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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

I'd say it also depends a lot on location and its prevalent culture.

Over here in France, most French companies (as opposed to US companies operating here) have to be dragged kicking and screaming into WfH arrangements.

Ever since the pandemic started picking back up steam this autumn, the government was "encouraging" companies to allow people to work from home, but there were no firm directives.

Most companies figured having their employees pile up in the metro (yay covid!) and congest the highways (yay pollution!) wasn't that big of an issue.

They also asked companies to try to stagger arrival / departure times to reduce the number of people in the metro. Didn't work any better.

In my opinion, if OP is living in France (or willing to relocate here), it should be extremely easy to find in-office jobs.

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I was working in France at the start of the pandemic, only managers had access to the corporate VPN. When we were forced to WFH in the first lockdown we had to email our manager (who had VPN access) each time we wanted to access or save a file and send it as an attachment. This worked about as well you as would expect, and they were in the process of trying to drag everyone back into the office as an essential worker when I left.

Looks like a company with poor tech culture, I am not sure it is specific to France and could be seen in any other places.

True, but in my experience many French companies were perhaps old-fashioned and extremely hierarchical, which doesn't really mix well with WFH.

Yeah but then you have to work with French people, which is a tradeoff I wouldnt do anymore, as a French myself :p

I was finding it quite ok to work with French,some were even fanatic about their work. What I liked most about them was that none of them drank cool-aid and could easily spot corporate BS.

> What I liked most about them was that none of them drank cool-aid and could easily spot corporate BS.

This may be true, but the issue I usually have is that they seem to not do anything about it. Not "rocking the boat" and "yessir" are quite common approaches here, to the point that a lot of people are under very high amounts of stress.

Disclaimer: I've never worked outside of France, so I don't know how people here actually compare to other places.

Why is that ?

I can confirm this testimony. Managers and directors are doing everything they can to keep people in the building, despite more than 10% of employees testing positive for covid last week.

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