Snap is ordering employees back to the office 4 days a week | Hacker News Reader

Snap is ordering employees back to the office 4 days a week

fortune.com

33 pointswootland39 comments

I've been wanting to go back to the office, at least part of the week, as I feel pretty isolated and detached from my team and miss some of the traditional office amenities like coffee and nearby restaurants. But every time I tell myself I'm gonna go to the office I never follow through. By the time I drop my kids off at school I'm just like "ahh f it, don't feel like commuting 30-40 min" and I end up working from home. Ultimately the conveniences of wfh for someone with family responsibilities are tough to shake now that I've gotten into this habit

Remote is only going to be the new normal for a few companies in the end based on these trends. Mostly in office is on the way back and it’s no longer a seller’s market so companies have more power to make these demands. Especially for smaller companies, I think in person has a lot of value to move fast and build a deeply connected culture that I have not seen remotely or even hybrid if hybrid is only a day or two a week.

Going to need some stats on that. Every gig I applied to in the last two job searches was fully remote. The gig I landed on this last month is fully remote. It is still easy to ignore the low paying, contract, in office nonsense from employers who think they have the upper hand right now.

All the big tech are heading this way. I don’t have stats on small companies, but I would bet on the in office startups any day over the remote ones in 99% of the cases. https://twitter.com/sama/status/1590832457431281668

Then you don't really understand startups at all.

I guess you can say that, I'm early in my startup journey, but do you think Sam Altman doesn't understand startups or have a pulse on what's happening there, because that is quite the claim?

He has an opinion not a factual claim

>" He has an opinion not a factual claim "

Is "He" Sam Altman, or is "he" ReflectedImage"?

Right? The whole point of a startup is to be doing something different than what “big tech” is doing. If it’s more of the same with the added risk of failing in a year then no one would ever want to join a given startup.

If people penciled it out logically it makes no sense for a startup to return to office. Consider these two startups:

Startup A, paying for an office lease, recruiting talent willing to live near the office.

Startup B, saving thousands of dollars not having to pay an office lease, is able to recruit talent from around the world and with the overhead savings can pay for better talent and/or a larger labor pool.

It's pretty obvious here that startup B is set up a lot better for success and has a head and shoulders advantage over startup A. This is not even considering the massive environmental costs from commuting and building an office building. The only reason to go for a model like startup A is if you 1, don't care about the environmental costs, and 2, believe in the hooey about "in person synergy" and value that more than just paying for more experience or more people.

The only thing that matters is shipping (the right thing) when you’re a startup, not environmental costs or saving on an office lease. My opinion is you’ll ship faster due to better/stronger team culture and better communication if you’re in person and that’s all that will matter for success. When you've build a succesful business then you can worry about the other things that don't change your survival materially.

I have never seen the whole “more productive culture “ thing pan out ever.

Is the dude chewing gum next to you all day, the sales person always on the phone, or the coworker who hasn’t showered in 3 days to “ship faster” as part of your ideal team of 10x-ers defined in your definition of “better culture?”

I feel like affording more staff probably ships even faster

Yep just like 9 women can have a baby in 1 month.

Startups whole mission is to grow enough to become the new Big Tech, at least in the US ecosystem in general.

For senior specialist tech roles, I think remote is here to stay. There simply aren't enough qualified people for e.g. a whole team of smart TV developers or even really good WordPress developers in any one mid-size city.

The premise is that, these specialists will have to move to the few cities where jobs requiring given rare specialty are concentrated. That’s how it works in the non-tech job world already.

I don’t know if I agree fully…

I do think that “remote work” is the new “satellite office”. If you’re a walk street bank, why open a NJ office for low-importance work when you could just hire remotely.

But I’m not convinced there is a willingness to return to office. Snap, the company in question, isn’t in good shape. Can they attract enough talent willing to be in office?

I vaguely agree that “for smaller companies, I think in person has a lot of value to move fast and build a deeply connected culture”. But the issue seems to be with getting any big corp back.

