PwC Tells U.S. Employees They Need Never Return to the Office | Hacker News Reader

PwC Tells U.S. Employees They Need Never Return to the Office

reuters.com

115 pointsinfodocket56 comments

Having worked in a consulting firm for years, I spent very little time in the office anyway. Instead I was constantly deployed to client sites. I wonder how this will impact those who are working for clients who have different policies. Will the consultants still be remote, or will they have to adhere to their client's policies, some of whom inevitably will require being in the office. In that case, this isn't as sweet a deal as it may seem.

This was my exact question reading this. I figured as a consultant your either at a client or on a plane.

Presumably the majority of clients are now also work from home.

Nope. But they have become more understanding of those who are so long as performance is improved. Many will still require you onsite, but they don’t care where you fly in from.

I wonder what the percentage of PwC employees is who worked at client sites before the pandemic. I doubt it's the majority.

As a former dev in Risk Assurance: PwC’s offices are terrible and crowded open offices. It’s a godsend for the software people. Also lots of client engagement work happens offsite. Though of course to a large extent PwC’s job is to show up and look pretty.

City?

As a dev in Florida their offices were the nicest offices I had ever been to. Anyone could checkout window seats, standup desks, or regular cubicles.

I also disagree with the show up and look pretty. Real work was getting done the majority of the time everywhere I turned. People would often work hard and leave an hour or two early because they had better time management. I saw significantly more overall productivity than at other big clients in other states.

Tampa, circa 2015-2018, IIRC. I was on the 10th floor at 4040 Boy Scout for a couple months and it was glorious. Then we moved to the 4th floor and it was bad. They intentionally under buy office space there because they already expected the majority of their IT to work remote.

And yeah, PwC also does productive work. I have a friend who works in healthcare who said working with PwC was a nightmare - basically teaching their associates how healthcare worked. The comment about pretty is really about how PwC seems to hire intentionally for visual appeal in their client facing roles. The company is basically selling confidence in their competence, so using the halo effect is a pretty natural strategy. It also lingers for me as being a bit icky.

A lot of consultants I know do not want to work remote because they specifically enjoy the on-the-road lifestyle. My experience with many of my consulting colleagues is that this this type of news is great because they still get to travel to client sites, but also can live (almost) wherever they want on the weekends and not be tied to a specific PwC office location.

Also how will they determine this part: "Location does factor, however, into PwC employees' pay, Seals-Coffield said. Employees who opt to work virtually full-time from a lower-cost location would see their pay decrease, she added."

If you think about this from a game theoretic perspective, it makes business sense to "defect" first (make this offer to employees). If all firms could be trusted to cooperate, they could pressure workers to return and workers wouldn't have any recourse. But because the first firm that defects has its pick of the remote talent litter, the slower you move the worse off you are.

This assumes “more than nominal” employee switching cost, and that’s only sort of true.

I'd actually be curious to see an analysis of this. All of my experience suggests that there is indeed a significant difference in employee quality and a substantial cost imposed by turnover, but I'd love to see some data to the contrary, i.e. that the "employee as interchangeable cog" model is defensible.

I more meant there's no first-mover advantage, because a 'last-loser' can always adopt the better policies and poach new talent under the new regime.

There may be SOME lag, but being a first-mover on return to office will not make or break a company's future.

Not really. Most _good_ companies are really flexible for employees they value a lot in terms of remote work, so this is not an issue. And they will likely have contingency plans to go mostly or fully remote in case they realize they are losing too many people.

> Location does factor, however, into PwC employees' pay, Seals-Coffield said. Employees who opt to work virtually full-time from a lower-cost location would see their pay decrease

I see these types of rules as encouraging people into elaborate lies where people setup fake addresses in the closest high COL city but actually live 200 miles a way. Even if just for taxes, have an address that has no state income tax but you actually spend your time in the next state over that has an income tax.

Ya, will get scrubbed for via device locations though I’m sure.

I’m sure there are plenty of solves for that for those motivated? VPN? Remote desktop?

Can states not subpoena mobile networks for people’s location histories?

