The workers have spoken: They're staying home
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a productivity hit on a good day, but they're extra awful when every day it's a new set of voices to learn to tune out, and another half hour spent packing and unpacking all your shit, adjusting computer monitors to minimize glare from the overhead fluorescent lights, etc. And, if you want to actually take advantage of the co-location, 15-30 minutes spent figuring out where all your collaborators are sitting today, and scrambling for meeting rooms and huddle spaces, which are now in high demand since collaborators can no longer sit together in any sort of stable way and must instead fight for huddle space if they want to do any in-person collaboration. Alternatively you spend the entire day with headphones on (uncomfortable!) because you decide not to do that, and instead spend the whole day on team meetings because it's easier. And even headphones when you're not actively in meetings because everyone around you makes the same decision.
A couple years ago, I was eager for a return to office. That died pretty quickly after return to office happened, because the reality is that we're not returning to anything. Office life post-COVID is an entirely new thing that's worse than what office life was like pre-COVID in almost every way. And so the mandatory in-office days are, in practice, just the days that fully remote team members need to cut the hybrid members some slack for not being able to get anything done.
I'm so glad I no longer have anything to do with those clowns.
If I want to get a snack, I have to end up walking fifteen minutes to a cafeteria in another building, get it, and then walk back. That cafeteria is also the cafeteria that most people eat lunch in, so half of my lunch break is gone just walking there and back.
No wonder why nobody wants to come back - I have better snacks, food, and coffee at home and it takes me less than five minutes to grab some.
We actually have an office. It’s over an hour commute away from me. And I have school-aged children that I have to prepare and drop off in the mornings. None of my co-workers work there. So I basically never go.
At my last job I did have an office that was within walking distance. My children were much younger. I had a dedicated desk and office. And I managed to make it in every day.
Commutes are a big factor in the decision. For a lot of reasons. Climate, expense, convenience, etc.
There's a part of me that wonders if part of what's going on here is a cadre of genxers who are so wealthy as to necessarily be out-of-touch don't realize that typical millennials' and zoomers' socioeconomic reality is not, and cannot reasonably be forced to be, similar to that of boomers and the greatest generation.
A lot of people did move to Manhattan for finance. But most left after they gained partners and kids.
In general, I suspect a lot of younger/better-educated/wealthier folks have latched onto some of the more elite cities, when they might not have done so in the past, but may not stay there over time.
For example, if you lived in Mountain View in walking distance of Google, would you turn down an offer from Facebook because your home in Mountain View is no longer walking distance to Facebook HQ?
Also, life situations. If your partner has a job at a school or hospital that requires physical presence whose commute do you prioritize?
Making jobs that can be remote, remote gives workers massive flexibility in work arrangements with partners as well as being able to change jobs.
We lost that space and switched to a lab about 10 minutes away. It's amazing what a difference that made! We go in more often because the psychological cost is so much lower.
We could have rented lab space that is less than 5 minutes' walk for me, but no such luck.
There's your first mistake.
You're right that recent trends have been bad, but offices have always been like this. There's a reason "this meeting could have been an email" has been a cliche for decades now and even before that the office was generally depicted as a place where you either pretend to work or desperately struggle to get work done in the face of endless pointless bullshit.
What? My workplace pre-covid assigned us 1-2 person offices and had a handful of dedicated meeting rooms. If someone was having a loud conversation in the hallway you'd either close your door or ask them to move to a meeting room. It was almost as easy to focus there and then as it is in my home office now.
The company I'm at now has an open floorplan with no assigned seats. The few employees who are actually in the office are often on calls with people at one of our other locations. There are enough people who do this that there aren't enough meeting rooms for everyone to take a call in private.
2nd was a WeWork building. open office room, but the arrangement had plenty of private booths (sharing the floor with like, one other startup) or lounges depending on your needs.
then 3 was mid pandemic and the return was a lot more of that "reserve your desk" style. It was a "true hybrid" workplace, though (0-5 days a week in office. Your choice, zero pressure), so it was only during certain big deadlines where it'd cause difficulties.
My employer mandated a minimum number of days in-office per week and then implemented the flex desk system with all of the drawbacks that you outlined. In my company's case it's a little worse: There are, in fact, often no available open desks in my workgroup. Furthermore there's no enforcement or discipline with respect to day-of desk reservations.
So this means that about half a dozen employees have permanently camped out at a "flex" desk, essentially claiming them for their own. Everyone I guess "knows" that those aren't real flex desks in practice, or at least nobody wants to stand out as the asshole who kicks Richard off his de-facto personal desk.
For the desks that aren't permanently camped nobody bothers to use the online tool to actually reserve them. They just show up at some point during the day, and if there's no jacket on the chair or backpack under the desk or something, they just sit down at it and start using it. If you reserve the desk in the tool before coming into the office often you'll arrive to find someone sitting there who hasn't bothered to use the tool to reserve it. So then you don't have a desk at all and need to camp out in a common area on your laptop, surrounded by 3 or 4 other people blabbing away on Zoom calls.
If you confront them to kick them off the desk they'll usually move, but that's a really uncomfortable thing to do and makes you look a little like a bully to everyone around. "Dude, you snooze you lose. Dick got there first. Why don't you just go to the common area where all the other late-coming slackers have to go?"
