The hottest new perk in tech is freedom
vox.com
vox.com
If you do not offer remote, then you better be... idk NASA, Microsoft, Apple, Jane Street or some fancy shit or paying way, way more
If a company does not realize that 0% fully remote workforce is significant talent pool disadvantage then Im shocked.
>They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.
Yea, I do wonder how those complex, cross-geo products get built!
Teams across US, EU, Asia - how do they do it??
King Kong is out of the bag and you're not getting it back in again.
But now it's a big issue if I want to avoid traffic jam and work more in a peaceful environment.
I'm in the process of switching jobs, and when I'm offered less than 3 days of WFH, I increase my price but the recruiters still don't understand why. It's like COVID never happened and no one managed to adapt to this "old new thing" (because WFH is as old as the internet).
This is entirely about the effects office space utilization will have on their balance sheet and the macro economy at large.
You are being told to bail out CRE holdings. That is it.
Not everything is a conspiracy and some people do actually prefer working from the office.
The problem is being offered that flexibility and then having it taken away, and people are well within their rights to protest that by walking out or putting themselves back on the market.
These same companies were eager to cut pay for people choosing remote work so it follows that they should be prepared to increase pay for bringing people back into the office.
The cost of real estate is a possibility that is obvious from the outside, so of course people latch onto that. When you have no information, you speculate.
So, at least in my mind, those explanations explain nothing.
May as well just downsize.
COVID was only a couple years ago, and many will have 3, 5, 10 year leases. And that assumes they didn't buy and are now paying a mortgage.
It isn't. The random companies are spending tons of money to bail out Property Owners meme is a nonsensical conspiracy theory some people have decided to latch onto.
HN readers really struggle with basic financial concepts. A lease or an owned building is an asset that is utilized for income. If it is not being utilized it is now a cost with no return. That is now unneeded cost when analyzing income and investment.
On top of that if owned it is marked down at its value and any real loss in value needs to be marked down as well.
This is the real analysis going on. This is not a conspiracy. This isn’t complicated. It’s really basic accounting. So please think before brushing everyone off.
This is such a ridiculous claim that it's hard to believe without any citation.
Dead reckoning seems to be all they do. Things are great? Let's hire like there's no tomorrow that won't be even better. Things are bad? Let's layoff and cut costs like there's no tomorrow that won't be worse.
It's 95% self-preservation by management. Maybe 5% thinking about tax incentives.
Time will tell if shareholders reward or punish companies that force RTO. So far they don't seem to care. But this will play a role in whether this trend continues or reverses.
Yeah, the meme about an evil conspiracy of corporate CEOs also owning commercial real estate is really, really dumb. Maybe you could theorize that when Andy Jassy and Tim Cook were the only people pushing for RTO, but now more and more companies are doing it, and I assure you that the CEO of (insert random 100-person tech company here) doesn't have deep investments in commercial real estate.
Occam's razor: the simple fact is management thinks that people are more productive when in the office. They may be wrong about that, of course. But if the question is "why is management pushing for RTO," it's simply because they believe their teams will produce more and better output while in the office.
I strongly disagree.
Managers don't care how productive their teams are. They care about keeping their jobs. They care about hiring more people and building an empire and climbing the career ladder.
If your team is more productive working in Hawaii, but you'll lose your job, you're not going to recommend they work from Hawaii. You're going to recommend they be less productive and you keep your job.
The same way if your team doesn't need any more people, you're going to fight to get more people, because you don't care about the company, you care about climbing the ladder.
Of course, they don't see it like this.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Though in my 15+ year career as dev and dev manager I've only ever encountered one person who was intentionally building things poorly for job-related reasons. (Even then, that was for a company doing a federal government contract, so arguably building it in a way that encouraged expensive maintenance contracts was good for the business, in a perverse way.)
I've seen a lot of overengineered solutions with fancy design docs but they've always come from a good place, genuinely thinking that the hot new tool X or architecture Y is going to solve all of the problems. I've built some poorly overengineered solutions myself. But even if that road of overengineered solutions leads to hell, it's at least paved with good intentions.
