Most people where I work are not going in to the office every day, but it cannot be inferred that it is because they don’t want to.
The thought of permanent WFH, with your job occupying a corner of your 600 sq ft apartment in perpetuity, is demoralising. Just having the option of a change of scenery, even if one doesn’t make use of it every day or even once in a given week, makes a huge difference.
In my opinion the pushing of permanent WFH by a certain privileged set is an obnoxious display of housing privilege. Of course that group has a big house in the countryside among the birds and the trees, where they don’t have to deal with neighbours, traffic noise, or other distractions. But that doesn’t entitle them to make those decisions or project their opinions onto the rest of us.
There is some confusion between covid lockdown vs WFH. I live in a recreational state with great phone coverage and wifi everywhere, I must spend at least half my time at some comfy park or a table outdoors at a coffee shop or something similar. Certainly I spend a lot of working hours in my nice back yard.
The impression I've gotten is people are not getting locked down and chained to a desk for WFH, just get the work done, doesn't matter if I'm reading engineering datasheets at the local bar (before drinking...) or the tables at the local park, etc.
This, to me, is the crux of the matter. I can accept that there are days when I'm needed in the office, but for the vast majority of days when I'm not, having the ability to decide has incredible benefits for me, and the company doesn't miss out on anything.
WFH reality means that the most pleasant part of my day is destroyed. It takes all the joy of living in the city away.
Then don't wfh if your company gives you the option to do one or the other.
Companies that today mandate one mode or the other (or some odd combination) are losing the potential value the ill-affected team can bring to the table.
WFH for those who'd like to, WFO for those who don't.
People working from the office saying "well I can't be as effective if so few people are coming into the office" are basically saying that their productivity needs outweigh the productivity needs of others.
The WFH pushers like to set up a “why spend 1-2 hours on commute when you could use that time on other things” straw-man. Some of us enjoyed our 20-30 minute commute as a separation between work and the rest of our lives.
It is not nice to come home from that coffee shop and see your workplace, waiting for you, across the room when you walk in your front door.
Dunno, I just close my work laptop when I'm done working and ignore it for the rest of my day just fine. I understand that non-insignificant amount of people have some weird psychological issue with that, but I don't agree that we should force everyone back to the office because of that.
like sleep
I have an hour commute each way if I want to go in and a dedicated 12x12 office bathed in natural light. There's no possible way a company office could come close to the productivity and comfort I have here, even on video calls.
Another chunk of the population lives in apartments not much bigger than my personal office and have a 10 minute walking commute into an office. If I were in that situation I'd maybe enjoy going into an office to do work more (but I probably would never choose to put myself into that specific living scenario).
There is likely everything in between those extremes. You also need to question intro/extro personalities, how much and what type of collaboration is part of the job, etc.
We used to live in a world where there was only one option: come into the office where the paper work lived. Now we have a choice. Let's take maximum advantage of that.
To flip your argument, why does your decision to live in a crowded, noisy, high rent (= small living space) city entitle you to make those decisions or project your opinions onto the rest of us?
Mine: parents with kids. Not one wants to return to wasting hours on commute, which is particularly egregious at Apple because many are not allowed to work on the bus because of the culture of paranoia and disclosure.
I don't want to go back to the office not because I want to WFH. It's because COVID is still a big threat. I'd go back to work in the office in a heartbeat if there isn't a pandemic around. The office is cool, and the in person interaction is great, despite me being an introvert.
Unless we have data on how many people choose to work remotely due to COVID, I would not hastily attribute those people to the camp of "only want to work remotely".
Last I checked, that's not really true for any of those companies. Where did you pick up the "almost nobody" part?
The hq houses about 7000 has at attendance of about <3% in another state.
> almost nobody wants to go back to office, at least not on a daily basis
Where's the evidence people DO want to go back to the office?
A two hour daily commute is like adding an additional day to your work week.
If I go play ping pong for an hour, do I now owe that hour to the company later? If I'm working past 5, will I be inclined to keep working because I can just go grab a free bite to eat later?
My current employer offers a few perks. We have pool tables, video games, etc. But you'll pretty much never find people using them because they're busy working. Seems like mostly a recruiting tool and little more. That's why I'm perfectly fine staying home and not utilizing the cool office space. I didn't use that stuff anyway.
