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Comment by davidajackson | Hacker News Reader

It's baffling that companies spend so much money on offices for tech workers. It makes no sense to me. It wastes money and it's pointless with tools like slack, miro, loom etc.

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I work for a software company who bought a giant new building a couple of years before the pandemic hit. They waited until the last possible minute to let us WFH once the pandemic hit, and then as soon as it got better they instituted a “hybrid” WFH policy - in office 3 days, WFH 2 days.

I don’t understand why. The 2 years we worked from home were the most profitable despite a worldwide pandemic going on, and I felt most productive WFH. We have been seeing a lot of turnover since this policy has gone into effect (last 2 months), more so than in previous years.

It sucks.

Y’all need to unionize and negotiate for remote work as a mandated benefit if you don’t want to leave but want to keep working remote. Otherwise, they'll keep treating you like peasants demanding whatever they can get away with within the bounds of or on the edge of labor law.

This past year or two would have been prime time to do that while labor power was at an apex, but once the recession hits that opportunity will be long gone. When the trend flips back to employer power dominant then WFH will no longer be as prevalent as it has been. Not to mention the chipping away at untold amounts of perks and benefits that tech workers, primarily Silicon Valley ones, have taken for granted for the past decade. This was a lost opportunity, a real "the ants and the grasshopper" situation.

"Treating you like peasants demanding whatever they can get away with" is exactly how I feel about having to spend 4-7 hours every day on Zoom. Collaborations involving remote participants are excruciating and move very slowly. The workload hasn't decreased to compensate. We've just privatized onto everyone the costs of remoteness, in the form of longer hours and Zoom fatigue. Any union contract I'm going to accept needs to protect me from that.

This job used to be about solving hard problems with brilliant people, now it's about barking dogs and echo cancelation artifacts.

What do you do that requires 4-7 hours a day on zoom? I’m a project manager with multiple projects and generally keep it to no more than 4 hours total per day. Unless your job is all about talking to people, then someone has made a big mistake.

As a senior engineer pushing staff, my job is partly to code and also partly to mind the architecture, practices, and quality of the several teams I have a hand in. To be a resource for problem solving, voice of reason in org level design and postmortem reviews, represent the org’s needs in company-wide projects, etc. My job’s not all about that, but it takes up a lot more of my time with the demise of the hallway conversation and the fog of Zoom making meetings a lot less information-dense.

I think there’s a large moralistic component to it. There are people who see remote work as a moral failing, and if you don’t work in person then there’s something wrong with you.

I can see this as the main reason why. Top level executives didn’t even have a standard work from home exception for bad weather (I’m in New England) and we had to work individually with our direct manager to get WFH approved when it was blizzard conditions. Luckily my manager isn’t a douche.

For a tech company, they are very slow to adopt modern convenience benefits for their employees outside of “free drinks and cafeteria food.”

The reason why they do this is because people continue to accept it and work for them.

As in, they are your employer and not ex-employer.

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