Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
My experience is that remote workers often have higher velocity but lower agility. When there's a well-defined task and little ambiguity, remote workers can usually complete it faster than in-office workers. But when the task is highly ambiguous, requires many course corrections, involves rapid communication, or relies on a large degree of trust, the in-office teams end up more productive. It all stems from known research on the benefits & detriments of office work, i.e. offices build trust and allow higher-bandwidth communication, but they also have more distractions and a less comfortable work environment.
I think the trigger that would bring people back to the office is a new economic boom based on new and unknown technology. That creates a highly ambiguous environment where you're forging ahead in unknown directions and need a lot of trust in leadership to make progress at all. Established companies with known markets probably would be better off adopting remote work - the employees work faster, and there are already well-known processes and strategic direction. Of course, if you're already well-established in your market, it probably doesn't matter what you do.
As with most things it really depends, also having some people be remote and some in person is always going to disadvantage the remote workers and set them up for failure in management’s eyes so no surprise there.
This may be a company-culture thing, but before remote work, collaboration at my past employers was always "Swing your chair around and open your mouth". It didn't take a whole lot of convincing or a conference room.
Remote Work lets me silence the things I don't need to deal with right away while those that truly need my attention I can prioritize ahead of time or there are ways to "break through" the silence because its urgent enough to warrant it.
I hated not having that level of autonomony in the office. Mostly, so did everyone else once they realized how this wasn't as nice as it seemed
My team is highly technical and generally requires deep thinking and little interruptions to make progress. The single best thing that remote work has done is stop the endless interruptions via shoulder tap at the desk.
I've spent the last 20 years or so working for large conglomerates that have multiple satellite offices in different continents so huddles were always on zoom anyway. But they're still insisting on RTO.
In my experience, remote workers are significantly more productive than on-site employees IF the culture is one of employee empowerment and trust. If you expect people to be mature, communicate effectively, and get things done AND you give them the tools and support to do it then being remote is absolutely no barrier. It just gives people an extra hour or two a day to think about things and do a little extra work because they are not commuting.
The missing piece is that leaders need to plan, execute, and communicate effectively. They need to empathize with their teams and work with people as individuals, which means extra time and thought and attention. Face-to-face work covers up for a lot of incompetence because that person is standing in front of you. Remote employees can't hide behind a herd and remote leaders can't hide behind an org chart. You don't need to spend millions of dollars on a building to cover up for poor leadership and weak culture.
For reference, I run a team of 10 remote employees and am responsible for highly technical engineers that support sales for a team that generates 8-figures of annual revenue on SaaS and on-prem software.
In my experience it's basically impossible to "plan, execute, and communicate effectively" in these environments, because if people knew what the plan was or how to execute it, someone would already have done it.
The company relies on quick and efficient feedback between employees, leadership, and potential customers. That's the part that's much harder with remote work. In a startup, if you tell an engineer to do something and it turns out it's impossible, you will see him grimace and cuss you out in person, and you can adjust the plan accordingly. With remote work, you don't get that body-language feedback, and he'll probably say yes while looking for other jobs and posting about how incompetent his manager is on Hacker News.
That sounds like an amazingly poorly run startup with horrible leadership.
The startups that I've seen that are successful purposefully try to fix that problem. We flew people out to customers, had them shadow them to see how they worked, and had a group of customer advisors. Out of all the startups I've been involved with the remote ones have done the best.
Honestly, the manager you're describing is incompetent. Why is that manager relying on reading body language instead of building enough trust with their engineers where the engineers would just say "that's impossible?". It seems like that manager is doing a poor job and is using remote work as an excuse for their own lack of ability.
> In a startup, if you tell an engineer to do something and it turns out it's impossible
I see a problem with that approach. To me, it's not about you telling the engineer what to do, they are not a tool to execute your bidding, they are a colleague with ideas how to achieve the goal you are striving for.
What is great about remote is that it kind of forces you to write down your ideas in some format, in PRs, in proposals, in documents. That gives the space and time for others to chime in, at their own pace, without your "body language" or your "room presence" shutting them down. Granted, it's not the American way with a top-down approach to startups, but if your working model is you simply tell your engineers what to do and they execute it, then imo you are missing 90% of their value.
> you will see him grimace and cuss you out in person, and you can adjust the plan accordingly....you won't get that body-language feedback
I have never had anyone at work "cuss me out", whether that's been remote or in the office. That sounds like a very unhealthy culture to me.
Additionally, I stipulate that looking for inscrutable clues in people's faces can instead be replaced with building a culture where you reward people for speaking (or writing down) their mind and all contributing towards the common goal, and there is a healthy amount of discussion (preferably written). As a technical manager, your role is to provide a clear goal to your teammates, and work with them to a good solution, not analyze their body language and making decisions based on that...
> yes while looking for other jobs and posting about how incompetent his manager is on Hacker News.
I'd be doing the same if my manager's main job is observing my every facial expression and I am not allowed to say no or at least explain why I don't think the task that's been presented to me is possible to be achieved in the proposed way.
Don’t hire people who don’t value synchronous communication. People who want all communication to be async and don’t plan to respond promptly to messages (like the work/life balance crowd on HN) will not produce a dynamic team because that’s not the strong point of async communication.
Do quick calls when text conversation gets too long, build a team where you can expect people to actually make an effort to show up to the calls. For us we also have strategy calls with video regularly (but not too frequently), and make sure everyone is aligned to the plan and concerns are resolved before building. Make sure the team understands that for anything where they are unsure what to do or have any ambiguity around requirements, that they proactively ping the right people.
Doesn’t mean you need to be on all the time and that async communication is not valuable, but you need everyone to know when it is and isn’t the right way to go. So long as people are making a best effort to value communication speed it works out.
Hire people who are motivated enough to form opinions, and confident enough to say they really think. Most people are not invested in their work, or not invested in the problem space enough to bother making the mental and research effort to form valid opinions on your problem space. This is fine for when things just need to get done (not everyone on the team needs to be a decision maker), but foster those who are ready to invest. Make it clear it’s a good thing if they do form opinions and are willing to express their doubts about the strategy to others/leadership.
For us we also have very clear owners of different aspects of our operations and product. Someone will make the final decisions on those aspects. This doesn’t mean they make all choices, they can choose to defer to someone they trust to make the call. But someone needs to be clearly responsible, and others need to know that if a conversation is not resolving that they can pull the right person in to resolve it efficiently. People need to agree to disagree at some point once those responsible make a choice.
This general approach works for us, people don’t tend to hate their managers if they understand why choices are made, feel that their concerns are heard, and are aligned ideologically with the approach and way of working. But it does require choosing the right people and setting a higher bar for yourself on alignment.
