Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
wsj.com
wsj.com
Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them.
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plagu...
It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
The higher turnover is expected in a booming economy like the one we’re in.
These articles with hyperbolic headlines and underwhelming actual data are very common right now. It feels like the journalists want us to believe some sort of revolution is happening, be it WFH or remote work or people quitting in droves. I’m beginning to think the reality is mostly a boring return to pre-pandemic normalcy, though, given how hard these articles are teaching for something noteworthy to share.
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
If those are monthly figures they are roughly going from "quit once every five years" to once every three. It's a pretty big change, I think. Positive, IMO -- mobility is healthy for the economy.
We’re at a daily occurrence now of these “I can never go back to the office” threads. I thought HN was supposed to be an area of intellectual stimulation - not droning on about the same thing for months with no end.
I wish there was an easy solution.
My friend received a flagban seven years ago or so on his “Show HN: Hide this repetitive subject on HN” tool.
When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working remotely, the burden of looking for employees in the locality of your office is gone. Wages will stop growing. While WFH is very convenient, the strong market is giving developers a false impression that they won't become replaceable cogs in the future.
Also, I'm glad you highlighted "Mexico or Brazil". Unlike decades past where lots of outsourcing was done to India, I think many people now realize the inherent inefficiencies when teams are 12 time zones apart. The Americas don't have that problem for US-based businesses. In fact, I often see lots of complaining on HN that Canadian dev salaries tend to be much lower than in the US - seems like a no-brainer to work remotely for a US company if you are in Canada if it results in a big salary increase.
Having people 12 hours offset from the US is useful if you would otherwise have to recruit US employees to work a night shift.
There's usually stringent laws when it comes to hiring people (depending on where you are, I guess). The company I work for, for example, had to sponsor my work permit in the Netherlands for it to be legal to hire me, since I'm not a EU citizen. That's a stressful, expensive and time consuming process for everyone involved, and in general it's just easier for them to hire local talent since they don't have to bother with all the extra steps. I'm not sure of how that works exactly in the US, but I can't imagine it's any simpler or more convenient.
Now, companies might move onto hiring more freelancer type workers to circumvent these issues, but that also has its slew of problems. They're usually more expensive, you have to spend time and resources onboarding them onto the project, they have to get used to the project and its intricacies, they have to learn how the team works, the process for paying them might be different than your usual workflow, they tend to leave just as quickly as they came which compounds the other issues even more.
I think things will mostly progress as they always have. Sure, there will be more competition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that hiring non-local talent is the easiest way to go for most companies, plus as can be seen from any discussion about WFH on HN, there's a sizable group of people that don't enjoy WFH and would rather stay in offices anyways. The WFH crowd like me will be free to pursue a company that suits their needs, and the ones that enjoy WFO will still be able to choose those companies that prefer that. Win-win, in my eyes.
These laws tend to exist when the people you hire want to live in the country you are operating from. I'm a non-EU citizen working in the EU, and am definitely worried that my residence country will kick me out, since WFH means I could very well do my job from my home country (and I'm now grateful that at least I'm paying a lot of tax to my country of residence).
I like Ensenada. Thinking about La Paz at some point maybe. Supposedly the water is warmer there.
It will last as long as the software industry keeps growing, or until AI can do the job of a dev. I don't see either happening for a long time.
WFH also appeals to American conservatives who want to target cities, which are democratic strongholds, and reduce their power and reputation. The WSJ is the leading news source of U.S. conservative elite.
I actually had someone on my team quit until WFH was over. They couldn't take WFH any more and plan to return to the job market once they're able to go to the office.
It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that they are. Absolutely sick of this infantilizing, childish requirement to force employees to come into the office.
People are not obligated to come into the office so you have someone to talk to, and the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth the countless hours of employees’ lives wasted in commute.
If I end up leaving because the company refuses to offer WFH, it won’t be getting a 2-week notice or any form of knowledge transfer from me.
Here’s hoping we’ll just pick right up where we left off!
Companies also won't be able to claim they hire the best if the rule out remote, but of course they'll still say it.
But of course while the WFH life will be sweet for the next 5 or so years, increasingly invasive productivity/monitoring/presence tools will make us long for the days when we could walk away from the computer and not worry about triggering some inactivity alarm.
It still means that I need to live near the office. Instead of a cheaper, quieter place far away from cities.
Besides making middle-management happy, I'm not sure what is the benefit of having one required day per week at the office.
But there are tons of jobs that require trust and collaboration. For those workers, in-person relationship building is a fundamental part of the job.
We need to be clearer in our job titles and descriptions about that, so that there is less conflict in expectations of remote work.
I mean, if I asked OP if they had a nice weekend, what would happen? Would I be ignored? Just a grunt in reply? Or a “fine” and that’s it?
Or even monthly have maybe a 2-3 day mini-retreat work a day or two on-site and do some after-work bonding for those who are staying in hotels, etc... I mean if it's just about bonding. I had pretty good bonding with an agency I worked with and we'd do once a year retreats and it was really nice to hang out with the team, then go back home and hang out in slack.
Every single day, lots of things have to go right: dropping off has to be at a defined time (whether school or daycare, most activities have a predetermined start time unless the kid is very young, which mine isn't any more), then I have to get to work from the daycare, then I have to hope that nothing blows up during the day requiring me to stay longer, then I have to hope nothing blows up on the trip to daycare, and so on. I'm very fortunate that daycare is on a transit path for me because my family doesn't drive and transit around here is usually more reliable than driving.
Working from home for the last 15 months has been a godsend. I don't have to deal with any of those oddities. My spouse and I have traded off who takes a few days off every few weeks or so to be "on vacation" with the kid, or we sync up and take days off together to just veg at home as a family.
If you tell me I can skip the bullshit commute and only have to plan child care around a retreat that is booked a month, or even a couple of weeks!, in advance, I will gladly take that trade. Even if it's a "bring your spouse" kind of thing, I can get a set of grandparents to train or fly in for that time (or even go to them).
I have worked with people whom only have friends, and social time, through an office setting. I've worked with people who can't wait to get away from their family by going to work. My dad couldn't wait until monday.
I was that guy that socialized, and made friends through work. I'm still that guy kinda? The hour grooming, and the two hour commute is making me think I should reach out to people whom I come in contact locally.
That said, some people don't need the social experience going to an office provides.
They have full lives, and don't need to show up to the charade. If they are good employees, why force them back?
Smart employers will let them work from home.
The key is to recognize that the in-person contact is part of the mix to enhance empathy/connectedness and for those few situations where a multi-way high-bandwidth conversation is necessary. Planning sessions are an example IMO. Understanding how people really feel about priorities etc. is important, but often involves interpreting facial expressions and body language that aren't captured (or conveyed well) on video. Making it a part of your every day team work environment puts you into an entirely different and no longer remote-friendly milieu.
