A WFH 'culture war' has broken out across Europe
fortune.com
fortune.com
Good. We have been forced to do things your way until now. Now times have changed. You do things our way. Take your ten minute talk about kid soccer elsewhere and let me work.
Otherwise, we'd just be remote first and spend that amount of money on hiring.
But then again, we might get a better offer hiring Israelis or Indians (5-10 year tax holidays depending on the region)
It's local government that makes these incentives at the end of the day.
Anyhow, we only hire Israeli, Indian, Czech, Romanian, Pole, etc engineers because of the right mix of talent and salary arbitrage compared to American talent.
I might be completely off base here, but they seem to be providing some incentives that exceed the incentives that cities in the States provide companies since the US hasn't been able to stop the trend entirely.
Or is it something in the Dutch culture that finds remote work off-putting?
Instead of disputing that, I'll just reply: "It might not be the best way for you, but it's definitely the best way for me, so I'll pick only those companies that offer remote roles, and I'll do my best working for them because I appreciate WFH much more than money". Incidentally, in my niche top-paid roles are remote only.
During peak pandemic there were parallels drawn between areas of high individualism and higher chance of ignoring quarantine, lockdown, and masking laws (or guidelines).
This makes logical sense to me: "rules for thee and rules for me" is a very individualist way of looking at things.
Meanwhile all the people I know who are more interested in remote work also happen to have been way above average when it comes to following guidelines and (this is an important distinction) not solely for their own wellbeing (ALA collectivism).
Anyway - personal observation only, but seems really off to me. Perhaps on average it's still correct and I'm in a fringe bubble!
---
Other commenters' mention of introvert vs. Extrovert sparked something:
To each type, the others' behaviour can seem selfish (perhaps even to the point of seeming like they're hyper-individualists with no care for the greater good)
- being able to live in a nice natural place, with a good climate and so on, not in a dense city;
- being able to avoid wasting energy and health to commute, getting myself uselessly busy in such activities;
- having a larger market, at least a nationwide one, with more potential competition but also more offers;
- being able to evolve. Something I can't do perpetrating past models, that have had very good reasons to be in the past, where doing certain things was needed, but they have no more reasons now;
- being MORE social, IRL, separating work and life, instead of navigate a sea of unknowing humans, most of them isolated in the crowd with noise-canceling devices and macrobugs aka smartphones to better avoid the others.
I choose a technical path because I want to explore, create something new even if that's happen rarely compared to the ordinary things. Even if it's hard and demand failures and sacrifices. I do not call that individualism vs collectivism I call simply love for tech and science vs love for a certain kind of business. It's an absurd waste of time, energy, health to commute simply because financial capitalism needs to sell ready made ultra-processed food, mobile macro-bugs as status symbols and so on. It's a nonsense build big buildings that we use for less than 12h/day moving all around them for the rest of the time just to be exposed to physicals ads (that's are shop windows, not only physical ads).
That's not collectivism because the collective are the flock of sheep, while the shepherds are away and decide. Remember "in 2030 you'll nothing" means that the publisher count to own anything, witch is far from a collective society vs an individualist one.
Wasn't where I was coming from at all.
My personal opinions on the matter are skewed as I have worked remotely (home, overseas, or while on the move) for more of my career than not. But that's still personal preference and I'm not going to pretend my opinion is some objective truth.
The point I was drilling into in my original comment was something specifically mentioned in the article which I found intriguing: the potentially misleading correlation between societies deemed "individualist" and the fallacious presupposition that one can only be a team player when physically collocated.
It's never going to be a simple answer - some people yearn for the open plan office, some wish they had a private office (but still at work), some wish they were at home exclusively.
The dangerous thing (which intrigues me just slightly more than it makes me uncomfortable) is when people start saying one way or the other is "right" (or worse, implying that one is selfish and the other selfless)
I've my own take, and I could easily make arguments for the opposing view - but far more interested in the meta-conversations than the bluster.
Having "the quid" who makes humans doing something even if they dislike it is a classical need of those who rule others, because there are regularly situations where is needed and totally "free" people, specially those who understand less what they are doing and why, might decide not to do something suddenly. The geographical vinculum, the regular physical proximity might help form such "quid", sentiment that push humans to act together, but in a modern world such need is just a sign of incompetent management who fail to "make a team" without certain helpers. Workers are not soldiers and daily work is not a war, any company need a certain environment and slack to compensate various situations without needing such techniques. Companies who operate without that have a bad future and if they perform well now it's just a temporary thing. A society who perform like that is a society doomed to fail quickly anyway. In the end it's not different than those who prefer the office because at home they have unpleasant situations, it's a kind of patch to retard a bit the outcome, not a solution.
