Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
I think there's a lot of different things going on here: 1. Control freaks are losing their minds in the Pandemic and they want some of the control back. 2. Extroverts are losing it and want things to be social again. 3. People who have bullshit jobs and absolutely don't add any value except look busy on "make work" are having a hard time justify their need in the company. 4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.
And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace.
At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.
You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market for remote work. I think things were moving in that direction but slowly (as things tend to do) - COVID just accelerated the trend.
Adjusted for inflation it does look like it was down a bit during last year, but Q1 there seems to be a rise again. What's interesting is that it looks like the Dublin prices have seen a wild 10 years of volatility.
If I were running a large company I would create many small satellite offices around the metro area that employees could sign up to work from. Might even be worth purchasing a few large RVs and renting space and power hookups in good locations while figuring out employee preferences.
Granted: I am a young, single person working in design/product and my job requires a ton of collaboration. I don't really consider myself an extrovert FWIW
Did it, though? GDP has just reached pre-pandemic levels.
Worker productivity is not measured in GDP. It is a component of it, but asset and resource prices also factor into the equation. Nobody is going to suggest taxi drivers can go fully remote and work from home, yet that still feeds into GDP.
You could argue that there still has to be a US lawyer in the loop, but that's still true of software projects as well, that there is one Sr. software person overseeing the outsourced team.
If you want a laugh about why not to be a lawyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs-UEqJ85KE
Also remote workers are easier to automate because employers know precisely what they are doing.
High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work.
The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the US.
You are also wildly underestimating some of the tech markets. I know plenty of people that are heading back to China because they are being offered amazing positions over there.
This isn't true. Yeah statistically maybe. In practice if you are willing to endure some hassle you can save a lot of money by using offshore freelancerds/contractors. However it requires lots of patience and also depends on the field.
Most people hire locals because they want to feel comfortable. It is just nicer to communicate with someone from the same culture, and it is easier to trust that guy.
Relatedly, after my previous job tried to force everyone back in the office a majority of the time, and I gave them my notice after accepting an offer a week later, my former boss was suddenly very willing to discuss working from home 3 days a week if it meant I stayed. They can do it, they know remote work has been fine for a year+, they just don't want to. If you're an employer, make your peace with a hybrid or remote environment and make the accommodations clear now, not after all your people have started interviewing places that will. No matter what you're paying your tech folks, someone else will pay them more right now, and then it'll be too late.
That's literally the same argument about the "Fight for $15" - the argument is 'yer gonna get automated'. That's going to happen no matter what.
Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan?
Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap?
It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021.
This is not a good thing. The dominant form of 'bullshit' in code is pointlessly self-inflicted pain, and so people who don't hit the 'enough is enough' point are wallowing in bullshit code most of the time, and writing more bullshit the rest of the time. We politely call this 'accidental complexity' to water it down and not point fingers. It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate, or thoughtless.
Anyone who hits the 'enough' point now starts to consider high threshold people as mess-makers. As being less than 1x employees (worst case, -x employees). Doing that kind of janitorial work for long is a quick road to burnout. It's taking and challenging to explain to people that 'okay' is not universal and just because you think something is 'okay' doesn't mean anyone else does and as you work on a team you need to adjust your levels to match expectations.
Time zone is the first hurdle. Although, in my opinion, this can still be overcome in a relative short period of time.
The second hurdle is familiarity with work culture and style. For a person who's worked already in your office, knows the system, knows all the procedures, knows the nooks an crannies of how all the softwares behave, who to call in case of issues, how to resolve them. All these aspects add to a significant amount of non-quantifiable knowledge which lots of organizations don't consider while outsourcing initially.
The third is process. Most organizations have their processes worked out over time. And this is rarely, if ever, documented. Even for people coming to office, there's a certain amount of time till they get familiar with this.
However, the biggest challenge is communication. This means everything - grammar, vocabulary, diction, accent, familiarity with jargon, parts of speech, colloquialisms, everything. To make a requirement understood itself is a challenge. Asking questions about that requirement when faced with a roadblock, is again a bottleneck.
As an Indian, who's worked in most of the English speaking countries, and now working from India, I can just humbly say this - never outsource to cut costs. This will bite you hard in the short run. Only if you have processes set, softwares used correctly, procedures documented, should you look into outsourcing. And that too it should be for reasons other than purely financial. As an example, having remote workers across time zones helps in maintaining support for your global customers better. Similarly, time zone differences can be used to your advantage. Finally, interacting with different cultures can only improve your organization's awareness, maturity, communication and global reach.