It's a productivity hellscape that I do everything in my power to avoid. I've resorted to dropping by the office a few times a week just to badge in and grab a bite to eat from the microkitchen so that I show up in the query that management runs once a quarter to make sure everyone's badging in often enough. I also make it a point to walk prominently by several other desks and saying "hi" to people to give the illusion that I'm "in the office" on a semi-regular basis.
The first time management tries to turn the screws to deal with my behavior I'm triggering my plan to move on to a role in another company that's fully remote.
My last job, at the office it was so loud (no dedicated conference rooms) that I was better off being at home, but unfortunately they also had zero respect for calendars, so getting in touch with people was... pretty much horrible no matter what way. In-office was less bad.
I had offices with desks so small and shitty I just wished for working from home at a normal desk. I once had a boss that saw my desk and started complaining to HR that it was too big, and if we can split this desk into 2 to save on office space.
TL;DR - works sucks. It sucks more when management can't get their shit together.
Wow, your boss is a real dickhead.
Yes. Yes he was. He felt that a half-sized ikea desk was too much space for people and needed to sardeen people into a room as tightly as possible.
ooh, I know the perfect way to save on office space...
as is the theme of 2023/4, Companies want to pretend they want X, but then make X as miserable as possible because the real reason is Y (anywhere from taxes, to sunk cost fallacy, to lack of trust in workers, etc).
It was bad.
If you're required to hot desk you might as well do it someplace more pleasant.
This is often overlooked. Humans are weird about making spaces our "own." The emotional response to a blank desk versus the same desk, in the same place, surrounded by the same people but with some nonsense bauble--or houseplant you're torturing--that makes it your own is massive.
Yep. Now, on any given day, half the office is at home. So, even if you're there, you probably still need to use Zoom for meetings or collaboration. At that point, why? I don't like Zoom but if I have no choice I might as well be at home and not commuting in to a half-empty office.
I still find some value in working at work. I find it easier to focus, I'm not distracted by household tasks and activities. But I could achieve that by just getting out of the house, going to Starbucks, or a co-working space, or the park. I don't need a permanent office to go to.
I'm jealous! For me, the office is where it's hard to focus. Once or twice a week, I even give up on getting anything done at all during the workday and just warm my seat, making up for the lost time at home that evening.
Yeah, this is a real noodle scratcher. WTH is the logic here?
Commute is certainly an important aspect, too, but when I worked in the place that adopted an open office layout, I lived a literal 10 minute walk away. Having such a trivial (and pleasant) commute in no way made up for having to work in those conditions.
We're moving to an open plan office design, to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity.
Also, please don't talk to people at their desks, it's very distracting. Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation.
I wish you the best, but if history is any guide then the result will be less collaboration and a decrease in productivity.
Which history? Rome and Sparta had profligate (for the time) public benefits and didn’t do much worse for the wear.
Of course, the actual goal is cost reduction, and on that count, I think the effort is a success.
But act fast, the next available slot is in two weeks, assuming an exec doesn't claim the room for that full day that morning.
Having a low stress reverse commute on 280, one of the bay area's most scenic highways, probably also helps.
Oh, and the chairs make my arse* hurt.
This isn't a stupid little startup either, it's a listed and profitable company worth billions.
I stay because they know how bad it is so I just go in a few times per month to socialise.
(* Please forgive the lewd British slang).
COVID gave people or in many cases made people re-evaluate what's important to them and many people concluded that their work-life balance placed too much importance on work. People had been thinking, what parts of their life were they willing to give up for work, but now the question of what parts of work are they willing to give up for their life is considered a valid, and possible decision.
This decision wasn't made in the abstract; WFH gave people real experience in what they would gain and lose by not going into the office, and what they would gain and lose by not commuting, and in many many cases, the tradeoff was worth it.
Open office is also just horrendous.
It could, but my initial assessment is that US workers tend to not make the connection that a reduced social safety net raises the stakes of employment and results in workers eventually playing a game of chicken sacrificing aspects of their quality of life like vacation, commute, and environment for job security.
If you force me to hot desk I will come into work as infrequently as possible and may or may not be "present" for work whether I'm at home or in the shared-space environment at the office.
But the "fully present" metric doesn't show up on the bean counters' spreadsheets as a quantifiable metric, so here we are.
This is what I find so funny. We accomplished more in the two years of full remote than any period before or since. Half the company now runs on software built during that time. But management refuses to acknowledge the fact, and mandated RTO.
I am 100% convinced that a full remote team can run circles around the same team in-office. Probably we will see a new crop of startups eating people's lunch that haven't figured this out.
This informed my new hypothesis: The people most in opposition to remote work are those who rely on charisma rather than other merits to remain relevant. They're losing the ground on which they have an advantage.
They tend to be tall and with a voice that carries well over a crowd.
That’s because while workers discovered they were working better at home, middle management discovered that they were useless and had nothing other to do than exert some control over workers lives.
They’re just afraid upper management may notice it.
