‘Great Resignation’ gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect
cnbc.com
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I don't think FAANGs will have any trouble hiring a boatload of eager, hardworking college grads in September even if they lose multi-digit percentage of their current workers.
Also the HN audience is far more remote-oriented than I’ve encountered among my coworkers over the course of my career, including > 4 years working full-remote.
It would seem prudent to be aware of these other "HNs".
There is a really funny one where the guy goes back to work and hits his head on a door.
If you’re suggesting HN is old and cranky…
You’d be correct.
I believe that I have a perception of being irreplaceable, but it's because of my future value rather than past value.
I've never felt like I was being treated like cattle at work, though, so maybe I've just been lucky enough to work at good companies.
Now I have a family at home and life is much easier working out of the house.
But maybe they have excellent documentation, knowledge sharing and mentorship, unlike all multinational corps I've ever worked for (where was generally a cost center and frowned upon).
I miss the office for..
- Free and convenient food.
- Social chatter & engagement.
- Making friends with employees who I don't know and connecting with new employees.
- Work life separation (balance).
- Proper workstation, climate controlled environment.
- Sense of belonging - team outing, after hours beers..
- Intra and inter company sports and games.
- Meeting potential dates.
[Not me. Just empathizing]
Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun?
If you scoff at people who want to make their workplaces more welcoming and happier, no shit the workplace is going to turn into anti-social, work-only hellholes that nobody wants to go back to. This attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a root of the problem.
Of course you can argue about how employees, despite being "in the office" are only productive for 2 or maybe 3 hours of their 8 hour shifts. But that's now how management sees it. Having a person visibly in a chair makes management feel like they are getting their money's worth.
I also don't get how people expect to get paid a full living salary for working less.
For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.
I surely hope this is rare. Even a 40h work week is less than a quarter of work per week and that doesn't account for holidays, vacation etc.
Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.
And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work?
I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.
I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends!
>and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.
See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.
I'm sorry that apparently you haven't been able to (or just haven't bothered to) build the relationships I have been able to, but work is unequivocally an indispensable part of how I (and many others) enjoy life and meet people. I absolutely wouldn't give up the friendships that I made at my workplaces for anything.
Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off.
But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired.
This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't.
It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?
WFH has changed work from a social experience into something boring. I get it, work is work, and maybe treating it as a more significant part of life isn't a shrewd move, but I am definitely missing out something in this current state.
(That being said, I do understand that I may change my mind in 10 years, assuming I have a family. But I can only talk about how this seems today.)
You sound SO different from me. I really struggle to form relationships so easily, yet it sounds like you making lasting relationships wherever you go.
I find that kind of fascinating. As someone who just went back into the office with the whole intent on being more social, I still find that my interactions with coworkers are at "arms length" and are very sterile. Hard to imagine a relationship with them outside of work. That line is still very strong.
Kudos to you. But I would ask, is this an intrinsic skill or did you learn this over time?
It works even better if you can manage to remember those things people get excited about. Even if you don't remember anything else about the person, it gives you something to revisit in future conversations.
I've heard from people who are good at this that it comes from a genuine interest in other people. They're able to work through the small talk phase because they're driven by an intrinsic desire to learn more about the person. I definitely do not have that trait.
One thing I would say though: if you believe that this is an intrinsic trait that others have, rather than something that can be learned, then this belief may hold you back more than you may think.
Your point about not over-investing into a company that doesn't care about you is valid, but not relevant.
I think how much you invest into this faceless entity is independent from whether you WFH or the office, no?
I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.
Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network.
In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times.
I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.
> Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun?
I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club!
Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive.
Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.
Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance).
It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial.
That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.
They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.
But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.
This is a brilliant sentiment and can be tide to multitudes of other items. The more that can be voluntarily decoupled from the employer-employee relationship, the more should be.
This is a lesson I learned in the last year. Even though I've made real friends with colleagues and I wouldn't change that, I would still advise caution. It can be tempting to make friends at work because spontaneous regular encounters and shared experiences are the natural basis for cultivating friendship. However, making friends at work has hidden hazards.
Most (but not all) colleagues are like fair-weather friends. It is easy to confuse someone being friendly with someone being a friend. If you couldn't imagine spending time with this person outside of work, they are probably friendly but not your friend. If it would be weird for them to call you outside of work to ask how you're doing, they are probably friendly but not your friend.
Why wouldn't you want to cultivate true friendship in the workplace? Don't expect workmates to continue to be friendly when you switch workplaces. If you're not engaging with them outside of the workplace, their friendliness will simply fizzle out. Secondly, confusing friendliness for friendship makes it easier to be exploited. I've stayed at a dysfunctional workplace far too long because I liked my "friends" there. However, when I finally did switch and these "friendships" fizzled out, it became much more clear that these were simply friendly people. This doesn't make them bad people, it's just a social lesson I learned. Finally, the last hazard of workplace friendships has to do with the insulating effect of selection bias. Especially in the tech sector, workplace friends will tend to be a much smaller slice of class, race, and gender and it's easy to have a narrow worldview as a result. Maybe the importance of that differs from person to person, but it makes it easier to wake up one day and realize, "Huh, I have only middle class white guy friends. What's up with that?"
40 hours a week is a huge chunk of my life. I don't want to just be a robot during that time, I want to be part of a community of some sort. (Even as I do try to maintain connections outside of work too!)
As these offices are sitting empty and are no longer required, instead of letting them sit empty, let them be free to all. Community involvement is the only way to get this done.
The lack of of "community" is not due to lack of concrete boxes, in my opinion. How busy is your local library? From the odd occasion I've been, mine is not very. And seemed to be almost entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet and were pretty solidly absorbed in facebook / paying bills / online shopping / whatever.
I don't think people like to invest a lot in public shared spaces because antisocial behavior from a few can easily ruin it and is difficult to police without being extremely restrictive.
Private clubs, groups, organizations are much more successful, and those are everywhere and (in my small experience) have good community spirit. You just don't necessarily see them easily because you can't necessarily walk in the door and start doing what you want.
I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces.
Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day. Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me. Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.
People don't prefer to socialize anywhere. Libraries definitely used to be a much more social community hub though. But I'm not just talking about socializing but "shared spaces", as OP said. People working, meeting, relaxing just weren't there. And it is not for lack of room. The people there as I said using the facilities I didn't mean they were wasting it or using it other than its intended purpose, the opposite they were. They were there for a free service they didn't have, but almost certainly if they had a little bit more money they would have prefered their own internet/computer/phone and used it somewhere not in a shared space. Like everybody else who didn't have to be there to use the internet.
> I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces.
There is no absence, they just aren't used as I said. And what do you mean we haven't figured it out? Everything is figured as we go continually. We have arrived here because there is actually less relative demand for these shared spaces than there used to be.
> Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day.
Is the problem this meaningless new phrase "shared space"? We've always had festivals and markets and shows and concerts and things like that.
> Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me.
I don't know why "aside" -- as I said those are not modern things. Would help to define what you mean, the first post didn't seem to be advocating for more crowded festivals but rather taking over empty office spaces and turning them loose to the public with some unexplained goal in mind.
> Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.
Sounds to me like the void is lack of community trust and cohesiveness and therefore willingness to share spaces. As I said, that will not be improved with more concrete boxes.
> Is the problem this meaningless new phrase "shared space"? We've always had festivals and markets and shows and concerts and things like that.
The point was that this is all where I live in terms of shared spaces and I seize those opportunities. The idea being, there is a need for shared spaces. For example, whenever a block party is organized here there's not really any public space to host it. Not enough greenery per district where daily activities of the locals can vary but special events, for said locals, are easy to put together. That's a void.
As for the term, I understood the spirit of it to mean public spaces to socialize, where any variety of activities can be done alone or with others. Examples include parks with chess tables, public pools and nature reserves. You can easily go to these kinds of places, socialize with perfect strangers or go alone and still be surrounded by people in your community. Again YMMV and that's OK. I'm open to any ideas so long as those spaces exist.
I agree and think it'll always be hard to trust strangers. But the more opportunities communities have to socialize, the easier it is to build that trust -- but they have to exist. When there's a lack of spaces, that just compounds the trust issue.
Suffer what same issue? You said there is a void of "modern social spaces" around you. Is that the issue you're talking about? I'm saying opening up empty office space to the public carte blanche won't turn them into vibrant engaging places that the community will gravitate to.
> The point was that this is all where I live in terms of shared spaces and I seize those opportunities. The idea being, there is a need for shared spaces. For example, whenever a block party is organized here there's not really any public space to host it. Not enough greenery per district where daily activities of the locals can vary but special events, for said locals, are easy to put together. That's a void.
Isn't a block party specifically organized on the block for local people to turn up to without having to go far? Isn't the block exactly the desired public space for this? I don't see what the void is there, sidewalks and verges are public spaces.
If you think buildings anybody is free to go in and out of to have parties in would be a good idea, I'm not sure what to say.
People are perfectly free to open their houses and invite neighbors to have a party too (which occasionally happens on my street). Or you can book venues or organize to go to a partk (where do you live that has no parks in walking distance?). The point is this rarely happens because people don't really want to invest in this. A block party takes very little investment in time or money or location.
> As for the term, I understood the spirit of it to mean public spaces to socialize, where any variety of activities can be done alone or with others. Examples include parks with chess tables, public pools and nature reserves. You can easily go to these kinds of places, socialize with perfect strangers or go alone and still be surrounded by people in your community. Again YMMV and that's OK. I'm open to any ideas so long as those spaces exist.
I'm just saying they exist everywhere (including side walks and verges if you want a block party) and are under utilized. The demand is not there.
> I agree and think it'll always be hard to trust strangers. But the more opportunities communities have to socialize, the easier it is to build that trust -- but they have to exist. When there's a lack of spaces, that just compounds the trust issue.
Turning the public loose on vacant buildings I guarantee will not do anything to increase trust. The results will make people rightly very angry.
> entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet
This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another. I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space. When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.