I agree, I've very rarely seen this done by individuals. However, I've often seen it done by teams.
Wanting to use X and Y and finding a way to shoehorn them into usefulness is called "motivated reasoning." Does that look any different from "coming from a good place?" Heck, it could be both motivated reasoning and coming from a good place.
The VAST majority of developers I've worked with couldn't give 2 shits about the business (as they probably shouldn't - the biz doesn't give 2 shits about them).
Most of them don't really care about self preservation, because if you're an IC - it's so much easier to get a job compared to a manager or a VP or an exec.
But most of them just want to build new things and use the hottest framework or drive some overly complex design just for the sake of it. At the same time, there's bugs that actually effect customers that no one is working on, because no one has time for that because they're too busy re-writing something in some new language or framework or whatever...
Can you see that the second is a likely consequence of the first?
All true
> If your team is more productive working in Hawaii, but you'll lose your job, you're not going to recommend they work from Hawaii.
Huh? I don't see why a team being in Hawaii would lead the manager to lose their job. You still need management in a fully remote setting.
It's just a hypothetical.
In my circle, it seems popular thinking that remote work could lead to less managers.
Time will maybe tell if that's true or false.
But.... why? A manager's work still stays the same whether their teams are in office or online. Really curious to understand why one would think otherwise.
The price is so low it's clear the market is underpricing the externalities massively. I have to admit, the market is the wrong instrument for this problem.
[0] https://carboncredits.com/how-to-calculate-carbon-credits/ [1] https://www.climatepartner.com/en/news/how-sustainable-commu....
They may be acting irrationally but they don't want about it.
The best thing, and probably the only thing, you can do is move to a job that treats you better. Remember though, the old company probably won't miss you because they're not interested in how retention affects performance.
It's best to be dispassionate about it. We're all just "resource" and jobs are just "work".
Disclaimer: I have worked fully remotely since 2016 and wouldn't go back to an office I couldn't cycle to in 30 minutes.
I would think you'd need very specific conditions. The office has to be climate-controlled in any case so any extra AC or heat used at home is incremental. (Other utilities etc. at home are probably pretty minor.) But to be a net negative, you probably have to assume you're not driving or you're only driving a short distance.
I haven't been to the office and we agreed I'm remote first.
If recruiter messages me about "Hot company but onsite", I just ignore it. I honestly don't care about the company. At this point I care about 1-Remote 2-Money.
In which country?
I had an interview for a SW dev position at a Austrian (Europe, not kangaroos) company that manufactures some high tech shit and they said it's 100% in office because if production workers need to be on the factory floor, then it's only fair that so does everyone else, no exceptions, including the SW devs.
I'm struggling to find companies that offer 100% WFH here. Every single company mandates you in the office at least a few days a week here and why I ask them I get the answer "because Covid is over so we're back to normal now and we're more productive when everyone is in the office".
Did you ask them if everyone gets paid the same too, including the owners, and if not, how is that fair?
Why should I care a factory worker or manager needs to be there? I did variety of jobs that required me to be onsite all the time, hence why I switched to computers/programming.
I might be switching to a hybrid model, where I go in for meetings as I will be taking a more of a leadership role. However, if I'm programming office is just not a good place to be, as it is harder for me to focus.
Factory, data center, and a few "owner" roles are expected to be on site. Makes sense for these to be on site, and they should have compensation and amenities (e.g. an office, or a nice cube, or whatever) to justify it.
That's a common culture in Germanic companies. Hey at least everyone is equally miserable.
Besides, corporate silos are not a remote work problem. It has existed for as long as corporations themselves. Most big corps are not really building "complex" products but merely reinventing CRUD apps in-house.
But I'm never going back. No matter what. That 75% pay cut remains a good deal if it is the only available option. Just don't tell my employer I'm willing to take so little.
