Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office
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Maybe it's down to management style.
It's long known that (at least in somewhat creative and self-directed jobs) workers who are motivated and happy with their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Managers then have to work hard, to keep motivation up and people happy. Let's call this the "supportive" management style.
It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with, and do only as much as they are forced/required to do. Managers than have to work hard to control and monitor everyone, to keep the slack to a minimum. Let's call this the "adversarial" management style.
In one of those styles, WFH employees can be more productive, more happy, and more efficient. In the other, WFH employees can't be monitored closely enough to keep them from slacking.
Some managers prefer one style over the other, and not many are able to switch styles.
Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
"Efficiency".
>can't have f2f meetings all day
i have zoom 1:1 meetings all day with managers. going remote doesn't obviate the need for team planning and management. bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this. if a behemoth like dell, amazon, etc can go fully remote and still be profitable, then what does that say for any smaller company? and then what does that do to all of the CRE holdings of said behemoths?
tough situation and it may not resolve in our favor
I suspect that alongside the obvious reasons (inflexible management styles, micromanagement, etc.) always discussed, this is a major driver: ongoing spend on office buildings needs to be justified, and is probably very difficult to get out of - e.g. long-term building projects, or ownership of buildings which would be difficult (or a big loss) to resell, or long-term leases signed when obviously the offices would be needed for decades, or senior leaders feeling personally invested in particular building projects, etc.
About the only bit of this I buy to some extent is very senior managers who've been closely involved in building out new office space only to find it's empty.
If they sell it and take a massive loss, they'll take a big hit on the balance sheet. So, they want to hang on to it until times are better. But, people will criticize the company for hanging onto unused real estate if nobody shows up. So now the company wants to show people in the office.
I'm not sure that this is true, but it's the only realistic way I can see CRE holdings driving returns to the office
Literally news from yesterday: Three compies conpired to impersonate millions of voters to influence federal policy
How many times do companies have to conspire to commit fraud before people stop claiming conspiracy and corporate fraud never happens??
There's no need for a "conspiracy theory" to explain it. The better way to look at it is:
Some VP at Dell leased X million sqft of office space on a long term lease that does not expire until the year 2030 (thereby getting a good deal and locking in a lower rent until that time) sometime before the pandemic flipped things to "WFH".
Now, post pandemic, with most employees in WFH status, Dell, the company, is paying $Y million/month for X million sqft of office space, which is going unused -- and they can't get out of their 2030 leases early without taking an even bigger loss. So from Dell executive's viewpoint's, this is office rent going to waste, so if it is going to be paid for anyway, we might as well force employees back to the office so we don't have to report the rental costs as pure losses on our quarterly reports to the SEC.
While we seem to be on a backswing a bit from it, eventually supporting WFH will be a matter of competitive survival. Office mandates will be the next hallmark of legacy firms who have become inefficient and wasteful in their spending.
The question is whether that competitive advantage will outweigh the incumbency advantage of the massive current players in various industries.
Sure, the small fry ABC IT Consultings of the world might get their lunch eaten by sharp new outfits that don't have to foot the cost of a floor full of downtown offices, but a behemoth like Dell, particularly one that has already been paying those costs as long as they've existed and has them built right into their structures, isn't going to be nearly so easy to dislodge.
This is one of the huge downsides of allowing so much consolidation across the board for decades. The incumbent players become much more resistant to disruption through changes like this—it will take a huge percentage of us, the tech workers, firmly saying "no, we will not accept on-site-only jobs anymore," to make a real difference.
this is not limited to tech
Tech just happens to be a place where almost every job can, with appropriate management and support, be done fully remotely with no meaningful loss of productivity.
This only applies to companies with large real estate portfolios that play real estate as a side hustle. If you mostly rent, just don't renew your lease. If you're an office space REIT, it's gonna be brutal.
No surprise JPM leading the charge on draconian RTO measures, given their CRE exposure..
I suspect that JPM is telling the truth about their internal productivity numbers being better in the RTO scenario, but I also suspect that these numbers are based on "doing things the way they were always done" and don't take into account scenarios with a JPM that is structured differently for WFH scenarios (e.g. reducing middle management and its proclivity for in-person meetings).
JPM is a huge lender in the space.
If CRE falls, JPM has a tougher time than the average big bank. They are also building a huge tower on Park Ave that was started pre-COVID and still not done.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deutsche-bank-goldman-and-...
as a former business owner (good exit, so no bitterness here) all i can say is good riddance, and i hope they take a massive haircut as an industry.
they're the biggest pricks i've ever dealt with in running my business. 'arrogant' doesn't even begin to describe the attitude they had in the 2015-2020 time period. and they are literally no fun at parties. even the front desk receptionists were arrogant, WHILE I WAS LITERALLY HANDING THEM CHECKS. mind blowing.
example in another industry - think of all the restaurants you've ever loved that have had to close their doors because of asshole corporate landlords, for no other reason than to avoid setting a precedent for lower rents even when it wasn't financially necessary.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dei
look at that beautiful, beautiful drop. it brings a tear to my eye. a tear of joy.
I agree with your virtiol, but this isn't quite correct.
You can tack "missing" rent onto the end of your financial agreement without penalty. "Lower" rent causes a reevaluation of the financial agreement basis which will almost always require a cash outlay. This is what is causing commercial real estate to be empty for 5+ years rather than lower the damn rent.
Municipalities need to implement an (in?)occupancy tax to stomp this crap out. If real estate isn't generating rent for 12+ months, tax needs to start going up on the space.
My guess is that it is not well-defined and therefore generates minimal revenue. I also can't tell if this applies to office buildings or is more for street level commercial real estate.
I've seen several people point to this narrative on HN and it just doesn't make any sense. There's three possibilities as I see it:
1) There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason. So these overlords go to their puppets running major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Dell and tell them they must make their workers return to the office in the name of propping up commercial real estate. Apparently some people on HN think this is likely?
2) The managers at Dell/Amazon/etc. feel the need to prop up commercial real estate as an act of charity. Rather than focusing on their own businesses, they are worried about their friends in commercial real estate. This seems even less likely than 1.
3) Managers at major companies believe that there are benefits to working together in person.
Why are people so reluctant to accept option 3? You don't even need to accept the premise that working from the office is better. You just need to accept that premise that management believes it's better to be a proponent of this option.
4) Some companies have a significant amount of capital tied up in CRE. Preventing its value from going to from $X to $0 is valuable to the tune of $X. There is no apparent cost to the C-suite in enforcing RTO. So for no cost, you can save $X. It's simple, non-complex, and tied to obvious incentives.
I'm as much of a WFH proponent as the next guy but blaming CRE on the latest return-to-office movement is some crazy conspiracy theory stuff.
However, who are Dell's the main shareholders? Do they have any vested interest in commercial real estate? Are they associated in other ventures with people who have a vested interest in commercial real estate?
You would think...
Dell is a subsidiary to "Dell Capital" who's portfolio also boasts at least a 10B stake in real estate. (Primarily CRE) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bdt--company-and-ms...
The reason is easy to figure out: "Holding a lot of Commercial Real Estate assets". There's literally trillions of dollars at stake here. I would personally propose that the alternative that the people holding this trillions of dollars of assets are just sitting back and watching their entire market collapse placidly, with it never occurring to them to call in favors, use political power, buy lobbyists, buy PR, and literally everything else possible to save that money, is the crazy idea.
It requires me to believe that the 0.001% are just so amazingly honest and fair-minded that they will calmly accept the judgment of the market that their assets are no longer required. This is not a position I see a lot of evidence for.
The only thing that surprises me is that we haven't seen a lot of call for some sort of regulation that accidentally whoopsydoopsy can only be conformed to by workers in offices whoknew what a surprise and shocking unexpected consequence. Keep an ear out for it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this tried in the next year or two. Their situation is pretty dire.
It hasn't even been all that secret either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/17/new-york-c... I'm not citing that as proof, just evidence. There's plenty of money at stake in this matter.
