Remote Work Is Here to Stay, and Employers Aren’t Happy About It
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* team building = observation & control, attendance & attention monitoring i.e presenteeism.
* communication = verbal. i dont want to put myself at liability [because i often am] by putting things in writing
* workplace culture = lmao. the bs we use to justify paying you less and/or guilting you into working above your compensation.
also remember all those zoom recordings that got shared online of people being fired by some sociopath ceo. yeah we dont want that to happen again.
Not to mention being in the office is more about Management controlling and observing.
https://www.ajc.com/business/incentive-package-for-ncr-could...
Given that spread, my guess here is either that their data collection and analysis is bad, or that there are other factors involved in productivity other than just where the worker is located. It is probably a very very very complicated question that is collapsed down into this "work from home: good or bad" way that is the fashion of most (all) business related pseudoscience.
Anecdotally, on the subject of work culture and community, I have a lot of friends I met at old jobs whom I still hang out with. What we bonded over was how much we disliked our customers, managers, and coworkers, and how much goofing off we could get away with in the office. We pushed a lot of chairs down hallways, and took a lot of very long lunches. That's about all I miss from working in the office: the not working part. It is true that I haven't developed similar communities in remote work, but I don't know where that fits in the "community building" argument for RTO.
The article doesn't get into the methodology of the survey, but another possibility is that respondents were just answering based on their feelings rather than any hard data at all. This sort of thing happens all the time; a well-known example is that if you survey Americans about crime, a large percentage will say crime has increased regardless of what's happening with actual levels of crime [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/16/voters-pe...
To be fair, I don't think anyone except the most mission-centric individuals will ever "miss work". Many people wouldn't work if they could avoid doing so.
>It is true that I haven't developed similar communities in remote work, but I don't know where that fits in the "community building" argument for RTO.
Isn't it just that? They want people to feel like they are working with a team, not as some remote drone from home that tags in.
As you'll see from many comments on HN, some simply don't care about that, so it falls on deaf ears. But this sort of PR isn't really for employees, let alone ones who will quit rather than RTO. They are a lost cause in the company's eyes.
If a colleague decides to come in, it’s like seeing an old friend from college. We catch up, get some work done in a different way, and maybe get coffee.
I’m not concerned about productivity either way. What will get is what will get done, and I’m happy about it.
I don't work in the finance department. The company stock keeps going up and I'm enjoying my job. If either of those stops being true, I'll re-evaluate.
I do not want to be approached. When 5pm rolls around, Slack stops sending notifications, and when I slam my laptop shut, it doesn’t open until 9am the next business day at the earliest.
That said, a whole office just to placate such people seems like a gratuitous expense.
And how did you feel when it was crammed full?
Look on the bright side, at least you get to choose your version of hell
Wasn’t the case for most of human history
(Edit: man, Y’all really don’t like this joke :P)
I am just patiently waiting for some technology or innovation breakthrough (or series of breakthroughs) that closes this collaboration gap and effectively ends this argument. I've tried dozens of remote collaboration tools, and it's basically all shit compared to sitting in physical proximity to other people. Maybe it'll never happen, but I'm hopeful (though it still may be a ways off).
I'm thinking of things like: presence (knowing when someone is actually at their desk/truly available), ad-hoc conversations that drop in and out, swinging by someone's desk when they don't look busy or deep in thought, overhearing a discussion or debate that is interesting or that you can contribute to (or easily ignore), walking a few feet to a physical whiteboard to quickly sketch out an idea, visually noticing that a junior is struggling and rolling your chair over to offer help, having a colleague hearing you sigh loudly over and over in the course of a few minutes and stop by to see if you need help, friendly non-verbal or very brief greetings to coworkers as you pass in the hallway or make eye contact across the office but whom you don't actually need to speak to, and so on...
Has anyone found any really good live collaboration tools other than the typical slack/teams/etc?
There are going to be lots of cases where the latency is really manageable, such as when people are in the same country or general area.
With AI enhancements and eye tracking etc. it could become extremely realistic.
