Props to the author for highlighting this.
As a result, everyone peacefully self-selected into their preferred employment relationships. Companies got the type of workforce they wanted and workers chose the type of environment they wanted. It was great.
Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. We should just return to the status quo before COVID: choose the type of company you want to work for that supports the lifestyle you want to have. If your employer wants to transition back to in-office work and you don't want to do it, switch to one of the thousands of companies that will hire you.
You have no obligation to stay at a company that is forcing you back in the office, and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.
Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be much more appropriate than firing “for cause”!
> I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida. Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim).
In the Re: Amazon article linked at the bottom of my post, the employee says:
> Now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. I moved to this area 13 years ago. I own a house here. My partner has a career here. I've built a home here.
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over...
Who else?
Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah.
Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare.
It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.
Of course few, if any of these execs will admit they got it wrong. That the root of the problem was their heavy-handed mandates and how they compromised the brand in the (employment) market.
And they always complain about stuff like that, even when they aren’t playing games!
I think you see where this is going :)
It's rarely so easy when times get lean, but everyone has a different experience for sure!
A great many people say they’ll leave ‘any day now’, or ‘after my next paycheck’ - but then somehow never do.
On the employer side, they care about output and costs, and the longer people stay (and keep producing) without need for raises or increased expenses, generally the lower their costs and the greater their output.
The point is, those environments, those cultures don't capture and retain top talent. Again, those who can...do (i.e., leave).
re: "Everybody leave..." Come on. You've got to do better than this. This isn't Reddit.
And I’m going to have to quote Sturgeon’s law here. “90% of everything is crap”.
If 90% of employers are crap, (or 90% of jobs in an industry?), there is going to be a lot of competition for the 10% that aren’t with the crap employers or with the crap jobs. In conditions like we have today, many of the top 10% will even relax their standards (sliding closer to crap), since they just need to beat their competition not be perfect.
All they need to do to outrun the bear is run faster than the next guy, not be the fastest in the world.
So not everyone is going to get one of those nice ones, pretty much by definition no?
I wish you luck with finding one, and making the move if your current employer sucks.
Many won’t, for valid reasons. And employers are counting on that. For valid reasons (even if we all hate it).
That is my observation.
How you decide to position yourself (and plan), and how they decide to position themselves (and plan) is of course up to each participant.
“Market Dynamics” is discussed as if it is a physics problem.
Markets are social creations - they are a human way to effectively allocate resources.
They are also constantly being manipulated and shaped to better achieve certain outcomes over others.
When these outcomes are bent to serve the benefits of the few, or to serve the benefits of a principle that isn’t human wellness, its is a pointless market.
The rules against oligopolies, monopolies, fraud and manipulation are to ensure the social purpose of the market is achieved.
By extension - a market that by nature forces RTO, when WFH is superior to the majority of humans, is a market that needs to be fixed.
A negligible % of firms include commute time as a part of your salary. WFH means that you can save nearly an hour every day, doing any number of things that add economic value to humanity.
Your statement seems to be one of 'should' due to social factors largely outside of the various actors control and/or self-interest.
Which in my experience tends to mean 'I wish was', not 'will be', let alone 'is'. Unfortunately. But pressure applied to various regulators, PR campaigns, etc. could change that! I wish whoever wants to spend the time and effort doing so the best of luck. When that happens, the factors will change.
In the end, labor markets only care about the wellbeing of participants as much as they have to - because labor will either actually not participate, or regulators will actually intervene, etc.
If someone is willing (and able) to commute 12 hrs a day to fill a job, and an employer is willing to employ that person at the rate they want, that will often happen barring better deals. Stochastically of course.
One can think of it in relation to energy states (when markets get above a certain size) if one was in the mood.
As always though, just as in said physics or chemistry problems, individual 'atoms' can and will end up in wildly different states from the median.
But that a single atom may be a movement/vibration rate equivalent to 100C doesn't mean the temperature of the solution isn't 25C (for example). Or that it won't average out over time for that atom as it collides/interacts with others.
Folks on both sides are allowed to make decisions others disagree with (within bounds), and suffer or enjoy the consequences appropriately.
While having a moral right to something (or not) is definitely important, when push comes to shove it’s the legal rights that come into play.
Legally recognized rights tend to underpin most definitions of ‘rights’ someone has, since if the legal system doesn’t recognize it, it’s nearly inevitable it will be stomped on at some point with no recourse.
And when that happens regularly, it’s hard to claim it’s a right anymore as practically it isn’t.
No one is forcing you to sell your home. You could rent your home and move temporarily until you find a suitable remote replacement.
Or, you could just quit outright.
The standard advice is stay in the house at least five years. These people accepted permanent remote roles at companies that have been remote-friendly for only two years. The track record's not there; you can't reasonably assume that policy would continue indefinitely. It might, but it's clearly a risk.
Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"
I resent being lied to. Had they been more careful and put this out more as a "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed. That's not how they rolled and they didn't even have the guts to simply admit "Hey, we just made a mistake here, remote work isn't working for us"
1. Real estate holding investment increases.
2. Control.
3. Silent layoffs.
There's no reason for RTO. None. They're doing it to save money and regain control of their workforce.
The result in my experience is you have either fullish remote or you need just as many desks so very little saving from a company point of view.
Sounds like motivated reasoning.
There are valid reasons for RTO like better communication or even better control over employees. It's a question of trade-offs.
[three reasons for RTO] "There's no reason for RTO. None." [perhaps another]
It’s all about pros/cons and either sides approach.
One big one you didn’t list - it’s really hard to a manager to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester.
Some (but not most!) employees may be burning out, or violating security or labor rules, or not following company policies, or whatever, and these would be trivial to detect in person, but nearly impossible to do so remotely. And almost definitely impossible to do anything about effectively while remote.
Incompetent leaders cannot manage people remotely and they generally do a poor job when in person, but it's masked by their ability to micromanage and type-A the problem away.
Yup, our commercial real was essentially fully vacant. So they rolled out these silly blended schedules (literally just electronically sign in to the office by physically being there once a week, no time req). Now they can say, hey our office space is 90% utilized on a weekly basis! I think commercial real estate investors are going to see right through this charade, but maybe I'm overestimating them.
You have several from major cities (NYC, SF, etc.) saying on the record that they are going to speak to CEO's and push for RTO so that downtowns, local businesses, and neighborhoods can go back to "normal."
Not everybody works or can work in an office. Not everybody can work in tech. Cities are symbiotic, they offer employment to both knowledge workers and non-knowledge workers.
Sorry but you can't just write off the needs of that 50% of the population that aren't techcels. Yes, you will come back to cities, yes, you will re-create thriving downtowns, yes, you will do your bit.
Service sector workers will not tolerate being turned into gigbots and stuffed into ghost kitchens so the PMC elite can pretend they don't exist.
Perhaps this will make things go to how they should be, which means that you work locally because that's where the demand for your services is.
Not just income or payroll taxes, but also regular traffic simulating the local bars, cafes, gas stations & oil changers, dry cleaning, late night pizza, you name it. If these folks can't make their nut then they can't pay rent, and end up moving away or going out of business. Then the problem snowballs.