... I just don't like it enough to make it worth 5ish hours of fighting rush-hour traffic [edit: per week], right after getting the kids where they need to be (for the morning half, at least), not being able to do my mise for dinner over lunch or move some clothes to the dryer during the day, the gas & wear & tear on my car, the risk to life and limb, not being able to work-and-travel, and not being able to move somewhere far away without changing jobs. Plus I can greet my kids when they get home from school every day.
I don't prefer WFH per se—I prefer working in an office, especially in a nice area with cool stuff around, not so much in some soulless office park—but with that all factored in, it's not even a close call. WFH by a mile.
[EDIT] Oh, and child care costs in the Summer. That's ~$2.5-3k/kid of value alone, per year, in sheer cost savings. More, if your workplace is in-person and also not flexible enough that you can get home before 5 in the evening and leave late-ish in the morning—more like $6-8k/kid per year, in that case, since you'll need before-school and after-school care.
You could test the relationship by looking at New Jersey and Connecticut: lots of people are relatively independent from cars for their commutes, but tend to have genuine houses (as opposed to their coworkers who live on the Lower East Side).
I'm guessing you mean the part of CT that's close to NYC. At least when I was growing up in the 70's / 80's, my part of CT had literally no public transportation, except for the occasional bus service for senior citizens.
To me it wouldn't, I live in the middle of no where near my family, I couldn't work for big tech and stay here. But I bet it'd shift a lot of opinions.
That would eliminate about 75% of what I hate about working in an office. Cubes are hell. The only hell worse than that is an open office layout.
I'm French and I never did video calls, ever. It's always audio calls using Teams and we just show the relevant part of the screen to the audience (aka Screen sharing or something).
Is there something I'm missing?
I really disagree, but people want everyone on camera.
At my San Francisco based fintech, the culture that's developed is:
For one-on-ones and small meetings where everybody is expected to participate, cameras are on.
For large one to many broadcasts (like an all hands) generally people turn the camera off.
But I would say probably 95% my meetings have cameras on, so I'm constantly "seeing people".
I've seen companies that dealt with a ton of business travel before WFH got big, prefer actual dial-in-on-a-phone conference calls for meetings, even when all parties happened to be in offices at the time, well into the Zoom era. It weirded me out at first, but I think they may be on to something. If you don't need to screen share, not every call needs to be a video call. Don't need to install anything—anyone with a phone, which is everyone, can join. Easier to join on-the-go. Reliable Internet connection not required. If your phone has signal, you can join the call. Can even join from a wired desk phone.
Other companies, every call's a video call and you'll catch shit if you keep your camera off. Remote cultures exist on a spectrum between those. (and, of course, open source projects with distributed teams are often highly productive with little more than IRC, email, git, and an issue tracker)
It seemed to start because managers who weren’t used to remote wanted to keep tabs on their employees.
I work in the US for a company that doesn't allow WFH.
All of our meetings are via video calls, even though we are all in the same place. This has been the norm in my experience for over a decade now.
The place I worked before my current employer did the same, but allowed people to keep the video off if they chose. Everyone chose to keep the cameras off, except most of the management.
I may be completely wrong, but I'm in France and it's mostly older people (from the age of 30 or 35) who want WFH. Young people don't know they can ask for a higher salary, and, apparently enjoy working in an office or open-space.
Older developers wants personal time, and some want to take care of their kids and family which is way easier if you're at home.
At my last interview, the boss asked if full-remote wouldn't be a problem for me, hinting that it may cause loneliness or psychological issues. I told her that I had friends and could see them whenever I wanted which is why I don't miss offices.
I wound up switching to a coworking space - a local alternative to wework. Didn't directly interact with people there most days but just having a space outside my small apartment and being _around_ other people made a huge difference for my mental health.
Of course, if you have family at home or even roommates, this may be much less of a concern for you.
I was thinking of asking for donations to cover my own coworking physical spot. The reason I thought maybe it doesn’t help is because the last time I was there I wasn’t talking to people really. I thought that meant it wasn’t for me. However the decent ~12 min drive, getting away from the house, being around people, it was really nice.
