages should do it.

I completely understand this, but I've seen more people complain that their company (in the UK mostly) is not letting them work from home, or did and are now demanding that people go back into the office.

I personally agree with you, we should be paid more now that we're not commuting but I doubt that will happen. Our company are organising a one-off payment to help people set up their home office though, which is a nice gesture.

UK companies will broadly respond the same way.

WFH is now more normalised and sensible companies will adopt it ASAP as the standard. Laggards will begrudgingly have to adopt it as otherwise they will lose talent and restrict their access to new talent.

Unless it's full of younger management, it'll be bums on seats forever.

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