If we create an environment where engineers feel comfortable enough that body language isn’t required as the sole feedback indicator in this scenario, perhaps the entire workplace would benefit.
I feel this to the core.
That is what GP says, too. GP was saying the advantage of in-person is agility and course-correction, which require intense discussion.
> The missing piece is that leaders need to plan, execute, and communicate effectively.
Maybe with perfect leadership this is tenable, but when responding in a quickly evolving situation, I can see the advantage of in person. It just doesn't seem realistic to expect leadership to do all the planning. Engineers "at the bottom" often have better perspective and should be at the planning table.
My personal perspective: I'm currently 100% remote and enjoy the improved throughput. I also have had to get better at planning, as you point out. But when I have to do heavy coordination, video conference fatigue gets real. I'd prefer to be in person for those days with >3 hours on video.
I worked in-person for the first 7 years of my career and remote for most of the last 7. This was true until the pandemic. It's not true anymore. Even in-office workers at my current hybrid workplace are using huddles and threaded chats to meet and decide things faster than scheduling a room or walking up.
The only thing that was consistently faster in-office was the espresso machine, and even that flipped around when the Bambino came out around 2019.
All of the above can be avoided with remote work. However it is a lot easier to pick those things up in the office.
That's a big if
Do you have an email address or a contact method?
You know both premises can be true at the same time, right?
Everybody gets a good laugh, and returns to their tasks, or coffee chats, or whatever it is that they were doing, where ever they were doing it.
Higher status and more extroverted workers tend to get energy and motivation from going to the office. It feels good and is fun for them. Our brains have evolved to know when we're high on the social totem pole and give us copious feel-good chemicals as a reward.
For similar reasons, lower status and more introverted workers tend to not enjoy the office. They find it de-motivating and draining.
This isn't always the case across the board, and there are often other reasons involved like family/commute, but I think it explains the different camps fairly well in broad strokes.
All that said, an argument can definitely be made that having happy, highly motivated leadership actually is extremely important to a company's bottom line, so I don't think it can be so easily dismissed.
And I'm just talking here about dysfunctional organizations, there are plenty of valid reasons for a functional organization to need in-office culture if they need to work through "legitimate" ambiguity (like designing a new technology or product).
Additionally, because the social fabric is weaker around remote workers in a hybrid environment, there may be a perception of them being less likely to remain out of any sense of loyalty or obligation. This seems like a potential stigma that remote workers would need to overcome in the absence of explicit inclusivity efforts by leadership.
I don't recommend holding loyalty to any company. Maybe to co-workers(s) or a direct boss (IE, if they leave, maybe you leave too. I've seen this happen) but certainly not to the employer, since it will never be reciprocated
Well, technically that would be a market inefficiency, so we should be encouraging employees to view their employers as fungible and switch jobs as soon as it's advantageous to them. If your employer is trying to keep you around through social ties instead of competitive compensation you're being taken advantage of.
Future job may look for prospects that are adept in AR office work and will be asked how well they use it
There's got to be some other process we could try to recreate (to the extent possible) that "together" feeling of the office. Maybe set aside an hour when team calls into a meeting but just keep on working as normal? And can banter/ask random questions etc. Otherwise things are just too formal.
You can always ignore people from remote till you are good and ready
However your team having 2 members that are remote, then generalizing it to all remote workers is a bit of a leap.
Outside of that I do agree. New technologies that require a high degree of experimentation and discovery lend themselves to in person work.
Also about half of the rest of the org is remote - folks that collaborate with my team, but who I don't have reporting-line responsibility over. So there's a good sampling across 30-50 people who I interact with as teammates as well.
I would love to hear otherwise. I haven't yet seen evidence to the contrary, and I'm very open to it. I don't think executives like culture changing without their fiat, which is what happend in most WFH transition cases. Some did end up embracing it anyway, but over and over again as of late, its being walked back, and even Amazon admitted they have no data to backup their RTO plans.
The pattern of behavior I'm obvserving aligns (to me) with what I'm saying: its C-suite taking back control because it diminished their executive power and increased competition for labor, driving up labor costs.
The difference is palpable in, for example, whether and how explicit norms around asynchronous communication are implemented, whether office budget is repurposed into services and materials that enable remote work (including, for example, company offsites), etc.
It's obvious that certain jobs require in-person presence, but I think the big reveal is that most white-collar jobs don't.
If you are a CEO and need to bounce ideas off of I.T., legal, finance, marketing with highly dynamic environment, definitely need to be in same location. Think war room or command center.
I have been remote since 2014, so far before the pandemic changed all of this. I also have 25+ years of experience.
I am able to handle architecting a major enterprise project fully remotely. The entire tech stack, writing code, handling pull requests, highly complex issues requiring communication between myself and other people to ensure everything goes smoothly.
It does.
We release updates on a weekly cadance and everything thus far (2 years with this current project) has been smooth sailing. And the number of issues, new features, and requests addressed in each update is significant.
It can be done remotely, without issue. I spent over a decade in the office, with an hour commute each way.
I am never doing that again.
With such a user name it goes without saying :)
I'd like to think that any new software workforce can arrange itself to be remote-only if it really tries, and it'd be much better off that way. Can also see why an existing company would rather bring people in-office.
I've worked in a rather average team remotely during Covid and it was pretty bad. Lack of communication, difficult to get hold of people, low productivity. The team fared better before Covid for sure.
After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos.
A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.
> The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings
Exactly.
The big killer is being able to pop into a team's room and say "hey tell me about VLAN X" and get an answer from someone. or even just figure out who to ask. with teams that's much harder, you have to play the "find the right person to ask" game, and the visibility is poor.
> (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either)
Teams is fine if you need a IM client for people who are in cubes on the other side of the office and integrates with the Office suite. but for distributed team use it's garbage.
The modern Internet, the WWW, Linux, etc. and most of the core infra as we know it (and take for granted) was built in the 90s by people worldwide largely communicating via IRC and mailing lists.
If that's not an example of new and unknown technology, then I don't know what is.
The economics of it are purely about labor efficiency. A company in the midwest that needs tech services isn't limited to service providers within driving distance. Service providers aren't limited in hiring. Talented people in developing nations get ready access to first-world markets without needing any connections. This was all thoroughly proven and justified before 2020.
A good internet link and company hosted audio/video room is enough for us to share issues, unblock, pair or cut some slack.
In fact our in-person teams have the opposite reputation: they are slow but theoretically work on high business value problems, while the remote hive mind takes care of business in the background.
