Top workers more likely to want to quit when companies have strict RTO mandates
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
1 hour commute every way.
2 hours every day, where he was stuck behind the wheel.
260 workdays = 520 hours, every year.
That's 65 8-hour workdays, just spent commuting.
He just recently bought an EV, but drove a car that used around 0.8L / 10 km. His daily commute was 150 km in total. So he roughly spent 12L of diesel every day.
In a year, that's 3120L of diesel. 1L of diesel here is currently 21 NOK, or approximately $2. So in a year, he spent over $6000 in fuel alone. Not to mention all the other wear and tear on his car.
He can use his lunches more effectively. Instead of spending all 30 minutes in the lunchroom, or surfing the web, he can do housework, do his daily errands, shopping, or what not.
All in all, by working form home, he saves money and time. And lots of it!
People need to get in the habit of enforced RTO being a strict pay downgrade. If a company isn't willing to pay you more to force you to spend hours in traffic and thousands in gas to come to work, then it's time to leave.
And that's every day.
And even if it weren't the case, you'd still have to do those 30 minutes at that specific time, you can't move them around. Don't want to read a book today, but practice something? Tough luck. Also, where I live, most people having a 30-minute commute will need to change trains / buses. Can't exactly read while walking between platforms or for 5 minutes under the pouring rain while waiting for a bus. Podcasts and audiobooks could work, though.
Oh, and that 30 minutes trip may double or triple without prior notice. Hope no-one was depending on you that day. Happens fairly often here, too.
This is by far the most beneficial part of working from home for me and one my employer semi-appreciates. Time to do those very short tasks which usually get dumped over on to the weekend.
Laundry for example. I put a load on before i start work in the morning, move it to the dryer a few hours later (when every office person is stood at the coffee machine) and fold / put away at lunch.
Its only 15-20 minutes of tasks but spread over four hours, it means i don't have to spend half a weekend day stuck at home.
Additionally, it means you can do this stuff during the day, when you have solar and/or the electricity is cheap.
My own commute is only 12 minutes by cycle, so this is actually the biggest annoyance on days when I'm forced to be in the office.
That's insane
So basically management is just providing more incentive for the top performers to quit? How is this a good idea?
At least in the context of SWE, I think all of those points are exactly the opposite:
> Top performers need less management.
Any halfway-competent engineering manager knows she should spend more of her time with her top people, because anything she can do to improve their performance is that much more impactful for the business.
> Top-performers may be competing for your management job.
SWE at the higher-levels tends to be "dual track" (and frankly this is a model that should be applied to more professions). A strong IC is better off being given more breadth/depth for their IC impact, rather than being forced into management -- and that's usually what they prefer, too.
> Top performers are more likely to annoy colleagues and/or make them feel threatened.
What a horrifyingly insecure company culture that must be.
I guess the point is that to improve their performance the best managers can do is "get out of their way", not "spend more of her time" with them.
Consider some common scenarios:
If you have a tech lead who's cooking up some new architecture, some new idea, whatever -- it's valuable to both of you to spend time together on it. The manager can make connections to work going on with other teams/customers, can help pressure-test the business reasoning for particular design choices, and can help line up the right people to work on it alongside the TL. Meanwhile, the TL benefits by having their design strengthened up front and getting connections to the right people, without having to spend tons of time meandering around the business.
By contrast, a junior engineer isn't going to benefit from a doubling or tripling of the manager's time. Their work is straightforward. The manager's only job is to ensure they have good tickets, make sure they have a nearby mentor in a mid-level/senior engineer, and then get out of the way.
Tying back to the article, the top/senior people are exactly the ones who are going to be doing new and creative things, so they -- and therefore the business -- benefit the most from the manager's time.
A senior engineer can generally do every single role involved in the process, from PM all the way down to developer. They often don't because they don't have the time to fill 3 or 4 roles, but they _can_.
One of the roles they can fill is manager and reaching out to others in order to coordinate and facilitate work amongst others.
A senior is _not_ a junior who can program faster or better. A senior is someone who has a much broader set of skills than a junior.
Getting lower performers to higher level should take less effort to achieve nice results.
Also low performers need to be controlled because if they don’t show signs of improvement it requires quick decision to let them go. You don’t let go your top performers unless they are really shitty people or done something really bad.
Top performers do need less management (and what you describe is not management) and they are threatening. These are 'natural' consequences of high competency and human nature.
In my experience, top perfomers/good dev will spend a lot less time with their own middle managers than average ones, except where the culture is terrible. But they might spend more time with managers for other teams and low-level executives.
So from a game-theory standpoint they remain an asset, but not a threat.
