Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers | Hacker News Reader

Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers

rte.ie

275 pointsewgfdgdfgdf295 comments

The discussion here follows well understood battle lines, but I want to add my grain of salt: working from the office comes bundled with commute. And the crux of arguments tends to be where you fall on the [commute is hell <-> working from home is hard due to circumstances] continuum. Some say that "commute helps clear the mind / switch context", but a simple walk does the same IMO; the mandatory presence in a vehicle along with everybody else at the same time, unpaid and very often for hours everyday feels incredibly invasive, wasteful and unjust. Every person then can talk price based on their circumstances, but that's the nub of it for me.

The flip side of spending "unpaid time" in commute is having "unpaid space" at home in terms of home office.

I actually rented separate space for that. So I pay for 50 m2 of private office space where I have two rooms, kitchen, bathroom, a desk with a comfortable chair, a bed, some simple gym equipment and other amenities. And in spite of paying for this every month, I would never ever come to the office where I could use some of these things (an old office chair) for free. It feels like some dark era has ended, at least for a certain type of employees.

Interesting. Who pays for that?

Sounds like, economically speaking, you are taking over the costs from your employer for providing a usable workspace.

in other words, "office space provides him with negative utility"

Yes, I pay for that - and I do it gladly. It's roughly 7% of my salary.

The same argument could be made about the cost of a commute, though.

I had a co-worker who rented a small office, close to his home. Because he lives far away from any larger towns he was able to rent an office for $200 per month, but he shares the space with his partner who also works from "home", so it's effectively $100 per person. Our employer paid for the office space, but not for the cleaning, because it was still cheaper than paying for him being at the office every day (we where short on space).

Depending on where you live, and your living situation renting a small office can be really cheap. In my local area I've seen private office rent for as little as $120 per month, but around $200 is more realistic.

Yes. Every type of employment puts undocumented costs at the employees.

But not all types of employment puts the same amount of costs. Those vary widely. And the possibility for the employee to optimize them also varies.

And all the comments up to now are still ignoring the elephant on the room and didn't touch the opportunity cost of having your entire family work on the same geographic area, and the insane housing costs on the few small areas where a family can do that.

> It feels like some dark era has ended, at least for a certain type of employees.

My friend was acually depressed by the fact that he had to work from home. At the first opportunity, he ran to the office.

I'm very happy for him, really! Also, I enjoy it when I pop into the office one a few weeks, it's an enjoyable experience - and part of this joy comes from the fact that I know I'm not forced to come there every way but it's my own choice.

I spent most of the pandemic working from my dining room table. Now when I work from home it is from table in the basement. Neither is particularly in anybody's way.

So that's your personal experience, but you can imagine that this might be different for different people.

The point is that previously you had a choice over the amount of space you need at home, there are requirements for WFH. i.e. You need a place where you can work effectively.

This is going to vary based on geography and circumstance, but some home office expenses are eligible for tax deductions.

> "commute helps clear the mind / switch context", but a simple walk does the same

Fully agree. In an ideal world, the commute would _be_ a walk to the office.

More realistically: for those who happen to live in an environment that allows them to commute by foot or by bicycle, working in the office is already much more appealing than for others.

As an European: yes and no, because that (mostly) means living in the heart of a big city and not everyone wants to do that (less living space, higher noise and air pollution)

The good thing is that cities actively work on reducing noise and air pollution.

And the irony is that, in developed nations, almost all of the air pollution in a city comes from cars.

Noise pollution too.

I moved so I could walk to work and it has made such a huge difference on my quality of life, crazy how much different a 15 minute walk is compared to even a short drive. Not sure exactly why, but for me it's a world of difference

I’ve done a similar thing with the added benefit of also living in a walkable neighborhood (can walk to my doctors, theater, cafes, bars, gym, grocery store).

I really wish these neighborhoods weren’t so expensive because they are very desirable.

As I do, I have a 15 minute bike ride, more like 25 minutes when it's my turn to drop the kids at school. Then I have a full desk full of light and nice colleagues with a great office culture. I like to be able to disconnect from work outside my 9 to 5, which personally I am unable to achieve when I work from home. Kudos to those who can.

Well, I have a 60 minute train ride (if I'm lucky and there are no delays), a desk which is less well equipped than the one I have at home, and colleagues which are nice but with whom I don't actually work - the people I actually work with are in other offices, so I have to do video calls regardless where I'm working from. And so does everyone else, and most of them don't bother to go to a conference room or "phone box" to do it. I hope you can imagine how good that is for concentration and productivity...

> for those who happen to live in an environment that allows them to commute by foot or by bicycle, working in the office is already much more appealing than for others

I take the bus, but otherwise yeah, agreed. I hate WFH, so I choose to go in every day even though my company doesn't require any office time. I love my time on the bus, gives me a short walk to & from the bus stop, and 45 minutes each way to be offline and read books.

On the other hand, if I had to drive, I'd go insane. Driving for a commute is awful.

> In an ideal world, the commute would _be_ a walk to the office.

Geometry would like to have a chat...

Most people are living in some form of long term marriage/family relationship, and the other person/people also has a job to get to. Even if we ignore zoning, force everyone into high density apartments, force offices into high rises, and so on: there is only so much space within walking distance and so a populated city will have a lot of people who cannot walk to the best job for them. There are a lot of compromises possible, and we are used to them (I live in the midwest which means I can't take a job in New York city)

next best alternative is efficient public transportation. But when the bus stop is 15 minutes away, runs every hour, and still drops you off an hour from your workplace, you see why that becomes unviable.

And that was for my closest first job, some 15 miles away (so, a 15-20 minute car ride). It legitmately would take me 3 hours to get downtown, with multiple stops to walk to. And even less options to get back home after work.

That's one of the more popular arguments but not the only one. When WFH, i have enormous freedom of arranging tasks they way I want them executed and it works marvels for my productivity. When I want to go out on my bike for 20 minutes, I do so, and excellent ideas come to my mind them.

There is simply no amount of money that would force me back to the office. I routinely pass on job offers where they demand "just two days a week in the office".

I doubt you can even get a hybrid position in this market if you clearly prefer remote work but can't find a remote job. Companies generally aren't going to hire somebody who clearly doesn't want to be there so the only people who have a choice are those who are capable of lying.

I suspect those "job offers" you're getting are probably just recruiters who'd waste your time if you told them you were interested then you'd never hear from them again. That's my experience with most of that "profession" anyway.

In my niche, the ratio of not remote (including hybrid) to remote is roughly 3:2. However, the interesting thing is that almost all top offers are remote only. Sometimes with the annotation "This is a remote position but you are welcome to the office should you wish to come".

FWIW, I don't recall ever being asked during interviews if I wanted to come to the office. The policy was simply stated as a fact of the position.

So any lying would have been spurious.

The "lying" I referred to would be pretending that you're actually interested in a non-remote job for anything other than the money you need to survive until you can find a remote job. Even if you don't come right out and say you see them as a "take it and keep looking", that's still going to be obvious unless you're at sociopath levels of skill in lying. And if you're somebody who wouldn't still be in the industry if remote work hadn't become the norm, you're not going to be genuinely interested in any non-remote job for anything other than money until you can get something better.

>Even if you don't come right out and say you see them as a "take it and keep looking", that's still going to be obvious unless you're at sociopath levels of skill in lying.

I see it as no different then when they ask "why do you want this job"? Except they aren't even asking.

Many people know the primary reason is finances, but companies tend to not pick someone who answers that way. There's an "etiquette" to lie about certain factors unless you're in crazy demand, so who's really in the ethical quandry here?

With WFH, I didn't have to listen to my coworkers' conversations in the adjoining cubes. Also, I could take a meeting with the cat on my lap (if she would cooperate).

Personally, I like seeing my coworkers in person. But the WFH advantages are real, too...

> Some say that "commute helps clear the mind / switch context", but a simple walk does the same IMO

No, it doesn't for everyone. Personal experience matters: after a 70-day lockdown including a very stressful work period (dedadlines etc), there's no way I'm going to WFH ever again.

But that's just me, of course. For others, priorities may be different.

I fail to understand how this is related to WFH? That happened while you were working from home, not because you were working from home.

I read it as that being the point - they have a bad association for it so it's just not appealing now. Likewise you might have a terrible time in one office that puts you off working in any office.

Because it wasn't just the lockdown: it was a pretty complex affair at the job too (including very tense moments; it would've been bad even in the office, mind you) and there was no way to shut that away from me.

FTR, I did WFH in other times (2 years in the 2009-2011 period) and it wasn't like that.

This would extrapolate to it being a shit situation in general. Attributing WFH as a causal factor is hard, given your description.

The lack of distinction between your workspace and reduced socialisation still exists - not OP but personally I’m climbing the walls after a day of working from home.

I cope by have social outings and activities outside my home basically 7-nights-a-week. It works but I don’t consider it a positive I’ve that I’m more or less incapable of relaxing in my own home.

Sorry, but this is bordering on some kind of pathology.

See a therapist, because you make it sound like you're on the verge of a breakdown just because you do some work at home.

Do you have the same reaction to doing household chores?

You got “verge of a breakdown” from that? Is it that disturbing to you that your preferred working arrangements don’t work for others?

Getting out into the outside world and seeing people prevents under-stimulation, and separating my work environment lets me switch off at home. Spending my every waking hour in my apartment doesn’t do it for me.

It’s not about “doing some work at home” - it’s about spending 5 days a week working in the same space I’m supposed to eat, relax, and sleep.

> It’s not about “doing some work at home” - it’s about spending 5 days a week working in the same space I’m supposed to eat, relax, and sleep.

Do you have good working habits? E.g. clean separation for working/non-working hours?

Do you have friends on Discord that you can engage with in activities post-work?

> It’s not about “doing some work at home” - it’s about spending 5 days a week working in the same space I’m supposed to eat, relax, and sleep.

It really is though. There shouldn't be much difference if at all between working 8 hours in a home office vs regular office + wasting 1-2 hours on commute. Commute helps some people separate work/leisure, but it shouldn't be a necessity or "drive you up a wall" like you said.

Same. I can work from home if I have an errand or something, but for me the default is and will continue to be to be in office. And I will actively select work places were that is reasonable. and common.

the mandatory presence in a vehicle along with everybody else at the same time, unpaid and very often for hours everyday feels incredibly invasive, wasteful and unjust.

At least in the U.S. almost all of us in this industry are on salary. In that case I don’t think it makes sense to think of a mandatory commute as unpaid. It’s part of the deal and should be factored in accordingly.

I can’t respond directly—-but at one time many of those things were deductible. Tax cheats are why we can’t have nice things.

I personally factor it in as a large reduction in total compensation, because it's a huge mandatory cost.

Non-remote jobs just aren't competitive unless they offer truly extraordinary pay.

Then things will work themselves out without the need for endless jawboning.

I haven't seen the in office jobs offer any premium over remote.

So if it's part of the deal those are all worse deals.

That's true, but I've then also subtracted commute times from office hours when I was required to come in. I can't do 8 hours in office plus 1.5 commute time on those days.

Subtract 3x commute. Drive 1.5 hours for no reason? Watch YouTube for 4.5 hours, also for no reason.

I'd make it a solid 4.5 hours of bullshitting with people and using the amenities.

Get my gym time in, go for a walk around the building to be seen. Learn the names of the cleaning staff, ask people if they are "makin' copies", if they are let them know it is "very nice". Can't believe the sportsgame.

