The damaging results of mandated return to office
entrepreneur.com
entrepreneur.com
It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision.
People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgrade” imposed by others, unless it’s something they’ve decided on their own and on purpose.
The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions.
We're discussing about the majority of people and not for the HN "elite" that have the privilege/luxury of earning hundreds of thousands, thus affording to be picky with their next work positions.
I'm working fully remote the last few years and I'm troubled on what is going to happen when the hybrid or RTO call arrives. I'm not in a position to be very picky and for sure I'll try to find another remote job, but as you correctly state: num of people seeking WFH > num of WFH positions
Producing food and shelter are quite well suited to being done at home. Once upon a time that was the norm.
> The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions.
There is no limit on WFH positions. It is technically possible for everyone to find one. However, you will often be entering uncharted territory to explore them. Commuting to a restaurant to flip burgers, or whatever, is much more well understood and thus carries far less risk. Indeed, the worker will prefer low risk opportunities in the vast majority of cases.
I'm thinking about jobs like nurses, electricians, factory workers, teachers etc.
I can see WFH jobs decreasing your salary if you lived in a big city with high wages before, but for anyone else the advantages of global competition pay a massive premium right now. Maybe that changes at some point, but looking at the massive shortage of software experts my country is facing right now, this point is still decades away.
A common form of agricultural contract in many countries, up to the WWII and in some countries even after was a form of rent where the owner provided the farm, and the tenant worked on it and they divided the crop (or whatever the farm produced), in English it is called sharecropping:
In sharecropping (with a lot of nuances depending on the specific countries and even different regions in a same country) the landowner and the tenant were some sort of partners, both had all the interest in having a better/larger crop (or raise more cattle, etc.).
In a normal capitalistic employer/employee relationship, the employees have no particular interest in the final outcome, they are only scared of being fired if they don't meet some (often arbitrarily set) "productivity goals".
Additionally different company's have different ways of incentivizing employee "ownership". Everything from RSUs, Employee stock purchase plans, a Christmas bonus for a good year, etc.
A bonus (or other forms of incentives) are additional to the base salary.
Until you are fired (or if the company does not pay your wage anymore) your salary/wage is fixed, and you get it no matter how the company is going.
In sharecropping the year you (as a tenant) got a bad crop, you wouldn't have anything to eat, and would have basic survival problems.
Orthogonal to the productivity argument, have there been any studies trying to find the motivation for people preferring/hating WFH?
My guess is you tend to prefer it if you have a social circle that's not your co workers and hate it if you don't.
I really enjoyed back when working from the office was optional and I was the only one showing up!
Holy Ahura Mazda! You have intrusive notifications enabled? That's not a good idea even when working in the office...
I could list my reasons too but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be it for real. We're good at making up reasons for ourselves.
Don't want to be bothered by a baby then go back to the office.
The parent poster simply said “Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back.”
And the reply was essentially “to each their own but my WFH experience was different “ and you’re ready to jump down their throat with accusations of lack of solidarity.
"Hey, we have this problem." "To each their own but it doesn't affect me!"
Why waste your breath to say this?
Employers taking the posters point into consideration may mean that they’re a remote first company, but they also provide coworking passes for people that appreciate not working from home.
In the same way that pre-covid management monoculture was “WFH could never work”, the monoculture now risks being dominated by people who have dedicated home offices who seemingly can’t empathise with people who appreciate commuting somewhere, feigning outrage at anyone who could dare suggest that there are multiple perspectives.
e: rewording
They were giving another perspective, not forcing anyone to do anything.
There are some workers who are more productive at WFH, some who are equally productive in either setting (but prefer WFH for personal reasons), and some who are less productive at WFH. Ideally everybody should just do what they're best at. If you're productive at home, work from home. If you're most productive at work, go into the office. Everybody's happy.
So where's the problem? It's that among the group that is most productive at the office, some of them still prefer to work at home where they fall prey to distractions and their output suffers. And rather than just coach those people appropriately, management finds it easier to just try and make everyone come in.
Which points to an even larger problem. That some managers are struggling with how to do their jobs in the WFH environment. And rather than acknowledge that they are the source of their own troubles, it's easier to pretend that the business is unmanageable remotely and everybody needs to come in.
That's exactly my point! I find it ridiculous that CEO's think they somehow have to create the same policy for everyone, as if giving people a choice was somehow a taboo. We've come a long way realizing self-organizing teams work better than micromanaged ones etc., I wonder how long it will take PHBs to understand that giving people a choice is not just good for them but it's overly beneficial to the whole company.
Unfortunately I think this is kind of a cope the remote people on the team use to feel ok about it (I've been that person quite a bit). But the people having coffee and lunch together more regularly just do form closer bonds and that matters. I don't think it matters as much as a lot of executives want everyone to believe it does, and I think remote work has giant benefits that aren't obviously or always or even usually overcome by "face time", but it's not not a real thing.
But we met on a planned company trip (with the excuse of a Vegas trade show, we went and met one week early) and that helped immensely with bonding and team building.
If I manage a remote team, I'll push for a similar team bonding exercise whenever possible.
It doesn't have to be crappy; I spent several years as one of the remote participants in a team like that, and it was one of the high points of my career. We made heavy use of instant messaging, and we met up in person for a week every quarter. People kept in touch well enough.
The issue is that companies are forcing people into offices. Nobody forces anyone into WFH (as a trend).
It a mute point, that people like different work environments or that different tasks might require different environments.
If you or some subset of your workforce has a suboptimal home situation, look at arranging individual coworking spaces. Everyone can shorten their commute by picking whichever space is conveniently located. You also sidestep the challenges of having some team members collocates while others are remote.
I prefer my small kid make a ruckus and than 50 phones ringing and shit talking and crap going on in the super open office place.
Glad my company saw the tide of times and switched to full WFH with office just a meeting space.
I think people are beginning to miss the social aspect of being physically close to their colleagues.
> _and you like the taste_
If you don’t, that’s fine, and your preferences need not be imposed on your peers.
Open office environments are terrible for productivity, stress, health, etc. — the science is pretty well settled here.