So there will probably be a new fight about virtual attendance where employers want you to be in your virtual office seat so they can monitor you that way.
That may actually be one thing that helps drive realistic AI and robotics in terms of emulating human behavior. People may eventually become their own employment agencies for AIs they train or curate and then rent out or apply for jobs. In some cases the employer may not know for sure if they have a human or not.
to be frank, I don't think many people on the worker side of the argument even care about reduced company throughput. Be it because the pay is unsatisfactory, the project is uninteresting, or they are entirely numb to the company's interest and simply want to get out of the workforce ASAP.
>I am just patiently waiting for some technology or innovation breakthrough (or series of breakthroughs) that closes this collaboration gap and effectively ends this argument. I've tried dozens of remote collaboration tools, and it's basically all shit compared to sitting in physical proximity to other people. Maybe it'll never happen, but I'm hopeful (though it still may be a ways off).
in the far, far future, I can see some VR/AR environment doing this. But the level of fidelity and processing power needed to project the subtleties of body language and the fine point precision of our hands means that we won't see this for decades. I'm sure it will happen in our (Millenial/Gen Z) lifetime, but probably not while we are still working.
But for maybe 70=80% efficiency, I can see VR coming far enough in a decade to start closing the gap between current conference tools and in-person interaction. I don't know if any but VR dedicated companies like Meta (and I guess Apple now) will really invest, but it will be interesting to see.
On a more serious note, once we return to a more jobseeker friendly market, I'm curious how companies that insist on RTO will be perceived by jobseekers. I imagine that those RTO companies will either change their tune very quickly or be considered a third rate place to work.
Then see how much they want workers in the office.
This is a classic case of Stated Preference vs. Revealed Preference
In the limit, you could choose to live 4.5 hours away from work and spend all day commuting, compared to someone who lives next to the office and does a full day's work.
i. don't. want. to. work. in. the. office.
i don't need office's bullshitism.
I think it’s a generational thing and that the next Google or Apple when it arrives will be fully remote and that will be one of its differentiating advantages as an employer. It will show that things can be done differently and then set the direction for other employers of that time. Until then, the current mentality of “you can only be productive when you are in person” will prevail.
Everything just worked magically during the pandemic. Once it was gone it don’t work. It doesn’t really sound logical.
A lot of things can work reasonably well--and maybe even better than expected--over the short-term but there can be tolls as a "new normal" as time goes on.
Remote work is fine and some people like it a lot but I think if we're being honest the jury is still out on what the value is to the business.
I live ~175 miles to the closest tech hub, so changing to in-office work isn't an option unless I move. If I was forced to move, an equivalent house to what I have now would cost about 3 times as much and I'd have at least an hour commute each way.
I save a lot of money not commuting and eating at home, and a lot of issues I'd otherwise have to miss work for if I went into an office (family illness, childcare issues) are super easy to adjust my schedule to work around.
Housing here is below the national average, so there is a huge savings there. I've only put maybe 10k miles on my 2007 Corolla in the last 5 years, so I pay much less in gas/maintenance/replacing vehicles. I can have delicious, healthy food every day for half the cost. If I need someone to come to my house for repairs (or other reasons), I don't need to take a day off or miss hardly any work time. I don't have to be mad when they don't show up (maybe a little). My daughter can attend a great school that requires pickup, because being away from my PC for 30 minutes every day in the afternoon is just not a big deal. If I want to take a break and get in a quick jog in the middle of the day, it costs almost nothing in lost time; I just walk outside and start running.
I don't know what sort of raise I would have to get to convince me to give all of that up. I think I've settled on 40%, which is untenable without relocation.
> dress
Hold up, these are on the clock too.
Meanwhile, where I work, we're still allowed to be 100% remote, but also recognize this has pros and cons, especially for juniors and new members of the team who haven't met each other. Productivity is up, but team connection and cohesion is down. Generally people are happy with the tradeoff, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved via thoughtful tweaks (periodic get-togethers, hybrid meeting protocols, etc).
The key is some level of trust and dialogue with management, not this adversarial hand-wringing-for-pageviews noise.