Soon enough you'll be promoted and you can use that promotion to go to a competitor and negotiate your previous role, but instead remote.

This is from an Irish broadcaster and commutes there tend to be hellish, unfortunately.

> [T]he mandatory presence in a vehicle along with everybody else at the same time, unpaid and very often for hours everyday feels incredibly invasive, wasteful and unjust.

All of this changes when you consider your commute on the clock.

I've been doing this since RTO 3-days a week and it really helps. I've already proven that I can work from home without issue, so heading into the office definitely isn't for my benefit - it's effort that I apply for the benefit of my employer, something they've even admitted by saying working from the office allows for "spontaneous collaboration and increased efficiency". As it's for their benefit (and also a detriment for me) then they can pay me for the time I spend doing it.

If they don't like it then they can let me WFH.

>If they don't like it then they can let me WFH.

They can also fire you lol

Given this attitude, the answer to your other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40511726 "As a junior employee, I have no patience for your point. Going into office is one thing juniors can do about the "problem with the culture" so my stance stays the same until the so-called culture changes. In my experience, the number of seniors who complain sbout RTO and don't hoard knowledge is tiny."

... is that it is likely that nobody is hoarding knowledge, they're just avoiding you because you're unpleasant.

They can but haven't.

Not to mention air pollution and energy consumption of commuting. Office mandates run awkwardly against eco-friendly principles. Another aspect is nasty viruses are still a big concern. Offices with more breathing room / less people per square metre, spread less illness.

This article doesn't mention people who don't enjoy WFH because of the unification of the workplace and home. Personally I hated that I can never "leave" work and it's always with me at home. Also not everyone can afford an office room to "close out" work to a separate physical place (which is a typical reply when this topic brought up) and I don't even think it counts.

I personally like working in office because it's where I work, and then I go home and that's my home. I don't work at home at all (and it's a company policy everyone knows that). But I live in Europe, work is a 30 min bicycle drive from home which I also enjoy. Considering it's an irish news site I'm surprised that was not mentioned.

> I don't work at home at all (and it's a company policy everyone knows that)

I believe this is a somewhat unique privilege. It seems many people have the worse of both worlds you mentioned: unification of the workplace and home, and needing to go to the office anyway.

Don't start calling the absence of abusive employer practices a "privilege".

It should be a "right".

I appreciate that a barrier is desirable for WFH, but that can be established without having a dedicated physical space for that. A separate work computer that is shut down at 5pm (or whenever you "leave" work) and not having company chat/email on your personal phone could go a long way.

Having said that this has to go hand-in-hand with company work culture and no expectation that you are available for work throughout the entire day.

I disagree. Physical space and distance helps, a lot. I can’t explain why, but the commute home helps establish a different psychological setting.

For you. Everyone's different, and I have no problem closing my laptop and psychologically switching from "at work" to "at home" almost instantly. But I absolutely appreciate that other people need the physical separation and temporal separation to make that switch. I don't begrudge anyone that wants to work from the office and commute each day. Please, do what works for you, but that's not what works for me.

Exactly my point.

“that can be established without having a dedicated physical space for that”

… for you.

There's another side to this: not being able to leave home to work. I, and many of my work colleagues, have small child or children and not enough rooms to dedicate one purely to work. I have my space and my wife does everything she can to help me, but it's really hard to argue with 10 month old child that wants to be held for a few minutes. Due to this, my productivity at home is nowhere near the productivity at the office. I do appreciate the possibility to work from home (I'm actually at my "home office" right now), but I use it as a last resort, not my default mode.

As for the space, some people don't have enough of it to replicate the "designed to work" tools at home. At my office, I have a large eraseable board behind me, printers, fast coffee machines, sometimes lunch is provided, easy access to people for "quick question" (chat/email doesn't have the same responsiveness), not to mention two huge screens and way more comfortable chair than I can fit in my home space. If my company will pay me to replicate this environment (which would have to include bigger place), I'll happily move to WFH for as much as possible.

At the same time I recognize the different preferences regarding WFH and I don't want my colleagues to be the victims of "some people prefer to use the desk at work so everyone needs to RTO". I personally advocate for individual approach, because I can see that many of my colleagues work better from home - overly social office space for them isn't really better than their comfortable home.

> I have my space and my wife does everything she can to help me, but it's really hard to argue with 10 month old child that wants to be held for a few minutes.

I am sure this is both a positive and a negative. Being available at home while your 10 month old child is at home must be great, and even if it's frustrating when you have to break away from work to hold him/her, this must be great for bonding. There must be a reason that you still work from home, and not, say, from a nearby coffee shop.

I am (or was) also in your shoes recently, WFH with a small child at home. She's almost 2 now, still isn't in nursery. I would say that we are very lucky that we can do this and I have no regrets that I am not going into the office to be more productive and potentially earn more. Sure, I do also have the luxury of having a small dedicated office space in the house though, I appreciate that not everyone can have that, and without it it probably doesn't work while a small child stays at home too.

This is also how it is for me. My son just turned 2, and I love that I am able to observe him napping between long meetings. I could also have a small chat with my teammates after 5 PM, and sometimes our kids hop into conversation and say hi to each other.

WFH is great for life, not always great for work. Depends on your priority at the moment.

I’m not sure what your personal situation is, but for most people in the real world, being able to be a certain degree of productive at work is a mandatory part ensuring that they can, say, pay their mortgage, or many of the other things that comprise or sustain the “life” part of work-life balance.

Did you know most people work to live? They don't live to work.

When I went remote, I went all-in with a dedicated home office. Not a bedroom with an office chair, but an actual separate outbuilding on the property that I had to walk to (even if it was only a few second walk) to "go to work." Comfortable chair, many screens, whiteboard for brainstorming and designing, sound insulation, mini-kitchen with a coffee maker, a bathroom... basically everything I need to pull an entire day of work without "commuting" back home to get something. My family knows when I'm out there I'm working, and they don't disturb me.

Understood this is extreme, and not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to build something like this, but it is possible to do remote work and have a hard, clear separation between home and work life.

Yeah I really don’t like working at home. The best situation IMO is a separate workspace that’s within a 5-10 minute walk, preferably with a cafe or some kind of public space en route.

The problem is not liking or not working at home. The problem is being forced to work in an office if it doesn't fit you and other jobs allow you to stay at home. And the impact it has on corps ability to retain those workers.

I know I have received a number of offers for work with higher salary in the last 2 years with forced hybrid work from office/home[1] but I won't accept any of that. At least until my youngest daughter is out of primary school.

I don't mind going to the office once in a while, or even everyday if it is 5-20 minutes from home (as long as I keep possibility to work from home if a particular need comes). But I will refuse one that forces me to burn co2 for no value, that add stress to my day (commuting by vehicle) or that takes me more than 20 minutes by bicycle or public transport as long as I can find a decent one that doesn't force me to do that. My partner's doesn't work from a computer so she will have priority in our place of living for the foreseeable future.

I agree and I do support companies that allow WFH, as it allows for the situation I mentioned - via coworking in my case. But I was replying to the idea of working at home specifically.

This is less of a concern in Ireland due to the Organisation of Working Time Directive and the Right to Disconnect. Most large employers will be at pains to ensure you stop working outside your normal work hours.

In general, cycling infrastructure is poor in Ireland and public transport is dire unless you happen to live in specific parts of Dublin, Galway or Cork. Added to the EU's worst housing crisis and highest cost of childcare and remote work is extremely popular here. A deal-breaker for many.

I guess this article is about good quality workers who don’t want to go (back) to the office. I have seldom been in an office (30 years career) and I wouldn’t, at any price.

>This article doesn't mention people who don't enjoy WFH because of the unification of the workplace and home

Maybe because companies seldom try to force people to work from home.

Except for when that big o' pandemic that just happened couple years back.

Yes, it was quite an exceptional thing indeed.

Therefore the "seldom"

Myself wasn't forced, I had already discussed this with my supervisor beforehand.

That's because you have the wrong mindset. And the more beliefs you have like this, the more complicated your life will be.

For reasons I won't get into, after the pandemic our local office ended up with desks for 75% or so of the employees. So if you wanted to come in, you reserved a desk, if you wanted to stay at home, that was fine.

Then the diktat came down from corporate headquarters: Everyone must be back in the office, unless their contract specifically said remote work. Pitchforks! Loads of objection from all the people who had gotten used to working from home and quite liked it. And of course there was the problem that we didn't actually have space for everyone.

Then an opportunity came up to get rid of our sub-lease on the current property, which could potentially simplify the process of getting a newer, larger office that could accommodate everyone; so word went out that everyone was going to go back to WFH for a period of time. Pitchforks again! This time from all the people who didn't enjoy WFH for all the reasons you mentioned.

In the end corporate has had to be satisfied with people coming in at least one day a week; and we're squeezing more people into the current office while still looking for another office to move into. But it's interesting to see the dynamics you mentioned -- lots of people prefer to WFH, lots of people definitely don't.

FWIW I've never had much trouble "turning off" work, even when I was using the same computer for work and personal things. Now that I've got a corporate laptop, it's even easier -- unplug it from the external monitor, close the lid, and forget about it until it's time to open it again, be that overnight or over the weekend or over the holidays.

Amen to that. That's why the key is NOT FORCING RTO. If you want go to the office because reasons, do it. If you prefer WFH because reasons, do it. You are either a goal-oriented workplace, where this would be natural, or you are a classical "show me you are committed to work by being there many hours" place, where then it's just WFO.

I found WFH forced a level of personal growth and adaptation for me to handle this, but its growth that I would have definitely benefited from before.

Previously while working in an office, I couldn't disconnect even when not home(on call, often called in while not on call to help). I ended up getting my own phone again to be able to leave work at home and go out to be able to disconnect, but mentally I never really did.

Now I work from home and that additional always on pressure was amplified that much more, and made me face the fact I had horrible life balance mentally and needed to learn to properly disconnect and compartmentalize.

Learning and practicing that has helped me in a lot of cases outside of work, and continues to help me with work. I can easily walk away from work and not think about it for hours/days even without guilt or significant struggles, something I couldn't do the decade before while working in an office.

So for those that struggle to disconnect with WFH, I can empathize but strongly suggest through whichever means they prefer (self directed, therapy or otherwise) they take the opportunity to practice and learn disconnecting more. Even if ultimately one prefers the office learning to disconnect is, at least in my experience, a very healthy skill to build.

I think from a utilitarian perspective, getting the minority who want to not work from home to find a cowork space or alternative solution is better than mandating working from the office. Won’t fit everyone, but neither does forcing everyone into the office.

In the end it's home office guys bending over and taking it up their ass from office loving fanboys or the other way around. I'd say to the office sickos go work something else, be a fishmonger or something that requires physical presence. Otherwise bend over and shut up.

The issue with this, and most of articles on the topic of WFH, is they fail to recognize that different people will have different preferences (the horror!) and different situations. They start by putting everybody in the same bucket whatever that is, then argument from there. Luckily smarter companies don't rely on journalists to decide that the best approach is "whatever floats your boat" and keep both options open no questions asked.

It's always with you anyway. The contract and the labour relation is there always, even when you sleep.

Whether you can shut it out of your conscious mind isn't necessarily about location, though I get that it might help. It's not obvious that you might want to either, many problems in software development require slow, sustained thinking over several days or weeks.