I've been working from home almost exclusively since lockdowns started, and it's hugely beneficial to me, while adding minimal burden to the actual work. Being in my own space, with my cats nearby, my own kitchen just a few steps away, and my family doing their own work in other rooms...
And this is as compared to my own spacious office, with a decent minifridge and a back room I can sit in if I need to be more clearly "unavailable".
Thinking back to my previous job, where I worked in a cube farm, I just shudder inside. There is no way in hell I'm ever going back to that soul-destroying atmosphere, and by far the most reliable way to ensure that is to only take full-remote jobs from now on.
Just sayin'
I know what you mean, but once you've had true greyscale, nothing really comes close.
There's a reason people watch uncoloured movies.
Let me guess, you are in a low cost of living area (at least relative to your income) and have a big house?
I live in NYC. Residential floor space is very expensive here. My wife and I on two tech salaries can afford a fairly large place by the standards of our area, but it's definitely not large enough for 2 adults to comfortably work from home with a toddler also running around.
For us, the optimal solution is hybrid with a schedule where on any given day one of us is wfh and one in the office.
When both of us were forced to work from home full time, we managed, but it was suboptimal and a drag on productivity. The "fruits of WFH" turned out somewhat bitter.
I guess I'll never know since, 1. corporate execs don't post to HN comments section and 2. even if they did they would probably not admit to a narcissistic need to bask in the buzz of an office full of their minions.
Letting everyone do what they want is not a path towards everyone being happy. I think a better approach is for companies (or at least teams) to land somewhere on the spectrum from full in-person to full remote, and then employees can work at the place that fits them best.
I know anecdata doesn't count but I observed the same in various companies: yes, those who prefer to work from the office miss their colleagues, but are surrounded by like-minded people and that works better for everyone.
In stead of thinking: I'd like to go back to the office because our home is too small, why don't you think: I'd like to work from home so that I can afford a bigger house for less cost?
This doesn't mean everyone will—there are certainly other benefits to living in a city besides proximity to workplace. But it is likely that, given time (and probably some common-sense changes to housing policies), this will result in less pressure for apartments, meaning that people who do remain in cities will be likely to be able to afford more space.
Are we seeing that?
Certainly lots of people have left SF, but the pandemic / WFH did not reverse the general trend toward urbanism. The geographic flexibility has been in people picking different cities, not in people choosing to move to rural areas en masse.
I am missing the kid component though.
Orthogonal to WFH conversation, are there even low COL areas left in the US that aren't complete and total sh*tholes?
In my state, houses that were selling for $150-200k pre-Covid in low COL areas are now going for 350-400k, and that's not even anywhere near urban centers, it's about 50-70 miles out in more rural areas.
You have to remember at one time people actually left their desks to go to a conference room and meet. The first iteration of bringing in remote workers to that was often speakerphone systems maybe with multiple microphones if you were lucky. You'd literally have twenty people in a room all talking to each other. It was nearly impossible to keep up if multiple conversations broke out and often it was work to be heard. There was no view of the whiteboard and people had to remember to share any materials and be explicit as they advanced through it.
Cisco's telepresence system that tried to create an experience mirroring sitting across from each other at a table was a huge step up, but still it was a large hardware investment and the rooms were a scarce resource.
Fast forward to today and everyone has the "Tandberg" equivalent of a single person telepresence device that was limited to senior management. In fact everyone has a better experience at their desktop with universal access to web-hosted whiteboard and collaborative tools, and (assuming broadband network speeds are home) all those things work equally well at home or in the office.
So the progression of making it easier and easier for remote offices to collaborate has reached its logical conclusion. At least where I work it was pitched as a way to cut travel costs. And if I'm being cynical it's worked in that the senior staff are still free to travel while small departments now share travel budget that was previously available on a per-person basis. My personal corporate card has a credit line that's nearly what my boss' travel budget is for fourteen people.
So with no need to travel and no local staff or coworkers, it's frankly better to work from home: same zoom calls, same excalidraw, same figma, confluence, teams, etc. And no scheduling a desk for the day. No loud coworkers yelling on their headset when they get excited. I can have my preferred mouse and un-office-friendly mechanical keyboard. I can wear a lapel microphone and use my also un-office-friendly speakers instead of being forced to wear a headset or earbuds. I can have a wide screen monitor and a better camera. In short: productivity-wise my experience is the same or better, but comfort-wise it is materially better in every way. When every other coworker is already in another state, for me and a lot of people like me there's literally no downside.
And there's zero sympathy for corporations that worked so hard to make it easy to work from any other office only to discover it's just as easy to work from home.
It's also a huge PITA since it requires people to live near their office -- can't move to rural Kentucky, still stuck in the burbs -- while simultaneously requiring them to maintain a at-home office AND work office.
Honestly if it's not 100% in person then make it 100% remote and learn to structure it that way. Otherwise it's the worst of both worlds.
I do think the geographical agnosticism of 100% remote is an enormous advantage, but there is no correspondingly enormous advantage of 100% in-office. If you've already taken the hit to give up the advantages of 100% remote, you can at least keep the advantages of flexibility by going hybrid.
Trivializing the work of others isn't making your point any stronger. There's plenty of complexity in delivering software via the web that benefits from in person collaboration.
It seems to me that the hybrid model of two or three days in office and two or three days at home is quickly gaining mindshare, and I've frankly become envious of that.
Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab's is a good start) to start grasping it.
But it will happen and the companies/startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc
And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).
Why do the people living in those cities feel so strongly that this isn't the case[1]? How does the city administration deal with skyrocketing rents?
[1] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-...
You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight.
This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.
There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut.
Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too?
Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?
I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces.
While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative.
All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.
Speaking personally, everyone I’ve spoken to on the matter (myself included) have zero desire to return to a traditional office.
The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.
This is obviously hyperbole for... living a life?
Hiring, the same way RO outfits can access unique talent, and information transfer, particularly to newer team members. Also, in industries where over-documentation is an unnecessary liability.
I enjoy going to an office, having a change of scenery, interacting with people (both close friends and casual acquaintances), brainstorming ideas with a small group around a whiteboard, getting lunch with colleagues, etc, etc...
