Return to Office Enters the Desperation Phase
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"If the ball is only slightly pushed, it will settle back into its hollow, but a stronger push may start the ball rolling down the slope" [1]
They only looked normal because there just aren't many mechanisms for society to explore (at scale) nearby states that might be more adapted but require a lot of energy to reach.
We have now tunneled by force into a more stable state. Everybody knows that massive amounts of knowledge work can be done remotely. There are tradeoffs of-course, a new equilibrium must be reached, but it has nothing to do with the old one.
That is a good thing. Somehow we should be able to get to better states without going through existential risks.
I’ve kept in contact with a couple of them and they’re now 100% remote, one is working for a local company the other an international and they seem genuinely so much happier.
If we changed that and demanded return to office I know for a fact that the most capable people would be the first to give notice and we would immediately be less profitable.
Right, because telework is only beneficial for the good developers, because most outside of the top 20%/10%/5% won't be able to compete with low-cost international labor enabled by telework.
Telework is quite clearly a way to cut down on the middle class while enriching a small elite class of workers, and comments like this show those who think that they're in that class.
(I know that it's the peak of privilege to complain about not getting free food delivered to work, but this feels like all-stick, and literally no carrots.)
And, yes, I'm entitled to be treated well, just like everyone else.
But I can get a paycheck elsewhere, without the company suddenly doing a 180 on me with regard to my other benefits!
And if my boss had that attitude, I’d be out the door very quickly. I’ll let others enjoy that carrot.
I see the folks who seem to revel in these policies around me, they are precisely the people who go to work to act on a stage. I’m here to build things the world has never seen and make it a commercial success. I guess you get what you pay for with your carrots?
Plus, if you don’t have food on campus, your engineers might go out to lunch, which always takes much longer. Add to that, since they are going out anyway they might go around the cubes and grab their friends for a group lunch trip (might as well carpool if you are leaving campus, right?), so hopefully nobody needs a disruption free stint of work between like 11:00 and 1:00.
Sure, the paycheck helps, it is just the most expensive way to buy somebody’s attention.
So you are almost always in a situation that your employer needs you more than you need your employer.
Disagree with enough nuance to matter. The company needs someone, not necessarily you. It matters when it's your paycheck.
If the employee is getting paid the same amount, and can get paid a similar amount for a different company without going to the office, it's not a carrot.
In addition to those general agreements, worker councils and thwir individual employers can, and routinely do, negotiate supplental agreements, e.g. extended working hours, christmas and vacation bonuses, overtime (up to the possibility to save up for early retirememt or fully paid sabaticals).
And since Covid, those agreements include up to 40% of remote work where possible. Before Covid, working councils, and thus unions as the majority of council members are union members normally, where oppossed to that. Which kind of makes sense, since most union members tend to be blue collar folks with serious problems when it comes to taking work home. And those priviledged, like in no shift work, bettwr pay and less physical labour, office folks (I am one of those) already had enough benefits (which I get). Covid changed that, even if I have no idea how that came about, I wasn't working in collective bargaining environment during that time.
Overall so, unions turned out to be way more flexible and pragmatic, as were employers, that some people, certainly myself, expected.
I wonder if people forced to come back into the office are working a ton of free hours for the company. I can't really stay late because I have that commute now.
And every time someone from management sent an email or tried to have a zoom I'd have a hard time not asking in the zoom why it wasn't an in person meeting?
And I could see people spending a whole lot of time "collaborating" too.
Maybe there needs to be a blog post 50 passive aggressive ways to get back at your employer for making you come back into the office.
I love this as malicious compliance in RTO workplaces. Brilliant.
The CEO recently claimed on Twitter and LinkedIn, essentially that people working from home were lazy grifters who did nothing all day.
He’s the sort of manager who believes on the one hand that no-one does any work unless he personally is there to crack the whip, and on the other that it’s fine to pay less than market rate salaries because the company culture is so fantastic.
Also conveniently forgetting that the best years the company ever had financially was when everyone was remote.
Now work for a much smaller fully remote company who love the fact they’re no longer geographically limited for good employees.
How is this not admitting that WFH is superior? If it puts a damper on people like this who feel it's their right to interrupt your thoughts, it's only a good thing. This article title may sound pro-WFH but it's basically pro-WFO and has no data other than CEO "feelings" to back it up. It also doesn't even mention all of the companies that started fully remote and will stay that way. Count me among those who would never WFO again, for any reason.
