Remote work won, don't let anyone gaslight you to believe otherwise
hottakes.space
hottakes.space
If you are a massive company, by allowing full remote you could be saving hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate, office upkeep, electricity, etc. You can recruit employees from all over the country so your access to talent is superior and you can afford to pay talent less.
These benefits are easy to analyze, it's just a massive amount of money and time being saved.
Now to go to the less tangible benefits that don't necessarily positively impact the business itself, employees can live in cheaper cost of living areas and actually have the ability to one day own property. Massive reductions in carbon emissions because of 0 commute. Massive time savings for employees because of 0 commute that they can then use to spend more time with family or friends, exercise, or sleep more (all of which could lead to healthier employees). Oh, and they will actually be able to live close to family since they will not need to move to a different state / city. There will be much more efficient use of space, office space is basically redundant when employees can work from home. This freed up space could be used for housing which we desperately need. I'm sure I could come up with a million more benefits of wfh.
To advocate for return to office you need to make all these logical leaps that somehow being together in person will result in us making more money than what we save from being remote and is better for employees somehow.
If enough companies have vested interests in keeping real-estate prices high in the cities it will happen.
Notice how many jobs in Texas are on-site only? Texas is aggressively enforcing the tax deals they had with companies to have XX% of their workforce on site, spending money locally to keep the tax benefit.
I have never seen any reasonable examples of what could be "quantified" here though. To be clear, leaders at big tech companies are not so worried about "number of tickets closed in office vs. remote" or some such related easily quantifiable metric. And the jobs that are easily quantifiable are the ones that leaders are least worried about doing remotely (both up and down the spectrum, from call center workers who can be measured on number of calls, to diagnostic radiologists who can be measured in RVUs).
Corporate leaders, especially in tech, are largely worried about a slow deterioration/decline in innovation, general employee dedication (i.e. employees feeling less connected to their job), and overall quality. Those things are extremely difficult if not impossible to measure, especially since they can take years to pan out. I'm certainly open to hearing counterpoints, but I haven't heard any yet that sound believable to me.
Anyway I think you're both wrong about this. The reason for RTO is two-fold:
* Working in an office is much better for higher ups because their job is much more talking to people than doing "actual work". If you're spending literally all day in meetings it is worth the commute to avoid Zoom. If you're only spending 1-2 hours in meetings it definitely isn't.
* They have a fear that people will do no work if they're at home. Honestly I think it's completely unfounded, and it's just as easy to do no work at work. But it's a real fear.
Actually I think hn_throway_99 has a point about them being worried about disinvestment too.
But it's mostly the fact that WFH is way worse for management than it is for the bottom rung.
For people early in their careers, face time on site can be invaluable. They get to learn from people who get things done, and emulate them (or not). On-site, they learn from both positive and negative examples. This is simply less effective through meetings only.
The counterpoint also ignores human behavior. The person getting promoted is likely to be the person who shows up every day and visibly contributes when compared head-to-head against an equivalently performing employee WFH. First time people managers will likely be expected to manage people where their boss can keep an eye on them before entrusting them with remote teams. This could create a career choke point.
the advantages you mention are real, but WFH is poor career advice unless you can compete on price with low-cost foreign workers who are just as remote as the person I am paying a US salary to
So, why is there so much (corporate anti-)Scrum everywhere?
I mean, most employees hate it with a passion, and the typical excuse is that it makes velocity more predictable, even if slower. Now you are telling me that the corporate leaders in tech do not care about quantifiable things, and are worried about innovation and employees. How can both of this be true at the same time?
I guess I will stay with my null hypothesis that most corporate leaders have no idea what they are doing, and just randomly do whatever feels right at the moment.
Some cutting edge R&D team may have legitmately worries about innovation. the team maintaining decade old legacy code, less so. But for several reasons these kinds of mandates need to be company wide, not just opt in/out per team (though yes, there will be exceptions for the exceptional, as always).
