Tech CEOs are backtrack on RTO mandates–now, 3% want workers in office full-time
fortune.com
fortune.com
There is no logic in RTO for most tech workers. I'm glad they're backtracking.
Edit: spelling
A cherry on top, HR scripts don't properly account for partial vacation weeks, so if you have 3 vacation days in a week, you are still supposed to be in office 3 days a week, or else your VP gets notified.
If you’re wondering why I stay, it’s cause Amazon was my first real Software job, I started as an intern in 2020 and was always remote. I’m on a team that rapidly grew during covid and I happen to have been on the team the longest so it’s hard for me to find a position with an equivalent staff level scope with my level of experience.
The final straw was when we got the word that we would be required to move so that we would be co-located with our management in the HQ2 offices, or we would have to find alternative employment elsewhere.
We weren’t given a timeframe on when that was going to happen, but based on the timeframe I saw from the announcement of RTO to the enforcement of RTO, I knew it wouldn’t be long. So, I chose to leave as quickly as possible.
I gave my manager early warning that I was actively looking for alternative employment, and I kept him appraised of how the interview process was going, and then how the decision process was going, and then how the hiring paperwork process was going. When everything was finalized, he then got my official two weeks notice.
That was also when I told a few people inside the company that I was leaving and where I was going, but my official notification to the team wasn’t made until my actual final day — my manager requested that he be the one to make that announcement.
During my final two weeks, my manager also told me that he decided to also leave, and move back to India. I don’t know if he was forced out because too many people had left the team within the past year, or if it was truly a personal decision. But I do know we lost a lot of good people.
So, RTO is not the worst thing that can be done to you by your employer. Wait until they force you to move to be co-located with your manager and the rest of whatever team remains. And all without any kind of assistance with the moving costs, because you’re just that damn lucky to still have a job at all.
But that’s the Amazon way. RTO, forced co-location, stack ranking, unregretted attrition, the whole nine yards. Humans really are one hundred percent disposable if you work at Amazon.
This tracking is reported all the way down to your immediate manager on a weekly basis. Or, at least it was back when I worked at Amazon.
So far, they do seem to be the only company I’ve heard of so far that is doing the forced co-location with your management, specifically for people who were hired as remote and promised that they could stay remote.
I’m sure they have some other practices that may be common amongst other companies, and probably some that are not common amongst other companies. But in terms of the main ones I mentioned, there is a great deal of overlap.
The logic of RTO has always been about two things:
1. A desperate attempt by investors higher up the food chain to salvage the commercial real-estate market.
2. A "work force reduction" technique that avoids too many negative headlines.
Anytime you see RTO the logic is always coming from one of the above, and has nothing to do with productivity. Reduced push for RTO in tech is primarily because the commercial real-estate market is increasingly looking doomed regardless of efforts to get people back into office buildings.
I'd RTO if somehow I could guarantee being at an office 10-15 minutes.
I'd lose literally dozens of hours of free time per month I currently use on chores, hobbies, naps, and quality time with loved ones.
My effective hourly rate (salary / active hours) would plummet. Going remote many years ago has skyrocketed my wealth when you account for time.
Many if not most managers believe people aren’t working if they can’t see them. Others just like the lifestyle of coming into the office and saying hello to the lackeys.
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/mining...
So how does that work - CEOs are being pressured by, not their VCs I assume, but like... hedge fund managers?
Every startup I've known that's attempting RTO is definitely doing so from VC pressure. Of course the announcement from the leadership will never phrase it that way, but when leadership suddenly has some inspiration about the value of working in proximity immediately after a board/investor meeting you can be sure where that inspiration comes from.
Most recently IPO'd startups are also strongly influenced by small numbers of institutional investors that have major sway in decision making. All of those investors have broad portfolios and have a keen interest in keeping commercial real-estate healthy.
At a certain level that pressure comes from the CEOs themselves since they likely have a large number of assets (and/or the company itself does) tied up in commercial real estate. All of those mega-campuses are real estate investments and have a certain value on the books. If the commercial real estate market crashes, the value of those assets does as well.