Sure, the "writing code" part of the job is easier when there are fewer distractions. And a crowded open office can be an annoying source of distractions.
And I definitely enjoy having lunch more often with my family, or hanging out with the dogs, or sitting out on my deck under the trees while I read my morning email.
But working in an office was nice too, and I miss it.
You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
Speaking as a senior manager at a smallish software company (300 people), absolutely, decision makers are in my experience smart and competent.
But what they don't do is necessarily make decisions based on data.
I don't believe for a second that most RTO debates are based on meaningful measurement. As with a lot of corporate decisions, I suspect it's a lot of HIPPOs, fingers in the air, and herding behavior.
The pandemic hit, we transitioned to remote work, I was happy. Everyone quickly adapted and learned how to efficiently work from home. About two years later, two things happened:
1. Surveys and postmortems showed that remote work lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity at our company.
2. Company leadership started talking about a mandated return to office.
People of course challenged this decision, pointing to the data, and no real explanation was given. Those who wanted to returned to office, but the mandated return was indefinitely postponed and eventually silently dropped as the manager primarily pushing for a return left the company.
That's precisely the problem. The decision makers suffer from extreme confirmation bias and Dunning-Kruger effect. So what happens is they run surveys, polls etc which are loaded and indicate that employees would 'love' to return to the office. They mandate RTO and are then surprised when people leave en masse because the data they've collected is wrong.
That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect.
They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office.
They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distance.
They may not be dumb, but their idea of "normal" is not what covid hath wrought, and therefore a return to the office is a return to "normal", and thus a heaving sigh of relief can be had that we're now past that extended weirdness.
They may not be dumb, but they may not be able to understand that people are motivated differently from themselves and from each other. "I work better in the office, therefore y'all do too". (admittedly there's a bit of dumbness in that one, however that's far from saying it's unrealistic or rare).
> according to data they are seeing
Anecdotal warning: Outside of the "best of the best" kinda places, my experience is that most decision makers work on 'feel' and not data - whether data is available or not.
Thing is, that normally works out, but large shifts like the "new normal" during the pandemic can take a while for the gut to pick up, and so the default is to get back to the known-good state...
I agree. They are seeing the data that their skills of busy-bodies bouncing between meetings and impromptu conversations at other employees desks don't translate well to remote work and they understand that their nice 3mil$ house in the valley will cost much less in couple of years if everyone embraces full remote, so they are doing their best to preserve the status quo.
It's hardly all roses.
Reducing people's different experiences to a homogeneous grey mush is overly reductive.
More progressive corps embraced online socializing earlier, and honestly that's all I need. To be sure something is lost socially by not being in person, but the workplace is not social-drinks club, or if it is that's where your productivity went.
You still build connections with people you only meet online, older folk might have more trouble with that, which makes sense why they might struggle to manage if they heavily depend on "making friends" to do their job.
Training and onboarding can be issues, but barring a straight up lack of talent generally focused efforts are probably better than just assuming the new employee will "make connections" and learn via osmosis.
And yes this might mean going to the office once in a while or to a company event etc
Not an unsurmountable problem but it's not negligible neither (as much as it is slowly growing)
I work in an organization with 10s of thousands of workers across the United States. I will never, in the best circumstances, see more than a handful of them in person, other than in-person team meetings, which have themselves become increasingly rare as the team is more geographically diverse than ever and travel budgets are slashed due to ready electronic collaboration tools. So ... what connection? I mean, I don't really care about having a personal connection with these folks anyway. I like them and enjoy having a positive professional relationship with them, but they're my coworkers and we have amazing tools to build those relationships. If some of them become friends, that's fine, but it's not anywhere close to a prerequisite for me to be successful and fulfilled at work.
My entire career I've worked successfully with people I never met who live on the other side of the planet. The whole discussion about the necessity of in-person collaboration over the last 3 years has struck me as one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I haven't had a conference call in 3 years. I cannot emphasize how revolutionary and positive that change is. I see my coworkers' faces more now than I ever did in the past thanks to Zoom and Teams. It's nothing short of miraculous how much better things are now.
In return for giving up a pointless commute to use a different Internet connection and for spending less time pandering to bosses who want to promote buddies who look like them instead of competent leaders, I can spend more time with people and things I actually care about and more time doing work I love. Every single bit of this new arrangement is roses.
Tech companies are not representative.
Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here.
As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).
- proximity to family and community support
- quality of schools for kids
- some people want to live out in the boonies, with a hobby farm or a real homestead
- shared cultural or political values
- some folks want to be nomadic, couch surfing or living out of a souped up van or rv
- some folks want to be able to stay with extended family for longer
- some folks want to cowork locally
- I know one guy who lives in a low cost of living area and reinvest the arbitrage back into his local community while still living comfortably
In my family’s case, I have been regularly going to the local indoor play gym so that my toddler can wear himself out. It’s too hot to play outside.
Also, flexibility != remote
There are remote work places which installs invasive software to monitor “butt-in-seat”, and you don’t really get flex time.
I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares.
With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...this trend is hostile to human nature and relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales.
Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal".
There's no "not ready", it entirely a choice by management.
Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software. It's even worse there. Their remote culture is highly dysfunctional and she goes into the office 5 days a week even though she doesn't need to.
An example: in some companies, the receptionist knows who has entered and exited the building, and can sometimes become the defacto person that can help people find each other. Someone whose effectiveness depends upon this informal role of the receptionist will find that they can’t work like this anymore when the company goes remote.
What are you talking about then?
> Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here?
I don't know what you're talking about. What result? What company? Can you give some more detail or did I miss a post?
I have many concrete examples right in front of me, which is the number of companies and government agencies that went to remote extremely rapidly during covid shutdowns.
> Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software.
Like I said, that's just a simple choice. Most probably by some self-important bureaucrat who wants to sabotage the remote work scheme. All they would have to do is use normal software like many other places permit, and that would be most of the battle.
Most companies attempt to have office culture and working style while working remotely, which absolutely sucks.
There are not a lot of companies (And employees) who have figured out how to do remote well.
