Unemployment rising in remote-friendly occupations (2024)
jedkolko.com
jedkolko.com
In 2024 a new CEO decided to encourage RTO and from then onwards the level of recruitment has just tanked. The only criterion for employment is pretty much “how enthusiastic are you about working at the office?”
Now we have compulsory office-days and I see firsthand the way these people just waste time walking around with a coffee-cup shooting the breeze, or sitting in half-day meetings.
No-one seems to care or notice.
I don't think anyone should be terribly surprised that you work with a lot of people that would rather shoot the breeze than get things done.
If everyone's doing nothing, and their boss is happy, then they're happy, too, because maybe they'll get promoted and a better raise and a better bonus.
If everyone's getting a lot done, and their boss isn't happy, then they're not happy either, because they probably won't get the raise and the bonus and the promotion that they wanted.
They don't care about the business. At all.
Obviously some people do. But that's not the norm.
This point is a bit naive or misguided. Slackers are to be found in a fully remote setup as well. Also, hustlers like Soham Parekh or North Koreans impersonators are only possible in a fully remote setup.
I think its interesting that its driven more by RTO policies than it is driven by say, offshoring of jobs, which is the downside risk of full remote companies[0], instead its by the desire for control[1].
One thing RTO should make plain for everyone is executives and their managers value control over substance. Productivity did not decline with the rise of remote work[2], to quote the BLS study
>Looking at a more aggregate level to measure the impact of remote work on economic performance across 43 private sector industries, Fernald et al. (2024) find little relationship between labor productivity and the ability of workers in an industry to work entirely remotely, suggesting remote work neither hindered nor helped raise aggregate productivity growth
[0]: Said in a different way: when a company becomes efficient at employees being remote, there's less barrier of entry for them to hire workers in different countries.
[1]: Companies seem to be using return to office as a two pronged thing: a silent layoff, that is, shrinking headcount that doesn't get replaced but done in a way where they're counting on natural attrition (IE people quitting) and a way for them to take back more control, which ultimately is the point, no matter what the headline reasoning is.
[2]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productiv...
Not to mention the challenges it induces on retaining good talent.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...
[2] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
While I can't recall a study on your precise question about morale, he did share a lot of findings strongly supporting hybrid and remote work, including lower attrition.
I've seen this repeated often, and I've never seen any convincing evidence to support it. The studies I have seen always focus on "task-based" roles, where productivity is easily measured and everything is very well-defined. Think call center employees, stuff like that, where they're simply measuring call volumes.
But execs are clearly more worried about the general "disattachment" people have with their job when they're working remotely, and they're worried about reductions in innovation and collaborative idea generation. Those kinds of concerns are much more difficult to measure in a short term study, but I think they're very valid.
Since those things are difficult to measure, I'm not saying there is good evidence one way or the other on remote work's effect on those things. I am saying I think it's disingenuous and just a bad argument to say remote work has no impact on productivity.
At least for me this is a consequence of the instability, extracurricular demands from my employer (signaling our relationship is not important to them) and deterioration in the labor market making my career less of a priority than my side projects (as at least in my mind the expected long term payout has dropped.) Being forced to commute would only exacerbate the situation.
Most importantly, it looks primarily at the data from 2019-2022. Most execs (and many have said this publicly) are not that concerned about the short-term impacts on productivity. Indeed, many have argued that a good reason things were able to transition relatively smoothly during the pandemic is all the personal and professional networks and workflows already existed.
But that study can obviously not measure the longer term impacts on overall competitiveness. And again, since I'm talking about longer term impacts, no study that only took place from 2019-2022 could measure these effects. But I think it's important to acknowledge that, rather than just leaning on the "See! Studies prove remote work doesn't hurt productivity!" argument, which is an invalid interpretation IMO.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/hybrid-work-is-a-w...
this should have a link.
Also a correction - it showed increased retention rates, but no change in productivity.
On the other hand, I felt very disconnected at work latterly with a larger group and mostly kept up tighter connections with people I already knew.
Didn't seem to be a problem then.
It didn't though, and if companies and managers are supposedly results driven, data driven orgs (many claim to be, some times very loudly), why would they go against the actual data? Famously, Amazon's CEO couldn't even show something - anything - that supported their RTO position.
If you start to see issues downstream in a few years, you need to ask questions as to why, but assuming - which is what RTO does - that going back to the office is right because its been the historical norm - without actually truly studying the effects of remote work - is the problem here.
This is simply the executive class flexing what power they have for purposes other than the goal they claim its for
More general, look up the "bullshit jobs" phenomenon.
I made no such argument.
