There aren't enough remote jobs to go around
chartr.co
chartr.co
Of course employers want people to come back. They have millions if not billions of dollars in real estate liabilities that are effectively useless. As an aside, I wonder if there is some clever way to get a tax write off for office space that went unused due to a global pandemic - or writing off an office entirely as a loss.
If employers able to get productive work out of employees who aren't using that real estate, the real problem is getting the real estate costs off their books, not getting the butts back in seats in some arbitrary office location.
This is a problem for landlords, not employers.
The UK has a law where workers have the right to request flexible work arrangements, for example: https://www.gov.uk/flexible-working
My current company hasn't made such a demand, but I've also heard that in others in this country about 20% of people actually prefer to work in person daily, everyone else seems to work remotely a lot of the time.
Now, I'm probably under a certain sampling bias here, but the few times I recently went into the office, it seemed comparatively empty, unless a team had decided to meet up in person for whatever reason.
I guess not everyone enjoys the commute, especially in pretty cold weather (or just thrives while working remotely for a plethora of reasons).
That 20% probably also expects/demands everyone else show up, because they prefer everyone else to be there, too! :)
This hasn't been my experience exactly, though I've also participated in the occasional get-together at the office when the team collectively decided to work together in person.
As for the motivations of those who prefer to be at the office, some might have living conditions where the office environment is a more pleasant for work (especially given some family situations), others like to have clear boundaries between a work place and a rest place... whatever those motivations might be, I don't judge.
Though I can see how it would be annoying if someone demanded that everyone fit their preferred way of work. I once talked to someone who was dead set on only doing synchronous communication and rejected the idea of someone being able to respond to their question an hour later or so as acceptable - something like that would definitely cause problems, though that's just a particular mindset to look out for.
The rest of us judge. That's part of being human and trying to understand situations. (Judge strongly but lightly?)
I only mention this because that comment seemed a bit like shaming for using judgement.
I’m a part of the 20% who enjoys going into the office a few times a week. There are three other folks who show up regularly; the rest rarely — if ever — make an appearance. I’m fine with this arrangement and I don’t see a need to force everyone else back in.
With the the exception of misguided upper management, I suspect most people take a more nuanced view of remote work.
I suspect many have preferences but not strong enough ones to take imminent action.
My guess was that a lot of the management demanding people to return to the office, are the kinda people that want to be around a lot of people, so they ask everyone to come back so they feel better. That's all.
I don't know where I fit in all this. I went full remote and at my company they don't allow everyone to do that - it's more of an "ask your boss and maybe they'll let you" kinda thing lol.
I'm not even an introvert. At least, I don't consider myself one. I like being around others and chatting and socializing and stuff. I just don't care for the expectation to be there at the same time for many hours every day. My office is big and noisy and there's a ton of people in the room making noise. It is distracting as hell.
It's also not in my favorite place to hang out. It's a kinda boring commercial area on a busy street with no good places to walk or hang out outside the office. IDK. I do visit sometimes.
I'm going to make up some dumb numbers: suppose people are 5% more productive in the office, but the office has an amortized cost of 10% total compensation. You shouldn't open an office. But say you've purchased an office outright, and maintenance is now only 2% of the cost of total compensation (8% of cost was paid up front). In that case, you would want people in the office.
In the real world, this is more complicated, because you also add in employee preferences as a reason for or against an office, you can't neatly measure productivity, you probably didn't buy the office in cash, you leased it, or borrowed money to buy it...).
I used to do this, too; get the whole team together around a whiteboard and sketch a new thing out. Some of the team made very little contribution in the sessions; I always put this down to them not being very quick (they made good contributions later over email). When I took some management training later I learned that this style of collaboration doesn't suit everyone: the "quiet" folks were just extremely uncomfortable sharing their ideas in the public forum of the whiteboard session.
Now I create a slack channel for this, and stretch the process out over a couple of days. I get more input and better ideas this way.
Yes, and now, let's define "employers."
None of the engineers I know want to be back in the office, including a lot of folks whom I'd call a "manager." At best, we want to be there 1 or 2 days of the week, or month, or financial quarter. We always knew that we got the short end of the stick with office politics, with petty concerns like how well-dressed we were, or how tall we were, or what elitist culture people think we're from (or not).
The pandemic really showed up how much we were the losers of that whole game because of how it shifted the dynamic so that it really did become about what you did for your team. And the thing about engineering, at least on the software side, is that it's still mostly ground-up and flat. Except for a company here or there that's actually led by a McKinsey consultant, the entire engineering org isn't interested in those games, and that includes our bosses.