I work from home, and my team is distributed, so we work fine online, but there are a few times when we say 'we'll have that conversation over a beer when we meet in person'.
There is no such cultural determinism. Many countries won't stop having children as their economy grows, in fact the opposite is happening in many places around the world.
So it's not that birth rates decline "as their economy grows" - the birth rates go up during the growth phase - it's what comes after in an established prosperous society: fertility rates decrease.
It's consistent enough to predict with some certainty. As prosperity has grown worldwide, so global TFR has dropped. This happens one by one with the individual countries following a predictable pattern.
China does have regulatory limits that keep their TFR lower than it otherwise would be, they are still in their (modern) growth cycle. Absent that regulation, with the economic boom they've been seeing in last twenty years you'd expect to see the fertility rate boom accordingly, and while it appears to be growing despite the regulatory constraints, it's still below replacement value. This slow growth in the face of structural prosperity changes is the impact of regulation, not organic. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...
there are direct factors that explain away TFR drops that are not "prosperity" - in fact prosperity alone has historically increased TFR pretty much every time
drastic drops in fertility rates in Europe and North America respond to very specific cultural phenomena that are unlikely to happen in a similar fashion in Africa or the Middle East, more likely to happen in South America and parts of East Asia to some extent, but certainly not across the board
social pseudoscientists can spend as long as they wish looking at past charts, they still won't see causality and there is no better example than fertility predictions to showcase The Poverty of Historicism
Look at any given developed society today (characterized by long-term peaceful stability and general prosperity, development of professional classes, liberalization of gender roles, shifts away from field work) and you'll see TFR falling below replacement levels. This isn't a "western" phenom, you can see it in Korea and Japan as well, for example.
It's simply practical economic decisions by individuals - kids cost a crap ton of attention and money, and when the risks of them dying have decreased (lower mortality due to medical care, less war/violence) and the obligation to reproduce is lowered (changing gender roles, birth control availability, women having options for professional careers), and kids are less useful as labor units, you get fewer of them. Predictably. Across hemispheres.
I suspect your examples are all "developing" countries, not "developed" but you've thus far only referred to nebulous regions and continents. Interested in a specific example of a developed country that has not exhibited this pattern.
Socializing, as other people pointed out, is also much easier in person.
Almost always I can avoid the full meeting with the understanding that they can call me in if they need my expertise. When that happens it's typically just a couple of questions and I can go back.
Sure some weeks can get a bit busy with meetings if we have a lot of projects going on, but I'm almost never in a meeting where I feel I'm wasting time.
If you need hourly contact with your co-workers I hope it's more about doing the job then socializing. If it is about doing the job and your job is software development then are alternatives to endless meetings.
Similarly, just because you do work with some people, does not make them your team.
Now maybe programming can be organized in a way that doesn’t really require a team. People can get projects done by interacting in a more transactional, contractor/gig-worker way. But that is a very different experience from being part of a team.
On web forums like HN people post regardless of who might be reading. That's an important difference.
I saw someone say that a lot of what makes WFH successful currently are the bonds that we had built while working together... and that as time goes on, those bonds will loosen as new people come in that don't have those experiences and those hallway talk.
I think I agree with that... but it remains to be seen how things will work going forward. I see most companies going to a hybrid model. I see a large number of turnover at places that don't offer hybrid.
My current place of employement seems to be winding up towards hybrid and I have a long commute (had before covid). I'd be unhappy with 5 days meat in seat. I'll be very happy if I only have to be there 2 days a week. Still happy with only 3. Sad with 4. I'd probably hunt for a new job with 5. Maybe 4.
For instance it’s a big difference if you can send and take your kids from school yourself 5 days a week or if for one or two days you need to find someone to contract just for that.
Same for having one or two cars, needing a laptop or not, etc. There are a lot of big and small effects on having to commute one/two days or 0.
I think, personally, most will want hybrid - to get the best of both worlds - and it's simply a matter of finding the right personal and corporate balance (if possible).
We'll see how long term the effects of COVID are. We might see WFH become mainstream... we might see a massive pushback to go back to the Old Normal. I think successful companies will find the middle to keep their talent.
I predict that in all the full time WFH companies, some small group will start having in person meets once every X. Or some other startup will innovate past an incumbent by having a hybrid model.
Then hybrid will be the next “new” thing.
I don't even think we have a point to make, it's just like a thing we say... like oh god another power point meeting, oh god another zoom call.
I think the real thing is "oh god another thing I have to do I don't want to" - but we're afraid to say it.
You can also quickly switch to screen sharing some chart and discuss it. Or you can look at a backlog, or some bit of code, or a mockup.
I've been remote for 12 years, in my experience video calls are strictly better than audio only, but of course it's fine if someone can't join with video.
It's not video that makes meetings bad, it's people.
And I assure you I wasn’t imagining the average of 3-4 hours of online meetings every single day that was compressed to 1-2 days every 2 weeks once we started meeting in the office again.
I think once a week in-person meetings and rest of week heads down WFH would be a great idea. Or we can do everything in async communication like emails.
And no, not Slack. It is even more distracting and should ideally be used only during scheduled meeting in place of Zoom or for emergency situations.
Internet quality and speed is a function of a few things, including where people live. I wouldn't want to extrapolate but I've not been finding connectivity to be an issue for internal meetings. Yes, occasionally there are hardware issues (e.g. I had a flaky WiFi chip in my laptop). These may be unfortunate for a particular meeting but tend to get fixed and so "can you hear me?" is definitely not a recurring pattern in my experience.
Sometimes people choose to join video calls from their phone while, for example, walking their dog (a completely acceptable thing culturally). In those instances video and audio quality can be variable; it's up to the individuals to make sensible choices around which meetings are suitable for this sort of thing.
Finally, there's a phone backup, where you can dial into a meeting (audio only) over a phone line. Some people use this if they need to take a meeting from somewhere with particularly bad connectivity. I personally have not needed to use it once in the 15+ months of WFH but I've seen others use it.
People unintentionally speaking over each other was definitely a thing in the beginning, especially in larger meetings. I've been founding it happen less and less over time, as people learned when to pause and we developed better ways to moderate large online meetings. Video makes this much easier compared to audio-only.
Overall, I think I've come to prefer video calls to in-person meetings, at least when _everyone_ joins over video. It'll be interesting to see how well the original, hybrid model (some participants joining in person and some over video) will work.
Since we're doing SCRUM, their spacing is also the same: sprint review, retrospective, splaning, refinement, ideation, etc..