Remote work seems to only be a manger problem.
So how can we help managers feel more "in control?" Or where can we hire managers that are like that?
Seems like the kind of task that should have never been created, but required you to schedule meetings first, which you didn't.
Failure on your side.
I concur.
I’m a remote employee (no company office in my city)
I work remote 3 weeks and then 1-week travel to be in office.
It’s a great balance of the dynamic you described.
For me, being in office would add nothing, because my team is split between two cities, and if i ask a question outside of my team its highly likely we're talking about crossing oceans.
Like anything, its about communication
When the plague hit, I was one of the few who knew how to transition from office to remote without a glitch - because I had the experience for how to do it. I honestly believe that fully remote can work only for a select few businesses, but mostly remote is perfectly doable for vast majority of tech and tech-adjacent companies.
To start, remote work self-selects for two types of people. Seniors, who already know how to work independently and productively - and the reasonably well-off who have the space and can afford to dedicate a physically separate study as their office. The overlap between the two is significant.
Several things are fundamentally more challenging in a fully remote setting. Such as...
1: Training and/or onboarding juniors. People entering the industry need constant supervision and near-synchronous assistance for a prolonged period of time. The first two years of your career you are clueless. Yes, you too, a HN reader. We ALL were! Training juniors takes time, skill, attention and - let's be honest - a personal touch. Doing that remotely is possible, but a lot harder. And only really possible in a company where everything has been built, from the ground up, to assume remote-first for everybody.
2: Active brainstorming. Bouncing ideas rapidly off of each other depends on establishing a rhythm where any communication delays are detrimental and can crash the cycle at any time. Having to devote brain cycles to communication delays and/or equipment detracts your attention.
3: Mob debugging. Very few things are more effective at complex root-cause analysis than having two or three people cluster around the same set of desktops, with enough large monitors to pull up new dashboards on a whim, and a whiteboard or three ready for quick scribbles and ad-hoc diagrams.
4: Random encounters. The US term is for some reason "watercooler effect", but in my experience "not at the office"-effect would be more accurate. If your culture manages to encourage people to take a walk outside the office setting, a small but meaningful fraction of those end up with valuable insights and outsized productivity boosts. Getting away from the physical office, while discussing things with coworkers, is an essential aspect.
5: Cultural cohesion. Maintaining a good company culture is tricky when most communication happens without leadership having any clue of it taking place at all. The only solution I can think of is solid trust.
Replicating or reproducing any of the above in a remote-only setting is incredibly hard. However - remote work has enormous benefits that don't necessarily show up directly. Such as:
Ten-second commutes. The ability for a remote worker to effectively flip from at-home mental state to at-work mental state, without having to endure commute is an incredible advantage.
Disturbance shutdowns. At remote work we can completely block off coworkers (or managers) from disrupting the flow. Just remember to also set your phone to silent.
"Friendly face effect". When your mostly-remote workforce does meet in person, they tend to spend time talking about things they have had simmering at the back of their minds. Stuff that has takenl iterally weeks to form. And they are for most parts happy to see each other. Compare that to office work, where seeing the same faces day after day gets dreary, really quick.
Encouraging async communications. When you have to properly think through what you want to convey, and actually take time to do it right, email chains can become quite fruitful[0]. Sure, the latency of communication may be slower, but the S/N ratio for non-combative topics tends to be high. (For combative topics, nothing helps. Best way to resolve them is to put the people involved in a cage and let them pummel each other to different shades of blue.)
For all of the reasons above, I believe that for most companies the best approach in the long run will be "mostly-remote". Have people meet in person for couple of days every couple of weeks, so that they can get all the synchronous activities done in one batch, and then let them disperse back to their home offices to focus on their real product-oriented work.
Onboarding juniors and non-senior new hires is still going to be tough. For companies that thrive on hiring newgrads, it's unlikely they could ever embrace remote work for real.
One of the unexpected downsides of mostly-remote is that a company going down that route is incentivised to have location based salaries. This works, mostly, when their staff live reasonably near large cities. But by incentivising their workforce to relocate to lower CoL areas during employment, they are actually also encouraging social isolation. I saw this first hand - and it's not healthy.
0: Writing a good email takes time. You may have to spend an hour on it, just to ensure that readership can not easily misunderstand the message you want to convey.
The RTO/WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?), and it's fascinating to watch some companies chew their own limbs off (metaphorically speaking) to appease investors-at-large.
Here I speculate, but the pattern seems to be that board members are involved with multiple organizations, and are stakeholders in even more - and those with ties to commercial real estate (and all the funds heavily invested into it) will do whatever it takes to push for higher office occupancy. At the same time, they're doing this (arguably) to a disadvantage to the companies they're supposed to steward - forcing best talent out, paying a premium for half-empty office space, and generally eroding morale by this display of duplicity.
At the same time, I love seeing the quiet resistance by the rank-and-file and even some middle management. The new reality is here, and there's no going back. The % of days WFH has flatlined, and I imagine over time it will begin to slowly but steadily trend back up.
Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing.
Young = under 40s - have grown up with the internet, github, working/studying remotely and so on.
I've worked in companies where the CEO and senior management are all 50 something, and in a couple of companies where they're all approaching 40. Can you guess which company used PCs and which one used Macbooks?
Going back further, I can remember working on Sun boxes, because management was reluctant to use that 'new fangled NT3.51 or even NT4.0'.
The point being, as the workforce demographic changes, so will the opinions and approaches. And the cycle will repeat.
In-office doesn't mean heading out the door at 8:30 and coming home at 5:30 but something more like leaving at 7:00am, dropping off kids at before-school daycare ($$$), driving back to the train station to make it in by 9 and then coming home at 6 after your 1-hour commute to the closest affordable suburb. An 11-hour day, and you are paying out the nose for childcare if you can even get it, and you'll spend all your PTO on kids doctor appointments and parent-teacher conferences and the like.
That was probably the low point in my, and others, working life that coincides with the age for raising a young family. It sucks.
You hit the nail on the head. Senior managers who are unwilling to learn to do their jobs slightly differently are a big part of the problem. Imagine forcing an entire work-force to commute so you can physically stop by someone's desk to interrupt them vs sending a message or scheduling a meeting. Senior managers want productive staff, but instead of listening to what they need to be productive, they set up roadblocks to satisfy their own lazy vanity.
As a geek, most of my time is spent working alone, even in ill-defined projects that require a lot of coordination and communication. Working from 'home' (more from wherever I want) is better. Also, although I agree that we lose something if we communicate remotely, I don't terribly care. When I communicate, information is more important than emotions. And they want me to work in an open floor office, ugh.