And then there are the other sources of cash, i.e. speeding tickets, parking fines, and jaywalking citations.
Arguably this is the 'invisible hand of the market' doing its thing, but it's hard to run a municipality if your year-by-year tax base could change dramatically.
It doesn't need to fix things. It just needs to appear they're "doing something."
I've even heard of companies reversing the RTO mandate after the desired number of employees have left. Or just not actually enforcing it and soft-pedaling the whole thing.
Pretty much exactly this happened at my company. They started touting these new offices they got for a steal, but in the all-hands said "our company has never required anyone to come in to the office and we never will". Three months later, they start encouraging everyone to come in once a week. Three months later, they changed it to 'we expect you to be in 4 days a week', and in the all-hands one of the founders went "We never said we wouldn't have you come back into the office. I love seeing people in person, that would be silly of me to say!"
Technically it's not a requirement, just an "expectation", so I still haven't gone in more than necessary. But I'm not expecting a great performance review next year because of it, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll stick around either (it does look like most other places are being even worse about it right now, though). I was so angry to hear that.
Not the only time they gaslit either. They also had a round of layoffs about six months ago while trying not to call them layoffs ("we let a bunch of people go today, it's not a layoff though, they just weren't performant enough to work here"), that really rubbed me the wrong way too.
Because sometimes that will be required.
You are quite correct that continuing on with the company (or in that corner of the industry) may - well, likely will be - impossible afterwards. Few things say 'burnt bridges' like a lawsuit. That said, being fired because of a promise they broke is them starting the bridge on fire anyway.
Either way, the CYA handbook is - document, document, document. And keep it where no one but you has control over it. You have no power if you can't prove anything. And documents 'go missing' or get 'automatically removed' from company equipment all the time in situations like this.
knowing if you even have a case or complaint is also important - which is only going to be possible if you can see what was actually said (not what you remember being said) or written. Sometimes we hear what we want to hear, not what was said. Knowing that BEFORE you show up in court is rather important.
I would keep it anyway for your records, due to it helping your claim for unemployment benefits by establishing constructive dismissal as opposed to termination for cause. But it might not work even then.
When changing direction results in actionable torts against employees, then employees are also entitled to be made whole (to some extent).
And I meant prosecution in the sense of ‘driving to an actual successful resolution including getting paid what you’re owed’ - which can be for breach of contract, illegal dismissal, constructive dismissal, etc.
There are a million ways for a company to fire someone without ‘firing’ them, which they’ll often use if they don’t want to pay out unemployment/owed vacation or the like. Many companies will target expensive employees first (age/seniority, expensive physical health issues, mental health problems, or they just think they ‘aren’t a team player’, or are harder to manager. etc.).
I see changes to these documents as similar to the change in T's & C's for any service I use; your continued use of the service denotes acceptance of the new terms. You're welcome to leave at any time.
Not sure what you can litigate against.
0: anecdotal from the past 15 years
If course, they rarely actually say that. But some folks have definitely been dumb enough to do so.
The issue with contract law is that most folks never put things in writing, so it’s a pain to litigate many claims, which makes it uneconomic to recover damages.
But if it’s in writing? Sounds like an easy to show breach of contract to me!
If it's a general policy that "we are remote", but your contract wasn't updated to reflect that, then don't be surprised if it changes.
If it gets changed in a way that causes you injury, guess what - you can be and should be compensated. If you can prove these things, then it should even be relatively easy to do so.
Contract law is not just things that say ‘contract’ on them. It is about agreements between parties.
Also, talk to a lawyer so they can look over the fine print and applicable statutes. They matter.
Usually what I’ve done is brute force. Every State has a State bar that usually has listings. Google Maps searches for ‘employment attorney near me’ or ‘civil law attorney near me’ also usually gives a lot of matches.
I dump it all into a spreadsheet, and then go down the list taking notes and calling each one. Attorneys should give a free consult (anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour).
Try to learn as much as you can about the applicable law and the situation; and ask questions. Not just what is legal/not-legal, but their history in getting actual results for clients and what the courts will actually take seriously or not.
Don’t pick anyone right away. Call at least 3, preferably 10 in each speciality.
If you like them and they like you, they’ll either take you on contingency or ask you to give them a retainer (funds to be put into a trust they can bill against). Either way there will be some paperwork they’ll have you sign before they’re ’your attorney’.
Additionally, some things to look out for -
1) anyone that makes you pay up front for a consultation is bad news. Run away.
2) anyone that promises a result is bad news. Run away.
3) Anyone who takes a case without asking specific questions and arguing with you sometimes is bad news. Run away.
4) anyone who tells you something that seems wrong (and you can’t verify independently, even after you ask for a reference) is probably bad news. Run away if you even suspect it.
Employment law is its own speciality.
Contract law is generally a subset of civil law. Civil law is a huge umbrella, from ‘my neighbors tree dropped a branch on my house’ to ‘the mega corp. in my county has been poisoning the water for decades and I got cancer’. You’ll run across attorneys who handle many different areas, ask them what they do and what their style is.
I hope this helps!
P.S. most states and countries put their laws online. There is still usually case laws which modify it, and gotchas, etc. but you can figure out 95% of it if you find them and do your own research. Leginfo.ca.gov is the California One. When you’re talking to attorneys, feel free to ask them for applicable cases and/or codes to start looking at.
Flexibility (both in being able to say yes, and no) is important. Not being abusive is important too.
A lot of folks have lost their minds over the last few years (more than most), and it’s going to be interesting for sure how this all plays out.
Anything non-monetary that they take away from you should be offered in compensation and/or renegotiation. You should not be allowing changes to your employment contract without approval, especially ones where they are removing amenities.
The company has already had to revise down their earnings estimates a couple times this year, and hasn't bothered to replace about 20-30 other employees that have quit in the months since then (despite several of them being star employees).
That's why it felt like gaslighting to me, claiming these people weren't good employees and that's why "it wasn't a layoff" (even if that were true, it's still a layoff).
It is working out.
I looked at a few financial statements for a few companies pushing RTO (Amazon and a couple of Wall Street firms). Granted, it wasn't comprehensive or scientific, but: They all made more money in 2022 than in 2019 (the last year before COVID).
So I really do not see what the problem is.
This would simulate the thrill and "buzz" of managing a busy office for these executives to cosplay without having to drag unwilling employees back.
Social bonding is much harder, but important for reliable collaboration, especially when there are disagreements. I also believe that conversations are more likely to derail when they aren't in person. I've also been part of so many lunch conversations in the office that resulted in someone being able to help out someone on a different team with an issue they had solved themselves previously, learn about activities on another team that were relevant to them etc. There are ways to achieve similar things in a remote setup, but it's hard, especially to deploy across large companies with thousands of people. For the record, I've worked fully in person, hybrid and remote and think hybrid is by far the hardest to make work.