This resulted in things where they suddenly found out that they need to pay taxes in four states (and Canada - unless they get that employee to leave within 3 weeks... and firing them is an option).
The three day hybrid may also be something to discourage one employee trying to hold down two remote jobs (on Reddit, this is a not uncommon question and sometimes a really suspicious coworker who suddenly can't VPN or connect to slack for a day or two each week).
The hybrid model keeps a number of problems that the company would otherwise have to think about and enforce non-issues.
I've side-stepped this issue by being self-employed.
Then it becomes as simple as - you keep paying me and I keep working.
(to counter companies pushing their workers to be self employed, to avoid taxes, healthcare costs, etc. But I am not convinced if the result is beneficial to the workers)
Though my clients in another country, I don't want to push it, they don't want to push it - so I don't care. Eventually I will jack up my rates and they will either sign me again or I'll find somewhere else.
If you pay yourself 100% of the extra revenue (aside from expenses), then there's no avoidance of a lower corporate tax, thus no issue.
I'd be ok with up to a max of one day a week in the office.
That doesn't restrict location too much. Only one day a week, I'm willing to put up with a multi-hour commute. Anything more than one day, I don't think so.
If it's "3 days every week at the office", then you need to live close by.
If it's "two days every month", you can just stay at a hotel for that time with the money you saved from commuting - maybe even bring the whole family =)
The company would be run like they're fully remote but there would be an easy place for people to meet up when necessary.
You sort of have to if some people are in-office and some aren't. For example, and I know a lot of folks don't want to hear this, but it's a good practice that everyone does video calls from their own desk.
I also hear of companies looking at reconfigurations of their spaces to be more collaboration-oriented, e.g. more space to conference rooms and enclaves with a lot more emphasis on hot-desking for the rest.
We do that sometimes, but I find it a bit painful. First you have to be on top of mute/unmute if you're having a conversation with the guy next to you otherwise everyone gets echo. And then, even if you are, if it's the guy next to you talking you hear him "for real" first then through the video call with a slight delay.
I don't want a situation where I am forced to always be in the office. But I also don't want to have colleagues I never see. That doesn't mean "mandate exactly X days at work". But it does mean "be at the office sometimes".
Folks have to meet in the middle somewhere if we want a society - some people want full office, some people want full remote, some people want a hybrid. They can’t all be happy.
Saying ‘I want to meet my coworkers face to face at least some of the time’ seems like the compromise position if anything.
I'd swear it just keeps getting worse.
WFH isn’t just a preference thing, having the option is about being treated with dignity like an adult.
We are uniquely privileged to be in an industry where leaving for better jobs is common and rather doable.
A consequence of this is a price tag on how much anger I have, and it's fairly small. More peaceful for me this way.
So far us software engineers have often seen jobs as replaceable and we know we'll have another one at the snip of a finger should we quit.
But with enough people actually quitting, how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision?
Genuinely curious here: Any of those quitting for the same reason recently, how hard was it to land an equally well paid remote job?
We'd have to take into consideration how the demand will change at the companies who are refusing remote work right now. I'd expect that it wouldn't diminish: they will still have business goals that will require developers to fulfill. They won't suddenly say "No software people want to work for us? Eh, we don't need them anyways. Let's build toasters instead".
I'm a data engineer in the Midwest with just under a decade of experience. All these companies seem to be hiring plenty of other roles and levels of seniority as well.
If you don't mind me asking, to what extent did you put yourself out there? For the longest time I just pursue whatever recruiters reach out to me, but I think I should probably do more active searching this time around.
I had a similar experience to you on LI. I wasn't particular desperate for a new gig, so I aimed high on salary range. At first I was told I was too expensive, but a couple weeks in I had plenty of options at or above my range, so shoot for the moon!
I'm still getting told ranges I expected to see two years ago for senior engineers (like pre-pandemic, where Chicago's market just kinda sucks compared to elsewhere and if you're here there's almost no remote jobs elsewhere to get higher compensation, but now there is), not even for principal engineers, which some of these roles are for.
And yet I've had about 25 recruiters reach out to me in the past few days. So there's got to be a lot of demand out there.
I think this is going to be the thing that cracks.
If everybody is WFH, I probably don't need YOU specifically. Programmers are about to get a big wake up call as to what their value actually is in the global market--and it's a lot less than they think.
If I were a particularly nasty manager, I would be pushing WFH like crazy and looking at laying off both my most expensive and most vocal WFH people in 18 months.
The most senior folk pulling the strings will survive. The rank and file will get decimated.
Be careful what you wish for.
That said, this is an unavoidable consequence of globalization that was due to happen anyway.The "pandemic" simply accelerated it.
A big section of the conceptual "West" is in for a very rude awakening.
I think a lot of management will be out of a job in the future, and they are grasping for control. Not saying we don't need managers, just that there are lots of fat that can be removed, and people have noticed lots of the managers weren't needed or invisible when WFH.
Reads to me like this is the exact chaff being separated from the wheat in the parent comment, and you know what: good. The less managers like that, the better for labor and the workforce at large IMO.
I think a few of us have had that manager and hopefully learned how not to lead and motivate people.
WFH just makes the difference much more obvious.
In my current commute situation it meas going from peninsula to SF for the day, which also means I get to have lunches in the city that I wouldn't otherwise get at home, and can meet people after work who live in the city. My work is also a couple blocks from the Caltrain station, and so the commute isn't really an issue, I just walk into this big metal box and keep working and I appear in SF an hour later, it's actually kind of relaxing, and I just like trains in general, and looking out the window watching the entire Bay Area fly by me without me having to drive. In the evening on the return ride I see the fog rolling over the mountains as I look out the train window, and that's relaxing too, and as I pass by about 10 other bay area towns, I can choose any single one of them to get off the train and have dinner, or bike around the town just for the hell of it, to get some exercise.
I don't want to commute for face time though. Rather, I'd do it for things like a big space with proper air conditioning, sunlight, and conference rooms without annoying gas leaf blowers that linger in front of my front door exactly when I'm having meetings. I also work on industrial-sized robots, and even if the company were to buy extra hardware, it's pretty impossible/unsafe to be running that kind of stuff at home. It's enormously more efficient to sit in front of the actual thing than to try to cope with a video feed.
I'm a bit of an ambivert, slighly more introverted, but not an extreme introvert. I do enjoy company, and I do miss the lunch conversations about wild and awesome things that I didn't get during the pandemic. I've also found time and time again at past organizations that those in-person socializing circumstances enormously helped build mutual trust with coworkers (specifically peers, not managers or subordinates) for when things actually went wrong. We're social animals and it's still hard to get around that biological fact.
