I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
The quality of offices was also much better in the past like a single office for for 2 to Max 6 people. Now it's crowded open space hot desks offices with 40+ people.
I am the same way - 3 days I actually find invigorating. It cures that cabin fever. But back to back, five days, after the pandemic, it just feels like straight up abuse. And it's what it really is. We just TOOK it.
At 40 hours & 5 days / week in the office, even a 15 minute one-way commute is a -5.8% change in comp-per-work-time. 30 min is -11.1%. 45 min is -15.8%.
I'm not saying you do, but people abusing the WFH flexibility are probably a big reason for RTO push.
That, or the (possibly irrational) management fear that people may be abusing the WFH.
If that happens, or management is operating in response to fear, management is incompetent.
I am a manager of a fully remote team, and if people are not getting their job done they are replaced no matter if they are in office or remote.
Meeting goals? All is well. Missing goals, find out why, and adjust dates or resources.
In most cases those who abuse WFH for us have been staff augmentation contractors. I have a theory they may be working multiple contracts, but it does not matter because things were not getting done, and the solution is simple.
The team members who are performing the best with remote work are FTEs, who understand that the benefits of the situation come with responsibility. In fact, sometimes I have to encourage them to _not_ work as much because it is convenient. Unless there is a fire drill, close the laptop at the end of a normal business day.
There are folks who abuse WFH/remote work (see the overemployed groups on reddit and other places), but companies are losing access to alot of extra, effectively unpaid, time by imposing an arbitrary start and stop time for people based on physical location.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
They love a distributed office but don’t want employees to have a decent balance.
If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
That just sounds like people who dont want to pay their fair share of taxes.
"Oh no, we now need to fund services we don't get downtown by taxing the people who make money off our civilization."
Local governments are primarily funded through sales and property taxes. Many tech companies that don't sell products to consumers don't collect any sales taxes. And if they rent their office space then they don't directly pay property taxes, either.
next question.
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
You are onto something here.
High quality talent is expensive, hard to recruit, hard to keep. High salary is one of many perks a company offers to capture high quality talent. A work visa to live in a first world country is another one.
Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
Probably the same here. This week might actually be my first 4-day in office week this year, come to think of it. Next week, I'll be in office at-most 1.5 days, because I'm going to be taking a day off in the middle of the week and then working from the other side of the (admittedly small) country for Thu/fri.
Covid changed things but they're is still a song mentality of in office work, especially in big older companies with an older middle management.
But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet.
Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
Its the fact that the policy doesn't work in a shitty culture!