Ask HN: How many of you are quitting over return to office? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many of you are quitting over return to office?

68 pointsd3nj4l52 comments

Midway through the pandemic, I was hopeful that work wouldn’t just go back to how it was before, now that more people were aware they could be perfectly productive working remote. Fast forward to now and almost all major companies I can think of are at best doing a hybrid system, which IMO is just a way to soften the blow of returning to office full time. There’s been a bunch of articles and HN posts about quitting for remote, but how many of you are actually doing it?

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I’m considering leaving my company, but not for the reason you’d expect.

We’ve fully embraced work from home, even though officially there is an expectation that people start coming back to office in the future.

I’m more frustrated because with WFH, a team I’m primarily involved with right now has essentially checked out. The manager doesn’t want to manage, and work that should take hours or a couple days stretches for weeks at a time.

There’s little accountability, and I feel like more senior leadership isn’t doing much about it because it hasn’t really hit the bottom line.

WFH is great I think when you have motivated people. With WFH, it’s an “out of sight, out of mind” situation with people not even coasting so much as they’re checked out. To be clear, I’m not blaming WFH. I do think it’s not helping a deeper problem.

I have seen the same thing in our company. Work that used to take a fraction of a sprint now spans multiple sprints. The velocity has plummeted, management doesn't care as much and people regularly do 3 hour lunches with coworkers. No one seems to give a shit. Company is heading in the wrong direction and everyone is coasting on this Titanic. Chatter on Slack is in comatose. IT issues take days to get resolved. JIRA tickets are piling up ungroomed. Is it because of WFH or pandemic? Not sure but what I am sure is the stark difference between pre and post pandemic times in our company. I am going to stick around because my pay is the same, so why not?

Some people are definitely not able to. There's a reason why co-working spaces were popular. Managers are just prone to this as well.

I don't think most are purposely slacking off, though. From what I've seen, they feel very guilty, and the guilt often pushes them deeper into laziness.

For me, if the work isn't really rewarding or I can't summon the motivation to do it, then where I do it doesn't matter, because quite frankly an authority figure's impression of me in person or not doesn't affect it. Maybe for others this does matter, and the only thing motivating them on an otherwise stupid project is fear. Perhaps the fact that the project in this case doesn't impact the bottom-line is indicative of it not being sufficiently rewarding work on it's own.

In recent interviews, when asked about what I want in my next position, I say that I want to be able to see where my work is going. I don't want to just write code and contribute to an opaque profit machine, because it doesn't keep me going when the work itself gets boring.

I have. Commuting is dangerous and expensive, and lowers my disposable income by half.

The office was also unproductive. It was loud, uncomfortable chairs, slow computers. We didn't really do agile either, meaning if it took 4 minutes to compile and can't hit the deadline, that's my problem. WFH actually covered a lot of the productivity loss from working in office, but not enough. My home office is a very productive place, with essential oils and a 4K monitor.

I think there's an element of disrespect. You're in the office not to work, but to bring up the prestige of the boss. It's not so much a problem with trust, but it's a problem when my role as a seat warmer takes priority over my role as a developer.

Slightly different situation. I want to work in office full time due to kid daycare logistics, but there appears to be some chance that our office will be changing to 100% hotdesking for everyone, presumably to save costs while most people WFH most of the time.

That does not work for me. I work with hardware. I constantly have robot bits or DAQ/RT systems on my desk. I'm not hauling that stuff home every day.

I have already told my employer in no uncertain terms that I plan to quit if they impose hot desking.

I'm in your situation too. I'm not making a big fuss though, I just go to the office every day and always take the same desk. I leave the desk clean at the end of the day, but I just put the things in the drawer under the desk, where people are kind enough to leave my stuff alone. If one day I find someone at my desk, I'll just go to a different desk (it happened only once).

No exception for a lab? Our network engineering team has a lab (it’s an office) where they keep a bunch hardware and this and that. It’s pretty much one persons office.

Yes, that’s a very good idea. Tell your manager you’ll need a lab(even if just an empty space) for you to continue working if hot desking is introduced.

Might be just my anecdotal data, but a lot of these things come down to does your manager have a way to present whatever you're asking as a decent expense to his superiors. And not so much wanting to make your (work) life worse.

It's like, managers don't realise a sizable amount of us are just looking for the least shit working conditions. They do the simple sums of how much they'll immediately save by essentially asset stripping the office and not the more complicated calculation of what's lost long term when people leave because of the stressful working conditions

And I call that one deprioritizing your people over petty office expenses. Might be just me, but I feel like the higher you go up the corp chain the more this line of thinking gets more and more common.