Moving to the middle of nowhere to get cheaper rent and a bigger work space isn't really what I want to do either, because I do like having access to public transportation and food from around the world, including the grocery stores of the ethnic foods I'm used to eating. I'm kind of happy living in a cosmopolitan/global part of the world. I hate the high rents, admittedly, but I realize I can't have it all.
But yeah, no, I wouldn't commute or do hybrid to please management. It's just me. I still want to make the decision about when to go in myself based on circumstances.
This sounds rather idyllic and I'm sort of picturing you as Belle in Beauty in the Beast as she walks around her provincial town singing to the shopkeepers as she walks to the library.
But having the ticket master interrupt my work or sleep used to kill me
Everyone is retiring here and they want to prepare new blood, that means unnecessary middle management. Everyone has them, but I was lucky. Until 2020.
This new guy wants to meet once a week. Got us all in the office FIRST, while everyone else was still WFH. I do need to be onsite for a few things, but I live 3 miles from work and being on call had been working great, but you think he was listening? Now I just spend my time sitting at the office when I could be letting my dog out with the same productivity.
Additionally he has no power of making any decisions that matter, so talking to him is useless. He doesn’t have the courage to transmit messages to other teams that could be a problem for someone else, so we are basically gagged. And whenever something happens he will defend himself, not us, so we are pretty much abandoned. The decline in quality of my position went from an easy 90 to a 10 in a matter of months.
In other words, my happy job turned into me looking for a job.
Crazy idea - install a whiteboard at home and point a 4k camera at it. The broke college student version of this involves a pen, paper, and the camera on your cellphone; it works quite well.
I actually agree that in-person get-togethers are useful. I'm just not convinced they can't be handles as quarterly events in many situations--as many companies with distributed workforces already do.
> virtual whiteboards
Even a fully virtual equivalent is fairly trivial. Just buy a damn drawing tablet already! Being good enough to do commercial artwork on, they're all but guaranteed to far exceed the needs of any software developer.
Not having a terrible commute or paying 10x the national average for a closet to live in are definitely a strong plus in the other column though for sure.
For capturing bullet points, and other terse text, a Google doc is far superior.
I am very lucky that I was employed only in one company before going on my own and never had to deal with the crap like that personally but I saw it happen to other people.
I’m trying to think of a less dramatic way to describe the aftertaste of that interaction, but all I can come up with was that it felt a bit like servitude—like this person felt he could dictate to me where I would do my work including an unpaid commute (it’s not like my work depends on me being in a factory, for example). I’m thankful that my skill set is basically on fire right now and I can go elsewhere without losing money, but at the same time sad for everyone else who lacks that luxury.
A feudalistic remnant in the nature of corporate hierarchy is that people higher up in the hierarchy feel that this gives them inherent superiority over people lower in the hierarchy. In reality, there's no reason that someone in a corporate hierarchy needs to have their status (including compensation, etc.) determined by their place in the hierarchy. A hierarchy should just be an efficient means to organize a group effort, and not a social order.
That way, executive compensation would need to be high even if value over replacement executive is low.
What I’m saying is that this is an IMMENSE opportunity for startups to attract young/emergent talent and possibly even established talent that is prioritizing remote work.
Others are correct, corporate matters are working on how to corral their herds back into their expensive capital investments on prime real estate, even if most people have no clue what’s really going on die the the blinding light of affirmation.
It's classic foot in the door sales psychology.
Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote and understands that remote can only work properly if everybody is operating in the same mode - precisely to avoid the natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical room.
A good way of judging all this is to start costing your time from the moment you start getting ready for work to the moment you stop thinking about it and start doing something else.
When you do that, you'll often be shocked at your hourly rate.
We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device?
In that case, i work 168 hours a week and i’m the most productive when walking my dog.
It's what other time based professionals such as lawyers do.
Assuming that there is ~260 working days in a year, subtracting 30 years for holiday we have roughly 230 days that one would have to commute on.
My average London commute was 1 hour each way. That's 2 hours per day. That's 10 hours per week. 460 hours per year. 4.6k hours over a decade. This is not a chill "going on a trip" time in a train - it is stressful rush hours madness, breathing underground air and constantly bumping into a crowd of frustrated commuters who happen to be power walking the opposite way.
To put this into perspective and assuming that an average working day is 8 hours, over the last 10 years I could've easily spent 19 months of full time work commuting during rush hours.
Also ironically ~20 years of commuting adds to almost 10k hours which supposedly would put me on a world-class expertise level in terms of being a train passenger. The problem is I'm a Software Engineer, not a professional underground train passenger.
Oh wow, that's such a good way of looking at it! I used to have a 3h20m daily roundtrip commute. Now our office is permanently closed. I work on a treadmill desk, have lunch with my wife, and after work I walk a block to my baby's daycare. I can't imagine ever going back to an office.
It's not just ignoring them, but making it hard for them to get a word in edgewise, or sometimes even to hear what others are saying. Most of the time it's not even intentional. It's getting caught up in the moment, and/or failing to adapt to an environment where different etiquette is necessary.
> Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote
Just to be clear, truly embracing remote works means more than just having butts in seats in homes instead of in an office building. There are still plenty of people out there making most decisions in the same kind of clique-only conversations they used to have in the office, excluding not only people in different time zones but those who are just more socially/culturally distant from the inner circle. Truly embracing remote work means adopting an asynchronous workflow that makes information and conversation available to any team member at any time. Requiring them to be in the right place at the right time to gain full participation isn't embracing remote work, even if that "place" is a videoconference call.
I'm currently looking for new work, and full remote has become a _hard_ requirement. In addition to the great point that you've made; if an employer is insisting on in-person work, there exists a strong signal of deeper issues. For example: dogmatic/discriminatory thinking, egoistic processes, stifled/silenced innovation.
This certainly isn't universally true, but it is a giant red flag.
There's also my responsibility. This is my responsibility by choice, and I'm not out for anyone who doesn't make the same choice. If I am hired by said in-person employer, then I am supporting and perpetuating that behavior. The transport device also happens to be destroying the planet: I would be supporting that. The transport device is a luxury: I would be supporting discriminating against people with no access to it. Some jobs are by definition in-person (doctors, baristas, cleaners, etc.), and I would be consuming their transportation resources (whether that's room on a train, or a road). The housing market madness has been driven by access to in-person work hubs.
In-person work, where it isn't actually required, is a terrible idea. It's bad for you, and it's also bad for everyone around you.
It's not infantilizing or childish.
There's pros & cons.
Find a company that aligns with what you seek.
To each company their own.
Agreed. I hope to never work in an office again. It's a horrible concept.
