We forced our company to allow work from home again
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
It's easy to make a case for WFH when your job is basically "Work alone for 90% of the time hitting keys on a keyboard". Hell there are tech workers who are going on 20 years of remote work. WFH is an old concept in tech, because the work is almost custom tailored for it.
HN is out here hitting softballs in the battle over retrun to work. However, the overwhelming majority of white collar workers are not tech workers, and do jobs that require way more human interaction. This is where the actual strain between workers and employers is.
Those employers also tend to be pushing RTO.
Most people got used to zoom meetings and async interactions, and they too liked it more than open offices. Big companies have it worse - they have the cubicles/open offices and their coworkers are in other offices throughout the country. This is all too common, and WFH made life much easier on everyone.
This was less true for executives, who were suddenly on 10 hours of zoom calls a day, and whose jobs are most affected. I truly think they forgot that ICs have a very different life than them.
Async communication can be more effective when it causes people to think a bit before talking.
For executives, they are trying to gather more information. What are the power dynamics? Who is deferring to whom? Where is the unstated conflict that isn't on the page? Is there obvious dysfunction? Do people actually understand the problem to be solved in the same way as the executive, and how do these need to align?
(Is the conflict between the sales team director and the vp of engineering a personal conflict exposed as a business one? Is the sales org selling more than what the engineering team has delivered? Is the problem really that the wrong things are being worked on? All of this may be contextualized within something as simple as a status meeting.)
They are also usually brought in for conflict resolution. Conflict resolution has the same dynamics that show up off of the page. Sometimes, it takes a few sharp questions to cut through the stated conflict to find the real one or to align people on the greater business objective.
Finally, it is quicker to read than a meeting, but it is much longer to write. If you are being asked to talk with sixteen different groups in a day, you cannot write all of that.
I don’t like it as much as I like not: having an extra 30-60 minutes of (risky-to-life-and-limb!) driving 5 days a week, thousands in gas and wear & tear on a car, having to own more than one car (more expenses, takes up more of the garage), getting sick more often, not being home when my kids get home from school, not being able to do any part of starting dinner until 5:30 or later, not being nearby if a kid gets sick at school and needs to be picked up, not being able to listen to my own music without headphones, having a shared bathroom, and a billion other things that come with working at an office but are purely bad.
There are a very few circumstances where I find it more beneficial to be meeting in person. For everything else, I find Zoom (or other online video) meetings much more beneficial.
I don't have to plan extra time to get to wherever the meeting is.
I don't have to worry about the meeting room being too crowded, or noisy, or whatever.
I can have my headphones set to noise cancel, so any noise that there is in my space gets filtered out, and all I can hear is the meeting.
I am guaranteed to have my computer right there with me to take notes on or look up anything I need to reference.
In general, I get to take the meeting in my own space, with everything I need ready to hand.
I don't have to worry about the other people in the meeting spreading COVID (remember that? it never stopped being a thing).
Etc.
So unless the "meeting" is, for instance, an attempt to troubleshoot a tech issue on a computer that can't easily allow me to use Zoom's built-in Remote Control feature, tell me why, exactly, I should like Zoom meetings less than in-person meetings...?
A decent portion of the white collar workforce is sales. Lawyers and accountants, recruiters, real estate agents can also be traveling a lot and/or work at places that are not their offices.
I'd also argue customer support shouldn't need to be done in sweatshop style offices, though weak connectivity could be an issue in more decentralized settings.
I really think the key here is that VC has spent twenty years convincing you IT people that “the office” is a floor in a skyscraper with 400 cubicles and no walls or doors or services. If your office actually had any of the redeeming factors of an office, you might feel a little differently, no?
I mean, if it was my company of course I would like the office I built to my standards.
The IT world really made a mistake by creating a space that’s so unpleasant that it’s easier to work at home. I think if a significant share of tech workers had an office with a door we would not be having this wfh rto conversation.
Yes. And it utterly baffles me! Even when employers were making an effort to improve the office environment, they did so in a way that didn't address the problems with it at all. Instead, they went for "perks" like game rooms, free snacks, etc. All of which are entirely orthogonal to what makes working in an office a terrible experience.
I.e.: people
The problem is, it’s cheap to just throw desks together in an empty room and call it a “fish bowl” or “open office section”.
Most companies don’t care that it affects morale, productivity. Just that they were able to seat 5 more people with a cheap trip to IKEA.
Can’t stop people taking the lazy, easy alternative.
The common pushback from employees forced into RTO is they are commuting to a significantly worse environment where they still just sit in teams calls all day.
Windows are fine; door will be open much of the time. It will be closed when I’m doing algorithm design, trying to plan out an N step refactoring to get some rust code to compile, or napping.
