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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH.

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.

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Nobody wants to give up a something once it becomes a part of their life that they enjoy.

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.

Before the pandemic FANGs seemed to want everyone in the office as much as possible. That's why they have their own cafeterias/restaurants, daycare, workout rooms, etc. They wanted employees in the office, working a minimum of 40 hours a week. I'm guessing even though remote work is going fine for now, they're concerned they're not going to be able to keep getting over 40 hours of week out of employees. (This is conjecture on my part, I have no idea how many hours FANG employees tend to work).

> (This is conjecture on my part, I have no idea how many hours FANG employees tend to work).

Then don't conjecture. Speculation doesn't add to the conversation. In the absence of evidence, it just spreads a misinformation virus.

Without due speculation we could only talk about fully established facts. That would make a very infertile conversation.

Also you should have more trust for your fellows in dialogue here, that they do have some immune function against misinformation viruses.

My experience in the software industry is that engineers are just as susceptible to misinformation as everyone else. It is the exact same process which reinforces beliefs in flat-earth, anti-vax, chiropractic, homeopathy, the stolen-election narrative, and other such nonsense.

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 hope you see the irony in this. Many of your comments, including this one I'm replying to, have "I think ..." which is really just speculation.

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...

Thanks for your input regarding critical thinking skills. Below are my suggestions for you, inspired from CBT skills. Normally it is a faux pas to point out cognitive distortions in other people's thinking, but looks like you're up for a direct conversation so I'll reciprocate;

- 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.

Many comments in this thread are speculation/conjecture, I was honest enough to label mine as such. We're not running studies or experiments here, this is a place to converse. My comment allows others to provide additional evidence for or against my theory.

> . Speculation doesn't add to the conversation. In the absence of evidence

This is an interesting claim. Do you have evidence for it?

I listened to a Cartalk or maybe This American Life segment many years ago that asked the question “Are two people talking about something they do not know anything about better or worse off after talking about 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.

I hate every time this mandate is slinged around as if this is the only way humans can operate intelligently.

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.

Sure it's N=1, but I worked more than 40 hours every single week when I was at a FANG. I used to laugh at all the perks because who actually had the time to use most of them other than interns.

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.

See I was the opposite. I had no time as an intern but have plenty of time as a full timer.

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.

I agree with you there about some interns being very busy. I do remember interns that had a lot of self imposed pressure to perform. If they even had say a minor issue with their work issued laptop they would be in a panic because of the time lost.

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.

At my FAANG they did studies and on average people are working MORE hours each day since the switch to WFH. If they were concerned about maximizing hours then they'd leave it as in. I suspect there are other concerns.

I have to wonder whether they're available for more hours or actually putting in more work. Home distractions tend to extend the work day for people who have pride in their craft.

At least for me, the hours I used to spend driving my car are now spent doing actual work, because that’s what I’d rather be doing anyway. The only reason I don’t work more hours as it is is that I have other obligations. Just seems like a total waste of resources along multiple dimensions to have me driving around my brain.

There could definitely be other concerns too. Such as security. It'd be much easier for someone to copy a code base, or get evidence of wrongdoing by your employer, or whatever, when at home rather than in an office. It's also harder to secure all your employees' home networks than one office network. But I wonder how many people who work at offices still bring their laptops home to use.

This had been my experience too. I don't think I had been more productive - many times I've just stayed late poking at the problem I'd normally leave for the next day when working in the office. Most of these times I still solved it the next day with the new ideas after a night's sleep. Not to mention I've got many ideas from random discussions with colleagues, which ceased with the WFH. So return to the office is a win-win for me and my employer: I work less and I am more productive.

Let's not also forget the ability to take your pay from say a major metropolitan area like San Francisco, and work remote where you get more bang for your buck like Wyoming.

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'

I think many of the companies that have announced remote options will also be adjusting salaries based on the local area's cost of living or cost of hiring or some other similar factor.

Of course, a lot of people taking their big tech paychecks to some lower-cost place will just be exporting the problem to another place. A sudden big inflow of cash into a low-cost area is going to raise prices.

Some people earning more money and reducing the income/wealth gap is not a terrible problem to have. The rapid-ness might cause some friction in the short term, but the alternative of stagnation and deflation in the long term is a far worse problem.

Since before anyone on this board was born companies, have adjusted pay based on location using charts like this;

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/25/us-dollar-ho...

To think this time is different is to be ignorant.