The vast, vast majority of person-hours required to go from drawing board to bits of silicon running in customer's computer can be done entirely without physical presence though.
I know mechanical and structural engineers and it's much the same for them.
* On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company.
* Socialising - there needs to be a regular opportunity (not mandatory) to meet up in person, even if there's no office.
* Communication - this is a biggie. The company can't just install Teams/Slack/Skype everywhere and expect collaboration to continue as before. Instant messaging apps are terrible for building asynchronous communication habits, since they incentivise quickfire messages. The company needs to publish guidelines on how to give status updates and ask for support, and potentially make communication skills be part of employee evaluation (if not already).
* Evaluation - remote work gives senior management a bad feeling because they don't feel like they know what's going on in the company. The root cause of this is that they're not actually evaluating employee output, but rather something else (e.g. how the employee contributes to meetings or responds to in-person questions). This kind of works in the office since those things correlate somewhat with employee quality. But remote work forces managers to think about how to objectively measure employee productivity solely on their work output... and some of them either resent the extra effort or just aren't imaginative enough.
None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.
In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.
I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"
It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).
> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.
This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.
> all electronic onboarding anyway
That's not true, you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office. And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
Right. Far from the "few and far between" narrative here, isn't it?
> That's not true,
I'm talking about HR onboarding. Signatures, payroll, boilerplate regulatory compliance training etc.
> you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office.
Nope, not if HR is located elsewhere. It's phone, email, electronic meetings.
> And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
"If you're in the office you'll be in the office".
All of this stuff is trivial to do online. I don't pretend it has exactly the same results, and one possibly valid concern is monitoring and hepling newer and less proven employees. It doesn't mean that just because there are certain pros and cons that the whole idea falls in a heap at the first hurdle though, so those kinds of anecdotes do not address what I wrote.
> In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
None of this is rocket science, and all of the tools to do it trivially exist in any software suite any company uses even ones that aren't remote. Email, calendar, chat. Or a physical pen and notepad if you must. Checking in on people isn't some incredible and complicated new skill managers have to learn, that's what they do.
Studies in the UK demonstrate that feeling isolated and making connections with colleagues in a remote environment is a major concern for younger employees: https://universumglobal.com/blog/the-leadership-gap-young-wo...
This is an organisational issue which isn't solved just by making tools like email and calendar available.
The point I'm making is that it's not because an organization is "not ready" that remote work is not permitted. Implying there is some set of steps or purchases they need to make and then they are ready. It's because the people who can make the decision don't want to.
I thought that I repeatedly made it clear that I made no value judgement on the remote work and didn't claim that is a bad decision to make.
I absolutely disagree with this. At least I disagree that most companies can do so and be confident of maintaining productivity. I believe it requires a big shift in organisational and operational processes and attitudes within the company.
I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a mode of work that more or less helped out the rest of the company.
These things were not free. The pioneer had to really put himself out there to implement the remote best practices. By the time I got there, most of that was in place.
Just off the top of my head, unorganized:
- manage outcomes instead of time spent
- Explicit presence: as a remote worker, you have to be explicit and deliberate about making your presence known. Status emojis, socialization, and “thinking out loud” threads
- Use [async] tags in messages whenever you can to help manage urgency of reply. Same with statuses
- Daily standups become even more important in order to promote social bonding, including brief chit-chat right before everyone shows up. Video if you can. It is about the only time the team bonds together
- Use the zoom chat for backchannel, so that you can still get something out without interrupting the speaker
- Having said that: Slack history records everything. Do not use Zoom chat as meeting notes. Put that into Slack, and then into Confluence/Notion/OneNote.
- Shared documents to work out a plan over Zoom helps keeps things focused
- You will be exercise writing a lot more. Leverage that. Be more thoughtful about replies. You can always link to conversations in tickets and documents
- Make use of do not disturb and periods when not to recieve notifications
- Keep your calendar up to date. Make sure to block out maker time (focus time), lunch, async times, and when you are running errands. That way, people can quickly schedule a time with you if needed
- Slack huddles in open channels can simulate drop-in calls. If you like pairing, you can start a huddle with yourself and work there. Rename the huddle to make it clear that you are open to drop ins, add a summary in the huddle thread to make the work visible
- hybrid meetings suck. People in person have to make more of an effort to make people who are remote in known. Conference rooms should be setup to put zoom folks on the wall, and zoom folks should put their video up. (It works better as all in person or all zoom meeting)
- team, dept, and maybe company should periodically bring everyone together onsite to do the things you cannot do remote
I disagree. As long as i still see traffic in cities, it means remote work is still a tiny minority
Or do you want police or ambulances or surgeons to also work remotely?
Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications.
When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting French truck drivers the EU pushed through new regulations that required the drivers and the trucks (!!) to visit their home country at least every 2 months.[0]
>The most controversial measure is an obligation for trucks to return to their country of establishment at least every eight weeks
I think political entities will fight a lot with dirty tricks like this to keep the tax revenue and employment in their jurisdiction.
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logisti...
Bulgaria (and Romania, per linked article) were on the receiving end of said dirty tricks. The problem is Western EU trucking companies did not want the much cheaper to operate Eastern EU truckers eating their lunch. The "dirty tricks" did not come from Bulgaria/Romania in this case.
I can say with the utmost confidence that spending more time and money downtown is the last thing that my 3 hour round trip commute motivates me to do
It sounds like you'd be very unlikely to enter downtown for any other reason. Also, may I suggest you move your home or employment? 3 hours is a lot of commuting and that is bad for you.
Unfortunately, they will have a lot to lose by not being cheap anymore. At least for the locals. See Lisbon or Boise, for example.
This is somewhat wishful thinking: most companies cannot have employees that live outside their country. These workers instead need to become consultants, and contract to the client companies. Employing someone overseas is not easy at all, and most companies just aren't set up to do it. There is a new industry of companies that specialize in "employing" digital nomads, and then contracting their services to their employers back in the other country, but of course this adds extra cost to the client. For US-based remote jobs, they usually plainly say "US residents only" to avoid these hassles.