I noticed that some of the millenuals / gen z’ers in the old bull pen (16 person cubicle) would just shamelessly sleep at their desks in the afternoon. I occasionally nod off when reading, but this was full-on pillow on keyboard stuff.
So, I’ve decided the stigma around napping in the afternoon is misplaced.
That said, I've never seen single offices for normal software developers here in Germany at any company I ever worked at, so the point is kinda moot. I'm also not sure I'd like it, because where's the benefit if I am walling myself off?
And then it's the question of equipment. Companies are either too stingy or too homogenized. Either I have better screens/chair at home because the company is skimping in general or I have better stuff because I chose what I want and not what was decided to be good.
They spent a long time getting dressed to sales standards for their first zoom call after coming back, and found that everyone had moved to just keeping the video off.
Sweat pants for the win!
(I get the impression productivity also increased, since their team also spent much less time driving across town when a phone call work suffice.)
And all of these interactions are fully possible in remote work. You just need to use the tools that support it- like normalizing video calls (with video on!).
The only reason we see so much "we all need to go back to the office" is that some senior leaders don't like this way of communicating, aren't used to it, and therefore everyone else must be in person as well.
I did have one job where we only spent 20 minutes a day doing that and the results were not impressive.
Even in software, there are some kinds of SW and development and timelines that are easy to do all or mostly remote. These tend to also be the kinds of work that, if not for language barriers, kind of offshore easily. They tend to involve mastery of a framework but otherwise mostly being a lot of glue code.
This is not true for all kinds of software and I think people really underestimate how important it is for some kinds of software to be arguing in front of a whiteboard and/or with massive schematics sitting out and so on or having different people drop in, quickly establish context, and reason through things.
I think a lot of HN tends to be - like most of the industry - basically web apps. Those don't have any problems with communications bandwidth or shared context because a lot of it is on rails and is mostly not interesting to discuss outside the user flows discussions around the UI. But that isn't true for a lot of software or high-value software.
Even with software that is ostensibly developed by a team in an office, is frequently worked on by employees in different offices.
they all resigned together but the company couldn't find anyone to replace them on linkedin. doesn't correlate with my experiences.
in any case would be interesting to know if something like this did happen. i think maybe only in smallish companies where employees have some leverage.
in my experience it seems they started treating remote as a more of a one-off privilge, or as a reward. it's no longer seen as a permanent benefit.
I would believe that they got zero real applications if the company was underpaying and had a decent number of skilled people who were there out of inertia, which would also account for them all being able to find other jobs quickly. It takes a particular culture, but I've seen things close enough to believe that that could happen.
Yeah this was a clear sign the post was fake. Even entry level posts on LinkedIn will get a few hundred applicants in day. Leave it up for a week and you might have over 1,000. This is the case for anywhere in the US. Could be the smallest most rural town in the US. If you make a job post requiring in office work there you’ll still get hundreds of applicants.
It's not like a small company on the middle of nowhere ever had an easy time getting people to apply.
But seriously, this just doesn't add up. I could see the company folding once they realize that they were dependent on the tribal knowledge of those leaving, but claiming to not get any applications is absurd.
More realistic is that it took time for HR to communicate up the chain what was happening; they posted the jobs in the interim; the ads didn't get enough applicants to confidently turn over ~50% of IT in 1 week (obviously); OP interpreted this as "they got 0 applicants and folded"
We could definitely do that, and not receive any local applicants for a week. Maybe longer. The few we might receive would be woefully underqualified.
If they're in (or just outside of) some minor midwest city, the same's true for them too.
Everything I've said is true a hundredfold if there's no university in that minor city.
I don't know what the tech scene is like there. It might be OK, but I don't think it is known as a tech hub.
So yeah, something like that could happen there.
Please do take everything you read on reddit with a pinch of salt. Reddit stories are more like Netflix documentaries, regulare stories, that are over-dramatized for the sake of views.
I'm sure that this is super situational dependent but on the whole I think it negatively impacts junior devs but I would love to hear some other people's thoughts.
I personally don't see a lot of difference in pairing remotely over sitting next to each other, as someone with a non-standard keyboard and layout I actually find it a lot easier, because I can watch and do some doc reading/research/tickets during that.
If you are more hands-off and don't engage with your younger colleagues, then yes, absolutely.
I don't really know how you would just magically absorb knowledge and not wasting all your time if you listened to everything that everyone in your physical vicinity says. (Including cursing, talking about sportsball results, etc.pp) But maybe people who are good at listening while doing something else see this differently.
What I do miss are the coffee break conversations, hopefully also with people from other teams and not only your own, but I think this can be remedied by going to the office occasionally, certainly not something I need on a daily basis.