What's important to me is to be able to stop people from work to contact me. And if I want to take a half hour stroll because the weather is nice and I enjoy it, I will, and I can stretch it out to an hour if I find something fun to sit and watch, like some birds or something. No one can stop me, and no one will question it, because the only reason they'll know is that I've told them that I was on such a nice little stroll and saw some baby geese the other day. Or played with my kids or went grocery shopping or whatever.

To my employer and colleagues the important thing is that the work gets done, with clear communication about whether it'll be done on time and why it won't be if that's the case. We're all full remote, in part because the stuff we do require a fair bit of personal maturity and professional seniority, and with that comes kids, grandkids and long established hobbies and side projects.

I work for a big, old-timey, international company. The current policy is WFH or from the office, whatever you like. Some managers have rules that their team members have to show up at the office 1-4 times a month. Our office can hold about 400 employees and this is about the number of employees that could technically commute every day. To my knowledge, there are about 20 people who commute to work daily. No one else is going there unless they have to. It's a very nice, freshly renovated office, with a lot of green plants inside, free coffee, height adjustable desks, ergonomic chairs, relaxation zones, lockers (so you don't have to take your stuff to work every day), etc. located in the city center that is well connected via buses. trams and subway. You can even drive a car to work if you want. And still given that option only about 5% of employees decided to work there daily. People like you exist and their needs have to be filled however most people, if given a chance they'll prefer WFH.

I think this is a possible conclusion you could draw, but not the only one. The value of going to the office is the other people. If no one's there, then it's the same as working from home (you need Zoom for all your calls, even if half of you are next to each other) so if more than about 5% of people are remote, it semi-forces everyone else to be, even if they'd prefer to be working with people as a local team.

Maybe that would bump the people willing to go to the office by another 5-10% but every once in a while we have days when multiple teams happen to be in the office on the same day, and at least half of the desks are occupied. Despite having half of the office dedicated as "the focus zone", most people don't really work or like to work on those days. There are much more meetings, and casual chit-chat but an actual output of "work products" is close to none.

> There are much more meetings, and casual chit-chat but an actual output of "work products" is close to none.

To me that implies that something that is fairly needed is missing by being remote. I think being a distributed factory outputting "work products" might be a net negative, but I could be wrong.

I’ve worked on international teams my whole career. bigco will never hire everyone in the same spot to save money.

It’s zoom no matter what.

I've done that a lot as well, but that's not traditionally been seen as the best way to accomplish work as a team. It's just so much cheaper it's worth the pain.

Well, this is honestly a sign of self-discipline and maybe accommodation issue. I WFH and I have "an office" (a room) and "the home" (the rest). So I know when I enter the office and when I leave. The office have it's desk/softphones, who do not ring outside etc.

I live in EU too, but I left the big dense city for the mountains to have such setup. Of course many are still "panicked" since if they leave the city they fear it would be hard to came back if the WFH end, but this is not really an issue in practical terms, it's a psychological issue: people MUST understand where we are, where we going and decide, no one have a working crystal ball but certain changes are moderately easy to predict and reasonably certain. Here the choice is between take the risk meaning potentially having a big prize or a big loss, or not take the risk and being SURE to suffer a significant loss.

Economically the office model is untenable: we have large, big buildings to "live", normally used less than half a day, "empty" for most of the days of the year, and others big as well used just less than half a day, "empty" for most of the days of the year as well. The rest of the time spent "commuting", it's an absurd way to keep people moving to get them "motivated" to work instead of the contrary. In the past there was no alternatives, remote work was limited technically, now is like convincing people that a horse is better than a car, he can go in much more places, he can reproduce itself, he eat grass around the world and produce free fertilizer for crops. Oh, all it's true, but we also all know why cars win. WFH is a key of a social change not only for remote worker but for ALL: we know an enormous amount of people will have to relocate due to climate change and human crisis, this alone is an enormous issue. Being able to move keeping our work means opening a way to move to others who do not WFH for the material needs like fill a cavity or buy groceries of the WFH cohort. Similarly WFH we can move where we need to be for climatic, productive needs, it's a needed flexibility in a changing world. WFH also push semi-autonomy witch is another big need because in a changing world we will experience more and more service disruptions and we need to keep living with them. A home can now have p.v. and lithium storage in most part of the world enough to keep a big of appliance working, can have water storage for a week to a month and so on. We can live well even with intermittent services and being able to do so means we are still productive and those who handle services have more slack to evolve them as well.

Consider that EU density and propensity of many EU country for dense cities" https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... is a big part of our current crisis. Irish people live most in homes, only 10.6% are in apartments, but Spain, Germany, Italy are the opposite, and that's why they suffer already and they'll suffer MUCH more in the near future being unable to implement the Green New Deal for most.

> Of course many are still "panicked" since if they leave the city they fear it would be hard to came back if the WFH end, but this is not really an issue in practical terms

May I ask where do you live in EU that WFH is stil in palce? Here in Austria no employer tolerates WFH anymore.

Any recruiter I spoke with and I asked them about WFH, they asked "how many days?" and when I answered "well, all of them?", the conversation ended there. All the managers want butts in seats at least 3 days/week. One company here I interviewed recently told me when I asked about WFH "we know people love this WFH thing, so to please them, we're offering WFH on Fridays" lol

Managers can't live without seeing butts in seats here. It's either you come to the office or stay unemployed. The market is really bad here and employees have no leverage for WFH, that's why I asked where you live, since I'm planning to get out of this hellhole and I'm checking my options.

France, on Sophia-Antipolis living in the Alps, "nearby" but still 99% remote. Yes here there is a big RTO push, but at least in IT it find little grip so far. It's easier AFAIK in Scandinavia in general, Finland in particular but I do not consider their future bright enough to suggest them.

Honestly so far in large terms the countries I consider most with some future are the USA in the MID term, Russia in the long term, France might have a future thanks to a lower density and still being an "almost complete" country where almost anything is or can be produced domestically but it's still uncertain, however having old parents in Italy (north west, so relatively nearby) where I'm from I've choose a near-enough country where I can live well enough and work from remote. In Italy the situation is similar to the one you describe for Austria, aggravated by a higher population density...

Edit: typos

>France, on Sophia-Antipolis living in the Alps

Isn't that region very expensive CoL compared to the local wages?

Can you work in France tech sector, without speaking French?

> Isn't that region very expensive CoL compared to the local wages?

It's depend, far less expensive than Paris, far more expensive than the rest of France, but a thing is the shore, where anything have touristic prices, another is the inner land where prices are far lower.

> Can you work in France tech sector, without speaking French?

Maybe it's possible, but it would be definitively hard. France is an ancient ex-empire fully knowing the power of the langue on individuals, so they do not like using foreign languages. Of course even in France in tech most things are in English, but the fact that docs, exterior costumers contacts etc happen in English you still need French for all, starting from the public administration.

In salary terms, you normally get FAR less than Luxembourg and still significantly less than Belgium, for a not so lower cost of life, but you still get EU level services, a nice climate, a bit hot now, but with cool nights, with nature around. I'm at 1030m altitude at 7km for the "main village" and I still get a 2Gbps/860Mbs FTTH, a small supermarket nearby, a big one at 15' with Drive, various leisure services and few shops. Not at all at the level of a developed big city of course, but still a good level of services, while in nature. So for me the choice was "higher salary with less nice condition for a period than going somewhere else or less salary but a good quality of life and stability", I chose this one.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Apartments are homes too....

Well, not yours. I mean, in most countries you can own a flat BUT you own just the unit, not the soil. A home on ground it's your property, you can rebuild it as much as you want (with eventual limitations from local norms, in terms of height, kind of roof, color palette etc but you can), a unit is just a part of something bigger you do not own, so when the building will be ready to get demolished you'll own nothing. You might own some fraction of the building, depending on local laws, but you still can't decide alone.

It's by far not the same.

When I've built my current home I design it (well, sketched, the architects have done the proper design) after I've decided to add domestic p.v., after an EV charging station, a kiosk (gazebo, not sure the proper name in English a structure open on all sides with a tiled roof and a platform on ground to be outside but a bit protected from rain, Sun etc). I can't do nothing like that in an apartment. I can't get backups in an apartment, for instance I have here a heat-pump domestic hot-water system, it's very simple in principle, but demand a certain amount of space for the hot water reservoir, much bigger than classic water heater. I've decided to stock a bit of clean water (1000+1000l with a pump and pressurized tank system to have a week backup or even more if a day water supply freeze (happen once since I'm here) or there is any other interruption), it's pretty cheap but again it demand space. I have also a diesel car with a 1000l reservoir in garage, topped up once in a while when the diesel cost less than the average. Again pretty cheap, comfy, simple, but demand space. There is no space in an apartment for anything like that. In a home there is room to OWN, in an apartment you do not really own nothing but a shelter and some stuff you put in it. For me it's the prototype of the "in 2030 you'll own nothing", the service economy where you are forced to rent anything because you simply can't own anymore, and we know from history how devastating is such model once you get trapped in it.

Ok… I really don’t see how that changes the fact many people happily have an apartment as their home.

Good for you, sounds like a comfortable place to live. The concepts of the city and the condominium aren’t going anywhere though. What a strange idea, humans living together, right?

I get it, I love gardening too, and balconies don’t really cut it for me either.

Cities have existed for as long as written history has. They can only get so wide before there’s pressure to build up. What’s the alternative?

> When I've built my current home

Vanishingly few people have the financial privilege to buy, let alone build, anywhere near a city, I’m sure you’re aware.

There simply isn’t a world where every single person can live in a PV-powered, water tank backed up fortress, with ample setbacks to keep your neighbours away. That’s far more dystopian to me than any “you’ll never own anything” boogeyman.

> The concepts of the city and the condominium aren’t going anywhere though

I'm not sure of that, at all: I see the green new deal as something happening that's here to last, and I see no chances to "migrate" to green new deal condos, electrifying them on scale. Yes, you can build a NEW condo "A class, all electric", but there is no chances to transform those built decades ago, and no chances to re-built them as well. Yes, in temperate climate it's still doable to put an air-water heating powerful enough per unit, even a central heating. However the operational cost of such move will be FAR higher than gas at actual prices, not only, if ALL condos switch to such heating setup we simply can't provide enough electricity for them all.

Where I'm from (north-west Italy, so not a cold region) a classic apartment have circa 24kW thermal gas or oil heating system. Converted to an air-water heat pump it would be around 6-8kW normal absorption for 6 hours per day at least 4-5 month per year. With ALL units at 6-8kW + the rest there is simply no generation capacity. No chance to electrify. Meanwhile where I'm now, in a much fresh place in winter, 1kW heat a home far bigger than a typical apartment most of the year, with -25℃ outside 4kW suffice. At this absorption rate there is enough generation capacity to be all electric. That's why we need new buildings.

Now HOW to made them? In a dense city crushing and rebuilt a condo is hardly feasible, in EU anything was designed at a walk distance, crushing a condo means blocking roads nearby for some months, there is simply no space to do so without big issues. It could be done for ONE condo, definitively not en-masse. Single family homes on contrary are easier to rebuilt end generally have enough space around to put a construction site in place without dramas. Aside we have many cities in places more and more flooded, subjected to dangerous subsidence and so on, again we can't rebuild cities, it's simply too costly. Take a look at the Indian's 100-smart city program, where the ENTIRE COUNTRY resources would be needed to built 100 cities able theoretically to host only a very limited percentage of population.

Long story short: modern city, future cities are like the ancient Fordlandia from Henry Ford, equally a failure and a distopic nightmare.