I wonder how this would look like if Microsoft's stock were to be doing poorly. I seem to have noticed a strong correlation between companies being all for FWH and other perks, as long as "line goes UP", but the moment it stops going up, for factors unrelated to the workforces' performance, then they start tightening the screws on the workers: RTO, layoffs, etc.
I'm not sure a WLB issue with one company is reflective of the tech industry as a whole. If anything, it seems the tech industry is much more accommodating to the needs of flexibility than other similarly paying industries like medicine, law, finance, etc. That, in and of it self raises an issue with modern work culture. There's currently a bit of a panic happening amongst those who study demographics. People are having less kids, and the pressures of modern living are part of the problem. I think the only way you're going to turn that trend around is by being way more flexible with and accommodating with workers. Either WLB gets better, or demographic collapse gets worse. Modern society has some choices to make.
We actually saw a very bimodal split: One group of employees had virtually no measurable change (neither improvement or decline) in any metric, subjective or otherwise.
The other group's productivity plummeted by nearly all metrics (again, from subjective performance reviews to any objective measures we looked at).
The angry internet comment section solution is to fire everyone in group #2 (people who can't work from home), but that group was large enough that no amount of firing or intensive coaching was going to turn the ship around.
The problem isn't as simple as you read about on internet comment sections. In my experience, it's good to have some remote employees but the WFH dynamic collapses when you try to let everyone do it. It's not appropriate for everyone. Normalize having some remote employees while requiring others to be in the office if they can't handle WFH. It's hard.
We talk about this, but also never particularly talk about how many an office space isn't for everyone. Especially as Gen Z, who grew up with smart tech and instant, HD remote communication, starts to enter the workforce.
I'd say you simply have to choose one or the other per team. If it doesn't work for some, move teams or fire them. It's not like management doesn't make unoptimal, undesirable moves all the time so this situation isn't special.
I’m actually ok with RTO, but I’m not going to do it when there are no actual upsides because it’s only some days and the team is spread across the globe.
"But everyone needs to collaborate!". In my friend's case, there was no one from his unit in this state - everyone he collaborated with were already 'remote' (mostly CA, and we're in NC, but I think there were some other folks in other states too).
The more places get rid of workers the more the pendulum swings giving more power to the companies over their employees and who they hire.
A lot of tech worker primadonnas who have not seen the ugly politics of downsizing, right sizing, and outsourcing are going to have a tough time, as companies won't be bending over to hire folks anymore. The possibility of being unemployed not by choice, for a few weeks, until a phone call is made and a new job awaits, but as a reality for months.
The attitude that "I QUIT if I have to the office", might encounter "Good, we need to reduce headcount anyway".
The tech worker primadonnas vastly overestimats their own value to the company.
When X had mass layoffs, the general consensus for some techies was that X would die in a months' time, with all the essential people who had lost their jobs. I dont have any inside information in X and they may well have had disasters but they do appear to still exist and still function. (Or so it seems to me, but I dont even have an account)
I dont like this. I dont want it to happen. but I have been around for a couple of cycles of seeing the pendulum swing one way then the other.
Lots of people have been saying this forever, but the truth is much more nuanced: tech workers are incredibly valuable IF interest rates are low.
Look at the revenue per employee figures of most tech companies. The difficulty is that the value of tech workers tends to be speculative until they've delivered something, and the low rates give them more time to deliver.
Just look at the Twitter example. There are many others. Facebook has been thinning resources as well.
There is consensus that major tech companies had hired resources they did not need.
Then there is the sad fact that some tech workers (as in any field) are shit at their jobs and provide negative value to companies. More are mediocre. (again as in every field)
There are also a lot of techworkers who are good at their jobs and some that are excptional at it.
So no. The statement: "Tech workers are incredibly valuable" is far too broad and generic.
There were some that enjoyed it, of course. Also, most everyone in the office loved using Teams to stay connected and it's still used for everything even after we've been back in office for years at this point.
But not everyone lives in an environment where they can just set up a chair on the deck and sip wine while they work on their items for the sprint.
It was a pretty easy sell getting workers back in the office for us. It helped that most people lived less than a 10 minute drive away.
That one product manager who posted a TikTok of her working by the pool has completely distorted people's view of what WFH is.
One of the tech companies where I live had a problem where a lot of parents who got to WFH went on to cancel their daycare. They thought they'd save a lot of money by watching the kids while they worked.
Companies were really lenient about kids at home for a while when daycares were frequently closed due to COVID. Some people saw this and thought it was an invitation to have their kids home all the time.
It went about as well as you'd expect.
When you're working from home, you yourself have to treat it as being "at work" just as much as you expect others to.
This means that if both parents are working from home, you still need someone else to look after your kids. Either out-of-home daycare (preferred) or an in-home babysitter.
There is your problem. Personal automobiles aren't a feasible method of transportation past a certain population density.
> congested, underbuilt roads
The choices really are two: subway (or any dedicated rail thing) or car.
While if they run in dedicated lanes there is a counterbalance: the more people drive the worse traffic is, making the bus a comparatively better option, making people drive less... :)
You’re right that they aren’t much use if they get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.
Every bus lane you build is ~800 cars you don't have to deal with in traffic, assuming an approximately two hour rush hour
These countries have been doing this for a long time.