Communicating effectively on camera is a learnable skill, it's not one most people in tech have. But making sure people are trained to do a good job is a management challenge and it's incumbent upon management to make sure people are doing it. If, after two years, your team still has trouble having real conversations over a teleconferencing solution? That's a management failure.
"Lunchroom conversations" are arguably the hardest thing to foment in a remote environment for sure, but between things like cross-teams with breakouts and the like, you can do it. And some people are going to do it naturally; I know what most of my director's peers' teams are up to and I have contacts in all of them, while also touching base with them on a regular basis. If your teams don't have people who do this naturally, assign it. If you don't, that too is a management failure.
"It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.
I would stress the video capability, though, because that's the thing that impacts how people feel in pretty substantial ways. I have a weekly 90-minute meeting every Friday where my product teams bring questions to both ask me and to kick around with a group, and so far the feedback has been excellent--and a direct reason cited is that I'm not just letting the meeting wander but I am leading it, I'm standing up while on camera and projecting excitement and a reason to be engaged. When compared with the interminable-drone meetings the rest of the week, it really drives the point home that you have to talk to people like you want them to listen to you, and that is much harder on a camera but it is a totally learnable skill.
Ones thing about meeting in physical space that I miss is directionality and locality of sound. If we are sitting with 4 people at a table at lunch, we can organically switch between having a single shared conversion or two different ones.
> "It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.
Agreed. Different from a power trip though. IMO it's just ineptitudes.
WFH gave those damn individual contributors some agency and prevented dead weight middle management from Lumberghing. Pretty soon they start thinking they're people and having some work/life balance.
Private equity that owns companies also owns stakes in commercial real estate. If companies start breaking leases or renting less office space those private equity firms will lose money. The worst thing in the world is your economic betters losing money. How else will that money trickle down in warm little showers of gold?
A better acronym for RTO would be KYP: Know Your Place.
It's not about making money. They need to make more of it, by pushing margin growth.
It's an absolute value extraction play from investment groups that hurts every company it touches.
Ironically, during peak covid lockdowns, "this is only temporary" may have actually been seen as reckless and irresponsible. "There's a pandemic! We need to be remote for the foreseeable future, not just temporarily!1!1" (etc...)
During peak covid, a lot of people made decisions that they reneged or reversed later. I'll get downvoted if I empathize with the executives making these decisions, but all I'll say is that no one had a crystal ball in 2020/2021. I give a lot of people the benefit of the doubt that they believed what they were saying at the time they said it (even if they have since reversed their opinion).
I don't think anyone was expecting the tech bubble to burst until it did. I don't think anyone was expecting the degree of inflation which led to interest rates which led to big tech downsizing, etc. A lot of people made a lot of mistakes. One of the top mistakes a lot of companies made was hiring people outside of their HQ cities and they're trying to correct that now.
Edit: To be clear I'm a proponent of remote work. Our company has been remote since before covid. Pro tip for anyone in the job market: look for companies that were remote pre-Covid and be skeptical about WFH promises if the company was forced to go remote after 2020.
While no one has a crystal ball it was known pre pandemic that bubbles were there and unsustainable and not far from being at bursting levels.
I know many in my circle were talking about when the dominoes would fall and which ones would topple which others in 2020-2022 as the pandemic raged on. The inevitable outcome of the social supports on top of the economic bubbles happening and then both likely ending at similar times was predictable in anyone thinking in longer terms than the next quarter and next fiscal year.
Meanwhile CEOs took advantage of conditions to go on insane M&A deals, hiring sprees and personal project schemes with little framework for any of that succeeding long term, and burning tons of cash with stock buybacks to keep up with the expected growth targets.
Once the 'Bubble' everyone saw about to burst met the realities of the pandemic and costs rippled through supply chains no one should have been surprised. Unfortunately the tech segment is way too much follow the leader/money right now and once the few big names start moving it happens regardless of it being good or bad.
I bought a house as soon as I could once the interest rate drops happened. Prices were going up by more than my net income each month. Given that I make several times median, I still don't know how there haven't been riots over it.
"Yes, we see all of these price changes, but don't worry it will go back to normal after the pandemic" ... which people went along with for a while, until it was clear that prices weren't dropping back to normal.
I've come to view this as a personality type, the eager salesman (or less charitably, the habitual bullshitter). They will say whatever serves their needs at the moment, and never carries any long-term weight. When they say "we never said that", they actually mean it -- because what they remember were their unspoken motivations, not the words they spoke to achieve it. You can probably find them in the hierarchy of most organizations, as they're good with words and readily commit to changing strategies. They must be, because they need to have a new strategy ready for when the old one inevitably fails. Admitting to mistakes is not part of their personality, the most you will get (if anything) is that their idea was sound but the problem was in the execution or in unforeseen (by them) circumstances.
Learn to recognize the type. If their goals align with yours, they can be useful idiots, but always have a counter-strategy for when the winds inevitably turn.
Unless laws change to require them to [1], workers organize to require it be provided [2], or you've had the working arrangement codified in your offer letter or other contractual documentation so that requiring you to come into an office is constructive dismissal [3]. This whole "employers can do whatever they want" era can't come to an end quick enough.
[1] https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislatio...
[2] https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotel...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urg...
We (as has happened with a lot of things) basically have two camps of people and a culture that makes us believe we are only allowed to make "one-or-the-other" choices (I blame the rise of consulting, KPIs, and 'benchmarks'.)
So two camps are arguing about their preferences but with the stakes that "my preference has to be the moral and logical choice," which will always just lead to nowhere.
Yes, some companies will go back to hybrid or complete in person, but it is also clear that remote work can be done in a much wider context than it was before the pandemic.
The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. Not everyone, but a huge number that had never been exposed to it before.
Now if a business wants to stay competitive they need to tap into that labor market. The vocal resistance to RTO is expected, we'll never go back to having such a large percentage of the work force working in an office. It's just that a lot of managers haven't figured that out yet and/or are personally incentivized to keep up the charade.
It's not even necessarily falling in love with working at home but just working not in shitty office environments. For most people "the office" is some miserable building in an office park in the middle of a food/service desert. Employees that need to commute to that office don't get paid for the hours of their life wasted in traffic or any financial expenses related to their commute. People with kids have to pay even more money for some child care if they can't be home when their kids get off from school.
Working from home/wherever allows someone to save on those money and time costs. They can be home when their kids get off school. They can make a sandwich at 11:23AM because they're hungry. They can stop pouring dollars into a daily commute. Hell they can even live where they want instead of somewhere in commuting distance of a shitty office park.
Many of the WFH challenges are the same as working in an office, like inconsiderate entities disturbing you or placating middle managers by attending meetings. At least you can bear those challenges in comfortable clothes in a comfortable seat. You can then take a break and shit in a bathroom you don't share with dozens of other inconsiderate coworkers. WFH isn't perfect and people don't need to love it to at least prefer it over the dystopian hell of offices.
That's why there is resentment. There was resentment before too, but it was more below the radar because it was always shot down with "we work better in person" and there really wasn't much an argument to be had.
But now those people have hard data that they clearly work just as well at home or even better. So now they have data to back up their desires.