> Cities have existed for as long as written history has. They can only get so wide before there’s pressure to build up. What’s the alternative?

Yes, because we never have had current TLC/IT and logistics. Today it's cheaper to build a chair in China, with wood from Poland, straw seat from Brazil, metallic connectors from India to sell it in Canada than directly build it in Canada few kilometers away of the final customer. We are in a changing world and that means mass migrations, war, we need flexibility to relocate and cope with countless "whole country malfunctioning issues" for a long period of time, in a city it's a nightmare, anyone eat, but all the food came from elsewhere, big infra are need to move food, goods in general, there is little to no room to change, an easy target for bombing during a war, an easy target to spread diseases and so on. The alternative is living in less dense and more geographically distributed ways, so we can relocate easily because number of people to move per single area on earth are not so high, impacted people from extreme weather, war, crisis events far more manageable, there is room for limited autonomy to be resilient, there is space to evolve as the tech change.

> Vanishingly few people have the financial privilege to buy, let alone build, anywhere near a city, I’m sure you’re aware.

Ignore the current economy: can we MATERIALLY build single family home for almost anyone? In terms of industrial output ability, raw materials availability and so on? I think yes in all western countries and in many other as well. Economy it's just a measure. If we, the people, decide to do something doable materially, the economy will change to make it possible, because the current economic state of things is the byproduct of the current failing democratic model, we are in a kind of economic dictatorship modeled after/well described by the ancient pamphlet The Science Of Government, Founded On Natural Law, by Clinton Roosevelt. If we decide to change our countries without the need of a III world war we can. 99% can. If most prefer stop the history train they will fails as regularly happen in history, ending up in city more and more similar to ghettos with a lower and lower mean income, bigger and bigger criminal activities, desperation and so on, as you can already observe in most USA big and medium cities compared to themselves 20+ years ago. As you can see in most EU cities even if at a slower rate than the USA simply because we have much more social protections that slow down the economical effects of current policies.

> There simply isn’t a world where every single person can live in a PV-powered, water tank backed up fortress, with ample setbacks to keep your neighbours away. That’s far more dystopian to me than any “you’ll never own anything” boogeyman.

There is no need to keep our neighbors away IF we slowly change from the city model to the spread model with public investments starting from WFH as a key element to allow people flee the city and behind them paving the way for others to build services outside "now" that there is a market outside. It's a path doable an year after another with a significant economy boost form such enormous general relocation effort.

> economy boost form such enormous general relocation effort.

[citation needed]

Actually not really needed: a nation-wide open relocation plan "all living in too dense areas, flood hit areas too many times, buildings at risk of landslides, submersion and so on can give their own property to the State in exchange of a to-be-built new one. Those interested have at their charge find a suitable ground to built, the part the State will pay is a similar size of the old one, the rest is at Citizen charge, the exchange will happen once the new home is built, residing there is mandatory for 5 years or a significant amount of the benefit need to be given back to the State, the State will ensure urbanization (meaning roads, electricity, water services etc of sufficient grade)".

Such "bonus" can ONLY be get from private owner for their old/new main home, and only very few can take it at first because EU job market, specially toady is not as fluid as the USA one, find a new job is not at all that easy and quick, specially if it's not a "desperate level" one, so essentially at first only remote workers with not much big family ties and early retired could accept it. Only some of them will do, people fear the change. Meaning only a small cohort of citizen can get the bonus the first year. Not too much to provoke market disruption as many "eco-bonus" already provoked here (for instance Italian 110%, meaning the State cover the 110% of costs to improve a building for 2 energy class or the French "Isolation à 1 euro" witch lead to an incredible amount of crappy insulation with a gazillion of problems led to significant costs for many who originally spent just 1€ to "better insulate" a new home. However this said cohort is still not too small to not count at all. After them successfully settled others will be convinced and another batch of people will took the bonus. After them it's time for many to look for a new "market" outside the city, instead of 10 restaurants in 1km in the city center there will be some moving outside to serve spread populations, and that another batch. Since building homes here is far from simple like in the USA, it took MONTHS just to buy the terrain and get a project approved, the speed at a certain point will increase but not too much, meaning a decade at least of steady economic growth led by the real estate.

I’m truly grateful that no one else shares your vision of the future.

I'm not sure seeing the current trends in cities, though try https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ if you have patience, it explain a bit more and you'll find various reference, scientific, about many aspects.

It's perfectly fine to not enjoy WFH, the point of the article here is forcing an option onto employees instead of giving them the choice.

> "I personally like working in office because it's where I work, and then I go home and that's my home. "

Well, that's not how IT nowadays works. On the assembly line, sure. But modern IT professionals usually take their "work" with them. I remember the times we had desktop computers and work really stayed in the office when we left, but the default in 2024 is laptop/mobile workplace.

That's true (and for valid reasons, e.g. saving on insurance/security at the office), but that doesn't mean you don't get to have a work/life boundary. There's a EU directive (or there will be) colloquially called the right to disconnect: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20210121STO...

We have lockers at work, and I leave the laptop there.

It's a simple decision that a) forces me to go to the office every day on foot, b) allows me to separate work and home, and c) allows me to unwind while I walk home from work.

This is a good Idea. Unfortuntely, most people, especially yonger colleagues, don't have the money to buy a separate laptop und usually use the work laptop for private use.

My previous laptop was a $180 Thinkpad that stayed with me for five years. The claim that _most_ IT workers can't afford that and are forced to do their private stuff on a company computer sounds preposterous.

You’re digging your heels in by cosplaying proletariat. If someone wants a separate computer, they’ll get one. It’s not a matter of not being able to afford it. Maybe their work computer is better than the one they’d buy themselves. Or maybe “afford” in this case (as usual) means that they can’t justify the cost when they could spend the money on something else, and are happy trading the work-life balance.

But don’t pretend that this isn’t a consensual arrangement.

I don’t understand why anyone would take issue with my reply. I just shared a perspective/experience.

modern IT professionals usually take their "work" with them.

This only became really prevalent post covid in my experience. Pre-Covid, when coming into the office every day was the norm, a lot of people, at least at places I worked, left their laptops at the office over night.

There's more to this than just work from home vs work from office.

I did a PhD and felt similarly: I couldn't ever "leave" work. Home was work. My desk at the university was work. When I finished and started a real job I was indeed relieved that I could come home and, for once, not be working.

But it was never about the location of my body. During my PhD, my head was work. I had nothing else in my life. I couldn't escape work because it was my entire life.

When I returned to working from home (during the pandemic) I couldn't believe how unproductive I'd been for the past several years of working in an office. I would finish a day and think "wow, I haven't been this productive since my PhD". This has made me happier than ever.

The difference is, unlike during my PhD, I have other things in my life now. It doesn't matter where my desk is. When I decide to "finish work" at the end of the day, my partner is normally home. When I'm with her I'm not working. If I decide to continue studying at my desk I'm not working. If I go out and do some exercise or walk by myself I'm not working.

I was incredibly stressed during my PhD. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to complete and lived with impostor syndrome the whole time. Nowadays I have a much more balanced relationship with work. This is something you should strive for too, and then you might find the scales tip in favour of working from home, like me.

Yeah, for me it is still important to distinguish the space

This shows why it's important to accommodate both and not impose one way or another. Like for me this unification is exactly what I'm enjoying. I can never "leave", but I never have to "go" either. Not perfect but as an introvert still a better situation. Also not everyone in Europe live at less than a 30min bicycle drive. Why must it always be 100% one or another?

> Considering it's an irish news site I'm surprised that was not mentioned.

Ireland is part of the Anglosphere, and suffers from many of the same developmental issues (long commutes, houses in the middle of nowhere, poor public transport) that plague other English speaking countries. That's presumably why they didn't mention it.

I was exactly looking for this in the article, couldn't find it, and therefore just ignored the whole thing.

Either you paint a truthful realistic picture, or you pick some political side. I'm not interested in the 2nd one.

I work 1 day at the office, and that's my ideal setup, maybe 2 would be better but I don't work fulltime. I have colleagues that after the pandemic "Don't want to work a single day at home during their lives". These guys were locked up alone in their apartment during covid and absolutely hated it. I get it.

For me, if I stay weeks at home, it works on my mood and energy. Humans are social animals, with maybe a very few exceptions.

Also a European perspective.

Funny how I'm getting downvoted. Some people really don't like the truth that some people prefer working in the office.

When I was living in London after COVID, at first, I didn't enjoy it. I still came into the office but when no-one else was there I realised "what's the point?". The office was exposed as the dull/boring/clinical place it's always been. The people I found going into the office were either those who were young and lived close by and somewhat used work as a social club, or those with nothing else better to do (also me at the time!). Anyone with a family was not there. Meanwhile, I've continuted to work remotely and I moved to the Cotswolds. I swapped a Victorian terrace for a much bigger detatched Cotswold cottage. I have a big garden, a glorious wild flower meadow and sheep grazing adjacent to the garden. There's no traffic on the roads and the nearby countryside is amazing. London is a veritable shithole in comparison. Getting a train to London is like travelling to a different - worse - country.

If I still lived in London and commuted to the office, I would never see my young kids. I'd be out the door by 7:30 and back by 7ish. It would also put a lot more stress on my wife, as she would have to do everything during the day. I'd also get about 30 mins or so a day with my kids. That's terrible. Now, I can play with my kids until 9am and then start work. I finish at 5:30pm and get 2 hours with them before bed. I can also go running during the day.

Switching off isn't really a problem for me because well... work is work. It pays the bills. So I'm quite happy to shut my laptop and forget about it. We had a cabin built in the garden, so my new commute is about 1 minute down the garden to the "shed" during which time I miraciously forget I even have a job in the first place when returning "home". I don't have any work apps on my phone for obvious reasons. I appreciate that's not the same for everyone though.

Regarding cost of commute We've had it drilled into us over the years (gaslighted, even) that it is acceptable for us to spend hours of our day commuting to work and for us to bear the financial burden. Why should that be the case? I used to spend £10 a day on the commute. Commuting 200 days a year, that's £2,000 of my salary I need to spend on just getting to work. For others it is much more. That's absurd but it's just the monetary cost. The opportunity cost in terms of MY time is huge. It's about 2 weeks of the year sitting on a horrid underground train. I realise, you can do things on the train but I guess my point is that being on a train limits you from doing other things like playing with kids or doing some gardening. When recruiters have been getting in touch about new roles I make it clear up front that if said company wants me to routinely attend the office they must pay me for commuting time and the commute cost, otherwise it's a "no" from me. Some companies agree remote is acceptable in that case. I mean, I don't mind paying for the odd trip to the office but on a regular cadence and if it's expected (part of contract), then they must pay.

Also, let's not forget the environmental impact of all this mostly pointless travel to work every day for knowledge workers. How much less carbon would we emit if we stopped doing it? Judging by the dip in CO2 emissions during COVID, quite a bit.

> Now, I can play with my kids until 9am and then start work. I finish at 5:30pm and get 2 hours with them before bed.

This right here. I'm actually nervous talking about this for fear of jinxing the situation.

I use to agree with this but I work remote and I can go to an office that is about a 15 minute drive away if I want.

Once I got use to working remote the motivation to go into the office went away completely. I not only don't have a home office but I just switch the input to my monitor when I log off for the day.

The song and dance of the office is just a total waste of time, space and money. It is just absurd this is even still a conversation.

That’s _your_ preference. Yet that is forced/mandated to the rest of us.