Suits spent most of their time in meetings. They also care much more about the emotions and human touch. They've spent years optimizing for firm handshakes, nice hair, good smiles and that weird clicking noise :).
Basically, suits want the office, geeks don't. Productivity doesn't have much to do with it :)
The people in that argument were located on 2 different continents 7 hours apart, that would be a non-issue if they were in on the same floor in the same building. This is not an argument for working in the office, just to adjust to the environment.
Maybe you are right and they are just fine having not experienced the in-office environment.
You don't have to go too far back in time to when work from home was also the norm (when everyone stayed at home on the farm). The office age was the aberration.
But I suspect you're right. I learned a huge number of skills being in high velocity office environments, shadowing/observing others, etc. Starting out remote must be much harder.
Anecdotally, I hear it's more younger employees who like going into an office for the social interaction.
20-30: Needs mentorship, can live closer to the office
30-40: Has young kids, moved to the burbs
40+ AND Management: Developed management approach pre-pandemic, pre-Slack
40+ but IC: Could go either way
This is still HUGELY simplified, and please do not take offense if you are e.g. 30-40 without wanting kids. But "young kids" is just a huge difference in terms of the morning schedule and flexibility needs, especially as most families near urban areas have both parents working.
Absent the Covid years, I'd probably agree more. A lot of managers, execs, and other senior people may not have liked commuting but it was just part of the job. But they're people too and many realized they could manage without going into an office all of the time. People do come in, especially for things like customer visits, but it's mostly a sometimes thing.
Oh, it's definitely not only about money, any more than the other "treat your employees well and you will provably make more money" things are.
It's about power, ego, and classism.
It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats.
It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office.
It's about avoiding ever having to question the assumption that the only reason regular plebeians ever actually do work is because they have the boss breathing down their necks every 5 seconds (and, of course, the ever-present threat of being fired and left destitute), because if people did start questioning it, they might realize it also disproves the assumptions underlying the most common objections to things like UBI. Which would shatter the upper class's power over the lower classes for good.
This is not to say that it's not about money, of course. The commercial real estate angle is a real one, for sure. But an awful lot of the assumptions that lead to calling for RTO have much less to do with money, and much more to do with maintaining a neofeudal power dynamic between bosses and workers.
I take it you're not a manager. Reducing people to "power", ego, corner offices... that's all very simplistic and (sorry that this offends) naive.
I've been fortunate to work in places where management is involved, technical, and impactful. It sets direction, identifies bad plans and wastes of time where work should be cut, identifies places where work can be combined, it resolves (and asks) difficult queries, and it works to grow the individual team members and make the workplace a good environment.
The cartoonish Clueless Idiot Manager Villain has just not been my experience. Sure, I've seen bad managers, but also bad individual-contributors.
Now that the cards are laid out flat, in retrospect it's easier for everyone to see and discover that the productivity and value may have been stolen. I'd love to see some investigation into showing the potential connections more concretely.
Many execs and upper management would have read or watched the movie about MacDonalds and how they make loads of cash through owning the property and renting it back. Board member or not, they try to use it to boost earnings.
It's the opposite actually. WFH is more efficient, but efficiency is not the reason why we work.
Every self respecting man needs friends and enemies. The more watered down a man's life is, the less intense the friendships and rivalries are going to be.
WFH is just the last step in a long process watering everything down, where the commoditification of every experience is making us dull and full of apathy.
The problem is that a disease like that becomes endemic in society, so people's beliefs become weaker and weaker, but not having strong beliefs closely correlates with people having next to no belief in themselves, which again closely correlates with WFH preference because people think they don't have what it takes to thrive in an office environment because they are scared of the strong sentiments of friendship, rivarly, love and revenge on the workplace and in life in general.
Work is just something I have to do so I can feed and house my kids.
With those workers leaving the city loses revenue, on top of downtown areas dying off, which exacerbates the tax base problem further.
Anecdotally, my org mandated 3 days back but has pretty slide, across the entire org, back to 2 days. The genie is out of the bottle and there is widespread, if quiet, resistance from everyone, to include senior managers.
Many people genuinely believe that collaboration is qualitatively better and easier in person. Regardless of where you stand, you can't deny that there are pros and cons:
* The bandwidth of typing on Slack is slower than talking in person. Also, one winds up spending a lot of time on Slack correcting small misunderstandings that are easier clarified quickly in conversation. And two people typing full-paragraphs back and forth often at the same time, can be clunky.
* On the other hand, Slack leaves a good paper trail and you can easily reference what you discussed. And it's low-effort and doesn't immediately interrupt the other person.
* But no good alternative to whiteboards, etc.
Also, as much as everyone hates it, management does have to deal with low performers -- a nd cases you can't really tell if that person is actually working through tough eng problems all day that take a long time, or are they just watching youtube videos all day. So as ugly as it is, "butts in seats" is a sort of proxy for at least eliminating that variable. I know this is controversial ("Boo, only a bad manager cares about how much time someone is putting in!"), but I offer that viewpoint as an alternative to "clearly about money."
Cost reductions from facilities are nothing unusual.
It's definitely a rabbit hole that goes deep and one runs the risk of ending up with a spiderweb of red threads on their wall :)
I guess I’ll have to tell the junior I’m mentoring that we are doomed.
Annnnnnyways, I’ve been having a great time mentoring a junior engineer at my company. We regularly meet to discuss his work and I constantly stress “please bother me if you have questions.” I reach out once a day to ensure he’s good to go and he often reaches out a few times a day for questions. We assign him work that is challenging, but within his skill set and abilities.
In summary, anyone saying juniors will suffer either has no idea how to mentor remotely or are just lazy. Adapt or die.
Edit: I will add that my company flies all remote employees into the office once a year for the sole purpose of team building. We did our hackathon in person and focused on building those bonds that can help people work better together. It’s technically optional, but who wants to turn down a free mini-vacation?
Finding a student/junior who is able to do well in your business environment at a distance does not imply that it is scalable across all workers businesses need to hire.
Might be possible, but most can't do it from what I've seen.
So if you go full wfh your pool of people who can mentor shrinks by a large factor (4x is my bet).
The fact that senior employees are leaving for remote work ensures junior people are all they have left! Junior people are, shockingly, not as productive as senior people... who would have thought?
This is a genuine question. The RTO push has befuddled me for awhile because the money that's already gone into the offices (like the leases) were decided on awhile ago and will be paid out regardless if people come in or not. Perks like free lunch and snacks also cost more when you force people to come in. So I don't really understand the financial aspect of it.
