I'm Loud Quitting My Job Due to RTO Policy, Bad Company Culture
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As someone new to my organization and team I’ve greatly benefited from a partial rto mandate. There’s something about being able to quickly bounce ideas or questions off a team that physically sits around you that slack can’t quite emulate. There are productive discussions that happen which simply would not have otherwise happened. Teams become closer as they better understand each other and get to know what motivates one another (not always the paycheck, as in OP case). You become more empowered to take a step back out of your daily work and give consideration to the bigger picture when you’re surrounded by other groups.
I’ve worked remotely most of my life and am a proponent of it. I also think moving someone who was hired as a remote employee, to an in-person role, is a huge dick move. But to pretend like there are no benefits to occasionally being in-person seems like naivety bordering ignorance (For most team based roles which require strategic thinking).
Hiring can become a bigger challenge when your competition allows fully remote work, and companies should expect to increase compensation in one form or another, or otherwise lose talent. For some companies, e.g. mine, those steps have been worth taking. Small price to pay to preserve our awesome culture.
It’s been the most difficult start to any job I’ve ever had. The total lack of face-to-face with any of the team means I can’t get to know anyone else, there’s no cooperation whatsoever and zero knowledge transfer… getting time to chat with your colleagues requires booking a meeting in their well-stuffed calendar weeks in advance. We get a half-hour slot per week with the Tech Leads to ask questions, which means I’m blocked frequently, and any other comms with them is through MS Teams, where you’re lucky to get a reply that day. I suggested more frequent scheduled time with the leads but that was knocked back immediately.
This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team. It’s a prime candidate for a centralised office with a mostly onsite policy, in my humble opinion…
This isn't an office vs remote problem. It's a hiring not enough people and pretending that doing no planning is okay, problem.
and this was an insurance company. Hardly a "move fast and break things" industry.
The only thing WFH solves really is long commutes and noisy offices. It also makes it easier for families to organize their day, which is why a lot of parents like it.
There was a well organized onboarding process which was a combination of Amazon indoctrination, AWS indoctrination, and team specific tasks including who I should schedule a 1x1 with. There were tasks specifically geared toward getting to know the internal tooling.
Admittedly when I started at my current company fully remote - a much smaller company - right when we were hiring rapidly for a new project, it was on me to get up to speed about knowing what my role involved, who to schedule 1x1s with and create my own onboarding itinerary.
My individual coding output pales in comparison to what I can accomplish by making other people more productive, keeping everyone rowing in the same direction. I feel bad if I take more than 1/2 an hour to respond to a question, at very least directing that person to someone else who knows the answer (or help find it).
I don’t think this problem has anything to do with remote/in office work.
It's still not the same - I was part of a team for 5 or 6 years and never met them in person. Apparently I wasn't important enough to fly to the US even once to meet everyone.
We had very little rapport, didn't know each other at all, it was a very poor experience of being in a team and extremely demoralising and inefficient.
I took my current job because I wanted to go back to the office and get to know my team mates properly. It's much better.
I do like the hybrid approach, I can basically work from home whenever I want, but I go to the office most working days. I probably work from home less than 3 weeks of the year all up, and usually when I need to do something here I can't do at work like making some brackets or similar.
The incidental conversations you have, short brainstorming sessions over breaks and lunch, just being socially closer, makes a massive difference.
I used to go for smoke breaks with a different project leader, even though I don't smoke, because we could spend that time talking about stuff related to our projects and bounce ideas off each other. That job was also in an awesome startup complex that used to be a railway workshop - way cooler than sitting around in my spare bedroom on my own.
I admit I'm no fan of too dense an open plan or hot desking - both dehumanising efforts - and eating at your desk should be banned.
Slack/teams/whatever isn't on the same planet.
Right but, dropping a slice of anecdata cake, I've had that experience multiple times before I ever did any remote working (and not just in contracts, in perm jobs too.) If the culture is rotten, it matters not whether you're onsite or offsite.
It's on your manager to fix it if your team can't communicate effectively or at all. You're letting them off the hook by thinking moving where you work would magically make things better without culture changes.