I was ok with office work during the first 15+ years of my career when I had a private office. That works very well. Commute was annoying, but I'll take it.
But then came the cubicles. Ugh. Then came the open office nightmare. I will never be in an open office again. Not an option, full stop.
You want my expertise? The options are remote or private office.
Another thing; partial work from home has been a thing over here for a long time now, called "the new working". In practice though, it was just as bad as the open office, in that it was a tactic to reduce the amount of office space needed. Because some clipboard warrior decided that office space was their biggest expense, not staff, nor the realization that they can do more with the same staff if they make some changes to improve their productivity - e.g. no open offices, fixed workspaces, and a goal in their career.
They can have a much smaller office space (can be fancier since it is smaller) for people to meet if they really need to (specifically client facing), then there are internet & coffee & snacks, desks & couches available. 90% staff don't have to go to the office to be honest.
And the rest of the money being saved on having smaller offices can be funneled to employee bonuses/benefits or gear (better desks/chairs if you are chair-bound) (more frequent upgrades or let the employee choose what gear they want (within reason)), (at work I have 1x 24" 1080p screen, at home I have 2x 27" 1440p but I bought it with my own money... (which is the ultimate size and density for programming for me)), (decent webcam & dedicated microphone and good headphones), paid for tooling (like gitkraken/jetbrains/pluralsight subscriptions). Stuff like that will make a huge difference.
The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business. I want to be able to jump on the whiteboard at a moments notice and maybe pull in a couple of others, while other people in the office can also listen in. This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business. If the sales guy and I are having a discussion and the junior front end developer hears us, he gets a sense of how we work that he’ll never get if the meeting is held in PMs on Slack or Discord.
I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office.
I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary. I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first. But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
A social obligation here, a senseless chat there, a coffee here...a person reminding you about an unimportant email there.
There are just way too many distractions from work, at work. And those distractions are what people describe as "corporate life" because corporates over-micro-managed everything.
Open office spaces are horrible, except for the people not having to work in them - which coincidentially always decide pro open office work space.
If the work culture is manifested in interrupting your colleagues over unimportant stuff all the time, it's perceived as toxic by engineering people because they lose valueable focus time.
That is essentially what it boils down to. Add the additional time required to get there (and costs on the side of the employee for commute) and you have the perfect formula to get rid of quality work people.
While there are upsides of working in the office, there's also huge downsides that management likes to ignore in the discussion.
You basically want the seniors' suffer the uncompensated inconveniences of WFO so that the juniors can grow.
> This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business.
This is not altruism though, juniors' professional growth is important for your business growth.
> if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week.
We know from "unlimited time off" experiments that the game theory of this doesn't play off that way. People will race to bottom yielding to tacit peer and management pressure.
> I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary ... But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
No one is saying it is arbitrary. It works better for management. And management makes the calls. That's the reason.
> I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation
Or lose the talent that prefers to have more agency on their work conditions.
It’s not like we were being underhanded. If they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t have signed on.
I know this doesn’t fit everyone’s model of WFH utopia, but whatever happened to an assumption of good faith at HN?
WFH employees get paid too, we're talking about the differences between costs of WFH and WFO externalized to the employee, which are not trivial e.g. commute, access to wider and cheaper housing market, all the associated stresses etc.
I think you’re being naive if you think that BigCorps aren’t thinking about how to turn this to their advantage.
I would agree on principle but there is a circularity here. The cost of own housing used as office space is directly related to how expensive the housing was. In Bay Area the marginal cost of a 3rd bedroom could be $XXXk while anywhere else it can easily an order of magnitude less. Then it is not necessarily as the most expensive item anymore.
The more office time employers demand, the more spatially concentrated the work force is going to be housed, which will increase the cost of that extra bedroom.
Turns out concentrating the work force is also aligned with the sunken real estate investments those BigCorps had undertaken. You can bet as we look higher in the corporate hierarchy, the likelihood of personal real estate investments increase too. So it is a balancing act of those influences vs. the projected attrition rate of the workforce, who mostly did actually like WFH. That's how we landed on the unstable-as-hell equilibrium of hybrid WFH-WFO for now.
It will be interesting to see if discouraging WFH can actually be an advantage when it comes to recruitment and retention, but when all of the main players in tech are embracing WFH, its hard to see how smaller players can sell "no WFH" as a benefit.
But in any case, I'm no FAANG, and I was just trying to explain the motivation for my preference that people WFO where possible. I wouldn't say I see it as a competitive recruitment advantage, but I'm yet to be convinced it's a disadvantage either.
Lets hope to god there is a large enough demand for WFH that your position becomes intolerable for more companies. I think having access to on office as an option is great, but thinking its "better" is a unfounded claim.
In my BigCo job, your run-of-the-mill managers don't have any influence on this stuff. The high-level decisions are being made by executives who are at least four or five layers of reports away from the masses of ICs (eg the CEO is seven hops above me on my management chain), and whose entire job--as well as the entire job of everybody they come in contact with--consists of attending meetings. We experience the company and the workplace in vastly different ways, and articles & discussions like this are the result of that disconnect.
I used to whiteboard out problems with the whole team. I loved it. We had a couple of star employees who were really good at coming up with ideas and sketching them out. Being able to get the whole team on-side for a problem and understanding the answer was great. Then I discovered (overheard conversation at a social function) that half the team absolutely hated them. I followed up in 1-to-1 meetings, and yes, over half the team didn't enjoy them, didn't feel they could contribute, and saw them as a waste of everyone's time (and saw them as me ego grandstanding). The couple of "stars" did enjoy them, and thought they were great.
During my MBA, I discovered this is common. Introverts don't enjoy this kind of interaction, and don't benefit from it. Some people don't come up with ideas by "vibing" off others - they come up with ideas by themselves. Some people can't talk about an idea until it's complete - the whole idea of "talking through" an idea to completion gives them the shudders, and doesn't work for them.
You may find, after digging, that (like me) you're doing what you love, and not what the team benefits from.
Is it important that the org bends to the will of a subset of workers with specific preferences, or is it important that we get a group of people who are going to get the work done?
I suppose I'm firmly in the latter group. I have goals that I need to achieve; I need a crew that can achieve them; and whoever I pick necessarily has to be aligned with the way that I work, because it's on me - and only on me - if I fail.
Again, you sound a lot like I did before I got my eyes opened. And the leadership stuff in my MBA really helped me to see where I got this so badly wrong.
It’s really important to me that my team is happy, and with half the team following me from a previous job I’m fairly confident that they are happy with my style.
But that’s an assumption of course, and it’s always better to get evidence.