And then there's all the people that didn't know they wanted to work remotely, until they were forced to experience it.
Literally the only people losing in this arrangement are the same parasites who win at literally every other juncture in our society and just, I'm sick to DEATH of it. I will DIE on this hill. I hope the commercial real estate market fucking craters. I hope every company doing this RTO shit dies on the vine. I hope it sucks for every single person in the parasite class who loses more than 2 dollars on everything. I hope it crashes the price of real estate in big cities and makes them affordable again. I hope it makes my home worth less because homes shouldn't be a fucking investment vehicle in the first place.
To borrow the bugs bunny meme, I wish every landlord a very happy get a real job.
So it depends on circumstances and preferences. Both modes should be possible.
But that doesn't solve for the folks behind us on the ladder; how effective are we being at mentoring and growing those people, how easily are they learning the small nuances that we picked up in hallway conversations, serendipitous meetings, and so on. For the company, this is a real concern, but it's harder to measure. To better advocate for remote work, I think we really need to pour more time and energy into this and call out techniques that can be more effective here. For example: having leaders write a weekly newsletter, or getting into the "Why's" much more intentionally when people are remote.
You adapt. The hallway conversations are not some natural world order either. Do you want juniors to pick up skills? When you're starting work on something interesting, post "I'm doing X in (conference link), feel free to join." in a channel. Invite people for a lunch call.
Humans are great at adapting to their surroundings. Mentoring/growing juniors will continue but in a different way that works better for modern work arrangements.
Both TFA (and the comment you are replying to) are about people specifically hired for remote work prior to the pandemic; the status quo before COVID was those people working remotely.
Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works, but are unjustifiably being told otherwise by people that don't actually know what works.
When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes? An example of pride in their work: Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.
The compensation is correlated with confusion.
If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office. There is a difference between making it through an event like COVID vs making forward business progress. Certainly there's a place for remote work but the higher you go in management the more you see the holes remote work creates. Realistically, employees should push hard for return to office and then no work out of the office. The reality is that as the job market tightens the expectation is going to be in office AND work from home. Vacation days will morph into work from home days. An expectation to answer emails after hours is already turning into an expectation to be online and available for zoom calls much later than normal working hours.
I truly hope the line between leave and work doesn't blur.
You're missing the inherent power dynamics of owners versus employees
The C suites at the top down to middle (mangle) management want RTO because their goals align with real estate value and tax incentives
Mangelement want it because acting as vague wardens for a bunch of people tied to desks for no reason means their jobs have meaning
This. Finding the balance is challenging.
- It is often unhealthy to expect too much from work.
- most software/hardware tech employers ask employees to be more than contractors and to care more than just a paycheck
- at the same time we see corporate decisions that are largely shortsighted, and sometimes even self-defeating.
I don’t have a history of belonging to a union, nor promoting worker-owned cooperatives, but I am a student (so to speak) of public policy and history. To use political economy terminology, we often see misaligned incentives: people with a little technical experience, calling the shots on everything from where we work (office, remote, etc) to how we work (remember cubicles? They were better than open office for anyone like me.)
Software and hardware engineers have been a key differentiating factor for tremendous technological advancement and meteoric corporate growth. Why don’t we have more influence on how we work at the least?
One key aspect seems damning: could it be because for most of us, as we get successful, we don’t pay it forward? And where are the ‘politically active’ retired engineers? Many of us cash out and become investors ourselves. I suppose we get working on other interesting technical problems and treat the lack of workplace control as immutable? To some extent, I’ve seen the problem and it is us.
Or maybe the business world is structured so that being “just a worker” relegates you to a second class status. Maybe there’s no point in hoping even a group of 1,000 of the relatively wealthy of us (to throw out a number: let’s say we define that as having net worth over $2M in the USA) could’ve made a difference? But I know this isn’t true; I largely notice a gaping hole where collective organizing could be.
Of course, there’s plenty blame to go ‘round. Anyone who seeks venture-capital has to make a Faustian bargain, trading a blood infusion for improbable expectations of growth.
The tech industry has grown so rapidly, adding people at a breakneck pace, that maybe we don’t think of this as being important. New SW/HW hires at least get paid well, we tell ourselves, even if they don’t really get to shape or work places as much as we should.
Our negotiating power is not as strong as it once was, and it isn’t getting any better, in my view. Will we act? Soon? Ever?
The engineer who wants to deliver their project in return for their salary, in contrast to the sociable c-suite exec, who wants to cosplay the work environment of yesteryear.
This applies to the wider corporate world and not even just the tech industry but I understand it's relevance as this is HN.
There will always be toads, but there might be some people in there, too.
There is a famous prayer where one asks to be strong enough to change the things one can, humble enough to not requiring the changes you can't, and wise enough to know the difference. I don't remember it literally, but should be easy to find.
Anyway, work from home just got promoted from something you can change into something you can. As it happened, the healthy thing changed from not expecting it into demanding it (if you want).
My phones are 1) a VOIPphone, and 2) a mobile device. The former relies on the internet; the latter can't send a FAX. PSTN is 90's technology, fewer and fewer people have a PSTN line.
Yup - it was much cheaper, my previous phone connection was from a cable company, and I already had internet. And as it turns out, VOIP seems to be more reliable than PSTN. And my (boutique) ISP specializes in VOIP.
I wouldn't have even bothered with VOIP, and just relied on mobile telephony; but I don't trust mobile providers, and I wanted a landline-style local phone-number.
Secondly, companies that pulled this bait and switch deserve to be called out and loose reputation among workers for it. My current employer had recruiters and even the CEO bragging about our remote work policy, just to pull it out from under everyone.
The status quo was horribly broken, and it took a worldwide pandemic for many people to realize that things could be different and didn't have to be so awful.
You don't understand why people don't want to have to go job hunting to keep a WFH position?
It's one thing to say "this is fine, get over it", it's another to say "I don't understand why people are resentful", I think that second part is pretty obvious.
If you look back at the history of work experiences, there were several old "status quos" that we no longer accept. We don't accept, manual labor for 60 or 80 hours a week. We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension. But society evolves. Assuming that something as disruptive as COVID should just be put aside without evolving how we operate in our world is exactly where the resentment comes from.
I think that if private companies offered pension plans, reasonable raises and promotion paths, many people would accept it. I think the company hopping stuff is largely a response to the death of annual raises and internal promotions.
I mean, this is a ridiculous argument supporting remote work because it works so much stronger the other way.
You literally had companies change centuries worth of corporate work for overnight to switch everyone to remote work.
If anything the people who want full time return to office have a much stronger argument that companies have suddenly changed everything on them, as opposed to the people who are complaining that now that things are normal companies are reverting the changes they made for a once in a lifetime pandemic.
Sometimes it takes a black swan event to reveal how broken something is and how things could be better another way.
