People can debate endlessly over the benefits, or not, of working in an office but it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a company to want its workers to show up at an office and reasonable to measure if they actually do. This is a non story.
Germany disagrees with you. This kind of employee surveillance is illegal.
[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/arbeitszeiterfassung-stechu... (in German)
it seems to be mostly true to me, though Germany may be an exception
Workers who have entered the workforce in the last few years, especially technology workers, seem to have a sense of entitlement and privilege previously unheard of.
I hate to break it to those of you in this camp, but life is hard. You have to go to work to make money and build a career for yourself. Your manager will probably ask you to come into the office at a location that is inconvenient for you and involves hours of weekly commuting time, and you'll have to decide whether you'll sacrifice your commute time for a paycheck and a chance at building your future career.
When we eventually get a recession (it will inevitably happen, sooner or later) these workers are going to have the rudest awakening ever when they discover that yes, you actually do have to work for money, and no, your manager is not required to pay you or keep you employed if you directly disobey an order like "please come into the office 3 days a week."
Goddamn, can you BELIEVE that expectations change over time? What kind of bullshit is that?
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I won't bother to add the sarcasm tag for the humor impaired here, but if you don't believe that most remote workers are actually (checks notes) working, the problem is not with the remote workers. Bosses can demand whatever the hell they want, sure. But if it turns out that some bosses don't demand everybody come back to the office and those companies turn out to do just fine, well, that's that vaunted market at work, baby. Expectations really do change, and it is not reasonable to assume that every "knowledge" worker has to be in the office all or even most of the time these days.
I never said that. I'm talking about a very specific smaller group of workers: those that started their careers between 2020 and 2023 and believe they are entitled to a full-time salary and employment whether they work or not. Reality check incoming...
Many tech organizations genuinely do not reap the benefits of working in-office like some other fields might.
If I were an automotive design engineer, being in-person in the company's design studio would make sense; if I'm developing a highly abstracted and distributed messaging system, what office resources would I utilizing?
From my experience, in-office interactions are not necessarily more productive than online interactions. In fact, when a team has a good grasp of the remote-working tools, we, more often than not, end up communicating more succinctly and effectively.
"Life is hard," sure, but no need to make it any harder than it needs to be.
The fact that we _can_ get work done remotely doesn't mean it's the most effective way for software engineers (which make up most engineering teams these days) to work.
That's certainly one approach towards living life.
Another might be:
Don't accept it when your employer decides to start tracking your every move and work for a company that values outcomes more than they do asses-in-chairs. When the eventual recession comes, the odds that it'll disrupt you in any significant way will be greatly reduced because you haven't spent the last three years worried about how to present yourself as "productive", and instead have been focused on actually getting things done.
If every person instead operated a bit more like a company, rather than a vassal, they’d be a little more assertive in their negotiating of boundaries.
"If you hire someone to fix the plumbing in your house and you pay him by the hour, would you check that he worked what he's asking or do you pay blindly?"
Yes "Amazon bad" and whatnot but in the end it all boils down to the same thing, we live in a society where you want what you pay for, whether you're an individual or a company.
And as a plumber, if you don't want to be checked or followed by some annoying customer, you ask to be paid for the completed job, not by the hour.
Because I’ve been a consultant hired hourly, and I would never agree to that kind of surveillance. If you don’t trust me, don’t hire me.
The output of the work should be all that matters. Back to your point, if the plumber fixed the problem for what seems like a reasonable amount of time, why would I need to follow them around?
Exactly, but how can I trust you without knowing you ? Trust but verify right ?
I've also been a consultant and worked in a place where they manage sensitive data. They told you on day 1 that the computer they provided is monitored for everything and that they can take screenshot from time to time. If you don't agree, you don't work there.
> The output of the work should be all that matters.
Not when you're hired hourly/weekly/monthly, the output is irrelevant. If a company hire you for your time, it means that your time is at "their" disposal. If they tell you to be at the office during that time, you're supposed to be there.