You're assuming that every city refuses to build housing. That is true in California but not in the US as a whole.

the economics are there for every city.

Who's going to let housing be built if it devalues the houses they own?

When their property taxes go up a large amount too.

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.

> This is why they demand the butts back in the cramped open seating office

It is also the astronomical real estate money they had sunken into new office spaces.

I don't think that's true. 1B is a big office but it's only a couple days of revenue

I found that meetings of dubious utility grew to fill every working hour and then some. I'm quitting and accepting a long commute to reclaim lifespan.

Where I work, those who want to continue to WFH can and those who want to go back to the office can; living 10 minutes away, I'm happy to go there two-three days a week and be physically in the same space as the colleagues who also want to be there (mostly those who live close by and also want to go to the office); also I appreciate the coffee machine, HVAC and opportunity for lunch and coffee breaks with the colleagues. While those who live 1h+ from the office or prefer to WFH can continue that way. Of course upper management isn't clear on if it will continue to function this way (I certainly hope so for my colleagues who are happy to avoid their commute).

My pay stinks (from what I can tell looking around on the net and at some former friends from university) and I'm going to have to move to the office for the first time soon. I'm unmotivated to work at home, and I'll be even less motivated at this pay to go into work and write C and Python all day on projects that don't interest me in the least.

I don't want to have to move.

"destroy morale for the remaining"

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.

this is an uplifting example, however, in business, it is not sacrifice in the same way. Business is about making profit, and extracting profit is what they do.. I was told by a retired consultant with decades of experience -- fifty percent of companies manage through fear. That is, you work hard there, or require others to work hard, because, you will be punished or terminated. End of story.

I mean, your examples of organizations are homogeneous in their nature, and borderline cult level communal. Unless you're in management or one of those workers who's an over zealous corporate kool-aid drinking yes-man who screams about company culture and has substituted any outside social life with the office and coworkers, these examples might be extreme and irrelevant.

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.

> I value having more control over what little time I have left alive

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.

I don't necessarily mean this in the context here of "work for a corporation" but one thing I have learned recently (thanks, therapy) is that one can lean too far in the direction of individual autonomy.

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.

> 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.

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.

I couldn't agree with you more.

> 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.

Some of these "in control" managers are just extreme extroverts, who can't comfortably live without a steady stream of victi^W "direct reports" to cater to their weird habits. Instead of simply creating a policy and a monthly report for a trivial daily process easily accomplished by a particular employee, it's so much more satisfying for such a manager to drop in unannounced every day to "supervise". These managers have been stuck at home long enough that all the maids and gardeners have quit and the third spouse has suggested a separation. An omnipresence of such people surely justified the invention of the guillotine...

You're confusing your personal feelings about some hypothetical organization with the separate question of what the definition of "morale" is. That organization will have a level of morale even if you are not a part of the organization.

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.

> perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH

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.

I agree with this line of reasoning. Owners of real estate, either directly or indirectly via owning interests in a company with real estate will have an incentive for everyone to return to office. Middle management may also have an incentive to return to office, lest they be found redundant.

Otherwise, I am sure most people by and large would enjoy would enjoy not wasting their life transiting back and forth to work.

>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.

Exactly, this is why you're seeing such a push for returning to the office from financial institutions -- commercial real estate makes up a large portion of their portfolios.

I am missing something that connects real estate ownership to WFH policies. Let us assume you have committed to real-estate and you cannot sub-lease it and you are on hook for paying for it. It does not matter whether it is occupied or unoccupied, right?

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.

If you own commercial real estate, you have some incentive to act in a way that doesn’t undermine the market for commercial real estate.

Apple is the prime example, touting the massive $5B+ investment into its new campus. Google might be in the same boat with its Downtown San Jose expansion work.

Here in Cambridge Google began work on an expansion before the pandemic, and it is now almost done. Do they now actually need it? Will be interesting to see.

> 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.

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.

I work in big tech, and management capabilities and oversight doesn't feel any less. Actually a bit more in a way.

> Something I need to point out: the office is still cheaper to run when empty, even if the corporation pays the lease.

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.

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH.

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.

Same context, same anecdote here.

My experience with my teammates is the same.

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.

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH.

Many just built multi-billion-dollar campuses that, in the WFH economy, are big useless pieces of real estate

The same can be said of Wall Street banks — they have significant real estate holdings that would be devalued in a scenario where a sizeable percentage of the workforce never goes back to the office. They have a vested interest in driving utilization of physical spaces.