This is like the first panel on a galaxy brain meme. I can just as easily say that it’s absurd that you demand to only be communicated with through a bloody webcam that you won’t turn on half the time. Don’t play the one-sided victim card. If you can’t find it within yourself to see things from another perspective enough to get out of the mindset of you being the only one that’s hard done by, don’t bother contributing to the conversation.

I WFH in a small studio apartment where I have two separate spaces for work and for personal stuff. Shutting off from work for the weekend is as simple as turning off my work computer, covering it up and going about my day as normal.

You definitely do not need a separate office space. It helps, but what's key is properly setting your own mental boundaries.

> Personally I hated that I can never "leave" work and it's always with me at home.

Same here. Was difficult to adapt to it

> First, there are some employees who believe that being in the office will benefit their careers. They are probably right; workers who return to the office are more likely to receive promotions. Whether organisations should promote the careerists who come back to the office in hopes that their loyalty (or submissiveness to RTO mandates) will win them promotions that their performance and effectiveness would not, is an open question.

I take issue with the fact how quickly this is dismissed as simply rewarding loyalty and submissiveness. It completely ignores how much junior employees struggle with WFH. Without an office there is very little opportunity for junior employees to casually talk to senior employees and learn from them. It is also much harder for managers to notice if a junior employee is doing well or not. So it is no surprise it is easier to get promotions with an RTO mandate and it has very little to do with loyalty.

I proactively schedule 1:1s with junior staff and reach out. I weed out the ones with potential and ones who lack ambition.

“Proactively” scheduling 1:1s with juniors is, frankly, the bare minimum. It’s just doing your job. If you think that this solves the problem, you are bad at your job.

Are you a manager?

The lack of communication of potentially valid reasons such as these might contribute to why people view RTO mandates with cynicism.

If we knew why we were being asked to RTO, we could solve that problem in the way we thought best, combining in-person and remote time. And those of us with junior team members we care about are already solving for this in the way we think best.

>And those of us with junior team members we care about are already solving for this in the way we think best.

Solve it in the way the juniors think best if you want to accomplish anything.

Believe it or not, we talk, and their input influences my actions.

If a junior struggles with WFH you have an engineering culture problem. Which the junior is not responsible for by the way... It's staff and senior engineers responsability ˆˆ

Personally would put the blame higher up than that.

The aforementioned senior employees and managers should find a way to talk with junior employees instead of assuming that no news is good news.

Even when no news is good news, the juniors would get screwed because the managers don't know what's going on.

The people who can just quietly do their job (and the one above it) don't get promoted. Only the ones that say "look at me" or where the managers are tracking them closely.

My juniors thrive in a WFH environment. This is a problem with the culture and the seniors not WFH. The promotion issue is real. But let's be honest, promotion in tech mostly happens by changing jobs. The in the office people are the ones who are really slowing down their career growth.

As a junior employee, I have no patience for your point.

Going into office is one thing juniors can do about the "problem with the culture" so my stance stays the same until the so-called culture changes.

In my experience, the number of seniors who complain sbout RTO and don't hoard knowledge is tiny.

> In my experience, the number of seniors who complain sbout RTO and don't hoard knowledge is tiny.

"Hoarding knowledge" makes it sound like they're intentionally trying to keep knowledge to themselves. I don't think the problem with remote leveling is due to seniors intentionally holding onto knowledge. I do see some senior employees try to hold ownership of a specific area of their work for apparently selfish reasons, but they're a minority.

I've spent a lot of time talking with other seniors (and juniors!) about ways to make sure we're spending time working with mixes of skill levels, but it's a hard problem. Just advertising that you're available to help if anyone needs anything does basically nothing to encourage most juniors to ask. It takes a lot of juniors a long time to lose inhibitions for asking for help, and I think people can often make it to senior levels without learning how to be proactive about offering help.

It does seem easier for most people to ask for help in person. I think one of the causes of this is because even in this field, most people don't grow up doing so much communication and socialization purely using crude text and video calling which have remained mostly unchanged since the 80s or 90s. Most people handle in-person socialization much better, and can read and express cues more naturally there, especially in a work environment. Also, those communication methods have a degree of formality attached to them which feels like a barrier.

Personally, I think it might help a bit if telework software would take more cues from video games (proximity-based chat and virtual environments with rooms and doors). There are some programs for this, but the few I've tried haven't been polished enough to use. The few I've used though did seem to make impromptu collaboration easier, but of course there could have been many reasons for that (e.g. novelty).

I feel like there is a large selfish component with seniors thriving in WFH; the hidden costs are, for one, less impromptu unaccounted for time helping juniors either with tech questions or mentoring. This maybe works for now, but makes me wonder how this will play out when the current generations of workers who trained pre-COVID retire out and the current juniors get into those roles.

Alternatively, what good measures are there to help the current junior roles? I see people saying it's a culture problem but it seems a very new problem with not many publicized solutions.

> what good measures are there to help the current junior roles?

i always make it very clear that anyone can reach me asynchronously whenever they want, and i will always strive to give a clear answer when i'm able to

i think some juniors have been burned by asking the wrong person the wrong thing at the wrong time and believe it was their fault for asking

sometimes people just had a bad breakfast

> i always make it very clear that anyone can reach me asynchronously whenever they want, and i will always strive to give a clear answer when i'm able to

This is good, but in my experience being proactive in reaching out to juniors is critical in a remote environment, especially if your company or team doesn't have an obviously healthy culture

It also creates new opportunities for employees who enjoy or don't mind working from an office that may not have otherwise been available.

I believe,at least in IT, once you get to a certain age, promotions are really meaningless, especially in large companies. So I think if you are young and you want to be on management track, you probably should go in.

In any job, once compensation is no longer significant (i.e. close to retirement, reached savings goals etc) then promotions are meaningless sure. But in most fields, IT included, compensation range is linked to role. For most people that means 50-80% of your career promotions and compensation are linked and meaningful.

But after some stage when life goals are reached and you're in end of career planning, I agree promotions are largely meaningless to many people (outside of those who's self-image is tied up with their role and job).

Ultimately I don't see IT being especially different from any other field here, what is it in IT you see influencing that?

In large tech companies, you might reach a terminal rank (ic5-6) before you’re 40. Total comp might be 400-500k, which is great but you’ve still got 10-20 years to retirement (Bay Area and Tahoe homes are expensive and if you enjoy your job you might not want to retire at 50).

So there may not be another promotion, and that’s freeing. You can focus on professional development free of concerns for looking good but grow in ways of interest to you.

Is that really unique to IT? Small to medium companies, academic and govt IT jobs will typically never reach those income levels. I think the Avg software dev salary in the US is around 77k, so a lot of the IT field has to make a lot less.

I agree in large tech companies that absolutely exists, but I also see it in legal, medical and some other professions that a subset of them can reach similar income levels. (250k+ by mid to late 30's, 400k+ if in Bay or similar CoL area).

Its a nice reality when you can be ~40 and have the freedom to retire whenever you want, but its not one I see as common for the majority of tech workers.

In the federal government, there are many ranks up to E15. In other industries, you need to move to management to make a decent living.

In large law firms, you’ve got a ~10 year path to partner or you usually move on.

Medicine is more extreme than tech. A few years after you complete your medical training, you’re a doctor with experience and you can just do that for the next 30-40 years.

Jiro dreams of sushi comes to mind.

It completely ignores how much senoir employees struggle with WFH. Without an office there is very little opportunity for senior employees to casually look to see how hard junior employees are staring at their monitor to determine the depth and quality of their work.

Instead they have to look at the actual work produced and try to understand it well enough to not look like an idiot when they talk about it.

>see how hard junior employees are staring at their monitor to determine the depth and quality of their work.

I don't think any senior does this. Managers, yes. Maybe a few leads. But I know butt in seat doesn't correlate to amount of quality work.

I've had days where everything is blank in my head and others where I did a week's work in a day. You can influence this somewhat by having a good environment, but the creative process doesn't work like blue collar work (despite many of our systems in office based on blue collar labor processes).

> Without an office there is very little opportunity for senior employees to casually look to see how hard junior employees are staring at their monitor to determine the depth and quality of their work.

You probably haven't been in the office for a long time if you think all people did there was sit and stare at their monitors all day.

> Instead they have to look at the actual work produced and try to understand it well enough to not look like an idiot when they talk about it.

Unfortunately not every junior employee has a manager that will champion the value of their work to their peers for them. Junior employees will often have to do that themselves and that's much easier to do in a casual setting during lunch or over drinks than having to schedule a zoom call.

juniors are getting hired in this market?

I've always found it weird that it's often called "work from home" and not "remote-first".

It's not only about the location, imho. I don't want to stay at home. I want to work where I'll be most productive on that day. This can be my dedicated desk, my sofa, a Chinese buffet, the coffee shop around the corner, or one of the remaining WeWork offices.

There is also a whole different aspect to it, which imho is overlooked and underappreciated: asynchronicity.

When you build your organisation under the paradigm of remote-first, you can tap into a beyond-regional (= worldwide), distributed talent pool. Once you tap into that beyond-regional, distributed talent pool, however, you will get people with very diverse individual realities:

People who located in different time zones. People with kids. People with disabilities. People with second jobs. There are also people who are more productive in the mornings, others who just bang out amazing code late at night. People for whom this might change over time, sometimes during the course of the week. Other people who take Wednesdays off, but work Sundays instead. All kinds of things which happen at different times and are not entirely plannable.

To capture all these flavours of productivity, you need to also build an organization that works well with asynchronicity. Ideally, an organization that is async-first.

This means: as an IC / manager you need to agree on deliverables and time lines, overshare information, submit actionable requests to your people, not require/expect immediate responses, and make explicitly stated assumptions when needed.

With this in place you have an organisation that is truly resilient, high-bandwith (as @paulgb said), and works like a global mycelial organism instead of a rooted tree, independent of location or time.

That's much more than to just "WFH" from 9 to 5.

Source: Have worked with and lead teams from San Francisco to Manila.

Yes! I have at least a few colleagues who do best coding on the train or airplane. I used to regularly switch coffee shops when switching tasks or projects.

Async is great, but it is hard to do partially. Sync is infectious.

How have you handled synchronization? I agree with async-primary, but it's also important to get some overlap depending on the situation. Did folks in Manila work off hours to align a bit with San Francisco?

> but it's also important to get some overlap depending on the situation

What type of situations are you thinking about?

> Executives who are pushing employees to come back to the office are most likely to succeed if they can make a convincing case for why coming back to the office benefits employees and the organisation. The typical explanation that coming back to the office is important for the culture of the organisation is unfounded at best, and hogwash at worse.

Maybe big organizations are bad at communicating RTO reasons, but isn’t it pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication? I feel like the quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues is much higher on days we work in person than remote. There’s a reason why even fully remote companies usually do some sort of recurring offsite.

That’s not to say that the benefits of RTO always outweigh the costs, but I find the trope that RTO is just some pointy-haired boss whim to be silly.

> high-bandwidth communication

This just sounds like some sort of buzzwordy justification for hauling people back to the office.

My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home, and that (if absolutely needed - which is pretty much never) a get-together is more creative and productive if it doesn't happen at the office - but is at another venue altogether.

> My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home

I think this is super dependent on the person and circumstances.

I found "meetings" which are just doc reviews or low involvement group updates are better via slack or meet. Active discussions from a few participants are better in person (esp. if using a whiteboard). I think this speaks to the waste of "this meeting could have been an email" culture more than anything.