I would never dare to do so where I lived before: I'd almost certainly be a blob of blood and guts splattered on the road by now.
It's infuriating how little thought is given to anything that is not a road for The Car. Billions of taxpayer money spent on massive road construction and repair but god forbid we build bike paths for 1/20th of the cost and 1/100th of the upkeep.
If biking works for you, where you are, great. But it's at best a pretty small part of the solution.
In the Netherlands kids bike everywhere with their friends, because it's safe and comfortable to do so. If they want to play sports they grab their bikes and go, they don't have to sit in traffic for 45mins in the back of their parents SUV. The Netherlands also has some of the happiest children on earth according to studies. Go figure :)
Ironically that makes cycling a much better choice for people who aren't fit. Finally something where being lazy gives you an advantage.
Raising the heart rate much faster is also part of a better self-regulation of a fit person.
- If a safe, reliable bus or train went to and from close to my house to close to the office, I'd take it. Key is safe and reliable.
- If the roads were designed with enough capacity and planning in mind such that groups of vehicles are not stuck driving 15 MPH on a 70 MPH speed limit stretch of highway for 30 minutes or longer every day, that'd be fine.
- If zoning laws/tax laws/whatever were such that it would be easier to build away from yet close to city centers and have smaller or additional offices closer to where people live, that'd work for me.
- If city apartments were in reach costwise or even somehow subsidized by my employer in an equitable way (don't really know how that would look), and crime was not an issue, I would consider moving within walking distance of my workplace.
> Do you mean it could crash at any moment? Or it is usually full of unsavoury characters?
Both. Buses/trains should be secure places and properly maintained at all times.
But regardless of fault, they aren't mostly just some people down on luck that at best ask for some change like in my childhood. enough are dangerous, unpredictable, and mentally unwell that public transportation is a non-trivial risk here.
If you build that, then more people see that there is a nice quick road between where they work and a place where they can buy a more affordable home. The road gains more commuters until the congestion returns.
Your other suggestions are more scalable. If housing is expensive, there should be more, denser housing. If commutes are long, we should be zoning such that houses can be near workplaces, and conversely workplaces can be near housing.
If you create pockets of higher density housing and workplaces, instead of only building large swaths of low density single-family residential, you can preserve the options to live in a city, a walkable town center, or a more quiet location, while still having dense enough groupings to make transit lines viable.
The main issue is it takes like 10-20 years of concerted effort in the US to approve/build a bridge, and nobody except the government is willing to wait that long. This is mostly a political problem.
> https://www.fastcompany.com/90978855/googles-plan-to-build-1...
20 miles is more than the entire length of Seattle. Heck it is more than the entire width of the Seattle Metro area (western most tip of Seattle heading straight east until it turns into farmland).
There should be sufficient housing stock such that people don't need to drive 20 miles to work!
Another thing that's happened is that all the good jobs in many industries have hyper-concentrated into a small number of locations. There's plenty of space to live available in many "main street" towns, but not necessarily anywhere nearby to work if you do choose to live there.
My own city (Chicago) does have new construction, but it can't possibly keep up with demand from people moving into the city, because all the land is already full of lower-density housing, and you can't replace half a city block's worth of two- and three-flat dwellings with a modern high rise without first getting all the people who already live there to move out. Which, best case scenario, takes time. So instead most the new construction consists of replacing 130 year old 2- and 3-flat residences with luxury single-family homes, because nimbyism or now, reducing housing density is just more economically feasible. All it takes is one wealthy family buying one lot of land, and there area lot more individual lots up for sale than there are contiguous blocks of eight.
It is funny because here in the Puget Sound, if we had two and three flat dwellings that would be a major improvement over the bullshit we have now. Like seriously, 3 story flats would be a dream for density and alleviate much of the area's high house prices.
Unfortunately due to a confluence of factors there are only two types of "density" being built around here:
1. Giant apartment blocks owned by multi-national investment firms where the rent goes up by LOL each year that exist just to drain money out of the community.
2. Awful 4 story townhouses that are inappropriate for anyone who has small children, or knees that aren't perfect.
Also because of reasons, the townhomes don't have usable yards (they have to be set in the lot such a way that neither the front or back are usable), and they can only be built in a few designated "upzoned" areas.
Zoning changes are slowly supposed to come that upzone[1] more and more of the city, but if building actual usable housing isn't even possible, just pure zoning changes aren't enough.
[1] Where upzoned means not just SFH, but still most of the city will be zoned SFH only.
When tenure at a job was 20+ years, and a house could be paid off in 10 years, it made a ton of sense.
The fact that such an idea is absurd now is not because the idea itself is absurd, but because how we have structured our economy is absurd.
People shouldn't be wasting their lives commuting.
In older books they have kids and the dad coming back home to eat lunch together! Heck I have friends who grew up in countries where 20-30 years ago that was still the norm.
Public transport is key, especially trains that can bypass traffic at high speeds. In my city in Australia I live about 25km out from the CBD, but I can get there in under 30 minutes via train if I ever need to - it works very well and I don't have to live in a tiny shoebox on top of 100 other people.
Selectively filing your company with dispassionate, or desperate devs may not be a good long term plan
:D
underrated perk for sure!