Where working remotely is practical, 100% RTO doesn't make a lot of sense IMO. On the other hand, you can't really dismiss concerns about company culture, team cohesion with new employees, mentoring new grads, etc. as the product of evil executives trying to prop up their commercial real estate portfolio or whatever. (I'd also argue that the situation is probably worsened because so many companies are carefully scrutinizing expenses for travel, meetings, etc.)
Many people do dismiss the concerns because their goals pre-pandemic did not reflect these values. So they see it as a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I think this is a continuation of the theme of technology making time-space co-ordination more independent.
Recorded music/videos made it possible for artists to record their content and for consumers to enjoy it across space and time.
E-commerce companies such as Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist made it possible for people to not require to be physically present at the same location at the same time to exchange goods and services.
Zoom, Slack, Confluence, GitHub etc. did make it possible for people to build great products and services by collaborating across space and time for a long time, it just validated during COVID.
The thing is remote work is what enables western companies to hire high quality labour from Asia, Eastern Europe etc to push out great innovations. If it works for that, why can it not work for employees across the length and breadth of the organisation?
I remember when I used to work at a company where I had to do some testing on physical servers in a datacenter. When I had to install new operating systems, I had to physically walk into the data center and stand in the hot/cold isles, pop in my USB drive and (re)install the Operating Systems I needed.
The day I discovered IPMI, I stopped going in. The IPMI implementation was not that good, but it was still better than going in physically to the data center. It cemented by view that, if something can be done remotely, it should be done remotely, even if the remote solution is not perfect.
This doesn’t work - 95% of software is communication - and that drives successful projects to hire within timezone and with folks that can communicate well. We have decades of failed India outsourcing projects as proof of this.
I will "8 and skate", be it a remote or in person job. They dont pay me for overtime, so I don't donate it to a for-profit enterprise.
- give equal pay for equal work;
- encourage remote work if it is possible and productive;
- let workers choose where to live.
Remote work benefits employer (lower office costs), employee (time/cost/stress of commuting) and environment (pollution).
These simple rules help to establish freer, more independent markets for labor, commercial real estate, residential property and various transport modalities.
Cross subsidies by employers for high CoL just perpetuates the existing inbalances, and most of the benefits go direct to landlords.
The result, compared to mass commuting into expensive cities, would be:
- slighty lower wages in general, sharply lower for some bubble cities (SV, SF, London...);
- cheaper offices, both less space required and lower cost/area, some businesses move out of the cities;
- convergence of residential property prices across cities, suburbs and remote locations;
- lower rents for low-paid non-remotable essential workers in cities;
- much reduced economic waste on commuting, including less congestion for those that must travel;
- reducing inequality across towns, cities and countries.
There would be capital losses for speculative CRE and residential property investors.
I had to read this two times as it’s poorly worded.
An any rate, it should be 80% and not 35%. You don’t need to go into an office to make software.
There’s something just sinister how employers are handling this as it’s got nothing to do with actual output.
If employers really wanted employees to abandon remote work, that would be obviously visible as a significant difference in remuneration.
If some employer is paying on-site workers 20% more than the exact same work for the same company remotely, then I'll believe that they truly want people to be on-site; but if not, then those are just empty words, not real preferences.
On the other hand, I do see employees choosing a lower-paid role/employer just to ensure remote work, so that preference seems genuine.
That would effectively mean increasing salary of the current employees that choose to go to the office by 20%. Alternatively, that'd mean reducing salary of current employees that choose not to.
Either way, that seems like a horribly inefficient way to deal with the problem. Most companies choose much more subtle approaches, such as:
0) Stop hiring remote -> build a new workforce that does not expect remote conditions
1) Mandate RTO (just like Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple, and others did)
2) Start putting people who do not respect RTO on PIP, or on some other bullshit process that'll threaten to fire those that do not conform while giving you, the company, enough time to replace them with new hires.
3) Slowly and silently follow through 2) until remote is a thing for <10-15% of the workforce.