So I can see both yours and the GP's idea both being correct, to some degree.
But I do worry about the long-term effects of so much remote work, primarily:
1. When I was new in my career, I learned a ton just "through osmosis" by being around more experienced colleagues. I also built good relationship and friendships early in my work career (to be honest, I always felt kind of sad for people who took the "colleagues aren't your friends" mindset. Perhaps not all of them, but why not make friends with people you spend a lot of time with?) I certainly understand married people with kids and with well-developed friend groups being much more happier with remote work, but I think it's much harder to develop those relationships in the first place if you start out remote from the get go.
2. I really worry about overall isolation, and also an increase in polarization. We used to talk about the loss of "third spaces" when countries became much less religious, and now we're seeing the loss of that "second space" (the office) as well. I go into the office multiple times a week just because I get stir crazy staying in my house all the time. The average number of people I have contact with in any week is way, way down, and that doesn't help my tendency toward depression.
In other words, yes, I agree that remote work has won, but given that, I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives.
One thing I’ve started doing at work is documenting workflows in various ways: not just docs but talks and screencasts where a new engineer could see my workflow. (I also give new engineers advice to keep a digital notebook! I still learn tons by doing this.)
For the isolation bit I just wonder what we will see replacing that. It’s possible we never see anything and everyone just deals with it but I hope shared office spaces or something similar picks up. I get plenty of socialization elsewhere but little breaks in the workday to not focus on productivity and just chitchat were nice and maybe important some days.
You can neglect new hires just as effectively in an office, and you can support new hires just as effectively over Teams.
Also, my issue isn't just with "new hires", it's with new inexperienced hires. I started my career in a company that had a "boot camp"-like training environment for new grads, and I found it hugely, hugely beneficial for both learning new things and for developing strong relationships that have lasted 25 years later. I disagree that kind of experience can be replicated over Teams, though I fully acknowledge that kind of experience is rare to begin with.
My hot take: Don’t hire helpless people, and the people you do hire, make sure they are fully supported to know what they need to do their job (internal mentor/buddy, knowledge base, frequent check ins until they’re more autonomous, etc). In person onboarding can help, as can week long in person on sites every quarter or twice a year (team cohesion).
1. Where is this number from?
2. In the grand scheme of things that is a teeny number. Not really surprised given as remote work is relatively new, but that number in and of itself is not really evidence for remote work's advantages over in person.
My Excel model. As someone passionate about the concept of remote work, and having a material component of my net worth invested in remote orgs, it is top of mind (and important to bring evidence for people's feels about the topic of remote vs office). I should probably just publish it as an Airtable.
> 2. In the grand scheme of things that is a teeny number. Not really surprised given as remote work is relatively new, but that number in and of itself is not really evidence for remote work's advantages over in person.
What number would no longer be teeny?
My experience is that some people are just much less likely to ask questions over Slack or start a Zoom call, which hurts them.
My productivity is higher if I don't have people asking me stuff, but if those questions just never get asked it's bad for new hires' growth.
There might be ways to fix this but I don't know what they are. Just telling people "feel free to ask questions whenever" doesn't always work. Having regular meetings just results in people withholding questions until those meetings.
I don't think it's possible to lower the bar for questions to the same level as just opening your mouth and speaking, maybe with a constant Zoom call but no-one wants to do that.
Here is a guide from Forbes that could be considered.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/07/1...
If you're asking me a 'quick' question - google it dammit. Interrupting more senior engineers should be reserved for more 'difficult' problems - specialized domain knowledge you can't find anywhere else, etc.
If you're interrupting me for stuff you could find by browsing the repos, or googling - I'm gonna be annoyed. If its something more technical/nuanced and it takes me 10+ minutes to resolve, I'm going to be impressed.
Again, I realize you made no claims about this, but the conversation always seems to pop up in these WFH articles
> specialized domain knowledge you can't find anywhere else, etc.
so most of the proprietary workplace tools, likely with shoddy or outdated documentation? Yeah, that sounds like a big issue that is definitely not the junior's fault.
