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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

I can only speak from personal experience, but fwiw I'm currently consulting with 2 non-tech Fortune 500 companies. Both have implemented "hybrid" return to office policies where employees have to live within 100 miles of the office and be able to come in 1 day a week or 1 day a month depending on team.

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.

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10% of people leaving during a time when hiring has gotten significantly harder sounds like a serious problem for any company.

A greater percentage than that leave every year anyway, so it doesn't sound all that dire. (I'd love for it to be that dire as we've gone remote-first with pretty good support for that, but I don't think it's actually going to be as massive a tailwind for us as this and similar articles suggest.)

IME 10% turnover is basically background noise of the unavoidable "my spouse got a better job and its right next to the kid's college" sort. That's practically a near-unicorn-level employer with lots of money and negligible amount of dysfunction.

It’s really not. Normal attrition rate is probably more than that and a good portion of the people leaving over wfh policies probably would have left for other reasons anyway. So the added resignations over wfh aren’t a huge burden yet. It will become a big problem if hiring continues to be very difficult, but we won’t know if that trend holds for some time.

> "hybrid" return to office policies where employees have to live within 100 miles of the office and be able to come in 1 day a week or 1 day a month depending on team.

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.

The problem is that the req to live within 100mi doesn’t allow workers to fully engage in location arbitrage in the way the workers would like.

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.

There is one exception to your location arbitrage: those who want a hobby farm. if you need to go to the office every day your hobby farm will be close to the city. If you only go in once a week a 1.5 hour drive doesn't sound so bad and you can move farther out meaning more land for the same number of people who want a horse or whatever.

This is only a tiny subset of people though, and is more the exception that proves the rule.

If you're in a major metro like the bay area, 1.5 hours still doesn't get you far enough to afford anything like enough land for a hobby farm on anything short of a FANNG salary.

Sure it does. 1.5 hours gets you to Stockton or Gilroy or Modesto of Fairfield and lots of other more open places where you can get a few acres at a decent price.

Based on a quick look at Zillow, 5 acres (undeveloped, no house) goes for nearly a million dollars. We have fundamentally different ideas of what constitutes a "decent price" if that qualifies for you. I'm 6 hours drive from the my office in Mountain View now, and I'm looking at a similarly undeveloped plot that's 250 acres and worth somewhere between $200k and $300k.

A house can be built on that lot for $150k (though most will probably spend more like 200k), a barn for another 100k. Still cheaper than a similar house right in SF.

There are cities other than than the west coast as well. 5 acres 1.5 hours from Minneapolis will be 300k with a house.

You need a FANNG salary to afford most hobby farms even if the land was free. It is possible to make a good living farming a hobby farm sized lot, but most hobby farms are not managed to do that (most are about horses which are a large money sink)

I think you nailed it, but an added wrinkle is that I’ve seen a lot of people (myself included) have worse work/life balance with wfh. When there’s no separation between you and “the office” it’s very easy to just never stop working. The number of night time emails and after hours meetings I’ve gotten skyrocketed after everyone started working from home, and it’s a similar situation across my broader friends & coworkers cohort.

That's a personal problem for you to solve by setting boundaries, honestly. I doubt those late emails will ever not be a thing, I've worked at a lot of places in things other than software and it never ends, regardless of working from home or office.

For now tech workers are at the edge, but I think if a company lets its engineering team have it, the other roles will come for it as well.

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.)

> employees have to live within 100 miles of the office and be able to come in 1 day a week or 1 day a month depending on team.

This is much more reasonable than what I've seen most places offer. I don't mind the sound of that at all!

if one day a month, just fly in. I fly in for a week per quarter (pre-covid). My main office is in SoCal, but I live several states away. Budgets pay for the travel.

>Both have implemented "hybrid" return to office policies where employees have to live within 100 miles of the office and be able to come in 1 day a week or 1 day a month depending on team.

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 is why I am glad to both be 100% remote, and be so far from the office nearest that there is no way they could argue with a straight face that I need to come in. They could fire me if they decide they don't want remote people any more, and that's fine. But at least there's no pressure to come in to the office "one day a month" creeping to "one day a week" creeping to "three days a week."

Job hunting right now.

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 think a lot of people are doing this same thing (I know several personally). Getting 2 hrs back a day is amazing, and after having it for a year it is really hard to give up.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> companies don't really know or have committed to anything just yet

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.

Purposefully designed office time would be immensely better for folks that need dedicated time to do work.

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.

I would love hybrid. Going in a day a week would be great. Enough time to plan things and then get to working on it remotely. Unfortunately my company is going full 100% back in the office citing that's where everyone will be in a couple years.

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