That's the most frustrating part of these return to office announcements. The reasons for RTO are never based in rationality. It's because management has a feeling that certain things will improve.
Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.
Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.
(Edit: Just to be clear, last time I saw a presentation on this, they did have actual metrics. But numbers on a slide deck should always be taken with a big grain of salt.)
> scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company
It does not though, if the culture is anything like Amazon's, Zoe will ask you to cut her a ticket instead of directly talking to her. There is nothing with in-person interactions that "scale".
A message or email works differently when you have an established relationship with the other party. It's one thing when I have to do something "because the company needs it" but totally different when I'm helping a flesh-and-blood coworker. You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.
Assuming you're neurotypical.
Definitely not in actual developers or sysadmins.
Almost all the ones I've met.
Modern corporate environments are spread out all over the planet. If you can't build relationships without sharing air, you will be at a massive disadvantage. That's just how it is, and it isn't something that was caused by the pandemic, it's a consequence of intense globalization over the past ~40 years and an aggressive investor-driven acquisitions culture.
Stack ranking forcing a number of your employees into "low performance" and putting them on PIP is awesome for social capital however. As are layoffs.
"it's all bullshit, and it's bad for you"
A layoff is going to sever some of those connections in the short term, but the number and quality of connections isn't a function of how people feel about their job. Stack ranking and PIPs are tools that the company uses to mitigate the impact of letting people go. In other words, they're there to protect social capital (for the good of the company, don't get me wrong) versus doing something like picking a random 20% of people to eliminate.
My point is that fostering a culture of mistrust and competitiveness among the employees is antithetical to protecting social capital.
I won't effectively collaborate with you if it helps you being the low performer that will be laid off instead of me.
And curiously enough, I normally don't care about being PIP'd or layoff, as I engage in healthy job hopping so that I was never actually laid off over my relatively long career. Typically I'm one to see the early signs of trouble ahead and line up a new job in the next month or so.
But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that the culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for the ones that are best at navigating the corporate culture in the way I described above.
Well, when you get down to it, if you find yourself back-stabbing a coworker to keep yourself out of the bottom 10% during a RIF, that's not a huge badge of honor either.
None of the reviewers ever have to lie remember. They just have to cherry pick the right examples.
(To be clear, it’s not just Amazon. It’s all companies that have a peer review system that couples with a stack ranking system. If it’s simply feedback to help you grow or established goals and your performance against it, the system will be fine)
You can't state this as a fact. My company has two main offices. Two of the other SREs I work with are in a different office/state. We're as tight as can be. A third SRE is in yet another city. Our teams performance since the start of remote work has been outstanding.
There are no "facts" to this RTO fetish. It's just a management fetish, just like Jack Welch's BS that spread like wildfire.
There's a lot of ways to share that piece of knowledge other than relying on physical proximity. Documentation, metadata, AOB in the team meeting.
Normal churn hits you MUCH harder if you are remote and even if you have a good documentation culture (hah, that's a tiny minority) there's a lot of intangible knowledge that doesn't get written down.
Given the state of the fresh grads and the company culture in my previous company, wfh is much worse onboarding.
In 24 years of IT, I've never seen this unicorn environment.
There are studies around this topic. My issue is that, they are never cited when these decisions are announced.
I think it is better to have no commute, since it is unpaid, and pollutes.
To me, an unpaid, let‘s say 1h, commute is worse on principle, and requires a strong case before accepting. WFH is better by default based on this principle.
I have been WFH since before the pandemic, but technically there is an office I could commute to. It would take me about an hour each way. If I did that Monday to Thursday, that's 8 hours - so four 10-hour days if commuting was part of my "on the clock" time. If my employer told me I had the option to make Friday a weekend day in exchange for commuting Monday to Thursday, I would strongly consider it and think of it as a reasonable compromise.
I would have less convenient and more expensive days for the working week, but more time off. They get 8 fewer hours of me in front of a keyboard, but do get the supposed benefits of office-based employees.
A full time employee is paid for 40h per week. So using commonly available tools we can determine the average commute time and in many countries travel time is considered work time.
So on paper but generally rarely enforced, you should be able to subtract your commute time from the 40h and end up with actual work time.
Everything on top being overtime and should be paid according to rates mandated legally.
Except for a handful of companies and state employees, I've never seen overtime being paid, though.
That’s not true, at least in the US. The amount of hours I work weekly has never been tracked at any company big or small.
You’re not paid for 40 hours a week, you’re paid to keep up with the general standard of your peers. 40 hours is a very vague estimate of the time required to do so.
We have a time tracking system and overtime is either paid (not in my company, alas) or you can take it as free time.
Data driven is great when you’re monitoring computer performance, but that’s a domain humans have nearly built from the ground up. And even then it can still be very hard to utilize that data. Trying to apply the same to systems we barely understand seems fraught with error.
And yes, I can believe that. With few exceptions, the execs with power are focused on sales. They couldn't give a sh!t about WFH. In fact, the reason this is probably an issue at all is because one too many of these same execs got p!ssed that they had no one to turn to help change an email setting or a printer cartridge and they had no idea how to do it. Not knowing sh!t gets old real quick (translation: "inefficient working practice which we need to do something about").
But I'm not bitter.