I am extremely skeptical of this. On the contrary there is a mountain of direct evidence that people barely work when working from home. People have been openly bragging both on the internet and in person about how they do laundry and watch netflix and mow their lawns while looking productive
All you need to do is look at the crowds in the park or lines at the grocery store on any given friday to gauge how much work is being done on wfh days
Consider that you might be in the bubble of yes-people.
Work from home allowed many people to find their exact productive schedule, motivators and rhythm. But we can't have that, 8h or leave!
As one who manages a remote team - substance doesn't come for free.
This sounds great as a dichotomy, but it is not - people who care aniut their work, and collaboration are rare to come across.
I'm one of those who are very productive working remotely, but not out of loyalty or some "ethics/morals". It's simply because, as an engineer, I seek efficiency, and remote work is efficient. I suffer from inefficiencies, rituals created to placate bipedal cattle, and senseless reactionary attitudes. We are few, I imagine, but we are also the cohort that innovates, at various levels and in various sectors, without whom I don't know how much the West could hold on, and this, indeed, is not free.
Today, with RTO, a social rift is forming between those who want to truly advance and those who merely muddle through, while the world moves forward. If this trend isn't reversed, the West, which has already lost so much, will lose what little remains and discover that its residual military strength amounts to little more than a Romans legio fantasma. At that point, the cost of "saving money" by not innovating will be so high that it will lead to bankruptcy.
> the West, which has already lost so much, will lose what little remains
The West already advanced a lot until 2020 by working from office. If anything, fully remote conditions are a death knell for software jobs in the rich parts of the world. Most of the SW jobs do not require special talent and can be done for a fraction of the cost from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa or India.
The Bronze Age was characterised by bronze, which allowed for many advancements. But then we discovered iron, and those who chose it first massacred those who had remained with bronze. Bronze was no longer what had allowed for evolution; it had been surpassed.
This is my feeling and my point. These changes are obviously not that rapid; culture changes across generations, but they will happen, and those who are left bolted behind will not have the long and slow experimentation and refinement that allowed to master the new, and so they will simply be crushed. Software developed around the world matters little; quality software is so rare that only by working globally can we still create it. No single company, not even a single whole population, can truly do it on scale.
Hard disagree. Lots of otherwise talented people still have problems with written communication or other norms of remote work. They thrive in an office though.
Mere proof of that is a lot of startups which are still flocking to SF and mandating in-person presence 5 (or 7) days a week so that they can move fast.
I am against full RTO 5 days a week, because for focused tasks, WFH is way more productive. But hybrid is not entirely stupid. Sure, if 100% of your work is focused work (say SWE work for instance), anything other than full WFH is a loss to you. But unless you work 100% alone with nobody else, 100% optimal for you may not be 100% optimal for the project / product / organisation. And I’ve seen first hand how conflicts brew when people can’t just go in front of a white board and hash out differences in person
Tl;dr : it’s wayyyyyyyy more nuanced than “RTO is stupid you control freak”
Honestly, I'd much rather we drop the whole pretense of appearances and fixed schedules in favor of shorter, flexible work weeks with a handful of fixed appearances (generally meetings/standups/lunches) to ensure folks stay on the same page. For all their crowing about technology changing how we work, they're staunchly opposed to actually letting that happen and mandating the same fixed structures we've had since being an Industrial Powerhouse in the early 1900s.
The workers want to modernize. It's leadership that's the problem.
And the 'metrics' for productivity are completely gamed, in any direction, at any time arbitrarily.
Management/those that set these policies can 'turn up the heat' or relax them at any time, without warning. I've been on both sides of this.
Sure, you can hit some metric if some real product is produced, like widgets or something, but even in that hypothetical example, what if someone is top producer but skimps on quality or something resulting in a shorter lifespan of the product?
Before I left a recent employer a very (statistically and materially; i.e he was both very good at 'playing the game' and actually doing, you know, skilled work) high performer was PIPd (for "low performance").
In the previous half-decade+ he was there, he got 'exceeds' and top rankings every single year and was presumably paid more than the managers but was forced out, likely due to pay and internal politics.
I take most measures of 'productivity' to be totally fake, just based on my experience.
Same. Having worked everywhere from tiny storefronts all the way up to the SV Big Leagues, "productivity" and "performance" as a measure is complete bullshit. The only measure that matters at the end of the day is corporate profit, and so long as the company is earning more than it spends while compensating workers to thrive in their communities, then any other measure of human capital is irrelevant.
