RTO: WTAF
wordsrightman.beehiiv.com
wordsrightman.beehiiv.com
You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent.
If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person social interaction, your cultural capital will also lose value.
There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech. Americans seem unaware, but if you insist on remote work, you'll lose that advantage quick. If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.
You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.
This is definitely part of it, but if you have east coast or central teams, this is totally doable. In fact, often the European employees get more done as they get a whole morning before the US based pings/meetings start.
RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity through visibility. Actual delivery of work is the only thing that matters in tech - and remote delivery has already proven itself at scale.
The idea that “physical location is your greatest asset” is backwards. If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.
In short: RTO doesn’t protect American tech workers from global competition. It just wastes time in traffic and props up bad management.
That’s why all this “WFH as benefit / RTO as cost” chatter is sleight of hand. It nudges you into negotiating around scraps instead of the only thing that matters: total compensation for total output. Companies push that framing precisely because it distracts you from asking for a bigger number.
But if every company decided "you know what? Let's go remote!", it will be a matter of months, if not weeks, before every CFO/CEO/Board decides to boost profits by tapping the global talent pool.
The recent delusions to replace software engineers with LLMs is a pretty good indication of where the thinking is vis-a-vis capable engineering
Well, it's not just capability. I know people who had offers at Big Tech, but had to move. There was no option to work from Bucharest or Eastern Europe. You either move to the US or to some other country like UK or Germany. Even if the job is remote. For legal and accounting reasons apparently. I know someone who officially rented a tiny space in rural Germany then secretly worked remotely from Poland, because they needed the official address for paperwork. So there are many artificial hurdles as of now. But the more normalized remote work becomes, the more people will realize these rules don't make sense.
RTO is not about watching people in their seats all day to see who is productive. It’s about getting talented people to sit next to each other, as there is significant benefit to that. It builds culture and internal networks (which helps attrition rates, especially for junior employees) and that helps junior employees learn from senior employees. They need that hands-on feedback from seniors, minute to minute. It helps people across teams work together, as in remote land, most communication is intra team only.
It’s not about input->output. It’s about building a long term company culture and employees who grow with it. It’s about building a system where communication and collaboration have less friction.
Can this be done remotely? Maybe, by a few companies who are very intentional and do it well. But remote is very difficult to do well.
If it were just about input->output, I’d offshore everything and save a ton of money.
Mentorship isn’t “minute-to-minute hand-holding.” It’s structured review, clear documentation, and intentional teaching. If seniors are expected to babysit juniors in person all day, you haven’t built a system for growth, you’ve built a dependency loop that collapses as soon as those seniors leave.
And claiming remote is “very difficult to do well” is just an admission of managerial laziness. Remote is harder only if your toolkit begins and ends with meetings and hallway gossip. The companies that are intentional about remote show it scales just fine.
So yes, RTO is about (damage) control - not because managers are cartoon villains, but because without control, the hollowness of their systems is exposed.
If you want a career, get back to the office.
For your belief system, yes - remote work is probably more suited for you.
You're not even wrong.
Counterpoint, developer offshoring has been happening since at least the late nineties with eh, limited success. It's hard to get around major timezone differences and thick accents. This isn't even getting into the fatal mistake that everyone makes -- thinking that there's, for example, a billion more "Brilliant Indian Guy in Our Office" clones out there in India.
There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.
This is sortof absurd on the face of it. For context, I'm a European who's been working for US based companies for well over a decade now, and rarely do I have communications issues (and they're generally with non-native English speakers, mostly Europeans living in the US).
> I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year.
It's important to note that not all Europeans are unfireable. In fact, none of them are, it's just that you need to 1) give a verbal warning, 2) give a written warning and 3) fire them if things don't improve. Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.
> I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.
This is the actual reason. There's so much capital available in the US that it sucks in a lot of ambitious people.
> There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.
In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.
1. large internal markets provide more funding and more competition at the start
2. which leads to better product-market fit
3. which leads to more dominance as the natural software monopolies happen
4. which leads to easier taking over of smaller foreign markets
Biggest software companies? American and Chinese. Also Indian ones are starting to rise, too.
In comparison Europe is super fractured. Ignoring big US companies, the average French person buys stuff from a totally different website than the average German, for almost category you can imagine.
Do you have a source for this claim? I'm not an expert in German employment law but would love to learn more.
The only thing that seems different from Ireland (where I live) is the Works Council hearing part.