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.

Not directly addressing your point, but how common is it for someone to be a FAANG developer - extremely well compensated and smart by all accounts - and not have other options? An argument like this makes sense for the random dev shops and non-tech company dev departments across the country. For many of those, the top 1 or 2 people are arguably good enough to switch over to FAANG or HFT or some other very highly compensated thing if they really want to.

I would expect everyone at a FAANG to basically walk into a comparable or better role at a more "traditional" employer.

As a FAANG employee myself, I think your opinion of the average FAANG developer is perhaps a bit too generous.

That's certainly possible :)

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.

Google and Amazon are both in Madison.

I actually did look them all up after posting this comment, and you're right. And Microsoft says they have offices in Waukesha and Wauwatosa but it looks like they both point to a sales-only office in downtown Milwaukee.

I doubt a lot of people would commute between Milwaukee and Madison when the Amtrak Hiawatha is 1.5 hours from Milwaukee to Chicago, within walking distance to Google Chicago.

I know the Google building but I was not aware Amazon was in Madison in any substantive manner. Is it an Amazon building or a company they acquired?

It's probably like Google's office in Ann Arbor -- 450 people in advertising, marketing, and sales.

No, we’re actually all hardware and software engineering in Madison.

What many miss is also these large companies are doing something very interesting in the labor market. They are starving the competition. They spend a bit extra on labor but they get a long term benefit of lower number of effective competitors. MS did this for years in the 90s. Apple/Atari/Sony/IBM did it in the 80s. Being in office ('free lunch', perks, etc) is part of that lock in. If people are at home then they are more likely to wander off and find another job as at that point the only real difference between jobs is the kind of thing you work on and money.

I agree with the first part, not so sure about the conclusion though. What makes you think that WFH increases attrition? The FAANGs could easily spend some additional dollars to make "their" WFH more attractive than the competitions, similar to what they did with offices.

Depends a lot. WFH when most companies won't allow it is a perk that will keep people around. However once WFH is a common thing it is much easier to switch. If you WFH you can work anywhere in the country (in theory world, but there are tricky issues there that I don't know much about) which means you can switch from a job in the Bay to NYC with no problem, then jump to the one job in some tiny village in Montana - all without leaving your family.

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.

I guess I was unclear in my comment. I meant that FAANG can spend money on WFH related perks (premium equipment, food delivery, whatever) that second tier companies are maybe not willing to pay, thus retaining the same advantage they had in the office work era that was mentioned by the grandparent in their post.

But they can't create a culture of WFH like that. For WFH to really work it needs to be first class in the company, otherwise those who work from home are cut out from the day to day office politics. In that environment WFH people are less valuable.

Both of you have fair points.

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'?

As a fellow FAANG, I completely agree

Sure, there are always other options. But there's also inertia - switching jobs is stressful and risky. Forcing people back to the office provides a push that might get people to think, "Y'know what, maybe <competitor> will hire me at L+1, and let me work remotely." The employees who can actually get the L+1 offer are the stronger ones.

You may walk in because of your CV, but the new employer may find out that an elite university and FMAGA resume does not guarantee programming and software design skills.

Some of the stacks at these companies are quite horrible.

Like most of hacker news, I think you vastly underestimate really how replaceable smart and skilled people really are. There are literally millions of them, most with far lower pay and conditions than offered by FANGS.

You are forgetting how expensive it is to replace smart and skilled people.

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.

Have you ever tried hiring these people? At FAANG scale? Good luck …

Even more, as it is measured, the more replaceable you render yourself in your work the smarter and skillful you are, and the quality of the work is considered higher.

I suspect it's individual managers who've never quite got past "if you can't see someone how do you know they're working?" Never underestimate human irrationality in these things.

This is the most blatantly ridiculous straw man, I can’t believe people on HN keep trying to make it especially against FAANG. Do you really think these companies are run by middle managers that just want to watch people work?

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.

It’s not hard. It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees. He asks the VPs, and the VPs ask their reports and so on and so forth. I have no doubt there’s data from middle management that is getting weighed more than that of the people they manage.

> It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees.

They actually send surveys to everyone. They also talk to the VPs, but surveys have weight.

No, they do. And you can see the aggregate scores of everyone in the company on a dashboard afterwards.

In Scrum, Scrum Master is a contributing member, just as everyone else. It's a role without power, but servant leadership and can be rotated.

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.

