Disagree with your sentiment. Big tech employee for 12 years. There is substantial support for RTO, but those voices aren’t as loud, don’t advocate their positions as vocally as the rest.
The problem with the RTO boosters is they aren't happy enough to just RTO themselves. RTO boosters generally start demanding OTHER people return to the office with them. So the problem is RTO boosters demand other people conform to their preference because "the office is dead without my team there" or similar statements.
Hybrid/WFH boosters don't care what OTHER people do. You wanna work from the office, go for it man, I literally could not care less. Work from the moon, your beach house, your moms house, Holiday Inn, Starbucks, or the office.. whatever.
Even if your immediate teammates may not be in the same physical space as you, hopefully you're "extended team" is. And I'd argue that even if no one from your team or department shares your physical space, there's still absolute value in returning to office because it promotes a sense of community and networking.
I'm pointing out that the RTO boosters are making a much larger ask of their teammates.
In the age of open floor plans, no cubes, no offices.. many of us find it near impossible to do "deep work" in the office. Sitting on an open floorplan with noise cancelling headphones on for 8 hours per day is not a life I want to go back to living.
Some of this may be fixed with process changes and better tooling; but that does not exist today for the company I work for.
I signed a contract that said I would come to the office when I took my offer, and honestly, if WFH people are serious; that should be more vocal about allowing folks to leave the state boundaries too. Silicon Valley folks who live in 3+ mil houses seem to be really happy with WFH…
As a personal anecdote, many of our local restaurants near my office have closed down, people I cared about lost jobs and livelihoods from these somewhat self-centered changes. I want more people to understand that these arguments have perverse secondary effects on society as well.
If they aren’t performing they can be fired
2 things follow from tips mode of thought:
The first is that you view (and presumably you believe others view) RTO as some sort of punishment. ("Oh, Jones, we caught you abusing WFH, therefore we're going to force you to RTO. That'll teach ya!")
Second, you have a presumption that OTHER PEOPLE will be there in the office with Jones! (Or else, why exactly force him to go into the office?) Now those "other people" can either be folks who choose to be there, or else it'll be made up of an army of Joneses! I'm not sure if I want to work in an office environment where EVERYTHING is forced to be there against their wishes.
> If they aren’t performing they can be fired
Yeah, business as usual. The trick is, how do employers retain happy peoductive employees, especially around the issue of RTO?
It's not as easy as "fire poor performers", especially if the employees claim (as many here are doing right now) that RTO is an absolutely miserable and unproductive experience for them.
Firing and rehiring people is expensive. :-/
It is much easier to add community and networking to a remote team (e.g. by frequent colocation) than it is to remove distraction from an in-person team.
I fly every 3-6 months to meet in person for a week and it has its benefits.
But last two times we actually ran out of steam by day 3 and I found my team working physically adjacent but mentally remote in headphone land by day 3, with some not even coming in by day 4.
I’m not sure I’ll stay more than 3 nights next time.
Without data it is religion. Even sect. If you want to insist, provide data how "absolute value" increases productivity.
So far, I suffer productivity loss after RTO. I also spend less time working (after 3 hours of commute I have very hard time convincing myself that I want to do some overtime -- a normal situation when I am WfH).
I know people who prefer to work from office (e.g., because no children distraction). The action work here is prefer. They are good enough teammate of mine not to impose their preferences under disguise of culture and senses.
>because it promotes a sense of community and networking.
Value is often measured non-arbitrarily. _community_ and _networking_ are both arbitrary.
Once again assholes are finding ways to coerce other people into doing what they want to do. No room for live and let live.
I know some people who like working in the office, and some whose home arrangements make WFH hard, and that is fine. However, the majority of my colleagues I have spoken to have the opposite view and prefer WFH. I haven't found anyone who withholds their view.
Just anecdata of course, like yourself, but I haven't seen substantial RTO support, even if some people prefer it.
At my company with thousands of employees, informal polls (where every employee can participate anonymously) show that people who are in favor/against of RTO is 1:4. At least that's a number I can quote.
The results came out very comparable to yours, 78% against RTO but the company is still enforcing it.
And it's great for other people to be able to choose something more flexible, whether for family or some other desire, and be able to leverage the benefits that remote work provides.
But even in small company, it's absurd to think that there's a single answer to "which is better" for every employee.
What's more absurd is that the executive-level positions tend to be more flexible. If anyone's to benefit from in-person communication and spontaneous interactions it's those making decisions that impact those people.
As an outsider, neither employee or employer, to me the whole thing looks like an abusive relationship, particularly egregious on the employer side, but not without problematic actions from the employee side either.
And while HN is an outlier, most people work to survive, not the other way around. Imagine if the same energy that went into promoting RTO, or even WFH for that matter, went into "enabling individuals to make worthwhile contributions and feel good about what they do."
Queue the "people are lazy and can't be trusted" and "basic income is the only answer" choir.
/end rant (cost: -37 karma)
I wish people wouldn't sarcastically portray themselves as the underdog. It comes off as superior, rather than humble.
Ironically, I think ensuring that people don't starve and become homeless during durations they are unemployed (which unemployment insurance/payments doesn't really do in many locations), is actually a good idea.
It'll be nice to move away from "work because if I miss it we'll be homeless" to "work because I enjoy what I do, and can contribute positively in the field."
I don't mind going in to the office to meet up with my coworkers sometimes. People who took advantage of the opportunity to move to cheaper locales may have an incredibly hard time with that.
E.g. just looking at the efficiency variable alone, people who collaborate better remotely are not more or less hampered be being in-person with their colleagues than vice versa (unless you cherry-pick).
So there's no reason not to just allow both, other than those common petty motivations that poor leaders are susceptible to focusing on, usually for optics reasons or other bad second-order metrics.
Just pointing out that if someone wants to RTO but their office wants to WFH, that person will be slightly inconvenienced. If a person who built their lifestyle around WFH is required to RTO, they might face insurmountably major problems.
And I think that's why the WFH contingent, including myself, is so much more vocal. Even if it were true that there were roughly as many RTO and WFH fans, which I don't believe for a moment, the WFH group deals with way more hardship if they don't get their way than the RTO group would.
Force RTO has also been devastating for caregivers (which are, usually, non-white & immigrants due to larger family sizes and less-established parents).
This is like voting for a tax increase on other people.
well yes, that's what managers do - make life miserable for others lol. (mostly /s but not really)
For me personally, being able to move somewhere with a lower cost of living without having a lengthy commute is a huge benefit. Especially in the face of ongoing layoffs.
If people (or a team) wants to be in office 2-3 days a week, fine, good for them. If you don't, _you should_ be allowed that choice.
My impression from working at Google was that mentorship was one of the most important software engineering job responsibilities. There were many summers there where I had interns and my full-time job was answering their questions, and that seemed to be what was expected. (They made some neat stuff that I would have prioritized for myself to do!) Big Tech's goal is to get huge, so they can pursue any opportunity that comes up. It isn't necessarily for Engineer #23847 on Team #8734 to type in as much code as possible.
(Whether or not this strategy is a good idea is up for debate, several rounds of layoffs later.)