Instituting KPIs for human capital only leads to the most toxic people thriving in an organization, because they have no compunction gaming the system for their own ends. Remove the KPIs and force management to deal with interpersonal conflicts and skill gaps again, and suddenly your org will start dropping bad people and retaining good workers.
EDIT: Adding that, especially in technical fields, KPIs will miss substantial improvements 100% of the time because they only measure what the business wants to measure. No KPI can accurately track replacing a six-month timeline for bespoke OS images with a 15 minute Packer pipeline, and most managers can't or won't recognize the outsized impact of such a contribution. Worse yet, organizations overly dependent on measuring human capital via KPIs will penalize such an efficiency gain, because it harms those gaming the KPIs for their own ends.
Stop measuring human capital with KPIs is the lesson, here. Evaluating performance is literally why you have managers.
This brings up a good point, one I have observed myself. That efficiency is ultimately punished, not rewarded. I think the term office politics should have been a signal of this, but it alluded me for a number of years while I was building my career.
Once I slowed down and started to be a little more performative, only then did the promotions start coming in. The only logical reason I can track is that its because in the act of slowing down and being more performative, is that I started talking more with others in the company up and down the hierarchy and became known as a do good affable guy (which admittedly, I actually am!)
In short, people like me and that matters alot, and my actual performance beyond being slightly better than my peers, mattered little.
Yet, me being personable - and I don't mean simply courteous, on time, using good verbal language etc but more akin to befriending - is what paid the dividends for my career.
This runs directly counter to what is supposedly valued[0].
[0]: Let me be clear here, I'm not saying people who are productive but mean, grumpy and don't work well with others shouldn't have that taken into account. There is at least some minimum of good social courtesy and discourse required, especially when working with others. I'm talking about how pseudo friendship is valued in and above being productive, while someone with good social graces and metrics (quality work etc) but doesn't network consistently does worse
I've worked with fantastic engineers from Argentina, Poland, Ukraine, etc. and since everyone is on Zoom anyway, them being remote makes no difference (this was not the case prior to about 2015 or so, when video conferencing got good enough), and they all adapt to US time zones.
I've seen lots of CEOs announce layoffs and plug how AI is making them so much more efficient, but I think the reality, besides previous over-hiring in general, is that it's much easier to find and utilize high quality offshore talent. I know some managers at Google who say they have drastically reduced junior engineer hiring in the US (and obviously they had layoffs at Google), while still hiring in lower cost countries.
Be careful what you wish for.
> "I've worked with fantastic engineers from Argentina, Poland, Ukraine, etc. and since everyone is on Zoom anyway, them being remote makes no difference".
If they get fired they get shipped right back to their home country.
They can abuse the hell out of them, make them work exceptionally long hours or under insane pressure and demands, and absolutely get away with it because the employee has extremely little recourse. They can't complain.
And infrastructure is low pressure? Damn I wish my blood pressure knew.
Millions in damage can happen very quickly, and not even from the tech outage, but potentially loss of Operational Technology for Real Businesses and Orgs that do things.
Think about chemical manufacturers, or large manufacturing plants. Think about shipping ports and airlines, and railways. Think about Internet Service Providers, hell - think about Starlink, they were just offline for a botched infrastructure change. I'd say that had some major impact around the world.
Infrastructure is not about managing an App, it could be about managing thousands or tens of thousands of apps, and potentially for decades.
So yeah, sure. You're right. You don't need talent to run infrastructure, I guess.
Millions in damages can happen very quickly though, so, maybe... Think about it. I know a lot of software engineers that I wouldn't trust to run my infrastructure changes.
MANY of the H1-Bs in the US workforce are not super talented. What they are is cheap and won't say no to mistreatment. The system is being massively abused, and has been for a very long time.
Second, you think I'm talking about app infrastructure. For like one app.
I'm talking about infrastructure changes that risk bank transactions. That shut down shipping ports, or prevent cross-country train movement. I'm talking about infrastructure management that when it goes sideways, billions of dollars of goods are stuck in port and the stock market starts getting worried. I'm talking about infrastructure changes for oceanic network equipment. Most people aren't dealing with that, but many are.
Also if you don't think inter-industry competition includes labor cost and efficiency, then I don't even know why we're having this discussion.
There may be some industries with difficult infra projects, but as you admit, that's not most projects.
And of course I think they compete on labor cost and efficiency. That's why they often send the infra team to low cost areas. Not every task can make maximal use of talent. The amazing PhD engineer demanding 500k won't make better coffee than a college dropout asking 40k, despite the potential for the espresso machine breaking down mid shift or accidentally dropping rat poison into everyone's coffee.
