The 'Return to Office' Lies
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blog.avas.space
Thank you senior leadership for your wisdom, "If you don't like it, find another place to work". The first good advice I've heard from them in 5 years.
So I'll reformulate what I wanted to express before: The time that somebody chooses to spend in a 80 hour workweek can't be recovered. So you'd better be sure that spending so much time in a job is what you really want to do.
Also, there's an interesting article about the topic: "Top 5 regrets people have when they die, says ex-hospice care worker" https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/07/phrases-that-are-often-peopl...
There are labor force bargains to be had for companies that offer workers flexibility.
Plus if you’ve ever looked at the org chart at Meta before flattening started there were quite a few M2s/Directors/VPs with < 6 reports, that’s insane unless you’re spending a bunch of time on IC work.
And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life. But the peace of mind and serenity I have retained by WFH is invaluable.
Yep. Speaking for myself, beyond a certain income threshold there has been no substantial quality of life improvement. My last promotion made it even easier to save for an even earlier retirement, and that's about it.
Early retirement is nice, and earlier retirement is even nicer, but given a choice between retiring when my kid is 20 and being home with him every day throughout his whole childhood, there's no contest. I'll happily delay retirement if that's the trade-off that's needed in order to be there while he's growing up.
Covid was a big moment for me in a lot of ways, because I was very pro-corporate for a long time. Having seen some of the bs up close and personal, it made me realize how broken our current system really is ( I still remember 'we are in this together' lip service and 'driving is your zen time' ). Having a kid ( and seeing it grow up ) can be such a radicalizing moment.
Still, maybe more importantly, we are not all even the same cogs, but management tries to lazily put us in the same category. I am not sure we can even really call it management. That is actually a mismanagement of human resources..
I think I mentioned this pet theory before here, but it is no longer 1950, but the management has not evolved since that period in US. Maybe it is time to force that evolution.
One big reason is they are very worried about their stock grants due to the stock value nosedive that will occur once they finally have to write off all those office space leases as actual losses and report the loss on their SEC forms.
If they can force RTO then all the money being spent for office space leases remains in the "business expense" category and the stock price does not tank as a result.
I travel around a lot (a thing I can do because I work remotely). From SF to Seattle to Tampa to Salt Lake to the small-town corners of the Carolinas, everyone is struggling. You can feel it in the air, find people identifying with it in every conversation, see the slow decay of every place you know. The dead mall in your hometown, your phone forcing a prompt to take your data to train some AI, the favelas that are now the norm in every major city (regardless of local policy), the fact that you now get a prompt for what is effectively a payday loan when you try to order a pizza.
I think people underestimate how poisonous that is to a culture and to a body politic. When you don't believe in reform, you either shrug and let things burn, or you start setting the fires yourself. Neither bodes well.
Why do you think healthcare is tied to employment in the US?
Why do you think minimum wage in the US has not gone up in decades?
Why do you think 2 weeks leave is normal in the US?
Why don’t more Americans travel overseas?
At this point you have to be willfully ignorant not to make the connection.
Because if you would take THIS money from the people directly, they will be very unhappy.
> Why do you think minimum wage in the US has not gone up in decades?
Minimum wage is eaten up by an ever-increasing amount of regulations
> Why do you think 2 weeks leave is normal in the US?
Otherwise, the minimum wage would have to be lowered
> Why don’t more Americans travel overseas?
It seems like because they already live in the best country
America is indeed the best country for rich, highly successful people. The minimum wage is not eaten by regulations, but the corporate profits which make those few so rich. Ordinary workers are better off in many EU countries, and they naturally make the majority of the population. I think the best country is one which provides the best quality of life for the average and median citizen, not just the elite.
Here on HN I often read that there are a lot of problems with healthcare, poverty, minimum wages, too big cars, overweight, pollution, racism, big companies and rich people having too much power...
... and then i see the result of the election and the only argument is: this guy will fix our too high taxes.
As just one example, they deeply believe Socialism is evil, never mind the very vast majority of their daily services are dependant on it.
This. So much this. I don’t want to start catching up on life after I’m 70 or 60 something and hate every minute before I retire.
Once I got my mortage, there is no more reasons to care about exact numbers that much.
Retirement sounds very appealing when you aren't spending enough time with your friends and family, or when you aren't getting enough relaxation. But there will come a time when your kids won't really want to spend that much time with you. And a hobby you spend all your time on could become an unpaid job.
There will be times in your life when you have to be all in on your job. But when its not those times, try to have a balanced life now.
A few years after retirement they got early onset Alzheimer’s.
I’ll easily still be working until retirement, probably beyond. I’ll be old and tired and probably pretty useless at tech. But I wouldn’t change a single thing about the last 20 years. It’s been amazing.
Everyone’s gotta do what they want to do - but not seizing life and putting your family at the middle of it - that, in my humble opinion, is batshit. We ain’t here long, and the only legacy is our kids and (maybe one day!) our kids kids. Make it count, which in my book doesn’t = “make loads of cash and as a consequence don’t ever see your loved ones”…
Two week vacations aren't the norm, people schedule meeting on Friday 6pm and make pretend a lot. Time and effort put into work in the end doesn't seem to differ, but people seem to reinforce the idea the company basically owns them. That of course is highly subjective.
The value in excess wealth is what you can do with it. You can find a person in need and hand them a thousand dollars for fun. You can fund some program your town needs. You can build a "third space" for your community. There's so much you can do with wealth that isn't just hoarding it!
Personally, my goal is to have enough money to buy a giant mansion on the edge of some town and be the weird rich lady you can go to with your problems. If I get richer than that, great! It'll be a bigger mansion and a bigger town. But if you gave me a billion dollars tomorrow, I'd just use it to be a bigger weird rich lady you can go to with your problems.
Thank you for your kindness. However, you can't become and definitely won't stay a billionaire if you give away your money.
In practical terms, you don't want strangers in your home. There are some bad people in this world. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...
On 50 million a year, you could give out 49,000 homeless people to give $1,000 to every year, and still have a million dollars to spend, without touching your principle. Could you even find 134 homeless people every day to give $1,000 to?
The goal is to Die with Zero, as written by Bill Perkins, and while you may not want to literally do that, it's still a good book to read to get you thinking about how to spend your money.
It's very possible that I won't, no. But I also don't think I'm naive.
I run a company. I founded it without funding from venture capitalists, so that no one will ever be able to tell me to sell anyone out. One of the first things I wrote down was that I would never lie, mislead, or otherwise tell anything less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And right now, my company is functioning and profitable, while doing - at least as far as I can tell - no harm to anyone.
Yeah, being a horrible human being means you're free to do everything to your game-theoretic advantage. But you can choose not to do that. You can win without choosing to do that. You just have to know, crystal clear, from day one, that you'd rather make one million dollars ethically than two million dollars unethically.
Similarly, will people sometimes abuse your kindness? Yeah, sure. But you can give your kindness knowing that that's part of the cost of doing business - especially if you're successful enough that you can afford the loss.
You ever read Les Miserables? There's a scene where Jean Valjean, who has been taken in briefly by a kindly bishop, steals some of his valuables out of desperation. He's caught by the police, who arrest him and bring him back:
“Ah! here you are!” [the Bishop] exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad
to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too,
which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get
two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and
spoons?”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop
with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said
is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is
running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this
silver—”
“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had
been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had
passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him
back here? It is a mistake.”
“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”
“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.
“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost
inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.
“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the
gendarmes.
“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your
candlesticks. Take them.”
He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and
brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering
a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the
Bishop.
Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
mechanically, and with a bewildered air.
“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my
friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always
enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with
anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”
Then, turning to the gendarmes:—
“You may retire, gentlemen.”
The gendarmes retired.
Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.
The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—
“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money
in becoming an honest man.”
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,
remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he
uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good.
It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts
and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”See: MacKenzie Scott
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/mackenzie-scot...
Outside of people who crave the fame and/or flaunt their wealth to promote themselves (e.g. Michael Bloomberg), wealthy people do not advertise that they are wealthy, because doing so invites a lot of unwanted attention.
> be the weird rich lady you can go to with your problems
that's great; but unfortunately in society at large, the people with wealth and the people who you can approach with your problems make a Venn diagram with little overlap
I've found that in most cases, people tend to become more selfish as they get more money, not less selfish. (Not talking about you, just commenting on society.)
if your work defines you - great, keep on trucking. but having financial means to not have to work at early age (while you are still youngish and healthy) is probably one of the biggest goals any human on Earth can achieve
I'd rather just do a job i like to do until i am not able to do it anymore.