Remember the "Day in the Life" vidoes? When was the last time you saw someone showing their amazing workspace, the free food, the amentities and all that? A few years ago they were everywhere. Now? Nowhere.
We are now in permanent layoff culture. Some of us still believe this is companies trimming the fat. It is not. It is wage suppression. If you get rid of 5% of your staff and just make the remaining 95% do what the 5% were doing then you've saved money. Even better, the reamining 95% won't be asking for or demanding raises. After all, aren't you luck to have your job?
But severance packages cost money. You know what's cheaper? Return to office mandates. A certain percentage of people will quit. That's a cheap layoff.
Now some of you think your WFH status is safe. You may even take a pay cut to continue WFH (even though it's objectively cheaper to employ people remotely).
Trust me when I tell you that the flood waters are rising. You're just temporarily on the high ground. Your remote status won't last. For a handful it might but for the vast majority, you will be faced with the choice of losing your job or going back to the office.
This is more wage suppression. It is employers forcing their will on you so they can walk around the cubicle farm and see what you're doing. It's the compliance of having you there regardless of whether you need to be or not.
As a tech worker, you are just like any other worker. You are not immune. The only effective counter is to act collectively with your fellow employees. Unfortunately we've spent the last 50+ years completely dismantling any kind of collectivism.
I do remember! Also I was always wondering where those people worked. Perhaps those videos were from FAANG companies ... but most of the developers never worked there! Point is that those videos were not representing anything.
With savings comes extra cash.
And extra cash can only sit on the sidelines for so long.
Until company’s are lured once again in to making bigger, larger, scalable bets.
You need engineers to explore new hypotheses, to drive growth, to explore these new possible markets.
Greed always returns. Idle money, stagnant growth helps no one.
You don’t scale a company with savings. You scale up by spending.
First, there's no such thing as a "free" market. Any robust market requires strong regulation and thus a strong government. So for a labor market, you need things like workers rights for the entire thing to work, even for the companies.
Second, companies collude to dilute labor power. Years ago in tech it was the Steve Jobs anti-poaching collusion case [1]. Now, every company is in permanent layoff mode. Notice how pretty much every company decided to start doing that at about the same time? You ever wonder why?
Tech companies have basically adopted the Corporate America model of "up or out" culture. It's incredibly toxic. It even goes against Google's findings that the most important aspect to team productivity is psychological safety [2].
Lastly, it has long been observed that the tendency is for profits to decrease over time [3]. The only way to counter this is by cutting costs, raising prices or growing a market. The last one is incredibly difficult. The first two are incredibly easy, at least in the short term.
It is cheaper to constantly churn 5% of your employees if that suppresses the cost of the other 95%.
[1]: https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-p...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
Sure, economic theory is just that. There's no true free market and no true socialism.
But I think a more charitable interpretation of GP's comment is "the market is free enough that customers can make a product successful if it makes their lives easier". Regulation in tech aren't so high that a few people can't make the next Whatsapp, if the market resonates with that.
>Second, companies collude to dilute labor power.
Yes, but ultimately new companies make sure they can't ever truly control the market. In some ways that is another sign of a "free (enough) market". There are more than 6 compnaies with money to throw at a good idea, and the current publishing mechanisms make it easy to ship.
>Notice how pretty much every company decided to start doing that at about the same time? You ever wonder why?
external stimulus. Money isn't free, R&D costs aren't easy to write off for taxes. investors are pulling out and putting money into savings. It's the perfect time for layoffs when you need to do a pseudo paycut, especially when it's hard right now for a new company to start scaling up (due to said investors pulling out).
From there, sure. There's a lot of trend chasing. Google does something and they know their stuff, clearly our much different company must follow suit!
>Lastly, it has long been observed that the tendency is for profits to decrease over time
sure, tech stabilizes and customers won't stay and spend forever. Very few products can grow year on year on their own merit.
Companies in the 2010s were indeed in "grow market mode", which is why they were hiring for every blue sky idea they had under the sun. That's obviously stopped, but doesn't prevent leaner startups from trying.
Depending on who decides to leave, it could be a VERY expensive layoff.
I have all that but I work at a prop firm and they're VERY secretive and compliance would fire my ass if they found out
Alternately, I am concerned that a company who has seen office work go home can just as easily see it go offshore at vastly reduced cost.
Good software developers are a scarce resource. There's a lot that goes into the mix of making one. AI can't replace them yet. They're critical for the success of many businesses.
We were in layoff mode but that seems to be reversing. Even if we see a bit more ups and downs the trend of more technology everywhere and the increasing demand for building and maintaining all that technology is not going away. The only real game changer is AI but when AI replaces all good software developers it has replaced everyone in the job market and we have bigger worries if we're even still around.
Because we are. In the sense that we own the means of production: our education and experience are the tools we take with us wherever we go. We own the process of (for example) software development like the craftspeople of old used to own production processes of material things.
We can dictate terms, because when we walk away, we take our workshops with us. The laptops and networks and all the infra any tech company owns/maintains, these are simply interchangeable shells.