Maybe it's management needing people in office to justify their jobs for some reason? I don't know.
Edit: I'm staff-level for what it's worth. I've also noticed that this article doesn't actually reflect reality; nearly every job listing I saw this year said that the applicant will have to be in the office 1-5 days a week.
a lot more than three years. remote work goes back decades before covid.
GitHub, Shopify, and Stripe all started as remote companies.
the really annoying thing is not the legions of people who believe it all started in 2020. the really annoying thing is that there's a ton of excellent literature on how to do it, and when it suddenly became mainstream in 2020, the newcomers ignored all that literature.
I think the effects are going to start presenting now, but because it's a new phenomenon for most organizations, it won't be recognized for another year or so. The next 2-5 years are going to be littered with stories along the lines of 'progress ground to a halt and nobody could put their finger on why, so we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work and eventually realized it was a lack of any remote strategy'
As for your "well known fact", I'm not convinced it's either well-known, nor necessarily a fact (I can buy it happens some places, but would question whether it's an inherent limitations or an issue with management in organisations who don't know how to handle remote work)
Going by the principles of capitalism or game theory it would be more surprising if this wasn't true and board members overwhelmingly worked for the good of the company instead of their personal wealth
WSJ, Fortune, FT, all fall along the same line with opinions about all the cons of remote work, or all the virtues of RTO.
Whilst most online only newspapers fall along the opposite end of the spectrum.
Seems like a topic where everyone has made up their mind and will only accept data if it aligns with their world view.
But using office space costs companies money, and they're not the ones leasing it. It is totally against their own interests to pay extra facilities costs, when they could just shirk that burden onto their employees who have to pay for a home office themselves. We're not seeing big real estate companies push this while big tech companies try to distance themselves from it and disavow it.
And as for the theory that mutual funds and whatnot are pushing it... it just seems like an opportunity for them to short this crap and make money sabotaging real estate.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like something really bizarre is going on.
That's only because people refuse to accept the obvious. Executives, whether correctly or wrongly, genuinely believe having employees colocated in the same geographical space is beneficial for their companies.
It's not even such a stretch to imagine this because we absolutely know they believed this before the pandemic. In fact, most SV companies were willing to pay employees located elsewhere huge sums of money to move to the Bay Area.
Shorts have the other side. You can't just ambiently short against nothing and nobody on the other side. Even naked shorting involves taking a bet against those who are long, you just skip the step where the shares you are selling actually exist. There can't be a market that consists only of short sellers, so there are going to be people interested in keeping values up.
You seem to be having a lot of difficulty separating out various separate interests in the real world. Of course companies are trying to cut office space spends. If office space were free those of us against RTO would already have lost. Office space costs are our biggest ally. But those are nearly completely separate people from the people vending the office space. (They're completely separate if the office space vendors ironically have gone to WFH themselves...) If you try to lump the vendors and consumers together you're going to have a very hard time understanding things, which may be why you're getting confused.
Older people are more comfortable having a face-to-face meeting rather than an online chat or video call. They're more comfortable managing people they can see in their seats, rather than having to judge only by the amount of output.
This is true even for many larger software companies.
Is this all of what's going on? Maybe not. But I suspect it's at least part of it.
Entire economies were built on top of office spaces and that upends a lot of things when they go away.
It's akin to saying that apartment renters care immensely about their landlords to the point of going out of their way to keep paying them rent. Its a total and complete fiction.
I don't think you have the right framing. Investors diversify, and so the set of investors and board members in your company that are invested in commercial real estate is non-zero, and arguably non-negligible.
The set of investors and board members that have some stake in work from home is considerably smaller, possibly zero. This is a clear bias that acts as a non-negligible incentive on CEOs to push a return to office. Everyone in this scenario is working in their own self-interest.
Obviously it is the producers of the good who have the ad spend money for submarine PR, just as it is everywhere else.
you spend $2B on a brand new office campus. you work directly with the architects and talk about how this new campus will create a great place for your employees to work. and then you have the humility and wisdom to throw all that away? even though everybody at the company knows that this is the big project you spent billions of dollars on?
the money that companies spend on their offices is a commitment that an executive makes. keeping their commitments and persuading other people to buy in to those commitments is one of the biggest parts of the job if you're an executive.
another very big piece is making sure that the assets on your balance sheet don't turn into liabilities.
This take is so common and so bizarre to me.
so take the time to think it through and understand it. commercial leases are 10-year leases. when an executive makes a 10-year commitment, they have spent energy to convince others to make the same commitment, and they are committed to spending more energy on it as well.
And when that impact hits, it will affect every business.
Those executives and many others know that. They're standing on the beach with the water out, knowing what's coming but helpless to stop it. But they're trying. Of course they're trying.
They often can't, though. Companies change policies after being hired (mine did), the job market is hard (my son has had his start date pushed back 2x now for a total of over a year), and a lot of time this "choice" of job is not in a context you can deal with. I want to go into the office, but I'd have to move to do it. I want to WFH, but I can't find anyone to hire me for the $ I need to live where I do.
Moving isn't an option for many.
However, that world will also have companies that are much friendlier to full-time remote where practical and companies that mandate coming in a few days a week at least. And people who prefer one or the other will naturally gravitate to different work over time if they haven't already done so.
Right now we're going through a phase where things are changing and people feel that they're not getting what they bargained for whether staying remote or getting back to a before-times office.
Because chances are this world is not our world. In our world the former companies have an advantage, but there are a lot of financial interests put on not going down that route.
"Thing is, we need ones that want to be here and ones that don't want to be here."
Context kinda matters, but the gist remains valid. WFH might not need to force RTO on others, but RTO absolutely does.
The FT articles on remote work can be found listed at: https://www.ft.com/search?sort=relevance&q=remote+work
Long-time columnist Simon Kuper's column [1] published on September 21 was in favour of working from home, with the position: "Homeworking is not just a corporate issue, it’s a chance to create a better society." Another article from columnist Sarah O'Connor published in May 2023 [2] argues that "More flexibility has improved work-life balance for many since the pandemic began."
Though the FT has also featured opinions in favour of more in-person office time (such as a podcast [3] featuring an interview of a professor who speaks about the benefits of in-person work), there is no clear bias for or against remote work from the search results.
To sum up the search results: there are opinion articles in favour of remote work, news articles about major companies ending work-from-home with quotes from executives who favour in-person work, and articles that report on the benefits of hybrid working arrangements.
For the FT, I've seen a diversity of opinion, without any clear effort to sway the readership one way or another about the issue.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/74b43b83-1af1-4045-9bd1-15fc85569...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/44e81232-9b25-4f4a-91ab-4462978dc...