I know people who are old and do charity work, who i envy. They could as well be doing half time paid work, but for them work is work, it's not so much about money or early retirement. It's about the contentment of doing something useful together with others.
The ideal job however for me would be a mix of being a tutor, experimenting, reading up on new ideas or technologies and fixing problems, in a part time regime. The free time can then be spent on woodworking, gardening, sports, family. I haven't attained that exactly but i'm actually not super far off.
My point being, it does not have to be black and white, work vs retirement. You can do part time work that you like for a very long time and have fulfillment.
I'm 47 and I'm teasing out what retirement would look like after seeing many people talk about their issues in retiring early and being bored as hell (and knowing many older folks with those problems).
I have a model in my mother who put my dad through law school and then he put her through MBA school, which she didn't actually use. She raised us until my dad passed young leaving her retirement level funds, She then did volunteer jobs like running part of the gift shop at the botanical garden (which had the great side benefit of taking lunch / strolling the botanical garden 4 days a week) and the tougher but much more rewarding Court Appointed Special Advocate work she did where you are essentially stand in legal guardian for children. She had 3 families of children she was working with. Very rewarding and very heart breaking work. Don't get me wrong she also took vacations, bridge, movie club, scuba, painting, sung in choir (I have several official photos of her standing right behind the pope in rome singing which my catholic friends love [my episcopal mom has spent more time with the pope than you have]). Worked her butt off (literally) to be able to handle Machu Pichu for her 70th. Definitely lived a full interesting life, not just on the beach. At her remembrance relatives and friends were a bit shocked at all of the photos I had on the slide show of the things she'd done / places she'd been.
Golf with friends is definitely fun and relaxing and can be done well into your later years, don't knock it but it's not the only thing you'll do. Getting drunk on the beach all the time also becomes harder and not as fun as you get older for many people. But your friends likely don't have all that free time.
One interesting thing I've found recently is some volunteer work in the BLS realm (basic life saving / rescue). Ski Patrol / SAR is an interesting combination of weekend outdoor hobby with goals. And seems to have roles as you age (usually in organizing) though that means you have to deal with older bureaucratic know it alls. But they also organize everything you just show up and do. Folks being pretty active well into their 80s (could be survivor bias).
There's a lot you can do, especially to use your resources to help others, as your mother did, while also enjoying life.
I wasn't saying early retirement is bad; I'd love to do it myself. But rather the question is, what am I willing to give up to achieve that goal. What is the opportunity cost. Maybe you're lucky and there's hardly any. But often it's your children who pay the price (as in the comment I was replying to). Or you yourself pay the price with suffering from significant stress, anxiety and unhappiness.
Why not enjoy life earlier, and especially with your children, and then just work longer.
I've turned down more money because I knew that it came with strings attached of more work and stress, and I didn't want that for myself or my family whom it would most certainly impact. So, I'll have less money for retirement and I'll have to work a few years longer. But I want to be happy _now_ not just when I'm old.
but if price to pay for early retirement is stress/anxiety/unhappiness and ESPECIALLY less time with your children (especially before puberty) no early retirement is worth it
My point was more about prompting people to start thinking about what they'd want to do in retirement if they even retired. I know quite a few people who don't know what they'd do, so it defintitely seems like a thing you need to figure out. Not a pool to jump into all at once one day.
For me I think it also helps me de-stress the idea of retirement, easing. into it.
Even if you live 30 years after your kids are out of the house, odds are only something like 5-10% of your total time with them will be in that 30 years.
Similar figures for your own parents and grandparents. Those hours with them are few, especially at ages when they can still do much.
If a remote-first company can give someone in a nearby time zone with the same language and cultural background and the same skillset a tempting offer while saving themselves 25% of their salary band, they're going to do it. It's not because they think you're less productive, it's because they're now looking in a wider job market with more competition from people who need less money to live.
The converse is also true: if you're living in a low CoL area, WFH can actually bring you a huge pay increase, because salaries balance out somewhere in the middle.
(I'll add that I strongly believe that where you live should not impact your income if you're in a remote company, for the reasons you list: if you're in the same country as everyone else, your location of residency has no impact on your value to the company.)
You don't need a FAANG salary to retire at (what use to be) the normal age or somewhat early, but you do need one to retire very early. I'm saying that I won't choose to chase a very early retirement if doing so compromises the time I can spend with my kids while they're young.
I strongly agree with this mindset, and I'd argue that it's pretty well-supported as a phenomenon for most people, if not all. Money is a huge deal up to the point where you can live comfortably and without worrying about the future; beyond that, it doesn't really seem to make anyone happier. That being said, it's still a luxury that isn't at all common for most people, but it doesn't require being a millionaire (at least, not with the current level of inflation).
Agreed. I took 3 years off to be with my child every day in elementary school, priceless! It certainly did delay my retirement by a lot more than 3 years but totally worth it.
The difference in your lifestyle isn't now, but in a few decades. It's hard to know when you have enough for the rest of your life. There are formulas, though I don't really know how meaningful they are.
Meantime you're clearly leading a better life now, and may well not mind having a few additional years of it (compared to a bit less time with a lot more aggravation).
So, congratulations. It sounds like you made a well-founded choice.
Don’t let your fellow citizen off the hook.
I wonder if I could negotiate cheaper car insurance rates. I’m driving far less and on safer streets, rarely getting on a major highway.
How did you and poster above manage this? A 50% paycut would mean having to move to a much more remote area for most people without a lot of NW already.
Homes being $1-3m in most of the places that FAANG resides just makes it implausible to take a cut from $400k+/yr to maybe $200k/yr. You can't afford a mortgage at $200k/yr for a $1m home with 20% down.
Is everyone here who is taking these paycuts just have a partner who makes bank or are you already rich thanks to having bought/inherited property long ago?
This advice just seems implausible to most anyone who cares about being in a good school district, in a relatively populous area, and hasn't inherited millions through buying real estate, inheritance, or stock appreciation.
1M can buy a house in a very nice suburb in an excellent school district.
Either way, over half your net income is going to housing and that’s on the lower bound of what I gave. You probably won’t have a nice house. Maybe a starter home. May as well move to rural Indiana at that point.
Working remote is the point. You can live somewhere nice for families instead of a big city. Just don't live in places like California.
You can absolutely buy a decent house in a nice city for $750K on a total household income under $150K. Without having inherited anything.
Source: me. 2 young kids. Not living in SF, obviously.
We live in a top-rated school district, although our kids are homeschooled, and will likely go private for high school. We live well-below our means.
I think it's just location, location, location.
Makes more sense. You weren’t near any of the traditional tech cities. So, cost of living was always going to be low. Your mortgage is less than what it costs for a studio apartment in most tech centers.
The company I work for now is HQ'ed in Atlanta, GA. But I still WFH.
For me and most others I know, I’m only living in these expensive areas - so taking that kind of pay cut requires something extraordinary to sustain a decent quality of life.
I did. Now I'm exploring the limits of slacking off while getting a nice paycheck. I could aim higher, but I doubt my new place would allow me to slack off as much as this place does. After all, I have only one life, so I'd rather spend it doing things other than working, and I know that modern work is unlikely to bring deeper life satisfaction.
I can't imagine being in a longer commute that I didn't like.
Would love to see more data on this. Quick googling shows average commutes well below an hour. I'm assuming average is just not a good stat for this?
(Obviously not everyone could choose to live closer without driving up the prices even more in the short-term, but the value of money-vs-commute compared to money-vs-remote doesn't seem directly comparable to many people.)
Even odder are the insistence on public transit or similar. I share the preference, but if time is valuable, a personal car or small car pool would almost certainly cut time.
Again, I used to bike about 3 hours a day. I can't really blame that on the job, though.
I think that in-office work is good for certain situations, which is why onsites still make sense. And for folks newer in their career, onsite time is really important, based on my experience.
But if remote is more attracitve, over time companies that offer it will win in the talent marketplace.
Remote is not more attractive to everyone and everyone doesn’t have the same economics on the trade offs.
Why? Because for the vast majority of people, employers have almost all of the negotiating power. What this means is the market is slowly shaped by what employers want, not employees. Because we need a job more than they need our labor.
It’s naive to think the market is a level playing field and if employees want something they just vote with their labor and the market will adapt. That’s just not true. Most people don’t have the ability to change jobs on a whim to play the market with their livelihoods.
I would not call remote work a privilege. Rather I would say remote work is a benefit. It falls into the same bucket as all the other benefits that employees can weigh in addition to salaries when they weigh job options.
