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mattlondon

Its only bullshit if you want to work remote.

I want to be in the office. Working remote is the most stressful thing I've ever done.

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It's BS because its unilaterally telling everyone to come back to office without data supporting the move.

Was the remote working 'movement' then based on data? Or was it covid?

Remote work was supposed to be temporary. Remember "2 weeks to slow the spread"?

There's nothing wrong with wanting to work in an office. The issue is trying to force everyone to work in an office.

But then these office lovers have no one fun to talk to!

No, they’ll have people willing to commute 30 minutes a day to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to talk to. Ask service workers what their commute is like and how many days they have to be “in the office” for.

Edit: found the people that have never worked retail or restaurant

Just because some jobs can only be done in a specific place, does not mean that people whose job can be done from anywhere should be forced to do the same in solidarity or some nonsense like that.

I’m talking more about the sense of entitlement. Clearly different jobs have different work requirements, etc.

What does this have to do with anything? Obviously there are jobs where WFH is not possible. Nobody is disputing that. Should we all be required to wear uniforms to work because some jobs require that? Some jobs require you to be clean shaven, should that requirement be universal as well? Or what about working night shifts? Doesn't seem fair that nurses have to work overnight shifts while pampered office worker get to work regular daytime schedules does it?

And for the record I have worked restaurant, retail and construction jobs in the past.

Sorry, I was referring more to sense of entitlement vs what people actually have to do for their job. To me, coming into the office twice a week for the salary I get just isn’t that big of an ask.

Yeah, I can see that and in most cases that's true. But I also understand the anger of people who were legitimately bait-and-switched. For some people it may be a big deal, if they have to move to work in the office for example. But even if it's not a big deal, it's shitty to have someone reneg on a deal with you. And that's especially true if you feel (right or wrongly) that it's for bullshit reasons.

Yeah for people that were hired with the position being 100% remote, especially pre-pandemic, I think it’s unreasonable to ask them to move. Just let them work remote.

The whole point of wanting to work in an office is being surrounded by colleagues. That means everyone on the team needs to be in the office on the same days.

I don't see why someone's desire to be surrounded by colleagues should trump someone else's desire to not be surrounded by colleagues and just work in peace.

Companies aren't democracies. If leadership wants RTO then they'll want everyone else to also

If you're willing to share, why was working remote the most stressful thing you've ever done?

Usually it's either living with people who don't respect that you're at work even though you're at home or a company culture that doesn't know how to engage with remote workers.

Usually both.

A lot of people forget the importance of having a door to their home office, preferably one you can lock.

Not OP, but it's lonely and it never ends. I live in a college town with a short commute and a neat downtown - a place I wanted to be.

But it's Michigan and salaries here are really low. Hard to work for a local company.

Not OP, but not everyone has an ideal environment to work from home. They might be in a small apartment with two adults trying to both get work done without disturbing the other. They might have young children that need full-time supervision.

They could leave to find a coffee shop or something similar to work from but not everyone enjoys working in that type of environment or has a job where that would be appropriate. My wife, for example, works on things that require a security clearance and are on a years long secretive development cycle. Having those conversations overheard in a public space could be problematic. By the time you get to the point of renting a workspace to get a little privacy, you might as well let your employer pay for it and go back to the office.

Working in office can be good. But the question is - are you getting paid 20% more for the RTO job compared to the remote? To compensate for the 20% more time wasted in useless transit (2 more hours per day)?

In your scenario, presumably you are 20% less effective for same pay. So in a way yes but comp does not need to be adjusted.

Why would a person be less effective if he works same 8 standard hours per day?

Surely that's 25% more?

Yep, my mistake. And that is also a conservative number, because human time is not equally priced. Arguably the free time a human has is more valuable per hour the less time remains. So a person having 8 free hours daily may value a single of these hours at X, but a person having only 4 free hours daily would value a single hour lost much higher than X, because it represents a bigger proportion of the free time lost. Corpos even agree with this, valuing overtime pay progressively more per hour the more hours they demand, not perfectly of course but still something.

People generally didn't get a 20% pay cut when going into the remote.

I’ll take a 20% cut to work in an office for a company where everyone is working in the office.

What makes it stressful? I haven't seen this take before so I'm really curious about this perspective.

I know several friends who prefer to be in the office because they need some amount of time away from their young kids. It's the equivalent of "them" time where they get an escape from child care for a few hours.

Where is the kid then when they are at the office? Probably in childcare then not left alone with a stove if they are at the bug you all day age. You can put them in childcare wile working remote too.

Many kids are taken care of by the other parent or a nanny or a relative.

If they have a child care option when they are in the office, why would the same child care option not be available when working from home?

I actually felt that way as well (and I have dogs, not kids). I felt like 2 days a week in the office was like a mini-vacation from home. Other than the commute (which negated most of the benefit) getting out of the house felt like socializing.

Maybe the homelife sucks ?

I can't speak for myself (I mostly enjoy remote), but I've had team members who had 3 kids of varying ages, on a single income, and simply didn't have the space/opportunity to focus.

They were VERY stressed out, and while they voiced a strong preference to work in an office (no longer an option for us), they ultimately choose to move out of our state (Cali) for much more affordable space to solve the problem.

From my experience remote vs. office is a very individual preference based on tons of factors many of us simply don't need to consider.

That doesn't make sense to me, what are they doing with their kids if they worked in an office, and why aren't they just doing that?

For young children (that is, before entering school), children are often at home all day being cared for either by a parent or a nanny. If you don't have a separate area to work, it can be really difficult to explain to your kids that Mommy or Daddy can't play because they need to stare at a screen for hours.

I think they are trying to say that in higher cost of living places you sometimes cannot afford to have a space large enough for your family and your work space. If they work at an office maybe their life partner takes care of their family during the day.

As a father of a 1 year old, my focus is immediately broken when she's throwing a fit or even just making unusual noises moving around, even if I rationally know my wife is taking care of it and she's probably just crawling around. I get twice as much done at the office.

I think this only applies to those who would like to be productive.

In my case, extrovert living alone. No collab and no meetings with coworkers due to which tasks I was assigned. Just droning on, writing code, with no one to take a break with. I'm still recovering mentally after 2 years of work-from-home during covid - pure mental torture for my personality type.

There is room for you in the no-RTO future. The big company I work for still has offices, those offices still have cubes. If you want to go in every day, it's open and you can. There are places to video conference, we still have a cafeteria, and if you want to feel like it's 2019, go for it.

The point is, requiring everyone to feel that way is bullshit. This bell can't be unrung, and the successful places are the ones who can cater to both, which is good because it's not mutually exclusive. The term "return to office," just like the term "remote" are biased towards desire. Workplace independence is what those of us who don't want to go back in are looking for, and there's room enough for everyone. You can go in, I can stay home, we can work together.

The last bit matters, though, because you going in have to be accepting of those of us who don't want to. Yeah, you're gonna sit on Zoom calls still from the comfort of your cube, but at least at my company, we were doing that on Skype before anyway, we just all forgot. Any office with more than one building, or any company with a tolerant work from home policy, had at least one person not come in at a time, so voice calls were a requirement. It was never not that way, and it won't go back to the time before that when absence meant missing things.

Make If you want to go back and make us all go with you, now we have a problem. But please, go in to the office! Enjoy it, it's a nice place to be. Just not the only place.

Thank you for speaking up. I have to say for me it's the same.

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