If you can't expend the basic effort, don't expect someone else to bail you out...
That and/or you went straight into a truly elite workplace where a "junior" is still someone with years of experience in industry. It is hard to sympathize with truly green workers when you have none. And industry seems to be leaning towards that as of late.
Wow - you really went out of your way to ignore that basic statement I made (and I stand by). No one expects juniors to come in with perfect knowledge (wouldn't that make them a senior/god? :-P) but they do expect them to do the basics. Why does that seem to sound so unreasonable to you?
>>legacy code with random landmines that would take weeks to understand from scratch
I also specifically mentioned something like this would be something I don't expect juniors to know and would have no problems helping a junior dev. with (it takes more then 10 minutes to explain...) Also, if a junior dev is getting a project like that either the Team Lead or the 'resident expert' will probably go out of their way up front to point out the 'landmines'.
By the same token, seniors can tell when you haven't "expended the basic effort" on something and thats when it gets annoying. If the answer to something is "search your email for 'onboarding' - all your logins are in that", we're gonna wonder why you didn't read it to begin with.
Enjoy the Weekend
I personally hit the former extreme a lot due to early careers outright refusing to give me help as some sort of "proving grounds" to show I can setup my own admin portal (I wasn't even in IT, I asked one and they were told by management not to help me), and that caused some extreme correction in later roles who encouraged me to simply ask. I see it a lot more often than a junior asking what what some language keyword is. So my advice will be biased toward encouraging juniors to "asked stupid questions". It just feels like bad faith (again based on my experiences) to assume juniors are stupid, lazy, and don't respect others' time.
>P.S. if the situations you describe above are what you consider 'bleak', you're probably not gonna have much fun in tech as it sounds pretty average to me.
Been in for a while, I'm just numb to it.
But just because I suffered doesn't mean I want everyone else coming in to go through the same things. The top comment here is talking about society becoming more and more isolated and this attitude of chastising newcomers for their lack of experience will just discourage them further from using their co-workers as a relationship to give and take from, instead of some cold evaluator to gain approval of.
At the end of the day a lot of work relationships isn't different from social relationships; co-workers remember how you made them feel, and not as much how many PRs you merge in. So even if you have some machine like efficiency you will simply be seen as an avatar on a chat screen if you don't make attempts to reach out. And being afraid of "stupid questions" will make you afraid of asking about anything else.
Yeah - probably just talking past each other... :-D
Wow - sorry you had such a shitty introduction (see below)
>> But just because I suffered doesn't mean I want everyone else coming in to go through the same things
FWiW, I've never actually seen seniors want that either. Generally, when I've seen people 'setup to fail' - its been a management decision (didn't like your tie, had to reduce head count etc.). I bet the IT guys in your first gig WANTED to help, but as you said, they were told not to..
Seniors WANT juniors to succeed - if only for selfish reasons: if a junior 'fails' - the seniors will probably have to clean up the mess, but if a junior 'succeeds' it allows the work to be spread out across another person. Also, the juniors might have some ideas about smoothing out rough spots, improving on-boarding, etc. Bonus points if they can help clear the 'landmines' (I've actually seen juniors do that - fresh set of eyes and all that..) So naturally, you want juniors to succeed.
As you mentioned above, I think it probably just comes down to what is 'basic effort' and what does it mean to respect people's time. As you said "co-workers remember how you made them feel" - Juniors that make you feel like they don't respect your time definitely get remembered too.
P.S. - I _hate_ being the 'smartest guy in the room'...I love working places where there's lots of people to learn from and I definitely ask a lot of 'stupid questions'...But I do try to do initial research before asking.
Anyway, Glad that first gig didn't sour you on the whole career :-)
There are many coworkers I met during Covid and have only known then remotely for years. I feel pretty close to them and know their kids, hobbies, etc.