I found that some people are better able to "focus" by ignoring junior employees when WFH, increasing their own productivity at the expense of the junior's productivity and growth. Some of my most "productive" coworkers are also the least helpful to the team, and the least active on chat too.

> I think this is super dependent on the person and circumstances.

Precisely, which is why this[1] comment from the GP isn't accurate. I think we should try to create less polarizing statements and try to sum up the entire human experience ("everyone") about how they feel about WFH.

[1]: > pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication

> high-bandwidth communication

> quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues

Can you elaborate? What do you need to exchange throughout the day? I've worked as an IC and as a manager both with remote-first, async-first and very local, traditional enterprise structures. The quality of communication on the former has been excellent most of the time, while in the latter there's always been a 30%-50% loss rate.

In my last job (10,000ish employees at a UK financial services organisation) we worked at home for the whole of the Covid period... apart from one small team in the whole organisation (which soon got dealt with as they were basically just slacking), productivity went up.

After Covid, we went into the office one day a month and didn't really achieve anything additional at all, if anything those days were less productive due to the heavy socialising that went on.

In my current job, pan-European financial services organisation, I am the only person in my team in London, everyone else is in Brussels. I've never physically met most of them. The one day a week I'm required to spend in the London office is a complete waste of time and money and usually involves me sitting on Teams meetings all day as I very rarely need to interact with anyone else in London. It's my least productive day of the week.

I'm also not in a "mostly lone producer" role like developer, I'm a project/programme manager and my job is interacting with people all day.

I think it just depends if people are able to refocus their mind into a new way of doing things.

I think that few days in office, especially as few as one per month, should really be about socialising.

Maybe start with a team meeting for a general update then smaller face-to-face discussions on topics best suited for in-person interaction. Then break for a team lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon on whatever people want to.

> The one day a week I'm required to spend in the London office is a complete waste of time and money and usually involves me sitting on Teams meetings all day as I very rarely need to interact with anyone else in London

Yes, same here. A mandate to be in office one-two days a week with no thought about the aim, and no planning for others to be there at the same time is a total waste of time and money.

> I think that few days in office, especially as few as one per month, should really be about socialising.

Came here to agree with this.

Personally (and there is a heavy personal opinion to this as some people also do prefer the office life) I think a majority work from home but with the occasional mandated office day specifically for socialising is a good hybrid. I acknowledge that more extreme (for lack of a better word) introverts would like to avoid the office all together though.

I'm not sure it's an introvert thing... I've no desire or need to go to the office, I have many friends not at work and have no need for the false "socialising" you get in the office environment

It's not about making 'friends', it's about getting to know the people you work with to create a personal connection and rapport.

But some people demonstrated they could achieve that without physically meeting over Covid... mandating it as a "sheep dipping" approach is old fashioned and thoughtless.

For me I don't need it, and I've proven that again working for a Belgium team from London. To tell me I need it to build rapport is ridiculous and a waste of my time and money.

In every organisation I've ever worked in, from military to SAR to healthcare to software, the issue has never been bandwidth. More often the issue is lack of concise communication. All higher bandwidth provides is more noise to signal.

High bandwidth communicating is also a firehose of noise, though.

You may find that the extra capacity to communicate is detrimental as people spend their time talking about marginal issues.

If your communication is limited, you will use your time on the most important things.

This is my experience in very small companies (think a <10 person startup). The value of everyone knowing a lot of what's going on from immersion is immense. You can have very little processes around information sharing (which takes time to set up and fine tune!), very little time to convince people what needs to be done (it's obvious from the conversation the other side of the room is having), and all the nuance of in-person communication is kept.

Once a company gets a little bit bigger, the processes around information sharing, planning and other communication has to be in place anyway. Teams need to collaborate, work needs to be tracked, there has to be meetings for planning. Once you're already doing that you might not lose anything by going remote.

This. If your company is on two floors, you have a remote company anyway.

In my experience, it's not _entirely_ that simple though. For some people, chatting and video calls feel super awkward and makes them avoid communication. For other people, in-person is super awkward and has the same effect. There are a lot of nuances. I suspect RTO happens in companies run by the former type, and remote happens in companies run by the latter. As a CTO (did that for more than a decade), I always tried to give the team what they need. But even then, when in doubt, I suppose I often went for what I would need, if I was them.

In my experience, meeting people in person at the coffee machine or at lunch creates way more social cohesion compared to exclusively using mail, chat, and video conferencing.

This is important even in bigger organizations, because you want to catch errors early on. It helps if people bounce ideas off colleagues to see if there is anything they missed.

With people you barely know, if it is not your responsibility to comment, why bother? Better to get get some work done, then to read the chat all day.

Personally, I think about two days per week at the office is best for this purpose. But that may very from person to person.

I am in a big company >100k employees and I don't care what the other million people do, because obvious reasons. I work for remote clients and my team is scattered all over the world, so there's no high bandwidth input possible from them. My local colleagues work in totally unrelated projects so beyond a bit of fun there's no shared information needed or required. I still go in the office for this banter like once a week, but I guarantee you my productivity is like the half - there's always somebody walking around with a coffee interrupting me for some "high bandwidth information exchange". Morals? Please stop assuming everybody works like you.

> the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication?

Pointless meetings, constant interruptions, overhead noise, watercooler talk? Those types of things have zero advantage.

We have to contend with working with people who are sometimes very hard to work with. Watercooler talk gives you the opportunity to remember that the guy who keeps filing badly written tickets has a wife and kids and hobbies, and is likely filing badly written tickets because he's extremely overworked and doesn't have time to write better tickets.

We're social creatures, and having unstructured social interactions greases the wheels when we work together.

I'm sure this also depends on the kind of organization you work at, but I find that being on-site makes a huge difference. Yes, even in the quality of the work.

High bandwidth does not equal high quality.

I much prefer a well thought out text message rather than someone spamming their thoughts at me through speech.

That being said, for discussion points and fast iterations I agree that in-person is hard-to-beat, but for a lot of work this is the minority and doesn't justify forcing people to be there at all times just in case this is needed.

>spamming their thoughts at me through speech

Funny way of saying 'talking to me'. I'm going to work this into my vocabulary for fun and profit.

No, it's not. There's useful communication and there's spam. Those exist on every media.

Spoken spam is a really bad problem with offices.

That only works for companies that have a single office. Once you are multiple offices, that argument is moot for the most part.

Also I think you are mistaking high bandwith with low latency. You can certainly do high bandwith remotely. What you lose is on latency because remote work involve some form of async communication.

What happens with communication "in person" is that people talk at the same time. This doesn't fly in remote meetings, so they kind of enforce good meeting hygiene in this regard. Not enough to make meetings great overall but it helps.

Management in many corporations want the employees to feel like they are friends, which they typically are not (do you regularly visit co-workers in their homes? no? then you probably aren't actually friends). It's one of many strategies to foster unfounded loyalty to the employer and enabling of corporate hierarchies.

I hate when people throw corporate bullshit using words like "family".

It might be true for small <15 employees companies, never for bigger ones.

We come together with remote colleagues to work. I can confidently say that high-bandwidth wears off pretty quickly. High-bandwidth is not essential 90% of the time, and it's easy to compensate the remaining 10% simply by taking more time. In my experience, bandwidth of remote work has been increasing, as people keep organizing themselves around it better. So, the difference will only get smaller.

Most important benefit of RTO is the social aspect, in my experience. And, even that wears off rather quickly. Whether there's a “benefit” depends a lot on one's colleagues, in the first place.

You can have some of the social remotely too. I’ll often open our weekly engineering meeting on Slack with a few minutes of people talking about their weekend or related stuff. It happens in chats as well. Of course we’re a small team who have worked together for years.

Definitely. I've become close friends with a colleague without meeting once in real life. That being said, physical presence brings a different dimension to social relations.

agreed, it absolutely does

> high-bandwidth communication?

For me, absolutely no. I want high quality not high bandwidth. I don't want everyone interrupting me all the time with, relevant or not, questions. I want you to write me an email or message in the chat and I'll check it and answer in due time. I don't want to be interrupted to go to the cafeteria or "for a smoke" every 15min by a different person, or to have people standing besides me talking about their weekend or their kids. It's very invasive because I get distracted easily, even with good quality headphones, and it's hard to get back on focus.

With this said I don't mind going to the office where I can chat with people and socialize but I want to allocate time for that, not be forced into it. I feel that WFH allows me to balance the time I need to work and the time I need to socialize much better.

>biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication

Wrong, it's the tax breaks:

>JPMorgan Chase & Co. and RBC Capital Markets are among more than 100 firms that have negotiated billions of dollars worth of agreements under New Jersey’s pre-pandemic programs. None have yet applied for the waiver, Sullivan said, meaning if they want their tax breaks, they’ll have to prove the jobs are being done on site at least three days a week. JPMorgan and RBC declined to comment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

Also cutting staff without ending up in the newspaper for laying people off.

> I feel like the quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues is much higher on days we work in person than remote.

Keyword: “feel”

Sounds like a skill issue.

In office isn't higher bandwidth, but it is more fun! I love going traveling to the office and hanging out with people. Hardly any work gets done, but being around people is really entertaining. Bonds definitely form better - whether that is good or bad for business I haven't been able to figure out yet. However, it is better for my social life.

All I know is that if I see someone WFH I know they are getting more work done than if I see them in office. 80% of top performers WFH the majority of the time or are remote.

Also, being remote and traveling into the office for week-long visits the past 3 years, I can say I almost never see people whiteboarding. I've done it once while in office in a meeting and it wasn't needed at all. People using online diagramming tools during zoom meetings? Definitely.

I really miss the social aspects of being in office, but the benefits to Remote work just outweigh those aspects, sadly.

Ultimately, what happens to RTO really depends on the market. If the job market heats back up again, RTO will largely go away. If the job market tightens, then it will dominate. That's because the vast majority of executives and owners want to be in office around their domain. What's the fun of being a billionaire and having to be on zoom all the time?

> That’s not to say that the benefits of RTO always outweigh the costs, but I find the trope that RTO is just some pointy-haired boss whim to be silly.

Exactly. I prefer to WFH like everybody else, but I accept that I am less valuable to my employer when I do and expect to negotiate accordingly.

For people who refuse to believe this, I think you can just link to the history of MIT Building 20 and pretty much drop the mic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20#:~:text=In%201998%....

> but isn’t it pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication?

High-bandwidth is some forms of communication. While the office environment harms severely other forms of communication.

Personally, I've noticed those make for a small share of my work needs. Overall, I communicate much better remotely.

'Nobody on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I had spent more time at the office."' --Paul Tsongas

Thanks to the Covid lockdowns we now know this isn't the case, in fact we can be quite confident a fairly large portion will spend their final moments surrounded by family and loved ones while wishing their could see one more time the thing that matters most to them: the shitty office cube farm.

Henry Royce (of Rolls Royce) disagrees:

> I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Royce

I don't see the word "office" in this quote?

I agree with that. I wish worked harder in some of my studies in college or on some self-teaching. None of that has to do with me wasting my time going into an office.

After my first few jobs out of college (15 years ago), I realized I hate working from someone else's office. It feels so constrained and like I'm in school again. Remote work was very rare then with salaried jobs, but not as a contractor.

The company I'm working for now had an office pre-pandemic (I would meet with the director once/month), sold the one here locally during the pandemic, and got acquired by a large, international, company where the majority of the employees work remotely and the HQ is in Europe (I'm in the US).