It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown in boats, stay in detention centres, leave the EU to keep the Poles out of the job market etc. exist primarily to protect local working markets. IMHO a people doing the same job in SF and Bangalore must be compensated the same but the fact that they aren't is exactly why it's much better to live in USA. That's also why you have H-2B visa quota.
I'm still puzzled about this, don't you think that this could have the same effect on your industry as the manufacturing moving to China? Especially for coders, don't you think that people in poor countries can code just fine? Technology is not only making the distance a non issue - recent developments are also removing the language barriers.
The money that even the junior US tech workers are making is at life changing level for most of the world. This will be tapped.
Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison.
Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway.
I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.
The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results.
I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.
People in different countries/continents work differently, have different expectations around how much initiative non-managers should take, etc.
I’m not saying one is worse than the other. What I’m saying is that trying to mix these levels and hoping to exploit cheap labor to offshore doesn’t work well in my experience and what’s saved on paper is paid tenfold in customer attrition, employee turnover, high severity outages, that kind of thing.
For example, having had experience with Indian sweatshops, the people working there were paid a pitance compared to us, had to use their own equipment, no paid sick days, forced to commute several hours to work and back… imagine how interested they were in the work, being treated like subhumans by their employer. And whenever we’d talk about technical problems, they’d always say yes even if it turned out they had no clue what needed to be done or how to do it. I believe it was a factor of the tyrannical management there, but also a cultural thing. Same with asking for feedback, we had a culture (country, not corporate) where it’s common to ask for and receive honest feedback. The offshored staff could never wrap their heads around it. Or being asked to do something unclear/stupid: onshore would bring it up/challenge it/ask for clarifications, offshore would just go ahead and do… something, anything. Then we’d have to spend time redoing it and rethinking it losing weeks of work. But it was cheap, look how much were saving!!
I hope this doesn’t come as racist. I do t mean that the Indian offshores were worse people than onshore employees! What I mean is that there was a huge values gap between the two, very different ways of working, different expectations, different power dynamics and that they absolutely didn’t mesh together well at all.
We were appalled at the conditions offshore had to work under. One of the workers had cancer and couldn’t really afford the treatment because apparently health insurance isn’t really a thing in India and had to come work sick because they couldn’t afford the treatment otherwise… it was a disgrace and we tried to pressure management to face the human cost of their penny pinching.
It’s not impossible to have offshore and onshore working together and save money but I’ve never seen it done well so I’m very doubtful it can work.
And I think that’s our moat: we work differently, have different values, and different levels of initiative that local comapnies benefit from more than the marginal amount saved on exploiting offshore labor (in the context of sweatshops)
That said, with all the communications in place today I think the culture is becoming global with newer generations having less and less difference between countries.
Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones.
As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to affect why that doesn't work.
Them: Hello, <name>
8-16 hours pass
Me: Hello, did you need something?
8-16 hours pass
Them: How are you?
8- 16 hours pass
As a matter of fact, even when you chit chat do it in self contained units. You don't know how much time passes till your co workers read your joke in #general.
The pandemic made it clear that there are naturally forming windows of better collaboration around longitudinal time zones. Outside of +/- 2 time zones becomes fairly difficult on a regular basis. West coast to East coast is difficult.
For Americans, there may be some interesting competition coming out Mexico and perhaps a few of the more advanced countries of South America like Brazil and Argentina.
For Europeans I would expect the same from Africa, from countries like South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, etc.
But once you are outside of +/- 2 time zones you either need one side to shift schedules or have zone local orgs.
At that point it’s less about remote work and more about outsourcing. We already know what outsourcing looks like, and it’s very different from remote work.
Bottom line, I do expect to see increased competition for remote jobs, but for the good roles that matter the competition is not truly global.
Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.
Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.
With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.
The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now.
They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.
Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.
Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones.
COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option.
People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was.
Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events.
Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties.
I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.
My guess is that you're also more likely to lose your best performers - since they will have higher confidence in being able to find a remote-friendly job somewhere else.
It's not really a WFH/RTO thing so much as a benefits thing. The same would be true for another variable like free lunches.
What we do know is anecdotal evidence of very influential and high performers at various FAANG type companies that have ended up leaving due to forced RTO.
Anecdotally, I work at a large company that fully supports 0% to 100% remote work, and I work with a wide mix. Some people, and some roles, just do better in the office. Others don’t. I’d be very suspicious of forming beliefs based on anecdotes, especially if they coincidentally align to your expectations.
Less certain about roles that are generally technical. The strongest claim for in-office work, collaboration, is mostly a well solved problem for at least software, possible simple administration that just relies on some collaborative spreadsheets. Sitting everyone in a stuffy boardroom all staring at the same boring spreadsheet is likely to cause stress and mental fatigue, not increased collaboration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7889069/ This is a well known effect.
Even large "interactive" meetings in remote settings can be counter productive - of course not all meetings are bad and one key to being an excellent manager is picking the right people for the right meetings, but the idea that your "top performers" objectively speaking will be the ones experiencing the most stress is seriously suspect.
What is more likely is some combination of workers who either "do well" in high stress environments, usually implying they are healthy and have some effective stress management techniques and as such are recognized as top performers compared to those unable to effectively manage their stress, or those in mainly technical areas have not yet experienced (somehow) the benefits of less stressful remote-work environments. E.g. parents or partners in cramped personal quarters being more distracted compared to e.g. a private office space.
Finally, for those workers that have an active job component where they must e.g. be on site for customer testing or perhaps they are a technical liason, some hybrid approach may work better - in office for resources which are cost prohibitive to simulate or when their role requires them to interact in an another capacity e.g. as a technician, security guard, or triage such as a front desk.
There is also the case where "top performers" are leeching off their colleagues e.g. where they can "get more done" because they can interrogate and corral others but where others are mostly experiencing productivity hits as a result of the constant interruption.
Forcing in office work for everyone means all the people who work better remotely now…simply don’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36501068
We’ll just find out in a couple years or decades by observing who is still standing.
I think the RTO folks are in the latter group. If their work was measured objectively by results, they wouldn't be considered high performers.
Firstly the people who are mandating RTO want to think of themselves as high performers. They want RTO so "high performers want RTO" is obvious to them.