“Return” to office can’t just be seen as a return to “normal”, it’s effectively a pay/benefit cut.
If you’re going to cut my pay for non performance related reasons, you better know that you’re completely destroying your credibility with me.
The merits of the gains to productivity, whether true or not, don’t really matter. Cutting salaries across the board benefits the company similarly. You can’t spin that as a positive to the individual employee.
Good for them. They should unionise really, but actions like this are incredible and admirable. It is very heartening to see any group of workers defend themselves and their working conditions like this.
When an IT department forces a small (?) company to do something by quitting: That seems way too fantastical to be true.
(Personally... yes, seems a bit too good to be true!)
And HN wonders why some people want unions.[1]
/I'm not aligned to their organization (i'm just an SME/liason on the project) so the return to office order doesn't affect me or i would be doing the same.
I think it's an introvert extrovert split, primarily, with extroverts more likely to be in leadership roles and therefore dictating to everyone else to live like they do.
But if the folks On High do not realize what the people doing the actual work value about their current position, that seems like a pretty big failure of leadership. If you don't understand the needs of those following you, you're not doing a good job leading.
Occam’s razor would suggest that it’s more likely that you have a pretty self-centred view of what “real work” is.
> Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year
> More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP.
https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-...
Managing competing priorities and setting company-wide direction are certainly actual work - but regardless, that's pretty tangential to my real point about leadership.
And the introverts are sick of it. They see the mess so-called "leadership" has created - from the corporate level clear up to the national level. Incompetence and corruption is running amok throughout the world and people are sick of it. They're also sick of being forced to work and live in ways solely intended to protect the wealth of others.
Corruption and greed are accessible to both introverts and extroverts.
I think a lot of it’s manager insecurity, bad processes and structures that also harm in-person work but are harder to ignore when remote, and tax incentives (these are often tied to having X employees working from a given office, and they really do mean working from)
They took a look at what appear to be fantastic results and came to the conclusion that, “we should fix things”.
If you’re in a leadership position, what are you supposed to optimize for?
Is that not implicit? You stated what works best for you, I stated what works best for me.
Likewise as a recent founder myself the fact that I’ve been able to start a company with no office and have the flexibility to hire people from anywhere in the country is a game changer.
If big old fashion companies want to make people work in person, it’s basically just a gift for smaller competitors ready to eat their lunch.
I'm in technical management and would probably be considered an extrovert by engineering standards. I'm really good at navigating office politics. And I hate the office. But that's because I like my family, I like hanging out with my wife at home and my kids, and I have a great office setup at home with windows and big screens and snacks and such.
The people who I see that enjoy going to the office are either young people who live alone and/or in small places, and old people who talk crap about their spouse and kids during lunch and have an obvious disdain for them.
Well there are also the "I had to do it for my whole career, so you can suffer now too" crowd, although most of those people also seem to hate their family.
Do people not have home lives they like, and don’t want the ability to build something widely robust there?
You’ll throw all that away, and the first chance available to do it for workers in idk, forever(?), so that we can all go back to… hanging with Brad and Barb at the office park more often?
Part of this is hard to grasp until you’ve got a house, partner, kids and hobbies that are home-defined (cooking, gardening), that all are worth spending time on, let alone the massive increase financial independence odds.
But also if I was 24, in an urban center, and could work from anywhere… that’s a wide wide open space to figure yourself out, like all the benefits of urban college attendance with an adult spending budget.
It’s a lack of imagination or an implication of a real sad state of affairs in your home/community like that you’d walk away from all that to hit the office park in Toledo or free cold brew in office in NYC.
Really blows my mind. Get a life outside of work! You can succeed at work without being in the office, for a very long time, until you’ll hit a job that the comp makes in-office an easy trade.
Not to say that you are implying it yourself, but when these points are usually made, it comes with an implication that the “extroverts” are seeking to perform some sort of superfluous duty, or something that is at the very least leaser.
Again, in the interest of fairness, anyone that isn’t able to see that WFH presents genuine challenges for leadership that aren’t just about “micromanaging”, “butts in seats”, or “feeling important”, really needs to dig deeper.
Speaking from the perspective of someone that recently had to build a small team from scratch entirely remotely, it has certainly been harder to build momentum, culture, rapport, etc remotely. These things are all important and all materially affect productivity. Onboarding is substantially harder. I had a severely underperforming team member (my standards aren’t terribly high, he interviewed really well, and I’m almost certain he was trying snd failing at over-employment), and working remotely turned it from essentially a non-issue into a months-long ordeal.
This incessant tribalism by esp. developers over the topic of remote work is ridiculously childish.