The last time I had to go to an office was for a local contract a few years ago (80 miles away from me) that required me to drive-in once/week for a few hours. The project ended after a few months and I found something 100% remote.

I used to work from coworking spaces and sometimes the library, but now I have my own home office. Everyone talks about mixing life and work when working from home. It's pretty easy for me to just turn everything off and walk away at 5.

> It feels so constrained and like I'm in school again.

When I was in school I did most of my productive work at home.

"This finding is not unexpected. Once you let workers do away with the commute to and from the office, office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings, the need to wear and take care of business suits and other costly and often uncomfortable attire, you should not be surprised that they will feel happier."

Gee.. how weird... people get happier when you don't force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming and frustrating corporate [insert your favorite animal feces right here].

> force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming

I have personally turned most of those into paid activities.

I wake up at 8:30 and start my commute at 9-9:15, and leave to arrive at 6 at home, essentially being free at the same time as when I work from home.

Pretty much everyone does the same in my team and even in my company as a whole.

Don't they track time to see that people are at the office less hours than contracted??

That's a pretty authoritarian move. No doubt some companies do it, but it's practically encouraging slacking via Godhart's law.

>That's a pretty authoritarian move.

It's mandated by law in many EU countries, even in the more privacy focused ones. To track workers working time to prevent or track any overtime hours.

But it's also used by companies to make sure all workers are at their desk for the full 40h, and not doing something else like commuting or 2h lunches. Hence why most companies don't allow WFH. They can't track your working time at home, and they're not allowed to install spyware on your devices, so butts ins eats at the office it is.

Can you give an example of such a law?

That exactly what it's called. That was my example. What do you want exactly?

France since 2017: le droit à la déconnexion Portugal since 2012: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/11/success/portugal-employer...

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/workin... - Colloquially known as the working time directive

I see what you're getting at. Still, the policy could be implemented by workers logging their time on Jira tickets, could it not?

No, Jira doesn't work for that. The law requires proper tracking of worktime, vacations, sick days, etc, so there are separate apps for that, some tied to a physical badge or token you need to scan when you enter/exit the building so that the system starts or stops tracking your time at work and that managers have a view who's in the office and who's not. Kind of like the punch cards and clocks of old days except digital.

Jira is explicitly to track the time you put in on specific technical issues/stories so that scrum masters and project managers have an idea how long tasks take, Jira doesn't track how long you spent in the office which can be longer than the amount of coding task you filled.

In a previous company I worked at there were displays in the building showing the current presence/absence of each employee, if they're in the office or not, if they're on sick leave, vacation, etc via icons next to their names on the displays like in some dystopian hellhole. And this was a tech company in one of the richer EU countries. Totally legal btw.

There are Jira add-ons for tracking leave, though. I can't see anything in the EU directive that mandates anything more than that although I can imagine some member states implementing stricter laws for the sake of simplicity. It's bonkers, it's basically banning a company from just saying "Work at your own schedule and don't work too long".

Welcome to Austria.

No, but if they started asking people to work their contracted hours they would be the ones to lose because the average work week is way above the 40 hours that is in our contracts.

For me personally this depends on various things. My job can be very diverse and it can be also very beneficial to get things done after 6pm. But if this starts to get to be a regulary routine where my free time gets eaten too much, i will notify boss and customer. Boss is usually on my side.

My children and wife are my top priority above anything else in this universe. I have made that extremely clear to each and everyone. I do and will not care even if their network is on fire or they lose a billion cash per hour. Bezos, Nadella and Musk themselves could be asking it, i would not care. Material and money come and go. Life is way too short for that.

If the customer is reasonable, i will be reasonable. If the customer is not, screams or starts to get (passive) agressive, they will be dealt with as slow and tedious as procedures and contract(s) allow. Most customers relent fairly quickly when they notice i am not so emotionally invested as they are.

I like this idea, but time spent commuting will never truly be paid. Because if you were working from home, you could still start later / end earlier and get the same amount of work done in less time.

Some uncommon topics in the WFH/RTO debate..

Many employers slowly expanded the norms of work hours during remote/hybrid, which haven't been walked back now that they demand in-office. Jobs that used to be a 9-6 in office are now getting regularly scheduled 8/8:30am meetings (and still keeping the 5pm ones). Employees are left with more complex working life of waking up extra extra early, or dialing into early calls, then taking a train between meeting breaks to get in before lunch, etc. This includes stressing that they get in early enough for the swipe to count.

A side effect is "statutory swipes" where others push the limits to work substantially fewer hours on office days as some sort of revenge. My wife has coworkers with long commutes who leave at 3pm when in-office. We work in financial services and this is previously unheard of, the markets aren't even closed by then. 3pm departure is like a twice per year markets early close departure time.

Another issue is with some of the increase in subway violence in NYC in particular, women are not as comfortable commuting as they were 5 years ago. My wife, and plenty of women I know no longer listen to music during their commute as they want to "remain aware of their surroundings". That is to say, the commute is quite the opposite of mind clearing for them.

> Jobs that used to be a 9-6 in office are now getting regularly scheduled 8/8:30am meetings (and still keeping the 5pm ones).

Incidentally, this sentence actually demonstrates that this is not a new thing with WFH. At some point in the game for a lot of people, the 9–5 became a 9–6 as employers decided to start begrudging employees their lunch break.

If you're on salary, short-sighted employers are incentivized to take as much of your time as you will let them. Going into the office won't prevent that (especially not in the internet era), you have to stand up for yourself.

Anecdotally..

- Working from home for long stretches.. feels more like "living at work" for me. Hybrid is good. Some boundaries in my life are healthy.

- Most people hate their commute. I ride my bike to work and it's the best bit of my day.

- I'm in a three person startup.. a ton of the software engineering and business problems I work on get hashed out talking over lunch and coffee—or in 2 minute hallway chats.

- I think there's something in it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/04/28/lunch/

- It helps that my office environment is quiet and I get lots of uninterrupted time.

My main argument to support work-from-home is because I think building top-notch software is a strong-link problem.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...

A strong link problem is where "overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is".

In this environment you really want to attract and hang on to your top performers! So it makes sense to do what you need to do to keep them happy.

But also, in my experience, the best performing teams I've ever worked in.. we ate lunch together nearly every day.

> I believe the pandemic shook things up in the world of work in ways that are still poorly understood. The great political philosopher Edmund Burke noted that "custom reconciles us to every thing", and I think this applies to all sorts of workplace norms and practices. If we were used to the way things were done in organisations, we were willing to put up with all sorts of organisational policies that were burdensome (e.g., dress codes) or even abusive (e.g., the expectation that we should work beyond normal working hours if asked to do this.)

> A year or two away from the office has opened a lot of eyes, and things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all.

I wonder if this has anything to do with zoomers beginning to enter the workforce. They're often characterized as being far more cynical and vocally intolerant of "office shenanigans."

> things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all.

I’d argue that the fact that the author thinks that “office politics” have somehow disappeared is a reason to discredit anything the author might have to say wrt work altogether.

It’s possibly true that with WFH the “politics” people have become much more adept at hiding the fact that they’re playing “office” politics, especially from those, who apparently like the author seem unaware of what’s actually going on at work, but the actual “office politics” has only grown significantly. It’s just more insidious now and the outcomes are not visible until much later.

There were people who wouldn't put up with the absurdities of office "culture" before universal remote work. They'd end up going into academia or entrepreneurship.

My guess is Zoomers are less willing to tolerate this because they didn't "get used to it" in the pre-2020 world when nobody else was questioning it publicly and those who did question it would be gaslit into thinking the insanity was normal. They see a critical mass of older people rejecting these ridiculous norms and that removes the fear of saying what they actually think and the ability of those who've given up hope of anything better to just shut their questions down.

Young people are vocal, older people revolt more silently. The effectiveness of each varies with the problem and environment.

There's no generational line to push.

I tend to agree with the premise, but it's hard to read something so obviously one-sided. This seems like an article written to be linked to by other articles as "evidence", when it seems pretty weak.

Agreed. Really poor.

It is not specific to "back to the office". You generally can't "force" good employees to do things they don't want to.

You can get them back to the office, some of them don't mind, some may even want it, or you may be able to negotiate it with an appropriate compensation, but you can't force them or they will just leave. Same for everything else: being on-call, travel, overtime work, flexible hours, etc...

> Second, there are employees who are trapped in their jobs, either because of family or community obligations or because they lack the skills, knowledge, and abilities to move to other jobs.

With the current job market, I think there are more people in this category than the article makes it sound. That's actually why companies think they can get away with forcing you to come back to the office against your will...

To a certain extent, but if you try to force change on an org which by unilateral mandate by using a limited job market as the breaker then you need to be prepared for the backlash once the job market picks up. Employees remember.

I think a lot of people don't change job because looking for another job involve all kind of stress. Am I taking the right decision? Will I be happier at the new position? What if I join and that company is announcing 1 year from now that it will have to layoff workers? Also some hiring process are so bureaucratic and long these days that just the thought of enduring all of it is tiring. Also when you are reaching 45y old you are thinking probably more conservatively.

I am saying this having moved jobs 6 times in 23 years.

That article kind of misses the premise of its own headline.

90% of the article is the usual discussion about working from home: Are employers more or less productive, cultural changes after COVID, managers reasons for RTO, etc

But all of these don't answer the why of the actual key observation:

"...they are losing experienced managers and top performers at disproportionate rates"

Why disproportionate? There could be many reasons, but there is surely an obvious one:

"You can force employees back to the office, but not the good ones "

And why is that so? Because you're less likely to force a good employee than a bad employee to do something, simply because the bad employee has less opportunities to leave your company.

The more interesting question would have been, whether there is actually a disproportionate amount of good employees, which wanted to work from home and therefore left, or only a disproportionate amount of good employees, which were able to leave (which is naturally always the case).

My thoughts on the office/home work management debate:

- Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick

- Be mindful of workers with families or other dependants who see wfh as a great benefit

- Don't count days in office and assess people on it - by doing this you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count.

> you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count

The majority of c-suite execs believe this to be true (except when they are out of the office or working from their summer rental for two months of the year) - why would you not signal it?

> Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick

Expensify tried this, making the best office they possible could, the end result was people would come in to try it, leave positive feedback then never go back.

https://use.expensify.com/blog/the-secret-experiment-behind-...

At a glance of that article they improved some of their furnishings and facilities. Is that the only thing you are considering when I refer to a carrot and not a stick?

Apologies, I might have misunderstood: when you say carrot, are you referring to things like extra bump in salary to go in?

Skimming the article, it feels they've focused on trinkets. The one thing that could make meaningful difference to their employees is giving everyone a room with a door that closes. The article doesn't seem to indicate they tried that. Free drinks and call rooms aren't going to offset the hell of an open-plan office; it's not surprising if people already used to WFH would pass on that.

I think that’s definitely a thoughtful approach but there is no carrot big enough. 50% increase or double my pay, maybe. That’s how big of deal WFH is to most. My work is trying to develop some in office novelties that I think most won’t care about one iota. I miss the office sometimes but then I remember all the crap that comes with it.

Having the experience of both working remotely and in office recently, you'd have to pay me a minimum of 50k per year more to RTO.

I don't want to commute. Above 150k or so I'm only keeping 50% of every dollar above that . So we're taking another 25k a year, or about 2k a month. I'm spending 2 hours a day on my commute. That's around 160 hours a month. That means I'm only making 12.5$ an hour commuting.