The online coworking on Zoom suffices sometimes but not when I’m already on there all the time helping manage it.
—
I have people at home but the negatives outweigh the positive when I’m there all the time instead of only a couple hours a day outside sleep.
Thanks for getting me back into this idea
lol young people in 2023 can't afford to live alone.
even entry level FAANG salaries in NYC or SF mean you're still living with a roommate if you're anywhere near your work campus.
Even living with one roommate I felt the isolation, since my office was still my bedroom. Placing my work desk in my bedroom was probably one of the worst moves I've made for my mental health; if my apartment had space to make a shared office I may have had a difference experience and therefore a different opinion.
I think a 15 minute walk to a low-commitment workspace was a good fit for me, but obviously I can't speak for everyone.
Can you see them during the half of your waking life spent working?
[0] https://brainscan.uwo.ca/research/research_summaries/BJHE051...
The improvement to my quality of life that remote work has produced is so monumental that it's hard to even envision how I coped most days before.
I'll be dragged kicking and screaming back into an office, and would only ever consider an in-person role as a stopgap measure while I job hunt.
I just also think its fine for a company to say "look, the way we work is [remote/office], and if you want to work a different way find a different company if that's a deal-breaker".
That said, I do have a 5 min commute, I get better food at work and have an office for myself. If that would be significantly longer, I certainly would prefer to WFH too.
I have a family, so I prefer being able to run into them at the water cooler when I leave my office room.
What's probably true is that a lot of people who want to be remote really want to be remote. They also recognize that remote hasn't been anything like the norm for office workers until COVID.
Whereas, a lot of the people who want to (mostly flexibly) come into an office, more mildly prefer the change in scenery and mingling with co-workers. While some might prefer more of their co-workers to come in, they may well work with people at other sites anyway so it's not really a big deal is all/most of their co-workers come it.
I have a remote exception for now, but I think they will take it away soon and when they do, I'm leaving. I don't want to waste 2 hours of my life commuting either by public transit (less bad) or by driving (really bad because it is very dangerous to drive in the metro area I live). I am 100% productive working alone or coordinate with coworkers remotely (in fact, I spend on average 9 hours a day working when WFH). I will NEVER go back to the office. If the company doesn't have fully remote roles, I'll skip applying for them happily and it is their loss.
I see some really crazy cognitive dissonance with RTO. Some of them say they prefer the new hybrid RTO policy and champion its benefits, but literally every week - without exception thus far - they've made an excuse to not show up at least one day. I think some people are just too nervous about not seeming to "drink the Koolaid". You'd think the seasoned people would be more immune to that kind of behavior, but here we are.
They probably 100% agree with WFH, or hybrid, but their job is to signal, and those RSUs depend on their willingness and ability to conform to corporate culture.
In other words, they hate it too but like $$$$
This RTO thing is b.s. and I'm not afraid to air my grievances in front of my colleagues. In fact, I started looking for fully-remote jobs so that I can leave soon and can write a letter to that VP, who said he likes working from office better, asking him to come to the office often. :D
I've worked for two remote-first companies, and both had a culture of at least turning on web cams. My former company took it a step further and would have an annual gathering of the whole company in February, and regional gatherings in August.
join a club, go places, talk to people. even working from home I walk to local coffee shops and chat with the people there. 6am there is always the same old guy and he reads the whole damn newspaper before 7am -- and is keen to talk. Old-timey, but a nice guy.
I'm on a softball team. there are a few meetup.com groups I like to hit, esp. the local LUG. there is a local non-profit art center and my wife sits on that board -- get to go to a few art events.
the problem is you're stuck at home. get out more, killer.
There is (almost) no salary level that would make me trade the current setup remote work and lots of time off.
I am more motivated to work and be productive than when I worked in an office. And I'm happier about what I do.
I haven't worked a full week in nearly 12 years, and that's how I want it.