This varies on the manager. There are managers who do want to see butts in seats, but there are also managers who want to know their directs outside of "what's the status of JIRA ticket X-1234" in a scheduled zoom meeting. Sure, there are 1:1s if the agenda isn't too full, but it still feels kind of contrived as opposed to bumping into someone in the break room and asking them about their weekend, hobbies, or recent projects.

disclaimer that this is completely anecdotal, but what i've heard from a few people in fortune-500 oil&gas companies is that 30-40% attrition is an acceptable side-effect of returning to offices, because productivity has been down by even more than that during WFH.

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.

They could also play the slow game by tempting some people back and then letting social and career pressure take care of many of the rest. You'll have a much easier negotiating position when half the company and half the world are back at their desks.

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH.

Yes, aggressive measures such as:

-Allowing employees to apply to be permanent remote employees

-Allowing 2 WFH days per week

...which policies were only implemented after significant employee pushback over the originally-announced "everyone will be going back to the office full-time" plans.

Google never announced anything like that. The moment they started talking about return to office there was talk of flexibility, lower capacities, and WFH. And in reality WFH at least 1 or 2 days a week was always a possibility, at least in my Google office.

Anything but allowing permanent WFH without any approval, never requiring any on-site visits, and never requiring the camera is "aggressive" to a lot of people for some reason.

> Allowing employees to apply to be permanent remote employees

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.

The 2 day WFH thing will fade away as well.

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

As someone who's company is doing exactly that (albeit with only 1 day per week) I can't see that happening here.

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?

The policy for applying for wWFH at the FAANG I work at involves seniority and VP approval.

Also consider that FAANGs (and other firms) likely receive considerable tax incentives from the local or State government for having offices in particular locations and the resulting high-paying jobs it brings. If you suddenly let everyone work from wherever, the government isn't generating the income taxes they bargained for.

> For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce

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.

Reminds me of Research in Motion.

Who are still around, calling themselves BlackBerry, and have not yet declared their return-to-the-office policy.

> For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce, this seems like a pretty big fucking risk to take.

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).

Handicapping FAANG companies could be beneficial to society, overall. Covid-19 brought a few positive outcomes -- less pollution last year, more WFH, ... Following that up with a decline or temporary slowdown in FAANG would be another.

What slowdown? My FB stock is up 100% since March 2020. Seems to me they are expecting even more power coming out of covid. Their influence on society has grown even stronger in the past year and a half.

Simply put: It's easier to to restrict WFH policies and then go lax on them later, as opposed to the opposite which would build a workforce accustomed to WFH that would revolt.

I think there's a chance we'll see WFH loosening up eventually.

You're glossing too quickly over the "corporate culture" part. It's not about sustainability or gaming out disaster scenarios: they're pushing for an end to WFH because they try to cultivate a culture where people want to go to the office. (That's what all the amenities are for!)

In my experience the quip about the "train not swerving off the tracks so far" is mainly just because of the momentum we had from years of working closely together in the office. The longer it goes on, the further my group/department/org fall apart. Communication isn't as good, the new hires aren't trained well and aren't integrated with the team well, a percentage of the employees are obviously just slacking off and not getting much work done, etc. Yes you could argue that those things could be fixed/improved but the reality of the situation is that they're real problems that we're really facing. From what I can see of my situation, it isn't sustainable in my org for much longer.

I work at a FANG (hence the throwaway), and I agree.

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.

i work in sf. i'm in florida right now for the nhl finals and covid is fake news here, and it's utterly refreshing.

One dynamic that has become apparent to me recently is that at my company everybody has to justify their building space. If too much sits idle we can be penalized for inefficiency. If half of the employees switch to mostly wfh then the corporation would need to sell off/rent out half of the buildings to avoid this.

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.

You seem to make very very bold assumptions without any data backing them up: 1. That current WFH isn't degrading company productivity. Some people love WFH, some hate it, and some just don't have space for that. And for FANGs, that are heavily concentrated in high-COL areas, having huge house with extra bedrooms that give you space for work isn't that common. 2. That brining people back to the office is the most horrible thing that can happen to the company. 3. That talented people prefer to WFH.

I get it, you like to WFH - that's great. But your anecdotes aren't data.

>I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH.