I don't think this is fair characterisation. If you have kids, working from home can be quite stressful.
> And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Generally almost no one gives a shit if you work from home or not. The only one caring about that is your employer, and you should negotiate with your employer about that. No need to complain about everyone and everything if you can't find an employer willing to let you work remote.
Those initial waves of offshoring were nothing compared with what COVID did. Wait until this affects labor prices.
I've seen this with my current employer. Their message has been that going forward at some point, "Working remotely is not an option."
There's really no reason I can't work from home. I've been doing it since March 2020. I don't have any customer-facing responsibilities; I administer servers and write code. The only thing that requires my physical presence is the occasional need to install or replace hardware.
It was one thing to not support remote work in 2019 when it was an unknown. In 2021, we've proven it can work; workers know it, and employers should know it. There's no un-ringing that bell.
I'm older, and have no desire to return to the startup lifestyle again but there's no doubt I can find remote work. As I see it, the choice is mine, and taking a mini-retirement and looking for new opportunities if my employer wants to be inflexible is not exacly unappealing.
Since the pandemic kicked off, this has changed. Despite the fact that there are many employers out there trying to force everybody back into the office, there is also a large pool of companies that have realised the wheels didn't fall off during the pandemic.
I've been speaking to a lot of current and ex-colleagues in the tech industry. Both on the management and on the employee side. Even the managers are increasing looking at where they're going to work from long term. Realising that they really can move to cheaper cities (in Europe), possibly with better weather, and keep working just the same.
I think there will be a bit of tension this year, but I can't see it just going back to the way it was previously. So many of the previous objections are just obviously false now. In a lot of cases I've seen teams become more productive (not to mention happier), because they're not sitting in an office.
I've seen the faces of most of their kids and pets now, and it turns out that's pretty cool as well.
That BBC host was a real trendsetter :D
So which do I prefer? Ehh, it depends. I'm not planning to live alone forever, it's just where I'm at right now. I'd imagine others are in a similar boat; we're different, and not necessarily constant either. So, as much as I encourage opening the offices back up and will take part in that space if given the chance, I wouldn't force that on anyone. I think the responsible thing to do is to measure performance rather than seat-in-chair, and so long as everyone's pulling their weight, let each employee make their own informed decision. It's their health on the line, after all, and healthy employees do better work.
IMO, there's no one "right" answer on this issue beyond "more autonomy", and I suspect we'll see more contractors/freelancers in Coworking spaces and more WFH arrangements to accommodate that, even if it's not touted publicly much.
It's somehow fine to have a group of people you've never met work in India, and they can get their work done OK, but you can't do the same thing from 15 miles away from your main office? Just insane.
I've heard a lot about this claim "no lost productivity". However that is for the employer to be evaluated, not for the employees. The complaining employees lose credibility when they make claims like that in complex fields, because productivity is very complex metric to be measured in many jobs.
Why have your employees work remotely in a city 100 miles from their original office at 80-90% of the cost when you can have them be 1000 miles from the office at 30-40% of the cost.
If you find employees in Central and South America they would also be in the same timezone.
A lot of communications type work suffered from outsourcing due to language barriers and poor connectivity and poorer skillset from workers in other areas of the world (or even the US). That may not always continue to be the case.
I'm guessing the top 10% or 20% of workers do not need to be worried since they can provide so much value that outsourcing is not worth it. But if you're in the bottom 4 quintiles, I would be wary.
Sure they are. The expertise and factories to build a lot of components are no longer in the US, which has a ton of knock-on effects in the economy - job loss, decline, etc.
That's a hidden cost that offsets whatever cash savings were experienced on the front end.
Essentially for short term gain for some, entire companies were destroyed.
So there were heavy costs on the backend.
It shouldn't matter who I am, but I say this as someone who immigrated into North America after having worked several years in South America. There are real barriers to collaboration that prevent outsourcing from being a silver bullet. They don't make collaboration necessarily impossible or difficult, but these barriers need to be taken into account.
Of course it was less about cost and more about the ability to quickly provide additional resources, and it was done with the upmost care to make it still feel like one team, but it doesn't have to be a nightmare.
