Companies Requiring Full-Time In-Office Are Struggling to Recruit New Employees

> I can make a West Coast salary and live in the midwest if I so choose.

For now, until the execs realize that they don't need to pay West Coast salaries, just whatever gets them the engineering output that they need. If the job can be done with Latin American and Canadian engineers for less, or even less if they are open to other timezones, then West Coast salaries for remote work will go away in many instances.

I'm definitely enjoying working remotely, but I doubt that the high salaries from the good times in the tech industry will be there forever for remote work.

Given how beneficial it is to employees and it's ubiquity, quality workers are reasonable to expect this flexibility when looking for their next company to join.

This news is what I was hoping for.

I thought WFH was great until the inevitable result of increased Slack messages and Zoom meetings. In fact, I think there were fewer hours wasted to context shifting and loss of concentration in the office. But it really depends on the company/team in the end.

How do you form your peer group remotely?

I was a developer in a small startup many years ago, ~20 person company and ~8 developers. We were all in cubicles, everyone got to hear every conversation, and there were still a few people that either fell through the cracks or were listening to a different drummer.

In-person is no guarantee for trust and understanding, and in my opinion it obscures bad habits.

Remote workers falling through the cracks is wholly on the company and not on the remote worker. It takes a very concerted effort on the companies part, to ensure that everything is remote first.

None of the other things you mention (bonding, siloes, etc.) happen because a worker is remote. They happen because companies treat remote workers the same as in office workers, without putting in any effort to become a remote first company.

> Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack

I would think that remote workers would be a forcing function for communications clarity.

Is there some deeper reason for this problem than "bad tools?" I see assertions that in-person is better somehow, but no reasons why that works better or why the same techniques can't apply to remote work. Is it all about pheromones or maybe some chemical sprinkled on the pizza?

> People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen.

I don't fully disagree with you but this is also something to put some long, hard thought into by the C-level whoever is running the company, if it's something new, how to put in place the communication methods, chat groups, information sharing SOPs and such to prevent isolation from happening in the first place. Deal with it as a structural/business operation and methodology issue first.

Get the SOPs set up before you start adding more than a couple of team members.

I don't think any of that has to do with WFH. It boils down to company culture. I've seen it all from small startups to large enterprises. The constant for great teams was just an open, trusting, collegial culture without a lot of top-down management.

When you inspire people, pay them well, and treat them like adults you would be surprised how much they go to bat for you.

"I still think it's good to get together at least once or twice a year"

I'm curious why you think that and why such an arbitrary number? why not three or five times, or zero?

I have been fortunate enough to work from home since early 2000s. For many reasons I don't want to use my own hardware for doing that though. The main one being e-discovery. If your company is forced to go through a discovery process, if you've accessed company resources via your personal hardware, it becomes part of that discovery process. Additionally, licensing issues crop up, etc.

But it doesn't surprise me that companies who are forcing people into the office are having a hard time recruiting. If Covid showed us anything, it was that we could all work from home and be just as productive, if not more so, doing it.

IMHO, forcing me into an office is actually a punishment. Why punish me for the high cost of your real estate?

I like having company hardware. But agreed on the first premise. Open offices are an abomination. That being said, I do think younger engineers can be a bit better off from the human perspective joining an office just do to getting a lot of social interaction, and hanging out with higher level engineers.

I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote.

Being remote works for me (even when I was younger cause I love sitting and hammering my head on shit until I figure it out), but a fair number of my coworkers genuinely enjoy going into the office.

It's interesting. But yes, agreed for the most part. Can't imagine wanting to go 5 days a week though lol.

If a company requires me to bring my own hardware they better offer a "sign on bonus" equivalent to the cost of said hardware. Coz I ain't gonna install whatever corporate Spyware they require to be installed onto my hardware. Heck even their corporate hardware sits on a separate vlan that has no access except to the internet.

>> For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware.

It took a long time for employees to convince companies they can be productive when they're left to their own devices.

I've seen both sides of it.

Back in 2010, I worked for a large company that was experimenting with some ROWE "Results Orientated Work Environment" which was basically people working off site three days a week. As long as you're productive and hit your metrics, you were good and left alone.

We had a major project and two contractors just completely stopped coming in, did barely any work and left the team high and dry three days before a major release of the site we were building. After that, the company killed the experiment and required everybody to be in the office 5 days a week no matter what, no excuses.