Money is nice, but I can, quite literally, always get more money. Time is the one commodity that I absolutely cannot find more of.
Employers need to understand this.
Completely agree how much collusion between companies there is though.
They all have a vested interest in molding work-file culture to their benefit.
I've yet to see any metrics that show forced RTO improves productivity, engagement, or anything else in white-collar industries.
For example:
1. Some flavor of "water cooler conversation is important for innovation!" Just... what?
2. "Collaboration is suffering" without any evidence offered.
3. "Productivity is suffering" without any evidence offered.
4. "How can we know if people are slacking off or not". Well how did you determine that in the office setting? Was it their physical presence from the hours of 9 to 5 that convinced you?
I went through a 4 hour "technical interview" where it was line by line questioning of my CV.
Then to be told I do not have the technical skills.
They may even ask borderline illegal questions to see if you push back.
I had one interviewer ask me how many kids I would be bringing into the country. Is against EU law?
At the time, I decided I wasn't going back to an office again if I could help it. Then the pandemic hit and suddenly everyone is remote and the whole thing flipped upside down.
Now it's a battle with return to the office or "flex". Thankfully, I am immune to this.
And I have taken a substantial cut in pay in the beginning for it to stay this way. I prefer the freedom and flexibility over more money, but that's just me.
Remote isn't new. There have been systems to support remote connectivity since the 90s, and it's been realistic for a tech worker to be permanent remote essentially since Git existed. There were a lot of workers who didn't realize they could do their jobs remotely, and now they do, it's been possible for decades. That cat is never going back into the bag. At least for me, it's been great and made it possible for me to change jobs during the pandemic easily without needing to be as fine-grained in my search as there's many many more remote opportunities now.
That being said: I wonder how much of remote work preferences are actually a result of affordability and quality of life issues in cities, especially in the USA. I would have no problem working a hybrid or even full-time in-person gig in an office... if I could afford to buy a house, walk or bike to work, and live in a quiet, clean, interesting neighborhood. Being paid a decent salary in tech that should be possible, but it's really hard to manage in the USA at the moment for most definitions of quiet/clean/interesting. And before anyone claims that cities can't be "quiet" or "clean", I've spent enough time in nice European cities that do satisfy all three criteria to know that I'm not just being overly picky. Even if I had a million dollars, I doubt I could satisfy those criteria in the USA.
Anyway, as long as we're stuck with an imperfect housing market, remote work is such a blessing. I'm sure it's helpful for some junior workers, too -- if you don't have to move to a $2k+/mo apartment in a major city straight out of college, you'll have a much easier time paying off loans and saving up money early in life. I suspect that's opened a lot of doors for folks who previously couldn't work the most prestigious tech jobs.
I’m skeptical this has anything to do with stock prices.
My opinions of those who are forced to work in the office with no physical requirement to be there, is that they are lower quality applicants with poor negotiation power and an inability to successfully pass interviews for the vast majority of companies in the world offering remote jobs, and thus they can only lean into their one positive attribute: a willingness to get dressed and commute to and from an office everyday.
I initially thought Google's work research teams would study this but I guess that was just a zero interest rate phenomenon and now they're also just another groupthink employer.
Big companies are typically older. They were created and grew in an environment that knew nothing _but_ the office. Having amazing(ly expensive) offices were prized social signals for them and were huge attractors of great talent, especially when residential Internet sucked so hard in comparison.
They also employed tons of people in the area outside of tech (property managers, facilities, janitorial staff, accounts, etc.) and were embedded into their communities.
Also, their DNAs were built _around_ the office. I can easily sympathize with them saying that collaboration happens easiest when everyone's in the office; the leaders saying this likely can't imagine another way of working!
Asking a company as big as Google to simply give all of that up and rent WeWorks isn't impossible, but is a huge, huge ask. While some groups can easily switch to a remote workflow, as companies, they just aren't mentally or physically equipped to do that without a significant number of breaking changes.