This is what's interesting about the 'remote work doesn't work' group. My first bigCo programming job in the late 90s was at a satellite office with another single developer. We built a lot of software with developers from other satellite offices using only email and phone calls. /shrug
But if they are discrete teams, working on discrete services, then the issues tend to be around management, collaboration & communication patterns (both human and technical). Those are the areas which many companies can't handle or don't have correct to enable useful outsourcing.
And this isn't even related to Covid, I've been working remotely for 6 years.
Everything I do is carefully tracked. Every line of code is logged and timestamped. All my assigned tasks are viewable by anyone, with every associated line of code one click away. When I am connected to the VPN to access work resources, everything is carefully logged.
If we need to do a meeting, we use Microsoft Teams. You can chat with me whenever you want, and can schedule a video call whenever you need to.
At least with my job, a senior software engineer, there is zero need for an office.
I realize not everyone is in my position, and there are plenty of jobs that do require you to go into a physical office space. This career is not one of them.
If employers discover that they can pay less (in real estate and salary!) if they offer remote work as an option, while keeping the efficiency of an office worker, then the companies that do this will have a competitive edge. If companies discover that having employees in the office is a competitive advantage, then I don't care how harshly HN lambasts office work, it will make a comeback.
I expect the result will be somewhere in the middle. Certainly different jobs and industries are going to be affected differently. As HN is mostly computer jockeys, I have no doubt that remote work will be more common to the people here.
Shared values, communication norms, peer reactions, shared history, and inside jokes can exist when people aren't in the same room, but that culture tends to be a lot thinner. It would be more fruitful to discuss whether that's a good or bad thing—the bare existence of culture isn't what anyone is talking about here.
This social argument I sympathize with - nobody likes to be lonely. But please - don't force everyone to go back to one model of working simply to support a subset of people who've chosen to make their life revolve around their employment.
There are some naive executives who believe having an office is a big part of what helps them operate successfully. These executives are just entrenched in the old ways. They can’t fathom a world where their employees can work efficiently in a remote environment because they build all their management based on the idea of personal face to face interactions.
There’s another group of executives that’s even worse. Those who simply operate from mistrust. They need to have their employees in the office because otherwise they can’t validate and measure their employees output (although this is just as hard to measure in person). They need to see the employee physically present because for them employees salaries can only be justified when they add working hours, not based on the merits of their output.
But a reality check is here for all of them. One positive outcome from Covid is that it’s fully rebalancing the power between employer and employee. Definitely eager to see how this plays out.
As an anecdote, I had a conference call with coworkers from another company who said that there were lots of people from their company that were leaving because the company had reneged on their promise to continue full time remote work.
This is possible with remote work, but much harder. In my experience, remote workers are generally rather detached from their colleagues and projects. YMMV, but I vastly prefer working from office.
In all my other jobs, including the startups that have grown into more traditional businesses, I have been pretty much a heads-down worker. I come in, do my work, and go home. There's not really much bonding or common culture going on that remote/on-site would really change anything.
Maybe it is possible for an office to be like this, but I would suspect that it is an exceptional case.
Mostly offices are where people go to do sufficient work to get paid, and the only real goal coworkers have in common there is a desire to receive paycheques and make sure the company doesn't go under so they can continue receiving paycheques.
If people didn't have to make money they absolutely would not spend their days pushing paperwork around and sending emails as part of some shared collective goal.
It is clear that many offices are dull hives that suck the life out of their occupants. But why be in such office? Why should someone have a job just to get a paycheck, getting miserable in return? There are always options.
To look at it from a different side, office is a tool, which, used correctly, can give a tremendous boost to productivity. But it is not a given. It has natural advantage - like physical proximity between people and disadvantages - the need to commute being one of them.
> Why should someone have a job just to get a paycheck
Because we need some amount of money to survive in our society and we need lots of it to thrive in our society.
> There are always options.
Not really. There are always options if you have highly in demand skills with no external responsibilities that prevent you from relocating to better work or risking a job change.
Most average office workers cannot risk a job change (because job changes ARE risky) due to family or other responsibilities. They also don't possess terribly in-demand skills.
> office is a tool, which, used correctly, can give a tremendous boost to productivity
This is employer talk. It's unclear to me why a worker should care about their productivity more than their paycheque, or their comfort, or their time spent commuting.