I also worked for another company that slowly rolled out a similar program. We had three pilot developers. Then you had to apply to be able to get approved to WFH three days a week. Therefore, management was only allowing people who were hitting their numbers and had good metrics to get into the program. This went on for two years until they started relaxing a lot of the rules until they hit some hard times and shut it down completely.

I work for a huge health care company and they were VERY leery about letting people WFH even during COVID because they were petrified that production was going to drop off too much. Even at the height of the pandemic they tried several times to get people back into the office - but as usual, there were rarely any takers. It was a bit of a running joke at the time, but after a full calendar year, they relented and they were able to confirm that production had instead actually increased and essentially gave a vote of confidence for a lot of teams they were fully capable of WFH full time without a drop off in productivity.

I wish upper management would understand that some of us need silence to work due to sensory issues and the office doesn't provide something of that nature. Sound blocking headphones don't solve everything.

IMO, it wasnt really until 2015 that we had the bandwidth available everywhere to do widespread WFH.

Looking at it from a sympathy-for-the-devil standpoint, WFH is a serious dilemma for management. The problem is that almost everybody has traditionally been OK with working in an office (necessarily so), and management as a class is tasked and structured accordingly.

As for the workers themselves, some people are OK either way, some people insist on WFH (raises hand), and some people absolutely can't deal with WFH. Maybe the latter people have stronger-than-usual social needs by the standards of stereotypical engineering workers, and genuinely contribute more as part of a physically-present team. Asking those folks to adapt to a solitary work life is like asking me to get up at 6 AM and hit the freeway every morning. It's not going to happen... at least, not for long.

Or maybe they live in a one-bedroom apartment with a spouse and child or three. It's easy for some of us hardcore WFH advocates to forget how privileged we are.

So now, management has to decide how to get the most out of all of these workers. I believe that those who put their foot down and demand RTO will eventually be outcompeted by those who don't, but that doesn't make the job of converting a previously office-oriented culture to hybrid or exclusive WFH an easy one. Middle management without appropriate IT support, for example, is going to fail at the WFH transition no matter what they do.

Now, throw ML into the mix, and it's easy to see that we are in for a tumultuous couple of decades. I keep recalling the words of Nikola Tesla at the dawn of electrification: Humanity will be like an anthill stirred up with a stick. The changes that are coming are bigger than any of us probably think.

As long as "own hardware" is my choice, then I agree.

My current setup changes from work to private mode by switching one USB-C cable from my work laptop to my own Mac Mini.

> WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000.

At a certain level of network engineering and in the telecom business it has been such since 2002 or so. Many of the people who run certain large ISPs have been fully remote (or at least 85-90% remote, if you count time with meetings and conferences) since 2000.

I don't know if it has been popular recently, but my dad told me that when companies he worked for wanted to do a layoff they just transferred positions to offices on the other side of the country.

After 3+ years, I find remote completely and utterly depressing. Too bad I live in the middle of nowhere wasteland where there are few software jobs.

I don't think companies in #4 are safe, mostly because commercial real estate is expensive. Consulting firms will advise them to either not renew building leases or have a hybrid/RTO policy as one of the first cost cutting measures.

I'm on level #4 too and I think that's the sweet spot for me.

Everyone on the team has the ability to come to the office when needed. Most never do. Some are there every day.

I usually go to the office when the alternative would be endless zoom meetings all day, I'll rather do those live if possible and gather them all in one day. (Or if I want to catch a movie after work at the IMAX that's near the office)

There's a lot to this. Where I am (not tech) we are generally in the office 3-4 days/week (some of us 5 days) but I have the flexibility to WfH close to whenever I want, on the day (barring having an external meeting and work travel). The flexibility is worth way more than the number of days, to me and many of my colleagues.

Have an office be optional is the best. You get the novelty of a commute and a visit without being forced.

I dunno, we used to sit around the first 10 minutes waiting for everybody to show up. Spend time fucking with hooking up to the sound system and projector...wait for all the chatter to quiet down. Talk productively for 10 minutes, spend another 10 chatting on our way out... then two people with more ideas would go off and talk on their way back to the desk, and the rest of the team gets left out of that one.

A tremendous amount of innovation happens in person and not in person. Alone and working in teams.

The next wave of game changing companies will be the ones to hire the best people. I find it very unlikely that being 100% in person will be a competitive advantage versus companies that can simply hire the best and ask them to work in the way they consider the most productive.

"Innovation" is a hand-waving term. If you absolutely need to have a brainstorming meeting in-person, schedule it. That's likely the exception, not the rule. Too often, I see people who head to the office to have loud social conversations while not doing any real work. (Do they have a bullshit job? How much does said bullshit job make? How does one guarantee they meet their performance ranking threshold for said bullshittery?)

