Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home | Hacker News Reader

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

theregister.com

62 pointsrntn80 comments

The problem(s) with RTO were manifested even before the mandates: open office plans.

Office rents show up on expense reports. So do employee salaries. What doesn't? Employee productivity.

There are many studies[1][2][3] showing the open office plans are worse for productivity. But lots of companies built them anyway. If the companies want to make an argument for RTO is better for productivity, but they also have open office plans, then it is inconsistent and non-sensical.

If you want complete RTO (more than 'hydrid' 2-3 days per week), then you should at least give cubicles, and ideally offices (even if it's 'only' 2-4 person per office).

[1] https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

[2] https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/what-science-sa...

[3] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/the-price-of-col...

I actually found cubicles are most useless, they look cramped but you also loose privacy. If I can not get a close office room I would prefer an open space.

The problem of the “modern” office space is that they tends to be a demonstration of how a company wants to show to the outsiders instead of actually fulfilling tasks. For examples, a large amount lobby and common areas looks nice, but are not useful at all for completing tasks, i.e writing code or meeting. This is particularly bad when people are required to rto now. Keep in mind, no matter how nice your common area looks like, most of them WON’T want to come if they had a choice.

Open office plans are shown to improve corporate masculine energy though which is vital to our productivity or something.

Right now, RTO mandates can work simply because many employers _want_ to shed staff. It's a tidy way to drop a few people without having to make hard individual decisions, in a form you can justify as keeping 'the most committed' and 'improving productivity'.

Anywhere where it's an employee's market though, anywhere that employers are really fighting to hire or retain good staff and they _could_ do WFH, RTO is out of the question. I suspect medium-term those days will return for tech (once interest rates drop and funding reappears) and all of a sudden WFH will spike enormously once again, as a baseline perk required to compete when hiring good experienced staff.

Hopefully this pendulum won't swing back and forth too many times before the industry settles on consistent norms, but I wouldn't be surprised.

If there's anything to be learned from this, it's that when you're a hot commodity you need to get the things you want in writing as part of your employment agreement.

If you are employed at will then that employment agreement isn't worth the paper it is written on.

Yes and no. Breach of contract is a breach of contract.

It's not a breach of contract if the company is allowed to change the contract whenever they want.

I don't want to push too hard, because it may be against HN code, but how many workplace disputes were you a part of and was it in US? I think it is a relevant question here though.

At-will employment is standard in 49/50 US states, and this forum is almost entirely American, so that is safe to assume by default. If you have a counterexample to share (where someone successfully sued a company to enforce terms of an at-will contract) then why don't you?

It's not necessarily about being fired or not; it's about being fired for cause or not.

Even in at-will states, you typically need to be fired without cause to be eligible for unemployment benefits. If you quit because you don't want to return to office or are fired for refusing to return to office, you get nothing; if they fire you for not returning to office when your contract says you are allowed to WFH, you remain eligible for unemployment and perhaps severance.

So to reiterate, if we feel we are a hot commodity we may be entitled to unemployment insurance.

That's a big yikes.

Huh? That is one weird take. You are entitled to unemployment insurance, because you pay into that insurance pool. You may have to fight over the grey area every so often, because life happens, but how I feel about myself have nothing to do with it.

To be frank, I am struggling to understand your perspective. Could you elaborate?

I'm just saying reading the entire comment chain went from an optimistic statement to...well at least you have the bare minimum benefits that society offers (if you are an avid negotiator).

I mean, the point of contract negotiation is to use your being hot shit to bond the other party when you're not.

If you're never in demand, you never have the leverage to negotiate; if you're always in demand, what you have in your contract probably doesn't matter, because everyone will be falling over themselves to keep you happy.

“Right now, RTO mandates can work simply because many employers _want_ to shed staff.”

It should be as long as there are sufficient job candidates are willing to accept RTO, the employer can continue to do so. There are significant less people leaving these companies with RTO mandate than anticipated.

I'm currently sat in an office surrounded by people forced to be here due to an RTO mandate. 1% of people like it. 99% don't.

So why not vote with feet? Because the market is grid-locked, everybody who wants to move is looking, and so we're in a position where the jobs that are fully remote are starting to shift down in comp offers a little too fast for people able to afford to make the move.