In Dell's case, I can only speculate, but they need to justify office space, and managers need to manage people, and most of leadership get promoted from middle management (or sales).
Worthless levity injection attack: my client supplied Dell windows machine still hiccups on cold boots sometimes (this ticket has been open for decades), while all my personal linux machines just keep chugging away. Find a company that is automating away management layers and uses linux.
This is not something I've ever heard of. Some websearching produced this article. - is it describing the concept?
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
I don't know about that. In my admittedly limited experience as an EM of 4 ICs, I'm drowning in work, mostly because they all do great work and are now double and sometimes triple booked on projects because we haven't been allowed to hire anyone. It's more than a full time job to keep a small team supported and I don't remotely feel like I'm obsolete because the company could chose to WFH.
I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. This is great for me, because simply being a conduit of information between other people isn't the most efficient use of my time, so I don't really feel threatened by that. All of them have told me they've actually appreciated the hybrid schedule and the time in office for some of the week, and some of them told me that when I was a peer IC (before being their manager).
Our work is definitely more experimental/R&D/unproven though. Frequent communication, collaboration, and brainstorming is critical for success. If you're doing the kind of work where you can sit down today and create a year's worth of feature tickets then maybe it skews in favor of the office being more of a distraction.
> Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
I don't get the impression anyone at the executive level of a BigCo is collecting feedback from low level managers about whether they should RTO or not. And even in the Bay Area, 2 hours a day of commuting is on the extreme end. Everyone on my team has a total of a 1 hour commute or less, and in my case that includes a day care drop off and pick up. Personally speaking, my commute wouldn't change even if we were 100% WFH because my home and the office are equidistant from day care.
We do have a peer IC who has a long commute though and it's not great for him. I do wish there was more flexibility on a case-by-case basis to tweak the number of days he's in the office.
Most communication norms aren't tied to the physical location, it's just easier to communicate communication norms when conversations are visible to the people not involved.
I was on two projects during covid WFH. The digital collaboration styles were night and day. One's mattermost team still has less than 50 messages total across all channels. The other team's mattermost was and remains a major collaboration point now that we're back on site. One team always had cameras on during calls, the other didn't. And wasn't just chat, just calls or just emails. The communication was different on every medium.
There was a lot of the same people on both projects, too. We all adapted to different collaboration styles depending on the project. The only difference was that project management made a few gentile pushes to enable fluid communication at the beginning of one project, and the other team didin't.
And I've noticed something similar with younger people. They're much more interactive in discord chat/calls than the slack/mattermost/zoom/chime equivalents. Not that this is necessarily unique to young people, just that older people tend not to lurk discord as much. What might be unique to that age group is they've been taught corporate tools mean bifurcated groups (e.g. teacher/pupil) where they're not equal participants.
The success of WFH is the demonstration that if you treat adults as such, they are going to do their job anyway thus rendering an entire horde of middle managers completely useless.
My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.
Most of them are content to simply pile on new functionality, without any concept of polish, refinement, or how allocating time for technical work can speed up the delivery of that functionality.
understanding importance of code quality/testing
&& willingness to allocate dedicated time to achieve code quality
&& having ability/position/power to withstand management's pressure on just deliveries
I've seen "senior" developers that are very happy to skip writing tests (or write useless tests that basically just return true) even though their management was happy to allocate the time to do decent testing.
The whole leadership chain from CEO down needs to make sure everyone understands and works towards the company's goals. If someone isn't that's just the normal course of productivity issue resolved in the normal way. Sometimes it's because someone isn't as good and engineer as you thought and is resistant to training, sometimes it's as you say they're unfocused on the mission, either way having a layer of people whose entire job is juggling these folks feels like putting fingers in holes in the dam.
That's who I mean by managers, btw. Just because someone has "manager" in their title doesn't mean they're this thing. Plenty of critical product managers I've worked with.
If people aren't doing their jobs they should be fired - not have someone babysit them and the whole team so everyone just suffers.
All that ends up happening is introduce things like broken scrum and push to show cards getting down rather than real value.
Congrats. You've gone from 1 extreme to the other. No difference.
It sounds like your hiring pipeline is broken if that's the behavior you observe. That's not how real Software Engineers work.
It's a shame too because it has a seemingly interesting premise. Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
Now roughly the same percentage believe in lizard people, bigfoot, etc. so we should maybe take self-reporting with a grain of salt but it does seem to ring true to us right? It feels like we've all seen people in jobs that don't need to exist.
And by the way that's exactly what modern economic models would predict. When we say the market is efficient we don't mean that's it's 100% completely and instantly efficient. In fact innovation relies on people recognizing areas where there are marketplace inefficiencies and exploiting them.
The propagation of new technologies through a market takes time and in that time there will by definition be useless jobs in places that technology has not propagated to yet.
What's more the main objective of a job is not always clear. That government employee who feels like he's doing nothing might actually be doing nothing but the purpose of their job might not be to accomplish anything, it might be to make them financially dependent on the government (or maybe the government would say it's a means of economic stimulus).
This is a really interesting topic and there's plenty to explore and lots of existing science to mine from economics to sociology, etc.
David of course ignores all of this and uses the premise to set up a rant about anti-capitalism (without making a cogent argument for an alternative). He includes such amazing insights as, "The only reason countries have armies is because other countries have armies. If we all agreed to stop waging war we could spend that money on better things." Brilliant! Why hasn't a great philosopher thought of this before?
He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics and that he doesn't consider that a valid argument. The problem is twofold. First, much like someone claiming they've found a perpetual motion machine, I don't need to debunk your specific version of it, I can just say, "That violates every observed law of physics, you'd better have extraordinary proof for me to consider your claim." Secondly, David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory. You can't 'disprove' his claim because he doesn't make any (or more specifically he doesn't have a central theory that can be disproven - he has an observation that broadly consistent with what we know about the world and would expect already, if surprising to some people).
And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths that it would take a book of greater length or a youtube video on par with the classic "debunking ancient aliens" to get through them all.
It's nonsense political drivel and it's disappointing that so many people here seem to consider the book profound in some way.
It shouldn't be surprising that David graeber, one of the most famous modern anarchist philosophers, is an anti capitalist lol. I also find it strange that this burden of designing a perfect society falls on anyone that dares criticize the current one. Like when abolitionists criticized slavery, they were expected to come up with a solution for all the money cotton plantations would lose if slavery was abolished. So odd.
By the way, he did propose two possibilities to alleviating the degradation of bullshit jobs: unionization, and universal basic income.
> Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
In the book, he argues that 50% of jobs are bullshit, not 15%.
> He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics
You may also be interested in his book Debt, an extensively cited book where he challenges the unscientific nature of modern economics. You'll find there a very rigorous critique of modern economics.
> David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory.
Perhaps the book was too steep an introduction to theories of labor and philosophy that are perpendicular to those commonly taught in public programs and held in general by a large part of society? The theories seemed quite coherent to me, but maybe that's because I had already read Marx and Kropotkin before reading Graeber. What did you think about some of these ideas from the book:
1. It's very strange that our society rewards hedge fund managers with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and teachers with 50k a year, considering by any measurement a teacher is far more valuable to society than a hedge fund manager. It seems capitalism is not good at allocating resources in a way conducive to a healthy society.
2. The general application of Marx's concept of capitalist modes of production being highly alienating for workers, but applied to modern careers like middle management for insurance companies or whatever.
3. Puritan-capitalist work ethic has turned professionalism and capitalism into a religion
4. Bullshit jobs are keeping the population too busy to protest or revolt
> And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths
Really? I wish you had some time to list some, this is interesting to me, and a huge brush to paint across the entire book. None of his critiques of capitalism itself seemed all that surprising or even really new, it was mostly more arguments against the mythological invisible hand of the market and the fabled efficiency of the market so far as I read it.