I think we should get back the control of our lives from corporations. At this stage it is about profit and control maximalization above all else.
Companies that are doing this, are losing their best people, and their competitors are gaining them.
If remote work and 'the internet' didn't work, we wouldn't have nice things like Linux, Postgres and so on.
What you call "mixed messages" is what I call "incompetent management" that has no clear idea what it wants.
There's a difference between mixed messages and incompatible desires.
My 8 yo wants to go on the roller-coaster and to eat a giant tipple-scoop ice-cream at the same time. I am stuck explaining why this isn't going to work out well, but she's insistent that both things can happen together.
A mature mind is able to join-up the dots and see the need to prioritise or prune. Modern corporations are not like that. They're a collection of colonial homologous zooids (departments) like Physalia-Physalis (Portuguese man o' war) that from the outside give the appearance of cohesion because they have a PR department, a logo, a company number and so on.
That's why it's meaningless when we read "Google says..." or "Facebook thinks..", because a bunch of sub-organisms that happen to occupy the same offices do not constitute an "entity". When dealing with them, like a patient with DID, you need to know which bit you're talking to.
Anecdotally I find extroverts prefer the office and introverts prefer home. I find that seamless access to people can be really distracting especially when I'm doing focus work.
I think you're correct if people are given a good work environment, are in on the same days and are all in the same office this makes sense. The reality is that in many large organizations this isn't the case.
My contract says "my place of work" is at my home and I work remotely. It is illegal to move employees thousands of kilometres.
Company should not expect some sort of honest answer to this illegal action. Employees should not fall on sword and quit, they should get fired with compensation etc... Also in my country if you quit yourself, you lose right for unemployment support!
I'm all with you. They wanted us to go to university. They wanted both partners to have jobs to support a family. Now they want to force those workers to live close to work (for the most part so management can watch butts-in-chairs) again.
This can only be prevented if employees stand and fight together.
That's a really good approach, that's also what I'd use if I can't find a better alternative.
What for? Well, nothing speacial, really. Just to have your Teams meeting from office rather than from home.
IMHO this is what pisses off people. There is no plan nor thought put into it for management to be able to explain the reason to be in office and why that is beneficial.
Workers won't have any other choice.
Since it is an employers market right now, it is something companies can afford. However, I suspect they will be complaining in a few years they can't get the talent.
One manager even said (while roaming the empty hallways on a a day where not many teams have their team-office-day and also during lunch time):
"People should come back to the office. I've visited facebook (sic) not long ago and there were so many people at their desks, being busy working. Such an inspiring environment"
This is the level of competence we have to deal with.
edit: Oh I forgot to add: They explicitly don't seem to follow the trends of paying salaries in the ranges of hundreds of thousands of dollars or making offices attractive like providing free food/snacks and other amenities.
I've always joked that I like solving problems, I like coding, and I like computers. I do that mostly for 'free' (it's a play on an NFL player who joked he gets paid for Tues. through Sat. Sundays he does for free). What I get paid for is all the other BS I have deal with, which can be significant. Going to an office used to cost $ and now it'll cost $$$. Fill in the numbers for yourself.
Where I think people will struggle is they want to work wherever, while also having a maximal career trajectory and making maximal salary. IMO, that's always been a challenge and remote/RTO has magnified that choice.
It's just that you trade off other things, whether pay or interesting work. Culture was generally ok in remote places, which makes sense considering they already picked remote working.
if each employer manages to cartel, then yes, employees will be forced to RTO.
However, as soon as one company gives the WFH perk, they'll get the cream of the crop of employees, and therefore, out compete the remaining companies that have to hire the 2nd best.
SO in the end, workers will have choice.
> SO in the end, workers will have choice.
This assumes that hiring the absolute 1st tier employees gives the respective company a huge economic advantage.
Let me put it this way: in my professional experience lots of companies have no idea how to make use of the potential of excellent employees. So I guess the economic advantage that companies get from hiring the cream of the crop is not that big; thus the leverage that you claim that workers have is, I think, barely given.
Even in this job climate, all they have to do is start answering the occasional recruiter that messages them.
So a tiny effect, not even measured on what they do, but on how they feel.
Again, being a “top—performer” gives you very little negotiating power in itself.
Of course it does. It gives you the power to find another job more easily than everybody else can.
I just find there are say 10000 jobs to look at on job sites and maybe a handful of companies through connections so dragnetting searches give more opportunities than seeing who colleagues work for.
And then even if someone who thinks you are great works at Google you still need to leet code etc. Not sure what advantage you get. Other than some inside knowledge of if it is worth applying to and what the interviews are like.