Here's the thing, those who are going to align to 100% WFH are going to get some _superb_ talent if they offer ~80%-90% of RTO equivalents, and they're going to win a lot of brain share. The brain drain is no longer about the Atlantic or even Mediterranean: it's evolving into London vs Bedfordshire, New York vs Arkansas...

The RTO-mandate companies are going to look at this in about 12-18 months and realise they can't attract talent in much the same way those who can't get people in to the country on the right visas weren't able to get people a few years ago. It's going to be a wild ride.

Personally, I can't wait.

And if you're building a team right now, make a clear choice: RTO might work if you want young people to grow with you, but if you want experience, you're going to go a lot faster, a lot sooner, for quite a lot less money, if you follow the data and go remote-first.

This is mainly an effort to get people to quit without providing severance.

However, if RTO actually meant returning to an actual office with walls and a productive work environment instead of a free-floating table in the middle of a huge open space of people using video conferencing apps and chatting about sports and entertainment, more workers would accept the huge negative of commute time.

Microsoft used to give every computer programmer their own office. Even with levels.fyi types of salary there's been a significant erosion to the social/political capital of our field.

I have mixed feelings about it.

Do I think I got more done in the office? Undoubtably.

Do I cherish the fact that I have been able to be home with my young children? More than anything.

I did not have children pre-pandemic, and was anxious to return to office. When our office did reopen I was there most days. But then my wife and I had children and I have not willingly worked from the office since.

Thats where things fall apart though. Your opinion will be formed on the fact you get more done in the office.

I get less done in the office. I'm orders of magnitude more productive at home. So my opinion is formed on that basis.

Theres absolutely no need to force a single option. Where I work we went for an approach of "the office is there, its open, you've got a key, if you want to use it, use it. If you don't then dont."

That as far as I can see is the fairest approach. Those that prefer being in the office can do so, those that prefer being at home can do so. Theres no loser there, except perhaps anyone with a bizarre view of "well I'm in the office so you should be too" but those people are crazy nutjobs.

When I work in an office, I’m more productive when the other people on my team are also in my office.

If management make me come into the office and expect me to work with people who are working remotely or from a different office, I will bitch about it.

The general problem is that the value of the office tends to be directly proportional to how many people are present. I led hybrid and cross-site teams before COVID, and if even one person wasn't in the office everything had to be handled the same way you would if everyone was remote. The value of being in an office is in-person whiteboarding sessions, impromptu conversations, team bonding, and similar things that aren't as valuable if most/all of a given team isn't present. Conversely, the value of being remote is lost if many people are in an office having those side conversations and the remote people end up feeling like second class citizens.

It presents a difficult problem b/c both sides have a point: without nearly everyone committing to being in the office (at least on certain days) or full-time remote, you lose the full value of either setup.

Fair point, but what's the solution? In my eyes it can't be force everyone back to the office, or force everyone to be remote, that feels like an incredibly lazy and devisive solution.

You probably leave it up to individual teams at the lowest reasonable level. Maybe there's a UI team that does a lot of whiteboard-based designing that chooses to be in the office certain days a week as a team. A different UI team prefers web-based design tooling so they agree to WFH. In some cases whole companies are fully onsite b/c of hardware requirements (e.g. Tesla) or fully remote (e.g. many smaller SaaS companies) based on what the company does.

I honestly don't know what the long-term solution is outside of a lot of variation and individual/team/company choice. Within a given company any change should probably be gradual (e.g. start only hiring in geographic areas around your offices if you eventually want to go full/mostly onsite, offer to pay relocation to people who move close to an office). Senior execs love knee-jerk, emotional decisions to impress shareholders though so I doubt it will work out that way.

I honestly don't think I got more done in the office, certainly not when I consider the commute time was another hour of non-productive time I devoted to work.

I firmly believe that a knowledge worker can't produce anything of any quality for eight hours a day, fives days a week. When I was in office I just spent more time pretending to be busy, and I think that's what management wants to see - the productivity pantomime.

Could companies place an explicit value on WFH vs WFO? e.g. Set WFH salaries to 50% of the WFO rate and let the market sort it out.

Isn't this already happening between companies? If people really prefer WFH jobs, then WFH employers would be able to lower their wages. Doing it within companies will be tricky though, because apparently you lose around a third of the benefits of in-office work if even one person is remote[1].

