Working from home isn't going away, even if some CEOs wish it would
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We've gone from fixed desks and floors divided by department to stupid flex desks where you have to drag your stuff from a locker and are sitting mixed with people you have nothing to do with whatsoever. Often noisy sales people besides ones that need to concentrate.
I used to enjoy going to the office 3 times a week. Now I officially should go 2 days but I hate it so much I rarely actually do. It's really a fancy place for management to see butts in the seats and the needs of the employees are a total afterthought.
But what's the point in coming to the office to sit in a pod or isolation cubicle all day?
What I liked was that our floor had its own atmosphere. Where people understood the needs of IT work and respected our conversations (eg headset on = leave me alone). That's all gone now with these hippie flex offices.
I don't see how the office could be made productive again with flex desking. It wasn't like the old office was perfect, there was already a huge reduced productivity from the late 90s when people had actual offices where you could close the door. It was already pretty poor with the large open spaces but it's now been ruined completely.
Let's say I'm in the quiet zone and someone wants to have an online meeting with me. What do I do now? Run to the nearest pod? What if they are all taken, do I take the call in the hallway? Do I go to the not-quiet zone and have my meeting surrounded by people participating in other meetings, or even worse, participating in the same meeting introducing a sub-second delay? And how comfortable are these pods anyway, are they good enough for meeting back-to-back? Because if I'll stay in the pod all day I might as well stay home.
I believe you can have comfortable working places (essentially offices with doors that close) that will be expensive OR cheap shared desks that optimize space but accentuate distractions. I don't think you can have a cheap, distraction-free environment, but I'm open to be proven wrong.
I've also felt quite discouraged by this. Before the pandemic, our projects had a specific area in the building. Now, it's about arriving early to find a spot somewhere in the building, often far from team members. But it's a catch-22 because the whole team agrees to work from the office, to prove space isn't wasted.
I (fixed desk) only get notices with a picture of how my desk should look like, and in that picture it looks like nobody works there. Granted, I'm a bit messy, but the standard I'm expected to follow is just bleak and sterile.
Musk, Jasys and Benioff should treat their employees like they do their customers. Adapt to their needs. Asking people to come back to the office is just like selling something a customer no longer wants.
As for Musk saying "it ain't fair for service employees" I reply those are different jobs. Poor excuse.
So, with disdainful indifference?
However, the Tesla Cars made in China are excellent.
The Tesla model Y is the biggest selling EV in Australia for a reason.
Also, the Tesla Powerwalls are very good, and anecdotally based on discussions with owners of other home batteries, superior to other battery products.
And Starlink actually seems to be pretty decent! Plenty of people in Australia love their StarLink!
Space X is doing Ok too it seems…
So yes, Musk has become rather odious, but the people in his companies are doing great work IMHO :-)
We won’t mention Twitter….
Exactly. I had a service job and I didn't mind going into work at all because that's what the job is. And besides, interacting with customers is much preferable to being in a building surrounded by people typing on keyboards when no one actualy needs to be there.
Should we now say that executive jobs are unfair to employees because employees don't get to run the company?
A class of workers benefited, but other classes didn’t.
This has nothing to do with worker 'class'.
This really impacts the lower and middle class.
Did you suddenly start producing more value? If no, then why would your wage increase?
Work from home can save employees money on commuting.
Work from home can reduce productivity.
So does WFH save employees or companies money?
So, to rewrite your prior message:
WFH does reduce commute time.
WFH can (sometime) reduce productivity.
Goodhart's Law does not apply, as we have done this for many years and are happy [1] with the way we do things.
[1] for some value of happy
Most managers, at least in EU, can't really get WFH, not just in terms of synchronicity or asynchronicity but in mere practical terms: they simply fail to understand the "job" part vs the "office boilerplate" part. This is an enormous issue that might reduce productivity alone. Most workers fear the change so tend to have poor home office setup and that's as well can lower productivity.
All these phenomenon are not part of WFH paradigm but just part of an evolutionary path we have all to do to understand. It's not much different than the old UK rule to put a horse in front of any train to control their speed. Now, do you prefer to have forever a horse in front of every train or having get rid of them is a good riddance?