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/b35e3643-de04-4a0e-ae4a-c0f2db6b5...
[0] https://commercial.ft.com/our-products/financial-times/ [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=342198... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-27...
It is sort of like how you see all sorts of segments about "the hydrogen economy" on Fox News as if they live in some bizzaro world there are more than two hydrogen cars out there.
It's because the natural gas folks want hydrogen vs. electric and are paying to advertise it.
I manage people and anecdotally I see engineers having collectively more output if they are in the office, and they do grow in seniority on average.
The remote folks produce sum-of-its-parts impact and do well, but grow slower and not as much.
More senior folks really benefit from WFH, they have similar performance, but I as the manager of the team miss out on a senior person training the junior folks.
We don't offer remote positions for junior candidates.
To be fair, they may be better now. It's been years since I've read a Fortune article.
I'm kind of between both camps. I actually like in-office work, but the combination of 1) facilities pursuing bad office plans (open-offices, hot desking) and 2) the rise of remote work and distributed teams makes RTO pretty unappealing.
Co-located in-office work also makes me feel a lot more secure. It's much harder to form social bonds remotely, which makes you much more isolated and replaceable. Remote work pretty ruthlessly cuts away all relationships except direct working relationships, and even makes those much flatter and less warm. It's easier for a higher up to fire someone they don't know, and fewer of your peers will care or even notice if you leave.
Also, here's your daily reminder that an offshore job is a remote job, so once you're no longer in an office you've removed a big speed bump for replacing you.
If my entire immediate team was in a single location I don't think I could get away with not going in despite the tradeoffs.
I think there is an unspoken belief amongst most here that they are the indispensable contributors to their organization (and there are many genuinely talented people here no doubt), and that they can never be replaced. Of course many of our mentors have told us an undeniable truth; that the world's cemeteries are full of indispensable people.
You'll often see an argument that timezones are important, which is fair, but I'll note that there are many countries south of the US with cheaper labor and some quite smart people (my experience from working with them).
Language/culture is another argument and another fair point, but I think at some point cost differences make up for it. And the US seems uniquely good at exporting language and culture anyway.
At the end of the day, I like working with a small team of smart and dedicated people. We work in a quite hybrid fashion that seems to work for us. I don't believe we've ever all met at once in the time I've worked here, but while I and a few others come in almost every day, some come in to work a bit more closely as needed. I think this sort of individuation of working circumstances is something that a large company is just going to struggle with; it's not really something that can be articulated in a policy that all parties will consider fair, but it's just sort of the way things have organically fallen here even before the pandemic, but especially after it.
While this is undoubtably true being in office won’t save you if you are in office in the US. I am full remote and for what my company pays me they could easily get 10 Indian engineers. If time zones are an issue then they could easily get 2-4 top tier Mexican developers instead. Go to Colombia and we are back to being able to afford 8-10 again.
The cost difference is large enough that if a company can effectively off shore then they will.
My point was embracing/demanding remote work removes one more barrier to offshoring (or more offshoring), not that working in-office will somehow totally protect you from layoffs or offshoring. Basically, being remote puts you in weaker position in many respects, and people should be clear-eyed about that.
It's a fairy tale to think of companies and ruthlessly rational and efficient. A lot of decisions are really driven by some descision-maker's personal preferences and personal convenience.
To the degree that an office is very hybrid, remote people will often be somewhat marginalized while the environment for in-person will naturally use things like hot desking and a lot of people won't just be there. Some of this can probably be mitigated (and large companies always had people in a lot of different locations).
They always have, but I think the key mistake is smearing a single team across different locations. Once you do that, or start doing that habitually, you've completely undermined whatever benefits you think your organization will get from RTO.
IMHO, if you really want to RTO, you need to co-locate all team members (and reorganize teams to make that happen), and ideally co-locate closely collaborating teams.
I suspect that a hybrid of in-office and WFH work is probably where we are settling, and I think that's far from ideal. With hybrid, you don't get the mobility you get with working from home: you can't live where you want, because you still have to commute into the office a couple days a week. From the business' perspective, you don't get the benefits of hiring people from other time zones (the greater size of the talent pool and, if you are despicable, the option to pay people less for the same result because they live somewhere else). You still have to pay for commercial real estate, even when it's not fully occupied. And, unless everyone's in-office on the same days—which is not the norm with hybrid offices—you still get all the annoyances of having Zoom calls. In other words, I think we're in the process of settling into a mistake. No surprise there I guess.
It would be better, in my view, for some companies to be 100% WFH, and other companies 100% in-office. The "native" remote companies I've worked for, the ones who were built around being remote, for were highly productive. Some office-centric companies I've worked for were productive, too. I've not worked for a hybrid company that was really very good.
It doesn't even make sense to call any other policy "hybrid", in my opinion. You're not actually working in-person with your colleagues in that case, so yeah it's functionally the same as remote work.
Correction.
Some people, work their assess off all times of the day because now they can be reached around the clock. Some people work the same but make up with availability which can be valuable in itself (I am one of these people). And some people goof off even more than before.
Maybe the total productivity didn't change, but definitely it has shifted.
The question is what happens now. I think what happens is companies will get better at understanding who is and who isn't spending time working (I am careful not to use word "productive"). And some companies will monitor this and some will make conscious decision to focus on trying to get better at understanding actual productivity.
The ones that monitor working time I call sweatshops and I would try to stay away from at all cost. You want to compete on quality of your work or even on productivity. But you definitely do not want to compete with your coworkers over who can spend more time by the computer because there simply are no winners in this game.
--
One way it can bite people is that it may help the companies identify who is productive (if the company is smart about it).
I once talked with my boss about why he is allowing employees to access company funds (within certain limit). The finances people are furious and want to cut it off and instead give some ridiculously low limit for spending.
So one argument is that it allows people to be more efficient. When they need something, they don't have to wait for approvals or for "process".
But then the boss also says: "It is much cheaper for me to have an employee steal couple thousand dollars from me because I can easily identify it and fire the employee. It is much more expensive to keep that employee."
I think the same applies to working from home. When you allow people to do pretty much what they want, thinking they are unsupervised, you have now much better chance to identify employees who are completely immature, irresponsible or fraudulent about it.
It's not clear to me that there's much of an incentive for this, and I think it requires more effort on the part of decision-makers than sending an email telling everyone to come back to the office.
Direct oversight has always been a very minor part of performance metrics, compared to word-of-mouth or deliverables. WFH still has those two factors, all it's missing is the direct oversight. I can only see manager support for this at places where managers are regularly checking over your shoulder, which is already crazy.