Seems kind of stupid to commit tax evasion with no chance of plausible deniability. For the bottom 80% or even 90% of people it seems like the rewards are only a few thousand dollars per year. And the remaining 10% to 20% are easy for authorities to identify.

I’m absolutely sure they could but, being devil’s advocate here, would they? What is going to tip them off? I feel extremely low chances this comes up in an audit

The tax comment was only a secondary point that i agree is quite stupid and obviously illegal. But I never underestimate how much people hate paying taxes and the lengths they go through to avoid them.

A couple years ago, Connecticut got records of all the Newegg purchases in the previous 5 years or something that had shipped to Connecticut, and mailed everyone a bill for use tax they evaded.

https://www.techspot.com/news/73582-newegg-customers-connect...

All I know is if you are trying to evade taxes, you might want to do it with some plausible deniability. When tax receipts come up short, they are going to come after someone, and many things are a few seconds worth of search query away in a database.

All work is tied to a corporate user name and a managed device.

VPN -> why is a private VPN on a work computer, further investigation (assuming you could even download it onto a PwC comp)

etc

I can see a "live in suburbs claim city" for some areas that's a significant cost of living decrease. Another 5 miles away I'm in farm fields and costs drop even further. A simple "i changed internet providers" if probably enough to move 20 miles and dro get the lowest cost for me. It's a very strange arms race

This will probably be done at the metro level rather than the exact city.

Hard in practice. What will you do when a nearby colleague invites you out for a coffee, walk, beer, etc.

this is where being socially awkward helps :)

Maybe hard for some. I dodged most of this preCovid and in office. I have no problem declining invitations though (It’d be a nightmare for my wife lol, to whom I often say invitations are not obligations). Maybe if you have a persistent coworker who just happens to work in your fully remote and fabricated neighborhood, you’ll have to make the trip over a couple times a year to appease them.

You might be deceiving your employer, but you're also committing tax fraud.

States already devote a ton of effort to take income they believe is rightfully "theirs". If you actually work from Oregon but claim to be a California employee, you're going to have to sign tax forms swearing to it. Oregon will no go easy on you if you find out you're actually a tax resident.

It's funny when businesses do it, it's not illegal (why so many incorporate in Delaware).

Or the Double Irish with A Dutch Sandwich[1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...

PwC already had a hoteling system set up because their offices did not have set desks for each employee by design - many staff members spend at least part of the week at client sites, so it doesn't make sense to pay for a seat for each of them to be empty for days at a time.

The real news here would be if they were never required to go into a client office either, which obviously won't happen.

PwC is doing this because it means PwC can staff projects with single teams across wild time zone spreads. Work with Europe in the early AM, work US during the day, APAC at night.

This was experimented on during COVID and I’m sure their billable hours turned out great.

That said, good luck keeping tech talent with this nonsense vs pseudo-investment bankers. PwC is bleeding technical talent for a reason.

People wondering about how much time consultants spent in the office seem to forget that companies like PwC also probably have massive numbers of support staff (accounting, HR, office management,... oops?) that doesn't directly provide any service to the clients.

No?

Yeah 100%. PwD is also a big accounting firm. Most of the accounting side was in-office.

I mean, PwC aren't consultants, they're accountants. They do audits and stuff. They actually got out of consulting entirely when they sold their consulting arm to IBM, but they've rebuilt that somewhat - I believe their consulting org is now called Strategy&, but they're somewhat arms-length (because it doesn't do, post-Enron, to be providing consulting services on how to structure your business to a company whose accounts you're also auditing)

Something like 1/3rd of PWC's revenue comes from consulting (officially their "Advisory" arm). They started rebuilding it almost as soon as they sold it. Strategy& is actually only a small portion of the Advisory org (S& is really just the rebranded acquisition of Booz&Company).

Another 1/3rd comes from the Assurance arm, which is kind of a cross between accountants and consultants. The "Tax" arm are the traditional "accountants", but that's only 1/3rd of the company.

It's worth nothing though that a lot of the Tax and Assurance folks traveled to client sites very frequently, too (not all of them, but a big chunk). Really the main groups that worked in-office were the internal firm services (HR, internal IT, internal finance, etc).