I expect a reversion in terms of remote/hybrid, but not all the way back to where it was before hand. Looked for some stats, didn't find much. From the US BLS[0]:
> However, remote work participation was still higher than its 2019 level in all industries except agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, which returned to its 2019 level.
The data only goes to 2022, but the publication is from 2024. If there are fresher stats, would love to see them, as I think things have changed in 2023 and 2024.
0: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productiv...
I think companies that won’t adapt and embrace remote/hybrid will slowly decay.
I think hybrid-with-scheduled-days is almost always a clear win over 5-days in-office, but that full-remote is a huge productivity drain. The cost of alignment, decision making, and collaboration for any sort of creative work goes way up. So unless you know exactly what sorta widgets you need to make and it won't change much more than once a year or so, you're going to have trouble keeping up.
I went through 3 different remote-only startup jobs before finally finding another in-person one, and didn't stay long at any of them because the productivity was just too low. Too much time spent doing things that would be easier in-person or waiting-or-making-up-for async-induced issues.
From the employee side, there are definitely non-monetary factors that play into the sale of labor as well. And H1Bs (in the USA) or other legal restrictions also impact how labor is sold.
However, would you dispute that there is some level of free market for software engineers? I think there's some level because:
* people can switch jobs (except as legally restricted above)
* companies compete for talent (as indicated by the rise in salaries from 2020-2021 and the AI hiring frenzy now)
* you can have an oversupply of labor (as we're seeing in other areas of software in 2024)
Those all seem like aspects of a market, if not a perfect one.
it might not be the sort of place they want to live. it also negates a lot of the higher salary argument if a lot more of it is going into paying rent or mortgage.
Taking a 15% cut, which allowed us to move further away severely reducing our cost of living, bring us closer to family which can help out if needed. It has reduce stress, ensures that our child doesn't need to be in the care of after school programs longer than she needs. The reduced cost of living, reduction in stress and the flexibility that we're able to offer my wife's employer was made a huge, positive, difference in our lives, well worth the 15%.
But for example if your office is Midtown Manhattan, the equivalent lifestyle to own a home for your family in walkable Manhattan vs long subway commute Brooklyn vs longer commuter rail suburbs vs extreme commute exurbs is staggering.
You can buy an entire exurban home for the incremental cost to upgrade from Manhattan 2bed/1.5bath to 3bed/2.5 bath.
My parents & in-laws each have 3bed/2.5 bath homes outside of Manhattan commute range, but within tolerably unpleasant driving commute to Stamford/Greenwich. That is - they are in commuter range of where commuters live / satellite office are located.
The combined values of those 2 homes might buy a single family sized apartment in Stamford, an ok 1 bedroom apartment in yuppie Brooklyn, or a kind of dumpy studio in Manhattan.
A lot of these answers seem to boil down to "I would simply have more money".
Not to mention that buying a house isn’t a requirement of living in a location (and isn’t the right financial choice for many places when comparing to rent).
But no I wouldn’t live in rural Arizona over the Bay Area or most cities unless there was a very strong extra reason to live there (like a manhattan project) and definitely not for a pay cut even if cost of living was near 0.
It's also not just my "current job", I make more than any peer that works in office and I always have at any employer that I've been at. If you want me to work for you, you have to pay what I require. That's how the market works.
lol to any in office startup being doomed. That’s a large percentage of YC startups and currently doing quite well startups.
You make more than any peer you know in office? Might need to meet more people or you’re a true outlier in which case this is not about you
A large percentage of YC startups fail, so that's not really a metric that's useful. Basic market analysis will do: more potential employers = higher pay.
It sometimes makes sense, when you are junior, need to form a network, and have low expenses. One can look at it as an investment. But not for the average engineer over the long term. It just doesn’t pencil out. Especially if you want a family.
Obviously people make it work, but I have no idea what kind of hours other people work, because doing a pick up at 16:30 would mean that my child would be the last one in the day care. In any case I don't see the point in tolerating the stress of traffic, school/day care, or just regular difficulties getting your daily tasks to fit in with a 8-16 job at an office. I have a family member that works at a hospital, she can't get her car service for four weeks because there's no available time to drop of the car and pick it up afterwards, which also fits with the mechanic. I can normally get appointments for mechanics, doctors, dentists, contractors, everything, with a few days notice because I can be incredibly flexible with my time.
My wife's boss recommended getting an au pair, she pointed out that he's aware of how much she makes, and that it was a stupid suggestion that he know that we wouldn't be able to afford that.
This is also how you build community, so has many benefits beyond cost.
In our data set, the on-paper gap is about 18% (~37k on ~200k) if you just compare remote to non-remote, but given that the remote candidates often live in lower-COL areas, some of that probably comes from COL and not purely value placed on remote work.
The real driver is that ~half of engineers only want remote work, and the vast majority of the remainder aren't in whatever city you're hiring in.
Some companies don't have the choice. If you need people to come in and operate machines, do manufacturing, care for others and similar, then you often need your employees to commute. If you don't need that, why wouldn't you hire the best qualified person, even if that person prefers to live in the Mojave desert?
But if I were to play devil's advocate?
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be a fraudulent person who doesn't exist.
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be interviewing for jobs they intend to quietly outsource, possibly to people worse than themselves and definitely in ways that create security risks.
- Because you think the random overheard conversations and water-cooler factor of in-office work has enough benefits to compensate for nominally lower qualifications.
- Because you think you're not perfect at detecting low-quality work and think remote employees might take the opportunity to slack off in ways they wouldn't in an office.
- Because you think it creates additional security risks by removing the implicit air-gapping of having to physically be in an office to handle sensitive information.
- Because you and your current employees actually like being in-office and having that cultural cohesion, and you don't think you can get it remotely.
...or any number of other reasons.
Like, I get that people like remote work. I do too. But the moralizing of RTO is...just incorrect, I think? There are practical arguments against it (I literally wrote a few thousand words to that effect not long ago - see my most recent HN submission), but that's an entirely different class of objection than the idea that it's just about middle managers wanting to breathe down your neck.
For me it's missed opportunities for business, it's about a better work life balance, reducing stress, improving health, about reducing traffic and the associated pollution and it's about decentralization. As you rightly point out, there will be situations where you absolutely need people to go to an office, or where it will make a difference. These jobs could benefit from less traffic, better service at the edges of working hours, because the work from home people can use the time slots in middle of the day. For those jobs where it makes no difference if you are in an office or would be an improvement not to be, I don't get why more companies aren't just going for it.
Most people are not fraudsters. Probably you will find them from time to time but it's something that's been disproportionately blown-up by the RTO crowd. There were many people like that in the office - they were forced to show up to work but their productivity has always been non-existent. Signing flexible contracts and allowing the company to fire more easily should prevent vast majority of such hires.
There's another weird point about not being able to detect low-quality work. I fail to see a difference between low-quality work in the office versus remotely. If the employer fails to detect it and pays salary, it's the employer's problem either way.
I think that’s how folks make it work.
I don't think it's spoiled, I think you're spot on. Yeah, it's hard. And yes, you (and me and probably many others reading here) are privileged.
> Obviously people make it work
And yeah, they usually make it work, and it sucks. Or if they can't make it work then maybe a spouse or partner has to quit their job to handle that stuff and take care of the kids and then they have to get by with even less income.
On the other hand, I have now time and energy to focus on all the cool things: writing research papers and my thesis, learning accounting to set up my company, make contributions to the open-source and open-data projects I care about, taking time for friends and family. In a word: living.
I'll surely lose out on some currency in the long run but I'm not so sure whatever value it's going to have in the coming fifties outweighs the time with my family I've gained. On a global scale a lot of things are going to shit and I'd rather my kids think of me as someone who didn't bail on them under such circumstances.
I’d switch jobs then as well, or rather, I would never take such a job in the first place. Luckily my commute is only 20 minutes by bike. I don’t earn anywhere near FAANG level either, though.
Depending on how one is, working from home not only isolates you, but if you have kids, dealing with them on a daily basis while trying to work is not what you think it will be after months and years of doing so.
Yes, your life will change and be totally different.
So when folks say they work at home to spend more time with family I take that at face value. I've certainly enjoyed being with mine - not every moment for sure. But I didn't have kids as an obligation, it was a choice and any relationship also requires work, being home with them helps that.
I’m less isolated than ever WFH as I now have the time and energy to have a social life after work.
Additionally, I can be more involved with my local community because instead of commuting to some CBD and filling the pockets of business there, I support and have relationships with the small businesses in my local community.