My day is full of too many impromptu meetings that require me to be on zoom, and the environment at the office is utterly counterproductive to having those conversations or getting real work done. If I had to stop what I was doing and find a conference room every time I needed to communicate with a remote co-worker, I'd spend half my day walking to and from a room.
I go to the office and I'm still remote!
Management doesn't care you come to the office just to do your work remotely anyway since your other coders are not in the same geographical location as you, they just want you in the office because they are also in the office because the CEO also wants them in the office.
RTO mandates are lobbied by landlords and shareholders who also hold stocks in commercial property.
Empty offices lose value and the push is to use workers to artificially prop the value of offices.
At very least those who come to office should be given share of capital gains.
The other underlying issue is outsourcing; it's a bit hypocritical to force an RTO while more of your workers are in another country. We're ramping up another phase of "let's try to hire cheaper workers overseas" as well as "nearshoring ", so the remaining people have less need than ever to come into an office.
I very much suspect that a lot of this push for RTO is very vibes-based, as the kids say, which is why no one seems to be able to produce any concrete reasons or numbers justifying it. I think a lot of people, especially those at the top, have very set ideas of what "working" means and want to make their organizations conform to those ideas. For many people "working" simply means being in an office regardless of anything else or any consequences. It's why you see so many cracks about "they're working in their pajamas!".
You’re going to start seeing more Intel-style layoffs soon.
I personally am sympathetic to the idea that most people are more engaged and more productive when they are working together, in person. While I certainly don't miss the commute or office politics, I do miss seeing colleagues in person, and I felt I would often learn things faster when it was easier to have impromptu discussions with others. I also just kinda felt like I cared more.
But the point is, while I sometimes wish I could hit the "return to 2019 button", that world simply does not exist anymore, and it never will. Like some of the comments here point out very well, I know lots of folks who have been forced into RTO, and then just spend the majority of their time in the office on Zoom calls because many colleagues are still remote - the whole thing is nuts.
Enlightened management just needs to realize that as much as they may want to "wave that magic want", it ain't gonna happen. The world has changed, and it's much better to accept the reality of remote work than pretend you can do a "Superman spin the world backwards" trick. At the same time, I think employees should realize the risks with remote work - after nearly a quarter century in this business I've finally seen a real explosion of off shoring since the pandemic, and I think it (obviously among many other factors) is having a real downward pressure on software engineering salaries in the US.
And hopefully an upward pressure elsewhere!
I think it's not too bleak for you guys tbh - a lot of remote US jobs aren't really available to most of the world because they have timezone restrictions. You'd just better hope South America doesn't get its shit together!
What you don't see in my comment is my absolutely horrendous experiences with 5 different countries that are abysmal places to outsource to.
(1) 79% of Tech firms are Fully Flexible
Tech has the highest concentration of Fully Flexible firms across industries. Only 3% of Tech companies require Full Time In Office for corporate employees.
(2) Employee's Choice is the most common Tech policy
56% of Tech companies have an Employee's Choice model, meaning the company has offices but employees aren't required to to go into them. That's up from 38% of Tech companies having an Employee's Choice model in June 2023.
(3) Fully Remote is decreasing in prevalence in Tech
23% of Tech companies have a Fully Remote model, meaning the company does not have any offices at all. That's down from 37% in June 2023.
(4) Structured Hybrid Tech companies expect you in office 2-3 days per week
85% of Tech companies with a Minimum Days / Week requirement expect employees in the office either 2 days or 3 days per week.
(5) Tech company office policy varies significantly by size 90% of Tech companies with 500 employees or less are Fully Flexible; just 7% are Structured Hybrid. On the other hand, 23% of Tech companies with 25k+ employees are Fully Flexible; 74% are Structured Hybrid.
(6) Fully Remote adoption varies significantly by company size as well
42% of Tech companies with 100 employees or less are Fully Remote. That percentage drops to less than 4% for companies with 1k+ employees. All Tech company sizes have shifted away from Fully Remote since June 2023.