That said, _my_ problem with how they are going about it is that they are walking back on their incredibly enthusiastic support for remote work during COVID-times _without saying why_.
Nobody's going out there and saying "So we were super excited about remote work, but after seeing a 30% drop in "productivity" year-over-year, we knew it couldn't be sustained." (This is a fake reason; I have no idea what the numbers are). They also aren't saying "We can't give up our office spaces without significantly wrecking the community that formed around us." Instead, their giving platitudes like "collaboration happens best in the office" and leaving us to conjecture the change of heart.
I love the fact that smaller companies are making remote work work for them, but I'm afraid that so long as big tech gets bigger, the effect is temporary at best.
That's evidence that the reason is nefarious. And not "the workers won't like it" nefarious, because they don't care at all about the workers opinion.
At best it's "if we say that, everybody will know we are incompetent", what IMO is quite likely the correct option.
What this really means is NOT what they said ("...bigger stuff needs more in-person coordination, blah, blah,blah...").
It is actually the phenomenon found by a long-ago study of remote vs in-person management (I wish I could locate it). It found that teams under good managers are actually made better by remote work, and teams under bad managers were made worse. The good managers focused on results, while the bad managers focused on indicators of work (time spent in chairs, at screens, in meetings, etc.).
In short, remote work amplifies the differences in management quality.
What this study shows is that larger companies have overall lower quality and far larger quantity of bad managers.
What they really need for performance is not more office time, as that will only paper over the problem of bad managers. What they need is far greater investment in good management (methods, training, etc.).
I'd love to create / work-for a company that builds out WFH office spaces. I.e., that specializes in all the success factors:
- workspace soundproofing* / acoustics
- HVAC
- networking
- electricity
- collaboration technology (esp. the ultimate prize for software developers: a viable replacement for in-person whiteboard collaboration, that's also compatible with corporate network security needs)
- ergonomic furniture
- features that help with mental health: natural light, sufficient artificial light, etc.
- "HOW-TO" guides for dealing with other residents. I.e., policies and/or tools to make it clear when the workers can be interrupted, etc.
- consulting with employers to make sure all of the above can work in harmony with the rest of the company
* I mean "soundproofing" in the colloquial sense, i.e. good-enough psycho-acoustic improvement.
> “Bigger companies, more complex companies, are more likely to be looking for more professional types of management,” said Kathy Harrigan, a professor of corporate management at Columbia University’s business school. “Investors expect that.”
hmmmm...
> And professionalism to them means butts in chairs. Harrigan says in-person work is necessary to coordinate the complicated, varied businesses these tech conglomerates now operate. The move to AI has only made in-person coordination more of a necessity, she said.
> “They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.
[Bernie Sanders Voice]: I am once again asking Management for evidence [0].
> “In the face of volatility and uncertainty, it is human nature to want to revert back to something that is a known quantity,” said Caitlin Duffy, a research director at Gartner, about the push to return to the office. “And so there might be some psychological things happening that may be overriding the evidence in front of them.”
> The evidence, she says, shows that offering flexibility in where people work makes them happier and, by extension, more productive and innovative. Accounts to the contrary were “unfounded.” What’s worse, Duffy said, is that arbitrarily calling people back to the office might actually hurt workers’ productivity and innovation by driving fatigue and burnout.
Well that's a refreshing turn of events! But can I see the evidence?
The capitalist class is not happy to have their proles to have the freedom of movement and choice of where they work. Much like how America ties expensive healthcare (and high risk of bankruptcy) to working for The man, forcing the white collared proletarians into the office shows power and importance of work over life. This also explains why it seems to be the CEOs pushing for it (in reality it is probably the board of directors i bet)
Officer workers almost always were insulated from the bloody history of workers rights and strikes, and I don't think there's a single white collar union in America, but I was surprised to find out how always on guard european engineers/white collar workers are about the employer trying to take advantage of you.
(They did eventually do 3 day hybrid, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people come in 1 or 2 days)