> The campus felt designed to suck more work hours out of you.
Another way to describe it is that the campus is designed to suck more employees away from the competition. If you assume the existence of an employee as a given, then the only reason for a perk must be to extract more labor from that employee.
But that's not how Google is looking at it. They're trying to convince good employees to work for them instead of other tech companies. Those perks exist to keep the grass greener on Google's side of the fence instead of Facebook/Apple/Amazon/etc.
This provides an entirely rational/economic answer for nice perks without needing overtime to justify them. (There are, of course, also plenty of non-financial justifications for the perks.)
In the Google offices I've worked in, they tend to be almost completely empty by 6:00.
> If I go play ping pong for an hour, do I now owe that hour to the company later?
My experience is that different employees have different feelings about that. Some do, some don't. Personally, I don't feel I owe the company another 30 minutes if I go outside for a walk because the walk tends to reinvigorate me and increase my productivity. But I would probably feel weird if I was playing a game for a significant period of time more than once a week or so.
> If I'm working past 5, will I be inclined to keep working because I can just go grab a free bite to eat later?
Some do, but dinner is extremely low-key compared to lunch. On the rare times I've been around at dinner time, the cafes are mostly empty with just a few partaking.
There are so many stories out there of people getting a "side gig" while working remote. The "working at two companies at once" is a real concern for tech companies - where IP assignment can create legal nightmares.
One of the simplest ways to prevent this is to make it not feasible for a 2nd job to be held. If you're in the office for 8h for 3 days a week, it is not practical to be able to hold a second job at the same time.
For companies with larger or more secretive initiatives and products these ideas are likely more reasonable.
The tech companies know that they've got people who are "coasters" who are doing the minimum and collecting a pay check - they don't want to continue to enable to them to have multiple jobs that they're coasting in.
Sounds like the job simply isn't attractive enough. Why would I waste time as a second job when helping my employer will result in a stock price increase that I'll make capital gain on?
The "free services" are designed to keep you at your desk working longer. You don't need to rush out and waste part of the day if you have an intense craving for a certain type of food or need to get a haircut or do laundry.
And a lot of great developers are young, fresh out of university, and the only thing they know in life is either having parents or a campus provide everything they need in life and living a semi-managed existence. Offering everything to developers is just a natural extension of that lifestyle.
But I'd respect a company far more that just paid you over the market rate, didn't shell out as a company for extra services, and let you use your own money to decide what services you needed to manage your own life.
As far as the office toys go (video games, pool tables, etc) there are very few times I've seen them used in any office outside of a planned holiday or office party. That said, I like some of that stuff as a decoration even if it's rarely used. It reminds me that there's more to life than just working.
As a programmer, our job is to make decisions all the time - how to design the software. That leads to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ).
One part of that is "if people are making choices that aren't important to work, they're less productive at work."
Here's a decision to make - what do you have for breakfast? Where do you go for lunch? And so on...
Granted, these are trivial decisions to make - but they're decisions none the less.
What if... the company could give you catered breakfasts and lunches? Or even to the point of back in the dot com boom I recall tales of a big tech company that even allowed you to set the billing address for things like rent and the like and it would be a payroll deduction with the company handling it for you.
Those extra services are certainly there to entice and ensnare people who don't make those decisions themselves... but they're also there to try to improve productivity.
Yes! That's the point. If you think there are 10x devs out there and that your company is capable of attracting them, then paying extra to remove friction to get a little bit of extra time out of them is worth more than an ever increasing headcount with regular devs.
> If I go play ping pong for an hour, do I now owe that hour to the company later?
No. Engineering isn't about hours, it's about results. If playing an hour of ping pong means the next 3 hours will be more productive for the players and they will be more creative it's an investment. I've seen tough bugs get solved by engineers going on a walk when they were absolutely stuck.
> My current employer offers a few perks. We have pool tables, video games, etc. But you'll pretty much never find people using them because they're busy working. Seems like mostly a recruiting tool and little more. That's why I'm perfectly fine staying home and not utilizing the cool office space. I didn't use that stuff anyway.
A company won't just become Google by buying beanbag chairs and getting a ping pong table. That's cargo culting [0].