This.
Imagine redoing The Office (either version), but with everyone working remotely. Barely any show left. It would consist only of "can you hear me?" and banter while waiting for everyone important to join and "hey, you're muted!"
Yep. I started a job early this year and the job posting said it was in person but I'm the only one on my team in my state. My manager just didn't have company approval to post a remote position but the fact that there's an office near me gave her the ability to hire me. Now that I'm employed, it's a fairly easy process to switch to remote if I want. I personally just use the office space like a wework so haven't applied to be remote but it's definitely an option.
Something the remote crowd might not realize is happening.
Something the in-person crowd might want to consider is that a lot of interesting roles are going to involve lots of work with people who aren't in the room with you no matter whether you're in office or WFH. If you go in being highly vocal about no remote work, you may not be considered for roles that aren't fully remote but do involve a lot of videoconferencing.
And maybe that's OK with you, but do think about it.
I don't want to spend my life doing Zoom calls. A quick telephone audio call for 5 minutes along the lines of "hey, are you nearly at the store" - sure. A call to avoid literally flying 5000 miles or something - if we have to.
But in general, for actual communication I want to be in the room with someone, and I think that a combination of colocating people and spending an hour or whatever on travel for clients is normally worth it for that. Hybrid office environments are an absolute non starter for me for that reason.
Colocating functional teams together, and by extension the teams they need to work with, is a great idea but the math just doesn't work out for a company of more than a few hundred employees. At the minimum you are still traveling to other buildings on the same campus to have meetings.
None of us want to spend our life on Zoom. But I'll take a few hours a day of calls to get back 2 hours a day in traffic that I can spend having coffee with my wife and petting my dogs.
One has free form ideation and camaraderie the other is people sitting in silos in a chatroom
Even my last fully-classified job, where had to be in office because we could only work from a SCIF, we still had SCIFs in Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and PA and that worked fine. Maybe because we weren't Scrum and there were only 2-3 meetings a week everyone had to go to? Theoretically, software development should be a job that is possible to do in a mostly asynchronous, largely work alone manner. Linux, GNU, and other gigantic open source projects seem to have gotten along fine for decades without needing offices. Even when I was last in the Army working in the 1st CAV HQ at Fort Hood, we had brigade HQs in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, and South Korea and that worked fine. And, of course, when I was at Platoon/Company level, I was a tank commander. Obviously, during maneuvers, you can only communicate with the other tank crews via radio. We managed somehow.
Unless you're sitting within speaking range of every person you work with, you're surely sending them messages via some chat platform or e-mail anyway, aren't you?
That's more than a bit unfair. From what I've seen a lot of companies that were completely unprepared to switch to remote, handled it a lot better than they thought they could.
Consider the pre-pandemic prevalence of "phone booths" and one person conference rooms, so you can be in a meeting as the only local attendee. As far as the other location is considered, you are remote just with access to a bigger coffee maker.
This is just a straight up lie, the speed of communication is literally 50% in real life by my reckoning. The huge vocal delay pauses, the having to focus more to get information out of low bandwidth sound, lack of body language (camera body language doesn't translate the same as in person). That's before we get to "ummmmmm.... errrr..." "Sorry can you repeat that" "oh sorry no you go first" "Oh can you mute your mic please I can hear myself" and videocall bandwidth only allowing 1 person to talk at once with a 2 second barrier either side of each thought from the sound delay and mute dance.
Literally video calls are so broken that you can't do creative discussions in them, if the tech was magnitudes better then maybe but these small delays and lack of presence make it a objectively different beast to working in the same space.
>no different than working with someone in another office
Given the choice, they'd likely prefer someone local in this case as well.
Refusing to work with people because of their office situation is toxic behavior.
How would the PM who is in remission from cancer or the engineer with a disabled child supposed to feel when someone says that they prefer to not work with them because they need to stay home?
True, but it's possible that a company had nearly 100% co-located teams prior to COVID.
If this is not shared with the non-engineering staff, then we'll end up with (even more of) a two-stream staffing problem - non-engineers will be social at work hanging out together, engineers will be productive at work being ignored.
And the implied threat of "you're less employable if you want to work remotely" is utterly pointless when applied to engineers. We're employable based on productivity not sociability. Thus it has always been.
Also seeing enough whole companies buing fully into remote, and more and more remote teams happily working together.. and tbh there sure are jobs/people for which this doesn't work out - but then good that there is more for both sides?