This gives the company a number of advantages, such as:
1) Not appearing evil
2) Not dealing with disruptions caused by mass employee exit
Companies that really want RTO don't have to do it in a "big bang" way. Such companies would rather do it silently while telling you how they value your opinions on what the future workplace policy should be.
They'll get away with it IIF point 0 is possible. I hope it is not, but who knows.
They'll never stop hiring remote. Remote workers will simply become second class citizens at a company with fewer benefits for the same work. Most people, including myself, will happily sacrifice beer coolers and ping pong for the privilege of never having to deal with an office again.
I do feel bad for people who are coming into the office. I hope those fun events and food are worth the gas money, increased risk, and reduced health going into the office entails.
Reduced health, of course, because of driving. You can also consider most employers aren't going to stock a full kitchen so you're probably eating more fast food and garbage snacks. You're more sedentary because you typically can't walk out of the office for a quick trip to the gym, etc. Oh, also, your sleep is probably worse because you have to be up 2 hours early to get ready for work and drive.
And for most people, if you can reasonably walk to work, you're probably going to be exposed to all sorts of particulates from the roadway you're likely walking along. Exhaust fumes, rubber particulates..etc, none are exactly health-boosters.
In some ranges it's the leading cause, although overdose deaths sometimes win out. It's kind of absurd that this isn't brought up in articles about remote work. Newspapers run articles about gun violence every day despite it being wwaaaayyyy less likely than dying in an automobile accident, but the far greater danger of commuting is almost never discussed.
If the reason to not go into the office is to not risk some accident out in the world, then you might as well also not go to stores, out to restaurants, or movies or shows. You shouldn't even go to a park, and certainly never travel just for fun. Just stay in your house at all times.
That sounds like a horrible way to live to me. There are other reasons to prefer WFH, but fear of the world shouldn't be one of them, IMO.
Fallacy 1: I can work from home; I can't see a movie on the big screen or visit a park from home. Your analogy has improper premises.
Fallacy 2: Many offices, work locations, and entire cities are not walkable and have poor transit. This is your first straw man argument.
Fallacy 3: The activities you listed are presumed to be more enjoyable than driving into work, so the cost benefit risk profile for traveling to them is different.
Fallacy 4: Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
Fallacy 5: Work driving will occur much more frequently and over typically much longer periods of time than the events you listed. As your risk of accidents rise proportionally to time on the road, these again are not equally weighted.
In short: nobody with a driving-only commute who does not want to RTO is also saying they don't want to go to parks or restaurants or travel. This is your second straw man.
Please bring logical arguments and not straw men.
>Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
In most major US cities, there honestly isn't much difference anymore. There's always too much traffic, even at the slowest parts of the day.
I'm not afraid of the world. When I am not paid commensurate to the risk I won't take it. If they paid me for the transit time in from home to the office and back I'd be worth $50-60k more. It gets worse with pagerduty. You're on-call and can't take an hour to get home lest there be an incident to need to respond to. So now you're stuck at the office until late at night doing unpaid labor. Driving home tired is a lot of fun too, aint it!
The "drive to work" situation is not only dangerous it's outright wage theft. Why should I want to collaborate.
Anyway, nice strawman.
Do you need to be paid to go to the grocery store or is everything Insta carted to you because you care about your health more than finances?
It's just such a werid argument to make. It is more convinent, but let's not act like the act of getting outside (an act our industry is stigmatized against) is endangering our health.
I just want fellow passionate coworkers to talk to. I slightly prefer in-office, but if the company is too far and the pay is good it's not the worst sacrifice to make.
My location is most important: nothing short of some crazy $500k salary is gonna get me moving into Silicon Valley. Even then, I'm lucky to own land; that much STILL isn't getting me a house out there.
Or you can try copying Google and Apple. Without having a $1B half-empty campus that is currently pretty pleasant to work at, because it is not crowded. The results will be very predictable.
There are lawsuits now because 2 weeks before RTO ultimatum, a employee union was formed so a lot of people think that RTO ultimatum was a Unfair Labour Practice or a union busting move.
The move was so boneheaded and uncomprehensible that a lot of people suspect that the CEO simply wanted to destroy the union even if that takes sinks the company.