I also have to give up being able to shower mid day, cook, lay on my couch, etc.

I live in a high cost of living city right now, but I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue.

> I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue.

As someone who did that, be careful. It's not all sunshine and puppies. Many employers promise they can support a move or it's fine but then when you update your address in the HR system it becomes a different story. I certainly wouldn't advise anyone move to a US territory if they think they can just move without issue, employers absolutely will not hire here (not even Gusto).

> I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue

So move closer to work?

Alright.

Hypothetically let's say we're talking about a job in Manhattan.

Rent will be about 5k for a 1bdrm vs 1500$ in Chicago. In this case even with a 60k pay difference I'm losing money.

Ok, so really you can't "just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue" since you're raising issues.

I don't understand, you complained about an hour commute each way, I thought you wanted to reduce that, not move to the midwest. Anyway tons of people who work in Manhattan live in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, even the Bronx or (god forbid) New Jersey. Plenty of public transportation from just about anywhere in the region.

My point is "moving closer to work" doesn't make a lot of sense.

Queens to Manhattan is easily an hour or so.

I have a pretty high paid job that's fully remote. I'd have to make something like an additional 50k a year to even consider going back into the office.

Even then, it would have to be in a location I like.

Offices are relics which have no modern reason to exist for the vast majority of tech jobs. Often the team is distributed anyway.

"Remote workers were not only more productive they were more satisfied with remote work than they had been with working in a traditional office"

I think some citation is needed here, there are multiple studies and they have very varied outcome. This one for instance find that productivity drops 18% when working from home: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

At best he is cherry picking his studies and ignoring the contrarian studies, at worst he is blindy pushing his own interest and views.

I love this, though:

> Second, there is a negative selection effect into the office, since workers who prefer home-based work are 12% faster and more accurate at baseline

This study is of Indian workers doing data entry and employed either direct to office or entirely remotely.

I'd expect pretty different results in different industries, demographics, countries.

Cherry picking indeed.

I suggest you'd need to show more than "I'd expect" for your cherry picking charge to stick.

I can't disclose details but I know for my office raw [short term] productivity was about 20% up for WFH (the situation differs in almost every aspect from that in the study your linked).

That's non statistically significant to make a general statement, but confirms to me that as a minimum there is high variability.

Data entry is low skill, high churn; in person I'd expect managers to put a lot of pressure on because they can drive people away in six months (it might even be preferable for employment law reasons) and still have plenty of people needing jobs to pick up the work.

I'm not going to research a paper here, only to note my direct experience makes the broad applicability of your single study highly questionable.

It's one study, I'm sure there are now more longitudinal indicative studies for most regions that anyone here can find with ease.

You (I assume) were probably right to suggest the OP might be cherry picking, but you didn't do much better IMO (nor did I, I suppose).

This article is the usual case of decide on a conclusion then build the data sources. It's probably the norm now.

How many are going to click and share: "Popular belief inconclusive, meta research suggests" vs "A research paper finds popular belief validated!"

News flash: You can't force the good ones to do anything against their will.

And whenever you force anyone to do anything against their will, there are serious consequences that are not easy to fix.

I've been remote for years even before Covid. RTO vs remote comes down to how and where you work best.

When folks want to go remote I ask them "when you were in school, did you study better in the library or at home in your bedroom?"

If they said bedroom, I assume they can work from home. If they say library, I think RTO makes more sense.

As much as I love remote, the best answer, like all things, is that best is relative to each person. What works for you doesn't work for others.

Imho the best approach to measure productivity is to see where people do their best work and support that. And if you think something works for you but it isn't (i.e., low performance rating), well... time to head into the office or find a new job. You, the individual, also have to be willing to change if you're not performing your best because you _think_ remote will work for you but in reality you're not nearly as present or productive.

Mandates, as the name implies, sort of admits that the ideal isn't best for {someone} otherwise you wouldn't need a mandate; people would naturally come back into the office if they so chose because it was best for them.

There's usually a hugely simplified model of the workplace in play, where workers are turning some handle marked "economic output" and bosses are selfless agents of the company which is in turn entirely operating in the interests of the shareholders. People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships, the social reward of "subordination"/"bossness" given to managers (which doesn't work when they don't have any visible subordinates), and so on. That requires a lot of anthropology.

(Personal observations: I don't mind being in my current office, but commuting is a pure deadweight loss; the social benefits of contact are real, as are the benefits of being at home; many of my coworkers are on a different continent and I cannot be in the same office as them anyway)

"People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships".

I guess the bosses don't know how to put those fuzzy numbers in Excel yet? :)

Should not be too difficult though, since an entire country actually found some way to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

It's a great idea, but how on earth can you quantify happiness? That seems like a good way of fooling yourself by metrics on the unmeasurable.

Google used to have Googlegeist when most everybody in the company would answer survey questions such as (rate 1-5):

* I am excited about my Product Area's strategic direction

* My Senior VP takes feedback seriously

* I plan to stay with the company for the next 3 years

The results would be summarized across Product Areas (e.g. Google Cloud, Youtube), and numbers compared year over year.

Then HR forced everyone to RTO, and mostly canceled this feedback outright to hide the wide discontent.

I choose to retire earlier than planned rather than return to the office. I retired last August at age 54. I got remarried in October and now spend my days managing a horse farm and restoration of a 1800s farm house which came with my wife. By managing I mean generally getting in the way of and annoying the actual farm manager and our general contractor. It beats commuting and sitting in an office all day.

I wonder if the divide has something to do with how much space and comfort a person has in their home. Someone who lives in an apartment with three kids and their in-laws might prefer office work more than someone who lives in a roomy house in the woods or suburbs.

RTO mandates are sometimes a simple action to a difficult issue that the company is not able to face.

In my case we now have a RTO mandate to work from office at least 2 days a week, which means staring at a screen and attending Teams meeting from office instead of from home (there has been no thought beyond "you have to be in office")

Why?

Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder. But apparently, it's due to WFH and the fact that management has been horrible, that the company has gone through several rounds of layoffs with massive reduction in headcount over the last few years, and that salaries have essentially been frozen for 3 years has nothing to do with it.

So, yes, CVs have been sent out.

> there has been no thought beyond "you have to be in office")

No thought?

> Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder.

Sounds like thought to me.

Hard to find a link with all the noise, but there was a big employer in Singapore that studied work from home well before COVID and started to switch to remote work because it made employees so much more productive. Yet this piece casually asserts "Against all expectations, remote workers appear to work harder and more productively than workers in traditional offices." The only people with these expectations were those who ignore the literature on productivity. Kind of sad that this seems to include most managers and workers in tech.

Is the advantage of 'close collaboration' worth the disadvantage of working in a glorified sweatshop? Give me an office and I'll come to the office.

My company has some positions that are work from home. Those who work from home receive $80/month for internet. So, by going into the office, I have to pay for my own home internet, gas and maintenance for the car, work clothing, etc. And that isn’t even including the time question (time to get ready, time to drive in and back home, time to find parking and walk in, time to find a place to sit, etc.)

So, having to work in the office is a pay cut.

Yes, for a brief time until your employer opens up those remote jobs to candidates in India, Argentina, Eastern Europe, etc. Then you'll see real pay cuts.

Evidence needed for this claim remote working "does away with" "office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings".

Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339852

Isn't a lot of the WFH/WFO debate centered around personal preferences? A lot of people like WFH but that doesn't mean there aren't also a lot of people who do actually like/prefer to be in the office.

Of course generally it's not up to them, instead up to the management who sets the office policy but to describe the people who don't like going to the office as 'the good ones' seems a little short sighted.

It appears very few people are privileged to be in a place for it to be a personal preference.

Like how the “I love Mondays” people are a rounding error.

Very few of the talented people with choices - already rare - are choosing that personal preference. And the other people that love it for the networking were not the talented people with choices, they are the ambitious juniors desperate to build rapport.

I'll take the controversial position and say that RTO (with a semi-flexible hybrid option for sudden appointments) is the best outcome.

Some context; during the pandemic, everyone suddenly had to do WFH, including uni studies. In my case, I did both an internship and my studies, so my main exposure to WFH is through this lens. WFH as a mandate policy ended when I got an actual job.

The main concerns when it comes to WFH I experienced are as follows:

1. Lack of commute means no hard checks on work-life separation. Commute sucks. It's also a period for your brain to turn off any association you still have with work, a period in which you're unreachable by anyone and in general helps you vent off the day's stress. It's also way too easy to overwork yourself without commute when you don't have to go home on time. With commute, there's a clear endpoint because the next bus is otherwise in an hour.

2. Complete collapse of social interactions. "Get friends" isn't so easy when most third spaces are unavailable (amped up by COVID as a "worst scenario" since they had to close, but they're declining on the whole), you've got introverted tendencies and in general your culture is becoming much more distant in terms of the barrier between "acquainted" and "friend" with casual interactions. Most people get their social interactions in a day from work and unless you're either living with family or friends, WFH won't change that. It just makes people depressed from what I can tell, something which statistics back up (although people who are hard on WFH usually try to blame this on other worldly ills, post-COVID measured a notable spike in mental issues and one that's somewhat settling now that RTO is a thing).

3. Productivity collapse and lack of oversight. Lack of oversight if you have a job with clear requirements, clear goals and clear means to achieve it is great. It completely fucking sucks if you're a junior or need to actively test and check up with other people in the office to see if something fits to desired spec/need to talk about why something doesn't logically fit spec. Email, Slack and Teams have a degree of formality in them that a simple "hey, can you look at this for a sec" when someone walks past your desk doesn't have. Especially during my internship, I noticed this problem as the lack of oversight kinda started to spin out of control after a while due to changing bosses and mediocre rapport with other employees at the company. Never unsolvable, but absolutely not good and I do have concerns with how well training up juniors into seniors (a basic part of career growth as you become experienced with the ins and outs of your job and learn what works) is going to go when direct interactions with seniors (who can rapidly answer institutional knowledge questions or know the "core tools" from the back of their head) are as low as they are with WFH.

One thing I have never seen mentioned is how organizations are dealing with IP theft such as source code. You could share IP with non employees such as a spouse by simply sharing your screen. It’s one thing to sign an NDA and another to have signed it but then inadvertent or intentional screen sharing is another.

I work in a highly regulated industry so not sure how this would work.

Showing a page of code do your wife is one thing, but stealing source code files is a complete other. Orgs are installing tools to track what you do and when you do it so that they can audit your actions. They might not be able to prevent you stealing the code but the evidence of your actions will be usable in a court of law when they make an example of you.

If you have never worked in a highly regulated industry such as defense or finance then I don’t think you would be so flippant over the data loss concerns.

I work in finance; if you came to me with these sorts of concerns I'd think you a paranoid lunatic.

Lock your screen when away from your desk, but no one is going to be pulling the secret sauce from your systems by occasionally going into your office to ask if you'd like a cuppa.

I get it - but I am not paranoid lol

This is coming from companies such as Lockheed Martin where working on tangentially related defense projects at home would be bad.

That's irrelevant. If you want, you will steal without leaving any trace. If Snowden could sneak out loads of documents from the CIA, no company would be able to keep their IP airtight. NDAs and good old trust are the only way.

Well no, we have DLP products, disabling of USB drives, preventing of printing, etc

All of those things could have prevented Snowden from leaking. He wasn’t a Remote Worker

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