I'm a little surprised they can't make an exception on a case-by-case basis for people coming into the office every day and with specific hardware needs. Have they told you they can't make an exception?

Exceptions are difficult in a corporate world. Everything is reduced to k€.

My previous job was for a major corporation and our entire department was an exception. They got rid of our office building several years ago and despite a corporate mandate that everyone must work in an office, they let our entire department work from home indefinitely (still was when I put in my two weeks last month, still no plan to relocate us or get new office space for us).

I'm sure it might be difficult or rare, but if you make your case enough hopefully there's some process in place that allows the exception to occur. Especially if it's just a case of your boss putting a sign on a desk that says "This desk is reserved for X".

I don't understand the "kid daycare logistics". Does your work provide daycare access? Is there a specific location near your work? I'm trying to understand why not switch the daycare closer to your home to avoid this whole office situation.

Why would you haul the equipment home every day? Given the policy they want, there are plenty of simplistic solutions. Ask for a filing cabinet on wheels, store your stuff there and roll your gear somewhere that is known for employee storage of cabinets when they're doing hotdesking.

Ask for closet storage due to the cost of the equipment.

I worked at a 3rd tier (being generous), rural private liberal arts college that has had roughly 50% of the department leave within the past 3 months. Some (including myself) due to the essentially mandatory return (they have a new WFH policy that requires multiple approvals, but they just don't grant them, "why not come into office for a few months and then we'll reevaluate the situation") and others for general displeasure with the organization as a whole. Their entire schtick is "we are a collaborative family as a university, so we need face to face contact" (they required nearly all in person classes, too) and it ended up driving away the competent people who have worked in jobs outside of academia. The only people left are the lifers who have never worked anywhere else and are fearful of finding a new job. It is 100% the college overplaying their hand and entirely ignoring the workers and current state of the labor market.

What is it about non-prestigious rural colleges? They all have this attitude problem. My first read of your comment I thought you were talking about the one I live near but I'm not that naive

The whole industry is scared because it is on the edge of complete collapse.

If the staff are WFH it means the students aren't getting face to face and they won't pay those kinds of fees because they'll just look for the cheapest remote 3rd tier school.

My department was already fully remote since they got rid of our office three years ago, but I did feel now was a good time to switch for other reasons (one being the company hadn't given out any raises to anyone in our department above 1.0% for the past three years).

I had several recruiters contact me that were saying the company required a hybrid situation and I stayed away from those. New company allows full remote right now, with optional come into the office whenever you feel like it. Hopefully it stays that way. If not, I'll probably start looking again.

And yeah, I also think hybrid is just a way for most companies to ease people back into requiring full-time in-office again (or 4 days in-office, 1 day out possibly).

It's really hard to pin down how likely companies are to stay full remote though right now. I only got a clear answer from companies that were remote since before the pandemic.

I have. My company wanted to begin hybrid next month, while I didn’t feel comfortable doing so until January 2022. When I initially broached the subject in May/June, they weren’t accommodating so I gave my notice. (Hybrid require a big move on my part.)

Recently, they’ve pushed back return date to November at the earliest and become more accommodating, but that ship has sailed, unfortunately.

I know people quitting (or at least upset) because they want to go back to an office, but our company has switched to fully remote. I think people are upset in both directions.

We should have a mix of both, so people can get what they want. I think that's what's happening.

My sense is that a lot of companies are using the current work-from-home moment to push through a stealth pay cut. The thing is, many people got very small pay increases in 2020, so if they now make anything above their 2019 level, they feel like they've moved forward. But most of my clients are handing out large increases to get software developers who show up at the office. If the folks at home get a 10% pay increase they feel like everything is going great. Meanwhile the folks showing up in the office are getting 30% increases.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with taking less pay for more flexibility. I know a lot of women with kids who have been asking for this for a long time. They'd be happy to trade away 25k to get to stay home and run some errands during the day when the kids are at school. There is nothing wrong with this on either side: some workers see the increased flexibility as a big perk, and some corporations are happy to offer that flexibility in exchange for slightly lower pay.