Equally though, I see how if you were a parent, or are incapable of going outside unless forced, it could be more isolating for some.
Just people who make more than they need to survive and can afford to cut back on income for a happier life.
Even years later, I am still not making as much money as I was making back then. I could not care less about that. I'm making plenty of money, and am more than twice as happy—this is harder to measure than salary, but it sure feels true.
It’s a trade off in this case that I think is worth it.
And let’s not forget the gas and car maintenance savings. I reduced my annual driving by about 4,000 miles. My car will also not have to be replaced as soon. I’m also eating cheaper because I’m more likely to make my own lunch rather than eating out. I’m sure there are more expenses like this that add up.
If I could make the finances work, I think I’d take that deal. (I’d be unlikely to sign up for that commute in the first place.)
But because everyone has an opinion, I’ll share mine: I like being in the office, sometimes. I hate going to and from the office.
And, yes, if I had an office to go into, I would do so some days if that were my option.
Ironically those days that are so bad that I think that I almost shouldn’t try to bike, those are the days that the busses don’t run because the busses and more sensitive to the weather than my e-bike with studded tires.
Busses in Oslo don’t work if it’s raining a lot or if it’s snowing a lot. It’s really sad since it’s snows and rains quite a lot every year. Our locally public transport is more interested in trailing self-driving cars than testing out new tires :(
Catching cold every 2 to 6 weeks on winter wasn't amazing though.
I get up at 06:15. Work for an hour, then go for a fast and invigorating walk through the forest where I often encounter deer, and this week a fox, and then I'm back at my home-desk to start the day with some video meetings.
When my kids get back from school I take a break and we have a snack together. Then I work another hour, and then in the summer I roll out my bike, and in the winter we've gone out with the snow-racer (although the kids don't wanna do that so much anymore).
Before covid I used to sit in a miserable office. Everyone had headphones on. My window overlooked a motorway on-ramp that was always backed-up as far as the eye could see.
I was just thinking about this recently as $company executives are sociopathically dangling RTO in our faces. The worst part is the commute by car.
I’m totally for WFH, but give me an office I can walk/bike to in a safe calm environment - not a bike lane next to 60 mph traffic - and I may just want to go into the office.
Furthermore, the company culture needs to be such that you can leave the office as necessary like we do in WFH. Do errands, take a break, etc. Cal Newport makes the point on his podcast that our work culture for creative jobs (anything that uses the brain primarily, I don’t know the right word) has not really changed from factory line physical in nature jobs.
[Edit: I see that it could be read to be asking for examples of the claim that office work spreads disease in a piece arguing against RTO. Given that at this time, none of the direct replies read it that way, I'm going to say that it was at a minimum ambiguously worded...]
In context, the person was replying to someone who stated “I have read it all when it comes to RTO”. They stated they hadn’t seen a _blog post_ making _this point_ that RTO would cause more sickness. They were never addressing the claim that it does or does not. They were talking about the novelty of this argument for them.
I get fewer (not none!) of this kind of misunderstood reply after adopting a habit of quoting the specific part of a post which I'm replying to, especially when that post makes more than one point.
So in this case (and this is mainly for the benefit of anyone still confused about what happened in this thread):
> > I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point.
> Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?
The entire point of RTO is a reference to returning to the office from when we all decided to not go to work to slow the spread of disease.
If you want a direct example, our first on-site after COVID led to half of my team getting COVID despite testing and masking precautions.
You may not mean to, but you are coming across as intentionally obtuse. Apologies for my tone of that isn’t the case.
So I asked for examples, so if they exist and this isn't actually uncommon in such blog posts and I've just been unlucky, then I might find some interesting blogs to read. The absolute bulk of somewhat popular tech work blogging is done by very boring, very self-centered people, and I've found caring about epidemic disease to be a decent indicator that people might not be in short-form social media.
But a bunch of what looks to me like illiterate cretins got in the way. Maybe they're not, but by now I don't really care either way, and have given up on the potential for blog recommendations.
The worst part of 2020 for me was repeatedly removing coworkers from the intranet as they died.
But either way I hate commuting. Especially if I have to drive.
But I realize that this is NOT a luxury most people have. Most people's commute looks like being stuck in the subway, or driving in traffic, for up to several hours every single day, and I just can't think of anything that would justify that type of commute.
[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr...
Slugging isn't common because the capitalist system would rather everyone buy a car. Selling cars is big business.
This isn't a pro-car thing. I've haven't driven a car to work in 8 years (I pay out the ass to live downtown so that I'm close enough to walk / bike). It just seems like "Well, that sounds like a pain in the ass" is a simpler possible explanation to why slugging isn't popular in the US compared to Big Business not wanting it to be.
not to everyone. I love being alone and hate to deal with people or drama on public transit.
My mom slugged for decades of her working life. I really wish it were an option.
I love being in an office with the handful of people I work with. I hate being in an office with hundreds of people I don't work with.
Just yell at people to be in the office for 2 days per week for no reason? Meh. Why?
Organize a week to have all local and international employees together for a week once or twice a year, schedule big organizational meetings and important discussions in that week, sponsor dinner and lunch together, have a team event or three? Just accept that concrete and hard productivity will crash for that week, and consider it a social event? That's actually nice and valuable.
When I read posts like this - however well-intentioned - I just see a person without kids or other responsibilities, who thinks it would be 'fun' to fly out to some town and hang with their colleagues 24/7 for those seven days, and forgetting that for a lot of people this would be difficult or impossible. At home there can be children that need to be looked after, or an elderly parent who needs a visit, or a partner who works nights or a disability that would make this type of 'cool' get-together impossible or extremely stressful.
I don't think it's nearly as 'tech startup burnout' culture as you're envisioning here, people travel for work functions regularly in other sectors of work. Nearly all my aforementioned coworkers on my team had children and lives that they were able to allow their temporary separation from. I dont think it's anyone else's responsibility to fix but your own if making accommodations and planning to meet other people makes you stressed.
On the team, "people without children" are the minority. We do have member s on the team with disabled elders, elders requiring care, disabled children. Lifestock even. We do have people with all manner of volunteer responsibilities too.
We have discussed this extensively internally. To all of these people, it is massively easier to clear up 1 full week with 3-4 months of lead time, than to free up 2-3 days per week permanently. That's why whe chose this mode.
I’ve worked in hybrid environments for over a decade and could never go back to a full RTO position. I’m currently mostly remote and that is also driving me a little crazy.
Some people do great in the office. Some do great remote. I’m not in either bin.
The issues arise when we’re all forced into the office, whether we like it or not.
I wouldn’t mind going from time to time, but i absolutely abhor being forced to.
I like being in the office when it means the office isn't packed to the brim. Prior to RTO mandates at my employer, our team voluntarily went in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And it was very nice. Not everyone (including myself) came in every day but there was always others present. Then RTO mandates came down, then we got moved out of our office space into another, next to a very loud group of non-engineers, then we got moved again, again next to a very loud group of non-engineers, and we are being moved, yet again, but this time back to our own, secluded space. It's all frankly ridiculous bullshit. I'm 60% remote today but I'm still generally annoyed about being in the office when I am there because of all of the stupid bullshit that comes along with it.
It’s not about real estate, it’s about power. For a brief period, during the great resignation, executives felt the sting of at will employment, a weapon that was never meant to be used against them. RTO is about showing us all who is really in charge.
For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate.
For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.
I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.
So, it is about wanting to assert control. Because they think "abusing" remote work is when workers have more control of their circumstances and don't have to break their backs or brains for their salary.
You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well.
If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
Some work might be harder to quantify, but... for a lot of work, there's deadlines. If you need to get a UI screen working to some spec by Feb 1, and Feb 1 comes and goes and it's not done, isn't that some indication that work is getting done or not?
Do they really care if someone 'does the job' or 'delivers the results'? Sometimes there's not much difference, sometimes there's a huge difference.
And why Feb 1? Who decides what the reasonable timeline is? How sure are you that they aren't playing political games? How do you measure their performance? Did the engineer abandon some on-call thing to get it done? Did they pull a more senior person off of their job to help? Did the manager who gets blamed for all this choose who to hire?
Management isn't binary in this way, and when managers try to make it binary, a lot of people (rightly) complain. And I'd bet that many of the people who complain about that are exactly the same people who are here arguing for remote work (not least because I am in both groups).
Quantifying work to such an extent that you can detect any slacking or poor-quality work is one of the fastest ways to make it horrible for employees. Unscrupulous employees abuse Goodhart's Law to hell and back, scrupulous ones get punished for doing important work that didn't make it onto the quantified metrics, and work becomes more about covering your ass than it is about getting stuff done.