[1] "I think another possibility, and there our paper gives a little bit of evidence, is that if you have even one colleague who is remote, that yields about 30 percent of the loss from having everyone be remote." https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/06/remote-...

They kinda do this already with location-based pay.

Location-based pay is not the same thing because location-based pay pays more to people who live in SF but don't ever go into the office than it does to people who live somewhere else and don't go into the office.

Location agnostic pay comes close to what OP is suggesting: put your pay in the median of the country as a whole and pay that consistently to everyone regardless of where they live. The company saves money by not having to match tech hub prices, and there are tens of thousands of developers across the country who would love to accept a pay scale that's weighted higher than their local market by the tech hubs.

50% is absurd, but in general full-remote companies that know what they're doing are already sort of doing this—forgoing location-based pay and offer a consistent rate anywhere in the country.

That rate will be lower than what they were paying for people living in the tech hubs (maybe in some cases actually 50%), but represent a major pay bump for people in the rest of the country. It's a win-win for everyone except the people who really want to stay in tech hubs.

I will be the first to say I enjoy working from home. I don't want to go back to the office. What I will also say, that what doubly makes me not go back to the office is the office space itself. It was expensive to put in. Some company paid a lot for it. There are marble tables in the break room, the furniture is obviously not cheap. It is all jarring. It is an assault on the visual and auditory senses. It's bright and loud and overwhelming.

If companies want to try and lure someone back to the office, they should spend some time and money and make it nice. It's not a magic bullet. It won't make people think, "wow I want to spend 30-40 minutes in the car each morning," but it's a start. It's the same thing about catering food into the office, don't buy mediocre food an expect people to hail your praises. If you really cared, you'd actually care about the quality.

I prefer working from the office, but don't like the commute.

If London public transport was not so utterly awful AND expensive AND slow AND unreliable AND overcrowded AND filthy then maybe, but as it is I pay crazy high prices to get a really unpleasant and inefficient experience. Anyone who has the ability to drive to the office, I envy you. What bliss.

Thanks for sharing the opinion, as many folks I know and here fantasize for public transportation like London instead of driving.

(I'm with you after dealing with San Francisco transit, I actually prefer driving and having my own space and control)

The only redeeming factor for public transport in London is the tube, and that it does not have to deal with the traffic and you don't have to try to park when you get there. There is no other reason to take it.

Note that the congestion charge in London was supposed to fix the traffic (still no parking though), but it didn't and it's now basically just a toll. Good luck NYC.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/19/starling-ba...

I have seen such claims right after we are recovering from pandemic. However actually the people are losing even more flexibility compared to pre pandemic. Why? These reporter should be realistic about the economic situation and job market.

This is where the hypocrisy and short sightedness of those worker/contractor regulations begins to show.

If these transferred to independent there may be a win for all sides. Merit and recurring opportunities may become more competitive.

I think this ignores just how poor and inconsistent companies and managers are with regard to accurately judging talent and competence. If I were put into a more competitive system, it would not necessarily matter that I was above the bell curve with regard to talent. This is still a problem in the current system, except I only need to get my foot in the door once. Having to constantly sell myself to an arbitrary and incompetent crowd would probably bias towards skillsets I don’t have, even if I could complete the work just fine.

(apologies; wrong tab, can't delete)

I think you're in the wrong comment section.

As usual, the article never lets slip that billions of humans have non-cushy-office jobs - for which remote work is not physically possible.

I have picked up on some social ..animosity towards those who WFH. You make a very good point, there are many, many more people who can never WFH, and I think there is growing negativity towards those who complain about having to go into an office. Working from home is very logical, cheaper, and better for a lot of office workers but the campaign against RTO could backfire if we are seen as privileged.

all true; there is though a useful point to be made that more WFH-ing office folks does free up transport for those who need to travel, be it rail/bus or just car commutes

One thing to consider is that most of the blue-collar workers who would have an easier commute into a city center due to WFH will have their job negatively affected by office workers not also traveling to the city center.

If you do facilities work in a downtown area, people not working from the office means you have less work to do and your job is potentially affected. Same goes for restaurant workers, sanitation workers, etc.

> if we are seen as privileged

This is not a matter of interpretation or view. You are privileged and your comment shows exactly that.