“Flex Report 2024”
https://www.canva.com/design/DAGLBzph2Ro/N8J1ayHcoxw4RjdoAHj...
Problem is, we were literally 2 engineers available to attend the office while the rest (~8 people) were remote.
Eventually i resigned and now (while i was the person with the most technical and product knowledge of the company) the rest of the engineers are following, there is a risk for the company that will leave them with literally 2 or 3 engineers, while they need at least 10.
To this day, i still can't fully understand what was on his mind that he essentially broke apart something that was working and delivering and now he may end up with no engineering team at all.
It might be interesting to ask him.
Is that what they teach at MBA school? Just do what everyone else is doing.
If I had a choice to manage a team hybrid in person or manage fully remote, I would always pick in person.
I think it will naturally move back to more in person just because those are going to be the higher functioning teams with the higher functioning managers.
You’re the exact type of manager I now screen for in job interviews.
However, If any are colocated then there's going to be a rift, guaranteed. As soon as the majority is colocated then the all of a sudden remote workers start unintentionally getting cut out of decisions. I've seen it happen every time. It becomes a lot of work for the manager to stop everyone from talking casually in the office. Next thing you know they're making hiring decisions based on colocation.
So keep it all remote or all colocated is my advice. But if you have two teams, one colocated and the other remote, it's twice as much work for the remote team to do the same work as the colocated team. Not impossible, just really hard and a total waste of management brain cycles that could be spent thinking about strategy.
The higher ups don't seem to care about this detail nor do they seem to pay attention to the fact that we have had 100% attendance in the office since the policy got implemented, me and the other managers are most definitely not just fudging the numbers and giving everyone a 100% score for office attendance!
1) Quiet quitting is primarily the result of disengagement. It is typically an organization failure and not an IC problem.
2) More than a fifth of the workforce was laid off early in the pandemic, causing issues with teams.
3) The pivot to massive hiring during the pandemic tended to ignore the need to be careful about changes to teams and their need to gel.
4) There was an impedance mismatch between individual KPI's and business needs that had been building for years, mainly due to Goodhart's law that also caused disengagement.
5) While RTO mandates were bad enough, firing those who advocated for who they thought was important taught workers that speaking out was forbidden, leading to even more disengagement.
6) While CEOs are back tracking, very few are doing anything that helps an organization recover from this engagement problem.
Obviously it is more complicated with activist investors, who sometimes had real estate interests forced the hand of some companies, but after seeing that it really failed as a tricky way to do a RIFF and had high costs that had a long tail, they are changing their story without any acceptance of their own role...same as it ever was.
In my experience it takes way longer to get a company to start working as teams, with a shared purpose, than most people expect. Typically 2-5 years in my experience to get most of the org in that mindset.
But that is without the very public and visceral impact of RTO related firings, with no communication from Leadership to say they changed course and that the efforts failed to align with core values etc...
It is festering, not fading. I turned down two EA jobs in the past 6 months because, as a guardrail/runways EA, there was no way to stay aligned with the CIOs goal and build that sense of shared purpose that would provide value.
I am sure that they ended up finding a ivory tower/cop EA, which will just exacerbate the problem.
I am sure that there are some Quants in BSG/McKinsey like firms that will blamed for this in a pile of books in a few years....
But C*Os must have known that when they fired people advocating for RTO targets that were important, they must have known that employees would start to delegate up and become less engaged.
We could use this crisis to help uplift Managers past their traditional role...as to be honest their need for new tools and tactics has been ignored for way too long.
But while CEOs are backing away from RTO mandates, there is little to no evidence that many are making serious efforts to repair the damage.
/rant
Typically it is thought of as a Clinger-Cohen Act compliance task and/or policy enforcement...I am in the enabling team autonomy and being a bidirectional translator between biz to tech type.
I'm 100% in on full-remote, but these warnings against crime when discussing RTO are a bit too privileged for my liking. It's not like you're safe and locked against all evils inside your home if you're working remote, you're still a human being and you'll eventually be required to leave your dungeon and do something in your life sometime.