Huh? Where did this come from? Why "bend"? You can just post on Slack: "The 'Ideation' event is coming, attendance is not mandatory, come if you want to hang out and discuss ideas about tasks X and Y!"
Whoever wants to -- and loves that way of work -- will come. Everybody else will keep on digging on their own tasks and job will still get done. Win-win, no?
> or is it important that we get a group of people who are going to get the work done?
I don't understand why are you conflating "not willing to spend an hour with people enthusiastically discussing ideas" with "I can't get dev work done"?
Too much polarization and "us vs. them", dude. Your colleagues are not your enemies.
I don't generally do huge whiteboarding sessions with the whole team. Typically I write detailed technical documentation about what I'm trying to achieve, and how I think it should be done, which I share with the team who are implementing it.
It's typically only when they don't understand something that I jump on the whiteboard. And it's typically the more junior people that don't understand things.
It's not that I love huge, didactic whiteboarding sessions; I don't. What I do enjoy is explaining ideas in small whiteboard sessions with just one or two other people, or with small teams who have specific questions, and I feel that these sessions are much more productive in person than they are remotely.
I'm saying you might be making the same generic mistake I did (assuming that because I enjoy something, and no-one is complaining, the whole team enjoys it). And that's purely because when you described it, you sound a lot like I did before I learned that lesson.
As you say, I'm making assumptions. If you're sure that you're not making this mistake, I believe you. Well done, you're doing better than I did :)
It’s like the old saying, that it’s difficult for us to see ourselves as others do.
But it's true that I got most of my workstation/tooling out of my previous supervisor, who installed his stuff since I had no preference and it made it more similar to his own machine, making the process of helping me on my desk easier. That probably would not happen remotely :)
I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM. I do it at work and then shortly afterwards with friends on discord.
The real reasons for return to office should be tangible. If you have metrics that people are taking advantage, share them. The only thing I’ve seen so far is out of this world productivity increases.
Different people have different work styles. The water cooler theory is predicated on random, unplanned interactions, which are much harder over those channels. At the proverbial water cooler, an employee might engage with someone they had not planned to speak with, or maybe don't even know, and get some information or connection of value. Maybe you overhear* a couple of other people talking there and you join the conversation because the subject happens to impact you. I'm not sure how well that's replicated by Discord/Slack channels.
After a year+ WFH during the Inside Times, I have come to see the value of at least quarterly, if not monthly, face-to-face team meetings or casual events. Of course, if you have employees in different cities, like west and east coast, you can't affordably meet very often.
* I would hope people would not have a conversation that should be private in a public space, so being overheard is not a bad thing.
I do software, but I have to work with some large industrial hardware and it's so much easier to just have the hardware in front of you. Especially when you have to from time to time set up hardware that isn't even on the network yet.
Telepresence just isn't there yet, and the quality of internet connections and videoconference tools still suck. I have dual 4K monitors and still get 720p feeds or worse on most videoconference tools, you can't even read a damn whiteboard with that, let alone push physical reset buttons or e-stop buttons on actual hardware.
I think there's going to be an interesting dynamic when the hardware workers go back to the office and the software workers stay home. The tendency for the software department to become isolated from the rest of the business was already present before the pandemic, but may become more pronounced.
The issue comes up with roles when that isn't the case. In most programming roles I would not have any clear reason to be in-person, and even if I did have times where I clearly needed to be in the office, I would not appreciate being forced to come in outside those times. Requirements like that are frustrating because they require a real cost on my end (less flexible schedule, less control over my environment, a commute) and simultaneously signal a fundamental lack of flexibility, respect and trust from my employer.
So, right now I am in a lot, but no longer have an office. That is at home now, including enough gear to work on the small scale hardware.
If I come in, you can find me in the shop. My senior firmware engineer and I work best together, but work very well remote too.
So, I am going to move a machine here. We normally get together for a few days and will now just do it more regularly.
I am the better tech anyway, and do enough software to make me a good working extension. We expect this to be a net gain.
As that manufacturing spools up, I will WFH, only coming in when doing R&D, or to improve on or resolve manufacturing problems.
Pre-pandemic, I traveled everywhere, hated it. That is gone now.
Outside of software and other info heavy roles, having flexibility will be seen as a great thing.
As we optimize the diverse tasks, we will work better, and have many options. One of my favorites is to get up at oh dark 30, work in the shop when there are no distractions and head home after lunch. Those are the days when I get the most physical work done, and or solve the worst problems.
Jeez, give it a rest. Companies don't give a crap about your life. None have ever showed the slightest interest in anything I do when not at work.
Most companies clearly care more about the fact that they can account for the time you’re in office, as opposed to how productive you actually are.
Well, that is one hell of a viscous cycle, isn't it?
What’s the name of your company so I can tell everyone I know to avoid it like the plague? My company is gingrapp.com. We’re hiring and would never subject anyone to this.
> I’m not snooping anything by monitoring our computer systems in the way I do.
You just spoke of monitoring people, not systems. You spoke of "slackers". Now you're already backpedaling. I hope you get caught, and sued into the fucking ground.
There is nothing for us to be “caught” you have no legal or ethical grounds. My guess is I’ve touched a nerve with you because you have realized if your manager could see such data then your scam might be up.
See the "notice" section starting at bottom 3 of this for the lay persons summary on the notice requirement (or read the whole thing to see what laws around this look like in Germany) https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/lutz-holg...
Back in the 80's, many computer games had a "boss" key which would pause the game and throw up a screen that looked like a spreadsheet.
To be blunt, yes, unless you're trolling. Nobody could like you, you'd be the laughingstock of the company. The literal bootlicker too inept to rise and just tries to make others miserable. I say try because I guarantee you nobody gives a shit, they all just cash in the paycheck and wonder why it takes the company so long to fire them.
Either that our you need treatment for paranoia. Not only are your incompetent employees screwing you over, but your competent employees are also out to get you by “hiding” their abilities from you. Come on.
People should get to pick a role where they work from wherever they want, but they should be realistic about both up- and downsides of their preferred location.
FWIW, I'm mostly pro-office - even after all this time - but I'm making a career change because I don't want to deal with living in the West anymore.
Maybe pushing for remote work would've worked, but I find it to be an overwhelmingly anti-social experience that sucks all fun out of being at work and I have no intention of continuing with that.
But yes, I agree that it’s a no-brainer to let employees choose the work style that suits them best.
Office is not the only place where face-to-face collaboration can happen. Coffee shops, for example, are one of my favorite co-working environments.
That does not follow.
Of course, I'm sure they exist. Not often, though.
The people who want to control other peoples' lives go into politics and activism, not business.