I'm sorry but if it's software related, I don't get going into the office at all. My entire experience before was one of mostly depression at work because I'd get maybe a couple hours a day to code. What the other hours had in store or what the point was, who knows. But, it was mostly for people to talk and network and "feel like they were working" form my cynical perspective.
I just don't believe people that say you _have_ to be in office to solve complex problems or some such nonsense. There are too many examples that show this is laughably false. If someone wants to go in, I don't mind. But don't conflate your discomfort of being alone with your mind with "better productivity" because a work environment provides you with distractions.
I don't think anyone is saying that. They're saying that collaboration on those problems is more effective/easier when everyone is in the office together, not that it doesn't happen when remote. It's hard for me to see how this could be wrong. The most obvious example is that when in person I have lunch with colleagues where we talk about work things that we absolutely do not talk about when everyone is remote. There's much less siloization. It's not impossible to fix that in a remote environment, but most companies don't know how to, and instead of replacing leadership with a remote first team it's easier to go back to in person.
I genuinely don't ever see this dynamic at least for technical problems. The back-and-forth in Slack of people that can now take time to compose an informed response is second to none. Being able to instantly demo your ideas and pass the screen share around is better than any whiteboarding. I don't get the culture. I'm far less creative if you make me try and make decisions based on whatever knowledge I happen to have in my brain-cache at the moment.
I doubt any of this posturing was about effectiveness of remote, hybrid, or in office work.
"it’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working, I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better."
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20231129224726/https://fortune.c...
He accidentally let slip that he unilaterally is (trying to) force RTO for 200 people because he's lonely. Oh boo hoo get a social life outside of work. We all suddenly understood why he was not even bothering to engage with the near unanimous disagreement with it.
The question is where things shake out in the long term. What percentage of young and growing companies will start remote and remain remote, start in person and then go remote, or start in person and remain in person (it's hard to imagine starting remote and then going in person, but I guess that's possible too)? The long-term outcome is still unclear, and it will take a long time for the dust to settle.
wasn’t github started remote-only and then went to some in-person?
Sadly true. I wish there was more discourse on HN about this. I don't think 10+ years from now this will be sustainable without revelatory therapeutics or vaccines that offer complete and total protection. It seems clear that this is going to be a slow burn where everyone's immune system gets nicked, little by little. Contracting covid once a year or couple of years seems to be the reality we're willing to live with and I am terrified of the long term implications of this.
* Remote positions have been consistently 60%+ this year
* Onsite peaked at about 23%.
* Hybrid peaked at 15%.
[1] https://www.hntrends.com/2023/november.html?compare=Remote&c...
Only a tiny sliver of the workforce are tech workers who are tasked to write lines of code on a laptop all day.
RTO articles are about RTO in general, not RTO for developers.
There are other whole professions that can cheerfully go full remote so long as they have adequate tech support for it.
If your work is at all "office job" you probably don't need to be anywhere particular.
They'll get to reflect on the futility of their commute to and from cubicle hell twice a day and might conclude the grass is greener next doors and simply might change job to some place with a better work/life balance. Usually, it's the best people that leave first. People with options tend to go for the nicest ones.
That might change if unemployment goes up. Job security for remote workers might not be as strong as for people in the office. When companies have to decide about who to let go, the people they'd miss the least will be at the top of the list. I.e. remote people are at a disadvantage.
Either way, I don't think the clock will be reverted to pre 2020 anytime soon. Companies should move on, adapt, and focus on how to make this new reality work for them. Save cost on offices and travel. Provide access to co-working spaces. Tap into the global labor market instead of hiring locally.
Ironically, for some places in the world this is a problem in the sense that this drives down rates. I'm seeing that the freelance market has gotten a lot tougher in the last years. I'm competing with people all over Europe. The fact that I'm in Berlin is of relatively low value to my clients.
"What makes companies money tends to stick," he said.
RTO is dead because it’s economically inefficient. Over time the emotional “but I like my employees to sit where I can see them” will be less and less compelling to boards and shareholders. After time has passed, say 5 years, the next recession will kill the corporate sponsored office and will usher in the “Bring Your Own Office” age. BYOD saved millions. BYOO will save hundreds of millions.
People bemoan their hour long commutes but if they can do the math and see they’re getting paid an extra $100 or whatever for sitting in traffic and listening to audiobooks, it becomes justifiable.
How much of a pay cut would you accept to WFH?
You should at least accept less by the amount of your commuting costs, because you're not paying that any more. But you're also getting the commuting time back, which might be worth some money too. You're essentially working fewer hours. (Yeah, they're not working hours. Still, it's hours that you can use for what you want instead of for something related to work.)
Anyone care to put a number on it? Or do people only like it at the same salary?
However I would take 10% less to stop having the debate.
If that's the case then we should also demand more by the same amount that the employer pays in office leases, right? If the employer gets money that I save, then I get money that the employer saves too, or is this a one-way thing?
I'm thinking it'll be a substantial salary increase, but I expect some opprobrium if I pitch the idea ;-)
More seriously, I have no doubt that any honest knowledge worker with a decent WFH setup delivers more value to their employer from home than they did from the office. This increased productivity is increased value that the employers get for free. A good thing!
Before the pandemic it was almost universally accepted that open offices were detrimental to knowledge work, but it was defended by the financials. You could fit more people in smaller offices, which saved money.
Now that the offices can be eliminated almost entirely, suddenly it's no longer about the money.
The real reason is of course that managers often can't measure productivity from office workers and use butts-in-seats as a substitute. I think it is a very poor substitute.
Not necessarily - a lot of people (myself included) essentially give that time to their employer. I drop my kids off at school and start work when I get home at 8am and work until 5pm when I pick them up. When I go in, my commute necessarily occurs between those two events.
In my company at least, I don't think this is rare. On the rare days I go into the office, it's easy to notice that people don't show up until well after 9 and everyone is gone by 3:30-4. I think many people have shifted to taking their commute time from what used to be considered the employer's time rather than personal time.
I live a 5 minute walk from my office and I get catered lunches.
For me the office days are terrible now though. I used to have my own desk, obviously that doesn't fly with hybrid. But the whole running around with laptops is just so horrible. I really hate the office (and the colleagues that love the office and keep asking us to come in because they feel lonely or something).
I don't think this works for me.
So...it's "Entrenched Senior $Trend Expert says that counter-$Trend ain't gonna happen".
Whenever I see this in other economists, more likely than not their findings tend to go towards where their capital is invested.