I see similar complaints about works like Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (nb I wrote that Principia reference before thinking to include this part). "There's too much of his opinion in it!" framed not as a caution against treating it as a straight unbiased "take" throughout, but as a flaw in the book. But... it lays out right up front that his intention is to first lay out each philosopher's positions as he understands them—and only a subset of those positions, explicitly avoiding some whole categories of philosophy—and then to provide his take on their position in the broader story of philosophy, which parts have been enduring and influential, which have fallen off, et c. And then then the book does that thing it said it was going to do. What do readers expect? Do people skip introductions and prefaces or something?
Bullshit Jobs goes out of its way to call out the limitations and scope of what it's attempting, it's not like it's trying to trick people.
(another thing I've noticed is people having trouble with the "concisely and confidently assert in a paragraph, then back up the position and directly address obvious criticisms in the following paragraphs" style that Graeber uses in, especially, Debt. I've read upset reviews that complain that Graeber ignored X, where X is some obvious problem with something he claimed, but he didn't ignore it, he explicitly covers that problem and attempts to address it, but it seems some readers check out the second they think of a problem in some argument and just go "ah ha, caught you you fraud, you didn't fool me!" and then, I dunno, skim-read until the next assertion, I guess?)
I can give it a shot just as example.
I grabbed my copy off the shelf and opened up to the middle (page 157 to be specific, but if you want to give me another page number between 1 and 326 I'm happy to do the same thing for that page).
The first thing I see on that page is a quote from Barack Obama and some commentary on it:
> "I don't think in ideological terms. I never have," Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.' That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
> I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he's also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.
> So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement--and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature [sic] took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
> To those who accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for suggesting that government plays any conscious role in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs, I hereby rest my case. Unless you think Obama was lying about his true motives (in which case, who exactly is the conspiracy theorist?), we must allow that those governing us are, in fact, aware that "market solutions" create inefficiencies, and unnecessary jobs in particular...
Okay, lots to digest there. Let's ignore the grammatical mistake (it should say legislation instead of legislature).
If we follow the citation for that Obama quote we discover that it's not a primary source but rather an article from The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mr-obama-goes-wash...
...published June 26, 2006.
Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect. Graeber says:
> here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement
That quote isn't only taken out of context, it's given a new context that's an outright lie.
Obama was not president in 2006 and in that quote he wasn't "reflecting on his signature legislative achievement".
In fact, the next line in the article he cites starts, "Shifting back to how he sees himself in the Senate..."
This is senator Obama, more than a year before he announced he was running for president, answering a specific question about why there needs to be a provision in healthcare legislation for job training for workers who would be displaced if the US moves to a single payer system.
Given the proper context that quote reads very differently and doesn't at all support David's argument.
And even if the context of the quote was what he fabricates it to be (reminder - it's not), the argument still doesn't make sense to me.
Even if a different system would eliminate those jobs it doesn't mean that in the context of the current system those jobs are "bullshit".
If we allow technology to progress far enough almost every job will change or manifest enough to be markedly different from the jobs we have today. People used to get paid to deliver ice door to door. We invented freezers and now there are fewer ice delivery jobs. It doesn't mean those jobs were "bullshit" when the people were doing them, it just means that technology progressed and made them obsolete ... like it eventually will with every job. Of course a bunch of new jobs were created in the process. And those jobs, along with every job, will change and disappear over a long enough time horizon.
So are you arguing that all jobs are bullshit? Well don't we still need people to do stuff? Hmm well we'll need a system to decide who does what. Some kind of distributed system where we vote with our dollars perhaps...
And there's 3 or 4 other ways to cut down the argument there. And that's just a random half-page of the book. The whole thing is like that.
Looks like a miss for him on Obama's take on jobs in healthcare (I even a tweet from what looks like Graeber's account musing about this Obama quote). I wish he was alive so we could email him about it.
Anyway, what we're looking for is logical fallacies in his critique of capitalism. You certainly found a mistaken attribution and thus incorrect assumption about the mindset of someone in power but as you indicate it kind of doesn't matter, because the core argument is that one argument against single payer healthcare (or just fixing America's objectively broken healthcare system) is that people will lose jobs as a result. Here's an article from Politico pointing this out: https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for... . People do make this argument, about the healthcare industry and others.
So for his underlying point, that the American healthcare system is propping up a lot of bullshit jobs, you seem to disagree, but I don't think that counts for a logical fallacy. Having myself interacted with the American healthcare industry, I have to agree with Graeber. Each interaction involved a rat's nest of bureaucratic nonsense and tens of people. The hospital I went to had a person whose entire job was middle-manning the insurance companies and the patients. So we could start with Graeber's general argument that probably a lot of those jobs aren't really necessary. These companies seem to agree when they do waves of layoffs. It's not even really an anticapitalist argument.
The anti-capitalist critique part of the argument is that the jobs are bullshit because they don't help, or in fact harm, society. This is the "single payer would be better" argument. Again I don't find any logical fallacy here, just perhaps an argument you disagree with. It's a similar critique he applies in the mutual fund investor vs teacher argument: why does the mutual fund investor get paid more when teachers are more valuable? Why do Americans spend so much on healthcare when universal or socialized systems can give more healthcare to more people for less money? Whatever the Americans are doing simply isn't efficient, but it's propped up as a star of capitalist resource allocation: even here you seem to imply that simply critiquing the American healthcare system is somehow anticapitalist. Now that I think about it, actually, it's not anti capitalist to argue that the American healthcare system is inefficient, it's simply objectively true: Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else, including countries with socialized healthcare.
However he is obviously anticapitalist and also takes the position that the jobs are bullshit because healthcare should be universal and thus insurance company jobs shouldn't exist (my interpretation). What's logically fallacious about this?
As for the argument that part of the reason the American government (not just pressure from think tanks or whatever) maintain this healthcare system because doing so props up a lot of jobs, which Graeber does incorrectly make based off a misquoted statement by Obama, yes, the chain of thought doesn't work, but it's not the only thing America props up for a jobs reason alone. The TSA, which fails the majority of its audits, is a rather famous example of an institution maintained by the USA simply as a jobs program. https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
Anyway, you did find a bad quote that I haven't seen anyone else point out, you may have some other pretty interesting insights to Graeber's book. I'd personally read a collection of "random half-page point by point" breakdown by you, it would interesting, and rigorous critique is important to me.
One other thing:
> Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect
I don't understand why this makes anything suspect? Nor do I see much to indicate The Nation is a leftist paper. I found this article as a good measuring stick: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-taiwan-war-mil... So certainly the paper is not a Tankie one, which would definitely make the whole thing suspect as simply a mouthpiece of the CPC, but it's clearly not, so I'm not sure what your concerns are, other than that it might lean different politically than you.
Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work.
But this only works if everyone goes to the office.
My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.
And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win?
How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers.
Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.
To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
This has been every place I've worked for the last decade, honestly. Even before WFH was a thing, all meetings took place over videoconferencing and most discussions took place over email and chat even with the people in the cube next to yours.
Working from home didn't seem like a major shift to me because no work or communications flows changed with it.
It is only now that I am restarting my normal body cycle again. I should not have to put up with that bs.
If you have never worked in that way, let me tell you it's the absolute worst situation.
I'd rather go back to the office instead of having it work like that.
People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
If a company has remote workers, the company ought to be remote first otherwise it's horrible for everybody and resentment is the only thing you reap from it.
Er, they've been doing that even pre-pandemic, and even when I'm in the same room.
That happened a lot even during the in-office days as well. People with more seniority and influence would whiteboard new ideas and then bring you up to speed on the next daily standup on what they decided.
If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day. If you have some stellar feedback, you can bring it up then and I'm sure they'll consider it.
And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
Not who you are replying to but sure - I am actually in such a position where I get the summary of what I need to do second-hand; it is great - mainly because the person I get it from is another senior developer so he knows the pitfalls; that also means he is able to lay the roadmap of what I need to do which makes things so much more easier.
Another time, it was a manager who was originally a developer and was quite hands-on - same experience.
> And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
100% agree.
> Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
> Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
When you have decision makers that neither have the technical chops nor consult those that have them, things usually get complicated. Because then they miss the technical perspective, don't know what is feasible and what is not, commit things that are technically not prudent, forget to take into account the potential pitfalls etc etc - all of those things have a significant impact on the hands-on person down the line i.e. the developer. All decision makers are obviously not like that - those with the awareness and humility about not having the technical insights, include developers in the meetings to cover such aspects and that solves many issues upfront for both the project and the developers.
Speaking for myself, I don't love being in those meetings but sure appreciate that being present provides the opportunity of handling things at design stage so that they don't come back and bite me closer to delivery. Are there power-hungry limelight-seeking developers who do it for visibility/building image? Sure, but I haven't seen as many of them as I have seen managers with such tendencies. And if we say that there is nothing wrong with vying for visibility and image building etc and all those things are just signs of healthy competition/ambition - well, then that applies as much to developers as it does to managers.
> > Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
Why aren't your developers empowered to say "I don't need to be there" to a meeting?
Why aren't your developers in the loop enough on things they're not participating in such that can still notice if an appropriate SME is being excluded?
Every job where I've grown responsibility, I find that not only did those interactions become possible, they've became expected of me.
That's incredibly condescending and reductionist, and it says a lot more about you than it does about "developers", either any individuals or in the aggregate.
Maybe try thinking of people as individuals, rather than lumping all "developers" together as one unreasonable bundle of pointless complainers...?
I think you might be a bit overly sensitive and overreactive (the Mary Sue I was talking about).
I also think you might need to look up what a Mary Sue actually is[0]. Hint: It's not "someone who reacts poorly to criticism," nor even "someone who wants unrealistic things for themselves." (It also has an extremely loaded and sexist history.)
But having half the team in one office and the other half remote seemed to be the worst of both. When I was remote I felt relief when everyone else in the discussion turned out to be remote as well, and when I was in-person it was similarly nice when we realized that everyone in the meeting was physically present.
So it's not surprising to me that companies would gravitate one way or the other.
It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.”
Some people prefer working at companies that are 100% in person. Some prefer 100% remote. Some are OK with some type of hybrid arrangement.
If a person is working at a company with policies they don’t like, either they work to get the policies changed, they find a job with policies they do like, or they live with the policies they dislike and keep the current job.
Just like people who prefer in-person work aren’t going to get their way at all companies, people who prefer remote work aren’t going to get their way at all companies.
If only it was that simple. There's pressure everywhere. Even governments try to push people back to the office with some mantra about e.g. saving the city.
If only it was just a choice.
At the end of the day most management never come into the office all the time. They do what they like. They have 0 implications so if they have dinner with a government official and was told it's best to ask the staff back then they do it. That's all.
Post-pandemic I worked with a few project managers who hated this, and would constantly complain about people not coming into the office for meetings because now they had to actually plan things, rather than just finding a random corner and talking things over. I even kind of get it, semi-remote meetings are the worst of both worlds, with the people in a meeting room wanting to draw on a whiteboard, and the people who are remote often struggling with audio from whatever crap microphones are in the room.
I suspect, after another few years of having this same discussion every few weeks, things will eventually settle down with some companies choosing to be co-located companies, and others choosing to be fully remote. Similarly to how you might select which company you work for based on what they do, or the personality of the people you interviewed with, people will also take into consideration how they want to work. I very much doubt there'll be many companies which routinely have both remote and co-located employees.
If the problem as you say is that managers are too lazy to plan then they should do their job instead of making it worse for everyone.
Unplanned meetings are the worst because you get forced into decisions no 1 has thought over. The managers assume we’re good because they don’t understand the implications.
Previously I could dig the ground and find gold too. And previously people would come out with a leaf around their private parts. If the manager can come into the offices with just leaves I'd be happy to accept that it's not their issue.
Startup founders originally don't have to manage. Do they get the blame when things go wrong when the company gets bigger? Hint: yes. i.e. we're all forced to adapt. It's not only the managers.
> At least in the case I'm thinking of this was more a corporate failure to adjust to remote work
That's correct - the corporate includes the managers though - as many chains up as needed.
Just get a Surface Hub.
With a Hub, everyone else can just collaborate on the shared whiteboard using their iPads.
Well, sure. We're asking that our reasonable desire to work remotely be accommodated.
Some are perfectly willing to be flexible.
Others are absolutely livid that you would dare to ask them to change how they do things to accommodate anyone else in any way.
I honestly have very little sympathy for that type of person. The "everything was just fine before, just shut up and go back to how it always was" attitude completely ignores the fact that for many, many people, things were not fine before, and WFH has been a godsend for so many.
If someone’s preference is to work in a company where 100% of the employees are in office, then someone at that same company who pushes for remote work or hybrid work is pushing their preference on someone else.
But that is 100% fine. Just as it’s fine for someone to advocate against remote or hybrid work. Neither are right or wrong.
Some subset of people who want to work in an office want to do so only with people who only work in an office as well. For these people, “everyone do your own thing” is not a satisfying solution. And it doesn’t have to be! Work doesn’t have to satisfy everyone.
If you work with people like this and say, “just do your own thing, it works for me” then you are trying to control other people because it pleases you better.
And again, there is nothing wrong with this. You are looking out for yourself, which is fine. It’s then up to your employer to make a decision on policy and then the employees decide if that’s a policy they want to work under.
Again, you're ignoring that the office workers preference isn't simply to work in an office. It's often to work in an office (only or primarily) with other people also in that office.
> I am questioning why the office workers try to make other people return to office with bad faith arguments (water cooler talk and synergies), when remote workers seem just happy to be working from home, without pressuring office workers to come and join them.
You're making the bad-faith argument that a person in the office and a person working at home is a win-win situation. The remote workers may be just as happy, but those in the office are not just as happy.
I get it. People like remote work. People want to protect their right to work remotely. But at least acknowledge that some people are negatively affected by the push for remote work.
The situation doesn't need to be a win-win! Somebody can lose out on what they think is best for them. That's 100% fine. It's up to the company to make a decision and then up to the employees to decide how they'll react to that decision.
It can be a large win-small loss situation too. Remote workers gain two hours of commute back and forty hours of focused work. Office workers lose the open floor plan vibe (it's called back to office but tech workers don't have offices) and ability to push around their colleagues, or whichever the actual reason is. I don't understand it fully. It doesn't seem morally justifiable to me, and they encroach more on the professional autonomy on the remote worker than the remote worker does to them. The office workers wouldn't like it if they were being coerced to work from home for some BS reason.
Here's the thing: they don't need a better argument. They don't need an argument at all. It's their preference.
> I don't understand it fully. It doesn't seem morally justifiable to me, and they encroach more on the professional autonomy on the remote worker than the remote worker does to them.
Here's the thing: it doesn't need to be morally justifiable to you or anyone else. It's a preference for working in-office with other people in-office.
I think you do understand this it's just that you don't like it because you have your own preference.
No. It's possible my stock options would be worth more if the office workers adopted the more efficient form of work from home. Maybe the hybrid meetings would be more enjoyable fully remote. I still wouldn't think about trying to coerce them into that with talk about synergy or the online version of water coolers. That's a bad thing to do. Let them enjoy the office, and others remote.
You may think you're more likely to get your way if you have a compelling argument but history has proven that's not always true.
The argument is, "I would like this better."
> For reason, the RTO arguments are very bad. Is there some part the proponents can't say out loud?
No, I believe the part being said out loud is, "We prefer to work at a company where all employees are in office." That's all you need to say. The only people I've ever heard talk about water coolers are the dismissive WFH people.
That's a bad argument. Sounds like we should not work from the office then. What comes after the "I like making others work in the office, because"? That's the quiet part not being said out loud. I'm interested.
That's not what I'm hearing or what you would read in an announcement for one the partial RTOs that have happened at some tech companies.
No you explicitly aren't. Not bending to someone else's preference is not "controlling" them.