In some cases I’ve gotten to meet them in person and it feels like I sat next to them for years.
In some ways it’s easier because I can have these virtual connections to more people, but in IRL I would only sit next to 1-3 people.
What I do miss is going to lunch every day. That was really nice. But at my current org, there’s no lunch culture so it was rare to eat lunch with people before remote work.
interesting, it's the opposite for me. I was in a small satellite office but I felt I got to know half of the 30 people in my area fairly quickly.
once the office shut down I never saw nor talked to most of those people. Just my immediate team of 3-5 people (2 of which came after the pandemic). The main upside was that I did talk more to people in the main office than I did before, but there was no chance of any get together when we're 500 miles apart.
I agree with missing lunch. That was definitely the best time to talk to people you'd never have a chance to otherwise.
* As the project is quite large, every time a new person appears (no matter if junior or senior), for each sprint they get someone to show them around, answer their questions etc. That guardian angel changes each sprint - and it lasts several months.
* We have open channels for ad-hoc meetings and the culture encouraging joining them even if the topic discussed is not directly related to your current task. In other words, you can just listen to what other people are trying to solve when doing your task and are free to interrupt them if you feel interested in so on.
* Every 3 months we try to get together as much as possible for 2-3 days (it never happened 100% as we live on different continents, the rest joins from their local offices or homes) - and it feels great!
* My teammates are really cool and our bosses too, so we have the necessary space to communicate without worrying it will impact our performance.
And if someone really wants, they can always come to a local office - but most of the time they are empty as everybody loves WFH and NO WE ARE NEVER COMING BACK.
All well and fine if you can, but you shouldn't be forced to. And it shouldn't be the only way to make friends. People with that mindset typically have other social groups.
> I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives
Agreed, and this is something we should've been doing starting decades ago (see: Bowling Alone). We already link health insurance to peoples jobs, it shouldn't be a persons entire social life.
I'm all ears on current ways to make friends as an adult, or at least ideas on where to go. Like the GP said, 3rd places are down and instead of talking about ways to build more 3rd places we're potentially seeing the collapse of 2nd places. And I don't think people are exactly comfortable going or inviting people into their 1st place as of now.
It's not a solution but it is the current best alternative that is currently falling by the wayside.
However if workers have so little productivity on-site, there is something wrong with the company (or workers).
I also started my career in a cubicle farm with a lot of other software engineers which was great for my growth, but I think that could be replaced with adjustments to the process of ramping up juniors. Perhaps colleges or training programs will incorporate training to deal with the lack of seniors or assign juniors with seniors to work together in a mentorship with guidelines.
I'm not as optimistic. that class of 2020-2022 (high school and college) got socially stunted in a way that I feel will only break the physical divide further. Those kids in 20 years won't even see it as a problem that they never got a proper prom, a chance to walk the stage, a chance to properly onboard into their first step of their career and form connections that will help them grow. It'll just be a new normal, a colder normal facilitated by the false platitudes that is modern social media.
The only possibly good long term (20+ year) ramifications will be that a lot of old crusty government processes will definitely be streamlined through the net. Having platforms livestream electorial forums to a populace who treat the internet as a natural extension of their bodies will completely change the dynamics of how candidates argue and pander.
1) While I'm sure there's always going to be some imposter syndrome, I simply feel like I'm not growing the same in a post pandemic world. People in general are less connected and that osmosis from random lunch conversations or overhearing other engineer's problems may be a big part of how the pioneers of yester-decade could take command of a system or entire product and truly thrive. not only do I not get that knowledge, but I feel I get less opportunities to really show I can push to the next level. I'm not as trusted with unfamiliar areas because I'm less a face and more a name that pings for PRs. I can't branch out as much because it's even harder to converse with other teams, I find it harder to get promoted as it's hard to point to "significant impact" (which I never get a chance to) and if I go looking for jobs I get less impressive things to talk about that may help with a more senior role.