I find the privileged argument to be unproductive. Do you work in a coal mine or a third world factory? Nearly every position has some level of privilege, does that make the desires of the workers invalid? Does that mean that every job needs to find the lowest common denominator working conditions?

If we are privileged, does that mean we should NOT work from home when it's clearly possible?

That's cool but I have crippling debt and I was just laid off. I'm considering signing up for disability or going to debtor's prison. I'm in my early 30s and I've spent way more than 10,000 hours programming and now my vision is suffering. Sure I was lucky enough I had WFH at a FAANG. I give to charity and I pay taxes. Do I need to self-flagellate some more or am I privileged enough now? I suppose I can always get a job at Walmart and apply for welfare because those are not exclusive at all.

Lest my negative attitude get the better of both of us, we should believe that society's goals are to improve everyone's quality of life.

As many should know by know, the reality is not as relevant as the perception of the issue. Even the economy can be 'felt' differently depending on one's perception of their circumstances regardless of the facts on the ground.

> You are privileged and your comment shows exactly that.

It definitely is a view. If you don't see it as such, that just means that's probably the primary way you view the world.

It is indeed privilege, and that's worth noting, but acting like having privilege makes you a bad person really misses the point.

Now this is the important piece. This focus is not accidental, but deliberate. I have thought how corporates will try to counter the movement, because, clearly, the old guard has placed itself in RTO corner.

Splitting popular support ( akin to Musk's attempt to cast WFH as 'laptop class' ) would accomplish that.

I have no good counter, but it only reminds me that maybe we do need some pan-wfh org that tries to deal with social media narratives.

The target audience of this article isn't workers in general though, its white collar workers who have white collar jobs that 100% allow workers to work from home.

I don't think its a crime of omission to focus on the target audience by any means. The Register is a tech focused news outlet and an overwhelming amount of tech jobs are white collar jobs.

How many are there? Not even people in finance/accounting can do that as they need to handle physical documents that must never leave the office. HR, marketing, sales people need to do the same and meet the humans. IT people seem to be the only group capable of doing so, I don't know anyone else in any other profession who would even consider 100% remote a possibility.

My uncle was a CPA who worked in finance for decades. His last few were partially or fully remote. Some consulting was onsite, but that was never a surprise and didn't change suddenly with the winds of management trends.

So where does he keep his client's documents?

Online

Lucky you, to live in such jurisdiction.

More than you're letting on.

Entire finance departments can work from home, my company is 100% remote, its a fintech company that handles and processes sensitive stuff all day.

Never impeded by regulation or data safety concerns, in fact, I think this company has better security practices than others I've worked for in the past to be quite honest.

There is an illusion that security requires an office. Most of it comes down to 'can you trust X person' vs any locality stuff.

You probably don't live in EU... Here it's illegal to not have the papers or to let them be taken away from the office.

We do have UK employees which I realize is decidedly not the EU though. We also have quite a few Canadian employees

I'm unaware of any meaningful difference in practice when it comes to the work stream though.

That said, I'm no lawyer nor an expert on the differences between the US (where I reside) and the rest of the world, in terms of specific data laws and handling procedures

FWIW, the vast majority of sales people I’ve spoken to over the past 5 years have been WFH/WFCS (work from coffee shop).

Certainly for bigger deals they come onsite for the final stages of the sales process, but most interaction is handled remotely and they aren't in an office.

They probably sell SaaS, don't they? What about industrial machinery, make up, whatever else?

It doesn't have to be entirely remote.

I do manual labor. My manager (a very nice guy) must show up on location. After we talk about things I message him and repeat the very things we've talked about so that I have a written record of things.

They have him drive around the country for useless chit chat. If I ask him why stuff isn't done it is always this same excuse. He has to go to meetings where the goal pretty much is to write my whatsapp message on a piece of paper and for other people to hear themselves talk. I sometimes jokingly ask him how it went. The usual response is PFFF, a 5 hour drive for nothing. He manages both the day and the night shifts which adds to the joke.

I think we need to send in the environmentalists so that people can stop burning my gasoline, eroding my roads, killing the birds, stinking up my city, taking my parking spots and wearing out their car.

I propose a special daily commute tax, a flat fee for the first 20 km with extras per additional km and a multiplier for each hour shorter than 8 before the return trip. Lets also do an office tax per square meter.