Control in and of itself is not a bad thing, the employer/employee relationship is about exchanging money for control of ones time, but it's still control.
But refusing to return to the office because your co-worker prefers to work in a full office? That's only control in the same sense that my refusing to let someone stab me in the chest is a limitation of their freedom of movement. Sure, if you want to really twist your perspective you can get there, but it's not a useful definition.
Then they should get along great with the people whose preference is any number of other ways that they dictate terms to the rest of society.
Fortunately, those people are losing, and this is good.
You many not feel like this is a substantial imposition, but many people feel that it is easier to have discussions in a physical room with things like physical whiteboards and eye contact. Using digital analogues can be nearly as effective, but it requires everyone adopt new processes.
That sounds decently full actually? Just treat it as an office with a generous square footage per employee.
Why? Half full office sounds like she should have plenty of other people who prefer to chit-chat near the water-cooler whole day to socialize with...
So make the office smaller. Although many people going to office probably prefer to have a bit more space and quiet, given how widespread criticism of open offices etc is.
If they halved the office space so that the office is full, would that make her experience better?
I know it sounds like a flip question, but I am asking it earnestly. That could be the compromise position.
It basically ends up just punishing the employees who do work, and the slackers still slack.
It's easier to abuse someone when in-person. I've seen managers shout and reprimand others in-person. Try doing it remote and they just mute you :)
Suppose your team consists of individual independent contractors or for example the team members are all spread across multiple offices. Such an arrangement is effectively indistinguishable from WFH arrangement as you do not really have the aforementioned face to face contact anyway.
Can management make it work? WFH may mean slacking in hackernews, office will mean slacking at the water cooler. Do you really need multiple a day face to face conversations "how are WE doing this"? Maybe the workload actually requires intimate contact for efficiency/quality. Maybe you can chunk workload into 40 hour chunks, have workers independently arrive at solutions and just sync once in a while.
On one hand yes, this is management lacking control. On the other hand this is about trust in workers and workload chunking.
Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity.
I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them.
It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one.
Or the developers. I've seen highly productive devs despite the managements worst efforts and unproductive devs despite managements best efforts.
A good manager is not ego-driven and is perfectly able to function when being paid less than the people they manage.
And then we can just give people more money and keep them in the role they work best at instead of having to Peter Principle them up to their level of incompetence or lose them.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's a LOT of Dell employees. I recently dealt with their service department and it was the worst warranty service I've had on any product. Reiterates my prior position of never buying Dell products again.
Took two, multi-hour iMessage conversations including taking 5 videos of my product each time, to prove warranty was triggered. Was at the point of asking "should I take a video of putting your product in the garbage as well?"
The craziest part was once that was done, they immediately shipped me a brand new replacement with overnight delivery. Product was already on the way before I realized they actually had granted me service.
Eizo on the other hand was a 5 minute process, but then the monitor was gone for a month being serviced.
Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. I've never had service denied or had to battle for hours.
So the dumbest possible outcome - they are out a new replacement monitor, and I am unhappy enough to never be a customer again.
Not my experience at all.
On paper this should have been a great monitor - 27", 4K, USB-C data & power, nice height/tilt/rotation adjustable stand, multiple inputs, USB hub integrated, etc.
Probably worst tech purchase of the decade for me.
They once sent a tech to drive to my university which was 3 hours from the tech's home base to replace a laptop screen.
They also came to my office to do the same to replace another screen that developed a dead pixel 3.5 years into the life of the laptop.
I don't have experience with any standard warranty/support though.
I also will never buy dell in my lifetime, and have encouraged all family/friends not to as well.
Apart from that, WFH does make management a lot more painful and tedious from a practical perspective. Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications, and their resolution is at the mercy of how long each person in the chain takes to receive each message, acknowledge it, follow up on feedback, make changes, clarify, finalize...
Maybe instead of setting arbitrary broad-brush WFH policies, just divide every role within WHF-able and non-WFH-able baskets under each business head.
Maybe that's a good thing? If the team can solve it informally why can't it be done over other mediums? Most of the time this happens because there's a lack of documentation or other issue.
WFH is a symptom. Fix the real problems.
But Commercial, HR, Marketing - all face the problem of spiraling communication loops. Physical presence does make a difference in planning and implementation, believe it or not.
If you can't tell that a worker is not producing because they are WFH then you are plain and simply incompetent. It's actually much easier to pretend to work in an office than it is at home in my experience.
Another very common excuse to use this "style" (I don't agree it's a stylistic choice at all) is to cover up the real cause that employees are not productive. These can be a ton of reasons including:
- hiring incompetent people
- not paying your employees what they're worth (often the cause for the first one)
- not letting them actually do their job (micromanagement, unnecessary bureaucracy, etc)
- not giving them challenging work
- inability to listen and change (employee's concerns are ignored)
It's not a style choice at all.
It's down to the caliber of employees and managers that a company employs (that's the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about).
In my experience, remote just doesn't work for cheaper (or "best cost" whatever the current term is).
A lot of firms tried "cheaping out" on coders over the years, hiring employees from bootcamps and doing internal coaching. In my experience that breaks down completely when going remote because of the amount of hand-holding required. While they could drop-in and check-in on the coders almost once per hour in office, it's more like once per day when working from home.
Firms that paid more and hired proper Software Engineers don't have the same experience at all, mostly because ICs now have several hours extra per week to concentrate and focus.
At the end of the day, it is a high level leader making these decisions and it is likely a high level leader with experience/conditioning within an industry PRIOR to the pandemic so I would guess that they are more conservative or "old-school" with their perspective on company/workplace policies.
> be me
> wfh as a soft dev for a big tech company
> company tells me to come back to the office
> they claim it is to promote coworking and socialize
> have to wake up an hour earlier
> 1h commute, no real public transport options
> get stuck in traffic, +20 minutes
> arrive late at office
> no matter, no one checks office logs and I turned on my laptop in the car
> half of the workers are wfh
> no one from my team is there
> remember they are not even from the same city lol
> put on my headphones
> zoom meeting, have to book a room
> finish meeting
> put some spotify on
> don't talk to nobody for 6h
> make a greentext in ycombinator
> leave an hour earlier because no one checks office logs
> 1h commute back
He just wants me to be in office just for the shake of being in office..
In my case I would not care about going to the office if it were anywhere near downtown. That way I could go down to my local pub or game store after work. However, my company is located in the periphery of the city. If I want to go anywhere that means getting in my car once more.
If you're an executive and have a choice between pissing off your employees (who you view as fungible) and pissing off people in your network who could make your life/the life of your company more difficult, the obvious answer is to piss off your employees. If local and state governments can't depend on office workers for $$, they might need to start doing things like raising corporate tax rates or stop giving companies incentives/grants/exemptions. Basically in person is worse for the company's long-term bottom line but it's better in the short term for the people making the decisions. What does the CEO care if the company takes a hit in ~5 years? They won't be working there. They do care if they have to start paying more taxes or explain to the board why all of a sudden they have to start paying expenses that previously were offloaded due to agreements.
That's my read on it anyway. It's a fascinating social problem wherein the interests of the higher ups and the interests of the company as a whole are at odds.
Well there's plenty of readings like that, but there's very little evidence they're actually _true_. They're just stories told around fires about evil gods depriving poor workers of wfh.
I see plenty other (often misguided) reasons why managers keep pushing for RTO, but "my companys office space, oh egads" is almost never one.
Knowing the 'gods' are stupid rather than evil doesn't change 'acting in their own interests but not the interests of employees/the long term health of the company' problem. Why are they buying into these misguided reasons? Because it benefits them to do so. Why are they listening only to the RTO side? Because those institutions are more trusted by the decision makers.
That's what most companies which now have a 'hybrid' model do. Many around here (UK) advertise at being 'hybrid', meaning 2 days in a office a week. But, really, why?
I think most companies don't have a solid justification for this.
IMHO, if there must be set days in office they must be special days with everyone in office the same day and a focus on face-to-face interactions. If it's to code in office instead of at home 1-2 days a week there is no point at all.