You might have excellent fluency, but my experience is that it varies a lot depending on the person.
> Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.
I think this is underselling the degree of employment protection in Europe, but I will freely admit I'm not an expert.
> In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.
But "better person" here doesn't mean smarter - it means a more effective employee. Working in a very different timezone, language barriers, and culture differences make that an uphill battle, which is why offshoring hasn't exploded.
I think the issue around employment protection is that the US laws are crazy bad, so any level of employment protection seems weird. Ireland and the UK (weirdly the places where you have lots of native English speakers) have pretty employer friendly laws for Europe.
Western Europe generally has a bunch more protections for permanent employees so maybe that's what you mean? Note that employment laws are almost entirely national, but the EU sets a floor.
Timezones definitely make a big difference, but again the cultural differences between Ireland and the UK and the typical coastal US tech companies are wildly oversold.
I speak Italian, English and French. I speak English to you because it's the only language you know. We are not the same.
> I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year.
We work to live, not the opposite. Again, we are not the same.
I have worked with overseas coworkers who spoke English. You're right, it's not always the same as having native fluency.
> We work to live, not the opposite. Again, we are not the same.
You're making my point for me - offshoring work fails for cultural reasons, not because overseas workers are dumb. Making work remote is not gonna change the cultural factors.
Also a very funny take because if you have ever visited the Bay Area, you can't throw a rock without hitting someone who struck it rich and retired at 30.
What does it have to do with companies looking for "motivated" americans? Also
> if you have ever visited the Bay Area
Nah, thanks.
This is not true - most American companies hire contractors, usually through a local intermediary.
> with a statutory month off every year.
This is something work pondering about, really. Take step back, look at your life, and think a bit about this point, no matter if you're blue- or white-collar worker.
Do you have a source for this? I would expect EU rules around classifying contractors to be much stricter than what we have in the US.
> This is something work pondering about, really. Take step back, look at your life, and think a bit about this point, no matter if you're blue- or white-collar worker.
Yes, I have taken a look at my life and thought about this point.
I enjoy work. I enjoy building things that are useful to society and I enjoy getting paid a lot of money to do it.
I'm not even gonna pretend that I don't take long vacations. Lots of places I've worked have had unlimited PTO, despite no legal requirement for it.
But the smaller and earlier-stage places I've worked? No, people didn't take vacations there. The company could not afford it, and when employees are shareholders they generally love maximizing shareholder value.
American companies are welcome to start offering Western European level benefits (and compensate for missing government benefits) at any time. I would happily accept 30-50% less pay for a very solid health insurance plan, pay for my childcare 30 days of paid vacation a year that I'm actually entitled to take, 6 months of paid maternity leave + some paternity leave, a contract that restricts my working hours and makes it meaningfully legally difficult to frivolously fire me and practically impossible to lay me off of the company isn't failing, and an hour paid lunch every day.
Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason. The closest is non-profits, who lack the cash to meet standard salaries but try to make up with benefits (which are, after all, cheaper), but for profit companies seem to prefer to pony up and retain the control at-will employment grants them
different NDA rules, HR rules, non-compete rules, expectations about unions, hiring & firing rules, etc. etc. etc.
non-starter for a lot of fairly obvious reasons if you've done hiring before.
it's an issue with any offshoring, but 4.14/hr for India offsets that risk compared to 2/3s of NA salary for EU and all sort of hoops.
Amateur armchair stuff. 9% YoY growth for decades.
* Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need.
* Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership.
* Extroverts: some people just prefer to be in an office, surrounded by and interacting with lots of people, rather than sitting at home in relative isolation. (I'm definitely not one of them, but I have good friends who are like this.)
Yeah, me too. It's much harder for me to focus at the office, which is annoying as mentally it's great for me to get out of the house and see people who aren't my family (who are great, I just do better when i see and interact with more people).
They have work to do, but then buckling down and focuses is probably worse than what they're doing. Unfortunately.
We can give them bigger/more-prominent zoom portraits by seniority. Should make everyone happy.
> Real estate
Probably shouldn't still be gambling company finances on real estate, 5 years after a pandemic forced us all to go remote.
> Extroverts
Great! We can put all the extroverts back in the glass fishbowl, while the rest of us do actual work from home
This would be hilarious, from a malicious compliance sort of angle...