I might be missing something. You're making it sound like there is some short term or new phenomenon happening here. COVID certainly has not been the cause of the decline of community cohesiveness, and certainly not behind any rise in demand for people "sharing spaces" with strangers.
> This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another.
Well I disagree with that characterization that it's a problem or that a solution would be to spend vast amounts of money on it. As I said, people don't want to share spaces. The "problem" is not lack of shared space. If you don't like the lack of community or people willing to share and invest in their shared spaces, the root cause is completely different. A top-down decree of more will not fix it.
> I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space.
Parks are one thing that can work if they are quite remote or highly policed or in "good areas", but that's because people tend to go there for few reasons, there isn't much in the way of infrastructure or services to be ruined or hogged or stolen.
I don't see many people working, cooking, or gardening in shared spaces though. Sure there are some college kids, occasional professional who takes their laptop there for a few hours to work, sometimes people will have a BBQ and there is the odd community garden project. But even with the meager parks there are, I don't see a lot of them overflowing for places to sit and work.
> When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.
Dangerously bordering on anti diversity wrongthink... but true. However increasing space doesn't really help all that much when there is a lot of crime and not enough resources to police it.
As far as chatter goes, nobody wants that. It's distracting to those around you. When we were at the office we were chatting over IM to cut down on the noise. Guess what? We're still chatting over IM while WFH.
Besides, many companies are adopting a hybrid plan anyway. My team, which includes many young professionals, wants to go to the office once per month. Make good use of that time to build your network.
I interpreted "social chatter and engagement" not necessarily to mean people are yapping at their desk, but that people say hi in the break room, have lunch together, etc.
> Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues.
I hear that a lot on HN, and I'm sorry if I have to roll my eyes a little. TONS of humanity make friends at the place where they spend nearly half their waking hours, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's fine that not everyone does, but this "rule" people like to spout about "your co-workers are not your friends" - well, maybe your coworkers are not your friends, but I've made plenty of deep, lasting friendships through work.
I just like talking to people. I like being able to go down the hall and solving a problem in 5 minutes that would take 3 days and 3 meetings WFH. I am "friendly" with many people in the office. I socialize with them.
They aren't dear dear friends but they are acquaintances that have helped me out of tight spots and I helped them. I can't tell you how many times I've been helped through these sort of relationships.
If you're introverted just say it. There's nothing wrong with it. But there's nothing wrong with socializing either.
Once allowed we'll be going out to lunch again. I always made it a point to go out to lunch with people - people I work with now, people I've worked with in the past, and people I've met through meetups. I like going out at a minimum every other week and prefer once a week.
Maybe it's company culture? We're in multiple states and have multiple locations within the same state - and I need to work with people from all these different locations and so we've solved this "working together remotely" problems ages ago. It's an important part of our corporate culture. WFH just solved the problem of working in a big, noisy area.
Some people make friends at work, others don't. While you may struggle blurring friend from colleague in the office, others may struggle WFH with separating their house and leisure from work. Not everyone has a luxury office to walk into. Some work in their dining room.
There are pros and cons, and those pros and cons change depending on individual circumstances. But ultimately you are working for a company that needs to make money and they need to make a decision. You can choose to stay or leave.
Some of my best times were working in a university department. We did all this, though the talking to people outside your team was at proscribed coffee times in the staff lounge and sometimes over lunch.
But they remained colleagues not friends. Outside the few parties a year we didn't go round people's houses. We collaborated and fought over work, as that was what brought us together.
I make the distinction between colleagues and other employees as not all employees are colleagues. Colleagues help each other out of tight spots and talk beyond "Nice weather". Friends could be either, but in my experience once everyone is married and has kids, the closest will be "friendly" rather than "friends".
My point is, there isn't a right or wrong here. It's frustrating see the WFH warrior brigade come out and diminish other's experiences just because they had a bad experience. It's simply not universal.
'Colleague' just refers to someone you work with who is of the same rank as you, and probably on the same team. It's closer to 'teammate' or 'peer' than it is to "workmate you have a friendly relationship with". You can dislike a colleague, and you can also barely talk to or really know a colleague.
I think the point being made is that this is totally okay.
There's an undertone in this greater thread that "people you work with aren't really your friend" and it implies that these "not-really-friends" aren't pleasant to be around. But that's not necessarily the case. For many people, being around "colleagues" and making small chit-chat is enjoyable, desirable, and helpful, even if they aren't (and never become) your "friend".
I didn't say they are "merely pleasant". I said they are enjoyable, desirable, and helpful.
Things could be perfect, but (with high probability) a relationship will abruptly end and managing every social aspect can be difficult.
Do you not live in a place with climate control? At home I make the temperature decisions not the facility folk.
>The latest results from the 2009 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) show that 87 percent of U.S. households are now equipped with AC.
That was 12 years ago.
I don't have AC and neither do many of my coworkers.
Seattle has the lowest percentage of home AC in the nation. It's not installed standard in new construction.
Does the office run the AC a bit cold? Yes, but to be honest when you reach almost too hot to sweat that's a nice problem to have.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/air...
I know plenty of AMZN and MS employees without AC.
There's also the matter of the fact that because Seattle doesn't get very hot or cold, there aren't that many people or companies that do AC installation. Anecdotally I've now heard that they're booked out for months, possibly a year, and with tight local housing and job market that is unlikely to change. You certainly haven't really been able to buy fans or portable units anywhere in the area since May.
I used a portable AC in the past but they barely work and are very loud.
Work is a decent place to meet people, but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy as your only or even primary opportunity for social connection. That might not be the case here but it sure sounds like it could be.
My own life improved immeasurably when I finally started having interests outside of pushing buttons into a glowing rectangle of light.
I sort of feel like these discussions are just (oversimplifying here) extroverts and introverts arguing back and forth about the best way to find satisfaction socially when they just have profoundly different social needs.
Also FWIW I've never lived in an apartment with climate control past radiators and window AC units. I don't think that's too unusual if you live in older buildings.
I've spent most of my career doing remote work. Since I planned on it, rather than being forced into it, I was able to do things like rent an apartment with space for an office and set it up how I like. That actually adds to my balance as I can "go to the office" and then "leave the office" when I'm done. A lot of people in the pandemic era aren't as lucky there since it was so unplanned.
More importantly to your point though is that remote work normally doesn't mean "only work from home". Outside of the pandemic I would regular take my laptop to parks, libraries, or other spaces for a change of scenery. With the pandemic that wasn't an option as places were closed. I'm hoping to continue this now that things are reopening.
Unvaccinated folks pose a potential risk to themselves and other unvaccinated people. So, if you're already vaccinated, why are you still hesitant to go out? Is it because you live with kids or with someone immunocompromised who can't get vaccinated?
- Work life separation (balance)
Does not compute.
You can integrate certain aspects of work and personal life (social circle) while keeping other aspects siloed
the only good thing about working at an office is the free food, but food isn't terribly expensive anyway. i could probably use transport savings to buy myself a nice food every week or two.
And dating a co-worker in today's climate? No way, to much a risk -at least in the US.
The rest of them (comfortable space to work, food) are easy to solve with minimal effort. Especially on a dev salary.
You made it all up, right? Not cool to wait until the end to say so.
> Work life separation (balance).
jibe with
> - Social chatter & engagement.
> - Sense of belonging - team outing, after hours beers..
> - Intra and inter company sports and games.
> - Meeting potential dates.
?
* "Single, young" "person" rips off its mask out of ravenous anger to reveal a 400 year-old lizardoid smacking its chops at the humans in it's vicinity.*
The person you're replying to is pretty similar to me, where I use the fact that I have a physical office as my work/life boundary. But I also don't shy away from having a social life when I'm within the work side of the boundary, and another social life when I'm on the outside. If you spend 1/3 of your life on the inside, you can have fun there without contradicting your personal work/life balance.
Most of my immediate team are in another continent, others 100 miles away.
I'm used to working 'remotely' to my team, but still from the office. The office is my social space, where the company culture is, where I go out for lunch with work friends etc.
I've worked at my company for a while, so luckily already know a good number of stakeholders around the business. I hate to think how bad it would be for new starters joining the company and only really being exposed to their direct team.
Meeting people at the coffee machine or at a lunch area may not seem important but it's what made me love my workplace.
The C level has completely changed three times in my time here, but our culture lives on in the people. If it wasn't for those connections and sense of belonging, I may no longer still be working here.
I don't want to be forced into going back to my 3hr daily commute, but I wouldn't mind easing back into the occasional office visit.
She worked in the same building for another company and we often saw each other at a nearby restaurant at lunch time. Often as in every single day. After some time (months) I was able to find someone in the other company that told me her name, searched her on facebook add her and we started talking first online, then of course we went to lunch together since we were in the same building. The rest is history as they say.
I do like free food though :-)
That's the perception we have in our groups. We meet up weekly face to face to share air when possible.
Seriously, does half of HN work in the real-life equivalent of "The Office"? Yes, office politics exist, but this idea that it's some sort of scheming, back-stabbing environment is a caricature I have never experienced in my nearly 30 year career.
Bullying? I've had it done to me and another time had to sit in with HR on someone else's behalf.
People being performance managed just because? I saw a bunch of 40 somethings get targeted and zeroed out. It got ugly.
30x1 is not the same as 1x30 or 6x5 or 15x2 or 10x3. They all look like the same equation but the experiences can be vastly different.
Inserted edit: I notice you didn't comment on bullying. That's awkward over a zoom. At least one boss of someone I know has found out the hard way. Especially on playback.
The mind set changes when you start self organising because you're alone in a room. It's a different dynamic.
The gig economy has a lot of twists and turns. Less old guarantees but some interesting new ones.
I get that some people want to put their head down and grind for 8 hours a day then move on with their lives, but I tend to prefer at least knowing who I work with. I work at a small company, well under 100 people, and haven't met half of them.
But 30% of the time? Or 20%? For plenty of people this won't seem weird. Spending two days per week working from home won't be strange.