Feels like a fringe belief here, and only really feasible in flat, lean orgs with semi-technical stakeholders and no BSers. [So probably <0.001% of tech industry currently]
But it isn't. There's a reason that every company wants that top 0.001%. Employees who give a damn and can be trusted to get things done effectively without supervision or managerial pressure are rare. Even at the best organizations, they're often a minority. At weaker organizations, and (typically) at older and larger ones, they're somewhere between "very rare" and "totally nonexistent".
If you're the latest highly-funded startup, maybe you can pay enough and create a good enough work environment to attract that person. But what if you're a random 30-year-old contracting firm in Overland Park, Kansas, paying $85k a year for software engineers? Do you think you'll attract that vanishingly rare talent? Can you rely on the idea that all of your engineers are so motivated and so skilled?
If you want to argue for that level of managerial hands-off-ness, you can do that. It's a legitimate managerial philosophy, and it might even be the right one! But I think it's hard to deny that many people don't think that's the right managerial philosophy, and that's all that they need to believe to favor RTO without any particular malice.
My point isn't to argue for RTO. Again, I run a remote company, and if you ask me, I'll tell you your company should probably be remote, too (depending on exactly what you do). My point is to argue that people who are arguing for it need not be doing so out of any particular malice.
You don't have to take off all guardrails which prevent abuse. You can still have a rules based office fully remote
Sure. Lots of talk by executives about reining in the “sense of entitlement” in the post Covid era. Worked in middle management, heard it endlessly. I’m glad to hear it’s not universal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
It was decidedly an org that felt like it resented the things it needed to do in order to compete for dev talent, and made very clear over time that it felt like it was overpaying us and other more "blue collar" roles in the company were more honorable and valuable.
Well sure. Just because they think it's a more effective way to run their company doesn't mean that their understanding of "more effective" isn't equivalent to exercising more control.
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
People are perfectly capable of thinking about things in terms that are inconsistent with their underlying motivations. Dog whistling in politics works and is necessary because explicit racism turns off a substantial part of the population that nevertheless remains open to more indirect forms of racist policy and language. Thus, dropping n bombs morphed into "welfare queens." While such voters may be uncomfortable with outright bigotry, dog whistling rhetoric still appeals to them because on some level they are not entirely comfortable with true racial equality and integration. i.e., they harbor racial animus that motivates racist beliefs.
Similarly, managers and executives may not feel comfortable speaking explicitly in terms of exercising power or control over their employees while still acting out of a subconscious need to exercise that very power or control. Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations. Others adopt similarly indirect language and comparable positions without being consciously aware of the emotional needs motivating their choices. Still others legitimately believe in their pro-RTO position without necessarily experiencing any ulterior motive.
> because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work
Lack of trust in their workers is a failure of leadership. Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more, they impose an extremely unwelcome cost on those employees. I don't see how that is any better than thinking about the problem in terms of raw power dynamics.
> or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative
Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees. It's an example of attribute substitution. They don't know how to measure actual merit or hard work, so they measure visible, loosely correlated behaviors. Again, this is a failure of leadership, and a failure to establish systems of accountability that can function in a remote environment.
It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader. Especially because an organization that cannot hold employees accountable in a remote environment will be unlikely to do so in the office either. So far, the overwhelming majority of the published data around remote work and the rigorous analyses based on those data strongly suggest RTO policies damage rather than improve productivity. Likely precisely because organizations with poor organizational mechanisms around accountability continue to perform poorly in office, whereas those with strong accountability perform even better remotely.
When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy, it makes sense to consider what their ulterior motives might be. Many ambitious leaders possess a deep psychological need to exercise power over others. That's what makes them ambitious. In the absence of any reasonable justification for RTO, it is thus not unreasonable to attribute their position to that need for control rather than accepting the insufficient and unconvincing excuses they explicitly offer for their position.
That's possible, yes. But I'm in as good as position as anyone to know, and as far as I can tell, that does not appear to be true of any of the people I'm interacting with. (I do agree with your preceding point, but that's a bit off-topic.)
> Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more
Accountability trades off against other things, though. If it's by some objective standard, you run into Goodhart's Law almost immediately. If it's by subjective standards, you run into politics and personal biases (the exact biases you're concerned about, by the way!). It's this effect to "improve accountability" that leads to metrics on your git commits or programs that watch whether you're moving your mouse or stack-ranking or whatever else.
You could say "well they should improve their accountability to something not stupid" - sure, but organizational and managerial talent is limited. You don't run a business in an abstract ideal vacuum, you run it in a real world of human beings who are sometimes selfish, biased, petty, inattentive, stupid, egotistical, or any number of other things.
Given the practical fact that accountability has costs and is often done badly, avoiding the need for two much of it is not as unreasonable as it sounds.
> Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees.
I agree with that, yes. Hustle culture is not a good thing. But buying into something dumb is different from malice or some deliberate effort to suppress workers.
> It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader.
Even if there isn't a moral difference (and I think there is probably one, for reasons already described), there is a practical difference in the nature of the problem and the solutions to it.
> When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy
But I do think they justify it - or at least, that a reasonable person could think that they do. I think you're sort of assuming management of spherical cows on a frictionless plane here, without any of the extremely messy business than comes with any organization involving a large number of human beings.
This still seems a lot like RTO being used as a weapon. The only difference is they aren't being cruel for the sake of it (which is undoubtedly rare), but they have cruel intentions nevertheless.
Yes? I've been at the table to witness executives and presidents of companies openly talking about their disdain for their own employees. It's happened multiple times. At 3/5 of the employers that I've had over 20 years in technology. I firmly believe the only reason I didn't personally witness this at the other 2 was because I was too far removed from the halls of power in those organizations.
So have I, and they absolutely have talked and acted this way behind closed doors and at other times, felt no need to even hide it.
All 7 of those people (in 3 different contracts) have failed to do so. At one point they said a variation of "because I say so" and that was that.
A lot of more liberal-leaning people don't understand the power-play games that many of the people on top love to play. One could argue some of them long stopped being there for the money and only do it for the power-play, even.
A workplace’s culture of consideration is expressed through communication channels, but is not determined by the choice of channel.
But instant messages? Everyone expects instant responses. Even when their message is something like, "hey,I see you have your door closed. Are you busy?"
FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU
My understanding is people don't expect instant responses, but that's never been made explicit. What do you base your understanding on? Do folks tell you?
Pre-covid you could tell when someone was busy based on body language and avoid interrupting them.
I’m a huge proponent of async messaging (email) over sync… but if you are in the office, turn that nonsense off if you need to get work done.
Now that the pandemic is over, we're back to mandatory 3 days per week, minimum, with more for higher level roles. Yet except for a recently acquired employee my entire team is remote. So, WFH and meet on Zoom or sit in an office and meet on Zoom.
Unfortunately the sales people are the policy makers and they can't seem to wrap their heads around doing anything that isn't face to face. Yet we started on this investment in remote work to control travel costs.
You gotta game the system and learn some basic acting skills. Twitch your face. Pause just a little too long before responding. Get up in the middle of a sentence to stare out the window and just stop talking, forcing the other party to ask you to continue. Laugh obnoxiously loud at your own jokes. Stall, delay, confuse, whatever you do: make the experience not worth repeating for the offender.
Get bipolar: be the very best person you can be on Slack. But be a complete hebephrenic bug eyed lunatic when someone interrupts you IRL.
I have to say being in the office has been better than I expected. I recently got together with a group of former coworkers, who I worked with for many years at a startup, and have kept in touch all these years later. We noted that this kind of friendship definitely would not have happened if we were working remote.
My only thing is, I would rather have the flexibility to choose where I work, even if only at the team level. It gets cold where I live in winter, I would love to be able to go stay someplace warm during those months, and come to the office when I want to be there.
I feel like for me, this debate isn’t really about working in the office vs working from home, it’s about control. Companies have realized that they gave over too much soft power to employees during the pandemic, so they are now working together to claw it back. They could care less where we work, as long as they are the ones in control.
They lost literally tens of millions in grant opportunities that I have written and the experience I bring, because they wouldn't go remote 3 days instead of just 2.
I understand wanting some time in person, absolutely. I hate it, but it does make certain processes much easier. But to not negotiate at all, even when the candidate is perfect for the job and happy with everything else? Ridiculous.
I'm not sure how else to say what I'm saying. My qualifications are literally perfect for the job. My experience is perfect for the job. My location is perfect for the job. My attitude is perfect for the job.