The RTO struggle is incidental here; what really threatens our productive autonomy are the nascent AI tools, where big capital again threatens to hold a new generation of tools captive. If we're not careful, what has played out over the course of the Industrial Revolution (fragmentation of workflows, despecialization into piece work, transfer of ownership of tools, etc) will happen again in the Information Age.
One side, the software engineers, can withhold their labor or sell it to somebody else. Nobody is irreplaceable. Large companies in particular have spare capacity to replace you if what you do is actually important enough. A lot of the time, withholding your labor is simply an opportunity cost to the employer.
The employer on the other hand has the threat of violence to coerce you. Without a job, we lose shelter, food, transportation, health insurance, schools for our children and so on.
You, as an employee, are an inconvenience to the employer. They want to replace you with an automated system that doesn't leave, doesn't require pay raises, is predictable and so on. And sure, for now, an AI system can't replace a software engineer. I suspect it won't be able to for a very long time. But the jobs around you will disappear. The flood waters are rising.
Your relationship with your employer is adversarial. If they could get rid of you they would. Currently they can't. That's all that's going on.
This is where your script falls apart. We generally have the ability to start our own business with our skills.
Speaking in games, they pretty much trimmed as much fat as they could with every loophole in the book. But they still want to make bigger games that compete with Fortnite instead of more focused reelases.
There's no fat left to trim so they are in fact shutting down studios and cancelling projects. I'm sure the trillionaire companies will survive no matter what, but games are genuinely in a bad spot right now.
>As a tech worker, you are just like any other worker. You are not immune. The only effective counter is to act collectively with your fellow employees.
fundamentally, the very reason companies kept hoarding tech workers is because in fact, yesterday's employee can be come toorrow's competitor. Gabe newell walked away from Microsoft and made a gaming empire Microsoft could only dream of. Jobs walked away from apple more than once and helped found an industry disrupting company that forever transformed a medium of movies ruled by Disney for decades prior. And likewise, a dispute in Disney animation created their biggest competitor in that new space, a competitor very clearly fueled by spite. Dozens of stories like that
In the 00's, the biggest fear of the big tech companies was poaching. Clearly in the 2020's past critical mass they care more about making number go up. The cycle will repeat and those companies will remember why hey at one point colluded among one another to make anti-poaching clauses.
Are we Western Devs about to learn a very hard lesson?
And "give me death" is not an option since every company has normalized RTO here so there's nowhere to go as the tech market is weak here so fully FWH option is next to none existent, while the offshore offices I know in Eastern Europe and Asia are fully remote since they were always basically remote anyway being away from the mothership and the tech market there has boomed after the pandemic meaning they have to offer WFH to not loose their workers.
IMHO the offshoring countries are the real winners here.
Outsourcing is nothing new. Companies have been outsourcing jobs to cheaper locations for longer than I have been working. In fact, my first job was as cheap outsourced labor.
This comes and goes in waves, because outsourcing to cheaper locations have a lot of downsides too.
I'm sure off/nearshore folks will happily take any work corp america gives them. My company is still remote and we've expanded significantly in 'near shore' hiring.
Industry wide, we may well be setting ourselves up for a 'hard lesson'. Our nearshore devs are actually pretty productive. I'm not finding nearly the same amount of friction that I've seen working with offshore devs that are in significantly different time zones. I don't see how tech TC doesn't eventually 'equalize' more with the rest of the world.
For me personally, I've had some recent 'come to jesus' moments losing some elderly family members and my own health issues that make me realize I should be working to live, not living to work. My current company is remote. I do not see me going 'into office' to satisfy the arbitrary whims of management. I'm old enough and well established enough that I can pretty much do what I like without worrying too much about the repercussions for my 'career'
One of the advantages of US/European remote teams is that they can pull the most skilled personnel available from many different regions and have them all working together. When you force a team to be co-located, you weaken your talent pool.
Or, in other words: A high-performing team requires a group of: - motivated engineers - with the right skillsets - who can communicate effectively - and work together effectively and losing any of these three things will trash your team's throughput. It is hard to get all three, but especially hard when you hard-limit your team to a single city.
Outsourcing trades "with the right skillsets" (and to an extent "who can communicate effectively") for "cheaper" and "in the same location". This works just fine as long as you don't need serious skillsets, but is nowhere close to an effective replacement.
We have at least 2 maybe even 3 full decades of businesses offshoring to cut costs, then the quality of the work they receive doesn't just plummet it burrows a hole through to the center of the Earth and keeps going. Then they onshore again, and everything eventually returns to normal.
Offshoring is a meme perpetuated by MBA's, and misery factories full of the "best and brightest" like ValueLabs - it doesn't work and we have decades of lived experience to prove it.
Might help change zoning policy in those cities too if managers and executives see that the entire local economy is basically an elaborate machine to funnel money to property owners with extra steps like employment.
They were confused when I rejected the offer.
I've seen companies spend tens of millions in open space offices in the past decades and this was by far the greatest work killer of all time.
Many, if not most companies, self created this ridiculous situation to finally realize it was a complete failure at so many levels, all that was left was to justify it. From awful diners and mini restaurants to ridiculous spaces no one really uses unless they need to make a phone call - open concepts don't work and never will.