WFH can save both employees and companies money IF done properly, similarly working on site can save money and work well or not, it's not a matter of where you work but how much you understand how to work in a certain way or another. The whole society can save money and live far better if the society evolve well, and we still have absurd procedures with pdf forms made not as forms but as to-be-printed, then scanned, than mailed tools, because those who have designed such procedure do not know nor understand the "modern" world (modern quoted since pdf fillable forms, digital signatures, web forms etc are modern, but definitively not new).
Now try to project the cost for a company of:
- eliminating offices, so not rent, cleaning services, electricity, ...
- enlarging they potential employees choice at least at a national level, if not the entire world (witch might be fiscally complicated)
- being able to move their fiscal residence as they want since there is no physical boundary
Does companies save money with such model? DEFINITIVELY YES, at least if they know how to do, and their best interest is trying, learning from errors, correct them and keep evolving instead of bovinely hold untenable positions just because they know them and fear the change.
As an employee I do save money WFH, but to do so I've invested much, I left a big city for mountains, building a new home and so on. I've studied and have done the change. A company can do the same with LESS investments typically.
They don't pay me to work 24/7, they pay me to work 8h per day. But of course the cost measured by the employee isn't the time lost working, it's the time lost working or commuting. So someone who used to sell 10 hours of their day to their employer and now sells 8 hours of their day to their employer for the same pay, isn't going to be happy about going back to selling 10 hours.
The fact that we got those 2 hours as an hourly "raise" at the start of the pandemic doesn't change anything. Being forced to go to back to the office is effectively a cut in your hourly rate.
There are many reasons to dislike forced work-in-the-office policies. Not all of these reasons apply to all people, but they all apply to at least some.
I believe it is a good thing to meet colleagues from time to time in the same place, but for deep work I need to work alone. No distractions, on my place.
As an adult I can manage myself better than most people can.
While remote workers can change employers potentially just changing some login screens, witch makes them less keen to accept bad work conditions or bag changes.
CEOs will cave fast rather than loose their toys.
WFH is a global trend and something you cannot fight. People will just go elsewhere.
Executives should indeed highlight there is a problem and fix it accordingly by changing how managers operate. Not by trying to wind back time.
Of course it's poor excuse, solidarity amongst workers is something Musk actively fights against, using that as a rallying cry for this is more than a poor excuse, it's blatant weaponisation of empathy against workers themselves.
Fuck that noise.
I think WFH is going to be more of a supply demand thing than a right though. Allow WFH and you have access to wider talent pool. Don’t allow it and you may limit your hiring rate.
And that's exactly what is happening. I monitor job listings in my niche and practically all top-paid positions are remote (with the few exceptions that ask for a visit in the office like once a month etc.).
As an employee though, Im happy with WFH :)
Feelings and anecdotes aside, the data shows the model to be effective imho.
I’ll make time to have the Google Sheet cleaned up and shared here as a post.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858529
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146703
(Strong believer in putting my money where my mouth is)
Both sides are driven by feelings and anecdotes. The few data points that exist are inconclusive.
There aren't any North American private companies that have an enterprise value of over $120B right now so the company is public, why not just name it?
Maybe that's why so many companies push for people to return to the office. In-person working where someone can just walk up and interrupt someone else is equally awful for everyone.
Aside managers like people in the office because they are more tied to the company, change employer often means having to move elsewhere and the worker might be in couple and his/her partner might have issues moving, they might have kids suffering from loosing friends and change schools etc, this means workers more keen to accept bad condition at work at a certain point in time. A remote worker can potentially change employer just changing some login screens.
I don't think such scapegoating will actually help the remote crowd.
But in most companies, it's both.
And people suck at discipline.
I think a lot of people really like the former but I don't think it works very well. There's a marked tendency of many people to drift apart and communication breaks down within and across teams and the fallout it quite ugly - a lot of people individually doing their jobs (and perhaps doing them well), but nothing really fits together very well. I personally found working in this environment to be torture because my work felt performative and meaningless.