Still, I've been reading articles that try to paint the current moment as a kind of revolution for workers, and I don't think that is accurate. A lot of workers have some leverage this year thanks to several trillion dollars of stimulus money that the government has handed out. But I don't think there has been any kind of long-term change in the balance of power between labor and capital. I'd need to see several years of big pay increases for work-from-home workers before I think any of the current "revolutionary" rhetoric would be justified.

In particular, there is the open question of who will get the big promotions. Who will be in leadership positions in 5 years? Everything I've seen so far convinces me that the leadership in 5 years will be the people who show up at the office.

Of course, not everyone wants to go into management, and that is fine. If people would rather work-from-home and be happy, rather than running after promotions, that is fine. Everyone should do whatever is going to make them happy. Life is short, so don't waste your time doing something that is going to make you miserable. But none of the rhetoric about some kind of revolution is justified if the promotions go to the folks who show up at the office.

Also, keep in mind, my experience is limited to clients in New York City. I've no idea what is happening elsewhere.

Anecdotally, I got a 60% pay bump by switching jobs a couple of months ago, to a company that's has a "you can come into the office if you want, but it's optional" policy, and said I should be able to remain remote as long as I want. But I was also underpaid at my previous role. If I was getting paid what I should have, it would have been closer to a 15-20% bump.

But you may be right for the general trend, especially within companies. Right now though, there's a lot of demand for software engineers, so if the company is trying to hire a software engineer that has multiple and higher offers elsewhere, they need to raise what they're offering to get those people.

I.e. the recruiters representing companies that had a max budget of about 10-20% higher than my salary at my now previous job, I quickly removed myself from consideration as I talked to more recruiters offering significantly higher salary ranges, and those that gave me job offers that were lower than the company I went with and weren't willing to raise their offer to be competitive I didn't go with. And plenty of those lower salary ranges had at least a hybrid working in the office requirement also.

So at least right now, I think for people job hunting seeking WFH positions, they're not seeing much lower offers than those working in the office just because companies are struggling to fill positions in general right now and there's a lot of demand out there. What you're saying will probably be more true once there's a downturn again, and probably true once you're part of the company (but then again, even in the office I never saw a significant raise anyway, and always had to switch jobs to get the raise I desired/deserved).

> happy to trade away 25k to get to stay home and run some errands during the day when the kids are at school.

That's definitely going to result in more happy families so I would be voting with 5 arms and 6 legs for this if I could.

I want to return to office. My wife wants to keep working from home. Neither of us are worrying about it much because we are both pretty sure that people are being premature even talking about it. The Delta variant is tearing around america and people here have started wearing masks everywhere again. It's one thing if you just want the excuse to quit, but seriously, we'll all be working from home again by halloween.

Not me. As freelancer I work from home over 5 years. Many friends was sceptical about that until all of them had to work from home as well. Soon they realised it has many advantages, especially if you have small kids. It is not a stigma to work from home any more.

I got prints curling off the walls at my house. Air conditioning is a big appeal at my office as well as interesting people.

I presume you're in a warm geographic climate with no AC then. How are the nights? If hot too, how do you sleep through them?

Genuine curiosity - I'm from Florida and when power is out for a week due to the last hurricane I sleep terribly...

Germany here with no AC. The few times it's been 30-35 degrees Celsius in the evening we've had ice packs. Sleeping with a wet towel also helps.

Upstate NY.

I don't have trouble sleeping through the night most nights.

Curling, as in humidity? A desiccant based de-humidifier changed me forever. I’d never have a house without one.

You can buy cheap temperature+humidity sensors from Amazon to check what your humidity levels are.

Why desiccant based?

Purely noise related. The compressor based ones are much noisier.

It wasn't specifically for that reason, but I chose this as a good time to retire. It was probably 1/40th of the reason I chose to leave the work force.

This makes the most sense to me - everyone makes decisions for lots of reasons, and those who quit over this would probably be thinking about quitting anyways, if only to interview elsewhere.

Myself and a number of people I know have flatly said they will not return to the office. Occasional visits or team meetings are ok, but regular office time is off the table.

But the place I work has publicly announced that they surprisingly discovered overall equal or better productivity during COVID, even despite the learning curve of everyone going remote.

I believe that much of the long term success of remote work depends on upper management being open to the idea and willing to postpone judgement until adequate time (a year) has passed.

It may not really matter, though, because it's possible that COVID and other similar global problems will come up often enough to forever change how we operate as human societies.

My company has pushed the return to the office back so many times, at this point no one believes it'll actually ever happen. So no one is quitting over it yet.

The organization I work for planned for people to be in the office at least half the time in September.