I work remote now. While I still see a need for in-person catch-ups this doesn't include any need for the classic daily commute. That, for me and many others, at least, is now dead.
It doesn't magically go away, it just keeps happening, almost certainly to your detriment.
I have recently started a new job and was interviewed and onboarded entirely remote. The process was fine and in the future I am not required to be in the office a lot either.
However I am eager to get into the office to meet the new people, have them at hand to ask questions (not just on teams) and generally assimilate into the team.
The problem with teams and other such tools is that I can’t see if someone is available or not. Their dot might be green, but they might be in the zone or otherwise not easily interruptible. In an office I can see whether or not this is the case.
I’m not keen to work in the office 100% but I am also aware of some of the benefits of being in the office at times. Especially planning meetings etc.
I also don’t think each case suits everyone and IMO flexible location is a good compromise allowing people to work where they would like. Let people come in when they need or for meetings but also let them work from home as they need.
In an office I think it is pretty hard to tell when someone is actually available. If you make a mistake and interrupt someone while they are actually thinking deeply about a problem, you can cause a pretty big dent in their productivity.
Maybe if the "office" actually gave everyone enough space to have their own office the push-back against going back wouldn't be so bad, but it seems like no company wants to spend the money to have comfortable and productive working environments.
I'm a soloist, and I've found WFH to be a mixed bag in the past 16 months. I love that I can set up my home workspace exactly as I'd like it. But I very much miss routine social interactions and don't care much for the daily isolation.
If I could return to an office/cube, I think I'd prefer that. But alas, my clueless F100 employer insists we IT-types occupy an open space without personal- or group- reserved seating, so I'll rarely be able to find or sit with anyone I know. NOT something I'd prefer.
Perhaps the exodus of those seeking greener pastures will include me too.
Do you truly want work life separation, is your work place your social venue, or do you want a mix of both? No wrong answers. Just pros and cons with personal preferences. I just feel that it would be nice to have that choice.
At this point in my life, I'm one of those people who is screaming to get out of the house. It's a place of comfort to me for sure, but also distraction and stagnation. Couple this great start to my career with having a critical third of college plus youth in general being ripped from me, I think its pretty clear why I am against pure WFH. People in different situations and stages with different needs will want different arrangements, but I am not going to apply for remote positions as a new grad.
But this can be solved with just renting a separate flat and using it as an office; something I actually considered, except small flats are the new fad for real estate investors (at least where I live), so prices are ridiculous.
Going back to the office, the company building, removes a lot of the flexibility and freedom that are important to me, and bring in heaps of crap that I don't want to deal with.
I don't want to go back to a small room crammed full of programmers shoulder to shoulder, stuck on depressingly out of date equipment, with shitty air conditioning and public restrooms.
I'm sooo much more productive and happy working from home
What I can't stand, and what I believe many people don't realize how much they can't stand it instead of something else, is having to share a space with people I have nothing to do with. Open floor plans prevent me from talking with my close colleagues, they force me to overhear conversations I have no interest in, strangers walking by all the time, the lack of privacy generates anxiety and so on.
It makes no sense that employees exist, right? Why not just pay everyone as consultants, gig workers, piece-work, etc?
But employees do exist, possibly because the best way to manage most people is to pay them to be in a room where all they can do is work.
Do you have a great idea to save time? Well you tell your boss, and you're pretty confident that this won't result in you losing billable hours, because you're an employee.
Are the requirements kind of bullshit? Not a problem, figure it out, you're paid to be here.
Do you need a break? Have a break. Maybe chat to some colleagues, that might even add some value.
All the anti-office folk seem very set on believing that they should be paid for the value they add, not the hours they are in the office. This is fine if you're delivering pizza, but for a lot of jobs this just isn't easy to measure.
Yes, there's some consultants and B2B, not everything needs to be employees, but for a lot of work and a lot of workers and managers it's paid salary that ends up being fairer and easier.
A lot of employees became more productive in lockdown, but I suspect this is partly due to novelty (change often has short-term benefits), partly due to there being nothing else to do, and partly due to all the uncertainty that the business might have mass layoffs.
While I'm in school, remote work is actually super useful because I can work wherever, whenever, and working around my coursework is incredibly easy. When I'm not in the middle of a term though, it becomes more of a chore. Working 40hrs out of my bedroom isn't ideal by any means (I go out and work at a coffee shop for a few hours each day to combat this), but the work-life separation has been really hard for me to form.
I just got swapped from 1099 to W2 so now I'll at least have a work machine that I can keep separate from all my personal stuff, but I feel like it'll still have more of a blurred line than it should have.
I might feel differently about this when I eventually have a house with a dedicated office, etc. but living out of an apartment with no formal workspace is really difficult, at least for me. Definition of spaces is incredibly important to how I work.
I've been working remotely since 2015. Do I want to go back now? Hell no.
Netflix engineer here. The portion of the company I work in has been hiring remote during the pandemic and we have a company wide permanent WFH policy (well guidance from HR) in place. The policy includes pay tiers depending on where you live, but the pay adjustment doesn’t take place until COVID WFH is lifted.
I work on a team that, post covid, has engineers in two countries. I personally live in PHX and won’t be returning to the Bay Area. My salary is currently 100% what my Bay Area was, and will be adjusted down to 80% once the offices fully open.
To put in perspective of how little I pay, I pay about 1900/month for mortgage, taxes, insurance and HOA (which is like $150/month because we live in a gated area). I am about 30-45 minutes door to door from PHX airport.
On the low end, it would require ~75-80k before taxes just to make up the mortgage difference, and likely be more than that.
TL;DR: Yea, it can easily be 100k cheaper in PHX vs SF depending on your situation.
Yes. I’ve run the numbers several times. I have a 2 child family. Treating our house, child care, groceries, etc. as fungible I could take a 50% pay cut over SJC and “maintain” our quality of life on paper.
But details matter. I live in a community with 22 miles of maintained trail, some of the best school districts in the country (with no lottery system, we just pick a school), our grocery stores are better (better meat, better produce, better selection), etc.
After living both, I strongly suspect my current quality of life in PHX literally does not exist in the Bay Area no matter the price point.
I understand that a lot of people will respond to a question of whether they intend to quit their job with a 'you bet!' even at the best of times, but I'm seeing a lot of people quitting and switching right now, as different company plans are crystallized for the 'new normal'.
In my current company (for another 2 months) I was interviewed to join a team of 12 tech developers, and a couple of months ago the first of the switchers quit to leave for another company specifically because they were guaranteeing remote-first work.
Then another five of us quit over the following few weeks. We met up last week for a goodbye lunch in the park: half the team that I joined a year ago leaving the company over the Spring and Summer.
Is a 50% quit-rate normal? Maybe each of us had slightly different priorities and plans for the future? But I do know for sure that people are reflecting more than I've ever experienced before, about their work environment, the balance in their lives, and prioritizing other things than 40-50 hours each week sitting in front of a screen, inside an office.
Corollary I guess is that some of us might be able to lock in a remote-only position if we act now.
I've talked with executives in charge of large teams at both companies about this issue and so far it looks like the actual resignation rate due to the policy is less than 10%. Hiring, on the other hand, has gotten significantly harder and candidates are citing need for wfh as a reason they're not interested in open roles.
So, personally I think tech workers are overrepresented in the "wfh or quit" discussions, but there's a longer-term shift of some kind that's going to play out, especially in hiring.
This is where I suspect a lot of places are going to end up in the medium term. I'm not back to the office in the first place, and I'm aware that I have a nice office and moderate commute, but I still want some wfh time, as well as some time seeing my colleagues. A balance.
The problem is that in a hyper-optimizing environment balance is something to be eliminated.
I think most people want a better work/life balance, which is what all this ultimately represents. I imagine the eventual long term settle is somewhere more in the “wfh, but with team gatherings for a few days once a month” in a lot of industries.
This is only a tiny subset of people though, and is more the exception that proves the rule.
There are cities other than than the west coast as well. 5 acres 1.5 hours from Minneapolis will be 300k with a house.
That means better organized meetings with a purpose rather than a bunch of weekly meetings that are there just cuz.
I think it is some personalities just need human interaction more than others and when they are in management/executive roles they want people in the office.
We’ve already seen it before the pandemic: where engineers had one day or half a day a week of remote as an exception, it generally resulted in a push to have it applied to the other roles that could work from home (marketing etc.)
This is much more reasonable than what I've seen most places offer. I don't mind the sound of that at all!
I know if I get two job offers and one is any form of WFH Hybrid (or a "you can probably work it out with your manager") and the other is 100% Remote, I'm taking the 100% remote position, unless the hybrid is like 2x the pay.
Right now there's a lot of recruiters trying to sell me on various nebulous hybrid positions (sounds like the companies don't really know or have committed to anything just yet, or are afraid to let potential hires know what they're really planning), but there's equally as many recruiters contacting me for 100% remote (and plans to stay that way) as well.
I don't mind meeting up with other employees on the occasional fun team-building outing, but I really don't want to work in an office again.
I likely have permanent Tinnitus in one ear thanks to my time in open offices and I had to turn music up to block out multiple conversations to concentrate, for one reason why I'm not in a hurry to go back, let alone there still being uncertainty about this or future pandemics (I'm vaccinated, but delta or delta plus or the next crazy variant might still fuck me up, and I don't want to be stuck having to go to an office when I start feeling uncomfortable about the spread of those).
Also I don't want to deal with paying and transporting my dogs to doggy daycare everyday, or spend 2+ hours a day driving to and from work. I've done plenty of that in the past, and it always sucked.
> I don't mind meeting up with other employees on the occasional fun team-building outing, but I really don't want to work in an office again.
I think this is probably where a lot of companies will settle out; wfh, but with monthly or quarterly workshops/meetups for teams.
A recruiter (household name tech but not FAANG) pitched me on a position that was "1 day a week" in an office 300 miles from my home.
I knew my conditions* wouldn't be met, so I turned him down.