It was billed as remote up to four days but the department head only allows 3. That was a deal breaker. I legitimately only negotiated on that. I was willing to take a pay and title cut because I agree with the mission of the institution.
It seemed like a no brainer to me.
Apparently I should've asked specifically about the role? Even though we were already talking about that role?
> I asked about remote and was told the company was up to 4 days a week remote.
Wait, do they work 7 days a week?
If that's their attitude (and I've seen companies where it is), that's a huge red flag.
They said they were remote 4 out of 5 days. But the specific department is only remote 2 of the 5 days for that position.
Though, I think the following could suffer from post-hoc rationalization fallacy:
> We noted that this kind of friendship definitely would not have happened if we were working remote.
Turns out it's more on you as a person to figure out friendship than arbitrary spatial collocation.
Then the anecdote would be different. Definitely post-hoc since there's also plenty of workplaces you never end up with friends from. I am reasonably outgoing and have kept only a handful of friends from various past jobs. Mostly one group is still mostly friends (but we co-founded together so perhaps an unusual group).
No, it's not, I agree. Though, plausible and intuitive do not equate to true and supported by evidence. It is the difference of human knowledge pre-1700s vs post, when science came along and basically said, "yeah, you think that, but how do you know that?" Post-hoc rationalization is quite powerful stuff. That something wound up happening, does not make it a generally true thing. Other factors can be at play.
I'm not talking about global hiring (something many people don't like because salaries tend to go down), but companies allowing remote work within the same country. This, imo, is the greatest advantage of remote work
If the company is willing to sacrifice productivity to pretend any collaboration is happening because butts in seats look nice, oh well.
I know how to make that work in a startup, but its premise doesn’t scale beyond a pizza box.
Has anyone figured out a better way that works at 100 people?
One idea I’m curious about is pods. Could you build a small team who all live close enough together? Could they coordinate remotely with the mothership?
The default seems to be to just embrace remote.
Or issue a RTO as a ‘polite’ way to decimate the team and reduce burn.
Being able to form and disband teams dynamically is an advantage.
That does seem to favor a big enough pool of people in the same place.
Or relying on remote for projects spanning pods.
But, this approach is not something that powers-that-be would even begin to support...even though, i betcha, this approach would have tons of people actually invested in the success of the org because of the good that it represents in allowing people to earn a living without making commutes and such that much more difficult. I know that if my employers supoorted this sort of model, i would not only work karder, but actually give more of a damn, and really care to have the org succeed. Basically, i would contribute far more to the org. But, nah, the bosses just want to squeeze the lemons, and not care how they get their juice produced. ;-)
Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situations would be handled by a phone call or email.
Meeting in the coffee room to chat becomes rare because schedules and tastes (eg. office coffee versus off-site coffee, bagged lunches versus going out) differ. Also there's too many people and too much churn to really get to know anybody.
Arranging meeting times becomes difficult outside smaller 5-10 person units so asynchronous communication becomes predominant.
What I've seen work is not trying to co-locate a full team at all. Doing so only leads to silos and hiring difficulties. Instead have small offices which people from a small geographic area use. Those people will be on different teams and in different departments -- which is good for inter-team communication and synergy. This is exactly what offices normally miss because teams are co-located resulting in a relatively high 'distance' to build a rapport between teams.
Funnily enough our team lead works in a 2 person office... hmm.
“You cannot dangle what people need to effectively work in front of them like a carrot and subtly threaten to take it away. It’s ableist. You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features at the office, so don’t do it with that either.”
This is only because there's usually legal protection for that kinds of accessibility features. If employers could legally, it would be way more common to threaten to take them away.
I have no doubt there are some that do so illegally.
When I was young, I worked in a call center in which the bathroom was taken away as a punishment for bad rates on multiple occasions, until someone called the Dept. of Labor over it.
I understand that most of us worked our asses off to get to a skilled position and that in many ways it makes far more sense to be able to work from home. I myself am being dragged back into the office 5 full days a week and it's a 45 minute one way commute on a good day, so I'm salty about that. But hearing people who live 10 minutes from the office in $450,000 houses complaining loudly in the lobby about being forced back into the office right near the minimum wage security desk is a little uncomfortable.
It’s easy to find another farmhand, it’s hard to find another ML engineer
I just want to make sure that we're not forgetting the people who weren't able to become high-level ML engineers for various social and economic reasons and are locked into 10 hour hard days in person.
Kids knew which kids they’d have to clean to the house of 20 years in the future and they intuitively want to knock those elite kids down a peg while they still can.
Never forget the extreme resentment that those around nerds have for a nerds mind. When this country stops treating nerds like shit and celebrating anti-intellectualism, I’ll start being worried about the plight of the lowly security guard.
I would argue that you, as the intellectual elite, are only leaning into and confirming their bias, and that perhaps a good way to begin to help reform the anti-intellectualism of America would be to try to have compassion for the people far beneath you, like the security guard. Otherwise, those people could have even greater anti-intellectual mindsets.
It's also a little odd to me to be willing to persecute or punish through inaction adults for their actions as children.
The “somebody has it worse” argument always ends up pushing people to accept getting screwed over.
But keeping context and perspective is important. Even in your example, it would do the security guard some good to take a moment and be grateful that he does have that minimum wage job and a place to stay.
It's not meant to encourage you to settle and get screwed over. It's meant to remind you of what you have and often those things should drive you to fight harder for other people and yourself.
Doesn't mean that advocating for blue collar workers is wrong just because the "founders" are doing it too. Instead we should actually hold them f-ing accountable to what they claim to believe and support when this happens.
There are tiny little condos being built next to my office in northeast ATL that are going for a STARTING rate of over a million.
Security guards are usually security guards because they want to be (most require a concealed carry license). I do not care if they think they are underpaid. They can always snap and go murder half the building. Id rather we didn’t even have a security guard, since the tweaker whod try to come into our building to do drugs is almost certainly not going to literally shoot the place up because overpaid tech workers were talking about not like RTO…
And just a point of perspective, it was only recently 40h a week ( 1940 ) and child labor (1938) was not considered some sort of communist plot intended to overthrow capitalism.
My point was more just being aware of how we sound to others who don't even have the opportunity we have. But maybe our vocal opposition can inspire them. I don't know. This is a very emotionally charged subject and maybe I should have kept my attempt at nuance to myself.
Absolute bollocks. This is the Elon Musk screed and it's baseless. Do you think fast food workers gripe and moan when extremely well paid pilots or nurses go on strike?
Every worker wants every other worker to succeed over management.
I'm not. I have repeatedly and continue to voice my opposition to RTO specifically, even directly to the VP. I can do this because if I get let go, I can easily find other work, and some of my coworkers can't due to restrictions on their lives.
Elon Musk is a slimy snake that seems to be dead set on becoming a fascist dictator. No fan of him. Actively avoid his products.
But it's odd that merely advocating for taking a moment and considering how we sound to others and maybe that their situation is different gets me lumped in with Musk. I didn't say "we all need to go back in the office in solidarity with the security guards." I was just saying I feel weird complaining about it around them.
Yes, some minimum wage workers are there because they chose to be, but I don't believe for a second all people living a more difficult low-wage life are doing it because they failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as someone in a different comment said. America does everything it can to remove those bootstraps for less privileged people, and I'm just saying I think it's wise to consider that.
We should all be working together against the corporate overlords and fight for better rights for all, up and down the chain. Let's just not think we deserve so much more than others while we do it.
Nobody said or implied anything to this effect. You said, imagine how our demands must sound to people who cannot work remotely. I say, as is the case with the labor movements of many other well paid laborers, the ones who make less do not think our labor struggles are invalid because we have better conditions than them. All laborers want all laborers to succeed against management
There's definitely a generational divide though. Older folks seem more likely to view being at the office as just a natural part of how work "works", while younger people are more likely to understand when it's necessary and when it isn't.
It's a different story for lower-status jobs that could be done from home but aren't allowed. But when it's such a clear signal that you aren't trusted by management/society/etc, you really do have something to resent!
And frankly, stop LARP-ing as a “sympathetic to blue collar work” person. God knows you’re probably an executive using them for messaging.
When has anyone on HN ever given a fuck about blue collar workers until RTO, when these mysterious “sympathies” emerged? Of course we should support the working class, but you should’ve started a lot fucking sooner.
So I've always been concerned for them. But I understand your point.
Some will argue this is a talking point for anti-WFH people, but it's still a valid point to make independent of your WFH stance and as a general tip for being a decent, empathetic human being.