This may indeed be a young/old divide as someone who was surrounded by older folk with families who feel elated (and after consulting my own family with young kids, I start to get it). Whereas I always felt more ambivalent on the situation. It does feel great once you get to a point where you feel no need to grow, but I very much do.
2) isolation is also a huge problem as well, especially since I moved to a town where none of my college friends are. Now with remote work I have to physically force myself to get out for the sake of sanity. I live alone so I can legitimately go a week without seeing another physical face if I fell into my usual habits. to call it "loneliness" is an understatement, and it doesn't feel healthy at all.
In office is a waste of time and money.
St Louis, Eindhoven and Bordeaux do not have hospitals, good restaurants and entertainment.
However, as a suburbanite, I have no problem “commuting” to entertainment in the city once every weekend, when previously I had to commute 5 times a week for work. And when I go to the city, it’s a day full of fun/activities because I know I’m not coming back for a week. You can get the best of both worlds that way.
Everything is supply and demand. Now workers are orders of magnitude more sourceable and fungible, meaning the supply went way up.
Wages will stop going up and even start to slide backwards for new hires. I've already seen it. I was making just over $400k at my last job, and new positions at the same level aren't listed over $200k total comp.
And if hypothetically AI brings down demand in the future (big if), then the wage curve is under even further pressure.
Increased property taxes will push people on the margins out and compound the issue while also decreasing real-estate value.
Further, actual local businesses in communities are benefiting from WFH workers.
WFH likely means people spend less on gas and eating out. This is one of the benefits touted by WFH proponents, myself included. I am spending at least $300 less a month since WFH.
Yes I’m certain some tax revenue shifted to the city I live in, but it definitely shifted away from the city my office was in.
it's not 2008 levels, because as you said residents outpace business. But it is a significant factor and I'd say it is looming.
>actual local businesses in communities are benefiting from WFH workers.
I'm not so sure about that (I feel less inclined to go out when WFH), but I'd love to see data on this.
Young people still want to live in cities. It's how they find people to date and things to do.
All the new high rise construction in my city is now residential, and there's quite a lot of it going up.
My city curiously just bought an empty high rise office building with the intent of converting it into affordable housing.
Charles Munger tried to do it differently with beds on the inside, but this is unpopular [1].
One reason that companies go for an open design is to get more natural light into the interior, which makes for a good first impression, but has other downsides like noise. (Sometimes homes don’t have enough rooms with doors either.)
[1] https://www.archpaper.com/2023/08/university-california-aban...
The notable change is simply the expanding set of options available to employers and workers depending on their jobs, personal needs, costs, etc. Which is great!
there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024. its so monumentally important the president of the united states even threw his weight behind it in symbolic gesture (arguably because he and his friends have investment portfolios they dont want to see take a haircut in a recession) https://www.hrdive.com/news/mandatory-return-to-office-400k-...
remote work means the death of major cities and a cascade failure of major economic sectors that are barely back after covid as it is. once office space cant be leased the property holders will declare bankruptcy. states then get hit with budget shortfalls as tax revenue is lost, small businesses and service industries in the cities fall apart and the unemployment rate rises, urban blight sets in and an entire legion of major real estate spends 20 years moribund and zombified, with bankrupt property holdings and trusts owning most of the decayed ruins as crime rises. Think cabrini green and watts during the mid eighties. All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare.
make no mistake, your relative comfort will be exchanged for the status quo, its just a matter of when not if. the president even earmarked 10bn dollars as a sign of goodwill to the landed gentry in order to "remodel" downtown high rises from commercial to residential, although anyone with even a cursory understanding of how real estate and development works (including the biden administration) understands this will almost certainly be pocketed to pay near-term creditors and stave off immediate foreclosures of properties instead.
to prevent something like this you'd have to have an administration that could act against its vested interests as a ruling class in order to secure a more verdant employment for you (and you probably wont find that in the gerontocracy.) the current fight isnt remote-vs-office, its a fight to get a handful of major companies still "hybrid" and "remote" to toe the line. Whether this happens in time to avert a real estate crisis is yet to be seen, but it hasnt made much headway in 2023, so theres not a lot of incentive to think 2024 will differ.