Source: Seeing my team every day. Talking with them immediately if they need help. We do group hangouts for current issues. I talk with them more than local team I worked with many years ago.
I’m in total agreement that remote work needs good management to be effective.
Relationships, communication, and culture pretty much set themselves up in office. While remote you have to work extra hard for it and it just doesn't seem to be happening for most people.
While I understand the motivation for this take I do not agree with it. You have to be intentional about supporting remote teams from the get go, which means you have to select for the skills that let those teams thrive when you're staffing them and especially their management chain. Expectations have to be clear, time needs to be protected from calendar pirates, outcomes need to be measured and accounted for, team members need to be able to talk to each other and management needs to keep reasonably close (but not oppressively so) tabs on team ops. It can absolutely work but it doesn't happen by accident.
"culture pretty much set themselves up in office" - that culture is sometimes avoidance, aggression, backstabbing. You have to work on the on-site culture as well if you want it to function well.
I haven’t needed to work from some remote open space office since March 2020.
Though since Covid cases came down late spring this year I do sometimes go - every other month or so - mostly only for when our toddler has to be at home for some reason.
At which point the company’s open office is temporarily less distracting than my (much better customized and equipped) home office.
Of course sometimes it can also be good to have lunch together or share some war stories for kicking off some planning or some such, not regularly needed in my line of work though.
So it’s nice to have the choice, have lunch together now and then.
I would quit immediately if there would be any form of direct manager pressure to come back.
I’m an adult and a professional, I do work on my own terms. If that’s something a company won’t respect then I will be giving my precious labour elsewhere.
Culture: it’s relationships all the way down.
I believe that the challenge of onboarding for remote teams in more fundamentally difficult than is acknowledged. I’m not so sure that the best remote-first culture and process can ever match a good in-person onboarding experience.
It’s fundamentally difficult to onboard. What makes “remote” onboarding hard is the same things that makes in-person hard: you basically need to hover over the new hire and ensure that they aren’t getting stuck on anything and that they are getting comfortable with asking for help and that existing team members are helping them.
The thing that makes remote more difficult is that it’s harder for a team lead to see if the new hire is getting helped: passive surveillance is harder when you aren’t sitting nearby. I think you can easily mitigate that by being a good leader and making sure to have routine check ins throughout the onboarding, starting at twice or three times a day for the first couple of days and slowing down over the first couple of weeks until you hit a weekly cadence or the new hire is thriving.
Well, you know who doesn’t benefit? Me with your constant interruptions. With remote work, I’m able to control when I want to respond and when I want to do deep work.
It's respectful and could be turned into a policy.
If there is ever an emergency that only I could handle, I was doing my job wrong.
My n-1 job was at AWS working in Professional Services. There everyone was juggling multiple projects, on customer calls, in planes, on-site with a customer, etc. No one expected an immediate response. Almost every interaction was either asynchronous or you would ask someone a question and the answer would be “my calendar is up to date. Send me a meeting request”.
I also first learned the concept of “office hours” there where the lead would just block off time on the calendar where the people could just join an open Chime (does anyone outside of Amazon use Chime?) if they had any questions.
I don’t know what things are going to be like at my current company once things fully ramp up. But I suspect as the person who is responsible for cross team architectural guidance, I will need to be able to handle the chaos using what I learned from my past three jobs.
You're assuming the worst in the person you're reply to. My team and I are extremely respectful of each other's focus, and yet we all still prefer the office for the same reason's as GP. Do you not see how there's a middle ground, whether you agree with it or not? Or do you think every interaction you have with a colleague that you did not initiate is a burden?
Sure you could argue that the same investment could be made remote. But the reality is people are more likely to be walking their dogs or cooking lunch, and that’s why they wont have time for you.
At the end of the day it’s not really about whether YOU benefit or not during work hours, its about whether the organization benefits. They’re paying the bills for your stretch of time. But even if it was all about you and your protected time, theres an argument to be made that you benefit as well in the long run.
It's not about RTO. It's cool if you find it better for you and your team, if your team also likes it better; as others, on some occasions I want to just work and don't want to be bothered by others every 5 min.