Right, but they do what they can to increase the time you are at work. I'd say requiring 40 mandatory hours in an office is a start to that, and they do plenty to try to grow those 40.
*after I was told I walked around too much I kept an internal record of every time I left my desk and for what reason. It turns out, the main reasons I walked by was 1) meetings, 2) lab work, and 3) bathroom. I was hoping he would bring it up again so I could show him the Excel sheet!
Why does management care what I do in my free time, so long as I get my job done? It’s a power trip, plain and simple.
I hope you gave a reason if they asked why you’re leaving.
Either way, I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to get a job, or have enough saved to weather the storm. In the meantime, the sense of freedom that comes from WFH is unparalleled.
It’s definitely the most family friendly working arrangement.
I’d be far more worried about being saddled with a huge mortgage to live close to an office. In a downturn, it’s not like there will be office jobs either. Yet you could still easily get stuck paying 1M+ for housing that would cost <300k in locations where you could wfh.
Some of my colleagues agree, but I obviously recognise the fact that most do not.
Even before the pandemic our organisation had hybrid working conditions and I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re aiming for again in the near future; for good or for ill.
This tells me you’re doing WFH wrong or don’t have enough discipline for it. That’s okay, wfh is not for everyone, but don’t blame this on anyone but yourself.
There are tons of ways to have that proper separation, including but not limited to, replacing the transitional commute with a walk to switch contexts. You can find a lot of tips and techniques on the web.
When I’m done with work for the day, I’m done, and it doesn’t intrude in my home life, even though my “office” is literally in the next room.
I don't think your original parent poster meant ill, IMO they were just saying that bending your home WFH setup to your will is achievable but I get it that some people just don't want to -- or their estate is too small or otherwise unsuitable for WFH (like kids not understanding your need to focus).
Where it gets problematic is that even if some people absolutely can't do WFH (and some absolutely can't do work from office like myself for the last 10 years and a half) and even with us respecting each other, the end result is not always productive -- one group doesn't work well with the other (reasons unknown, at least for me?) and it all kind of ends up in "us vs. them" mentality. :(
However, why must I make it work if/when I get other options? I liked working in an office with other people.
I definitely don’t mean to generalise - I know loads of people who don’t feel the same way as I do. I was just sharing my personal experience.
The people that want it, really want it, are almost like zealots about it. Where if anybody mentions that they struggle with WFH, they get mad almost like it's a kid raising his hand to tell a teacher they forgot to collect the homework.
And I get it - Going full remote would literally be life changing for a lot of people. But there has to be nuance there.
People often talk about the importance of a "third place" in communities. A place that isn't home or work for people to socialize. The WFH zealots are advocating for a complete elimination of even a "second place" - But the workplace is something a lot of people benefit from. You form deeper connections and sometimes friendships with your coworkers, some people use it as a way to concentrate away from the responsibilities of home.
Getting rid of the office would have huge implications on our society as a whole.
I also feel that WFH was easier for me when I did it after having been in office for a long time. Both in terms of connections with the team and having office time helps instill discipline around work. As newer generations enter the work-force without that, I can see it being really hard for them (in both directions - in that they slack off and don't do anything or that they become workaholics.)
Rather than learning to live with each other, we'll all just retreat to our own little castles (or shacks), taking all focus away from making public spaces enjoyable for everyone. Who needs public transit when we never leave home? Whatever your station in life is where you'll stay, there are no trains coming.
We'll all have a carefully curated whitelist of like-minded neighbors to protect ourselves from witnessing any of the negative externalities of our lifestyles. Our only view of the outside world will be entertainment news that coddles our doxastic anxiety, telling us the exactly what we want to hear at all times.
It's funny that you opened your comment complimenting how I verbalized something, but this feels like an even better verbalization of it.
What's the answer to my crappy 2 hour a day commute? Remote work, not funding public transportation.
It's all about convenience without stopping to think of what we're losing as humans. We didn't evolve to live these siloed lives without any sense of community. I feel like American society forments a lot of loneliness.
And the tone of it really comes through in the people who advocate so fiercely for it - there's an entitlement there.
I am glad I do a mix of things. Some are great to WFH, others like hardware dev, R&D benefit from being around machines and often people too.
Not for a large chunk of the HN audience. The stimulus and unemployment don't come close to covering the six-figure salaries many on here get paid.
Also, I think, in the long run remote work will level the playing field between introverts and extroverts quite a bit.
As someone who hires, remote at least does have its pluses - one can reasonably expect comp (costs) to decline and perks are gone. Not sure why I wouldn’t just hire a team in Eastern Europe though once remote is the way.
They just became friends with their bosses when they talked about private stuff at work.
Introverted people usually don't do this and missed out on this opportunity.
Remote work removes many of these non-work related things, that could still impact your work. People who profited from it in the past won't so much in the future.
And yet, all the developers I know actually managed to stay employed/get jobs/etc.
The world is full of doom-sayers...and someday they'll be right. I just don't think thats day is today :-)
I mean yes, you absolutely can hire much cheaper devs, sure, but I've witnessed the fallout from them not being good at their jobs which then mandated bringing me and several other senior devs onboard so we can fix the mess and get the project back on track.
So can companies utilize the global market and hire cheaper devs? Yes. Is that usually risky? Also yes.
(Exceptions exist of course, e.g. Eastern European devs are usually high quality and are happy with 2X, if not even 3X-4X, less payment than the American ones.)
Color me surprised. For some managers it may become a time where they'd have to look for a new job and likely not because that was what they wanted.
Yes there are very good managers that help great deal in facilitating development. I am sure those would be just fine.
But I suspect there are more managers who are busy with nothing but convincing the rest of the company that they are needed and irreplaceable while doing useless work.
Silicon Valley leaders, such as Google, have long invested significant resources in incentivizing people to stay at the office - great food, massages, ping pong, lectures, etc. The value of being at the office hasn't changed, and Silicon Valley already experimented with mostly remote work and rejected it, years ago. I remember Yahoo (IIRC) abruptly canceling their experiment and bringing people back to the office.
I'm surprised to see some SV companies now planning for WFH. Nothing has changed in that regard, especially for them - it's not like their employees didn't understand how to use Zoom and were forced to do it by the pandemic, like people in less tech-savvy industries.
Organize in person events that are worth attending. Maybe we found a new purpose of management…
i’d forgotten that they buy the cheapest kleenex, and the cheapest toilet paper.
but hey there’s an endless supply of sugary drinks to tempt me all day.
Do people coordinate their in-person days so that meetings can be in-person?
How do zoom meetings happen when some employees are in a meeting room together, and others are on zoom?
It’s easy enough to have a big screen in that room to put remote participants on-screen, but how do remote people know who is talking or see all around the room? Where are cameras placed?