Every job has its perks and disadvantages. I don’t have the same perks my friends who are doctors have, so should they now give them up because it’s not fair to me because I’m not a doctor and don’t have them?
Those that are most pro back-to-office are the ones that are either very extroverted, and have human-to-human roles. Or the people that simply can't disconnect between work and home. I know some people that say they simply can't focus on work, unless they're at the workplace, or some other non-home office.
But by far, it's the extroverted managers that seem to hammer on about return to office.
However I’m a team lead. And no matter what I try I can’t train my juniors as quickly remotely.
My seniors and I can show them how to work, and solve problems so much faster on-site. We catch bad habits sooner and in-still the teams approach to working via example. Which so far I’ve found hardest to replicate remotely.
Yes you can pass skills on remotely. But many people aren’t willing to spent extended periods on a call. And it is time people need more than anything else at the start of their career.
Many juniors - understandably - don’t know what skills they are lacking. And those that do don’t know which to focus on first. Only 10/20% have the right personality type to self-source these skills independently. They need our help. Just as we needed the previous generations help. And to provide that we need to really get to know them.
In a world with any worker’s rights, you wouldn’t be able to.
That's an unnecessarily aggressive and uncharitable read of the situation. While it may be possible to train up juniors remotely, many people (myself included) have given it a serious try and have found it far too risky to be worth the effort. An intellectually honest manager will say "it's not for me, I can't do it," and their higher-ups have to make a value judgment about whether it's worth it to force them into a shape that they're not, or accept that the tried-and-true method of socializing juniors in-person is still valid.
If you're honestly curious as to why it's so hard, my experience is that it's a socialization task: you have to make the junior folks feel like they're part of the team and have standing to ask questions. That's really hard to do when everyone is just words on a screen, or occasionally floating heads on a video chat. Embodied communication has something that gets lost online.
This isn’t about punishment: it’s about how we organize ourselves if we want to create together. I write LARPs collaboratively, and I play tabletop RPGs, too—and those are more fun and more productive and creative in person.
Back when I was healthy, I would have agreed with this. Nowadays, chronic illness forestalls shared meals or casual walks. Informal communication doesn't need to be over the top of a cubicle wall. It can be as simple as switching from Slack to Signal/Whatsapp/iMessage.
As with most things, cohesive dynamics are achieved by working with the tools and limitations that _exist_ rather than assuming everyone can relate in the same way. If I worked on a team where all the above were socially expected, I'd feel excluded and probably leave.
It's perfectly fine to acknowledge that _you_ require those walks and meals to lead effectively. And I'm sure that your non-handicapped team members appreciate it as well.
The rest of us, however, still have a lot to contribute and shouldn't be implicitly (yes) punished for not fitting into that mold. We're good engineers and good colleagues.
Workers have all the right they need.
Don't like RTO? Leave, find a job which allows WFH or go start your own company.
I will accept that some of my senior team feel punished. They don’t need to come in for their own careers. They’re past that point. But part of being a senior is passing your skills along. And upskilling others.
I’ve trained dozens of people remotely and helped them level up. Sure it’s not the most *effective*, but given the immense benefits of WFH, I have no problem sacrificing the ease of my job so that my juniors can have a better life.
While this is less convenient for me (a fact which is reflected in my compensation), it flattens the onboarding curve without requiring a complete RTO for everyone.
And this is the problem. I want to work from home full time. But until I can replicate all of the benefits remotely I will continue with hybrid.
This is a very emotive subject. The only way we are going to translation to a fully remote future is by accepting the limitions of remote. And then fixing them.
Because of their bully tactics I've essentially been paid for doing absolutely nothing at home for 2 months now. They can't fire me for cause, because they did contract with me under the stipulation of WFH, and they can't lay me off without cause because they know perfectly well that I can and will sue them if they do because the reason is obvious even if not explicitly stated.
I guess the point of this post is that companies will cut off their nose to spite their face.
If such a law were in place almost no company would ask any employee to commute anywhere unless it were absolutely necessary. Return to office is really easy for them to ask for when they aren't the ones who have to pay for it.
I get some people were hired without any understanding of that during/after the pandemic and sometimes offices move, but that seems like when to renegotiate.
Because of this, it is common for companies to get a cheaper policy that does not cover car commutes and set a company policy requiring employees to walk, bike or take public transit.
Particularly this point: in office collaboration is digital
I feel the other points have been hashed out to death on other similar HN discussions:
- in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
- at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
> in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
Many people's adult friends come from work. Sometimes their spouse does too. I've noticed a phenomenon where more junior team members in particular would go into the office, even though the senior folks rarely did, and I think part of this is just to meet people because they may not have built up a friend group in their city yet.
> at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
That's the case for me, although it depends a lot on your physical home situation and the social dynamic at home. I think for some folks the office is an escape.
And then she revealed that she had a nanny flown in from her country and the nanny handled everything kid related. Don’t be this kind of a boss.
Justifying office space is not a useful business strategy. I think it’s best to treat people you disagree with as reasonable and consider what their motivations could be. In this case I think it’s clear there is one big one—-productivity. It’s clear that some people (not everyone!) use remote work as a way to do minimal work (see r/overemployed). Moreover there are some benefits to in person collab in terms of being able to discuss things quickly and rely on people to be there.
And I say this as a remote worker who loves it and never wants to RTO. But I don’t assume the other side is acting in bad faith, I think there’s pros/cons to both. Mostly remote work is great, but not always. Sometimes my teammates randomly don’t respond to me on an urgent issue and I have no recourse. Sometimes they aren’t making progress on work I am counting on and I can’t tell if they are even working.
There has been some bad faith over hiring and then forcing rto to avoid termination payouts. We see Musk plans to do the same even moving government offices to states like Wyoming.
Most companies are not bad faith actors just copying others.
I miss being able to look over and check to see if someone was busy before interrupting them. I also miss being able to read body language during meetings and not having to stare at the camera the entire time or having people talk over each other repeatedly due to network delays.
I was hired during COVID with the expectation of a fully remote first policy, for good. Now it's this micromanagement where I need C-level approval to change my address. And there are one-off exceptions all over the place both for hiring and for relocation.
It tells me that leadership and the board don't give a shit about me. I am a cog in their machine. Expendable.
I am quietly looking for a new job and not stretching myself as much at my current job. Not coasting, but also not answering those slack pings as quickly, or referring people to the help desk process instead of solving their problem then and there. Putting me and my needs first more often.
Truly remote first companies should be at an advantage both for hiring and for cost efficiency.
The question is: are they at an advantage in effectiveness? I think they probably are, but it seems like a reasonably open question, one that we should see an answer to in the coming years. If in five or ten years remote companies aren't crushing non-remote ones, that's going to be pretty strong evidence that there is good reason for in-office work.
It’s entirely political. Conservatives hate the idea that “lazy” limp wristed soy boy ML engineers can make more money than their good old boys making tractors at catapiller.
"...we are not designers or knowledge workers solving issues, we handle data!"
The second sentence is what got me.
I know it's implied as the author's perspective, but speak for yourself.
I am a developer, designer, knowledge worker, and my products are used to solve business issues. There would be no point moving data around and making dashboards, products, automation, except for solving business problems or pushing the bottom line up through innovation.
The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.
I agree with the general thrust of the article, that in person routine working isn't needed. I work fully remote and collaborate better in many respects that way.
There is also value in having face to face meetings and conversations, body language, microexpressions, aspects of tone are all significantly more palpable in person.
BUT, that doesn't mean we should be in the office all the time, just for occasional face to face meetings. My employer is in another state, I visit for a bit every quarter or two.
It also doesn't change the fact that the return to office is motivated by micromanagement and stop losses on real estate.
But people conflate the needs of the business with the “needs” of the executives or investors. I have little faith that any exec that I have met that is capable of putting their own ego aside and honestly describe how RTO helps the business. Maybe it does help the business, but I haven’t seen anyone make that case.
I wonder if most of the RTO-enforcing people will be swept up in that 50%.
Covid led in the most early retirement ever seen. We’re are not expecting a spike in retirement by any measure that I have seen.
I do think that there a lot of baby boomers hanging out in the workforce still, Covid just pushed the RIP (retired in place) people over the edge.
Reflecting on my place of employment though, I can only come up with a handful of people planning to retire in the next year.
We also fired a lot of them recently, so there’s that.
Sometimes I think millennials fell into a trap following GenX back to urban living, but missed out on the sweet spot late 90s/early 00s where cities were attractive but also cheap.
I worked with guys 10 years older than me who bought apartments at 1/5 the prices my generation saw, but had starting salaries more than 1/2 of what ours were.