I find that the highly collaborative kind works about as well as working in person - possibly better. However, I think it's only really possible with a lot of camera-on video calls which many people find quite draining.
So effectively you have middle management failing to be fulfilled at an emotional level as well as failing at a professional level to do management, and their plan to deal with this is to first blame others, then try to convince leadership to kill wfh for line workers before anyone notices the real problem.
Nothing against any individuals out there, just seen these things play out a lot and have been having the wfh discussions since long before Covid.
Technical alignment is easy in a sense because it’s clear when two ends of a bridge don’t meet in the middle. Product people or department heads have a harder time of things, but if I were a ceo, I don’t want to buy office space for 2500 when 25 will do.
It’s kind of evil to advocate for back-to-office if you know it’s good for you, but bad for both the company and your coworkers, and I expect many of the most vocal advocates know these things in their secret hearts
I think it's something else. It's providing space for employees to interact spontaneously. In software there's a huge push to have everything public and recorded, which makes me very cautious about how I present myself. When I switch to private messages, I get much higher sense of connection with the other person, because I don't need to stay that formal.
In person collaboration is definitely worth it, but this needs to be planned. It doesn't happen automagically if you are being forced to sit at a desk.
I can see why middle management's hates it thought. You can no longer tap on someone shoulder and pester them in prioritising your work above others. You need to make a business case rather than bullying a poor Engineer.
Recruiting only from the pool of "people who accept to work 100% in an office" is a massive handicap, at least in some regions and positions.
Getting back to 'we partially won' = that means the maker is the classic enemy of the worker. In fact, I believe you are wrong. They need not be enemies, there is no war. There are people helping each other.
One of the reasons that Japan and Korea and Europe mastered this was to get the workers and manufacturers to be on the same side. I recall the UAW refused to have 2 board members on the car makers board of directors!!. Remember, board members have full access to all financial of the company = whatever they want = they get. The UAW wanted to be a pure adversary. From the 1940's they have done this. What did it get them? Good wages for one, but they lost 85% of their jobs as the high wages allowed Japan/Korea/Germany/UK/Italy the ability to make cars for the US/Canada market because those high wages made US/Canada costs high = allowed their entry. European/Korean/Japanese unions had board memberships that properly and rationally allowed their unions to chart a reasonable wage where at the end of their process their members had good wages and the products they made could achieve good market sales, which is a win-win for company as well as employees.
Thus the USA/Canada needs to move from this adversarial positioning at both the union and maker management level for the good of all. /rant
A form of gig labor is evolving. Instead of work from home, we might get a task pool format = bid for task = race down a hole. This is widespread and is allowing many so-called third world countries to get hard currency by exploiting the fact that a USA worker wants $30/hour for a data task and a smart lady in Nigeria can do this for $3/hour with both people happy at their local hour's wage because they can buy the same breakfast/lunch/dinner/rent for the same number of hours used. We see many of these tech migrants doing this between Thailand and Silicon Valley, and many other places. I think there is a 'great levelling' under way with the migrants in the vanguard. When it is fully levelled, with a robot work force and work from (any home)to (any workplace) has been achieved we will be inching towards a world government - by AI of course, politicians will be happily shed along the way, as they die their inevitable death by uselessness...
But I never found it very interesting. The key insight at this point really is that employees, I think, mostly don't care whether WHF is more or less effective, or whether companies function better or worse with WFH. They are going to work from home regardless. So they'll end up at companies that either believe that "it works".
And after that, there is a second insight that follows from that: it becomes self fulfilling. If enough people refuse to work in an office then companies that force office work are going to recruit from an ever shrinking talent pool. Eventually they'll be less effective even if they would function much better given the same employees or salary budgets as the companies with WFH.
While I agree with you in general, I believe there is a substantial group who knows that in their particular case the company will be as effective or even more effective if they WFH. Why? Because they worked in (usually) open-plan offices before and they work in their own spaces now and they can estimate how much time was spend on work and non-work activities.