And they are right, look:
> get stuck in traffic, +20 minutes and > half of the workers are wfh
you have seen way more people than if you had stayed at home. Especially while driving, at the red traffic lights, or while overtaking cars/or while they overtake you :)
> > remember they are not even from the same city lol
it doesn't matter, distances should not matter, you could befriend someone that is 50 km away, why not - it doesn't matter that you're doing to meet him/her only once a year.
Overall, it does help socialize. :)
If this wasn't a joke, then my comment was addressing that.
Can't wait to see this line in a company e-mail about forcing people into the office.
And of course I totally agree with you.
I think a big part of many people’s contempt for their jobs comes from the sense that it’s an endless, thankless stream of tickets and demands. Seeing people in person, remembering they’re human, can help make the rest of the job more pleasant. A day of socializing might make the other four days of remote work more productive, increase job satisfaction, increase retention.
But perhaps the question is whether it's good for the company or for society as whole. That's a much more difficult question but I suspect that it is good for society and possibly the company too. It's normal to not like all aspects of society but it's still better than the alternative.
“So this is all resolved if we monitor employees constantly, and punish them for being late.”
I'm not at Dell but that would be me if I were forced into the office. I have teammates in every CONUS timezone and none are anywhere near my closest office. I'd essentially be in the office working remotely.
Not sure why people keep thinking it’s a gotcha that will work in their favor.
> company tells people to go to the office
> mfw when carbon neutral goals
It’s clearly not what an employment lawyer would call “constructive dismissal” but it sure feels like that is the intent.
Isn't it? I'm pretty sure this kind of forced change to working conditions constitutes constructive dismissal under e.g. UK law.
It's also I realize kind of iffy. If Dell said explicitly "we will not ever require RTO", and you moved following that, then maybe your lawyer would be willing to bring a case, but in this case Dell is saying "if you live within an hour" you have to come in to the office. Given my employer's RTO has given me 3+ hours of commuting a day that seems in the region of what the US considers reasonable.
Previously I could commute via public transit + work on commute buses, but given the lack of masking, vaccination requirements, or separation, driving is now the only safe option.
Not just for covid either: not going to the office meant I did not get sick for years - within a month of RTO starting I had one coworker saying that they would have been in the office but the (at the time) rules said you couldn't come to the office if you had flu symptoms even if you hadn't tested positive for covid. e.g. The only reason a coworker didn't come in while knowing that they work sick was because at the time it was explicitly prohibited.
If a company promised no layoffs ever, I wouldn't believe them. But if they promised to continue WFH, I'd believe them, since that's directly under their control.
In fact, I bet all the people that got laid off recently will be happily hired by remote first companies very quickly.
This is my third time seeing this type of job market (2000, 2008 being the other two). This is the time where there is a “flight to quality”.
The laid off ones.
Source: have a few of those on my desk right now.
Pre-covid my entire team was office and I was the only remote. Without wanting to brag, it's factual: my Drupal knowledge made it worth for them to keep this up. Post-covid my entire team is scattered to the winds. You couldn't get them to come to the office because almost no one is within the same metro as the office.
We had an example at our office several years ago where employee X was a great worker, nothing to say about that, that was having his own "working" rhythm (e.g., until late at night, mornings off, etc.), and was coming to the office only from time to time, just because the manager was really pushing hard, or for certain office events.
This spread and people started to ask - can I work from home? -> only 1 day Why? X does more than 1 day, and sometimes X is not available when I need.
... as a manager you can only "yes, but ..." that much. At a certain point people (who I would like to remind everyone again and again: most of the time are people with a high college degree, used to read books, papers, and do things, not 3 years old kids) connect the dots and say "alright, it's time to go". And before they go, they let the entire apple tree rot to hell. If that doesn't happen it might be because this spreads and goes to high management that asks the manager "WTF are you doing?"
That's when either more rights come in equally for everyone, or ... they need to let go of their best employee, or they need to find a compromise. Just having the nicely protected "best" employee is never a good strategy. Eventually people get pissed off and leave, and if they don't, congrats, you have just made the "non-best" employees even less motivated and less productive.
Honestly it seems like it’s part of a tech career trajectory. Once you are very established and your skills are built up there are several tracks available to you. Two of those are WFH specialist or 5-10X experienced dev and WFH consultant.
The cube farm grind is something you go through to get your skills and network up.
I have seen the same in other knowledge areas: corporate law, finance, some types of editing and design, accounting, etc. WFH becomes one of the options at more senior levels.
The other reason it’s a more senior option is that senior people are seen as better able to self direct and thus requiring less micromanagement.
Nokia at one point started handing out very generous severance packages to get people out. The management thought that the bad workers would be the ones to take the deal.
Nope, the oldest and most experienced ones took the money and used it to start their own companies.
http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
It sounds perverse but surely conpanies notice how much the market likes them.
Even the serverance they save is a rounding error compared to a 10% bump in market cap.
I imagine current round[0] of layoffs is opportunistic - companies know they'll want to do some layoffs at some point, but when's a better moment than when everyone else is doing layoffs? The public at this point doesn't even care anymore - there's been too much of it going on, it's not novel, it's what everyone's doing.
--
[0] - I'm not sure if "round" is even a good term anymore - it's been what, half a year already, of ongoing layoffs in tech companies? I've been seeing at least one headline per week about some recognizable name in tech announcing/executing layoffs, since February, or maybe even January 2023.
If you work remote, you have to actually write down things, like 1. who your workers are, 2. what the teams are, 3. where they are, 4. how to contact them, 5. what they're working on, 6. who else they depend on or who depends on them, etc. There are a lot of new tools to learn, you have to learn how to ask for someones time and schedule time. That's a lot of work that managers don't want to do.
If you work from the office, you mostly have to: 1. walk around the office and ask someone. Interrupt whatever they're doing to ask anything you want anytime. Of course, there may be many offices, but then you call the other offices and ask the secretary to go around and ask people.
It's also very easy when wfh to accidentally leave a paper trail or records of conversations you'd rather stay hidden. In an office you can just talk in person with no record.
Wfh is a right that white collar workers are gonna have to fight for, the way all unions have had to fight for the rights workers deserve. Don't threaten to quit, threaten to unionize.
In the office one person at a time can DOS attack my attention and everyone else can see I'm busy helping them. Slack is far worse, multiple coworkers are DDOS attacking me and 10 more unread messages pop up before I finish helping the first guy.
People message me while I'm on zoom, I tell them I'm busy but I'll get to them in the order they reached out. It works just fine. I have a note on my computer I add their name to and once I get off zoom I check if I still need to reach out to anyone.
Without sarcasm, I think a lot of people think this is what "important hallway conversations" and "collaboration and innovation" are. I also find it hugely disruptive, and it caters to people can mostly only communicate verbally.
There are easy solutions to these problems. Put up an away message and silence notifications. Set office hours when you will respond to messages. Time box. Give estimated response times. Provide an escalation method for emergencies. Keep a weekly rotation for support requests.
All of this is well established in fully remote companies. But you can't expect to completely change the dynamic and expect it to work perfect with no changes.
Sure, threatening to quit is easy. But doing the easy thing isn't the same as doing the right thing. Unionizing allows us to prevent unpaid overtime, demand more vacation, better health care, fewer contractors, more diverse hiring, fewer hiring restrictions, and of course, things like wfh, child care, family leave, maternity and paternity. Things corporations making hundreds of billions in profits could easily do, but will never do unless we organize.
What's egregious to me is companies committing to something which has major life and financial implications to the people that work there and then pulling the rug out.
I've learned the hard way to never organize my life around benefits that are "promised" but not in my contract. This here is exactly what happens every single time: the person who made you the promise leaves the company and the promise goes along with them.
Hour during rush hour or hour as measured by Google Maps without traffic data?
So they're basically asking people to spend 40 hours a month, unpaid, in their car going to and from work with no compensation?