* The more you speak, the smaller your square gets
* The square varies in size based on the emotion in your voice
* Your square gets larger the longer you've had your hand up without being asked to speak
* The squares change size to equalize the size of everyone's face on the screen, eliminating the effect of camera and distance
(I wonder if Google Meet is hackable, as it's delivered in the browser rather than an app?)
Why? If the lease was signed before the pandemic that gives a very easy "out". It's not like anyone could have predicted the pandemic and the associated shift to WFH. If for whatever reason they signed afterwards, that's just them being dumb.
I'm not saying it's rational, but that doesn't mean it's not sometimes an influential factor.
The funny thing is that the CEO of my current employer lives in Connecticut and rarely (ever?) comes into the office in Manhattan. When he does come in, they shut the office down for "leadership meetings" so all the New York based employees can't come in anyway!
You know what, since the dawn of work - it's always been the extroverted way. Introverts suffered through. Now that the tide has changed, let the extroverts suffer too, it's their turn. We have done our part.
I also found results suggesting flexible working policies had positive properties like higher employee satisfaction, retention , and a wider applicant pool.
I'm not interested in hearing why the choir here at HN thinks companies are making these decisions, I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
A small percentage of countries also mandate severance even if the employee is fired (with cause).
But yes I'm pretty sure this is a big part of the reason for these mandates.
IMO, RTO efficacy should be measured on a team-by-team basis. There are no doubt zero "one size fits all" approaches for entire orgs, or entire companies (and if there are, then the metrics should /strongly/ reflect that)
You spent $10m or $100m on a building that's now half empty.
Either you downsize or commit to enterprise scale sunk cost fallacy and enforce RTO so your real estate investment isn't "wasted".
City centres also thrive on RTO, with high street shopping on a generational decline it's up to office workers and their employers to prop up the economy of the CBD one overpriced lunch at a time.
It should be a tradegy of commons at best: it may affect the CEOs 401k, but not by much (0.000001% for their individual decision to RTO for that company y). It like buying McD shares then going to McD for lunch every day with your team.
I think there are other reasons.
In fact, a whole bunch of office leases were supposed to be expiring in 2024/2025. If this was the reason RTO wouldn’t be picking up right now since they would be cutting back and ending their leases.
But let’s get back to reality, the business decisions are made in the style “I like this” and “I don’t like this”. Only most obvious decisions are somehow backed up. And RTO is known to work well to ditch 2-3% of workforce in few months for free. Parents go first, high performers go afterwards. Headcount reduced, job well done!
The way with severance packages can go for years with many rounds when the packages are too small. Severance packages also involve social plan negotiations with unions… Somebody will go to court for sure and sue the company… So obviously let’s do RTO, it’s cheap and quick. And improves collaboration of course. First round with mandatory 3 days in the office and second one with 5 days in cheapest possible open office with chaos, distractions and noise.
Generally people don’t push for redundancies is companies growing organically.
If this is a signal I wonder what the lead time is before it starts to bite?
So you're really going to have to deal with only hearing what people think.
RTO is trending for many reasons - some are doing this for bad reasons, I'm sure, but I also know that some managers are pushing for this because they a) see that junior developers aren't getting the necessary mentoring to help them develop and grow into seniors, and b) because they feel that people are spending more time on tasks because they're less likely to reach out if they have to ping people, wait for a response, and try to work through things without benefits like being able to draw on a whiteboard and such. --Maybe some companies are handling this better than others, but they are valid concerns.
I want evidence that proves "it's about cheap layoffs" or "it's about real estate" or "it's because they want to monitor people" or "<insert any speculative reason on this thread>"
Once we have evidence"it's about layoffs" then we can debate whether it's ultimately helpful or harmful to cull headcount that way.
[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.
[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.
I think worthwhile evidence would only be available if two things, both questionable, were true:
1. an unbiased sample of companies implementing RTO are willing to disclose their reasons - e.g. make public announcements, or cooperate with academic studies. 2. they were honest about the reasons.
If common reasons for RTO would make the management look bad (and some might even be illegal in some places) then the first is less likely, and the second is highly unlikely.
One point I did note is that there is an increase in management overhead when workers are separated, and this increase in workload by senior management is likely a pain point for them - even though there are likely productivity benefits in forcing management to communicate through official channels and have a more organised approach to task delegation/internal messaging.
From a financial perspective office spaces are a type of investment vehicle. Prior to the GFC office space was lucrative, and that was again peaking pre-covid. There are likely secondary motivations at play beyond productivity.