> It has natural advantage - like physical proximity between people
This has just as much potential to hurt productivity because the #1 timewaster at offices is other people.
Such workers shouldn't be calling BS on their leaders on return to offices, they should keep their heads down and do as they told.
Regarding your points about needing money, the audience here is blessed to be in such high demand, that they can freely choose projects and leadership they like. We have just one life, why earn money doing something that you don't love?
So people shouldn't have any say just because they have lesser in-demand skills?
Note that I didn't say these people were useless, they fulfill some role, just one that could easily be done by many others.
They might be extremely loyal, productive people who just want to continue working from home for whatever reason but because their skills are less in-demand, they should shut up and do as they're told?
Wow dude.
Actually, yes, that's how it works. If you are valuable and hard to replace, management has to account your desires and listen to your feedback, allowing work from home, 3 month vacations, and even for you 'calling out their BS', if you are very valuable. Because your skills are the leverage you have over management.
If you can be replaced easily without much cost, then you don't have leverage, and you are in no position to oppose your bosses. More so, if you are economically dependent on this job and you know that you wouldn't be able to find a new job easily, the situation is even worse because your bosses have very big leverage over you. If management says, 'working from the office', such workers can only say 'sir yes sir!', and do as they are told.
That's how it works in real life, and it is natural, so wow dude yourself.
However, every non-mentally impaired person is gifted with a capability to learn and acquire new skills, greatly increasing own worth at a workplace and improving job prospects.
The one argument, #3, about corporate culture is in favor of not WFH. They are saying that research shows corporate culture is important, but the methods used to build corporate culture when people are WFH are failing badly. Which indicates that if corporate culture is indeed important, then the only way to really build it without pointless BS is by having people working together in a physical location.
Maybe the purpose of many workplaces, from the perspective of some managers and workers, is not only related to the output of the company. I have come to the belief that part of the purpose of "work" for some people is "live role playing" careers, and thus they want to fill the roles for the other co-players.
From this perspective, it's not surprising that people want to return to the office.
Is there anyone who doesn't think "company culture" is bullshit?
There shouldn't be, but if life has taught me anything, it's that there's always an audience for whatever bullshit someone is selling.
Politics in the US over the past few years provides proof of this that's so far past reasonable doubt it's not funny.
It gets easier all the time, the pay gets better, and I actually have a much better setup at home then I've ever had in an office (Granted, I've had 20 years to set it up...)
I'm not concerned about 'losing out' in any capacity going forward, especially now when its become so common.
After the pandemic there was an even larger number of companies that are at the very least remote friendly. Most < 1000 employee tech companies I know are never planning on returning to an office full time. I also believe a fairly large number of the major tech companies are also planning to be fully remote friendly going into the future.
Pre-pandemic getting a fully remote job didn't take too much work find, and now nearly all companies I've talked to in the last few months are willing to support remote roles.
There are _enough_ employers that will allow fully remote employees that it's not hard to find jobs, and it's only gotten easier in the time I've been doing it.
Why?
A company hires an employee because they think they can make more profit than that employee costs them.
My expenses have nothing to do with the equation except when the company wants to be cheap and figures out they can up their profit margin per employee by lowering salaries due to low competition for employees.
If you require $250/hr but a smart person in say Brasil will do the same work, to the same standards, for $100/hr, what is the rationale for the company to keep paying you? You might complain that the Brasilian is leaving money on the table but that's not in your control.
He's not though. He's undercutting someone else to get the business. Race to the bottom is one of the most fun features of capitalism!
Do you mean pay you more because the office no longer needs to provide space and power for you, but you provide it for yourself? ... and because you can be called 'in' faster without the 45 minute commute?
:P
If workers are also now expected to provision their own work space (space, desk, chairs, monitors, etc.), then the compensation model around those jobs also needs to be adjusted to account for that.
the other question is should employers pay a share of your property tax contribute to a sinking fund for repairs
If someone wants to live in a dense urban core and a company is 100% remote, that may not be a good deal.
I've been working from home for 5 years. Standing desk, Aeron chair, dual ultra wide monitors, it goes on and on.
It all adds up to about 1% of my compensation over those years.
I spend whatever it takes to have a great working environment, if I see something that will incrementally improve the 8 hours a day I spend working I immediately buy it. As far as my income goes it amounts to a rounding error.