Secondly a lot of non-doing managers want to be able to justify their existance. To do that they need people in the office to distract by walking around and having conversations etc. They can't do this when people are just WFH doing deep work.
Thirdly, if they know a manager wants RTO, then people who want to suck up to that manager will say they want RTO and will come in to the office to actively suck up to the manager. The manager will see these sycophants as high performers because they are spending their time fluffing the ego of the aformentioned manager.
Behavior you describe would never get my any promotion anywhere I worked. Maybe I was just lucky, who knows.
Does this mean that 58% of companies that mandated a return underestimated attrition? And 71% are doing fine with recruitment?
Would you rather get paid $100k and be paid extra for oncall, or $350k and not be compensated for oncall? That's the real comparison that's being made, and why people consistently choose the FAANGs where on-call is an expectation -- the extra on call pay isn't going to make up for the big gap in total comp.
The hardest part for me is balancing slack and video conferences. Slack can be useful but it's hard to have more nuanced conversations and make complex decisions. Those really need conversation to make them effective.
A friend recently mentioned that they are on a forced return to office 3 days a week and they spend most of their day on calls with people in other cities and countries. If I had a job I was mildly disinterested in and was forced to commute for no reason, that would nudge me to quietly apply for other jobs. Any company claiming to be climate friendly and forcing people to commute is hypocritical (cough cough Amazon).
If someone wants to be in an office, then accommodate them. Then for everyone else shift the office space budget to the travel budget. Done.
But on the other hand it's Amazon and its ilk that allow people to be at home all the time, not out running errands. Don't get me wrong: I'm no fan of Amazon. But on one hand you have a lot of self-proclaimed car-haters pretending that nobody needs a car, but then wanting to take away the street capacity that makes carlessness possible by enabling delivery.
I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more. Even without online shopping I'd still prefer remote work.
"I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more"
Not sure what the point is there.
> it's Amazon and its ilk that allow people to be at home all the time, not out running errands.
I was addressing that line
I've found that I can shop during business hours fine. And if not during business hours I can shop for what I need in the evenings before stores close. It comes down to time management.
For example, yesterday I took an hour break for lunch and ran a couple errands while I was out. No big deal.
we're really talking about 1h of an 8h workday, so about 11-13% depending on your denominator. not trivial but something I'd happily do.
0 https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...
There was this IC who was working on cross departmental stuff. Things like pipelines, UI component libraries, build tools, etc. He would frequently go on walks to think, either during the work day and return to the office or to go back home and work some more. At this amazing place, we had extensive timesheets to fill in (with 15 min granularity, was great). That guy used to count his walks as work time on specific projects (15–30 min walks.) The joke is that management came down hard in him because you can’t get paid to walk as you’re paid to be writing code. Thinking about code for the company isn’t a paid activity unless it happens in the office. What a sucker this guy was, asking to be paid for taking a walk harharhar!
My colleagues then added (after the manager left the room) that as a result the guy in question took much longer “walks” to think things through in an empty conference room every day instead. Nobody saw the stupidity in that and he left shortly after this new policy was enforced.
This was the single most toxic worst company I’ve ever worked at.
My point is that employers still think that butt not in seat = not working, and since I’m paying you I can make you suffer and I own you for that duration. My job sucks and I can’t work remote so why should I allow you, puny peasant, to have it better than me when you didn’t “work” or “deserve” it?
This is a huge red flag for companies. Currently I can just go for a 15-30 minute walk with my dog if I get stuck and still count it as work time.
If I'm at the office I can go grab some snacks and go sit on the break area sofas and watch some crap on my phone - still working.
It's actually been scientifically proven that a change of environment brings more creativity and makes problem-solving easier.
---
At a company I worked years ago we had "work reatreats" where we booked a conference room from a random hotel or office for a day. Breakfast and afternoon tea was catered.
Everyone had to pick a few tasks they thought they could finish during the day, we turned off all communication devices and started working roughly on a Pomodoro system monitored by one person. No talking allowed unless we were on a break, where we all got up and left the room for a while.
Pretty much everyone was finished with all their tasks before our lunch break. We did this multiple times.
It's amazing how much work you can get done when you're in a novel environment with the knowledge that you will have zero distractions for the next 8 hours. Nobody can just pop in for a "quick question" or ping you on any communication tool.
If you need a citation for this, "Learning How to Learn" and its sequel "Mindshift", MOOCs created by an engineering professor and a neuroscientist. The former is the most popular MOOC in the world.
They also had 15 minute timesheets. I used to fill them in accurately. I was pulled up on that for not doing my full 8 hours a day on assigned projects. I pointed out that filling in the timesheet alone took half an hour a day, and I also talked to colleagues, made drinks and did other things that were not attributable to project work... Just like all my colleagues did who were claiming 8 hours. I was told to make the timesheet add up to 8.
I don't like coffee breaks because I just drink water and I find small-talk very tiresome. I also don't smoke. So I never take breaks except for when I'm stuck on something and I need a walk to think it through.
Multiple times, managers or people even higher have complained of both : not taking coffee breaks and taking walking breaks.
To me it's not exactly "butt not in seat = not working", it's more "not behaving like everyone else = not working".
But when you come with a solution/idea that none of the regular coffee break takers had, now they're glad that you're not like everyone else. Weird.
Not saying it wouldn’t be ideal to have that segment of the day paid for, but I’m just trying to get my head around how the tightwad money folk deal with such a nebulous target.
In a lot of ways, it was actually better for them because they could have a multi monitor set up and be looking at one of our shared screens while taking notes on the other one instead of a bunch of people crammed up against one laptop screen in an office.
Sometimes I think the college mindset of “if my code doesn’t compile, the TA must have made a mistake giving it to me like this, I’ll ask him what’s wrong” persists into a first job. And there are jobs (and senior engineers) who encourage this pattern too, so it can be a while before anyone encounters a different atmosphere unfortunately.
Edit: I worded that a bit poorly. The point I wanted to convey was that the physical location isn't what determines accountability.