It used to be the norm in the US for children to be allowed to work in coal mines and factories too (apparently in 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were children under the age of 16[1]), but after some photos were taken of them exposing just how bad the situation had gotten, it helped shift public support to pass legislation barring child labor. Nowadays I doubt hardly anyone would be in support of that now.[2]
[1]: https://www.history.com/news/child-labor-lewis-hine-photos
[2]: https://energyhistory.yale.edu/child-labor-pennsylvania-coal...
The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. I remember going to the dentist and telling the dental assistant that I work from home, and her response was "don't people think you're slacking off?" and my response was "no, because I'm an adult". There was an almost insurmountable stigma around remote work. As terrible as the pandemic was, it exposed an irrefutable truth about remote work: people can still do their jobs perfectly fine at home.
I spent most of my career working in offices, until I went fully remote about 2 years before the pandemic. There are aspects of the office that I miss. I'm not vehemently against going back into an office, but it would come with some pretty big caveats: the office has to be relatively close, there are no fixed days or amount of days I'd be required to come in, and I'd have the flexibility to come and go as I pleased. I doubt many companies would agree to that arrangement, mainly because of the real estate costs, which is why I stick to remote work.
I don't want to go back to a world where I have to convince a company that a remote worker can still provide as much value as one in the office. I don't want to be forced to stay late at an office to finish something that I could knock out twice as fast at home. I can only hope that we don't spend the next few years going backwards to arrive at a status quo that was misguided and not grounded in reality.
Edit: Grammar
In my last position (exclusively work-from-office), I had two co-workers (out of nine) that were seriously counterproductive: the rest of us had to work around them. I don't know why the bosses hired them, and I don't know why they kept them on - perhaps they thought they were somehow rescuing them.
At any rate, these guys weren't just less productive; they were seriously counterproductive. And this was a strictly office job; we were more-or-less forbidden to work after 5:30PM.
The bosses had some kind of "company culture" fantasy, that they could weld us together into a bean-bags-and-table-football crew of clones, who would both work and play together. Interestingly, neither of these bosses had ever done an office job in someone else's office...
When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive.
I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees.
Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Require that people live or be available at regional hubs monthly or quarterly. My aunt had an arrangement like this for a airline in the late 90s - they setup a router and PC in her basement and would have meeting or two a month at the office.
For me, top down dictates that remove business unit autonomy and don’t understand reality are always a net negative. WFH flexibility reduced sick and family sick absences by 60%. People who’d take an hour off to go to the doctor now take a half day.
Now, I have two employees reporting on this stuff instead of doing something productive. So I’m losing thousands of man-hours to absences and spending 3000-4000 more to figure out how many asses are in chairs in dozens of facilties across the world. Managing professionals like fast food employees is dumb. The only winners are the CRE and banking people.
Even skilled laborers, like plumbers and electricians, are not in a profession. They're members of a trade.
Doesn't everyone, you know, hate this kind of stuff? I know I do.
For more mundane day-to-day work I don't care for it, but I think it can be a handy supplement to mostly remote work.
When everyone was forced to do it, many learned that it is not only possible but results in better overall life satisfaction.
I’m sure some people learned they really hate remote work, but my guess is there were more converts the other direction.
Also, the commercial real estate market is getting fuct. And a lot of big corporations hold commercial real estate in their portfolio.
Why? People at my org had been begging for WFH before the pandemic, and the pandemic helped us win that battle.
Why should we cede ground back to our bosses when we are happier and more productive now?
Isn't "companies going crazy and forcing good employees into situations where they'll quit, when they could just as well... not do that", something to push back against?
It's now been shown that it's possible and that productivity is very similar. So that's why companies forcing the return to work are resented, and why they don't even pretend to have numbers to back their decision. https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
Says the ownership class.
When we are given a rare and unique opportunity to shift our labor culture in the favor of those who provide labor, we would be beyond stupid not to seize that opportunity for everything it's worth.
No secret that the answer is: to privilege the anxious social needs of those uncomfortable working remotely. And those whose career is on the hook for over-investment in trophy real estate.
Two, people love to handwave away the difficulties in "just find another job." This isn't trivial like switching toothpaste brands, somebody who's been with Acme Corp for 3 years has invested time with that employer, learned their ins and outs, and has banked some social capital there. Saying "oh, just find another job" is saying "just toss all that out and start over."
Three, if you do change jobs you have no clue whether the next company might get swept up in the RTO craze at a later date. When Acme Corp's pro-RTO CEO or another c-level person trot over to your new workplace, guess what? Now it's no longer remote-friendly.
We're not living in the same world we were pre-COVID and many of us see no reason to go backwards.
They saw the light. Simple as that.
They also noticed, if more employees in the market demand remote, chances are higher that employers will allow it.
Because these companies hired a lot of remote employees in the interim. Also, many of the employees of these companies decided to buy houses in areas where they could afford to buy a house instead of continuing to rent - and now after several years these companies want to renege?
How can you not understand the resentment? This is the biggest FUCK YOU in the history of corporate America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[2] "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.
I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote.
Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.
Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH.
Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/t...
"Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."
* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work.
2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study:
"Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office."
>* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
>The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest.
2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.
I think there's a bit of a selection bias. I believe many people can work effectively remotely and these likely applied to remote companies. But many people are less effective remote and these wouldn't succeed in remote companies. In the end I certainly think there's a space for remote only companies, but I'm not sure if it's a model useful for the whole IT sector.
> All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
In the end it doesn't matter. It's the managers calling the shots and carrying the responsibility. If their guts tell them office work is the right direction, it's their bet.
I think the hard reality is that companies need to make a thesis on the level of flexibility in remote/in-office work and commit, then 5 years from now we'll get an idea of what works well.
* Employee happiness
* Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office
* Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge
* Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure)
* Able to hire from outside local metro area
None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And yet now vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations is enough to shift everything back to in-office?
Now there's a significant portion of the labor market that expects WFH, companies need to produce a policy on WFH/RTO instead of treating it as a non-decision.
Data gives no clear insight into which is better, which makes this a judgment call, and everyone with >5 yoe has enough experience in both modes that they feel qualified to make that judgment. Many think requiring some in-office time is superior. You can try and dismiss those opinions as "vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations" but that's not going to actually convince anyone with the power to effect these decisions - even if you're right! You need answers to concerns like "virtual communication is too low bandwidth to build alignment on strategic shifts that are necessary for the company to grow to profitability" (quote to me from a director at a company with >1,000 employees).
My argument is basically: if you could have addressed those concerns, it would've happened during the pandemic. Manifestly, those concerns were not addressed in a satisfactory way. Therefore the only real resolution now is to wait 5-10 years to see if RTO/WFH is a meaningful differentiator for companies.
I worked as a volunteer in an online team before the COVID years. I was FAR better at ensuring a team was cohesive online, than I was in person. You can make out whats going on based on how people talk, you can have one on ones, and diagnose issues.
And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.
Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it.
> And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them?
My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations.
Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
> My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it.
Then my intuition is that you were one of the people popping over walls.
(You weren't? Well, your intuition is worth about as much as mine.)
(You were? Well, then you've got a vested interest in believing that that was better.)
That's great until you are forced to come in on "anchor days" and there are no free meeting rooms left.