And if they think that it's best for them to have you sit in a room with 20 other zoom callers for the possibility that you might talk with someone down the hall and that it might raise the revenue, that's their decision.
Work is a business relation between 2 entities with rules in place, if 1 entity doesn't like some rules, the relation stops.
And as they are paying, they have the right to verify that they receive what they're paying for, whatever it is.
Just like it's my decision to accept that I must pay the plumber for his time when I ask him to explain me some stuff about my boiler that I could read online.
The key difference between the two is precisely that employers are not presumed to watch and control how a contractor works.
I've been a consultant and an employee many times in my career. You can take any variation of the following sentence and it'll remain true:
I've worked for a company as a [ hourly consultant | salaried employee | per project consultant ] that [ monitored my every keystroke | monitored attendance | monitored nothing ].
Every variation is possible, and I've seen every variation.
It all depends on the nature of the consultancy agreement. If you work for the financial industry as a consultant you can expect to allow monitoring.
I don't know of a single place that makes the law clear, but if you dig in a bit, you can find a lot of resources that describe the legal differences between contractors and employees. One thing that's evident in nearly anything you can find is that contractors basically have no protections.
The IRS doesn't care in the slightest if an employer monitors a contractor.
Especially for "subscription" services. I've found it's best to trust, but verify that they are coming out as frequently as you're paying them to and doing everything you're paying them for. It's not even a malice thing; humans make mistakes.
I hire you to change the electrical panel and you charge me X to do it, I'll leave you alone and might even leave the house because the electricity is out.
If I pay 150$/h to have something fixed, you can be sure I won't be far.
But if I want to watch them work, I ask first if it's ok for them.
During the pandemic, we have worked remotely for a year or so, and we were bloody effective. However, when I pondered about why is it so, I found out that because we have deep personal, one to one connections already. In other words, we can work effectively because we know each other very well, not only in work setting but in personal setting too.
When a remote team is assembled, the window for knowing each other is way narrower. You can work and put good results out, yes. We also do this all the time, because we work with many remote teams as a part of the said team, and we don't see them face to face for years sometimes, however when we meet with these people, even for a couple of days, our relationship and work performance changes.
Since we spend time together, we understand each other better and note our underlying characters, inside and outside work. This allows better relationships and faster, way more efficient work. Mails get shorter, things get more fruitful, and work accelerates.
WFH and remote work works, up to a point, but there's a glass ceiling. Some people may not feel or want to understand that, but it's there.
Face to face communication carries way more information than a webcam + microphone.
A mandatory first month work from the main office, bi annual everyone retreat in one location or twists on these ideas might work for remote only setups.
Total surveillance only works for drones and monkeys hitting typewriters. Totally fine for a cash cow monopoly.
I started working full remote in 2018, and I found quarterly meetups work well. 3 days to 1 week on-site per quarter. I pack the week with in-person meetings/lunches/dinners with my customers, coworkers and management to get facetime.
This makes the person you're working with more than a drone, because you have the chance to touch to other person's life. The same is also valid for your colleague.
To be able to foster these kinds of relations, you need to share the space for quite some time. Humans are not machines, this is not a file transfer operation This is way working face to face, esp. in a harmonious team is always better than WFH. Companies are not always in the wrong for wanting their teams in the office.
Of course some people may prefer WFH more, for any number of reasons, and I'm no judge. However, claiming that F2F working conditions have no advantages over WFH is just not true, to put it very mildly.
Maybe you have 2 A students (metaphors for workers) and 4 C students remote. The A students are effective regardless of attendance. But the C students actually become B students when attendance is forced.
You might argue C students should be replaced but you might still end up with C students a year later because hiring is hard.
Given this dynamic it’s obvious why one would be motivated to require attendance.
This is just a thought experiment but I think it shows how blame could be pointed at many different places. For example why couldn’t attendance be required only for lower performers? Etc.