What you're describing has some merit, but it also means you are being watched all day, just like if you were in the office. Not being watched is probably a major benefit of WFH.
Now instead of a lousy 4' desk in an open office plan … I also get a desk that isn't mine? I'm supposed to … what, lug a keyboard¹ & mouse & laptop in? It seems like literally nobody has imagined what it might be like for a SWE to actually attempt to do work in the machinations that get proposed. (And in my case, luckily, never seem to materialize.)
¹between the insistence on MBPs, and my RSI, an external keyboard is a requirement, not a nicety
This is inarguable fact.
Sizes from a 10" ASUS eeePC to a Toshiba 17" monster desktop replacement, generic brands, a 14" Lenovo Thinkpad, a 13.3" Dell XPS, Samsung (real puurty silver slimline thing I was sad to say goodbye to), current work laptop is an HP Elitebook, a 15" ASUS, a 13.3" ASUS, and at least a couple of other work ones that aren't memorable enough. Plus my kids' school chromebooks.
No macs though, I've not crossed that border yet.
I can deal with any keyboard, but for actual proper typing in an environment where one is meant to be working, gotta be an external keyboard. I've got a mechanical at home, but I'm fine with non-mechanical at work, so I don't think I'm too much of a prima donna - I won't say that's inarguable fact though ;)
If that choice is a MBP … then you're stuck with not only an infamous keyboard, but also one that causes me (and many people I've worked with) RSI … it's that, or an external.
Then again if your employer doesn't even have monitors at hotdesks then maybe it's time to look for greener pastures.
… if only it were so simple! Employers are incredibly stingy¹.
But what I was trying to convey in the previous comment is that I already have an ergo keyboard. (So do many of my coworkers. It is also mine, purchased with my own money, because of the above.)
The point is not really obtaining the keyboard … it's transiting it to-and-fro the office, day-in, day-out, in these hybrid RTO plans. "Hotdesking" is inherently incapable of supporting this as the desk is no longer dedicated to a specific employee, but nobody in power making these plans appears to have thought it through.
(¹but frankly, a part of me would rather just say "give me that in cash as part of salary" and I can make a better purchase & management then than trying to deal with what amounts to being partially paid in keyboards. This extends to more than just keyboards: employees should absolutely not forget we bear costs in order to be employed for the company in the form of depreciating hardware costs)
In the first one they just converted regular nominative desks to free ones. Every desk had different screens with different cable standards, no ergo stand for the screens, some had shared keyboards, each had different chairs, some had drawers, some had accessible outlets, other were hidden behind the desk... You had to come with your stuff from home. And the cleaning was done once a week.
The second one, every desk is the same. The same two screens on ergo stands. A USB-C dock with network connected to the screens. Easily accessible on the desk to plug USB devices. Same chairs at each desk. Each employee has a big personal locker to put stuff like keyboard, headset, coffee mug... Cleaning done every evening so when you arrive in the morning everything is perfectly clean.
You can see which is which.
The second is by far the best place I worked at in my 10+ years career. Depending on what is your main topic of the day, you just pick the next near the people with whom you'll work. Don't want to be bothered with your coworkers most of the day? Just go near another team. And you can also meet new people this way. You can even change desk during the day if need to change context. Just unplug your laptop.
I know people prefer having their own desk with pictures, goodies and other junk. And I thought I was one of them. Until I tried free office the right way.
Corporate environments bring out the worst in people. I don’t believe 70% of workers are looking to be lazy by wfh. We want to sift thru the toxic bullshit so we can actually do our FUCKING work.
Yes I’m bitter
It seems that, for whatever reason, covid has increased the intolerance of shitty behaviour like this. Possibly because remote working meant people could choose to have less contact with toxic co-workers, and so upon return to the office it was far more obviously toxic than before covid when it may have been somewhat normalised.
This is how it should be. Penalise the fouls.
This would probably kill off whatever co-working space businesses are left out there.
Silver lining (cope) for me is losing weight and slowing down passage of time.
Also interacting with people IRL is nice, seeing physical people. I don't get out much other than going to the bars once in a while.
But it sucks... Losing an hour a day for driving and I gotta get up earlier to get ready/drive. And I'll be working in a cubicle... Oh well got my cans for tunes.
My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. Thanks for mentioning this in the context of working from home. I feel a little better now.
Maybe I should get an office job too.
If you really want to undercut that effect, inject new experiences into your life as often as possible.
I’m only half-joking.
that is the plan... gotta save/invest
The theory behind this is that your brain "compresses" memories. Identical days are just stored as "and here I spent 5 days working". And if your weekends are mostly similar, then it's just "And then I spent 12 weeks doing routine shit".
For kids time seems to move slower because everything they experience is new and can't be "compressed".
As an adult you can emulate this by doing things you haven't done before, getting new experiences.
Do yourself a favor, anytime you have vacation try to do and see something different, new, every day. Even now with small kids, when we try this our vacations feel much longer than they actually are. But prepare to be more exhausted, although I call it 'good exhaustion'.
I call it prolongation of life mentally, the best we have for now (apart from physical aspect of living healthier obviously).
Paid for via reduced quality of life of the contracting masses and higher environmental impact.
(Also a really nice, clean website redesign.)
> A late-stage SaaS startup decided to embrace this wave of change. They worked with me to introduce flexible work policies, and the result was almost immediate - they noticed a sharp decrease in employee turnover and an uptick in job applications. Their story echoes the collective message from all three reports: companies must adapt to flexible work policies or risk being swept away.
I'd love to see current hiring stats on committed work from home or flexible companies. There are more places that allow WFH than ever, but as some companies are forcing a return to the office, I bet the remaining WFH companies could exploit the fact that the majority of people don't want to do that. At least some people are willing to switch jobs over it, and so WFH companies should get an influx of talented applicants.
It's not ideal, but it's also almost no different than the teleconferencing with satellite offices that we had previously anyways.
Just instead of calling other offices overseas or whatever, you're calling people at their homes or their own chosen offices.
If everyone is dialing in to the daily stand-up from their desks, what is the point of having everyone commute to the office to do it?
Only if we're not willing to fight for more.