Some articles have pointed out that the major driver (from executives) to return to office is simply underperforming real estate investments. In short, the attrition, decreases in performance and morale, and environmental impacts are simply not worth the massive losses that would be incurred from the innumerable empty office parks.
There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.
The former can be somewhat measured by in-effective methods such as lines of code produced, revenue per emp in division, and other measures. The latter via surveys.
A company's direct objective it to turn a profit. Their indirect objective is might be to do that via retaining productive workers, or they may take a churn approach. Is it surprising they'd put more effort and weight on the former (prod) than the latter (better for people)?
What math function allows you to strike the correct balance between the 2 measures. For some employees you might make them maximally satisfied by paying them a lot to do nothing. For others they might want little to no money for socially rewarding work. It's not going to be the same for every person.
So in your mind what's the right optimization function for this equation?
Unless being a slacker becomes a protected class companies will hire the productive people, given a choice.
just what in the hell are you thinking?
I see this assertion every time the WFH/RTO topic is brought up, but there's never any data to back it up. Mind changing that?
If you (royal you - anybody who wants to make this claim) really want to claim that many people are measurably more productive at the office, we'll need studies to counter those done which show WFH is more productive than working from the office.
I think some people _are_ more productive WFH. But also there are lots of people who become quite unproductive WFH. Direct managers can often tell.
I don't know of a study that says one way or another, but from experience those two kinds of people exist (among other kids of people).
I really don't think it's a controversial statement that some people work better from home and some people work worse from home. In fact, I'd be extremely surprised if the opposite was true (everyone works better from home, or everyone works better in the office), I'd almost say that's impossible.
I always point out that most "productivity" numbers assume the costs of commuting hours/fuel are $0, because it measures from the perspective of employer costs, and it assumes the employer has used their bargaining-position to force all those variable-costs entirely onto the employees.
So we've got (A) a misleading "productivity boost" sometimes being used to rationalize (B) one-sided policies which are (C) probably not sustainable in the long-term anyway.
If you already have a set of employees, and you demand they all come in, you are selecting against people who know they can sustain their lifestyle by moving to another company.
Only problem with low enough productivity enough to be bumped down to becoming totally unemployable don’t get the choice. These also are the people who are most likely to follow an in-office mandate. It seems like a bad filter to apply.
This is my response to both your comment and TFA. There is less consensus on this topic than the very-vocal WFH crowd would have you believe. I know plenty of other talented engineers that feel similarly to me. They aren't dogmatic about it, but they prefer working with their teammates in the office.
There's a third option beyond forcing everyone into boxes in the middle of nowhere (old and busted) and everyone working from home (new old hotness).
My point is that if 5/100 people want to work in the office and 95/100 don’t, that’s fine.
If 5/100 want to work in an office with 100 people, and force the others to return against their wishes that’s * not* fine.
They can have their preference, but it seems wrong to me for their preference to override the preference of others.
> I’m not a CEO so it’s not my place to decide what a company does or doesn’t do.
Funny, because I’m the owner of my company, but I don’t think employees should defer their decision making to a CEO.
An employee can have an opinion, and even demand their preference. CEOs can’t actually make a unilateral decision on this. Labor absolutely gets a say. If the CEO says “RTO or you’re fired”, and 95/100 people say “okay, bye”, then that company won’t RTO.
This is the part I was disagreeing with. The CEO does not make that call. The CEO and labor negotiation over that call.
If you view it as just the CEO's decision, you've ceded a tremendous amount of power.
But, actually, it's a shared decision between the CEO and the entire body of workers. If the body of workers all reject the CEO's decision, then...that decision will get reversed.
This is more of a level-setting question than any sort of disagreement.
Every industry, every company, every team, and every project is different. What works in some places and times doesn't work in others.
You have to decide for yourself and your team/company if RTO is what is best, and don't take other's lived experience as your own.
I don't understand this response and it come off as incredibly rude.
What I'm asking is whether it ever makes sense for a firm to do something against the preferences of employees if it demonstrably increases productivity.
> You have to decide for yourself and your team/company if RTO is what is best, and don't take other's lived experience as your own.
I genuinely think you might be responding to the wrong comment or something. Where did I "take other's lived experience as your own"? Am I misinterpreting your response?
I've already said in this thread that I'm open to both arrangements. I'm not a zealot on either side of this conversation, and it bothers me that you're assuming I am. There's pros and cons to both. You put forward a scenario that for whatever reason inspired me to present a hypothetical situation because I was curious what your response would be.
I am not trying to be rude, but the way you asked the question "Hypothetically, would you still feel this way of it turned out that everyone being in the office (remember this is a magical hypothetical) has a significant and demonstrable improvement in productivity?" is leading to a yes or no answer to a hypothetical question with a lot of missing quantifiers (the lived experience). Neither answer is wrong, and neither answer is right.
A better question would have been: "_Have you_ experienced a demonstrable improvement in productivity from being in the office in yourself or others?" Personally, I have not. Going to the office wastes a lot of my day getting ready to leave the house (unhooking laptop and charger), commuting back and forth, etc. The only time being in the office is a net positive is when I need to get like 6+ people into a conference room for a few hours and get them all to agree to something. These type of meetings only happen every few months.
For the record, you're talking to different people. You asked the question to me, and I responded. guhidalg is a different person in the conversation.
Yes, in a particular scenario.
If it improved productivity so much that it exceeds the work required to commute to the office, and the employer is willing to pay for that commute (both in cost and employee time), then sure. If the productivity gain is so large that if offsets the cost/time of the commute, and the employer is willing to pay for that time, then I think RTO makes sense.
I will prioritize my own needs, my own life, my own comfort, over the "productivity" or profit of a company every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
And frankly, so should we all. This obsessive focus on enabling companies to make more money, regardless of what it means for us regular workers as human beings, is utterly ruinous and needs to stop.
Just about this. We've seen again and again that they will.
I don't understand what is happening well enough to explain CEOs destroying their companies before conceding this to the employees, but this is clearly a thing common enough for it to be the default expectation.
And that's my main criticism of the article. Those CEOs clearly are not doing some random bullshit. They are doing some completely intentional and heavily desired thing. IDK what is their reasoning or if it's aligned with the company's goals, but they do have the intention.
Nobody should be forced to anything, but that doesn’t mean that an arbitrary mix works.
I don't see the OP assuming that. Not everyone enjoyed it but for those of use who did going back is not desirable.
This was the line I was directly responding to.
There's a mile wide difference between "my preference is to be vegetarian" where people will get out the stops to provide accommodations and "my preference is everyone must keep vegetarian."
I don't personally hold that view, but I know people (including individual contributors) who do and, depending on why you think in-office work is good, it's an entirely reasonable view for some people and some companies to take.
I understand the argument, I still don't think it's valid. Companies are made up of heterogeneous individuals with not only different preferences on how to work, but different work styles, different flexibility needs, different energy cycles. One of my current teammates has Crohn's and is a fantastic programmer but there's no way he could work 8 hrs in an office. For myself, I have really bad ADHD and working in the office means I will be completely dependent on stimulants instead of being able to work around it most days.