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's not largely driven by personal profit motive/asset exposure of the decision maker class ... executives, boards, and upper management at such companies are nearly uniformly composed of wealthy individuals who probably have diversified investment portfolios including tons of commercial and residential real-estate interest in places like the Bay area ... what happens to real estate prices in the bay if tech becomes remote? Personally I can't imagine choosing to live in San Francisco in the first place -- but how many of the folks who did for work, then left during the pandemic to live in more livable places, would really want to go back if given the option not to ...?

FAANGs don’t need that much monster “talent.” They need some, like the Jeff Deans and whatever. But most of the jobs at a place like Google require just basic top 10% software engineering skill which they make too much money to ever have a problem hiring.

Many of these companies are letting more senior people stay remote while requiring L4 and below to be in office. If they lose a ton of L3's and L4's to other companies its a loss but much less of a loss than losing L5's+

Can't speak for the others, but Google is not being aggressive about return, frankly. Return will be based on regional case numbers, and the expectation is only for 3/5 days, low office capacity at the start, and I'm sure plenty of flexibility will be given.

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.

Taking objection to “FANG”

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.

Your baseline assumption is that everything is peachy with full WFH. It's not always the case.

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.

It seems to mostly be driven by managers who are not part of the productive class and therefore can’t perceive the hit to productivity and WLB the office incurs. If you spend your entire day in pointless meetings anyway, then yes, maximizing your commute time and “random office conversation” time is a rational choice. And it’s not like you can measure the productivity of the code monkeys anyway so who cares?

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH.

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.

The pattern I've observed is that younger and more junior people want to work in the office, and older, more senior people with established networks, family life and nice accomodation with a home office are more likely to appreciate working from home.

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.

I'm at a FAANG and for any of these categorisations that I think about I can immediately come up with enough counterexamples (across age, marital status, role, ...) that I don't believe there's any easily pinpointed uniform grouping.

So one of the things to remember about Google is the desire to increase attrition of senior employees (e.g. those with the most flexibility to move elsewhere). It's.... weird, but it would totally match.

==Making such a big push to go back in September instead of waiting until January just seems reckless to the point of irrationality.==

Maybe the goal is to get the type of expensive, experienced employees that inhabit HN to resign?

Maybe their plan is to have all the workers on big-city mega wages, currently working remotely, quit, and then hire replacement workers in remote locations at much lower local labour market rates.

Introspection is very hard for anyone running the world. That's why revolutions happen and there isn't a single dynasty stretching back to ancient times.

Pretty sure if revolution breaks out in the western world... it won't be started by overcompensated engineers upset that they have to go back to attending an office with free snacks/food and on-site massages.

I now see the irony of my comment.

That's a likely class of people to start revolutions - if anything, they might be too low. See elite overproduction theory.

I was of the same mind until I saw the iOS/macOS reveal and now I’m fairly certain whatever WFH system Apple is doing isn’t working.

Of the FAANG companies, aren't Facebook and Netflix saying that people can work from home forever if they like?

There are always H1Bs to abuse. They are going to do the employers' bidding. I think FAANGs will be fine.

it's just supply and demand of labor. when there's a vast oversupply of talented labor, you don't need to cater to the desires of that talent pool. there's a long list of potential candidates that would love to work at a FAANG even if they have to go back to the office.

Well...FANG products have largely reached the point in development where new features are incremental and not closely tied to growth or churn in a meaningful way.

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?

In "theory" yes, as measured at scale. Whether or not such correlations really hold is up to a) your data science group, and b) the complex and political negotiation of optics by stakeholders.

I'm sort of kidding here, as I find your point sensible, but it may be a tough sell that demand is inelastic.

The market is neither that local nor that global. I don't mean this in a "threat from China" way, but if US companies just look at the offerings of other US companies and the US labor market they might get blindsided again when it turns out that there's good money, good programmers and good designers in Europe and China as well, as it happened with TikTok.

It's feature 3.2.97 missed this quarter, but serious general stagnation in the medium and long term: if junior office dwellers replace senior workers from home moving somewhere else very little is invented, let alone implemented.

And with no one mentoring those juniors, it's very unlikely they will ever reach the same level of experience and knowledge to actually start making those kinds of impacts on the product or company.

As a non-fang employee, I will gladly scab any of them that are not willing to go back to the office.

Having spent so much money creating billion dollar campuses has them in a sunk cost fallacy IMO.

>>It’s pretty clear that it’s not short-term unsustainable

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.

Fb is going full remote for a lot of positions IIUC

Especially since they are throwing out mask requirements and vaccination verification for folks returning to work - who wants to expose themselves to that?

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