So... those of you working at companies demadning a return-to-office... are you going to quit?
Think really hard about switching jobs now. If you do, have liquid reserves to fall back on(cash or cash equivalents, T-Bills, not stocks), and pick a company with good cash flow.
I understand folks who have ridden out the last two recessions and will tell you you'll be fine, and you probably will be, but don't be hasty right now. A lot of big companies are going to be under growth pressures in the next few quarters and one easy way to cut expenses is to fire people.
If you quit you don't get EI, you don't get any kind of payoff from the company, and it looks worse than "I was let go due to company downsizing" when interviewing.
I knew a guy at Apple that was given 60 days to find a new job or move to LA or be terminated. He found a job in another team just as his 60 days was running out.
It's good in theory, but in practice you can't count on that money, and you must find another job ASAP to feed your family.
I found a better job and I will quit because it's way faster for me to get out of my current company's mess.
You (nor anyone else) can forecast neither recessions nor 'stock bubbles'.
Otherwise they'd have already made a fortune in the financial markets.
Of course, a recession is always possible.
Recessions just aren’t well defined, and you’re not going to know for sure if you’re in one/were in one until months or even years after it started because you need to collect a whole lot of data on the economy. But you do start getting early signs. It doesn’t have to come all at once in a huge market crash. That is actually pretty rare. It’s totally possible for an economy to slowly wither and then falter.
Both China and Europe are in trouble. Europe’s energy shock could be painful, but it has the potential to be short lived. China’s property market looks like a real mess, and could have huge political consequences that extend beyond its borders.
You seem to suggest that financial markets are decoupled from the economy?
To be precise: my thesis is that you can not forecast recessions better than the market consensus. And not just in stocks:
For example, If you can forecast that industrial activity will be slowing, you can make a lot of money in commodities futures markets.
If you can forecast an increase in defaults, you can make a lot of money trading credit-default-swaps.
Slightly less finance-y: if it was easy to forecast recessions, wouldn't you expect to see that reflected in business inventories?
In general, if forecasting a recession was easy enough that you and me can do it, you'd expect businesses in general to anticipate the coming recession, and that anticipation would look exactly like a recession. Thus making the forecast a now-cast.
Anecdotally Ive continued to receive a similar amount of recruiter emails as I did before the market downturn a few months ago. So my current thinking is that tech layoffs are companies force purging to please the Wall Street gods while demand continues to stay stratospherically high for technology.
In my current job, I have that flexibility and that is worth at least a couple of 10 thousand euros per year to me (well if the inflation can't be controlled for some more time then maybe not).
Living your life in a 12ft radius of your bed ain't great lol.
With respect, the question was what about I am going to do.
If they start to insist I move to one of the cities they have an office in, I will refuse and they can terminate me if they want.
I'm not doing it.
If they open an office in town, I'll consider going in once a month or so
Commuting sucks, paying for parking sucks, shared kitchens suck, open floor plans suck, office politics suck, being at the whim of people "just dropping by your desk to ask a quick question" sucks. Getting sick all the time when people don't stay home and they spread it around the office sucks. No seriously, I haven't had a cold or flu since the pandemic started, I love not getting sick every flu season.
What is good about offices? Why do you like them?
I can understand the not getting sick part, but I guess I never really suffered from colds that often. (Though I know some people who get them four times a year -- if this is you, I sympathize)
I know this website has a selection bias for introverts but surely I cannot be the only human who feels this way. The worst part is that anyone who wants WFH can have it, but I cannot have what I need. I pay for a WeWork just to get me out of the house, but that's basically nothing more than an expensive home office. My job is still 100% slack and zoom with everyone else in their bedrooms. WFH makes me depressed.
As people are discussing if they should quit over having to come to the office, you can also think about quitting because you don't have an office to go to?
There are many companies which have offices you and people with similar preferences as yours can go to. Do you mean you want your colleagues also having to come to the office even if they don't want to?
I don't want to "force" you to do anything. I would like to find a workplace where I can thrive.
Some employers are mandating back to office, so this option is being taken away. Those that prefer to WFH are not able to have what they need/want.
I'm always curious why those who like to work in the office are opposed to letting employees choose what they wish to do.
>>My job is still 100% slack and zoom with everyone else in their bedrooms. WFH makes me depressed.
I feel that most WFH proponents are in the minority, or on the spectrum of wanting to have the option to go in sometimes. So hopefully you won't be 100% on Slack/Zoom if employees are given the choice.
I think it's because they know that a lot of their coworkers will choose not to come into the office anymore, so the office will feel empty and that will make them feel lonely and sad.