I feel like they will probably change their minds before then.

It's a strange feeling, that the next month or two is preordained and the authorities are all in denial.

I guess I don't think it will be too bad to go in, if it's only half as crowded, on the streets, in the office, etc.

But it will kind of surprise me if it goes according to plan.

I quit my previous job over WFH, even before the pandemic. They moved the office farther north, farther from my home, through some nasty traffic. I asked to work from home, they said no, I quit.

Now, they have all been working from home for a while and embraced remote work for the entire company. Good for them. It just didn't work out for us.

I quit my job over the lack of a return to office.

Interacting with people to solve problems is a lot of what I enjoyed about being a software developer, and particularly after starting a new job mid-pandemic where I didn't already know people (the old company imploded for pre-pandemic reasons), work was much more isolating and less rewarding than it was in 2019.

Once it became clear return-to-office was not on any sort of definite timeline, and that I would be fully vaccinated as more places reopened, it became an easy decision to quit. And it's one of the best decisions I've made. My mental health has improved considerably, and I've discovered new hobbies and am in better shape than I ever have been. I should probably have taken a multi-month gap at least once before.

I met a colleague from my old company today (in-person, of course), who reported that ten people have left this year, from an initial number of roughly 60. It's a consulting company, and as far as I know no one has been mandated to return; most of the clients were already remote. So that's a ballpark 15-20% figure, albeit with a small sample size, of people leaving over 7 months from a company without a strong return to office movement. Many of people leaving were people with low tenure at the company, and thus not having the in-person ties that might encourage staying with their friends and colleagues.

I quit early 2021.

Among other things, the fact that my employer was okay seeing me commuting 3 hours daily and paying it out of my pocket.

Honestly, I didn't mind the commute (first class train, direct line, time deductible if I work in the train, office 2 mins away from train station) but the topic of long commutes and their health impact started becoming regularly covered in the news. I began to realize I was being mistreated/disrespected. I shared my feelings with my manager and HR and they didn't offer me any support.

Along with the invisible career path, that was enough reason to quit.

I found a job a few days after quitting. Got a 10% pay raise + unlimited travel pass for the entire country + WFH/flex.

I miss my colleagues though :)

Out of interest, what country are you in?

I’m in the uk and haven’t heard of all travel being paid for, not even commuting.

I'm not but almost did for a while. It wasn't that the return was the issue, more like a catalyst - I prefer office working (my commute is a 5 - 15 minute walk) but one of my work colleagues is an absolute predator and a few are vocal anti-vax. It's difficult to deal with face to face. We were always flexi/remote work if we wanted but the anti-vax lot have been campaigning against that too. The underlying cultural issues aren't going to change so I'm going to hold off and quit in 12 months so I can get my personal life together

The company I work for has simply given the possibility to amend the employment contract and let people switch to full remote.

Many colleagues didn't quit because of this.

I'm on a "wait and see"... if they force me to go back to fully onsite, I'm quitting.

If they make it flexible / hybrid, I'll stay for a bit more.

I was already on the fence due to the lack of career growth, it would be the final shove. OTOH I was looking forward to some low-stress time as I'm getting married and was going to use a lot of time off, I'm not looking forward to switching jobs just yet.

I’m ready to quit if I am told I have to go back to the office even if it is 1 day a week or something.

I’ve lined up a new role through Toptal and can make that more full time and drop my other one if I get any push.

So far I haven’t been pushed to go back but there have been a few times where “everyone is going into the office” and I just don’t want to - more importantly I don’t need to.

In my case, I would gladly WFH 100% as it gives me more free time and also it gives me responsibility on how to manage my own work without having judging eyes all the time over me, also it gives me freedom on how to arrange my workspace.

BUT, company culture must be results oriented because otherwise stress could burn you out!

Talked to a recruiter who said that companies were reversing the return-to-office directive in some European countries as employees were refusing, concerned about Corona obviously, and travelling on public transport.

Petitioned & got remote work for all

I know for my part I wouldn't mind a position that is hybrid or requires an office as long as it is local, as I don't like working remotely at least all of the time.

My problem is the companies that are requiring both in-office and proof of vaccination, like I think Google is doing. That, would having me quitting.

In office and proof of vaccination is exactly what I will be looking for when I look for my next job. I also don't like working remotely, so in-office is a requirement, and proof of vaccination is nice insurance against the company switching back to remote in the future due to an outbreak.

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