It's about mandatory RTO. It's about forcing employees to do something, without asking them, without including them in the discussion, without explaining why the decision is taken ("it's better" is wrong; it's better for some, worse for others. It needs more explanation)
We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees.
If it was about work then let the people who actually do it manage themselves: they're grownups engineers, surely they can work it out. But it's never about work, and employees are right to protest the decision and to demand transparency.
In the EU countries I know, each contract has an office location specified. Alternatively, it specifies that the job is remote.
Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time. If you don’t like that folks, then stop whining and unionize please.
> Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time
Well, yes, and this is why people are getting mad. People should also be much more explicit about the cost of their commute; you can argue back and forth about the benefits of being in the office, but almost all commutes are deadweight loss and some are both miserable and expensive.
Do you have any objective elements proving this?
I have witnessed a dev colleague who worked from home. They were unable to document and communicate, and it screwed everyone else. They were really happy to work from home, though, thinking they were doing great, doing all the tickets and all the new tickets that appeared because of how badly designed for purpose their solutions on the previous ticket were. The mess and difficult job they were creating around them was not their problem. When asked to come back in the office, they used exactly those arguments.
I'm sure bad management and bad direction exist, but HN is naturally biased towards devs and against management, and of course, everyone thinks they can manage themselves and that if it does not work, it's the others' fault. I wonder how much grain of salt I should add to these affirmations and if there are more objective analyses of the situation (for example some that acknowledge the two possibilities).
How did working in an office improve the documentation abilities of this employee?
> doing all the tickets and all the new tickets that appeared because of how badly designed for purpose their solutions on the previous ticket were.
How did working in an office improve the design decisions of this employee?
But in fact, there are a bunch of elements that can explain why.
For example, when remote, pressing them to answer was impossible: you ask a precise question on Slack, 15 minutes later, they answer something vague or irrelevant, you refine and refocus the question, 30 minutes later, they repeat what they've said, you ask to have a call, they complain that there is too many calls. And if you try to profit from an existing meeting to go to the bottom of that, you just ruin the meeting. In the office, you confront them, show them on the screen exactly why their answer is not helping, and they cannot really go away without answering.
There is also other cases were a question is asked to them in the office, and other people chip in, with things like "wait? what? you told me that it worked the other way around ...". Again, this is not possible remote unless you systematically add everyone to all the chat (and people stops looking at them anyway because it's too much noise).
As for badly designed for purpose, this is just the natural consequence of bad communication: the person thought they knew when they did not, and considered "yeah, whatever, details are not my problem". In the office, there are way more opportunities to notice that early and to correct the course, based on the same situations as given in example above. Again, it is just based on facts.
If the standards did exist then bad design doesn’t make it through design review or code review. If expectations did exist, then the employees manager is having a conversation about lack of documentation being a problem that needs to be fixed.
Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.
I'm not saying that everyone against RTO is a bad employee or is biased (I'm against RTO myself). I'm just highlighting the unbalance and the strong unawareness of this aspect.
For those unprofessional devs, it is ridiculous to pretend that "a better standards" will magically turn an a*hole (to take an extreme case) into an angel. You are talking about "work around", but this is not a work around, this is a relatively efficient and pragmatical way of dealing with this kind of problem. What you propose seems to fall apart as soon as the dev has a tantrum and has decided that something is not like they like.
You seem to assume that none of what you are proposing has been tried, despite it being obvious. (and it also does not mean that we are not going to continue to do that, but it is just stupid to pretend that "working from the office" is forbidden while it helps a lot to ease the problems)
Let's also notice that supervising and controlling the standards to catch it up each time it slips is a lot of effort, it is pretty risky, and the devs hate it and then blame the management. What you are saying is that the management should work very very hard to accommodate an a*hole, and at the same time, asking the a*hole to make a small sacrifice is unacceptable.
> Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.
The point of my comment is "let us not blame management when they are trying to solve problems of devs unable to understand that their own comfort is not the centre of the universe".