This has everything to do with executives exerting control because for the first time in a long long time labor had managed to make small gains
The question remains whether future hiring will be changed.
It’s entirely possible that local jobs will face the pressure of low cost global remote workers and what pools of workers will be sought for remote workers.
Unfortunately (for you), some engineers are just better than others. The right engineers on your team can make or break your company. It can mean the difference between being first to market with innovative game changing solutions, or putting out a shitty product filled with defects and poor design choices.
And experience has consistently shown that the best engineers tend to be American or American educated.
So yea, you can hug your fantastic offshore engineers tightly and treasure them. But the fact is if they are as good as you say, they should easily be commanding higher salaries that justify the kind of ROI they bring to a company. Why go cheap on the salary for an engineer who could 10x your revenue? If they're not being paid those high salaries, then you're exploiting them. And worse: they can easily be poached by competitors who offer to pay them twice as much as you, leaving you with the problem of finding new hires again.
Wholeheartedly agree with that.
> And experience has consistently shown that the best engineers tend to be American or American educated.
I call total bullshit on that one. I agree the culture of many Americans and American companies (e.g. taking ownership, more comfort with risk-taking/failure, willingness to speak up when things go sideways, etc.) contributes a great deal to American companies' success, and I've seen some instances of other cultural aspects being a direct negative - for example, I worked with some great engineers in India, but they would often tell me everything was going great right up until a deadline, when they'd then let out all the problems - there was clearly a cultural aspect at play that prevented acknowledging problems early.
But when it comes to raw engineering chops, it has not been my experience that American engineers are any better. Sure, many of the best engineers would come to the US because the potential rewards were greater, but we're seeing the impact of America's (or at least the current administration's) newfound distain for foreigners.
Yes, and most of these engineers are not in the US and are cheaper than engineers in the US.
The only reason engineers in the US have jobs is because employers, for one reason or another, believe that in an office environment under their constant supervision, workers work more efficiently.
When they stop believing this, engineers in the US will not work remotely, they will lose their jobs.
We're already seeing this in manufacturing. The Chinese middle class developed and now manufacturing moved to Vietnam and India.
Offshoring is just exploiting temporary cost of living arbitrage opportunities. The market is going to naturally fix this as other countries develop and as the skilled labor relocates.
I have never seen any evidence that remote work increased offshoring, and it makes perfect sense why that would be the case. Almost all offshoring done by large companies is a /cost-cutting measure/, it is absolutely not about trying to find the best people regardless of where they are. Most of that off-shoring is to lower cost employees (regardless of competence, or in most cases incompetence) who work in an office in another country. RTO + Offshoring is a combo made in hell (but beloved by corporate executives) and basically nonexistent in remote-first companies.
Or alternatively, why are there no foreign startups built with this cheap labor competing with our employers?
It's software. PP&E doesn't matter. If you want the role of the "ownership class" there's a link at the bottom of the page you're looking at just for you.
EDIT: Can't reply right now but you're arguing my point for me.
It's easier for some to care less about people that don't have the same accent or clothes or common background.
And the US has a lot of financial liquidity.
Hence, you'll get a lot of people starting companies in the US while the ICs are remote - also where many of the buyers are likely to be of your product.
The global job market remains the mostly same: top talent gets paid top dollar globally. A lot of first-world markets command a particular premium and incentivize immigration. Some people will not move no matter what but will still get very high salaries.
A lot of offshoring fails. The offshoring that works isn't newsworthy and nobody hears about it. A lot of software that gets shipped is crap.
Still, stretched-thin HR teams say it’s the only way to handle thousands of applicants.
We all have a responsibility to not participate in degrading the human experience, and part of everyone's job is to say no when they are being asked to do things like this.
All of that text and the data looks exactly like a reversal to the mean. And not even a strong one.
People need to keep in mind that return to office is going to steadily be a more and more orwellian affair.
Monitoring of internet was always kind of standard at this point of course, and attempts to track users remotely for attention and activity were already partially in the works.
But one thing that was nice about having your home is that they can't put cameras and those types of things outside of an approved device.
You have no such assurances in office in office. They can monitor you every second of the day and now they have AI that they can apply to those data streams.
Governments of course desperately want these capabilities and will fund them to no end so that they can apply a AI agents to the fire hose of monitoring information that governments have at their disposal.
Corporations will be happy to pilot these in the environments that they have greater totalitarian control of over compared to "the public".
Combined with the massive unprecedented labor bargaining hammer that AI gives them, acceptance of this by the United States and Democratic workforces is inevitable.
And with that, it'll pave the way towards total societal monitoring and control.
Don't give them any more ideas...