>> there's a lot of people, including almost all the tech-oriented professionals under 30 that I know
That's called selection bias.
You have chosen to live in a location with expensive real estate. Good for you. Other people made different choices. I have rooms in my house I haven't been in for months.
The median income for mechanical engineers in the US is around $88k, with many (especially early-career) people making meaningfully less than that. I'm glad your income is high enough that thousands of dollars in equipment, and far more importantly, extra space in your living quarters, is a blip. I really am. But statistically, your situation is not representational of the hundreds of thousands of other workers.
Some of the stuff companies do truly baffles me. It's only the beginning of June, you can't really assume your whole team is fully vaccinated. Why would you bring everyone in for lunch and then send them home? All downside and near-zero upside. It'd be another matter if it was a full day event where you did some meetings or seminars in addition to the meal, but are you really going to make people commute in, eat, and go home?
(edit: obviously, I’m assuming the article is talking about a company in the US, since the article is about the US.)
Never change, HN.
Cases are at all-time lows in the most vaccinated locations, and are dropping rapidly nationwide.
Herd immunity is when Rt = 1, or 1 - 1/R0
It is the point when infections begin to decline due to acquired immunity.
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/set-c/set-c...
The issue is with the anti-vaxxer types (including people who won't get vaccinated for religious reasons) who seem to be more likely to attend an event like this without caring about their (or others') vaccination status.
I do believe it is true that everyone in the US who both wants and is able to medically tolerate a vaccine should have been able to get at least their first dose by now.
Regarding herd immunity, I'm honestly not expecting that to ever happen in the US. There are too many people who are skeptical of these vaccines, some for the regular disappointing anti-vax reasons, others who do have serious concerns and/or have been swayed by misinformation. The fact that states and municipalities are resorting to crazy incentives like cash lotteries and even stuff like trucks and guns for people to get vaccinated really illustrates how bad it is.
It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.
Wow, agreed, I would not have guessed that high a percentage.
> It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.
Right, and I explicitly said that I would hope people with medical conditions would decline these kinds of in-person meetings if they weren't comfortable with them just yet.
Seattle area has had access since mid-April, and I drove 90 minutes to get that shot as early as I could. I hit full vaccination status on Monday of this week, so no outdoor lunches for me last week. But math is hard, amirite?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...
>If you’ve been fully vaccinated:
>If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
I don't know what this caveat right after that is about though.
>However, if you live or work in a correctional or detention facility or a homeless shelter and are around someone who has COVID-19, you should still get tested, even if you don’t have symptoms.
Guidance for opening up and removing mask mandates under a government led by people publicly for masks and for extra caution for opening back up is politically influenced?
Sounds like some terribly ineffective political influence.
As a person who can only handle so much social interaction, it is baffling, but to others, it is baffling to stay home all the time.
In a remote-first model people could stay located in the areas that suit them best socially. They could live in the hometowns they grew up in, or by their families, or in their college towns. Concentrated industries like tech are particularly bad, because there are so few metro options, compared to the geographic flexibility of doctors or accountants. Office-first in tech is a siren song of loneliness. First it draws us far away from our loved ones, which leaves us with no other option for meaningful human connection outside the workplace.
[1]https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/We-seem-to-be-missing-0-...
As an adult, you have precious few opportunities to make lasting, deep friendships. I consider myself an outgoing person with lots of shallow friendships, but my best, deepest friends are still the ones from High School, College, and the surrounding activities -- places I was, more or less, forced to be.
Being forced to be somewhere, be it the office, your college dorm, or the US West coast, gives you a sense of shared experience. Is it ideal? Maybe not, but a lot of people are, for better or worse, forced into experiences that (can) lead to deep and lasting friendships.
Candidly, I actually miss the office, even with all its warts. It builds a shared experience that is difficult to replicate digitally. I can see it in the faces of new hires since WFH started - despite best attempts at inclusion, they're still a little bit on the outside looking in.
Pay close attention to how you feel during all of this, extroverts, and remember it. You probably make introverts feel like that every day with your pushy social behaviour.
In a sense, an outdoor lunch event is potentially much worse than a seminar or meeting since at least during a seminar/meeting people don't have an excuse for taking off their masks and they can socially distance more easily vs sitting at a table together.
You could go all isolation and lockdown mode for over a year. Either due to fear, or due to lack of control. However, at some point the costs outweigh those risks.