*The company covers my airfare and meals. I fly out and back same day. The morning outbound never departs before 8AM. The return never arrives after 6PM.
That is a good point. My company doesn't know or has not set a return policy. So I imagine it is hard for recruiters and hiring managers to give an honest answer. And I wonder if it is better to wait until more companies have set a firm policy.
This sounds a bit too much like jobs that claim 10% or 25% travel that pull a bait and switch, or don't hire the 2nd opening for your position, so your responsibly to "cover" for the dept really means double work, or same amount of work but more like 60-75% travel.
Same with jobs the promise of a 40 hr week, but ends up being 60 hrs to handle everything that's your responsibility.
So my question is: what guarantees or addl compensation are people getting (in writing) to keep the one day a month from turning into more?
Excuses like: "oh that one day is for our staff meeting- if your team leader wants weekly update meetings in the office you need to be there"
Or "you're responsible for coordinating and meeting with your team as needed to fulfill the responsibilities of your position"
Etc
Extra day off or extra days salary or just compensation for extra commute? Or just put up with it til it crosses a line?
This article told me nothing concrete of value.
"Hey this number is big" - Yes, but was it also big before? How much bigger is it now? 2%? 10%?
Is the cumulative number larger than just the sum of months under quarantine? Ie this is just pent up demand and if we averaged it across months it'd look normal? Historically what percentage of people thinking about changing jobs at some point in time actually do within 12mo? 10%? 70%?
Without any context to me this article is just as likely to be the precursor to a follow up articke about "the major job resignation that never materialized" as is it to be about an actual change in positions.
A week later we got an email saying people wanted 2-3 days in office.
If you want to stick it to them you should put out an informal poll with all employees and publish those results separate, show everyone how the company is lying to you.
Multiyear leases and/or real estate investments.
Public discussions are good for, you know, the public. Keeping things private just means the manager is the only one who knows the whole picture.
Sure it could all work out fine for them. Maybe employees will grumble for a bit, then settle back into office life. But maybe it wont’t. There’s a very real possibility that you lose a non-negligible percent of your staff (disproportionately the most talented who have other options), handicap your ability to recruit replacements, and destroy morale for the remaining. For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce, this seems like a pretty big fucking risk to take.
I get it. Maybe you think WFH is long term unsustainable and it will erode corporate culture and what not. But the point is it’s pretty clear that it’s not short-term unsustainable. Obviously companies have survived for a year without the train swerving off the tracks. Why would any rational company want to be the first back? Why not just wait six months after the other FANGs go back to see what happens? At worse you lose a half year in the office, which clearly isn’t that bad. At best, you potentially save the entire company from collapsing.
Making such a big push to go back in September instead of waiting until January just seems reckless to the point of irrationality.
Yeah no. The core value of these companies is the fact that they’ve managed to establish a monopolistic position within an important high-margin market segment and now find themselves stewards of a massive money printing machine.
Yes, eventually, without a competent workforce they’ll start to face threats and crisis, but I think you’re wildly underestimating the usefulness of that money printing machine to solve any problems that crop up in the next year or three if they find they’ve miscalculated slightly.
Not being dismissive, simply pointing out...what fundamental leverage does a developer have against inelastic customer demand? Are customer going to stop using FANG products because advertising feature 3.2.97 isn't added this quarter?
I'm sort of kidding here, as I find your point sensible, but it may be a tough sell that demand is inelastic.
Yes, aggressive measures such as:
-Allowing employees to apply to be permanent remote employees
-Allowing 2 WFH days per week
We'll see how this plays out, but I'm expecting this to be just a ploy to keep people from leaving right away and 95%+ requests to be remote will ultimately be denied.
My company has put those optional 2 days WFH to TLs to arrange amongst their teams, with the expectation that the whole team will have the same schedule.
Basically if your TL doesn't care or want you to WFH, or the team can't agree on days, you're done.
It'll be a major inconvenience and staff will ultimately not see the benefits of full WFH with 3, so it won't last.
I think there will be increased churn once the "wait and see" crowd clears
Agreeing on a day between 6 people isn't that hard (disagreement can just be solved by the TL making the decision) and once the policy exists it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
Forcing everyone to come in seems like a huge political blunder for a TL, why would they do that?
Frankly, the COVID-19 pandemic is simply not over yet. Not in the whole world, and not even in the U.S. Especially with news about a new variant, it feels like a safety risk to re-open offices so early.
At least at Google, a huge number of employees already work in a different floor, office, city, or even country than their managers that this couldn’t even be a factor for them.
They actually send surveys to everyone. They also talk to the VPs, but surveys have weight.
This doesn't work in practice, as people are too bogged down in their work to take on this. So the role is left up to the nearest manager, ex-manager, clueless business people who're not contributing or otherwise people who just reports upwards. This defeats the role, and it's very very rare to see a contributing member being scrum master, ie. taking up slack and do the necessary stuff around the team.
So you end up with such role, or manager, overseeing the desks in open office, of the servants. Such a one-sided arrangement is both intentional, ignorant and about dominance. Feng Shui explains why it is bad for knowledge workers to have eyes over their shoulders all the time.
A lot of people want to work for FAANG. If a current employee resigns because of WFH policies, those companies can likely find a replacement who is more receptive to returning to the office.
This means that if you lose a lot of people because you start being stricter about working from home, then you'll probably disproportionately lose the senior people who are hard to replace and not lose very many of the young juniors who are easy to replace.
This depends on how you define morale. Morale can be thought of as the willingness of people to make difficult sacrifices to maintain community ties, in the sense offered by the essay "Why Strict Churches Are Strong":
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230409?jou....
In that essay, they make the point that there are no freeloaders in a strict church, and that is what draws people to strict churches. Strict churches will be smaller than non-strict churches, because non-strict churches allow a lot of members who do not participate very much in the life of the church. In a strict church, people obey a large number of rules, and make substantial sacrifices, to belong to a group in which everyone else is also making sacrifices, and therefore, in a sense, everyone earns their place. And by most definitions of "morale" strict churches have better morale than non-strict churches.
It's the same with any organization, including the military, and including corporations. Asking people to show up to an office means you're asking people to make a sacrifice to continue being a member in good standing. Such a request can weed some people out, but that is the point of the request. For those who are left behind, morale is higher because everyone is known to be making that sacrifice.
There are several qualifiers that are normally added at this point, raising questions over the fairness of the rules, the fairness of the enforcement, and the group perception of the fairness of the enforcement. I'm not going to write all of that out in a comment on Hacker News, I think the essay I linked to above covers most of the details.
We're all slowly dying, and personally, I value having more control over what little time I have left alive while getting done what needs to get done to make a living, and do it right without being tied down, more or less against my will, to any office.
This right here is the entire argument. It's about control, and nothing more.
The pandemic displaced a large group of socially successful people from the social hierarchy. Those people want to return to the old normal because they want their status back. They want control back. "You'll do what you're told because I said so, that's why." lies at the heart of it.
Some of those displaced people have been revealed as frauds: they don't actually contribute value that is commensurate with their position in the hierarchy. And some of those who report to them have had just about enough of their shit.
We're collectively asked to give up our lives to these companies. To willingly give over our ability to determine how we order our days. To look the other way as our various employers build a literal dystopia.
Yeah, no thanks. I'll stay in control of myself from now on.
At a base level, everyone wants a meaningful, fulfilled life. A key component of that is having enough autonomy and control to feel that your decisions matter because they are your decisions. But another important component is to feel that your decisions matter because they matter to others. We are a social primate species and for most of us, our emotional systems are wired to feel the greatest peace when we feel we are helping our tribe and being supported by it in return.
Being part of a group (job or not) where you feel your efforts help not just you but the entire group is deeply important for most people. There's a reason that male suicide rates skyrocket not long after retirement. We are not happy alone and disconnected, even though being in that state in theory maximizes our personal autonomy.
Obviously, this is not to imply that a job is the only or best way to find that kind of tribe or group identity. But there are meaningful jobs out there and working together can be an important part of a fulfilling life.
That seems to be a completely artificial problem of the modern corporate first-world that discards or isolates anyone it doesn't find useful (the elderly and children) when, for a most of history; the elderly never stopped working in a meaningful capacity ever until they dropped or were incapacitated; children were working with their guardians much much more of the time without dipping into exploitative child labor of industrialism.
> But there are meaningful jobs out there and working together can be an important part of a fulfilling life.
It's like we're making the best of having our village raided for resources and saying some of the raiders don't take all the stuff (and they don't take nothing). What we need are appropriate walls so that our relationship with these outsiders can be one of trade/negotiation.
> Some of those displaced people have been revealed as frauds: they don't actually contribute value that is commensurate with their position in the hierarchy. And some of those who report to them have had just about enough of their shit.
Oh boy, I could share quite a few relevant stories (as I think many of here could too) that'd make your head spin. It's crazy to think of the number of these fraudsters out there and how awful it is for those who are forced to be stuck dealing with them/their actions day in day out. Been in that situation with a few managers in the past, and it's an understatement to say my time was stolen by them.
As to this:
"We're all slowly dying"
That is a double-edged sword. Many people find meaning through the commitments they make: marriage, the military, the nation, their religion, children, parents, friends. Why make a commitment? Because we are all dying and so we wonder "What is the meaning of life?" And for those who find meaning through their commitments, then the fact that we are all slowly dying would be a reason to make more, deeper commitments, not less.
"I value having more control over what little time I have left"
Unless someone puts a gun to your head, no one is taking away your control over your time. Whether you decide to make any kinds of commitments to marriage, the military, the nation, your religion, children, parents, or friends, those are your choices, both if you reject all such commitments or embrace them.
Many just built multi-billion-dollar campuses that, in the WFH economy, are big useless pieces of real estate
Meanwhile in tech, I would say folks have been more productive over the pandemic. I certainly have been. So there’s no big push to go back.