In person also allows for async conversations during demos/presentations and is much easier to read the room for the speaker.
Until WFH advocates can do that, a CEO’s vibe is going to trump their vibes all day long.
(but it would be a hard case to prove, at macro-level, given all the other recent factors which would also impact those metrics.)
... I guess I've not heard of any businesses failing specifically because of WFH.
Sure, but that is an argument to a baseline not a benefit. Easily countered by “How many businesses failed pre-pandemic because they were not work from home?”
Without real hard data showing a direct benefit, we cant argue WFH over in office from a position of strength.
So uh, any other indicators you'd like to use to measure the impact of WFH?
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-productivity-drops-fir...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/business/economy/small-bu...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273909/seasonally-adjust...
[3] https://thehill.com/business/3945727-inflation-eases-as-corp...
Sure, there's people who feel it's their right to interrupt your thoughts. There's also people who feel it's their right to talk at everyone without stopping. Healthy conversation is a balancing act, and it's hard to get right in a group situation over video.
You can, of course, find ways round this. One on one calls, with shared screens, are often more productive if you're remote. Maybe large meetings are ultimately a bit pointless anyway?
https://www.meetup.com/blog/virtual-gathering-tools-for-your...
I should make a sign I can tap for all the CEO feelings instead of data. For now I'm content adding to my comment chain [0].
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-su...
And then she describes the solution - assign a moderator to your meetings:
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/04/05/how-do-we-make-remote-mee...
Just like we all know that meetings are better with agendas, notes, and action items, having a moderator also important.
There's a reason why nearly every single developer in modern office settings wears headphones. It's not for the synergy.
Really, couldn't close on something more substantial to the business?
With a large pay increase and a promotion to “guy who remembers stuff so nobody else has to”, I would gladly come into the office and not feel like it was rude to be constantly interrupted.
But as it is, my job is “finish the work you asked me to do”, and constant interruption is quite rude, in-person or otherwise.
Also, at least for me, it's not black and white when I need quiet time. I might jot down something, brings another idea and suddenly I have a new idea to fix a problem which has been nagging at me for months and off I go for 10 hours.
I won't think about turning off notification until there is one - by then my mental flow has been disturbed.
But I do love home office, I just want to outline that managing notifications is not without friction.
My default is all notifications off. I understand that for some people that's not really an option but for most it certainly is.
Our whole team agreed to do the two days so we could have our project meetings in the lab and do our scrums in person. We also acknowledged that the days are shorter because of commuting time and productivity will not be as strong because of the office environment.
Hell, we spend half our time shooting the shit, eating lunch, and talking about non-work stuff. But we're happy to see real people. So far I'm not unhappy with the setup.
And maybe that's the solution, if you're willing to do a bit of hybrid work. Get a plan going before you have one pushed upon you.
On the WFH side, it's straightforward to calculate the commute hours saved, carbon footprint lowered, and minutes more spent with friends/family.
Now that many workers have enjoyed the WFH status quo, they feel that management is actively removing benefits.
I’m not saying I don’t get why people like wfh, it’s just like, a small subset of workers this applies to who have purely computer jobs, and many of the articles about it seem to imply “everyone” is working from home, never mind carpenters or cooks.
It'll be interesting to see who ends up being right.
Now, granted, tech is an outlier in that a lot of companies ballooned up during the pandemic and are now undoing that mistake, and so your explanation makes sense in that industry, but the push for RTO is happening outside tech as well.
"They would much rather focus on their own returns than on the continued well-being of the company."
Apply this line to your job, your career, your family. This is life in modern America.
Yes, but those positions rely on ICs taking "ownership" of the work, often at the expense of IC's own health, relationships and families.
Treat the company the way they treat you (and your peers). Nothing more, nothing less.
Tell me your company doesn't use headsets without telling me.
Seriously, if their major complaint is half-duplex audio, just make sure everyone is using headsets so everyone can speak and listen at the same time.
The desperation phase? Yes, for employers. Watch this whole RTO thing collapse and corpos "changing their mind" once the herd gas been thinned and 2024, an elections year, rolls around. They have limited time to pull this off.
That said, not every role, in every situation, needs in person interaction. It’s even reasonable to argue not every day needs in person interaction.
This blanket statement is not compelling on its own. In theory or in practice, it would need to be demonstrated that any of these soft assertions are true.
- no commute
- being at home with the people you love and miss
- not getting distracted by office drama
- simplified work/life integration
As a company we're using WFH as a selling point for engineers - they love it.