If the market see no need for commercial real-estate in cities, it ought to bankrupt. That is the free market.
Forcing people to work from an office in order to plan for economic outcomes could be deemed plan-economy - the US communism (How ironic).
Total BS.
Total.bs.
Forcing people back to the office won’t make bad investments good. The bank bailouts of 2008/9 are still fresh enough wounds that another one is not on the table. Inflation finally going down also underlines that point. No money printing is on the table either.
The bubble will pop and the investors will lose their money and the stone will continue to roll.
This seems a little hysterical. Cities functioned extremely well, perhaps even better, before the advent of lengthy car commutes, office work, and mass commercial real estate. The businesses you mention - grocery stores - aren't even usually patronized by commuters, and their recent appearance in city centers has been precipitated by downtowns shifting from commercial-only blight to round-the-clock mixed use, something that will only accelerate as downtowns are liberated from massive buildings that sit empty 2/3 of the day, small businesses that have to shut down at 6pm and all weekend, and peaky congestion that requires all facilities to overinvest in capacity to handle a couple of hours on weekdays with much lower usage otherwise. Anyone who has walked around the ghost town of SF's financial district on a Sunday should know CRE is not conducive to vibrant city life.
Imagine instead if you and (the majority of) your colleagues came to work by cycling for 20 minutes through green pastures, parks, under willow trees along the river, and through the centre of one of the most famous historic towns in England. That’s what we do here in Cambridge.
We also do not operate a cubicle farm. Our office is spacious, filled with breakout spaces, relaxation spots, a library (aka quiet room), VC equipped rooms of all sizes, with a mini- and a maxi-kitchen and free snacks and meals.
We come and go as we please with two days a week all together and frequently other in-office days for sub teams too, agreed by consensus not fiat. I often work at home in the morning or go home after lunch for the afternoon if I need uninterrupted focus / maker time. We have a personal IT budget for our home offices so I don’t need to cycle with my laptop (which btw is an Ubuntu Dell XPS, because our IT team know what they’re doing — you can have a MacBook if you insist.) Cambridge has gigabit fibre which is handy when pushing and pulling models from the A100 machines in our remote data centre.
We still allow people to be as remote as they want and we also have a satellite office in London. It is rare though for the core eng team to not see each other in person for more than five days on the trot. It’s just so much more productive to build and plan stuff in person around a whiteboard, with pair programming, or in a war room.
> "First, a little background. Monitoring software programs entered the workplace a decade or so ago and initially were popular in call centers and warehouses. Fast forward to 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the monitoring industry exploded as employers in nearly every sector saw an urgent need to monitor employees who were suddenly working from home."
https://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/voices/article/Opinion-Em...
Saving time and energy on commuting is an undeniably positive benefit, but IMO the optimal remote-work situation is in a separate space from one's home, ideally a walkable local office space with its own dedicated network and power.
I like the flexibility that remote work gives me, but at the same time I also enjoy going to the office because it forces me to get out of the house, and interact with people at the office.
Admittedly, if I were full remote, I'd probably rent a desk at a co-working space, so I could get that office-like feeling.
That is also for the employees advantage. Your social circles are not bound to your employment anymore and will outlive new jobs.
However, this will also commoditise jobs even more as the main thing you need to change is the Zoom like you login to work weekly meetings, which is to a detriment for the employer.
The most obvious example to me when remote work is simply unsuitable is when it comes to onboarding. Being able to ask lots of low effort questions quickly to many different people and building an esprit de corps through eating and laughing together matters for long term success.
I can code anywhere and I can text anywhere just fine. 1:1 calls work more often than not. But boy do I abhor remote workshops. They suck in every way possible, and even in some previously thought impossible!