The FANG workers got a taste of not having a daily long commute and don't want to give this small life improvement back. Getting back several hours of your life is pretty big.
FANG companies however have gotten a taste of nearly unlimited power and have not heard "no" in years. They too don't want to give this up. This is why they demand the butts back in the cramped open seating office. Does anyone buy their "we will allow you to apply for remote work" BS? That is just something to get you back in the office. They will quietly deny your request later.
People can call these FANGers spoiled, but I really hope they win. It would benefit everybody, but the CEOs of the world.
Then don't conjecture. Speculation doesn't add to the conversation. In the absence of evidence, it just spreads a misinformation virus.
Also you should have more trust for your fellows in dialogue here, that they do have some immune function against misinformation viruses.
A number of folks are asking the question, "why does the HN consensus appear to be so far away from my experience?" I think the answer is really that noise is being amplified and echoed above the signal.
If you know you're just guessing based on what "seems reasonable" and "matches what other people are saying" you need to stop and re-evaluate the validity of your beliefs. That's an important part of critical thinking which is sorely lacking in this forum right now.
I mean, you say "It is the exact same process which reinforces beliefs in flat-earth, anti-vax, chiropractic, homeopathy, the stolen-election narrative, and other such nonsense.". But is that true? How do you know? Do you have all the facts? I'm sure it seems reasonable and matches what others think...
- don't read minds; dialectic can only happen if we allow the flow of conversation back and forth. Cutting that flow prematurely happens for example when we assert that we know what the other person is thinking.
- don't use should statements; don't enter the scene with imperatives and normativities. At best it is insulting to fellow adults you're talking to, at worst it again kills the dialectic. Conversation requires trust in the other person being able to unpack and reality test what is being said. It requires an assumption of good enough character. Talking down to people is a self fulfilling prophecy; when you show you have very little expectation in having a good faith conversation you have already created it.
- let go of black and white thinking; simple categories are useful but have serious precision errors. I invite you to consider "truth", "knowledge", "validity" as shades of gray instead of discrete categories while talking to people, because it allows parties of a dialogue to puzzle together the subsets of truths they have.
- don't overgeneralize; don't take a comment and overgeneralize that to a person's essence e.g "they are a person who always does this". Don't take a few comments and overgeneralize that to the entire forum. Don't use labels.
- don't discount the positives and filter in only the negatives; instead of focusing where people might have missed your expectations in critical thinking, see if you're downplaying or outright ignoring when they are in fact demonstrating it.
Hope it helps.
This is an interesting claim. Do you have evidence for it?
The consensus was that the downside risk is the two people coming to various conclusions even though they knew nothing about it simply due to our cognitive biases and how we interact with each other. Therefore, two people talking about something they do not know anything about might very well be worse off than had they not talked about it at all.
Humans are deductive creatures and we're not terrible at constructing and testing hypotheses. A lot of value can be derived from discussing inconclusive topics, and an understanding of new subject matter can be established for those unfamiliar. It's a valuable exercise to walk through supporting facts.
I wish we didn't cry every time we conjecture.
Times I used a climbing wall or nap pod: 0
In the end even the free lunch was annoying. (Yes I am going to complain about "free" food.) It just lead to short lunches where people go back to their desk as soon as they could.
I love the social aspect of lunch and it's the highlight of my day to eat with friends. When you are trapped on campus that rarely happens. I was immediately happier when I left and got the social aspect of the middle of my day back. Went from taking like 20-30 minute lunches to like 70. Leaving the office and eating lunch with good friends a few times a week is a huge moral boost over waiting in some silly named tech cafeteria.
Don't get me wrong pre-FANG I dreamed of how nice it would be to eat at on campus free cafes. Later on I realized it was mostly there to keep you from taking a long lunch stuck in traffic.
It seems like it's almost completely self-inflicted if someone doesn't have time as a full timer (at the 2 Big-N tech companies I've been at). I didn't have time as an intern because I wasn't confident and felt I needed to prove something. Now, many years into it, I know I can work my 40 hour weeks, enjoy the perks for what they are, and relax most of the time.
I've never understood why people consider perks like food as traps to keep you on campus. Nothing stops you from leaving campus for lunch, as long as there's not some meeting you scheduled. Nothing stops you from working 40 hours a week, unless you choose to work more to get ahead faster.
Also totally agree with you not having to work so many hours, but this is exactly why they love the college grad pipeline. So many fresh workers with something to prove.
The problem with nothing stopping you from leaving campus for lunch is that it's hard to convince your work-buddies to join you. Free is very compelling to some. And all your co-workers plan their meetings around this truncated lunch break.
When I was working in the bay area I would've happily taken a 10-20% pay cut in order to work remote from anywhere. I would've been happy with a mandate of 'come into the office for a week (on the company dime of course) once a quarter, bi-annually or whatever'
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/25/us-dollar-ho...
To think this time is different is to be ignorant.
Who's going to let housing be built if it devalues the houses they own?
Prop 13 in California is a key thing cited as why NIMBYism is stronger than usual, because current entrenched residents don't feel the pain of their behavior.
Gov'ts also do not willingly pass something like prop 13 themselves, because they don't like to limit their ability to tax.
It is also the astronomical real estate money they had sunken into new office spaces.
I don't want to have to move.
I would expect everyone at a FAANG to basically walk into a comparable or better role at a more "traditional" employer.
Even as someone with over a decade of work experience it's somewhat aspirational to work for a FAANG and get that big paycheck and all those RSUs. But no WFH is a deal-breaker unless they start opening up offices in Milwaukee soon.
Family is the key above. I moved to a different state from my family and I often feel the loss. It is now a big deal to go visit. I can't "call in a few favors" when I need my house painted (I'm also not called upon to help). Once you don't live near friends/family moving is just about the relocation package. Once you have friends and family around it is personally hard to move as you throw all of that away. By WFH you can ignore all that and live where it works best for your life.
Now yes FAANG can give me a bit extra money if they want. However I've reached the point where money isn't my only motivation. I want interesting/fulfilling work, which if I decide they don't offer they can't really change the offer to give me.
Mostly the lock in is money. They just pay higher rates, with stock incentives to keep you around longer. After awhile you realize the 'free lunch' and other things are nice but not really needed, especially if you are working from home. Where you realize those perks can be bought cheap enough.
Also at some point you may get to the point where 'I am pretty good on money and just want more challenging work'. That only goes so far too.
But yes companies could up their WFH perks. However, if I am reading the tea leaves right it looks like WFH may become be a perk that is part of a package. Not the perk. Something along the lines of 'every other friday' or 'be in office at least 2 days a week' something like that. I could see that only lasting so long too unless the upper management pushes it. Get a few over zealous ladder climbers and suddenly 'we need to skip WFH this friday we need to ship this ASAP' few months of that and it just doesnt happen anymore.
But remember companies could also go the other way, and go bring your own device style of work. Meaning you pick up all the costs. I could also see 'oh you live in city XYZ well the pay rate there is 50% less than all the other sites'.
Having worked at a few places in my career. Each one has for a lack of a better word 'style'. But at home that 'style' would not be as noticeable. Part of working at a place is that. You walk into a google building you know it is that. You walk into a bank and you know it is that. Just something about how everything is setup and run has a particular feel. I have bounced out of interviews just by walking the office (you could just see the dread and deathmarches they were on). I could see 'oh you say you buy top of the line computers but in reality all of your kit is 10 years old'. But at home, I am not going to get that. One company would be fairly similar in feel to another. Just me speaking personally if companies all look the same basically what ties me to one or another other than maybe some 'perks'?
Some of the stacks at these companies are quite horrible.
I wouldn't rush to this conclusion. Robustness and sustainability are related, but not equivalent. Being wrong the other way might be higher consequence, in their estimation.
I think there's a chance we'll see WFH loosening up eventually.
I think the divide between WFH and return to the office boils down to something surprisingly simple: how much longer does your current lease last and/or how much office property do you own.
Companies that are about to have a lease expire, or are growing at a rate that they would need to soon lease an even larger building are going to be surprisingly friendly to WFH.
Companies that have 5+ years on their current lease and aren't planning rapid growth, or companies that spend enormous capital building mega-offices that they likely can't recoup the losses from unless people keep working in offices are going to be very resistant to wide spread WFH.
The company I currently work for has an office, is not giving it up (so I assume long term lease) but has nearly doubled since the pandemic. They are very WFH friendly. Another company I know had a shorter lease, shrunk considerably and is now too small for there old office: also WFH friendly.
I know a few other companies that aren't growing or shrinking and either own or long term lease several large offices in expensive cities. All of them are pushing a return to office.
Any company that owns commercial real estate is going to be very aggressive about a return to work, not just for their employees, but for everyone.
Otherwise, I am sure most people by and large would enjoy would enjoy not wasting their life transiting back and forth to work.
I personally find this true, but I think there are a lot of younger tech people that use the workplace to fill a social gap that is hard to fill otherwise. I have nothing but anecdotal evidence but my company sold quite a few properties-- their leases were either up and they didn't renew or they outright sold commercial properties they owned-- and our younger employees have openly expressed concern that we are full time wfh.
Is there something that reduces the cost if the building is fully occupied rather than mostly empty? If so, companies could remodel the buildings to have lower density, but more comfortable working spaces - turn all available spaces into small meeting room/working space.
In fact, it might be cheaper if your employees WFH rather than come to office since you can avoid paying for subsidized lunch, snacks, coffee etc. at office, power and cooling all of which I would think are substantial.
Something I need to point out: the office is still cheaper to run when empty, even if the corporation pays the lease. And as far as I know, no company pays extra for working from home, in fact the opposite seems to be sometimes true. So I don't think your assessment holds.
I think the most important factor is... management. Managers just feel they lose the control. Maybe some are even afraid they will become irrelevant.
It's a sunk cost fallacy situation. They're already paying for it, so why not put it to use? The collaboration and innovation gains are worth the premium, and they need to stay competitive since $OTHER_COMPANY is going back to the office.
