64% of workers to consider quitting if asked to return to the office full-time | Hacker News Reader

64% of workers to consider quitting if asked to return to the office full-time

cnbc.com

75 pointspaulpauper20 comments

I have an extremely hard time understanding how these surveys work, and what question people think they are answering. The headline number here doesn't seem unreasonable at first glance, but what does it actually mean?

From the article: "About 71% of 18-to 24-year-olds said that they would consider looking for another job if their company insisted on them returning to the office full-time, compared to 61% of 35- to 44-year-olds and 56% of 45- to 54-year-olds, the report found."

What was the actual question asked, though? Was it "Would you consider looking for another job if your company insisted on you returning to the office full-time?", word for word?

How can any reasonable person answer "no" to a question in the form "Would you consider looking for another job if <condition>?" Given that so many people look for other jobs in any given period (say a decade), one has to assume that even more people (nearly all?) consider looking for another job in the same period. So without period restrictions in the question, why does <condition> matter to the answerer's answer? "Would you consider looking for another job? Yes, just like I would consider staying, consider what I'm having for dinner, etc."

I know this seems nitpicky, especially in the context of a survey that doesn't /seem/ to say anything surprising, but I really don't understand if I'm just overthinking things, if the questions that are being asked in these surveys but not disclosed are actually much better phrased than it appears, or if people are often answering a very different question than what the survey thinks it's asking.

Yeah my take is this is pretty meaningless - I "consider" quitting my job at least once a month and I have complete flexibility with remote work.

Anecdotally up until recently we had a "hybrid" location requirement on our positions and consistently lost candidates to other companies offering remote.

"Are you willing to move?" "yes."

"Do you have a strong preference to not move?" "also yes."

You can ask the questions based on the answers you want, right?

Probably 64% of workers "consider" quitting every week.

I think we need to collectively remove credibility from survey based results.

It's funny that persistently reporting surveys in the news was originally conceived as a marketing tactic to articulate to people what they think, yet even now it's popular to take it seriously.

Or they could report data on how the survey was conducted.

I spent over 10 years at Amazon and considered quitting after my first three days. I continued to consider quitting every year for over 10 years.

My point is / “considering quitting” is absolutely meaningless. It’s a clickbait story.

98% of workers consider quitting all the time.

The other 2% just quit.

Hear hear

I would have no choice, personally. My company operates in different provinces than I live in so it would be uprooting my life to live in a different city. That's non-negotiable to me.

This is a startling reversal from the pre-pandemic days, when workers would pack up and move wherever the higher-paid spouse’s company said they had to. It’s amazing, and I believe we must fight for this. It’s a more humane way to do business.

The efficiency I gain from working out of a home office would be very hard to give up.

I calculated an extra 90 minutes per day that’s required to work in an office. Once in an office there are a number of distractions that prevent deep work. Tasks are perfectly doable so long as they don’t require much focus or creativity.

I find that for creative or problem-solving type activities two things are pretty crucial:

1. You need to be able to get up out of your chair and go do something else for a bit with zero friction.

2. You need to be able to start early or work late when you are in a good flow state with zero friction.

Working in an office destroys both of these almost completely because of the subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to do all your work in one contiguous 8-hour stretch each day where any time spent out of your seat is not considered work, even though many thorny problems have been solved during a walk or a workout, etc.

What makes sense when 20% of employees are more productive at home and 80% are less?

Would like office away from home, but don't want commute or open floor plan.

If only my job asked me to return to the office full-time, I would probably quit. But if all jobs did the same thing simultaneously, I would probably stay.

So, we'll see whether the job market works more like a perfect competition, or more like a cartel.

This convinces me the corporate media is genuinely stupid.

The threshold for publication needs to be higher than stating obvious sentiments felt cross all cultures and throughout history. Despite all that, the editor(s) let this story get published. And they wonder why their business is dying.

99% of workers would probably consider quitting their jobs if they were given $100 million.

No, 100% of workers would consider it. 99% of them would quit.

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