How? Most people can barely make rent as it is, the problem is that almost everywhere the large employers are in the city centers and people can't reasonably move close to there.
There are exactly zero ways you can force those people from their homes back to city apartments. Their kids go to school in the new city, their SOs might have in-person jobs there, they have a huge yard and better quality of living. Some of them theoretically work under an hour away from their current job.
If companies force WFH, they will just quit and find a new remote-only job.
Cool, and I'll apply for the now open position as I have great train access to the city.
I doubt Dell have adjusted their pay to accommodate that.
In the end this has always been about manager/owner power, not about getting work done or doing the right thing by your employees.
With regards to hybrid jobs: you can get a job closer to home, but there is a reason why house prices are more expensive in tech hubs and why wages are lower where housing is cheaper. So you can either have cheaper housing but lower income, higher income but higher house prices, or have both but pay the penalty with you time (ie longer commutes).
This is how it’s always been and why fully remote jobs have been a great life hack. But you can’t really complain about having to spend you own time commuting should you have a hybrid role.
Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't mean it's fair or right.
The standard work week was once 12-14 hours a day, 6 days a week. Things change.
> But you can’t really complain about having to spend you own time commuting should you have a hybrid role.
Of course you can. You can complain about anything, and sometimes with very good reasons.
Ultimately employers are free to demand that employees RTO with no travel time compensation if they want, but it's silly to say this is something the employees can't complain about.
How would travel time compensation work in this situation? Why would companies not discriminate implicitly or explicitly against employees who live further away?
I work from home the vast majority of the time currently with very occasional visits to the office. The office for me is 15 minutes away. I would never accept a job that required a greater than 20-minute single direction commute, so travel time compensation is not on my radar of things to worry about.
Apologies for the confusion
Sure there is time savings in not commuting, but there are also time savings in face-to-face interactions, team spirit etc.
Instead of cooking some food and eat alone at home you can eat and discuss with colleagues or friends who work in the same area.
Instead of commuting people waste their time on social media, news and other junk before, during and after work. A commute via bus, train, subway, bicycle can often be productive or even relaxing versus taking the car. It's an often needed break between work-time and free-time. It's hard to make that break when working form home.
You seem to be extending your own experience as if it applies to everyone equally, but it doesn't.
I find commutes neither productive nor relaxing. I do not need a break between work-time and free-time, I have an office space at home to provide that compartmentalization.
Wfh = internet addict?
Counter example
I end my work, get ready and head to the gym 10min later and 1h later im free
Meanwhile when commuting Id barely get to the home
Appeal to tradition is one of the weakest arguments anyone can make.
You already get compensated by having both a higher paid job and living in a bigger property in a cheaper yet desirable neighbourhood. And more to the point, your employer didn’t choose where you live, you chose that yourself.
If you were commuting to different site(s) than the one listed as your “base” location then it would be a different story. But most businesses already compensate you for that. They just don’t pay for you travelling between home and your base location because that was the expectation you agreed to when you took the job.
I’m not saying changing policy against your employees wishes is a good thing but if your acceptance of a job is predicated on the condition of being fully remote then you’d want to be damn sure that is written into your contract. And if it is, then your employer cannot change those terms without issuing you a new contract.
Also I know plenty of people who haven’t changed jobs in the last 3 years.
I knew your employment laws were lax but all the conversations I’ve read on here have suggested that US employees still had contracts.
Having experienced the full-time WFH during covid, I believe many feel that the extra time not spent on commuting can be better used for life. Why bother with extra commute when it does not bring you anything?
In the past for the paid workforce WFH has not been possible. You had to physically be present to perform the labor. In these modern times with computers and internet, we now have the ability to communicate and even perform most tasks related to the job when being in a completely different place than my coworkers.
Companies only get the benefits of people being in the office (more interaction, more control), but not the penalties (unpaid commute time).
Norms should move with the zeitgeist, in the spirit of the time and age we live in. Why stay stuck in the way of working from 50 years ago?
You’re free to challenge the norms. I just don’t agree with the arguments made on this occasion and had listed other reasons why beyond just social norms. Ie you’re already being compensated by choosing to live in a bigger yet cheaper property then you’d have afforded if you wanted to live closer to work.
Ultimately there is always going to be a trade off but that’s your choice not your employers.
You're literally just making up an imaginary scenario of people moving just because they can WFH and then acting like that's "compensation" built into WFH.
This isn’t a weird new concept I’m throwing out there either. It’s a well discussed topic. So much so that I could name several TV shows that feature this as a plot point.
* More office space required * Need to pay workers to be within reasonable distance of the office
There are penalties to WFH as well:
* Additional living space required for WFH
Of course, there is a trend to people choosing to relocate to cheaper areas once the requirement to live near a (n expensive) city office is lifted. As such, this would often provide ample space for a WFH office.
I do about 95% of my work on my recliner with a laptop and a lap desk. No additional living space required. Occasionally I'll go in the computer room with the dual monitors when I feel I need them for something, but that's certainly not required.
I’ve given reasons why I don’t believe the a company owes you. Yet no one has given reasons why they believe a company should.
Since work from anywhere showed that a lot of work can be done remotely, if a company wants someone to work on premises it is obvious that they have to pay for the extra time and effort spent.
So if I take the tube to see a show, then work should pay for that as well? I’m not working while sat on the tube any more than I’m working while on the way to the theatre.
And if people do decide to work on the train, then they can count that towards their working hours so there isn’t an issue.
If you’re not working on the train, then it clearly isn’t work time any more than that lunch break which companies also don’t pay you for.
Also what about people who have chosen to pay more for a property that is closer to the office? Should they be excluded from this subsidy? Effectively penalising them for not having a long commute? How is that fair on them?
> Since work from anywhere showed that a lot of work can be done remotely, if a company wants someone to work on premises it is obvious that they have to pay for the extra time and effort spent
The ironic thing was during COVID some people were complaining that their home expenses had gone up due to working from home and thus insisted they should be compensated for that too. The British government even issued tax credits to help such individuals.
But certain management types feel great knowing that their drones are being good little drones.
“How it’s always been” is a lousy reason to keep doing something if there’s a better way.
The pandemic forced employers to allow WFH so they could keep the money spigots flowing. We learned that it isn’t really necessary to burn additional fossil fuels and contribute to pollution and donate commute time for free.
It’s entirely logical that workers are complaining about a unnecessary constraint that costs them time, money & restricts where they can live.
Because it is.
People used to write code on paper, later transfer that to punched cards, submit that for execution and wait days for results.
If you were asked to do something similar today (write code on paper and not have your own computer) you’d take it as crazy and offensive too.
I’m still yet to hear one single reason why it is “offensive” to have to pay for your own travel into work. I’ve given plenty of reasons why I don’t see an issue with it but nobody has given any reasons why it’s offensive beyond simply saying that it is so.
How does such a compensation work fairly when someone people pay the premium to live closer? What’s stopping you from working on the train and counting that towards your working hours? Etc. what’s stopping you from getting a job closer to home?
There’s so many flaws to your argument and the only point you make that cannot be refuted is your sense of entitlement. So it’s not surprising I’m unconvinced.
But we might just have to agree to disagree on this topic. I suspect this is more a question of perceived morality than it is something tangible that can be proved.
Laws and agreements?
You’re supposed to guard company data, you can’t just open your laptop in the middle of anything and let everybody on the train take a look at your code or any other company data.
Also, you’re assuming that the train is not crowded enough that you can sit comfortably…
Would have been nice if you read more than just the opening sentence before announcing that it was unconvincing…but each to their own I guess
Slavery was also the norm, until we, as a society, figured out that maybe... it shouldn't be?
I simply do not get people who defend idiocy by claiming that it has always been the norm?
Given the shitty wages most people are on, how some people walk for 2 hours a day, every day, to get to and from work because they can’t afford a car…and then we have this thread. It just feels like there’s a real disconnect from reality going on right now.
Incorrect, it is a reasonable and deserved level of entitlement. When you spend hours of your life for someone else's benefit you are morally entitled to be compensated it.