You can't put the cat back in the bag that made the whole world collectively realize that for most jobs being in an office building wasn't the real requirement we all thought it was.
There are discussions and topics that just work better in-person. If you think you have (or could arrange to have) 0% or 3% those types of conversations, you're fine to work fully remote. If you think you have 70% or 90% those types of conversations, you're logically going to want to RTO to whatever extent you're prioritizing company outcomes.
What is the value differential--in dollars--of these in-person conversations? All I'm seeing are vague speculations.
People and companies who want to associate in a different way should also be allowed to.
That lets some people and some companies choose RTO, others choose hybrid, and others choose remote-only.
I shouldn't be able to force my beliefs onto you, nor you onto me (we probably largely agree; I'm pro-remote overall); to the extent that there's an imbalance in supply and demand, there's a lot of room for prices to adjust the balance. If companies need to pay a premium for RTO, they can choose that.
People who want an office to work in are just as valid as people who want to work from home. It's the people who want to force RTO on everyone that are real assholes.
It reduces commute time. - This saves environmental and energy costs
- It increases worker productivity because now they commute time is recovered
- Commute time was not accounted for in contracts, and was a cost of doing business. It is no longer the case.
A common complaint is that Coordination costs have increased. However Data is missing for this. Further, Coordination activities are achievable online. Competitive firms will adapt and thrive. Bad firms will and should die.
Other benefits: - Less money is spent on rent, Especially in high rent locations. This means that more money is available for R&D, or to give to shareholders
- Rent Money is now distributed across geographies - and will favor regions with lower costs of living. This spreads talent and wealth broadly, increasing chances for entrepreneurship and new businesses to flourish in those locations
WFH was considered infeasible, but COVID provided hard evidence not only was it feasible, it was feasible at scale.
The data has been updated, so our position has changed. Expanding the economic pie makes us all better off. WFH is probably one of the more interesting economic revolutions we will see in the developed world.
Also, I've been in this industry for 17 years. Malwarebytes (VP), Vicarious (VP), Rad AI (VP), Explosion AI, Aptible, and now Comcast. Every one of those companies except Vicarious had a remote or hybrid culture, and it's worked great for all of them. You absolutely can "arbitrarily mix people with different modes" as long as you have good management.
To head off negative reaction to this, I'm not saying that remote should always be similar hours, I mean remote work positions that otherwise would have been in office before the pandemic, if that makes sense.
I just look at this situation and to me it looks like people are like, ohh noo, remote work isn't as good as in office work, well, yeah, you haven't even tried to make it anything like "in office work but thru a camera," you've almost allowed your domestic employees and contractors to work as if everyone's in different teams in different timezones, with all of the problems that come with that...
Sure, you don't need to write everything down - but how many times could someone have simply RTFM if people were more in the habit of documenting institutional knowledge among other things? Even just defaulting to email discussions would help keep track of things much better.
And yeah, when I'm working with other people, I make a point to hang out in a BigBlueButton or other similar instance, with a note with my phone number there, as well as putting in my email signature line my phone and a note that I'm available for videconference.
Of course, sometimes it makes sense to do check-ins (e.g. for onboarding) or a pairing session, but that can also be scheduled.
I also tend to forget things that were just said in personal interactions or meetings. If it's written down, I can look it up.
Ultimately the argument is about control, extorting and coercing compliance under threat to some will. The alternative is a relaxing of control. In that model no one tells you to work in the office, and no one tells you to not. Instead of management exerting coercive control their job would become ensuring productivity given a lack of control.
Tax advantages are part of the story, but the other part of the story is most managers aren’t very good at managing people. They’re in their job through some career twist, either under the delusion that management gives them scale of influence or because they don’t really like computers that much and went to CS for a career. The easier policy to enforce is the coercive one because it requires no thought, and it’s uniform in its application. The harder one for management is figuring out how to adapt to a changing environment and maximize productivity by understanding their people and how they work and smoothing the landscape for them.
This challenge extends not just to the line managers but to the CEOs and everyone between. None of them are usually very good people managers. Often senior management are better at strategy and manipulation of the organization. They are perplexed by ambiguity, and when you’re used to being in control being perplexed is uncomfortable. And when you feel like you’re in charge you don’t have to feel uncomfortable alone, you can make it someone else’s problem. Layoffs, resignations, turmoil are all issues they are used to. But a changing work environment that fundamentally rethinks the structure of corporate engagement that’s focused on lack of control in exchange for productivity and reduced operating expenses and freeing up of capital? That’s scary stuff, and they don’t need to feel scared - it’s easier for them to make you feel scared.
Anyway - tax agreements expire, leases lapse, cultures adapt, management learns new playbooks, and things change. In 5 years the cold hard dollars will win - eventually no board will accept hand waving culture arguments when confronted with an improved EPS, freeing of cash flow, and reduced capital commitments coupled with improved morale and productivity and the “Bring your own office” moment will be here. BYOD saves a few million a year, BYOO will save dump trucks of money. It will happen.
Disclaimer, I just quit my cushy senior exec job at a mega cope over RTO and joined a forward late stage startup with a mixture of remote and in office “work the way you work best” structure.
I enjoy going to the office from time to time, and if you establish no rules, I'm pretty likely to go to the office about 2-3X per week and coordinate those days with others, because I'm also a social human being.
I also enjoy being able to see my partner for a week here and there. Some have a "4 week work-from-anywhere policy", but if you're in an LDR you know 4 weeks per year is really not enough.
That said, personally is the key word. I manage a team. I love seeing employees together and aligning on things in person where possible - but totally understand if this does not suit their schedule that day or week. It often does not work with mine.
It's the small human mistakes that are innocent and spontaneous - like inevitably spilling coffee on myself - that keep us humble.
Some fit the remote world entirely never wanting to see the inside of an office again, some thrive off rubbing shoulders with colleagues. I found it difficult to not have social engagements outside of family during the darker periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also found myself working longer hours, not having solid disconnected time or neglecting my health physically and mentally.
I believe we still have a lot to learn about how to work best remotely. Businesses should invest in making this as normal as possible - for example enforcing a work-from-desk policy for calls has helped normalise communication. I do worry slightly about those younger graduates coming into the industry now that have never had the experience of working in an office.
To the frustration of my then boss, I noticed that I (and a lot of other coworkers) used RTO as a way to reduce our hours to ~40/week and not spend our nights and weekends with our work laptops open nearby.
It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either.
Just as an example, I see people complain (a lot) about “cameras on” policies. This is the result of a company trying to eliminate an issue that they are seeing from non-participation to potential instances of fraud. They want to do return to office, but this is a “let’s find a middle ground” step.
And yet, people will act as if it’s the end of the world. The alternative is being in the room itself. You have to pick your battles.
Now, we're being told to do hybrid, but there's no peer friendships because it's hotdesking, and the senior personnel are no longer nearby (they're at home or on a different floor) ... so there's no "return", we're not going back to what we had, we don't have our own desks anymore.