I personally mourn the loss of a proper full-time office lifestyle, because I've always been remote, and now I will never know what it's like (hybrid is a joke because you're in the office but you still have to get on zoom calls).
But I do understand it.
The world won't end or anything if you don't network, but you'll have a leg up on everyone if you do.
I've had face to face meetings that cleared up 6 months of email/chat/zoom misunderstanding.
I also really miss my lab. I used to run what could be summed up as a giant advanced makerspace: we had chemistry fume hoods, a machine shop, electronics, hydraulic lifts, cranes, etc ... it was a really fun environment.
Cubes and open spaces suck.
I do see an advantage being in office with juniors and interns. I definitely learned a lot when I was junior being able to ask the senior staff questions without having to schedule a zoom meeting or wait slowly on slack replies.
5 day RTO would be insane tho.
Looms, pair programming, and Slack Huddles have worked great for us.
- what is version control [0]
- good commits and good pull requests
- working through pull request reviews [1]
- merging my PR into their PR [2]
- how to edit config files in a sane way (naming conventions are important)
- how to debug a few weird Arma3 config file errors
- how to deliver changes that satisfy some ... specific community constraints
- ways to think about solving a problem, before actually trying to solve it, and why
... and a bunch more. All on discord.
Direct messages. Audio only calls hanging out for a few hours talking / sharing screens, sometimes pair-programming. If I'm busy, I find some relevant documentation and ask them to read through it until I've got a chance to speak to them. A big mix of async and sync communication. Sometimes organised, sometimes ad-hoc.
I've got workshops mentally planned out to upskill the rest of the game server dev team. I've got another mentoring project lined up where we'll hopefully be able to dive into some functional programming things [3].
Remote mentorship isn't tough. It just requires
1. Prioritising the DMs from the people currently being mentored.
2. Manually creating the "sit next to each other and work on something" opportunities by clicking like four buttons to start a voice call and jump into it.
In essence, I make them the person sitting next to me in my online Discord office.
----
[0]: the "keeping a version of every single change in any tracked project file" lightbulb moment was fantastic to see.
[1]: the "always expect someone else to find something wrong because you're a human being who inevitably gets tunnel vision" lesson.
[2]: the "i'm going to make you responsible for merging into release branches at some point, so let's get you comfortable with it now" lesson
[3]: the person wants to learn how to be a "scripter", whereas the previous person was a Arma3 3DEN Editor main.
When one door closes, another often opens.
I like to choose who I have human contact with. You have no right to put people in a room against their will just to satisfy the shortcomings in your own life. I’m an engineer, not a surrogate.
I have friends, going to the office just cuts into my personal time.
Your coworkers are not your friends and your job is not a substitute for a social life.
To me that is way more tolerable than the constant pinging in chats and putting my headset ON & OFF to jump on calls several times per day. Hearing the ringtone of Teams/Slack today still gives me PTSD.
A situation that can be figured out by a 5 minute face to face talk in person can end up as a 30+ minute back and fourth in the chat. You walk away from your computer for a second and you see 80+ missed texts in 3 Slack channels. The more people in the chat rooms, the worse it gets, as while one person is writing a long sentence explaining something, another is writing a long sentence asking about the thing that other person is just about to explain leading a lot of wasted time and effort with communication.
The worse part is those super long bank-and-fourths in the chat rooms then become "the documentation". Why did you break this? Didn't you know we changed X because of Y? It was discussed in the group Slack yesterday. Didn't you read it[the 100+ message papyrus]?
I much prefer WFH, but it can also be absolute hell, keeping up with the bombardment of chats that remote sync cooperation leads to. In my new job I'm mostly in the office and it's much less stressful.
Oh definitely, but where I live in this small European country, large SW companies with internationally distributed teams are not really a thing, it's mostly local small and medium enterprises where the whole company teams are under the same roof. Not every SW employer is a large multinational.
at least I moved to where I can bike to work so I'm in the best shape of my life. That is the major gain