Let be clear: I'm not supporting forcing working in the office. What I'm saying is that the large majority here are behaving exactly like my problematic colleague behaves, pretending that it is obviously a management problem when in fact maybe the management is just trying their best to find a pragmatical solution. As far as I can tell, RTO can be the result of management trying their best because the devs are not accepting that something is inefficient in the way they are working. It may not be the case, but the problem is that people here are convinced it is not the case, not because they have proofs, but because it is what they want to believe.
What if they ignore you in the office? Is that behavior OK there because they at least showed up?
I mean this sounds like either a terrible employee (not working or not capable of working), terrible manager (not communicating expectations), or a scape goat excuse because someone wants RTO
Humans also tend to be more sympathetic when they remember they're working with another human. Maybe the issue here is that someone is lacking sympathy when they don't see the other human
If you enforce RTO, in the worst case, the employee will be pissed and will quit, leading to the same situation as if you fired him (except that it's less risky, less costly, less damageable for the reputation, ...) (the employee can also try to sabotage their work, giving you a better position to fire them smoothly).
Do you also realize that firing someone and the whole process to re-hire someone else is a big waste of time? Why would you do that if you can avoid it?
Also, my illustration is a fixed scenario. I'm talking about a dev who can work relatively efficiently when working at the office, and cannot when remote but don't understand why. It is not about an employee who will "ignore you in the office" (why the hell would they do that, they've never done that before) or "refuse to comply" (they were explained the situation, but they were truly unconvinced by it, which means they did not really change not by insubordination, but because they were not really capable of changing).
So, you talking about "terrible manager" is irrelevant. Terrible managers exist, I've said so earlier. Here, I'm giving a real life reality where it is not the management, it is not a scape goat, it is just people who truly try to make things work.
And maybe they are wrong and there is a better solution. But that's not the point. My point is that someone said "I know it is X". Maybe it is X. But I've observe several devs saying "I know it is X" and I have he proofs that they were wrong.
So, naturally, I ask: I'm ready to believe you, but there is no way for me to know if you are right or wrong, so can you give me element more objective than just "I know it is X", for example an analysis that is smart enough to acknowledge that maybe RTO is sometimes coming from a truly honest desire to make things better.
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work.
tl;dr It's yet another way for these hugely profitable corporations to not pay their taxes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
It's a fallacy similar to this one:
1) vaccines help avoiding sickness (equivalent to: working in the office can be a way to solve real problems that the dev doesn't care about)
2) big pharma can make a lot of profit by selling vaccine (equivalent to: working in the office can make profit for the company)
According to your logic, number 2 would "prove" that number 1 is impossible.
Of course you're supposed to be working correctly as a group, and your example is a dysfunctional group because one dev who wants to stay home doesn't play well with others.
The crucial point is that only the group can decide what is best for itself. If the group (you and your colleagues) decide the fix is to be full office, then fine, you as a group decide to come back to the office. If the fix is to alternate some days home with no collaboration and some days at the office where you concentrate all the discussions, then fine. Whatever the choice, it's yours and that's what matters.
The issue is not RTO, it's mandatory RTO.
The problematic dev was convinced their way of working and communicating was perfectly fine (even after multiple time where collaborators reacted). The rest of the devs team were also agreeing. They were measuring their efficiency as the number of tickets they were doing. As the same feature with small crucial tweaks were coming their way again and again, they were pretty happy with themselves: they were doing a lot of tickets, none of them too challenging. They were even saying that they are more efficient in remote than before.
But the persons outside of the team were noticing the problems and paying for it. The research and development team (that I was part of) had to wait a long time to see features we desperately needed put in production, as each time it was not what requested (and no, the requirements were correct, the devs just went in the wrong direction because they read half of it because they assumed they knew). Same for the other team having to collaborate with the devs. Same for the managers, who were seeing clearly that there is a problem, continued to explain to the devs and show them proofs that the work was not done properly, but the devs were convinced "a lot of managers are useless anyway, they just say that because they want to feel important, let's not change anything".
The problems were communicated clearly to the devs, but they just ignored it, and when we were forced to change the way of working, they complained that "it was done without any explanation" and "it is mandatory".