Otherwise, commuting and interruptions isn't conducive to focus and getting shit done. Fuck, my monitors at home are bigger than anything in any office and I have my keyboard tray, so why on Earth would I want to go into an office with a shittier setup? Also, most offices took away their snacks in the trendy spirit of being cheap and enshitifying their culture.

Well, people are too different today, to the point they can not tolerate close proximity to each other.

I am right with conspiracy nut job. If we cooperate in person, you would be exposed to my rants and other quirks. With remote there is no such issue. We can cooperate just fine.

I think some people just hate remote, because they do not have their own social circle. They also have no working habits to be productive with async communication. They expect prepackaged deal of friendship, mentorship and support.

Companies everywhere are "struggling" to hire as many people as they would like at the wages they would like.

Obligatory: ackshually water makes things wet it is not itself wet.

It’s about control not productivity.

WFH means an employee can easily interview elsewhere. It is harder to manipulate them into working an unhealthy amount. It is less likely their entire social circle will be at the job which hurts employee retention.

Also you have to manage people based on outcomes which raised the bar for managers. Most managers really aren’t capable and have been mostly coasting on looking busy and watching attendance. That doesn’t work for a remote team.

I have been working remote for almost 7 years now though. I am never working from an office again but hey that’s what works for me.

> I doubt a company would force people back in if it wasn't to their benefit

Don't assume that companies act 100% rationally. Personal agendas emerge and triumph all the time - some for better and some for worse.

You have to remember where you are. Hacker News is going to have some selection bias on people who _enjoy_ their job. By trying to stay up-to-date on the latest software news, they're probably career driven people.

Imagine how many people who are fully WFH who don't have this attitude. Do you think they're also more "productive" than if they were in an environment that forced them to do their work?

You might doubt it, but companies are doing it, and they're facing the consequences. Uncompetitiveness. Companies are led by irrational people who learned how to manage in the 90s and care more about keeping things the same than actually making their place of work succeed.

>> I doubt a company would force people back in if it wasn't to their benefit.

"We Will Watch Your Career With Great Interest" (every HR director everywhere)

I'm guessing that it's the double whammy from the layoffs: fewer (attractive) positions, and now more people competing for what remains.

I got laid off for the first time ever a few months ago, and I've been surprised how hard it is to find a job that will pay the bills.

(I'm also surprised by how badly I've done on live coding tests. Apparently it's a skill that needs practice.)

Everyone is hiring, but HR uses very exactly keyword reviews, related, HR wants a top performer (based on some meaningless resume heuristics), but wont pay for it.

My company is telling everyone they hired remote over the last few years that they have to become hybrid now if they’re within n miles of an office.

I’m exploring other “opportunities.”

we really need more flags for “REMOTE”; I hire remote (not hybrid) but people think they can work from the Principality of Sealand, Madagascar or Timbuktu. It’s really frustrating as: for tax reason, I can only hire in Germany and Sweden (where we have business entities).

But when I file a position (even where this is very clearly stated) I get literally hundreds of applications that are impossible for me to pursue- since they are never open to relocation either.

Its a pretty huge waste of resources on my side because we really try to assess each application and give a clear reason why we don’t continue with them-

That's either a very wasteful mistake or a series of poor decisions by that company. They are going to have a lot of candidates who are unhappy and waste a lot of time on screening.

The most lasting and deep co-worker peer bonds I have were all formed during remote work. Office work and commutes make me want to 'punch out' when the little hand is on the 5 and not think about work for the rest of the night. It doesn't help that 'random conversation' is heavily frowned upon in most open office environments due to potentially distracting people nearby. When I pair with my coworkers over zoom/voice though it's hardly a concern... waiting for builds/tests to run chat about a hobby or the movie you saw last night or some new tech you've been looking at. In an open office that starts to get you scowls even if you are sitting at some slightly further away from the 'pit' pairing station.

Depends. Pace of learning, remote is definitely faster than open space, because regular 1 on 1 are needed often for the first 2 months imho for a good onboarding, and you cannot have deep 1 on 1 in open space. If you have a real office, probably the same?

Bonding depends very much in the characters. One of my current coworker has a personality that reminds me of one of my best friend. I guess I could attribute the fact that we bonded faster to 4.5 WFH days compared to 2.5 at my previous company, but that would be disingenuous.

One benefit though is that I can invite my coworker/friend and his SO to spend a week at my place, in a coastal city and bond over catamaran outings rather than around a beer.