I never once had the same experience in a remote or hybrid workshop.
I do prefer in-office work by a huge margin, to the point where working remotely or having more than a few colleagues remote would be a no go for me.
Once upon a time people thought “hey if we could let people use their phones instead of a corporate blackberry we could save like $5mm a year!” BYOD was born.
Now, as passions cool and leases come up for renewal, they’ll look quite hard at the hundred million spent on real estate per year. Most companies compute a per head occupancy cost. I know for banks on walls street it was $30,000/person/year before 2020. With hybrid that’s becoming nearly $60,000/person/year because the people only occupy the seat half the time.
Thats eye watering numbers. It’s going to be increasingly hard to justify without concrete returns on investment. “I prefer,” “serendipity,” “corporate values,” “think of the children’s careers,” etc only have weight for so long. Right now there are enterprising finance directors preparing slides to help secure their next promotion proposing eliminating most office space once tax agreements and leases expire. Boards will see a nice uptick in EPS as the conclusion of that deck, and when the almost retired CEO starts lamenting the loss of the way they grew up, they’ll buy them a horse and buggy whip and shut down the office.
This will pale compared to the wage savings they’ll reap when they level the wage distribution nationally. There’s no reason to pay inflated rates for Bay Area or New York City employees, beyond the very few that are genuinely differentiated.
It has nothing to do with preference at the end of the day. And there will likely be some much smaller offices for people who really insist on working in an office. But for most people it’ll just be a thing of the past
No one I know working outside of tech is even close to this in their attitudes towards remote work. Nowhere else is anyone who disagrees "gaslighting". Nowhere else is this all a "plot by commercial real estate".
Most want the flexibility to work remotely when they need to (or a few days a week), but prefer working alongside their coworkers for a variety of reasons. The complaints about entire divisions or floors being ghost towns and it being impossible to find the person for help with something are perennial.
I know there's some selection bias in who comments on the topic, but I think there's more to it: most people here work in a context where they take a ticket, work on it, etc with ideally minimal synchronization points or meetings. Of all forms of work it's among the most well suited (there are others) to working remotely.
Not to mention the absolutely horrific Bay Area commutes. I don't blame you all.
But have some humility.
You don't represent the norm in work.
I think it's because the tech people are young and single/live alone. Many people need the office to separate life from work and dont prefer remote.
It has a lot to do with the fact that lives are built around tiny real estate.
if you grew up with the internet and are used to navigating it to fill technical, social, and personal gaps, you can see RTO as a waste of efficiency. Regardless of the industry. Meanwhile if you work with folk who struggle to plug something into a USB, you may be more inclined to simply be there in person, for multiple reasons. But of course, any online discussion will be full of somewhat tech saavy users, at the very least ones comfortable enough to browse and post on social media.
The looming commercial real estate economic catastrophe aside, everyone who fought to keep work remote fought for the opportunity to compete directly in a global wage market.
BuzzFeed-journalists enjoy sniping middle managers-as-petty-autocrats from the peanut gallery in a "fight the power!" attitude using gender-war headline bait, but I expect zoomer MBAs still living in their grandparents basements into their 40s, overseeing the cheapest possible globally remote gen alpha ICs and AIs, are going to do just fine.
But I don't browse Twitter nor Tiktok. So that may be a factor I am spared from.
I’ve asked this same question when leaders have had entire webinars about how awesome the office is and how nice it is to be back to work. I’m still not sure if their work life is just that different from mine, or they are super stupid, or they are gaslighting.
It’s made worse as they interview 20 employees and every one of them talks about how much better the office is than remote. And then me and every coworker I know feels differently.
(2) People have investments in commercial real-estate, and forcing RTO is a way to profit from those investments even if it immiserates the workers (article discusses this point).
(3) Cities offer tax breaks to encourage businesses to move, on the basis that the workers will use ancillary services (transport, restaurants, shopping, etc). If the tax breaks go that will negatively affect the companies. If the ancillary service businesses go that will negatively affect the city's revenues.