Maybe the goal is to get the type of expensive, experienced employees that inhabit HN to resign?
The people who are going to leave are people on the fence anyway. COVID accelerated stuff like retirements mostly, or was the straw the broke the back of people driving from rural Pennsylvania to Manhattan every day. Other than childcare issues that are timing-related, the non-medical objections to this are mostly just noise, and people will show up to work.
I personally can't wait to go back, and that's the same sentiment I hear from most people on my team. HN seems to have become a bit of an echo-chamber of people who prefer WFH, but frankly I'm looking forward to the hybrid model.
I get it, you like to WFH - that's great. But your anecdotes aren't data.
Which are those? I'd say e.g. Google's value has more to do with incumbent market position. Google and others (Facebook, for instance) derive a ton of value from access to massive amounts of data and scale-required-as-table-stakes advertising revenue that make it damn near impossible to compete with them unless you're already an enormous corporation, even on some minor product that's not part of their core business. Arguably, exclusive access to and ability to leverage data is much of Amazon's value. Microsoft's, too, increasingly.
Granted they need some number of competent people to keep that going in much the same way that any business does, but "entire value" is significantly overstating labor's case here, I'd say. Their historical-data moats and exclusive visibility into valuable data streams are what make them so damn hard to compete with. It'd be more accurate to say that their users are their entire value, than their human capital (though still wrong, I think).
There sure are millions of them, sure, but not necessarily millions of them available when you post your opening. I know because I am searching for senior Java devs for a stable, global, wealthy corporation and yet it takes months to fill positions.
Then to the expense of searching you need to add the expense of the guy having to spend at least a year on the job to really become productive, learn the system, the organization, learn the problem to be able to effectively design quality solutions, etc.
If this guy leaves in 2 years on average you have spent most of the time basically searching for him and waiting for him to warm up.
Smart and skilled people spend a bunch of time learning your problems, figuring out solutions, only to take all that knowledge and experience with them to be replaced for a green guy who will have to start mostly from scratch.
There is a general acceptance that for the vast majority of teams, they are most productive when individuals are collaborating face to face, in realtime. I've found that to be true as well.
There is still a gap in remote collaboration tooling that results in this differential. Perhaps if the tooling becomes more robust, the difference can greatly diminish.
the push to get people back in the offices is because people aren't working from home. there's no point retaining your staff if they aren't actually getting anything done. maybe it's different for software engineers at FAANG companies, but keep in mind that even if software engineers are productive, those companies employ thousands of people in sales, marketing, HR, accounting, and other office jobs. and pushing people back to the office in one department while letting another department continue WFH isn't going to play well.
As a result they announced that everybody has to be in the office at least 3 days a week, and also most people would be losing their permanent offices and only have access to hotel office space. I've heard rumors that employee retention is becoming something of a concern.
WARNING: ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE
I manage a team of 12 people at a FAANG. One team member just quit working entirely until offices open again. Any information about offices opening is immediately pounced on and celebrated. While most folks have stated that they enjoy working from home, a few others hate it. Interestingly, zero people are interested in being fully remote, even though our org has a stated goal to get more people to go remote.
That said, EVERYONE is excited at the formalization of a hybrid policy that allows up to a 50/50 split between home and work. That policy also leaves it up to individual teams to decide what, if any, restrictions they want to place on that.
I'm sure it's very different in other teams and companies, which is why I prefaced with the warning.
I’m the sole member of my team that moved out of the Bay Area during the pandemic. I can’t imagine moving back, but my teammates (all 10-15 years younger) can’t wait to get back in the office.
Netflix engineer here. We’ve been hiring remote during the pandemic and have a permanent WFH policy in place. The policy includes pay tiers depending where you live, but the pay adjustment doesn’t take place until COVID WFH is lifted.
I work on a team that, post covid, has engineers in two countries. I personally live in PHX and won’t be returning to the Bay Area. My salary is currently 100% what my Bay Area was, and will be adjusted down to 80% once the offices fully open.
But what will this mean for society?
For one, I see in the immediate future a bit of a reduction in commerce for a while. This is simply because people will have less money To spend. Duh.
Still… humans always persist and adapt.
Therefore in maybe 5 years there will be more of a Renaissance and a big change in how we work, shop and play which could be positive in unexpected ways since some people will learn to live with less.
Unfortunately though this will lead to a bigger segment of the population that won’t have enough to live on.
And the segment of the population that are “driven” to create will get richer serving that lower segment in innovative ways.
So the wealth gap will increase for sure. And probably pretty widely.
I know some of you reading this are getting triggered just about now…
But what else do you expect? I’d love to hear how the next 5-10 years would play out.
But it would be silly to say that so many people stopping work will not have some measurable (most likely negative) effect on the economy and what we normally expect from society.
You, me, and every economist, analyst, and investor.
Just like it has for many decades now. Some things that may de-rail this are war, sudden demographic changes, societal instability, weather catastrophes and/or changing weather patterns, or some other destabilizing force that causes the US to no longer be the premiere option for "order" compared to the rest of the world.
People usually get bored with a wall of text.
My sentences are longer on desktop - but I was writing on mobile now.
really glad
not everybody does this
the sentences
that were in
the paragraph
There's a new technology call "paragraphs" that a lot of people are using these days. I don't know that it'll catch on long-term, but it might be a worthy middle-
road
between walls of text
and unnecessary line feeds.
People have more money now than ever before. I wouldn't expect a reduction in commerce in aggregate because ~3% of the workforce quit temporarily or even permanently.
I won't be surprised if inflation gets so high that there's a reduction real terms. But that hasn't happened yet.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
Federal deficit was $3.1T
Bank lending for mortgage originations increases M1 - this increased by over $1T.
Total = $8.1T
Since the Fed bought most of the government's debt, though, a lot of that $3.1T government deficit should be included in the $4T balance sheet increase of the Fed.
So this could possibly only account for half of it. I'm not sure.
Other personal debt (which includes auto loans) isn't even up another $1T. Margin debt in stocks is up $260Bn. Anyone else know what the rest is?
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/01/whats-behind-the-rec...
> In any case, it seems that the modification of Regulation D in late April has effectively rendered savings accounts almost indistinguishable from checking accounts from the perspective of depositors and banks. Accordingly, the composition of M2 between M1 and non-M1 components conveys little economic information.
People just have different preferences.
I think what we’re seeing right now is a significant expansion of remote roles. Previously if you worked remote, chances are it was a lesser job than you could get in the big tech hubs. Now the quality and quantity of remote work jobs has significantly increased.
As a result, there will be a big shuffle as a lot of people who previously would have preferred remote but couldn’t find an actual remote job they wanted soak up the new opportunities.
As for the space they leave behind, there are some people who have been hungry for a taste of Silicon Valley in-office life who will happily take those jobs, as well as TONS of tech workers already settled in the Bay Area but working at smaller companies who might jump at a chance to move into FAANG.
The question is just one of supply, demand, and market-clearing prices.
If FAANG collectively decide they want everyone back in the office and after all the turnover they struggle to replace the people they lost, then they’ll have to raise pay to compensate. But they have plenty of room to raise pay further if needed, so there’s no real reason to think they can’t fill up those roles.
The bigger impact is on startup formation and any other smaller business that doesn’t have the budget room to compete. I think that is increasingly being priced out of the Bay Area, almost exclusively because of housing shortage, which does not bode well for the long-term. But we’ll see.
As to your point on the cultural and institutional knowledge impacts of said turnover… I know it sounds crazy but I don’t think they care. So long as you can survive the turnover, it’s often easier, faster, and less impactful to just “rip off the bandaid.” When you try to drag out a transition you end up with a lot of people unhappy and grumbling internally, but who don’t leave yet. Those people kill morale, and letting them go is often one of the best things that can happen to the team’s productivity. So yeah, it hurts, but if you know that you’re going to lose a survivable percentage of your team due to some policy change, it’s often better to just get it over with quickly than to let it drag out. You see this all the time with companies offering enhanced severance packages, exit bonuses etc. when they need to make a big change.
I'm always surprised how HN treats WFH as _obviously_ superior and desirable in every way, to the point where OP is claiming these mega corps may collapse if they ask their employees to come into the office.
From what I've seen, people aren't advocating for strict fully-remote work, but rather flexibility for teams within larger companies to decide what works for them and what remote hiring policies makes sense within those teams, rather than having strict guidelines passed down from executives indiscriminately.
Those places are all commuting hellscapes, so there's almost no scenario where you wouldn't do WFH if you could. My dad did the Queens-Manhattan bus/subway/express subway/walk treadmill for most of his career -- not fun.
I live in a small city with a 6 minute commute, my preference for WFH varies by weather (I mostly work outside) and whether my wife blocks my car in the driveway. Overall, I like both -- WFH has advantages for focused tasks, but I tend to work longer hours. Interacting with colleagues in person is much more productive in an office setting, and it's easier on my family. It's tough for my 8 year old to not be able to talk to dad when he gets home from school.
These kinds of things are just really hard to generalize.
But you can look at data like stuff from the Census Bureau and see detailed comparisons of commute times in different locales that give you a sense of the variation.
For many, going into the office is their preference because everyone is required to go into the office.
For a while I may be the only person going into the office on my team, which defeats the whole point. I want to be in the office because I work better when my team is around in person.
That's pretty much why I said that allowing remote work isn't unambiguously the best choice. There's negatives to every arrangement, and your scenario is one of the negatives to allowing remote work. Personally, I don't think it's enough of negative to counteract the positives, but it's enough that it's worth having the discussion.
Was this at a "tech" company of any kind, or a non-tech company with a small number of software engineers? This sounds more like an archetype based on Office Space rather than a real office that I have been in any time in the last 6 years.
But all of those things are trivial and unimportant in the shadow of the miserable 1-2 hour of commute every day, which is truly a waste of time, resources and our limited human lives.
It's surprising how bad smelling the coffee from a Starbucks iCup machine is though.
