It is unclear who wants RTO, at least within tech and other leaders whom I know within tech.
So completely do away with tech hubs. People can continue to grow organically, they are free to stay or move as makes sense to them individually.
As a society, we should be striving to continue decoupling work from our identity.
New employees, at the bottom of the pay scale, are competing with employees making far more (with vesting) for homes.
Democratizing this across a larger number of cities (and towns!) seems healthy.
Disclaimer: Biased, as have to move regularly for spouse's job, so RTO wouldn't work for me.
- Companies just aren't interested in training people if they can hire someone trained somewhere else.
- Project-based time accounting doesn't account for time spent mentoring and transferring knowledge.
- Some older workers withhold knowledge and aren't punished for it. Some older workers share knowledge and aren't rewarded for it.
All this existed prior to COVID and expansion of work from home.
I see people mention in these threads that in-person mentoring and networking is somehow "just better", but no source or wide-population evidence is ever provided. It's always "trust me bro" and "it helped me", whereas the reality is a lot closer to what you described.
There are lots of companies with shitty in-office cultures where new employees get hazed and bullied, but never productively mentored. Either way, for the last 15-20 years at least, the burden of learning has been almost entirely on the employee, regardless of whatever corporate PR drones may say.
This anecdote to say that I'd probably been terrible at a remote job while in the old structures. Now I'm married with a child, but I get to call the shots on daily routine, so to speak. I can even work late nights without mom coming to admonish.
I doubt this. Would probably be cheaper, but I doubt the rental market is so inelastic that the new price will break anything.
But they could be turned into something else useful. All that space close to each other and at the destination of every transportation structure will find a usage.
https://www.profgalloway.com/work-from-office/
One of his arguments is that for younger employees, in that it provides an opportunity to create social connections. For example, it appears that ~20% of people meet their spouses at work.
I worked from home before the pandemic, hated it, and vowed to never do it again. Then the pandemic happened.
The pandemic was a huge rearrangement to so many things though. It forced through a lot of the accommodations that previously I had to beg and fight for. Got everyone used to having to write more, have video option for all meetings, train judgement about what can be async etc.
It also normalized the lunch errand, the early dinner then back at work, the "I might just be away from the computer when you message me" dynamic that makes remote work genuinely fulfilling. I no longer feel like I'm committing a moral transgression against my coworkers by stopping to help a family member with a chore or whatever.
I once said I would never willingly do remote. Now I say I'll never willingly work from an office regularly. I might turn out to be as wrong about this as I was about that, we'll see.
So yes I think your experience is probably an outlier. And on HN generally I think that sort of environment is overrepresented still.
Understand that your current preference is a result of being in an advantageous living accommodation next to the office building your company is leasing.
> Understand that your current preference is a result of being in an advantageous living accommodation next to the office building your company is leasing.
I prefer to go to the beach or the park in my free time, but my preference would certainly change if there was hurricane outside. In that case I'd rather stay indoors.
Obviously my experience would differ if I had a 30+ minute hellish commute. The only teammates that have a commute this long choose to do so as a tradeoff (e.g. more house).
I guess this response and tone surprise me because it seems obvious. There are clearly tradeoffs made when we choose where to live and where we work (including WFH or in-office policy).
We're trying to prevent reverting to that being the mandatory norm for all workers though.
We have folk who prefer to work from the office, and that's fine. But it makes team meetings more challenging than they are when everyone's at home.
When we were only spread across two offices, we'd occasionally have a team day in one or other of the offices. But the third office is much further away.
Between outsourcing, satellite offices and remote employees, almost no team I see nowadays has everyone in the same office.
If the shoe were on the other foot how would you feel if someone forced you to be remote?
What am I missing?
"But you could do that from home": yes, but i wouldn't.