No, it isn't, it's a symptom of the fact that herding everyone into the same building whether it is actually necessary or not is an outdated business concept, and now that employees have the wherewithal to push back--because now there is abundant evidence that lots of jobs can be done by remote work--they are pushing back. From an employee's perspective, even if there might be some benefits to having everyone in the same office, there are huge costs associated with having to commute back and forth to an office every work day, and having to live close enough to work to make that feasible, meaning your choice of where to live is dictated by your job. In the past those costs were unavoidable so employees simply had no choice but to suck them up. Now employees have a choice.
Yes, that means that managers who are used to managing in an everyone-in-the-office environment will now have to learn how to manage in a remote work environment. That's always one of the risks of being a manager: the game can change at any time, and you either adapt or you go out of business.
I'm still fully committed into forcing your hand. It's your problem to solve (or did you want that salary increase to come with less responsibility), not mine. At the same time, once in a lifetime, I have the upper hand, and I'm not letting it pass.
The incessant tribalism by esp. managers insisting that workers just give away anything they want and never negotiate is ridiculously childish.
Can you present some of these challenges? I've actually done director level management both in person and remote, and I don't know what they are. When asking this question to management looking to RTO, it usually comes down to "how do I know who is working and who isn't?", and in my experience if you don't know who on your team is productive remote, you probably don't in the office either. You just see bustle and assume it's productivity.
Other challenges like running effective video calls are already problems in person in medium to large organizations. I find it easier to keep everyone in the loop when everyone is remote, vs having to remember to update the team in New York about the conversation that happened in California.
Except they themselves don't even go to the office that often or come and go as they please. It's not the same.
I’m an eng on a leader path, have a strong background in leadership, and like people well enough.
There’s nothing stopping you from being an extroverted leader in a digitally-defined environment. It’s easy, it works. Be social-ish, be professional but casual, be friendly, produce output, and soon enough you start winning at tech leadership - produce output on high vis projects (what matters/is seen in remote-first), and be seen doing it and have “friends” (as in, banter on slack a bit - the other part that matters, people need to like you).
If you’ve grown up in chatrooms, text message first (so, born early 90’s and after), the argument that to be extroverted means to be in-person is nonsensical.
You just have to take these digital social skills, wrap a bit of professionalism on it, and you’ll do fine climbing (if that’s what you want).
So more accurately - it’s a split around people who know how to build IRL outcomes via digital context and also like their IRL home lives, and those that can’t and don’t.
I think I'm pretty extroverted in social circumstances where I feel comfortable. But I'm energized by topics that tend to not be great in the workplace (broadly speaking, religion and politics), so in the workplace I usually keep my head down. My workplace has said they want people to bring their "whole self" to work, but work is absolutely not a safe place for my whole self, so in the workplace I have the behavior more of an introvert. WFH is definitely the way to go for me.
Cult-y startup, but still.
That would have been my cue to start polishing my CV.
He’s an absolutely fascinating person to talk to.
Something about me doesn’t come across in remote interviews. But my “culture fit” and competence distortion field still works in person. Just like pre pandemic
My current job was “once or twice a week onsite” but has been once or twice a month
If you don't mind me asking, are you physically attractive? People do behave differently around nice looking folks, especially in person.
I have the opposite problem of I look better on (zoom) camera than in person (not really in shape, etc).
If I brag about my intimate experiences with women, people say its because I’m 6’1” tall, lean, nice jawline and everything that has nothing to do with what I did.
If I complain about any aspect of my relationships with women that I found frustrating, people say I’m an incel, “yikes”, not physically attractive enough compared to a more extreme scarce version of man, and also critiquing everything that I did whether I specified or not.
So, you tell me. I don’t have much consensus since my experience is invalidated by default.
I could believe that for a fully remote position, you're competing with a much larger applicant pool.
I began pushing for onsite interviews on a hunch
I can think of a lot of quantum reasons, but more importantly I wasn’t getting job offers and couldn't find anybody to relate (most discussion I found was about not getting a call back, I pretty much always got to technical interview and then got unceremonious rejections)
So I pushed for onsite and did a classic whiteboard technical interview, the first one sent me an offer. I answered as well or as poorly as every other procedurally generated technical interview. After dozens of other companies all I have is the 100% correlation to going onsite.
Is what it is. Might help someone else.
Open planned offices are a pain the arse for distractions.
I for one couldn't imagine going back, far more productive WFH.
Just asking because people usually use the term specifically for conservative vs. liberal belief clusters. So I'm not sure if you're saying WFH is tied into that culture war.
Personally, as a job seeker, I'm interested in any new changes to the WFH landscape.