For example, I communicate on Slack quite often, we have huddles as needed - but only when needed. If someone like, they can have smalltalk on dedicated channels and socialize as mach as they want - but only with the ones who explicitly choose to do so. In other terms, you control your time and the execution of your tasks much better.
I think this is where a lot of the dichotomy in people's experiences come from. Existing remote companies select for people who are effective in remote (who in turn self-select too).
But if you force an existing organization (or even the whole economy) to go full remote, you will get many people being very inefficient since they just don't work remote just as well as in-person.
Old people are never going to learn, but young people can.
Communication skills, like everything else, can be learned. But still, some people will be disadvantaged.
It is clear that there is demand for consulting into making great WFH companies. Companies will have to learn from each other in this.
At this point it’s clear that the Bay Area in particular and much of the West Coast in general refuses to build enough housing to meet demand because it’s controlled by owner and real estate speculator cartels. The only economically rational move is to leave.
CEOs who insist on locating there with no remote work option should skip the middleman and pay property speculators directly.
And then I saw "Bay Area". Ah.
When corporate changed their minds and said everybody needs to start coming into work again, our management realized that, because of the way they did the conversion to open offices, they no longer have enough room for everybody in the company to be there physically!
I still can't decide whether I'm bitter about the pointless change to open office, or if I'm thankful they did because otherwise they would have pressured us harder to start coming in again.
Stop me if you heard this one:
Act I: "Since most employees are working from home we'll move to a smaller office and assign shared desks. Please remove all personal items from your office."
Act II: "No one is coming to the office and the few that do feel lonely. Please come to the office three days a week."
Act III: "You are all coming Tuesday-to-Thursday and we don't have enough space for everyone at the same time. Please choose three non-consecutive office days."
Act IV: "There are too many people using the meeting rooms. If you have lots of meetings then please stay at home that day."
I'm a heavy proponent of WFH, but I have the experience to understand that it's not suitable for all occasions (and especially for middle management ;-) )
I divide them into two groups (it's not about being middle, low, or top, or junior/senior): reasonable and flexible ones and unreasonable and inflexible ones. The former can provide convincing reasons why in a given scenario WFH may or may not be preferable and you can discuss it with them on equal terms - after all, if an employee leaves, it is an extra cost for the company. The latter are unable to do so, for various reasons - fear, insecurity, bias, need for control, distrust and other traits they are sometimes not fully aware of.
I think of WFH as a perk akin to paid vacation or health insurance benefits. Are workers more efficient when they get 4 weeks of paid vacation? Maybe or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter though because vacation isn’t framed as a way of increasing productivity. It’s a perk. I think flexibility around WFH is should also be talked about as a perk that companies offer to attract and keep talent.
We might find out what CEOs really think about WFH if the job market looks like 2021-2022 again and forces companies to compete on perks to attract workers. Although I doubt it will happen anytime soon (or ever)
Other than routine labor like doing paperwork for the municipal office aside, in person companies are going to have an extreme edge, Musk is right on this point, it's also an explanation for the geographic concentration of say, the tech sector, people don't pay those horrendous SF rents for nothing.
This part is wrong, or maybe it was more right in 2014, but it's definitely wrong now. Our fully remote team is on chat all day talking about all kinds of things, and we have regular video conferences.
That's extremely unlikely to happen remotely. Video conferences and chat interactions are always deliberate, nobody really sees what you're doing or struggling with spontaneously. You always have to go and initiate an interaction.
Needless to say, I'm back at a fully remote place now. I'm fine if they offer hybrid, not everyone has the room/situation to work from home. I can imagine that for some, having a desk at an office is a net benefit, but don't make me come over and waste my time because you have control issues.
In past I would deal with that, and just pay cost from my own pocket. But pandemic changed that. Now I demand fair compensation for work in hazardous environment.
Older togs tend to just chill under a desk for most of the working day, next to their owner.
Seems like you just had a few bad experiences with dogs.
Offices are not actually great places to make lasting friends. I can understand missing the social aspect of work though (although at my age it doesn't bother me at all).