I was wondering if anyone here went through this and actually left because RTO was enforced. How did you go through it all? appreciate any feedback.
But the job market is really shit. In the past I've left jobs and got new offers in a week. This time around I was out of work for almost three months.
I'm curious as to what your experience was when chatting with recruiters while job-hunting about being fully remote? Did you next company advertize as remote-first?
The job I eventually got is fully remote.
I begged for permission to work remote when a family member got sick. I was reluctantly granted it, but they lined up my replacement behind my back. Luckily I trust no one in this business so I jumped ship before they fired me.
Unfortunate circumstances as I liked the people but didn't like going in to an office every day to work remote.
Current job started out 3/2 hybrid but full RTO is being mandated by the end of the month. Not looking forward to it.
I checked linkedin a few times and it seems remote jobs are decreasing for some reason.
What I don’t understand is why companies don’t seem to accept the obvious cost savings involved with remote work. I just can’t imagine that even hypothetically losing 10-20% productivity is worth paying office rent for. I thought the work from home studies were pretty conclusive that productivity wasn’t lost at all!
The weird thing is, I’m sure many people here would likely take a pay cut over RTO.
If only we used this monumental opportunity to rethink how we need to collaborate and design cities to support or even embrace remote work models.
Instead, back to concrete jungles and mind numbingly sitting in traffic or being herded from one stop to the next.
The tricky thing is if you have the office you gotta have space for a lot of people, even if the "ideal" amount might be a smaller space that would just feel fuller in hybrid environments.
In a recent Kojima Productions video, Kojima said something like "yeah we have the new office... please come in everyone!" It's an uphill battle, accentuated by people putting offices in places where you are doing close to office XOR low rent.
Or there’s the tried and true explanation that it’s just micromanagers who want play power games with their employees.
The senior leadership team member can’t really conceptualize a world where an individual doesn’t sacrifice their entire personal life for work, so hearing that an employee has time to do laundry makes them think that it’s anti-productivity to be home.
Everyone thinks they are the good employee that doesn’t need to be managed thank you very much. Yet every manager has seen employees that produce very little if they aren’t constantly managed.
And every manager thinks they’re a good manager, too!
How many developers work in a companies where achieving a S.M.A.R.T. goal related to their output will result in a defined positive outcome (bonus, promotion, salary increase, title/level increase, stock grant)?
I’ve never seen a software development team be given an incentive like “deliver XYZ feature with less than N defects by datetime to receive a performance bonus of $10,000/1,000 shares.”
I have worked at a grand total of zero companies where anything close to this was the case. For me, every company has made equity into a joke, performance reviews into “you will always be a 3 unless you turn water into wine,” and significant raises regarding high performance merely match inflation.
I thought that we were beyond the illusion that micromanaging works. All it does is produce employees who create illusions of productivity beyond a minimum standard. These illusions will exist whether they’re in an office or not.
It’s as simple as making sure your boss likes you. There’s really no output difference between the mouse jiggler working at home and the salaryman staying late but pretending to work, taking care to leave after the boss leaves.
Meanwhile, the sales team has a grand total of zero people who are slacking off because their salary is on a commission. Every ounce of extra work is potential to earn more money. But for the engineering team the company has a perpetual surprised pikachu face when they find out that employees are just doing the bare minimum to stay off the firing radar despite having no tangible incentive to do otherwise.
"Well I appreciate you were paid X as a senior dev in your last role, but the compensation range for this more JUNIOR role is Y".
The difficulty is that folks that had agreements with their management prior to Covid about flexible working arrangements were nullified with Apple's RTO. So, if M and F was your arrangement prior to Covid and your org chose T-W-Th, too bad. Badge-swipes are being tracked and upper management is applying pressure to managers to get their people in the office, regardless of individuals' needs.
So, yeah, it's technically hybrid, but extremely rigid.
Going full time remote is also significantly harder now, as it must be approved by an SVP on an individual basis.
Any of this may have changed in the months since I left, but I've not heard of anything changing from my colleagues that are still there.
Yet we did just fire one guy for claiming he was still active on a project that was put into maintenance mode 6 months ago. Some people are not mature enough to handle managing their own time.
Personally, the office space was a cost only second to labor, and people would have to be epically unproductive to offset the operational savings. =)
Competent people switch jobs, while incompetent are fired, and the mediocrity stays and grudgingly conforms which is exactly what companies want - authority over the interchangeable cogs in the machine.
It wasn't the entire decision, but a large part of it was seeing people who live near an office being forced to return.
I wasn't likely to impacted anytime soon given I lived no where near an office and was working as a contractor, but I've seen it before where once you have a mix of people in office and others working remotely the remote workers tend to become second class citizens. I had this happen at a previous position where I was often left out of meetings and discussion I should have been in I suspect because people in the office saw it as bothersome to bring a laptop with video conference me in.
I left for a remote-first company a month ago. I didn't want to return to office, but I to be honest I wouldn't have minded that much if I lived close. I just wasn't in that position.
After the pandemic we all got an RTO mandate and I found a new, fully remote, job within a month.
The director of the department I was in at the original employer told me she would not be ‘grassing’ on me for not going to the office but it didn’t sit right with me so I left.
After all that I made sure that my current contract has an addendum clearly stating I can:
1. Be fully remote
2. Work my hours whenever I want as long as my core responsibilities are met
3. Work from anywhere in the world.
I’ll be honest, it is great I have that not but it does make finding a new job a bit harder as I am not willing to sacrifice the freedom I’ve earned here.
Probably a good move on your part
1&2 are non-negotiable
I can't imagine all/most discussion async. I much prefer things to get discussed and resolved quickly, rather than having a back-and-forth of 10 messages last days because people are out of sync.
For me it’s not doing the “syncs” in a specific time. I huddle up with a coworker if I need something figured out. If the person I need to talk to isn’t there I talk to the next person with the closest experience in what I need to do.
This makes collaboration a lot more effective and organic for me instead of trying to fill in a 30’ slot.
It went like this, paraphrased:
Hi boss, I don't think that avoiding any form of social contact is good for me. Since it's clear that this is now the new expected working environment, I am resigning effective immediately. Toodles!
I guess it'd be a bit like that but the other way around.
But for people for whom work is life and what little social interaction they get is at work you're strongly RTO because that's your lifeline.
And our current CEO moved states for this job and he's lonely as fuck so our office went RTO.
I enjoyed the social interaction in my job and it didn't really affect my ability to see friends and family after work or at the weekend.
Since WFH became commonplace most of them have moved out of the city so it's actually harder now because my friends live all over the place.
It also feels like people are less likely to go out in general now.
My comment was more about the fact that I just think that social distancing was a load of bollocks and that we could have just gone to work with some people WFH as before and gotten the same end result.
Current job does 2-3 days hybrid too, but it's more like synchronised days. If you can't make it, or if you're more productive at home, nobody yells at you to. Many people love working in person, but even the most extroverted ones don't like being forced to, especially when they're also under pressure to get work done.