Now days the only thing I see are noise cancelling headsets, people leaving early and a complete lack of interaction.
For many, working from home just works. My setup here is now years ahead of what the office may offer...
just the top of my head
Four years and a few promotions later, you couldn’t pay me extra to bring me back to the office. I like strict 9-5 work, and nothing can make me give up five hours of post-office daylight during the summer.
It’s vital. Most large companies think that as they are hiring “the best from around the world” that leaving them around the world is fine. Look leaving people on different floors of the same building screws up team cohesion.
So from a certain standpoint, it does not matter. Companies have long ago chosen to cripple their productivity and WFH simply helps, but frankly it annoys me.
Get better at building and releasing great code. In the same office. Move people, pay them well. Or maybe I am wrong - maybe the extra cost to co-locate and do the job well is more than the loss of productivity by seperated teams
But I bet you the CEO of Crowdstrike is rethinking that idea right now
I was no less productive working from home during the pandemic, a metric I can back up with completed user stores and completed projects.
If you want to go back into the office then please, by all means, as that's clearly the place that you work better in, but don't force people who are less efficient in the office to come into the office.
Which is fine as long as you understand that the rest of us don't. Most of the push for back to the office is being pushed by extroverted people that miss being about to chat with people and not because of any results driven data.
As for focusing on results - no thanks. Unless those in the hierarchy get to be judged on those same openly published metrics - no way.
All said, maybe it is a larger issue and working from the office is just addressing symptoms that are more apparent when going remote. Are we really missing out on those water cooler talks or is there a missing information/management role. I think of how I've had the conversations with other teams around the occasional virtual water cooler "oh, you're building a microservice to do that... so are we.... why are we building the same microservice?"
I am a remote worker, and I quite like working with other people, too, which is why I do it. Walking and shouting don't really factor into it, but we do share plenty of jokes.
That is why I totally understand and agree with all of what you said, except for the part where you're shouting in a room, especially one in which others are trying to work, or worse, speak in an online meeting from their desk with shouting in the background. That seems pretty disruptive and inappropriate when you could just walk over, or better yet, send a message. To me, that behavior is tantamount to asserting that what you have to say is more important than everything everyone else is doing. If there's a fire, maybe it is.
To be sure, my coworkers and I are friends, but I have many more outside of work, and deeper friendships besides. Are you describing your conditions for amicably and effectively working with coworkers, or are you describing your conditions for making coworkers into your friends? Sometimes folks desire deeper work friendships as a substitute for friendships outside of work.
depends on your workplace. There were dedicated quiet rooms workers would go in when they really needed to focus. Meanwhile, being in the lounge was a sign for a more lax work period. You don't really get that social messaging, especially since some people never update their status, or worse yet are eternally "do not disturb".
>but I have many more outside of work, and deeper friendships besides...Sometimes folks desire deeper work friendships as a substitute for friendships outside of work.
I don't. Only thing harder than befriending remote coworkers is trying to keep up with flaky meetup members you see once and never again. If you didn't stay in physical contact with schoolgoers, I have no clue how men c. 2018+ actually make friends post college. Maybe if I played sports it'd be different.
but sure, if you could solve this conundrum (I've tried for some 6 years now) I could easily concede to remote work.
My experience is, the "social messaging" isn't necessary there: you can just send a message via slack or what not, and wait for the recipient to reply. If they have notifications disabled, you can wait for them to come to a stopping point enough to check their messages and reply. After all, such a configuration is generally implemented to avoid the in-person or digital version of someone shouting for immediate attention.
> Only thing harder than befriending remote coworkers is trying to keep up with flaky meetup members you see once and never again
Having coworkers on friendly terms is nice, but it sounds like you might be falling into the trap I mentioned, of seeking deep friendship there, rather than outside of work. This misaligns incentives: whereas someone might want an RTO just so they can more easily befriend people (a captive audience, no less), coworkers might just want an amicable, effective working relationship, which can be had in-person or remotely. The latter is more important for a company to consider.
> if you could solve this conundrum (I've tried for some 6 years now)
Sure, I've solved it and don't mind helping you do the same! I don't know what all you've tried, so this list may duplicate some of your efforts:
- Go to one meetup consistently? It's unlikely that all of them have so much churn that you never see a single person twice after going several times.
- When you meet someone at a meetup, ask them questions that show you are genuinely interested in them as a person. If you want further friendship, ask them to hang out sometime later that week (yes, a play date). Take down their phone number, reach out.
- Ask them to hang out again, after you have hung out previously. Repeat this process.
- Repeat this process for many potential friends.
- Try Bumble BFF? The message here is that friendship is dating anyways, and you have to show someone you want to have the kind of relationship that you genuinely seek, and always be closing, and consider it a numbers game, because not everyone wants to be in a relationship.
see here's the thing that has me scratching my head. I talk to my coworkers WAY more now that we're not all just sitting in our offices or in the open work area with headphones on. and get this, I can screenshot! and screenshare! and link to code!!! it's wild. communicating via analog audio signals produced by forcing air across our meat pipes is positively barbarian in comparison.