There are lots of them and they may well represent a larger proportion of dev employment in the US than either stodgy-old-established-bigtech (IBM, telcos) or ones that are a part of the aforementioned West-coast tech culture. They tend to develop industry-specific products (or, often, a whole bunch of industry-specific products) but are definitely tech—and often even purely-software—companies.
In fact, I’ve already started going back into the office (since April) and 1) my productivity is easily 5-10x what it was before 2) I’ve had amazing so many conversations that never happened over zoom — both productive and personal - and as more of our company’s employees return over the coming months I’m even excited for more.
Most other engineers here that I’ve talked to have expressed the same sentiment. Over 50% of our SF office (hundreds of employees) has already voluntarily signed up to return over the next few weeks.
Maybe I’ll switch to a WFH company when I’m ready to start a family or something, but for now — I love my team and I can’t wait to all be back together.
How are you measuring this? Those numbers seem incredulous.
Now I’m firing on all cylinders for 7-9 hours a day, completing the entirety of a previous WFH day by 11 AM, and it feels _really_ good.
The switch to WFH _destroyed_ my productivity and made me extremely depressed. At a previous company I switched to remote because of a move and the same thing happened, so it's not the pandemic that's causing it either.
Different people are different. For me, WFH is absolutely soul sucking.
100% agreed! The sudden industry-wide acceptance of WFH is very welcome, and I'm glad that you and people like you are gaining many more options for WFH-friendly employers.
There's a good chance I'll develop a strong WFH preference over the years as my life priorities change, too. Always nice to have options.
This seems very high to me and little suspect, what is even more suspect is that they didn't link the report.
I have seen a few of these articles, but no good report that tracks this over time and all the articles dismiss or omit the possibility that more people are quitting because there is build from the past year and half where people were afraid to switch jobs. I think this is most likely.
Did you apply?
No no
Do you plan to?
Any day now!
does a jobs site have a reason to maybe exaggerate that number?
What's the point in making me drive an hour just to sit in a meeting room, hiding from all the people who make noise all day?
On the other hand when they're hiring new workers they're going to have to face up to the fact that a lot of workers are going to want to work from home, or do so for a substantial part of their working time. They're going to need to meet that expectation to be competitive for talent.
It's not as if 95% of workers are going to be able to just walk into 100% wfh roles. The roughly 95% of companies these workers currently work for are also the ones hiring people.
So this is going to take a while to work itself out as each company or worker figures out their best way to navigate through this transition, but the transition is going to happen.
WFH is hard to manage. A lot of things that get shared in "hallway communication" become formal meetings. I make no claim as to who is right, but there are downsides to everything.
Second, I can second the hallway conversations, those never happened at the places I've worked. If anything, it was more akin to "send me an e-mail/message" about it.
Having said that, I used to work for a big international bank and apart from a few people in my direct team, most if the other people I worked with were in other countries, let alone other offices. They had outstanding collaboration and communications software and infrastructure though. By far the best of any company I’d worked for. They were very well set up for remote collaboration and I learned lessons there I’ve found very useful in the last year. You work with what you have.
Where I work currently, we had a no-remote policy although our team is spread across two continents. The rationale for in-person-only-sort-of was that the organization could extract greater value from employees through the benefits of hallway conversations (except between team members in different offices). Hallway conversations just didn't happen; neither in-team or between teams. They happened in formal meetings where half the attendees just looked down at their phones.
When we went temporarily remote-only in March of 2020, we were not given any adequate technology (and in fact the required VPN technology prevented many from doing their jobs so it was often hacked). Eventually, many of the employees discovered there was a chat service and people who had never spoken before started communicating. Hallway conversations were had (initially mostly focused on hacking the VPN). Formal meetings were still run by the same people with similar output, but over-all productivity began to climb and we pushed out releases on time and on budget. It turns out at least our segment of the larger organization worked better remotely despite the lack of support and the official policies.
Recently it was announced that the entire organization would be returning to in-office only, 100% of the time. The errant chat service would be shut down. We would return to exactly the way it was two years ago because that is the only way that works, according to the CEO. We will return in the fall to no hallway conversations, head down at our desks focused on our assigned tasks, communication trickled down from the top as it should be.
One useful bit of advice I got years ago was when in person instead of reaching for chat when you need someone walk over to their desk and talk to them. For the vast majority of people talking to them face to face is more meaningful than the chat even if to you it seems that chat is more efficient.
It's been pretty nice -- 9 mile bike ride, then squatting in a small office or conference room with a view over the Lake, maybe 1-2 colleagues to have lunch with or a "water-cooler" discussion, all on a floor that was laid out to support hundreds of people.
I fully expect this to change once more people are there. The layout is mostly open floor plan, with anonymous desks in rows. Noise always was a problem before we all started staying home. I'm lucky enough that I can choose how often to go in, but a reading of this thread shows that many aren't as lucky.
What it highlights for me is that how quality of the workspace really does matter (especially acoustics), and that companies must compete along this axis, along with many others (location, WFH fraction, compensation, etc.).
Companies have grown accustomed to a 2% "performance" raise. This year it's suspect that 2% keeps you treading water. Why wouldn't we expect employees to move?
So folks might want to do something else but might be difficult to actually find something that isn't the "same", really.
These're put together like school projects. Some anecdotal human story, some quickly summarised generalizations and speculation, some "quick stats" from 3rd party sources that I suspect they don't study very deeply. It's rote.
Anyway... the timing of the current labour & money markets to WFH necessities throws a lot of cards in the air. The second and third order implications of WFH are pretty vast... pretty unpredictable too.
In short, they could avoid all the high costs related to unnecessary employee turnover by doing the same thing up front, but will fail to do so.
And the rule of thumb that you must switch jobs to advance salary & benefits is still true. The only way around it is to get the new offer and ask current employer to match it (this time WFH instead of salary), but that only works once per employer.
Isn't the ideal scenario that we have a mix of companies with different models, so people can choose what works for them?
Now, due to both economics and the pandemic Moz had shut offices and even more people are fully remote. We'll have to see if that crosses some previously hidden tipping point where the culture is eroded because the MV office doesn't exist, but I suspect not. It's the mission, people, and processes which make it a great place to work.*
* My knowledge is second hand, I don't work for Mozilla or speak for them.
I interviewed with them a couple years ago and it didn't work out; I feel like I dodged a bullet.
As for offices/WFH -- in that case I was specifically attracted to a hybrid model (work remotely but go into the local office 2-3 days a week). I would have not been interested in a purely remote model. I suspect many companies flirting with pure-remote will run into this.
In other large/largish companies that have gone through boom and bust cycles I've seen this same pattern play out. During growth periods people laud leadership choices and during contraction and turn around people say "there's something fundamentally wrong here."
So not saying you're wrong, just that this reality is not unexpected or unusual.
Make workplaces better. Ask people what they want improved, and then actually improve it.
The future can't be about squeezing out every ounce of productivity at the expense of happiness and autonomy--it has to be about increasing every ounce of happiness to make small gains in productivity. The equation was looked at backwards for far too long.
I'm increasingly convinced people not switching industries is a huge barrier towards equity in the job market. If another industry/location treats workers much better, but the cost of switching is too high, then the industries/locations aren't really competing for your labor. Competitive labor markets seem to be table stakes for fair work.
COVID just lowered the cost of switching, so I'm hoping the built up differences can finally equalize.
For a company like that, how hard is it really for someone inside the physical office to hide the fact that they're watching cat videos all day? What does the physical office space have anything to do with it? We basically carry around portable entertainment devices that can fit in our pocket.
On top of that, a lot of companies have sophisticated HR software that monitors employee activity, some that even takes periodic screenshots.
It’s hard for me to pin “abuse” on working from home.
The focus should be on whether goals and projects are being completed not how much people have their asses in office chairs.
Just how much was being done in the office pre-pandemic? Those businesses likely didn't actually know. well they sure looked busy, right?
The abuse aspect is also interesting. Friend of mine got verbally abused. On zoom video with audio. While it was recording. So that was an experience when HR got involved.
Overworking is another aspect. That is still being explored. Plenty of scope for that to blow up as well.
Maybe it's because I'm in an "return to IC" phase of my career, but I'm finding that 90% of the other ICs are at least 10 years younger than I am. Then there are the managers, who are primarily people who have been with the company for 15+ years and all seem to be at least 10 years older than I am.
I'm thinking this "everybody back to the office" push is going to be the thing that gets me to finally leave the Big Tech scene. That, and the fact that I can probably get a comp bump of at least 10% by going with a smaller company that has a desperate need for my skillset. (As it turns out, no Big Tech company seems to ever have a "desperate need" for anything.)
The four of five cities where you "must live" are: San Francisco (Bay Area), New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and perhaps Boston. Nothing happens anywhere else, or so goes the meme that has been deeply embedded into the culture of GenX and younger.
It results in "no good jobs or unaffordable housing, pick one." Without good jobs it's impossible to build your career. Without affordable housing it's impossible to accumulate wealth or raise a family. The working class of the top-tier cities is pushed into poverty as well as their housing costs start to become >50% (or more!) of their wages.
Oh, and all the interesting culture that made those cities "cool" to begin with gets priced out and leaves.
Building more housing in these cities won't work. The fact is that if we try to cram all opportunity into 4-5 cities there is nothing that will make those cities affordable save some massive government-subsidized sci-fi super-arcology housing project (that would probably suck to actually live in). If we build more then more people will come, the city FOMO feedback loop will intensify in the culture, and prices will go even higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
The "everywhere else" cities all lose too as their talent base leaves, forcing companies to leave as well. Everyone loses except property owners and rentiers in top-tier cities.
WFH can geographically diversify. Over time if some returning to office occurs, people may look for jobs in their new local areas pumping more talent into the talent pools of those cities. Capital and VC is already more willing to geographically diversify than ever before, so the old "you can only raise money in the Bay Area" canard is just about dead.