If you pay enough, people will move to you. We’ve seen that across all of human history. But can you pay more than remote companies? Do you gain enough productivity to offset the cost (either salary or missed talent)? If you hire a mixed team, you hired a remote team.

What a great loss to the environment then forcing all of this commuting and useless office building construction and maintenance. I will never forget how crystal clear the air was during lockdown, and how these supposed 'thought leaders' have forced us away from that.

it was a great loss to a lot of things. people's personal mental heath, family time, ability to move to areas with affordable housing, a dissemination of people & money to states that need diversity, overall its a big loss

I dunno why anybody thought otherwise. This whole Covid thing was a temporary measure. Society will revert right back to the mean… even if some people go kicking and screaming back.

> it’s no longer a seller’s market

US unemployment is at historical lows, some people really lose sight of the bigger picture and get caught up in news headlines.

In my country everywhere is clamouring for workers.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

I think quite the opposite.

Over time the companies that force in-person work will find it much more difficult to hire and retain talent vs those that optimize for a remote first workforce.

I mean the efficiency gain in broadening hiring pool, not having to do relo packages, smaller office footprint, cost of commuting, lower comp/higher QoL are just far too great.

Nobody wants to be trapped in the bay area and forced to pay $2m for a house an hour away from their office. They largely did it begrudgingly (myself included)

It's the new way to do layoffs

My thoughts exactly.

I wonder if that says more about the companies or the employees.

The better way. Get people who want to work in the office together and get people who want to work from home away from the office.

Sort of.

If remote is efficient, they'll outsource the position to a low-income country.

If remote is not efficient, they'll urge people to go back to office and whoever fails to comply will be let go.

I don't think it's that straightforward. Remote US employees are not (in any scenario I've witnessed or been part of) equivalent to Remote Low-income Country employees. A person who previously worked in Snap's LA office who relocated to, say Scottsdale, is likely still going to be a much more valuable employee than an offshore person.

Depends on what you mean by 'Remote Low-Income Country'. I work for a US company that opened an office in my country, pretty much only because it is much cheaper than the US. We are in the EU and our culture is pretty similar to the US (we grew up watching US TV shows in the original language), and everyone here has good written and spoken English (I say that as a native English speaker).

Timezones and language barriers eat into the profits fast.

What’s with the idea though that 300 million people can just be ignored? Me thinks you’ve let yourself get lost in the economic philosophy and detached from reality.

There is no just shutting down the US economy because economists can’t make fiat currency math work. Such ideas are ludicrous.

Ludicrous? So how come has the US and Europe relocated a large fraction of their manufacturing industry into low-income countries? Are these companies raking in billions in profit ludicrous?

It takes some effort to understand another culture, and I think it's definitely easier in the US since they have so many people coming in there from so many parts of the world; and also because cultural differences can be overcome, and it's profitable over the long-term, given the wage gap lasts long enough. Language barriers doesn't matter if the whole team speaks the same language and the manager is bilingual.

If that was not the case, why would big tech companies have engineering teams in Europe and all over the world?

What’s ludicrous is the idea they can close up shop altogether in the US and 300 million plus will just sit on their hands and do nothing.

Twice as many guns as people over here. The public will make a new economy without them. Real people don’t just vanish because aristocrats find their demands inconvenient.

Let them eat lead will quickly follow any contemporary version of “let them eat cake.”

Physical reality does not bend to our philosophy. Philosophy always bends to reality.

I know people prefer to forget reality because ew it’s dirty, but reality doesn’t bend to ape hallucinations.

Snap is trying to generate headlines in a desperate attempt to stay relevant.

This has nothing to do with WFH. Just a sorry attempt at trying to piggyback on Musk's just as desperate attempt to get attention with his 996 proclamation.

Snap is struggling they are under $10 now. Ending WFH wouldn't be the right move to recruit talent.

mission creep always the risk with hybrid. Best workers can hope for (outside of the US) is a compromise to a 4 day week on 5 day pay. Looks like a decent number of UK companies will end up doing this

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33781563

Farm the cattle back to the stables.

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