Almost 50% would refuse job offer with no remote work option – survey
rte.ie
rte.ie
On second glance, though, employees also face a national market rather than a local one, and can be underbid for the job by anyone in the country. Maybe employers like that, and employees don't.
But maybe it's like this: WFH means that employees can leave more easily. If you work in the office, and you're in my town, there's only so many places you can go. I can mistreat you (bad bosses, bad raises, bad working conditions), and your options are somewhat limited, and you're more likely to stay. But if you're full remote, the whole country is open to you (without even a relocation), so you're more likely to not take it.
So I suspect that maybe bad bosses and bad companies want to avoid WFH, because remote employees are less constrained to put up with the bad conditions.
It seems funny to me how people always look for the ulterior motives and give basically no chance to the explanation CEOs give (collocation leads to a more productive organization).
Because it's horseshit, and everyone knows it. The only orgs that truly need colocation are those built around non-digital machines. Anything data based can be handled through one screen as well as another.
More likely to me is that many managers were coasting and not needing to actually track work, manage, etc. there’s a big pushback when they’re forced to actually do their job and not just rely on butts in seats.
Well no, there have been years of chances for those CEOs demonstrate their position. That's precisely why no one believes them anymore.
The problem for them is that there has been zero evidence for what they're saying. No one has been able to actually demonstrate these supposed benefits (or, more precisely, the supposed harms to productivity that WFH brings). You can see this in how their claims shifted over time: in the early days of the pandemic WFH shift they offered the productivity claims you note, but it soon became clear that there wasn't any evidence for that. Then the claims shifted to vaguer, non-measurable ones about office culture and exchanges of ideas. When that didn't really convince anyone it finally shifted to "you have to because we said so".
So you're getting it precisely backwards: it's the proponents of returning to the office that now offer theories of conspiracies and secret data that totally support these moves but somehow can't be shown to anyone.
That's not exactly true per se. My wife is from the country of Tunisia and my plan was to live and work from there, but once I got to the offer stage at each and every company said I must work within the US citing IRS regulations. While I'm not entirely clear why I've also seen a number of remote jobs that are only eligible in certain states within the US as well.
The kind of work that can be done remotely (programming, design, sales, etc) and the kind they can’t (retail, weird bosses and extroverts who feel they must be in office).
So it makes sense that 50% won’t consider. I recruited for some software dev positions recently and applicants said that non-remote offices were just a different philosophy.
I know of at least one company with an RTO drive but leased the office, and the land owner doesn't have external shareholders. Also the company paid for quite a snack supply, so backsides in seats actively cost a relatively small but still not trivial amount of money.
It could be a non metric cost vs a metric cost. They RTO and deadlines slip but they can blame that on anything. Versus losses on the balance sheet from real estate holdings. I don’t necessarily think the real estate theory is right, but I do think calculations like that happen all the time by tech execs.
I think though there is a network of decision makers that when you take into account this high dimension of decision variables, there is an emergent alignment of self interest towards the office.
I work for a very small company and of course no one comes into the office. We are small enough and lack enough of those variables that we don't have to perform this office theater like bigger firms. The bigger firms don't really have a choice when you sum all the inputs.
This is the most echoed, low-effort theory repeated over and over on places like Reddit.
The vast, vast majority of people I know who want to return to the office have absolutely nothing to do with commercial real estate.
If you put any effort into the theory at all it immediately falls apart.
Some people just like working in the office.
edit: Come to think of it, I understand the why. Up until now, it was all about 'productivity and collaboration'. The change in rationale would be rather jarring.
No doubt. This isn't a one-size-fits-all thing. Some people absolutely love working in the office. Some people just prefer it. Others have a garbage home office and will never have any home setup conducive to work. I 10000% agree with this, and anyone who says otherwise is being dreadfully foolish.
That doesn't explain even a little bit why folks who do not like (or even very, very strongly dislike) coming into the office are being threatened, are getting cut off from any and all promotions, or even being fired for continuing to work from their home office.
> If you put any effort into the theory [that the "force everyone to come into the office with threats of removal from the promotion track, or removal from one's position" situation that's ongoing may be related to plummeting commercial real estate valuations and attempts to prop them up] at all it immediately falls apart.
Your anecdotes don't support this claim.
I'm a SWE, and we went from full office to full remote for about 6 months when covid hit. I didn't particularly like working fully remote, and went back and have been back at the offices full time since then.
To me the benefits massively outweigh the negatives. Mostly commute tbh. It just feels more human to me in a world where it feels like your entire life revolves around work. 10 hour days between work, lunch, commute, etc. weekends are full of chores that I didn’t have time to do during the week. Balance is way out of whack, to me personally.
I live in NYC and go into the office two days a week, which honestly suits my lifestyle just great. But I used to pay for a monthly metrocard, now I pay (much less per month) per ride. Mass transit requires a certain level of ridership in order to be sustainable. In 2023 that subway ridership was at 68% of pre-pandemic levels so not the disastrous drop-off some feared but still a significant drop. Should these trends continue governments are going to have to find some way to equity between lower income workers that must travel to their job and higher income remote workers. Likely taxing the latter, which will be very unpopular.
Better civics education should be able to overcome this vieled "fuck you, I got mine" attitude. Richer cities already subsidize rural areas, and rural areas support cities with non-monetary benefits like food. Politicians shouldn't be able to so easily divide us when we need to support each other.
Most urban value is exploited by exurban and suburban population, while paying very little tax towards urban upkeep.
Similarly, small up-state cities rely on the central 'bread-winner' city while overwhelmingly voting against QOL improvements for that city in state legislature.
Rural areas don't factor in too much.
Only in the US can it be acceptable for the city's governing body to live outside city bounds. There is an absence of basic incentive alignment and the outcomes show that.
Congestion pricing, limiting free parking, mandating weaker housing restrictions around regional transit, etc. are tried and tested ways for cities to get their due.
The cities are at fault too. NYC's insistence on housing 100k+ illegal immigrants in manhattan's 3 star hotels is a self inflicted wound. NYC isn't the worst, but I started making a self-inflicted wound list for west coast cities, then we'd be here for a long time.
Honestly, US are badly managed in general. However, produce so much economic value that they're able to brute force their way out of the mismanagement.
Knowing history, brute force only goes so far....
edit: replied to the wrong person. This was meant for a child comment. But point still stands.
Other people whose jobs could only be done on-site were deemed essential enough to require them to work, but not essential enough to be treated with minimal decency by the public, and a lot of those people never want to be in that position again.
Imagine being a machinist where you get barely serviceable tools at work, versus a fully-equipped custom workshop at home. For me, this isn't about Covid and recent events — it's the end state of a work environment that has seen decades of dismantling.
What the article actually says is that nearly half of Irish jobseekers claim they would refuse a job offer with no remote option.
(It's not US-only, by any means, and info about Ireland is not something we ignore because "nobody cares about that". But it's reasonable to point out that this is not data from the conditions that most people here assume by default.)
Or perhaps they do!
Now that you ask, I'm also not sure of the source of that statistic. I'm pretty sure dang knows, but he may not be the source of the information. It may have just been someone's informed guess, or uninformed guess for that matter.
I do know that there are lots of people not from the US here, and that you shouldn't assume, for example, that English is someone's first language. Also shouldn't assume US vs England even for native English speakers (so don't attempt to "correct" British spelling).