You should be more specific, because the cities were always inhabited. Which millennials are you talking about?
If one wants to be really pedantic, a lot of that growth was in outer boroughs that were relatively sparse in the early/mid 1900s.
Manhattan is still below its peak population of ~2.3M in the early 1900s. Fortunately we don't have overcrowded tenement housing anymore. Manhattan population was about 2M in 1950 and bottomed around 1.4M in 1980s.. so a 30% draw, and is now at about 1.7M.
She's a marketing event manager, he's an accountant manager, and I'm a, well, it depends on the day; let's say senior systems architect and programmer across our HW-and-container-based security products.
Of the three, mine needs the most in person time, which we mostly satisfy with ad-hoc whiteboarding sessions, but we've gotten good at doing even that in video calls.
When we do get together, it's for team lunches, mini-golf tournaments, etc.
It's great.
My co has people in TO, NYC, London, with most of us around but not necessarily in Ottawa.
People aren't, though. The most valuable people are the ones who have the most options, precisely because they are valuable. If you play that game, you're going to differentially lose your most valuable people. That's not a smart move.
Want top tier talent but can’t afford it in your area? There’s likely a cheat code available to you now.
It’s inevitable that zoning laws will change. When the bag holders for corporate real estate have an exit strategy, I wonder if we won’t magically find the question of RTO features a lot less in the ambiance of life. I don’t know enough to say whether it might be true that the kinds of people to have large investments in media conglomerates are the kinds of people who’d consider large investments in corporate real estate as a sound and obvious diversification strategy (and vice versa).
>You’re asking me as an immunocompromised and chronically ill person in pain and dealing with fatigue to show up and do the same stuff I do at home so others can play family at work?
>Home office is the only way for many people to have a decent work output because family, household, caretaking, further education, illness and free time activities are better taken care of this way and people can work focused in silence without noise and interruption.
How is one taking care of those things mentioned and still "focusing in silence without noise and interruption"?
Working in a silicon valley tech company your still not innovating, I spend lot of my time making bullshit suck less.
And if I was innovating, and for the few times I did actually get to do something cool, I want a quiet room with no distractions so I can focus and research and hack on things. I think one of my most productive and innovative times at work I did a work-cation for a couple week, to a different timezone by 3 hours, no people interutpions and no slack interruptions.
What surprised me about this article is that it's not the typical Hackernews fare of "Hi, we're Cerridwen, a transenby fox-weasel hybrid plural system and CISO of Eoana, a startup building enterprise static container verification tools in Rust." It was just someone with kind of a shitty job who does tech on the side because it interests her. There are more people like her out there working in "tech", by far, than there are Cerridwens, and yet the Cerridwens are the ones who bubble to the top of Hackernews. And so the thinking of Hackernews tends to be within the Cerridwen bubble, whether we're aware of it or not. So it's great to get a more ordinary perspective on this kind of issue.
Hopefully by this point everyone understands that office working has significant upsides for some jobs/people, and only downsides for others. Can we please stop saying "it's good" or "it's bad". It's like arguing whether marmite tastes nice.
For me, as a lowly code monkey I could never work anywhere where going to the office was mandatory again. The advantages aren't worth the commute. I would imagine if I was in upper management I might be more tempted though. Zoom just can't match real life.
But middle-managers should come in, for collaboration, we're told, and to mentor junior staff, right? Bad news for you - 50%+ of your work week is in meetings and, you guessed it, on Zoom with headphones, where you'll blabber out loud next to your engineering colleagues, everyone with headphones on.
But, we're told, if you don't want a 45 minute commute, you should move closer to the office. Bad news, there: if you want to actually own your home, you're facing a record affordability crisis (in the United States and as far as I can tell, in major European cities like London, Paris, Lisbon, etc. as well). And rents are through the roof, if you want to live near the office.
And if your office is a city environment like New York, Paris, etc., and you want to live near it, then you should enjoy living in an apartment with people above, below and on the sides, playing music or doing whatever noise they want at any point.
If you're not neurotypical, and find the sounds of other people stressful (apartments and office), then tough bananas, your dreams of working remote from a quiet, comfortable, affordable environment in nature are shot, because the brass decided we "collaborate better" in the office environment.
Personally speaking, I actually enjoyed coming into the office during Covid because the office was empty, it was lonely at home, and there was no one on the commute. And then I enjoyed coming in a few times a week when they brought that back, because I do think there's value in it. Now, the company has decided we must all come in, suddenly, in a few weeks. And of course I'm infuriated and ready to move on this company I've been at for years.
Is it any wonder that people gamble in options and crypto to try to 'get rich quick' when the working environment can deteriorate so rapidly, when the housing costs can deteriorate so rapidly? I think there's something to the idea that these types of get-rich-quick dreams are the lottery ticket equivalents of the blue collar workers.
1- No we're not all privileged enough distance-wise or weather-wise or safety-wise or fitness-wise to bike everywhere, guys.
It’s to the point that I realized the tech industry may not be for me. I don’t want to be a shill for Bezos or Musk or some other tasteless billionaire. I may opt to leave entirely.
I’ve started religiously studying for the LSAT. Maybe if I work hard, I can push to make America better so these insipid fucks cannot play with our lives.
I'm grinding to start a cooperative company with a non-abusive work philosophy.
I have respect for the people I collaborate with. It's easy. Yet so many managers and business owners rely on explicit abuse and manipulation... for what?
- giant's needs for slaves. That's is. I know many do dislike such strong term but again that's damn is. Take a look at https://youtu.be/MJBz66H5QIU than see what happen around the world, from Jakarta "will be abandoned" for Nusantara, Cairo for "New Administrative Capital", Iran recent announce they'll count moving the capital in a to-be-built new smart city, failed Saudi's Neom, Arkadag, Innopolis, ... everywhere current ruling class knows well we need to built new settlements and infra because we can't evolve/keep the existing ones for long. Why smart cities? Because they are the best way to enslave people keeping them amused at least formally, while keeping them owning nothing. Let's say you own an apartment, what you really own? A portion of a building, no more, and most in cities do not own but rent. Cloud+mobile, the modern mainframe, what to you own, a thin client/endpoint practically managed by the OEM and nothing else? Current fintech, where instead of giving signed transactions via APIs (like here in EU, OpenBank, de jure since 2017 but not down to the customers) the substantial owner gives next to nothing, some banks nowadays do not even gives pdfs receipts for most operations? What else? In cities people under-utilize large buildings for less than 12h/day, commuting between them like a ritual every day, just to consume collective transport, privately owned by someone, ready made food, fast fashion and fast tech (really, if you WFO you do not buy much dress or wearable devices) for what? In the '80s most factories have flee the city, only offices remains to keep the economy running and we all know there is no needs for offices, the only who need people in cities, so offices too keep them there, are the giants;
- ruling class, more and more a kleptocracy, who need to been able to surveil and controls slaves, again, in a city you easy surveil anyone and locking some access networks with very little forces you control many people, especially if they do own nothing, like they do not have cars to move, large food stock, water from natural sources, way to heat in winter and cool in summer autonomously and so on;
- needs to keep people moving without thinking about the world and the society, because cities are essentially artificial environments easy to hide the rest of the world with panem et circense model, as long as the dictatorship could withstand them.
These are the reasons for RTO at the high level. The the reasons many follow the trend: fear of change and personal ignorance of the modern world. Most CEO do know next to nothing about IT, so most middle man and so on, including many at the bottom of the social pyramid, all of them fear to being alien in a modern society because they do not know it. They know how to confront with a human in an office, they do not know what to do with mails, calls and so on.
That's is. However reading hear and there it's clear all these pushes end up in nothing, they might hold for a moment but not more. Especially when we talk about resilience and the war loom, resources might became scarce and so on, because while most do not even think about having a blackout or some food supply issues, sooner or later they'll start thinking and they'll realize in cities there is no possible resilience. There is no room for p.v. and storage on the upper end, there is no nearby wood to source for emergency stove-based heating and cooking, no natural water sources, way too many people to nourish/relocate and no one who actually produce food etc. Skyrocketing prices to impoverish people for the sake of 2030's Agenda, looming service availability/stability issues, climate change, natural infra aging will kill any will to be in cities. And so will kill offices anyway.
You should still have a seperation of spaces with your home and your work. If not, you focus less when working and relax less when chilling. It's doubly counterproductive.
Most can’t afford this in Europe.
As a result, I just don't think of that room as part of my home. I'm never tempted to go in there and use that room for something else. For the most part, it's as if that room only exists during the workday.