Generally, remote attendants means everyone takes the call from their desk. (some exceptions if the structure allows it, e.g. people in a meeting room present to a distributed audience, but for general meetings that's the default)
I found it pretty natural to _also_ look at the camera while also looking around the room, as if you were just making eye contact with a new person. And while the "highlight" border would only ever show for one in-person person, cameras are usually close enough that your eye is naturally drawn to whomever's mouth is moving.
Presumably they bought empty commercial real estate. If it remains empty they'll get back most of that investment when they sell.
If one corp transitions to full WFH, their office just keeps their value.
If all corps go WFH, nobody would want offices like that, and all offices would plummet in value.
I'll mention something trivial yet having strong effects. While working, I often come up with a bunch of random work questions. When co-located, I often look at the person who could answer / I could discuss with. Are they in the office currently? Are they currently looking deeply focused or are they already distracted / looking bored so asking them would not probably cause an issue? If yes, I can ask them and get an immediate answer to solve a problem / clarify my thinking etc.
There's no corresponding possibility with WFH which leads me to shooting an IM which is often answered too late thus delaying the problem-solving. You could say that the difference between getting an answer in 1 minute or 10 minutes does not make much difference, but in reality it can have big consequences. With 10 minutes latency, you've probably already switched contexts and will take a look at the answer later, thus introducing even more delay.
Another thing I noticed that different people manage differently with WFH. Some people communicate often and even build relationships over Zoom calls with ease. Such people typically have great communication / interpersonal skills in the first place. But OTOH there are people who hardly ever initiate communication, very often keep muted in most calls etc. Those are usually the more quiet ones in IRL, but in WFH they are even quieter, and it shows. This is very much amplified when the team did not ever meet each other IRL.
I think that the "best WFH performers" can form great distributed teams. But it's not going to work for the majority of teams, who are likely to see productivity decrease.
I actually believe most of the WFH communication problems could be solved / mitigated with better technology (VR office), but we're simply _nowhere near_ that.
man, employees are never going to get it and they resist unionizing? see you in 100 years this is hilarious
I intend to find a fully remote role and then move back to a cheaper city.
Not everyone needs to live in San Francisco
I feel like this approach would make it more collaborative for employees as they can decide which days they want to go in person, probably pick a day when some/few office colleagues want to go into the office. Any important meetings can also be set for those days. People wouldn’t have to move to their actual cities in this fashion, also companies would still be seeing people in the office. Just a thought.
So thank you plague, for showing me what my future holds.
I don't expect employers to pay more willingly, but if these supply/demand changes continue, perhaps they won't have an alternative?
It's not because of productivity gains, the Fed has been pumping money into the economy without regard for inflation and we're finally seeing the financial system respond. everything is more expensive, not just stocks.
A concrete hypothesis might be: Less people would have left Base Camp if they were not remote.
Interestingly my whole team is very much in favor of being in the office a few days a week.
You’re at the mercy of your employer in more ways than one if you rely on them for such a core human need.
You're still going to deal with your co-workers eight hours a day. Dealing with people who think of you as a friend is a lot easier than with people who don't.
There are entire categories of drama that wfh eliminates.
Perhaps this is fine for you, but I want to point out to others that just because you don't see this happening anymore, doesn't mean that it has actually stopped happening.
That’s a huge win and those aren’t the only detriments eliminated when you don’t force grown adults into a high school like environment.
I suggest that lots of this WFH/WFO stuff is super personal, and what benefits one may disadvantage another, so it'll be interesting to see how all of this pans out over the next few years.
Please never hire at a company near me, thank you
Secondly, we spend a lot of our finite lives working, do you want that part of your life to be cold and robotic? Wouldn't life be richer with a wide range of human relationships?
Every contractor will tell you that you can be far more productive than normal employees because you don’t get quagmired in silly social drama. Look at open source software, it is absolutely possible to create great software without even knowing the other team members. This whole concept that reproducing high school in a professional setting adds to productivity is entirely unfounded.
Do you have good internet? If not, upgrading it might improve the video signal.
What about something like Discord with voice setup so you can literally chat every five minutes if you want?
Could you not use one of the VR programs on Oculus Quest that create virtual meeting rooms like Spatial?
What about playing a game together once a week online? Could be something that requires a ton of cooperation like Rainbow Six.
I'm not saying that real lunches or whatever are not great and a step up in bandwidth, but I feel like if you really take advantage of all of the possibilities then you can still have social opportunities online that can build real cohesion. Which I think you are not really trying.
I’ve worked at a Fortune 500 company for 20 years and I’ve never so much as seen a C-level person, even though we all work on the same campus. They have separate parking garages, separate buildings, separate fitness facilities, separate eating facilities, etc.
From what I've seen, its a losing game. You can kiss all the ass you want, socialize whatever. But when there is an opening in companies like that, it seems like the boss's son-in-law/college crony/etc. always gets the job..
Fuck that, go to a bar, I don’t need friends.
Maybe consider that are other reasons besides fear for why people prefer to work in an environment that is productive for them?
* Doesnt want to go back to work because of fear of infection * Wants to go back to work because she cant stand the kids and her husband anymore
I havent heard any other stories so far. Maybe because I am not allowed to stay very long at the office...
This is the key part though, this isn't an individual choice, it's a company (or at least team) one.
If the rest of your team is in the office, and you aren't, then you aren't going to be "in the loop" and you aren't going to be an effective engineer.
If the rest of your team is not in the office, and you are, well, at that point it's not really different from a coworking space. The advantages of in person communication simply don't exist.
So... expect teams changing from/to in office to be painful, people who disagree are going to have to choose over leaving or sucking it up, and that's not a nice choice to be making. Unfortunately this is somewhat viral between teams too, because your manager is effectively on the "manager team" as well as the local team, and people do move around between team...
Moreover there will be plenty of times were you want to work for company X for reasons unrelated to whether or not they work from an office, you like the company mission, the technology, etc. As a result even once things settle down you can't expect everyone to be happy with the office/no-office/partial-office choice that is made...
But my commute is 1 hour one way, some people don’t get seats on the train, U-Bahn in Berlin is like a can of sardines during rush hour and the bigger part of my team is in another country and the customer is at the other side of Germany. And the office is one big open office with ~40 people working. You need noise canceling headphones to keep your sanity. I couldn’t focus without them.
I‘m glad they don’t want to force us to come back.
No, sorry, it’s great where I live. Great nature around the corner, everything walkable, still a town with restaurants, but there aren’t that many interesting full stack dev and devops jobs and they didn’t pay as good. So, I’ll stay remote as long as I can.