Oh, now you have to take hotel seating instead of your own desk and setup, where you have to take whatever equipment is available.
Pay me 20% more and give me a dedicated desk, and I'll go into the office.
A dedicated *office*.
I neither want to see, hear, or smell the guy at the open-plan desk next to me eat his lunch at his desk.
Because I'm sure as hell not doing it for my benefit ...
Those trade-offs are best made by the employee, not the employer. Everyone's preferences and family situations are different.
why just a desk though? i want a dedicated office.
That implies that other employers could have offered lower salaries if they had allowed remote work - and thus that they are paying a premium for getting/keeping people in the office, no?
Another reason it's not worth trying is that the conclusion might be already evident - many top-skilled people are leaving their jobs and taking a pay cut to work in companies that respect their work-life balance. A pay differentiation will not make the best employees self-neglect.
I think the pandemic reset a lot of things, made a lot of us look at the bigger picture. Certainly not everyone, but some people probably thought they wouldn't be proud of their lives if they died of Covid when all they've achieved after school, college and uni was wage-slaving in an open office, sandwiched in between two rounds of commute each day.
Many employees avoided the expense of moving during Covid. Unless employers want to pay these new found expenses… people won’t go back to the office. I’m sure there is a good chunk of staff who are insulated from this reality due to home ownership and seniority - but that won’t last long when people realize market rates for junior staff have risen to that of tenured staff.
- People like me value their work/life balance and satisfaction with the job. I could easily be making 2x what I do now but I'd hate every single second of my job. My old boss taught me "Work is 1/2 of your waking day so you better enjoy it".
- I'm currently working remote for a german company for their average salary. The italian average salary for a developer is around half that. So realistically unless I moved to Germany working remote would still be the most profitable option.
A more accurate wording might be "once you stop imposing a hardship" ... it's hard to convince people to let you re-impose it (for free).
Also, with the office attendance being part of performance review in some companies [1], how do you think the compensation will look for a WFH individual after a couple of review cycles?
1. https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/06/google-makes-office-a...
"We've tried nothing and we're out of options".
I'm sure they do have preferences, but they don't care enough to put work into the solution. so, bringing people back into office isn't worth a 20% raise in this case. But that's not surprising; nothing seems to be worth a raise compared to hiring and re-training new employees. As companies have long since abandoned retention.
I can see at least two problems: your company code, systems and processes are either poorly documented or complex, and you are happy to interrupt someone that is probably busy.
If we get '@here'd it's an actual fix-it-now production problem. Then again, my soft-phone, and cell would also be ringing like crazy as well.
on the contrary, I have yet to work at a company that had proper up to date documented systems and processes. It's always suggested to ask a co-worker or a producer and get answers that way.
Of course, we're professionals so I've never heard of the cases where someone is pinging someone 10 times a day for micro-questions. There's a hierarhy you should try to follow before pinging someone specifically, and for larger questions you should rearrange a meeting time, ideally 1+ days in advance.
But we also acknowledge that there's tons of tribal knowledge in the company and industry as a whole that you can't simply Google. So you shouldn't treat asking questions as something to discourage.
Employers don’t want mutually beneficial, they want control. Working from home gives people the ability to work while handling other priorities as well. I’m sure the employer time tracking plays a role, but they’ve always had the ability to do that, the pandemic didn’t create that.
I think it’s because companies love to push their corporate propaganda in person, upper level management loves to feel that they’re making a meaningful impact on team morale, but it just sucks when done over zoom.
- most productive days, writing a complete new windows 3.x course at home using my own pc and my company provided copy of framemaker
- most enjoyable, back at the office/training rooms teaching the course
different strokes etc
So basically, there's no impact to productivity. Which is the bottom line.
The bigger issue is commercial real estate leases, which often have occupancy requirements imposed by the city to keep area's tax base healthy. See: downtown Portland, downtown San Francisco, etc.
The city needs local businesses to thrive, so the building owner needs the buildings occupied, so the company leasing it needs butts in seats.
It's a start, not something to conclude from.