So, no, the opinion of the devs on what is best is not always trustworthy. And this is my point: someone said "We know why companies don't give explanations". I'm just saying: I saw plenty of devs saying exactly that while I saw myself that this was bs. I'm not saying it's never that or that it cannot happen, I'm just asking: do you have objective element to support this, or is it a "smart conclusion from the very very smart dev team who know better than everyone and yet don't understand how much inefficient they are"?
This one person is just one example, even a bit extreme, of a mentality that I keep seeing over and over again.
The problem is not this person, or "working from home" or "at the office", the problem is the mentality here: they are basically saying that asking someone to go back to the office can only be part of an evil plan from incompetent management.
As you say "the issues you present are easily mitigated". One way to mitigate s to ask the person to work at the office. The problem is this mentality of excluding this mitigation as if it is not as good and as legitimate as another one. All the other mitigation that you will come up with will have inconvenience for one or several actors. It is just biased to say "I can solve the problem by clicking on the button A or on the button B, but if they click on the button A, they are incompetent evil management, because after all, they could have clicked on button B. Button B has also some inconvenience, as much as button A has, but not directly to me, so it means it is objectively the best choice"
It's incredible how infantile a lot of the reactions are here. This guy took an on-site job and is now whining that he has to go back TWO out of the FIVE days he EXPECTED to be there.
There's been more than a few times where I've thought "if I could just sit next to this person for half an hour, I could save myself a frustrating 3 hour teams meeting".
Our team was going into the office once a week, some of us had even started going in twice a week because it just made meetings easier.
Then the RTO mandate happened and we suddenly have to be back in 50%. Three times a week is excessive (even if it is only every alternate week), and the entire team's enthusiasm to come in and work together has evaporated nearly completely.
We were never given a reason why, either, they gave us a completely contrived response about "company values" when pushed.
We have this terrible booking app called Planon that doesn't offer any way to locate someone. And it's horrible to use (every time you use it you have to sign in with a 3 step MFA process). So most people just ignore it and it causes a lot of conflicts between people that booked a desk and people that just grabbed one. It's a total mess. At the same time I'm sitting beside all sorts of noisy annoying sales goons that are on the phone all day so I get nothing done.
All it's accomplishing now is that I thoroughly hate the company and its 'leadership'.
There are plenty of people who will gladly replace this entitled, unprofessional crybaby.
This, in turn, kills morale and within remote work is more likely to affect collaboration to a much greater level, thus reducing 'productivity' rather than making things better as perhaps intended.
The end result looks as if it is remote work being a problem, but the cause is management 'tightening the screws'. The fantastic culture and respect that brought the innovation and success will fade and the value creators will leave.
Forcing people back into the office will obviously not solve the problem. It just makes it easier to shout at people and analyse their daily behaviour in the belief that such metrics are the answer.
"We prefer people over process" is clearly dead. Servant Leadership is gone. Taskmasters and labour camps are looking to return. All hail the cubicle farm.
Behold the story of the capitalism and thoughts of the elites worldwide (eventually). They have all the money, but have no forfillment, no time to enjoy it, or dont even know how to enjoy anymore, even in early retirement.
The grind isnt as glamourise as the motivation porn you idolise. You spend your whole life looking for an answer in status, money and power - so even if it eventually comes, you know nothing else and get pleasure no other way.
Here we are debating RTO policy as if our opinions will make a difference.
They want you back in the office except they don't want you to have an actual office unless you are very special at most places.
I get the whole "collaborate" angle but different teams collaborate differently. And when you have team members who are fully remote but you have to do partial rto then the remote team members get excluded from that collaboration.
It's just one big shitty copy cat management cancer. This is also why everyone and their mother were laying off people, the in-group country club members decided to fight "antiwork" culuture and rising wages by setting a trend and having everyone copy cat after them. "Money-see, monkey do" management.
I hope Gen-Z would get proper politicians in power to rein in the ruling class some day.
that checks the box, doesn't matter what other industries do they’re not living in the 21st century like we are, bring these companies to the negotiating table.
Really?
One argument for taxing these businesses is that they will increase the number of vehicles on the roads. I'm not so fluent with the language of social justice, but this could be spun as pro-environment and anti-gentrification.