> I believe their consulting org is now called Strategy&

I still can't believe they settled on that name..

When reading that there and not knowing the name, I thought it for truncated somehow by my mobile display.

The name sounds like a parody.

If they're your auditors, they're not just in their office; they're in your office. Auditors can feel like consultants; they show up on your site regularly, they have a conference room that's theirs for the duration of their stay. In the past I've even had them sit behind me and watch me click stuff, although I'm sure a lot of that changed in the last year.

> PwC employees who choose to work virtually would have to come into the office a maximum of three days a month for in-person appointments such as critical team meetings, client visits and learning sessions, Seals-Coffield said.

I worked for a big consulting firm and the only time you were in the office at a hot desk was when you were doing CBTs and billing time to professional development. It was not viewed positively by anyone.

We always called it being on the beach. Indeed, not viewed positively.

I don't get it. Is it very relaxing or something? Are people just dicking off while supposedly working?

You generally aren't doing anything to bring in revenue nor that will advance your career. You might as well be spending that time on the beach. You are deadweight.

> Location does factor, however, into PwC employees' pay, Seals-Coffield said. Employees who opt to work virtually full-time from a lower-cost location would see their pay decrease, she added.

Different pay for the same work.

“Meritocracy” in action.

Since humans had to intuit quantities (food, etc), time (seasons), before formal language in order to survive, I’m pretty convinced logic and reason are our stronger innate abilities. That human romantic languages are a cognitive burden forced on the masses by conquerors of old.

I don’t see it as bad to bin ideas originally conjured by lesser educated dead people.

If the cost of living in different locales can vary, is it that unreasonable to pay the same job function differently?

The same janitorial, wait staff, and gas station attendant work in different locales pays based upon the local prevailing wage. Why not the same for a guy sitting in front of a computer?

Why should a worker accept a smaller cut for a feature the whole team contributed to?

Did they write less code or contribute less bug fixes?

Is the pay based upon output or businesses ability to manufacture consent in workers?

Americans are battered spouses who would be wise to force austerity on CEOs rather than the other way around. Indeed, look at the wins teacher strikes and workers sitting at home right now, have on wages and competition.

They need workers (when humans believed in religion as our social temple they were called “flocks”).

We’re filling in the area of a perimeter originally defined by Bible thumpers and dead men of a classist perspective. Workers build the world.

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed uses a forced importation metaphor, of high minded aristocratic/imperialist expectations on locals. It’s one of my favorites to point folks at.

> Why should a worker accept a smaller cut for a feature the whole team contributed to?

It’s simple. They don’t have to, but then when someone in Bali will do the same work for less, why wouldn’t the company mix shift that way over time?

> Why not the same for a guy sitting in front of a computer?

Because, you’re not competing for the talent pool of Podunk, KY, you’re competing for the entire globally-connected internet-capable talent pool. And if you’re not willing to pay equal talent what they’re worth regardless of their location, someone else is.

Location-based comp is how you tell employees that what they can achieve for your business doesn't matter.

Pay for performance assumes that you can measure performance with high accuracy and that employment status and pay should vary directly with immediate company/industry/market results. Employers mostly bear market and industry risk (and reap the rewards) insulating employees from business decisions, although this is a leaky abstraction (commissions, layoffs, stock comp).

I know if companies think they can do it, they will, but in consulting you’re often billing clients marked up hourly rates, so this makes even less sense. The hourly pay for a consultant is less a business constraint than it is for typical employees.

I wonder how soon PwC will start dumping office space. That will really show their commitment to the work-from-home model.

I’m pretty sure having a Manhattan headquarters for many businesses is a form of prestige/credibility. It’ll be there, but would not be shocked if Manhattan becomes just a place where tourists go if this keeps up.

Agreed, they'll keep that crown jewel. But they also have thousand of sqft in many cities all over America.

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/about/office-locations/usa-by-city...

I'm sure they'd be happy to get rid of some of that real estate.

This is a non-story. I don't know anyone in consulting or auditing who ever worked from their own office. In fact if you did it too much you would get dinged, because it meant you weren't billing clients. This will affect administrative positions (HR, billing, office management) but that's it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com