With a third of your life spent at work (at least, but hopefully less), this is no way to go through life. Everything is up for negotiation.
People who want to attempt to unionize to get the right to work remote can do so, as organizing is federally protected activity in the US and it only takes 30% of employees of a bargaining unit to petition the NLRB to hold a union vote: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/conduct-elections
This is a labor rights issue, plain and simple. It makes little sense to be subjugated to management edict “because they say so” when there are labor tools available.
I wonder what the real-world stats for different professions are as to employees preferring work from home vs at the office.
I do know many workers who do not want to work at home. The office was a break from the screaming kids and / or no AC / or have a home that is just not practical as an office / or just prefer a clean break between what is work / office and what is home.
Plus, a lot of people behave differently when they are dressed up professionally for work. Again, the distinction between home and work is valuable for some.
We have somewhere between 100 - 300 years of experience having people working at the office. We know a lot about how that works / or doesn't.
Working from home full time at scale is not yet studied to the extent we can draw real conclusions from it.
A couple of years is far too short. So it is an experiment.
Personally, I prefer to work from home, but I am not so sure I will be able to long term.
My prediction is that working from the office will become increasingly common over time with some professions going back to the office short term and other longer term.
And some companies will prefer fully remote.
I am not sure what the breakdown will be in 50 years.
Perhaps I would be singing a different tune if I didn't live in London with its obscenely overpriced chicken coops of houses and had a spacious home office, but somehow I doubt it.
My best WFH situation was a beach house where I had a dedicated room for work, a large back garden and could take 3 walks a day down the beach between calls.
It also helps that my commute is 30 minutes by bus + Tube vs 45 to 90 minutes in SF due to Muni's abysmal unreliability.
Translation for sociopathic leaders: never let your workers taste something good. It only took a global pandemic that forced people home in order for us to experiment with something that a huge portion of the population sees as beneficial to their well-being. Where were the small scale experiments before the pandemic, and why did they never catch on?
"The crux of the problem lies in the anchoring bias, which leads us to heavily rely on the first piece of information offered (the 'anchor') when making decisions.
When initially joining the company, the employees were primarily concerned with compensation and job security, the "anchors" in their decision-making process."
OK, but then it says:
"However, once within the fold, the pandemic caused them to shift their focus to work-life balance and flexibility... the rigid return-to-office policy made these new anchors seem less attainable"
So the "anchors" are NOT the first piece of information offered, and they can change willy-nilly. Not much of an "anchor."
I think that the only way to pull that off is working all together in an office. Too many things to do, people to talk with, known and unknown unknowns to figure out, etc.
But a couple of years after launch, when the dust settled down? Working from home would start to be possible.
I'm self employed and working from home now, for almost 17 years. The only two things that would make me go back to an office are either I can't find a customer for a long time or somebody covers me with gold, really a lot of it.
Specifically, I'm referring to the type of thinking where you think of remote work as capable of handling "business as usual" but maybe less productive than on-site and less capable of handling "crunchtime".
This type of thinking is what blows up hybrid remote/onsite companies. One day, somebody thinks it's a good idea to hire Bob remotely, while Frank, who has been with the firm for a while, has to stay on-site, to limit the scope of the "remote experiment". Now you've just given Frank a reason to be jealous of Bob, and, at the first possible opportunity, Frank is going to start putting out the message "Bob is just not pulling his weight. But what do you expect? He's remote."
A manager of a failing project with remote people is going to go: Wouldn't it be a great idea, to fly everybody in for a month, just to get through crunchtime? And now you're alienating your remote workforce, because the only thing worse than an on-site job that you sign up for, is a remote job that transforms into a "living out of hotels" job that you didn't sign up for.
The inevitable outcome is that the company blows itself up, either from the bottom-up, because you've allowed a caste system to happen, and the castes are at war with each other, or from the top-down, because some high-level manager goes "well, if on-site is more productive, why not increase the productivity of the whole company by mandating everybody to be on-site?"
Here is just an example: Looking at the same exact job. Office workers would make 20% more than the WFH employees and Hybrid workers would make 10% more than WFH employees.
Now employees have incentives to pursue jobs on both ends of the spectrum. Maybe the employee values the freedom of working from home, not having to endure the cost of commuting or living in a major metro area.
You could argue about the percentages, but basically a pay differential could be the thing that settles the WFH struggle.
The Law of Supply & Demand.
The protestant work ethic in the USA essentially makes a worker feel guilty not working hard, or to feel good by working lots. In other places, doing as little as possible "manana" is viewed as a more humane way of life. Some places are more communal even to the level of prioritising the mother company they work for. Maybe ex Communist countries have differences too.
Anyhow I imagine it will be skewed as techies may be culturally more American and generally the west is more techy.
The company enforced a <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=entrepreneur.com+return+to+the+office+policy&oq=entrepreneur.com+return+to+the+office+policy&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l3.2851j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow noopener">return to the office policy</a>, causing waves of unrest.We had an all-hands meeting recently. The message was essentially, "We have heard your feedback that most of you don't like this, but WE like it, so it's staying."
...and they say the slippery slope is a fallacy
2008 implosion? Nothing? A new evolution? Unemployment armageddon? Something totally new we don’t have a model for yet?
Some people thinking history repeating itself as usual and nothing new? Then those people should tell us what’s next if they claim to know everything. After all, it’s a repeat, so they should know already.
Going to the office everyday would, for me, feel like drinking every day. Probably not very good in the long run.
edit: typo
So now we foot the bill for all the electricity and space required to do our work.
People also ignore these costs when arguing for "densification." Now that we spend even more time at home, people who want to make that home a little nicer and more spacious are vilified. OMG, you want a patch of yard? ELITIST. Never mind that everyone's dinky patch of yard could come out of the tracts of dying, boarded-up malls and empty office parks and defunct commercial/industrial zones... and the parking lots that surround them.
They made the home office return to work, but for our sizable satellite office they’re literally building a new 4-story building so the devs can come back in 2025 or so.
Business is booming if you’re in the right industry, and for tech workers it’s not that hard to switch it up.
Nothing new in the article, and nothing new in the discussion.