Edit: this hyperconcentration is also a contributor to America's political polarization, since it turns everywhere into a bubble where people are surrounded only by people who think like them. The physical community becomes a filter bubble.
I also wonder just how large a contributor to wealth inequality this could be. It seems like wealth inequality has exploded over the same time period that the "you must be in one of a few cities" meme became deeply embedded in culture.
Yes there has always been a draw to the big "alpha world cities," but the trend I'm talking about is beyond that. Starting in the late 90s to early 2000s it became the idea that if you were not in one of those cities you couldn't do anything at all. You simply "must" be there.
What I've been struggling with is how can we amplify this message and get it into the mainstream consciousness. This is a huge opportunity for older generations in leadership positions to help younger generations.
As for me, I'm more than happy to relocate to a different office than my current local and as a senior IC with several years in the company and a great track record, my personal negotiating power is better than ever right now.
The only shitty thing is that it's very hard to acquire talent that wants to be in an office right now and the quality of the candidate pools I've been interviewing has dropped off a cliff.
That seems awfully high unless "I thought about it, but decided to stay here" counts as "considering".
In my peer group, it's probably closer to 20%. It's probably much higher in low paid jobs like service workers, but I imagine that most McDonalds workers consider changing jobs every day even under normal circumstances.
I myself do not want to go back to our open office layout full time and Im checking out my options. Still though its going to just be a small percentage. Of course there might be more slowly over time as more remote/hybrid opportunities become available.
"World needs plenty of bartenders."
Every employee- and every manager- at every not-trivially sized firm is replaceable.
Resigning is ABSOLUTELY THE WORST response, both individually and collectively, for those interested in enshrining a more remote friendly ecosystem.
Not if you are refining in favor of entrepreneurship providing remote-friendly work, or taking available remote-friendly work. Heck, even just withdrawing labor from the market arguably helps.
Reducing the supply of workers who treat remote-hostile work as acceptable is the only way to enshrine a more remote-friendly ecosystem.
(Per AnIdiotOnTheNet's feedback here is a summary of my motivations and a compare/contrast with the ideas mentioned in the CNBC post) The main thing for me was the prospect of having kids in the next 5 years. It doesn't seem like it will ever get easier to have a sabbatical than it is right now. It helped me to think of the decision as a tradeoff between money, energy, and time. When you have a full-time job you optimize for money and sacrifice your energy and time. Taking a sabbatical means that I'm choosing to sacrifice money in order for more energy and time. Maybe this is helpful way to think about burnout: burnout is sacrificing too much time and energy for money. Not wanting to commute any longer was a secondary decision but not my primary concern. The article states “Either they’re unfulfilled from their jobs or their priorities have changed", I would say both of those were relevant in my experience. Last this article is suggesting that people are resigning because they have better opportunities elsewhere. I do worry that I'm taking this sabbatical as a terrible time. It could be a great time to switch jobs and lock in a full-remote position. I think there are two general groups of people participating in this potential "great resignation": sabbatical / gap year people like me who are doing it from a "life is short" philosophy and others who are doing it to land a better job. The motivations to resign are probably very different depending on what group you're in.
Edit: Someone left an angry comment (deleted a few seconds ago) stating that I keep linking to this post and it seems like I'm doing it as a bot. I will note here that I'm not a bot and I'm sorry if my comments are coming off as robotic, but I put a tremendous amount of effort into that blog post and I'm just trying to share my perspective without spending a lot of time on one-off comments. The fact that this conversation is coming up so frequently on page #1 shows that a lot of people are thinking about it. And because I actually took the leap I figure that my post is a good "skin in the game" anecdotal explanation of why one person actually participated in this "great resignation". (Edit 2: I put in a summary of my blog post and a compare/contrast of my motivations with the CNBC article's content so this last paragraph is now obsolete)
Now, if said link is accompanied by a brief overview of the contents or some other insight or commentary, that's much more acceptable.
For the record, I did not down vote you, I'm just offering perspective on why someone might have.
I would be surprised if 95% of the people on monster.com are NOT considering looking for a new job
Yes, many new remote positions will be created, and it is a trend which will grow. But most will (have to) stay right where they are.
- FB stock is up ~75%. - GOOG almost up 100%. - AMZN almost up ~50%.
Stock portion of the compensation could be big enough carrot to keep the talent.
Within our job market, are we seeing similar 'great resignation' patterns? Anyone with direct insight?
Yesterday I saw someone post about JP Morgan doing this and that person was suggesting a "hack" of choosing not to disclose your vaccination status to get out of a return to office (or at least delay it). It's worth noting that the EEOC has ruled private companies can fire people for not being vaccinated so proceed with caution.
As for the FAANGs, I do see some value in physical presence with your coworkers. This does allow interactions that otherwise wouldn't happen. The food and amenities has value. There's no doubt in my mind that a physically colocated team, all other things being equal, will have a closer team dynamic than a remote one.
But... times have changed. As software engineers in particular, we're in a fairly privileged position where we have a lot of options on where can work. Several big companies have already seen what way the winds are blowing and allow permanent remote work (eg FB, Twitter and even Google is in the early stages of this).
So you as an individual software engineer have the power to be an agent for change if this is something you care about and that is to vote with your feet if the company you work for forces your hand.
Personally, I lived in NYC for 10 years and there's a lot I liked about it but it reaches the point where you're choosing to live somewhere old, small and probably noisy but convenient or putting up with a commute, which really just robs you of time. At least in the tri-state area you can read or something. In the Bay Area where many have to drive, it's worse. And commutes are often much longer.
So I know I've made a lifestyle choice to move somewhere cheaper and warmer.
But a "great resignation"? I don't see it. Many don't have the options you do working in tech so they'll grumble about it but will comply and go back. I do wish we'd stop reporting people "considering" quitting as meaning anything at all however.
yet the attrition rate was way lower. in the time i was there almost no one left
Office work is weird and too political. It was like game of thrones every day. The boring bits with pointless drama to determine who sits on an uncomfortable chair.
Key question I have now when I have a face to face meeting: why exactly am I sharing oxygen in close proximity with this person? Especially after this silly commute just to do so.
BTW I now make more money than my boss's boss. Why would I want to go back? There's that pragmatism as well.
I find it so odd that with the endemic ending that there is a call to return to an office without the commute problem solved. If productivity is lagging at home it's signs of other issues for the employee and the office doesn't magically solve them they just temporarily remove them.
Don't have those expenses anymore? Then why should I compensate you the same as if you did?
Why should I pay you more than some other remote worker in India, who'll work for a third of your pay?
Sure, you can hire a remote worker in India for less; go ahead.
But how people are paid as nothing to do on how they spend it to work. If someone has a partner that can take care of the children at home and walk to work, are you going to pay them less than someone who needs daycare, a car, a parking pass?
You pay to get skills executing a task. You put a price on it, adjust it to market value, and done. Who cares if the worker is in Bora-bora sleeping under the stars or in a suburban house in LA commuting in a new leased car.
I'm not especially invested in my employer, other than the stock price going up for all those lovely RSU's, but that hasn't stopped me working hard for one company for the last 16 years. The thing is though, that I work to live, not live to work.
I don't get a free lunch, but TANSTAAFL is as true now as it ever was; more important to me is that WFH (for me) is a major benefit, and this past year has shown it is (a) possible, (b) functional, and (c) oh so desirable.
So, for the first time in 16 years I'm seriously considering jumping ship. There's a chance I'll be promoted in October/November (one of those keynote things again) which comes with a healthy up-tick in bonus/salary so I'll probably stick around for that, but thereafter ? Close inspection of the market will ensue.
Because you're paying people to complete a job, not for what they do outside of work hours genius. Are you paying people who have kids and longer commutes more money? Didn't think so.
>Why should I pay you more than some other remote worker in India, who'll work for a third of your pay?
They're 1/3 as good. If that's such a good option then why haven't you done it already?
Good luck getting qualified workers with that attitude. Capitalism works both ways bud and isn't an employer only benefit. Right now employees have the upper hand and if you want to bring decent talent in you should probably be competitive.
Ah, totally not an inflated sense of self worth... do you have a source for that number? New grad salaries for even graduates of top CS programs in India are between 1/4th and 1/3rd of $100k [1]. For most other good graduates it's lower.
So what you said is incredibly ignorant and arrogant. Do better. You're not as special as you think.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Ba...
Grasping at straws here.
> I have many years of experience, and a history of being worth paying
Seems like your ego can't handle it. Why do you think that there aren't similar people elsewhere in the world? You can't keep throwing random numbers without sources to back them up. The reality is that your job can be done by many others living in a country with lower COL with much, much less money.
Then why isn't it being done by them already? Do you think companies hate saving money and just prefer to throw it away on more expensive employees who aren't any better?
Someone has an inflated self worth and ego issues but it's not the guy you're responding to.
And I don't know what your problem is, I was merely pointing out the parent commentator was very wrong with the salary numbers they provided, which shows disconnect with reality. I never said that all jobs can and will go remote. Read my comments again, properly this time.
I know col is better in India, that isn't as big a deal as you think because once you get past food and housing to luxuries to buy things are more expensive there. (Except servants are dirt cheap, while I wouldnt dream of one here )
With that said, I'd gladly make less than those that have to work in the office.
Why should I pay you more than some other remote worker
in India, who'll work for a third of your pay?
Because someone as good as me in India makes a lot more than a third of my pay. They do make a lot less them me, but not that much less.
Because someone in India isn't in the same timezone as me. Call me at your local 2pm and I'm wide awake. Call someone in India then and you get them out of bed. Of course some reading this will discover that India is a better timezone than mine. I work with great people in Australia, India, and Mexico - it isn't possible to have a meeting with all at the same time because the timezones don't overlap right.
Where do you idiots get the idea that remote workers don't need to pay for childcare, clothes or cars?
Similarly, even if (as seems likely in most cases) childcare is still necessary, not having to do a triangle commute of home-dropoff-work and work-pickup-home reduces the likelihood of overtime costs for childcare, given a constant number of working hours.