I don’t think I am a top coder, certainly not commercially but I am OK. But the networking aspect seems like an orthogonal concern/effort to the being good at what you do.
"I was in the same company as this person at the same time, we either talked about work stuff or I heard good things by other people I trust" - true for many more, but does that really help?
True for the top performers you've worked with perhaps?
> Intent to stay among average employees was 8% lower with strict RTO mandates. Among high-performing employees, their intent to stay was 16% lower with these RTO mandates, double the rate of average employees. Among millennials and women, the intent to stay was 10% and 11% lower
So the self-reported “intent to stay” ranged from 8% lower to 16% lower depending on the group.
The way they cherry picked it sure does fit nicely into the “RTO makes high performers leave” narrative, but I’m actually surprised that the “intent to stay” was only 16% lower in the most cherry-picked group they could find. That’s honestly not much, and I can see why such numbers aren’t threatening to companies who are downsizing and doing RTO at the same time.
I think the narratives that RTO is nothing more than a downsizing mechanism are overblown. The downsizing is more likely to be the window of opportunity to let employees self-select out if they don’t fit the company’s new RTO direction, but most of these companies also have layoffs around these periods.
I work remote and have for years, but even I have to admit that moving everyone to WFH during COVID all at once created a lot of really bad situations with a lot of people who couldn’t handle it. It’s frustrating for those of us who can and do handle remote well, but the mass migration to WFH without preparation or filtering for WFH ability really poisoned the well.
Companies can no longer shocked-pikachu their way through this. If you enforce RTO, your top performers (who are top performers wherever they are) will leave for somewhere that allows them to maintain a decent work-life balance and no commute to a soulless office.
I wonder what it would take to create a society where we could vote on things based on the objective truth rather than needing to vote based on what we would like the narrative to be
Hybrid works so well. You get best of both worlds, so to speak.
If you NEED to have facetime with your co-workers five days a week, I can only assume that your main task is to manage/oversee them.
No. I live far away from the office. Hybrid, just like a full RTO, means I have to move. I don't want to do that.
The days in the office were always unproductive, as you work on a new desk, need to set up your work station (which gets even worse with hot desk approach). You also couldn't really count on having all the meetings in person, as someone always had to stay at home for some (probably quite often, bs) reason, so now you have 5 people in office that need to Zoom because 2 stayed at home.
After a couple of you realized you won't get much done in the office, you use the time in the office to chat about things, most often not about work. When it's about work, it's in a negative light about silly decisions the company / team has been making, things that annoy you to no end, you can "casually" discuss alternative companies that hire your kind of talent. In person, it's much easier to talk about these things casually.
With hybrid work, you also can't hire people that aren't reasonably close to the main office.
It does help to have face-to-face conversations with co-workers because simply the easiest way to share ideas and thoughts. The 1-day a week feels a little more than enough to do this, but I can deal with it.
And because of the environment I don't feel very productive coding, but I suppose it was productive to have face-to-face conversations, which helps us stay connected with each other.
Can people who are pro-WFH write some reasons why RTO might be better overall for the company?
Therefore the communication/synchronisation/interaction of the people is the most important thing that defines a company.
1. Workers in an office can onboard new workers more easily.
2. Leaders (whether official or unofficial) can communicate with people more easily.
3. Companies benefit from the social bonds formed between workers inside the office environment.
For example, while I can knock out more tickets personally, it won't matter if the entire project is the wrong project and I can't influence people enough to change it remotely.
I have a sense that things like coding can be done more productively remotely. But everything else leading up to the code part is worse remotely. This includes talking to customers, negotiating with other teams, iterating through designs with the team, selling the idea to executives, and onboarding new customers. The actual writing code part can be done just as effectively remotely. And that part is what most of Hacker News user base does.
Therefore, I feel that a lot of pro-WFH people on HN don't actually understand why companies are adamant about RTO. They can't see the overall picture - only their small part - so they conclude that there must be some conspiracy theory like commercial real estate investments driving RTO.
What is the truth you speak of?
Oh and you'd thank management each day for allowing you to spend your precious little free time raking in profits of which you will get a share in form of a salary, yes, but a much smaller one than the work you contribute should entitle you to.
and what is that truth?
It works really well when companies/departments are setup to do it that way. More people are now being clued in that it works insanely well with the right setup and the right line of work.
Even with RTO and massive lay-offs, we’re just going to see more start-ups coming around that are completely remote.
Tech-giants can keep in-office. Things will shake out over the long term.
I’m personally not opposed to being in office, but the benefits of remote are many.