- Harder to join team for new members
- Harder to learn field for novices
- Lack of unit cohesion through informal interactions
- Lack of access to equipment and tools necessary to complete job effectively
- Lower social interaction
- Risk of underworking
- Risk of overworking
- Unending distractions
The list goes on...
The interactions that take place when humans are next to one another is irreplaceable by current technology. Actual bandwidth to exchange ideas is lower.
I know this is going to bring a lot of bitter downvotes, and I accept that, but the reality is WFH failed as a universal, "Everyone can do this." idea. The upsides are all for the employees, and the downsides are all shouldered by the employer, the one with the money, the one who creates and justifies the job, so it is ending for most. Not everyone! But most.
Specific to your team, I do think it can work remotely, and have run remote engineering teams. But (and this is a big but) it requires a specific personality for everyone on the team, and you must do a lot to make up for the loss of in person interactions, and I can totally understand orgs who either a) don't think they have teams with the right dispositions to handle it or b) don't think they'll be able to successfully execute on all of the many extra work involved in recreating some of the missing aspects of WFH teams.
Do you have conflicts? If so, how do they get resolved? Maybe it all works, but if any real problem shows up, I've found creating safety is a lot more difficult remotely. WFH can breed all of the nasty "snake pit" attitudes and behaviors a lot more easily when everyone (or even someone) is remote and therefore less interconnected.
The one thing it can't address (unending distractions) is a red herring. Either you've hired an employee that can manage their own time or you haven't. If they can't manage their time while WFH I doubt they would be much better managing their time WFO, either.
I've found it's only bad management (and in some cases, access to exotic/expensive hardware) for WFH to not work for software development.
If you work on a team with no conflict you're lucky, and it won't last forever. That's when WFH shows its downsides.
I think this bullet point belongs under cons of working in the office. I have FAR less distractions working from home.
WFH was thrust on a good portion of the world by necessity. It was cobbled together at the last minute so that business could continue, with the typical amount of investment and diligence of a profit-driven entity fully expecting a return to the status quo. To frame WFH over the last 3 years as some deliberate experiment where learnings were sought (and found) is just plain ridiculous.
At best, you can argue that particular roles are best performed, or can only be performed, in an office environment, and that some people prefer the more social environment of an office. Any remark on WFH otherwise is just an anecdote that you're attempting and failing to pass off as a universal truth about WFH.
Study after study demonstrates in person interaction is superior to remote interaction when it comes to rapport, bonding, emotional safety, and every other critical aspect necessary for building and maintaining a team.
The people who think WFH is fine are the people who aren’t responsible for keeping a team functioning, and the people who are demanding a return to work are. There’s a reason for that, and no it’s not because they’re evil or out to get you.
> WFH can breed all of the nasty "snake pit" attitudes and behaviors a lot more easily when everyone (or even someone) is remote and therefore less interconnected.
That's not how social conflicts arise.
It seems to me that there's no evident connection between the points you list and your - in my opinion - quite premature and unjustified conclusion that "WFH failed".
That’s on the same level as flat eartherism or antivax, so if those are the kinds of positions you want to support, that’s on you.
But after these ad hominem attacks I'm not actually in a mood to discuss this any further with you. If you cannot make a cogent argument and have to descend to such derogatory accusations, I'll rather leave this conversation.
Have fun in the mud.
No, I don't. Like I said, if you can't see how those two concepts connect, there's nothing here to discuss.
Also for anything I wrote to be an ad hominem, I would have needed to call you a name and also claim that, because you are that name, you are therefore wrong. I did neither, so no ad hominem occurred. There is nothing here for you to be sick of.
You can feel vaguely insulted all you want, but that's got nothing to do with what I wrote.
You sound upset that your points aren’t being acknowledged, but you’re not presenting them clearly and you’re incredibly defensive when responding to feedback
You can feel vaguely insulted all you want, but that’s got nothing to do with what I wrote
Maybe take that rate limit a bit more seriously, consider why it was applied...
But in person teams are way more effective IMO. I think an example is that (at least in my experience) with colocated teams if you have a problem to work through, you generally keep finding time to work through it until you solve it. With remote teams, it's really easy to become a slave to your calendar: "our one hour is up, maybe let's schedule some time for next week to discuss again". I'm not saying this is a trap that everyone is guaranteed to fall into, but I _do_ think that it's a case where there are a bunch of behavioral nudges that make collaborative work much more natural in person. In a lot of cases, that's very valuable!