(4) Bad middle managers feel they lack control if a worker isn't present.
We had a global pandemic. Government spending had a massive impact on eviscerating poverty, raising some 11.2 million Americans out of poverty [1]. To keep companies afloat and to avoid the healthcare system collapsing, people stayed indoors and worked from home. Many took pay cuts or loss of benefits to do this. A lot of people realized they didn't need to go into the office at all and they could have a substantial improvement in the quality of life by not wasting hours a day in a car and/or moving somewhere more affordable.
Demand did drop in 2020/2021 but it came roaring back and companies saw an ppportunity to recoup lost profits with predatory price incresaes. They saw massive profits and inflation shot through the roof as a result [2].
To compare to the oil shock of the 1970s, Nixon instituted price and wage freezes to stave off shock inflation [3].
The Fed responded to inflation by raising interest rates. They government had a far more effective tool available: corporate taxation. Some countries like Spain instituted a windfall profits tax. Taxes fill government coffers. Interest rates enrich bankers.
Certain workers gained wage increases in the pandemic as they were essential. Inflation eroded much of this and employers took further opportunity to suppress or claw back wage incresaes through layoffs. Layoffs increase the workload of those workers who remain and reduce the ability for workers to demand wage increses, even cost-of-living adjustments.
Return to office mandates are soft layoffs. They're cheaper too since if people quit they don't get a severance payout.
The only effective wage increases gained during the pandemic were through labor organization, such as with the UAW and the Big Three automakers.
So here are the lessons to draw:
1. Government policy exists almost entirely to transfer wealth from the poor to the already wealthy;
2. Employers are not your friends. You owe them absolutely no loyalty. In fact, given the trend to rescinding job offers, I would strongly advise people not to quit their job before starting their new one. Just don't show up. Two weeks notice is a courtesy not a legal or even contractual requirement. "At will" employment goes both ways.
3. Government spending is a way to redistribute wealth from the ultra-wealthy to the poor and it is incredibly effective. Post-GFC we've had many countries operate with austerity measures. This is simply propaganda to stop this wealth transfer.
4. Greed is the primary driver in inflation. Taxation would at least allow the government to help those worst affected;
5. Companies use layoffs and return to office mandates to suppress your wages; and
6. The only effective counter to wage suppression is labor organization ie unions.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/who-was-lifte...
[2]: https://thehill.com/business/economy/4057722-greedflation-is...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#:~:text=Nixon
I don't think even unions can fight against th above 5 points you made. Unions are collective bargaining, and you just showed that the government and the ultra-wealthy hold all the chips. We saw this happen as is with nurses and the train industries in the past year.
Short of a country-wide walkout no union can properly fight the government. And the working class US is divided enough as is.
Funny.
Previously people would take new tasks on weekly basis, now every single task takes the whole sprint.
And no, there is nothing that can be done since labor laws haven’t been updated and most likely won’t be before we hit AGI. I just wish I could coast like my colleagues or had the balls to start another job on the side
Previously you'd see lots of people hanging around at the office at 8 and 9 PM still working, often even white boarding solutions and having meetings. In WFH, you'd never see folks online and responses would take time. Sprint productivity definitely dropped.
I think WFH == work 20 hours or less for a whole lot of people. We had hundreds of people tenured 6 - 10 years at the place, and they immediately started dropping and finding other work.
I'm now at a startup and we're working nights and weekends. It's a much better environment.
WFH is going to calcify and sink a lot of companies.
In the beginning it was funny to see people literally playing WoW in the middle of the day
I'd understand if it was doing plumbing at a departmental business cost center, though.
That website shows that it's easier to find a company that did NOT layoff in the last 12 months. Seeing all these company statements on "focusing on core products" as justification as they cancel products and entire product lines suggests fear in the market instead of complaints about their labor.
As far as I know, most evidence points to there being no difference in productivity between remote and in-office workers.