That was probably true during the pandemic, but anecdotal conversations I've had with non-tech colleagues and friends surprised me by echoing what many in this thread are saying: that they'd like the option to go into the office on certain days, but not necessarily 100% either way.
It feels like the true minorities are those that that are 100% in either direction, except that there seems to be a higher percentage of leadership teams in the 100% minority.
This really makes it sound like you think other people should be forced back to offices so that you can get what you "need"
Office work shouldn't be your substitute for a social life.
Someone who prefers WFH can do this.
The last two years of the pandemic is a huge outlier where remote work has been the norm. Most workplaces before the pandemic were full time in-office and it seems there's a huge push starting to get everyone back in offices across a lot of industries now.
Many companies might wind up settling on a hybrid approach, but I can almost guarantee you that will lean more towards office than remote.
I'm sorry that the forced remote has been hard for you, but get over it. Society is still built by extroverts for extroverts. You will be able to get those jobs a lot more easily going forward than I will be able to find fully remote jobs, I guarantee it.
You can not seriously suggest that people who can do (and have done the last 2 years) their job remotely and want to keep doing that, come to the office to satisfy these... desires?
Why not get a job that gives that to you, naturally like a sales person or bartender or something.
Which implies you want "me" back in the office to satisfy your social desires and NOT because of improved productivity.
You can have what you need, just not with me / your colleagues. But you seem not to want an alternative solution.
Be better.
Luckily I live 15 minutes door-to-door on the bus away so I’ve been going in for not even a full day once per week. I do now think it’s nice to see people, but really that’s all I’m going in for, I find I am far more comfortable and therefore work better at home.
Don’t see myself ever working in an office again, and I look back on the days where I would actually take two flights a week to go and work in other people’s offices with amazement that I actually put up with it
For working my home office is far superior.. less disruptions, better ergonomics, no commute. The only thing that I think is really better in person are whiteboard sessions. Sure you can do it online via whatever collaborative tool but it is not the same.
If anything, being back in the office would be welcome for me. Sure, commute is a bit inefficient, but a lot of time is wasted when no one goes to the office ever.
Three times a week seems like a good balance to me.
I will quit in a few days due to a combination of various factors. I found out, way too late in my professional life, that I was exploited by all the companies I worked for. My salary being too low, and the ridiculous number of days working from home are important factors but it's not limited to this.
An old friend called me recently and offered me a job at his company. I thought about it for a few days, talked to my wife about it, and accepted an interview. That's where I discovered that I was being "exploited."
I will have interesting tasks, I'll work on modern C++ again which is good since I have been lazy about it and didn't improve for those past few years, I will have up to 4 days of WFH per week if I want, and I managed to get a 40% salary increase (yes, 40%).
My current employer refused all my demands: salary, WFH, support from the managers, budget, ... I will get most of that elsewhere. I will miss my colleagues who are very competent, but I will NOT miss the management and the crazy answers from the HR department. They will freak out though when I send my resignation letter as I became a central point across all the teams, but it's their loss.
End of the rant!
I'm in a fairly odd situation, however. Prior to lockdown I was already WFH. Oddities are coming...
After the lockdown started we went through at least two leadership changes. Now I'll [eventually] have to self report by 'filing a request' to make the WFH status official.
It doesn't sound like it's something likely to be denied, but rather something I'll regret later.
I'm now having to basically have this same negotiation again six years later.
If I have to do that, I may as well do it for more money. I don't recognize my role [or team] anyway after going through the tumbler
All jobs I apply from now on should be remote with a local option. Some things are just easier to do in-person, but mandating 3 days in the office per week is just overkill. Let the team decide what's best for them.
And if you have some bigger all-hands events, warn a few weeks beforehand so people can make accommodations.
Just do something else instead. Have an internal podcast that I can listen to async while I mow my lawn or clean my house. There’s no need to tie up your entire workforce for a live stream. Deal with Q&A (which is usually terrible anyway) by having a Q&A episode where you answer the top 10 upvoted questions.
I much prefer the lifestyle out here to living in cities, so as long as a large number of companies are sticking with remote work, I should be good. Companies like Apple that invested in massive new campuses in recent years understandably have an incentive to get people in them.
I don't understand it. It's a sunk cost, getting people there will just increase the costs and make many unhappy.
Now I'm _really_ glad I didn't take it.
As with most situations of this nature, it's infinitely easier to make this decision if you already have a decently competitive job offer in-hand.
However I’m moving to the Bay Area to fulfill my dream of living (hopefully someday in the future thrive lol) in the tech hotbed
(I typically don't officially track work hours anyway (only informally for myself to keep track of my work/life balance), and just worry that I get my week's worth of work done. So I wouldn't even know how to do any extracurricular activity 'on company time'.)