Now if it's a war in the office, managers need to pick a side and the freedom is reduced even if you get some WFH days or whatever.
Full remote is a whole other can of worms.
Well, if you're slacking you can be fired, it doesn't matter if you work from home or from the office.
It would be great if it wasn't a war, just measure output or equivalent objective measures, but like religion (which wars have also been fought over), belief systems die hard. Mental models are rigid, emotional health is not always available to everyone, and so on. Loss of third spaces doesn't help, and your cohort of workers who demand in office time because that is the only socialization they get (or those who are fleeing their home life by going to work) also contribute to the friction.
Similarly someone who do work less at home typically is someone who can't be productive anyway, who sell his/her own time/presence but not much competence, again that's not always true but I'm pretty confident it's true in the mean.
However the real war is not about being remote or in person, but live in cities vs live outside, because with WFH as the way to work for all eligible jobs the big of real estate go bankrupts quickly, similarly many bit tech service player like Uber, Just Eat and so on, together with the cloud+mobile model. The rest is marginal.
Some do like the office because they have tough familiar situations and being "separated" for a significant part of the day means for them have a way to keep their family, witch sounds good for them, but IMVHO it's just a way to torture themselves more, some other do like the office simply because they can't afford a good home and they have a better setup in the office, again it's not a good thing to have IMVHO but all such examples are marginal.
If you live on mountains you do not use Uber for trips, you do not buy ready made food via Just Eat and so on. Big of real estate discovering that no one want big glass coated, hyper energivore towers but nice homes and homes are private business there is no much slack to bribe the public and craft big money affairs, in the end spread people OWN something so the 2030 "you'll own nothing" agenda fails. The rent-all, all is a service model fails.
Those who really want the RTO do not care at all about the office, but the surrounding. If people realize that things will change faster.
WFH really doesn't change this that much. I remember offices where half the people were fucking around on Facebook at their office workstations, pretty much all day when they weren't in meetings. Or talking about Sportsball in the break room.
Foreign Tech Companies get tax holidays from the Czech, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, etc governments if we invest $2-5mil in an office AND can prove that we have at least 15-20 employees working in that office, so we need to force employees in the office otherwise there's no point having a presence there.
The Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian workers are much less pushy about it as well.
They were paid on the higher end of Czechia TCs
> don't let the door hit you on the way out
Most of the high TC companies across Eastern Europe required hybrid so there aren't many options if you want to be remote first - we get tax holidays from the Czech, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, etc government if we invest $2-5mil in an office AND can prove that we have at least 15-20 employees working in that office.
It's hard to justify high wages when fully remote means you are competing globally.
The Czech office itself expanded as a reaction to finding out that remote productivity between the US and abroad was comparable.
Going remote first means you are competing with a global market, but being hybrid means you at least have facetime with leaders, and stuff does get done faster when dealing with cross-dependencies.
And ime, I saw the rise of the same kind of anti-techie disgust in a lot of Eastern Europe that I saw in the US.
It's hard for most people in a country where median household incomes are around $10k-20k/yr to empathize with employees earning $50-100k/yr who want to not go into a fully furnished office with catered food, events, and mentorship 2-3 days a week when most other employees earn a fraction working in a car factory or tending bar for drunk stag partiers while rents reach Dallas levels.
The reality is you scramble to find a workstation and are cramped in a tiny room with 10 others, there is no way to concentrate and be productive; catered food that is barely edible for humans and horrible for the environment; not sure what you mean by events, except pointless ones that are scheduled after work, so basically unpaid work; and mentorship don’t make me laugh.
As I stated above I’m more than happy to work in a different industry than tech, it’s toxic af, the workload is high and growing and ultimately most tech companies are nothing than managers of rich peoples money and don’t provide any value to humans.
Freedom means risks, hard situations, hazards, but also opportunity and being able to walk on their own feet instead of being at the mercy of someone else. One reasons our society implode is that so many have traded short-time benefits other long times goals and as a results we are all LESS stable than before.
We want better pay too but the income gap widens.
Most comments tend to be partisan on one side or another, but some are still insightful and help other reasoning. Some publish studies about specific aspects of various working models, collected data on various experience, they are good to reason as well.
The signal/noise ratio is also good as well, because show the current level of social polarization/fracture and help to understand the reasons behind.
...That said - whilst it's a legitimate hot topic for our industry, I'd still trade it all in for more of those classic and insightful threads on obscure algorithms. (The ones seemingly populated entirely with folk who figuratively - or sometimes literally - wrote the book)
What we in the US do in a day, takes them about 2 weeks to do. Such is the wild difference.
What "things" ?