Yknow something else I just realized? Now when i want to tell someone a command, I can literally just - send them `foo bar /srv/company/* --snafucate --no-fubar` instead of "ok so foo bar - no wait, sorry, backspace that, it's foo space bar, not foobar. Ok now /srv/company/*. Sorry backspace that I mean literally the star character. Ok now dash dash snafucate. Now dash dash no fubar. No sorry not --no fubar it's dash dash no dash fubar. ok yeah hit enter. oh sorry sudo -i -u companyuser first." The alternative to that exchange of course being to type on their cheesy keyboard. No thanks, I don't want to cross-contaminate our keyboard microbiomes, mine is just the way I like it.
I dunno. I grew up on IRC and MSN and stuff. So slack is just IRC with inlined GIF memes and mini-memes (emojis) that you can comment onto literally any message. Sounds like a pure win to me.
it will ultimately vary on the workers. There were some people on slightly different teams but in close proximity pre-pandemic that I talked with every day (even planning some personal projects on the side). Then the pandemic came and I never heard from them again, despite technically being a ping away. my team slack channel during the pandemic was still faily lax, meanwhile the other team's slack channel went eerily silent.
maybe this will be a non-issue as more Gen Z workers grow up, but I definietly had a different experience from you.
A local good developer would cost ~200k in SF, but to move me and my family would take at least 2x that (to compensate for my partner’s lost income), possibly more (so that I can catch up to peers who’ve been saving US salaries for 10+ years, so that I can buy a house in a reasonable time).
I see people take 25% pay cuts to have WFH/Flex hours.
I've done it and I've still made work friends. Heck, if it wasnt WFH, I would have been gone because there are closer places to work.
edit: changed country to county
It's an oft-mentioned point in the last few yearss to focus on raw income and not on spending power. if you get 50% more pay but rent doubles, the vast majority of people would have less spending power. same with job numbers. "Unemployment is historically low!". meanwhile, gig and part time worked soard while full time jobs dipped.
In addition, you look further and realize how people who "gave up" after 2-3 months without an interview are not counted as "unemployed" and you realize there's a lot to break down, that no one is breaking down
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/persons-not-...
https://www.bls.gov/cps/lfcharacteristics.htm#discouraged
BLS may not be perfect but they're not idiots and it's wildly better than other countries.
The numbers OP cites can be 100% accurate and reflective of reality while it is still also true that people in the Bay Area struggle to pay for housing.
However, the person to whom I was replying used cheap and not-so-cheerful language to suggest that it was possible to talk about this en masse. Assuming that to be reasonable, I replied with an en masse response.
Certainly if you break it down at the county level, I expect you'd find multiple different patterns, and would then be faced with which ones to call "typical" or "indicative".
While they have gone up (almost certainly faster than inflation), they are not part of the inflation numbers that we hear in the news.
Yes, they are [1][2].
[1] https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/methodologies/RIPfac...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-consumer-pri...
Which actually makes my point even more clearly: yes, there are a lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent, but these are not supported by the statistics for inflation and median income. Doesn't mean that they are wrong, but makes it more likely that there are other reasons for the proliferation of these stories.
They are, as one of the inputs to imputed rent for owner-occupied housing.
> lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent
A lot is explained by regional variation. For example, real mean wages in San Francisco are back where they were in 2017 [1].
but no one is digging in to talk about the regional variation. SF going back to being "still one of the highest CoL post genrification" instead of "unbearable for all but the elite" isn't exactly comforting.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-has-outpaced-wage-gro...
Maybe this isn't that Axios journalist's field, but that huge spike of 9.1% annual inflation in 2022 won't be made up for by a 1% difference in 2024. Showing only the current rate and not the cumulative effects seems disingenuous.
You're both right. Real wages are down from the pandemic, but that's because they spiked massively due to the stimulus spending [1]. Real wages today are where they were in Q1 2020, which was the highest they had been since at least 1982.
Both the Axios and Journal charts are confusing because they're taking the first derivative of a complex curve.
How do you navigate Fred effectively? I can usually find something close to what I want, but not exact through Google searches of the site.
Kagi :P. I know the names of most of these data series, so it’s searching e.g. real weekly earnings fed fred.
What would prefer me to do? Post a dozen links that all the same thing, arguably less obviously?
I have not seen a single one yet that shows a decline in real wages.
BLS has been tracking this number and it has skyrocketed in the last generation (Number of Jobs Held in a Lifetime): https://www.bls.gov/nls/questions-and-answers.htm
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf ("young baby boomers" age 18-56, years 1978-2020)
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsyth.pdf ("older millenials" age 18-36, years 1998-2021)
The "Chart 1" in both of those seems to be almost the same logarithm and the 18-56 "baby boomer" chart at age 36 appears to be roughly the same number of jobs. It might even be slightly higher in the baby boomer chart at age 36.
Good luck with that, almost every company that does that either fails or brings development back to their main location.
I guessed so
Note that a 'remote worker' is increasingly used as an analogy for bot performance.
(edit: I should clarify that I don't mean it in absolutes, if you got a task at hand, wfh by all means, but I won't do zoom meetings, if you wanna talk, come to the place)
How so?
That being said, I don't see how meetings are any less engaging. There's still the exchange of ideas and opinions, that's what really matters.