> The target audience...

True.

> I don't think its a crime of omission...

Nobody else thinks that, either.

Perhaps I should have been longer-winded than "As usual, "? My concern is not particular to this article, nor to The Register. Whether you figure that journalism merely reflects the worldviews of its audience, or that it also shapes those - there seems to be a near-universal "less-privileged people don't exist, or we should never give thought to their welfare" undertone to the whole RTO issue. Historically, that kinda thing was often a bad sign for a society.

Eh, you institute WFH where it makes sense. I am a heavy WFH proponent and I am not suggesting that surgery should be done remotely ( at least not yet, but technology is supposedly improving in that area ). On the other hand, some jobs absolutely can be.

Why on earth does everyone have to fit the same mold?

Why should you be entitled to WFH and a cashier not? How would you create a mold for like someone above?

If automation was to be implemented then there would be no job at all for the cashier.

Or is it "my job is bigger and important" argument?

I don't think importance is a factor; it's simply a matter of whether a job can be done remotely.

Not every occupation, at this point, can fall under this categorization.

Hmm? I am amused by the attempted framing, but it is neither of those. The job is not entitled, but it is bound by requirements bestowed by reality of how that job functions. For example, cashier's job happens to, often, involve physically moving stuff around at the same time customer wants to have it moved. Therefore, they, currently, have to physically be there.

My job, for better or worse, however, has to exist in the same time-zone for the sake of meetings, while my output is more ephemeral.

<< Or is it "my job is bigger and important" argument?

Hadly. If anything, I would argue that my job is less important.

So what is your reason to wanting to WFH? You advocate it yet give none or is it "I don't need to commute, family matters, can do my washing through the day"

Does it matter what my reason for the preference is? The fact of the matter is that when I have to commute, my performance suffers. That alone should be a big reason for corporations to consider their decisions carefully, because last time my bosses indicated anything close to moving us in we collectively said 'fine, but you will not see us doing the extra you are used to'( edit: and they backed off, because some stuff need to be done). But the companies want 100% in person, 100% after work, bringing your whole self-in, but not while being offensive, but also being brand ambassador, but not in a way that alienates anyone..

What is my reason..

That's the worst of all takes, I'm afraid.

I believe the argument is just ”my job can be performed from home”. It’s not about entitlement, it is about making ones life easier without additional downside to your employer. You might disagree with the no downside part but that is orthogonal to the entitlement argument.

But the "my job can be performed from home" is entitlement. It can be done in the office too.

You want to work from home because it's easier for you. And I agree, it takes a lot of weight off your shoulders but for me who enjoys working in the office a caveat is that it's harder communicating with those who do work from home.

I couldn't work from home, even if I wanted to.

It's easier, yes. But also it's harder to effectively work in a badly designed office (read open office). At home, I can create my ideal work environment. Specifically for me, I don't want to sit in traffic for an hour a day just to work in a worse environment. It's also my time. Work is not paying for my commute so my 40 hour week turns into a 45 hour week. This dilutes my pay while at the same time reducing my free time to spend with/for my family. With young kids, you can't get that time back.

> Why on earth does everyone...

They don't. (And I don't know a single person who thinks they do).

But in any society where the "haves vs. have-nots" division is a major social problem - there can be serious downsides to convincing the latter that the former really don't give a crap about them.

What would be the point in return to office mandates for people who don’t work in an office? It’s not mentioned because it’s irrelevant.

Why would it, it's an article about office jobs. The word "office" is mentioned in the headline and multiple times in the article, so why should the article mention factory workers or truck drivers? White collar workers working from home is better for anyone, less traffic, less pollution, better home situation (e.g. if you live in a household where the other party is not an office worker) and so on.

What exactly is your point?

There are billions of humans who live in countries that don't have a functioning democracy, but we still find it to be valuable to fight to keep and advance democracy in those countries that have it. There are billions of humans who are poorer than the poor in rich countries, but we still find it to be valuable to fight for better living conditions for the poor in our own countries.

Are you proposing that no one should fight for WFH because not everyone can? Or that there should be one of those "privilege disclaimers" at the top of all of these articles that apologizes for bothering to write a piece that fights for improved conditions for a group that is already perceived as privileged?

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