LORDY, yes. The only solid "scientific" theory which Economists seem to have developed is the millenia-old one of predicting which "truths" each emperor / prince / nobleman / etc. will want to be told.
At the end of the day "anywhere on the planet" just isn't true. Language, work culture, time zones, shared educational base, low network latency, and more are all still important in remote work and place strong constraints on how geographically distributed a team can be.
Even splitting a team up between West Coast and East Coast presents difficulties due to time zones -- and that's a case where everything else is more or less identical.
That suggests we're probably going to start seeing a commercial real estate collapse, beginning some time in 2024 as significant numbers of rental agreements expire.
If that's true, I wonder what impact this will have on cities in general? There are so many potential knock-on consequences it's hard to predict outcomes.
---------------
...some studies offer insights into the average CRE expenses across different industries and company sizes. Here's a breakdown:
By Industry:
Finance & Insurance: 10-15% Professional Services: 8-12% Technology: 5-8% Manufacturing: 4-6% Retail: 5-10%
By Company Size:
Small Companies (1-250 employees): 5-10% Mid-sized Companies (251-2,500 employees): 8-12% Large Companies (>2,500 employees): 10-15%
These are just general ranges, and the actual percentage for a specific company can be higher or lower depending on the factors mentioned above.
It's one thing to get me into the office - it's another to expect me to get everything done in my morning routine, get to the office and immediately be ready in front of a desk, contributing to discussion, communicating status, etc.
By the time these meetings wrap up, I get the post meeting notes written down/persisted and do all of the other things you need to do after being in meetings for 2 hours, it is almost lunch time.
The company gets acquired by a fortune 100 that does not do remote work. Now let's see how this one goes...
When the same company started to grow - and had multiple offices across entire Poland - we started to communicate each other with IM/email/teleconferences/...
This is the part when staying in the office was pointless as I/we needed to use IM/email/teleconferences/... anyway - so it does not matter if You do it from home or from the office.
Many manager do not understand that.
I work daily from home and I am not going back to office because of waste of my time (and money). If - for some reason - current employer would try to force me to get back - I am out of company in minutes and getting other job in more mature employer.
My $0.02 on the topic.
People would be more amenable to offices if they were driving to downtowns that aren't paved over car-hells with 30% of the land being taken up for car storage.
We built our cities wrong. People have had enough.
The transition from school to sitting in your apartment is harsh.
For a lot of them in person work is a great place to make friends and romantic partners too.
No force need be applied to "we have an office but you can work remotely if you'd like."
Local officials feel more pressure from the business community.
CNBC: 0/1/2/3/4 days at office
Oregon Live: At least 20 hours from office for city employees.
If a company paying big bucks needs some some they get to select from a global talent pool, or at least several time zones.
The best talent gets the best jobs. This is better for both the employees and the employers.
The losers are the under-talented who now must compete with a larger labor pool.
The primary driver of RTO is the massive overhang in corporate real estate. Not only was it overbuilt, it is now also redundant (and not in a good way). Notice one of the primary drivers is Jamie Dimon, Charimand & CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who will be a huge loser in a office real-estate crash, as are many of the other drivers.
Meanwhile, most workers have seen that daily commuting is an absurdly wasteful anachronism, and astute managers have noticed (as IBM did decades ago), that remote work slashes Capital Expenditures for real estate, and has gives a massive talent advantage, since your available talent pool is national or global, instead of only a small radius around each office.
They can keep trying to make RTO happen, but it won't. RTO has flatlined, and remote will only grow. It'll probably stay stable as current office leases continue to run, but on expiration, any smart company will reevaluate if they really need so much office space.
Could be just coincidence that he recently sold his 140 million dollar worth of shares of JP Morgan.
Sure, for SDEIIIs that's not true. But for entry level people 100% WFH is a disaster.
Remote may work in tech and tech heavy businesses, but it doesn’t work everywhere.
We hear so much hand wringing about the loss of 'hallway conversations,' but few people seem to discuss the loss of productivity from high performers in particular. I was at an intense startup when the pandemic hit, and switching from in-office to remote was such an unlock. I had an additional ~90 mins a day, could wear whatever, and just focus on executing.
But what really frustrates me is they could save at least 10-15% on salary (biggest cost for most companies) for those who want to WFH.
Part of it is manager ego but a bigger part in my opinion is like most things in the corporate world, consultants are driving RTO because they always have a conflict if interest (the real estate companies they also consult with) and by nature they're extroverts.
I've worked with people in the past where even though it is their job, they will not lift a finger to help you unless they socialize with you in person and know they can play political quid-pro-quo. These people cannot function remotely and many of them are typically managers. But see, I would have expected consultants to use the opportunity to train management on how to manage a remote workforce efficiently.
A lot of money to be saved/made all around with WFH but greed has gotten so bad they want the whole cake and be able to show it off. More cake isn't good enough.
This is basic human psychology you're talking about, not "political quid-pro-quo" motivation.
To me, you do your job because that's why you get paid. And for non-managerial roles you work with others not because you want to but because you need to in order to reach assigned objectives.
If you request someone to QA your code as a dev for example, the question of the QA guy knowing you in person, liking you and then knowing he can extort favors later on should never be even a consideration. What I was saying was for some people it is a significant consideration and they can't do any of that remotely. They are people persons and extroverts, their mindset does not allow them to do work without considering the social cost benefit analysis to be done in person. These are the people that demand you turn on cameras during a zoom call.
I mean, it is what it is, not even a problem so long as managers can manage those people as well as everybody else. But it is exactly those people that end up being managers.
It's like trying to explain antarctica to someone in the sahara. You do your job and do it well with no upside other than your paycheck - a lot of people do that and they can be very productive remotely because their objective of getting paid is being met. But when their performance review suffers from their nose not being brown enough they will fall in line and focus on that and inefficiently try to brown nose remotely and then hybrid and still fail and then execs think the reason for lower productivity is WFH not their managerial incompetence for both types of people when they WFH.
There are plenty of succesful remote-first companies. If you suffer from productivity loss it is because your managers and hr are failing at their jobs. Not your employees.
Unlike many in here I have no delusions of 20bn exits, much less 20mm exits, hell not even a 200k personal ROI.
But one point I am not willing to negotiate on is physical presence in the same working area.
The startup will crash and burn and cost me time and money but while it's still standing I shall be the leader of a wolf pack and in the trenches with my soldiers.
If I can't find a group of equally stoked individuals ready to match and amplify my energy I think I'd give up the startup idea entirely and move to South America to buy a Series D Football Club instead.
At least footballers are quite the stoked bunch and it's impossible for them to claim that they can WFH.