Management acknowledge that office days (we're hybrid) will be low in productivity, but no changes to productivity requirements. It's all about collaboration, except you're next to random people you've never met and you can't talk because it's open plan and you'll disturb everyone.
None of the reasons given for return fit the reality (in my office), but they probably make sense for senior managers (who seem unable to see past the end of their own noses).
Time to get a new job.
I mean this is true in the scenario where demand for their skills outstrips the supply of available workers with said skills.
In a different scenario, where tech jobs are being reduced across the board (due to return to normal interest rates and VC funding slowing down), such an "aren't going back" ultimatum isn't necessarily going to be compatible with "I need a job."
And of course, if you believe Microsoft, ChatGPT is going to start eating tech jobs left and right any day now.
The economy runs in boom and bust cycles, and the winds are shifting. The tech environment from 2020-2022 was extremely weird, and the balance of power now is shifting back to management. Management knows that (at least some) workers highly value remote work, and they're not going to hand that out for free.
The only certainty here is change, and as tech workers lose leverage, "remote work" moves from a default assumption to an item that must be negotiated for (perhaps in exchange for some total compensation) - if it's available at all.
When I was in an office full time, I had to work my life around my work. When I have forty hours to fill out over a seven day period, I'm working my work around my life.
Not all states are understanding about this either; many states are notorious for penalizing employers for failing to comply with compliance requirements they didn't know they had because an employer moved to a state without telling them.
Prior to COVID, many companies considered this grounds for for-cause termination. Even post-COVID, some companies still consider this grounds for for-cause termination.
You're being too kind. Whims aren't the problem, lack of imagination is (and in leadership positions that should be unacceptable).
The problem is, few of the RTO office execs have WFH long enough to understand it. They have no clue how to lead WFH. They have no clue how to manage WFT. And they're not interested in learning new tricks. They simply wield their power and reinstate the status quo.
In a word...weak.
The RTO v WFH debate (?) is an opportunity in the market. An opportunity where WFH is the new up and coming opportunity. RTO is all but a fax machine. Who would feel comfortable working at a company where the executives lacked imagination and are all but mandating "Bring back the fax machine"?
- The UK team wants a noon (their time) meeting? Sure, I'll do it at 6am my time vs the SF team doing it at 4am.
- That NYC customer wants us to present at 9am ET? Sure, I'll do it at 8am my time vs the SF's team at 6am.
- Need someone to cover that meeting in Atlanta/DC/Dallas/Houston/Chicago? Sure, you can take a 3+ hour(+2-3 timezone) flight to cover it or I can just hop over in a fraction of the time.
After a while, I got ALL of the East Coast and European calls simply out of convenience.
I'm never going back, and have shut down plenty of recruiters and headhunters with one simple phrase: "100% remote."
So no, to say it's "bullshit and everyone knows it" is just pushing for some agenda. I wish everyone can have their way, if you don't want to come to the office then don't, employers should make it possible, but don't make it sound as if everyone hates it, it's just wrong.
I'm very with you on the commutes tho. I live in Seattle and Mondays and Fridays are like driving on Thanksgiving (a major holiday in the US when no one drives and even the roads in L.A. are clear), and Tuesday is worse than the before times. Wed/Thurs are a bit better than the before times though so I just go in on those days (that's also when we tend to have happy hours).
But I agree on the last part, I prefer it when certain coworkers WFH. TBH some days I strategically choose my office hours so I overlap with them less.
But having a mostly in-person, and some-people remote setup, where the remote folks are left out of the hallway conversations sucks. Having an "in-person" setup, where your team is distributed between building locations and remote sites, and you can't ever schedule conferences rooms and you are working in a cube-farms/open-office sucks.
The key is finding a way to be engaged with your colleagues remote or local, and figuring out how to scale that.
We had a large onsite last week and a ton of the young engineers said to me "people told me stuff immediately in person that I've been trying to find out for months". Humans are still kinda humans.
Same goes for the "hallway conversations." You just got to get out of that company-habit where major decisions and information transfers happen in this ad hoc way. It takes discipline (often on leadership's part) to properly document and communicate. Again, where I work, we would never consider "Oh, I talked to Director Xyz in the hallway and he said our focus is on the Foo project rather than the Bar project now" to be any kind of official guidance. Totally unacceptable.
Interesting on the hallway conversation thing. I have no idea how I'd handle that.
Perhaps some find IRL distracting, so they suffer less and have easier time compensating for the difference between in-person and remote. Meanwhile, some others are good communicators who thrive with and make the most out in-person, and for them it’s more of a challenge to WFH. I personally suspect many of those who want to WFH are naturally not that great at remote communication without realizing so.
I personally had insightful office conversations that started as tangents from semi-idle chance chats and would be impossible remotely, since in an online meeting you must be mindful of others’ time because you don’t know how busy they are (IRL you can sense if a person would rather be doing something else, but you know it can be perfectly faked remotely—so you will never have a chance convo; meetings must have agendas—culture!—and once the agenda is over, everyone gets to be free). Such random conversations can easily alter the course of whole projects.
I don’t see WFH vs. RTO as a black-and-white, high culture vs. lack of culture, good vs. evil sort of battle; more like people have different natural tendencies, life circumstances, desires, and everyone wants it to work best for them.
But it isn't.
The only housing within 35 minutes of my downtown office is small, expensive, high-rise apartments and condos. And there literally are not enough of those to serve the abundance of offices in that area, so it is literally impossible to provide even that meager standard to everyone.
I get "more done" remotely, in that I can usually have more time for deep focus. But then it's harder to get high-bandwidth knowledge transfer sessions, and overhear when someone has some particularly bad ideas (or roads you've already been down, etc).
I think I still prefer the remote side, and it's probably a better deal for the biz, but I would like to spend a few days here and there with like minded people on shared problems.
But no, the writer titled "return to office is bullshit and everyone knows it", which phrased like that is patently false.
Return to office can be a problem if some other conditions are true, like your office sucks, you are made to clock in clock out at inflexible hours, commute is inconvenient, etc. Why not talk about that.
Qualities missing from most people at the office.
But it's a small open office. Probably in a big open office it can be worse if many coworkers are distracting. I can see how I would hate that and it would hamper work.
I don't mind going to the office a fair share of the time but I don't want rules that require N days per week because that prevents me from visiting my partner. I generally work from my partner's place about 1-2 out of every 8 weeks. Going to the office as little or as much on other weeks isn't a huge issue (though admittedly I do work more efficiently from home, and have way better snacks and drinks at home than the office) but I want those 1-2 weeks to be respected.
Tried the cube life, didn't like it, company happily re-allocated my veal fattening pen to another drone during the heady pre-COVID days when such real estate was scarce.
There are too many social, economic, and ecological reasons to put a stake in the heart of requiring people to be in a specific location unless there's an honest to goodness requirement.
It does take time and active effort to become fully productive in a remote environment. It's not something you're just born knowing how to do, it's a set of skills just like working in an office is a set of skills. You have to learn them.
now the market is packed with applicants and the backlash is making it harder.