None of these arguments were ever made when sending engineering teams offshore.
But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.
This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.
Language barriers, dialects, and social norms can all be quite different when offshoring.
The local worker, even if they are working from home, is still more in sync culturally (presumably, maybe you hire some real weirdos).
Having worked in offices, remotely, and with offshore teams I can say that remote work leads to really bad outcomes from team members who don’t want to be part of the team. Worse than having them in the office.
I think the big part is that, at least in work culture here, that you simply cannot call someone out for not doing their job. There’s no shame. No cost. Nothing to avoid.
There’s performance plans. There’s meetings. There’s never radical intervention that leads to the change needed to have people shit or get off the pot.
This is good financially for these people in the short term but in my experience much worse for their careers in the long term.
WFH would be way easier on us if people had the freedom/were enabled to leave jobs they hate.
I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names and lists of things they’ve done to fuck up or times they didn’t do any work just in case.
If you publicize that list, you are likely to destroy yourself.
Nukes are an effective deterrent only if people think you have them (and think you might use them).
If I was their manager, that would be a really bad look for the person.
I honestly don’t think it’s your mistake to act that way, I think it’s the leadership in there who are not working enough to build enough trust in that work environment so that so you need a CYA folder.
If you're delivering value then you don't need the file, and if you're not, then you should be fired.
garbage in, garbage out.
If you want me to be a part of the team you have to make that team have meaning and benefit. That I work with you is neither. Those I work with are no more important to me than the shit stain I power washed off the toilet bowl.
If we miss goals? What happens. Nothing. If we hit goals what happens? Maybe the PM and EM will get a small bonus and we're all made to work hard to achieve that level of productivity with no benefit. So, sorry, no, I don't want to be a part of your team.
That's exactly my point. Why be there except for your need of income to be exploited?
It depends on how you measure the costs of remote... the company I used to work for saved $5 million/year in real estate costs by switching to full remote at the start of covid. That is one thing to consider when comparing remote and on-site costs.
*It took about 2 years to reach those savings as we waited for some leases to expire.
I'd also like to interject that "Productivity" metrics are almost never some kind of efficiency of human potential to create civilization against a hostile universe. They're b(i)ased on what the employer spends.
So even if a study says an employee is X% more "productive" at the office, that means ignoring all the time/money spent commuting, since that's typically shouldered entirely by employees.
So watch out for people conflating "employers get a better deal" with "offices are good for society."
You can also save money with hiring and retention due to happier employees.
Offshore is a reasonable comparison. Virtually all offshore implementations that I have observed result in at least one employee being forced into becoming an offshore orchestrator. Everyone now has to play telephone with the offshore dev through this channel. Even if they could contact them directly, you have a one day communication lag because you only get one shot a day to have a one hour sync with the offshore team. In bad scenarios, the offshore team has all communication channeled through the local team lead creating yet another layer and further communication lag. The point here is that engineering teams have been communicating how this issue is detrimental for years. We saw WFH work in a forced experiment (and had a lot of data about improved productivity). It is obviously not a direct comparison, but the egregious nature of blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH makes the comparison relevant.
You must read a different HN than I do