Even if a bunch of companies adopt RTO, many others just embraced remote work as a competitive advantage. I can just choose to work for those.
So, RTO all you want. I am not joining.
Are you sure it's that easy?
As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.
Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.
A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.
My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.
Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting
Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)
Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.
Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.
Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research
Sounds like you think software development is like one of those stock photos with 8 people smiling and high-fiving around a whiteboard. Devs are (mostly) nerds. Nerds have been collaborating in the online world for decades. They somehow managed to achieve things and build genuine friendships without ever being crammed into an open office - crazy but true. Everytime I hear someone say/suggest "dev needs to happen in person", all I can picture is a PHB.
The main pet peeve I have is with the hybrid approach of having a single person remote where you have a constant battle of negotiating interactions between folks who hate interruptions and those who hate scheduling a meeting for a 10-minute chat.
Also taking a junior stance, a lot of us learned by just being around senior devs, when you just started you don't even know what you don't know, and learning by osmosis is huge.
Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.
I disagree, this does not make any sense to me. You can work together with other people without being physically present, and you can socialize as well. We had regular after hour meetings online drinking beer.
If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.
I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.
Or nobody is there and I end up having driven (40 minutes each way) to the office to have Teams meetings with a wonderful view of the car park, under fluorescent lights, using a cheap low-resolution office monitor. When I could have been having those Teams meetings with a view of my garden and a much nicer monitor I have invested in
Alternatively, you networked, built useful relationships and shared knowledge.
Regarding knowledge sharing, that happens equally well via Slack. (Actually, I'd say a screen share works better than over-the-shouldering someone else's screen in person)
"Hey, Chip."
"Catch the game last night?"
"Yeah. What a snoozer."
"Are you ready for that quarterly meeting? Heard Tracy will connect from the conference in Toledo. Hopefully I don't get a crappy seat in the conference room."
"I'll take the meeting from the desk."
"Nice. Lunch later?"
"Yeah. Talk then."
Wow. Another day of building relationships and sharing knowledge.
All these complaints about poorly-thought-out RTO policies come from big corporations. If you're a senior leader in a organisation with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, it's very difficult to keep in touch with the people who actually do the work in making or providing the product or service that the business brings to the market. As a consequence, leaders come to believe that the routine of their work day - ingesting reports, engaging in discussions, and communicating decisions - is representative of what's going on in the organisation. Ultimately, I think it's a limitation of human psychology: the organisation is larger than Dunbar's number, and so starts to become opaque to its members.
My solution is to only work for businesses that are small enough for everyone to know everyone else.
Personally, I can't count the amount of times I've switched sides, and I don't think I'm the only one.
IMO, mandated RTO is (objectively) an effort by large organizations to make their "systems" more predictable in aggregate. The manner of predictability will be largely depend on the size of the organization (e.g. A startup vs. Microsoft) and their needs (productivity/reliability/consistency/etc), and we see this manifest in any number of the RTO announcements we've seen online.
At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.
It isn't the corporations job to prove it, they're paying the salary because of their own internal calculations about what is valuable to them. It really in't that much of a stretch to say companies are serious about their motivations here - there are much easier ways to do layoffs than moving everyone into an office.
"Your company didn't collapse during COVID" isn't much of an argument. It is like saying someone didn't die of COVID so they can handle being sick 24x7 for the rest of their life. Just because something is survivable or even tolerable doesn't mean it is desirable.
I think the reason is simple: Lock-in for employees. Moving for your employer demonstrates dependence and highlights your inferior bargaining position. If you have to move again to switch jobs it will be quite painful so you'll likely accept a lower salary instead.
That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)
This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.
RTO: Return to Office
as if they care.
People will be more tired once they arrive in the office. From a companies perspective skilled people will just leave to another company. And you can't hire the best people from everywhere if you need to have an office present. And obviously there are a lot more drawbacks.
From a society perspective it contributes to traffic jams, it contributes to overfilled public transport, and it puts needless stress on infrastructure. In general, it's just not efficient at all.
Sadly many big corporations are lead by narcissists who care more about their ego, who need to feel like they can control other people, rather than their well being or having a positive impact. Some may use it to get rid of people, but that, truly has to be the most stupid way to get rid of your best employees.
don't you feel like everything is getting worse in some ways?
the delusion is to think you're special because you work for a big evil company.