> Given the shitty wages most people are on, how some people walk for 2 hours a day, every day, to get to and from work because they can’t afford a car…and then we have this thread. It just feels like there’s a real disconnect from reality going on right now.
Crab mentality. Multiple shitty things exist of different scales and all of them should be fixed. Everyone should be paid for commute time AND no one should have to walk two hours or have a low wage job. Calling out the wrongness of the former does not mean we are okay with the latter. The subject matter of thread happened to be about the former.
You call it “idiocy” yet literally nobody has been able to put into words why it is so.
The real idiocy here is how one sided the discussion has been. The supporters, like yourself, simply say “it should be like this because I say so”. Whereas the opposition, such as myself, have detailed a number of reasons why, such as cheaper housing vs regional wages.
If it were really as clear cut as you claim, I wouldn’t be reading through a page of meaningless straw man arguments like I am right now.
- No commute saves workers you an hour or two every day and benefits the company by loosening traffic for those that do WFO
- Hours saved by not having to prep in the morning/commute benefits the company by making workers more well rested, late less often
- If you have kids you no longer need to hire someone to watch them and can spend a bit more time with them
- Don't have to interface with people that can give you diseases, benefiting both your health and your company by keeping you from taking sick leave
Some of these are so obvious that they feel self evident which is why I think people are not mentioning them outright (it would be redundant)
You’re acting like an idiot?!
> I don’t need to prove it to you or anyone.
You’re the one engaging in the conversation. If you don’t want to explain your point of view then why bother posting in the first place?
> I don’t consider employment offers that don’t align with me along this axis. I have plenty of options that do.
You have plenty of job offers where your employer pays for your commute?
I’ve been in the industry for several decades and the only time I’ve ever known this happen is when someone has site visits, which isn’t the scope of our conversation here. So I think you’re either misunderstanding the conversation here or just posting BS.
...that's what immediately struck me as weird as well about the article. It seems to be presuming that raising young children while simultaneously doing a fulltime WFH job would sort of naturally be a position that an employee would now find themselves in.
Elsewhere in this thread, the question of whether or not that's possible is being hotly debated. But, be that as it may, I would expect that, if this does occur, it would occur by agreement between employer and employee and with some sort of accommodation around lost productivity.
But, maybe, the actual substance of the matter is that Dell allowed its people to WFH and now all of those couples that could previously have only one breadwinner due to having small children are suddenly drawing two fulltime salaries due to combining WFH with parenting responsibilities. If that's actually the case, then I kind of agree that there's a real problem there, but would contend that it's only tangentially related to WFH.
- It's probably more difficult to do great work WFH than F2F. But I mean "great", properly great stuff, novel, hard, high stakes, high pressure, high coordination, moonshot level.
- It's probably not difficult at all to do mid level boring stuff WFH, and everybody saves time and money on top.
- 99% of orgs do the later kind of work
- 99% of orgs don't like to admit they do the later kind of work
This is why we can't have nice things
Traditional employment contracts, which were common years ago but are now used principally for C-suite positions, typically have terms employees can sue to enforce such as WFH.
For most positions in tech, nothing in the paperwork will give you a way of enforcing WFH if the company changes its policies.
That's what I meant by my comment above, which I can no longer edit. (I should have been clearer.)
Sort of like, a gal is by definition your main squeeze if you're with her 4 or more nights out of every 7.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/10/dell_remote_work_revi...
Neither article gives Dell reasons for telling people to come in more often. The only quotes are from the past, and allude to productivity in new hires being low — the same reason Zuckerberg is bringing Meta back into the office.
He was definitely promoted beyond his capability though, and as a "director of engineering" couldn't keep his hands out of the minutiae of day to day code discussion.
It's a shame that's the way it is -- but it places the onus on the employer. They would have to fire you, and bear the cost of replacing you.
A junior learns at a fraction of the pace of a senior and relies on direct 1-1 help, together with learning by observing others. This is quite difficult online and requires a lot of hand-holding which most mid-level / seniors are not willing to do.
So saying that WFH policies should be the norm is no longer an acceptable statement. It sacrifices the longevity of the team and the company if juniors cannot be onboarded quickly.
There is no statistic longevity in tech. It’s well known that the quickest method to make more money especially when starting out is to change jobs after two or three years.
Salary compression and inversion is real.
Yes I know it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors. It’s a local maximization problem
It's self-correcting: the fewer seniors there are, the more they cost. Eventually hiring a junior becomes the more economical option. The market gets exactly as many seniors as it deserves :)
We are in a tightening economy where stock prices are jumping double digit percentages from layoff announcements.
Everyone seems to recognize that forcing employees to return to office will result in attrition (aka soft-layoff).
Perhaps when growth becomes the focus again, companies will switch back to work from home. The public line of reasoning will be something dumb like "eliminating office costs" or "reducing emissions associated with commute".
Hybrid means you'll commute to work to arrive in an half-empty office. In this office are people sitting in calls all day.
You cannot have good old fashioned face-to-face meetings in a hybrid model. Because part of the crew will be remote on any given day.
Likewise, you cannot catch up on a project at the coffee corner, because the remote folks won't see that. You need to put all of that in writing, just like you do when everyone is remote.
The work-related stuff does not change back to the old ways when you go hybrid, it will remain in remote mode.
What hybrid does offer is in-person socialization. Breaks, lunch walks, etc.
If its not left up to 100% employee choice and nothing else (and therefore, the policies, processes and procedures don't equally accommodate remote workers) then I think its a power play, as there is no discernible benefit to the business, as others have stated, the Microsoft study that came out, as have other studies, shown that WFH has been a net increase in worker productivity.
I do think it should be an employee choice though, there are some folks, even if its less than majority, that work better in an office, for whatever reason, and they should be supported too
Those individuals that work better in an office setting, do they work better when everyone else is in the office and they get to interact with them in person?
If the person shows up to an office that is pretty sparsely populated and then has to sit in Teams calls — does that even meet their desire?
I’m saying this as someone who is strongly pro WFH, have seen my own productivity rise, etc.
If the only reason you're going into the office is to socialize with other people, then I think there's bigger questions to ask
1. Investment in real estate. Unoccupied large campuses are very expensive to maintain.
2. Management style.
3. Collaboration (this is really limited as most office workers don't spend more than 1-2h per day "productively" collaborating)
It's cheaper than maintaining occupied campuses.
And, merely appearing to increase productivity is often just as valuable as actually increasing productivity, at least from the perspective of an individual manager.
Forced return to office has the benefit of "everyone else is doing it" and at the same time, management can pretend like it has measurable benefits to the business, even if that runs contrary to the available evidence.
If someone asked you to give up 22 days of your life, every year, they'd need a really compelling reason.
Money?
Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. It's not a solution, it's a new problem.
Generally, when management creates a new problem, consultants pop up to sell them a solution. Do we he have an industry of "hybrid work consultants" yet?
My guess is that ultimately high performers will migrate to one or the either and it may depend on what industry. I think many of the conversations happen in silos (software devs) and the reality is messier than anyone thinks.
If you can do the same task at home, at work, or on the south pole for that mater, why do we NEED to keep the office culture alive?
This reeks of "Because that's how we've always done it"
Hell, there are plenty of doctors doing consulting over video these days.
the most unproductive set of employees i.e managers wanting to see productivity.
say it ain't so.
I would counter that new tools will surface, and they will be remote oriented, making it even easier for people to work from home. At some point, only the "old guard" would want to go back to the office, and will eventually diminish dramatically, like paper did after computers took over.
> Simply from a political view, those who are in the office more, by definition, are winning.
While this may be true, what about upper management who are fully remote?
As for support businesses (food / clothing / commercial real estate / parking / technical services), nearly all of that is also doomed. Urban planners had best figure out how to address the issues of keeping more valuable services (commercial kitchens, entertainment, boutique retail) from fleeing to places closer to home.
It's not for everyone, but nothing is.