For those it works it is not just a lot of saved time, the flexibility to hire anyone anywhere (a lot of people are not ready to move their whole life for a new work) but also just great for environmental impact, imo.
Not ironclad, a place could be implementing it decently, but they'd have to do some convincing. (Being remote pre-pandemic would help.)
No wonder I never find many jobs in "Remote, OR!"
Remote is one property of a job to select for.
You may not value it high enough to compromise on other parameters.
Sure, there aren't enough remote jobs for everyone to have one.
But everyone doesn't want a remote job, just like everyone wants a high-paying job. (Sure, everyone wants money. But they want to work excessive hours, or work in a field they find questionable? Well, maybe high pay isn't always a good trade-off either.)
There are endless startups that are hiring which are 100% remote, but they aren't handing out 500k comp packages for staff level engineers though. It's a pretty obvious case of wanting your cake and eating it at the same time.
Whether that salary difference is +10% or +90% I would expect it to show up in salary data eventually, and that might be a more accurate indication of the magnitude of the mismatch than job postings.
I personally think the remote work genie is out of the bottle and it's here to stay! Unless it's a very collaborative phase or (big) hardware related like automotive there will be plenty of remote jobs.
This doesn't actually tell us anything nor did the source linked in the article clarify further.
For me return to office would be 60% pay cut. Good luck finding another developer :)
I would not consider that to be "easily" even for mid-tier devs.
If you can't tell if you are a special snowflake or not, you can check if your company behaves you like one. Getting promotions, extra RSUs or very high bonuses should be an indicator
Everywhere I went companies had bold plans regarding hiring, but somehow never managed to realise them.
In my opinion very few jobs should be posted as remote but adjusted to remote if that does not hurt productivity.
Another explanation could be: High-paying tech industry jobs are more likely to offer WFH, and are more competitive than low-paying service-industry jobs. There are more service industry job postings, but more people applying for each tech job posting. Thus, 15% of postings offer WFH, but 50% of applications go to WFH positions. Though true, this is not evidence for the conclusion they're drawing.
Not saying this is the explanation, I'm saying that they're picking out one element of a job posting and drawing conclusions from it.
50% of applications were asking for remote work in one of the positions that offered remote work (15% of the total LinkedIn openings). That's a 3:1 applications to jobs ratio.
So what!?
Saying "there aren't enough remote jobs" makes the assumption of a 1:1 match ratio: 1 job opening will be filled by 1 applicant. But that's never true. Forget about the remote jobs. What's the applications to job openings ratio for the ones that do not offer remote work?
Definitely people I trust no matter what their schedule. Definitely people who worked fine before pandemic and people I hired during the pandemic that are close to useless and just pretend to work if they’re not in the office.
Someone sitting at a desk is not evidence of productivity.
* overhearing organic topics of conversation
* walking by their desk and observing random 'snapshots' of tasks
* observing general work patterns
* observing any red flags of poor work ethic
When someone is remote, you have to explicitly work to gather this information (many don't, and simply wait to judge output at a deadline), rather than the implicit gathering you'd get from being in physical proximity.
It also helps when people are new in their career and/or come from different backgrounds, and don't fully understand productivity expectations. You can easily provide quick feedback, and you can set examples of expected behavior by doing it in front of them.
I've worked remote for my entire career. I nap. I work out of my pajamas. I go out on walks to think. And I delivered a solution for a hedge fund client that couldn't for the life of itself find or hire even moderately competent devs to create the solutions myself and my associates built for them.
You're just defending the "adult kindergarten" thesis of employee productivity.
But, over my career I have literally seen egregious instances where someone, habitually, up against a deadline shows up to work late, sits down in their cube, puts on a gaming headset and plays an MMORPG for a few hours, then shows up to the standup and says they need more time to get their work done. These situations are something that even the most Theory Y manager would need to address.
Luckily I now work in workplaces where I have the luxury of hiring people with a track record of success, but in places where many hires might not be aware of commonly accepted workplace expectations, these things do happen. That doesn't mean you should treat everyone like children, as you say, but it does mean you need to be aware of your employee's attitudes and expectations.
What makes you think they'd be any different in an office? Have you actually walked around an office before? A Significant portion of people are faffing about for the majority of the day. But in remote there's no need to do kabuki and swap tabs whenever your boss walks by so you look busy.
For real though if you aren’t aware- it’s a social media platform for work(ing ‘professionals’).
Seriously musha68k, steer clear - Facebook but with even weirder content
A lot of things like 'I ignored my family for work' with applauding