Most tech workers I know would do random WFH days when they needed to without a problem pre-Covid, and now that is just branded as "hybrid" and sold as a perk. Give me a break.
That seems like a noticeable benefit to me.
And yet, I can't help to acknowledge that there's no going back. And of course I can see that some things are remarkably convenient when working from home. So even though I miss the way things were, I understand this is here to stay.
They are just properly informed.
What would be really cool is reconceptualizing hybrid work as quarterly retreats, where the company provides housing and other amenities for 1 to 2 weeks every quarter. This gives everyone time to bond and work on harder problems.
I get this wouldn't work as well for those with families because being away for that long is tough, but this would be great for say juniors and seniors with greater flexibility. It also solves some of the other issues, ie I could move to an MCOL and just fly in once a quarter to work together with everyone. The "retreat" aspect of it would also incentivize more people to be there.
On the company side of things, instead of leasing out a building for a long time, they can just rent short term and use the money they are saving to make the retreat more fun and productive.
I'm fully remote atm, but i've also done hybrid. WFM was always a benefit to me personally.
I don't advocate that it's for everyone, ofc. Just saying many of the benefits hold true even if you have to work hybrid.
- two desk, both underutilized, often equipped with laptops and eventual docking station to economize money, witch means also moving equipment and having less than optimal horsepower or less mobile friendly stuff;
- living in cities or nearby or accepting regular long commute to reach the office, a significant geographical limitation for what?
- works in the office as you work at home, because part of the team is remote, so to avoid cut them out you need to work as if you where at home, and no, wasting money and create infosec nightmares with Meeting Owls and alike does not help.
Long story short I fail to see any benefit in hybrid work for the workers and for the company, I see some "benefit" for some actors, who have many other business in cities/around the city model, but they are outside both a company on it's own and workers interests. Working in the office might offer advantages in certain scenarios, like introducing a new member in a team, where the new can observe the others and learn quicker from this, have an easy mentorship etc. But this is sub-par with hybrid work, and similarly hybrid works means you are still geographically bound much, so well define this model the worst of both world is true for me.
Beside that fully remote means, on company side:
- no offices, they only need to take care about work organization (not harder per se than in the office, but being for many a relatively new thing potentially a bit more challenging, especially for those not accustomed) and arrangement for the home office setup, witch might be a little challenging for NON-IT workers WFH, since operation can count on them nor count on a direct LAN access as needed;
- no offices ancillaries like cleaning services, fire safety, ...
- able to hire workers if not from the entire world (challenging for fiscal reasons) at least from a whole country instead of a small area of a whole country, also being protected by "future developments" of such small area;
on worker side:
- being not geographically bound, so being able to live in nice places, potentially in far better accommodations at a far lower costs;
- having more comfortable work environment and no commuting
- having more competitors, but also more offers, and an easier change for a company to another since the office, the commuting etc does not change.
On the social side:
- WFH means a spread population for those who work from home, witch are a significant slice of the total population, meaning a more spread economy, less big business for big players, more small and medium business for SME
For the negative I've seen so far:
- for companies having workers less keen to accept doing more than they are paid for, just because keeping the job is much more important than monthly payments alone, because hunting for another job means potential need to relocate, family issue since a partner can't relocate so easily and so on
- for workers, specularly, companies can fire easily since new workers need to be trained, but the market is at least a whole nation, and the chance to find skilled workers who do not need much training and are very effective it's high, there are as well less social links in the team who can obstacle firing someone
I fail to see disadvantages for the society except maybe if not enough people can be disciplined enough for WFH, having social issues of a significant slice of WFH population that do not works well simply because they are not interested nor disciplined enough for this model coupled with a slice of population who are still not accustomed to deal with remote workers, like people who feel the need to go to an office instead of call someone on one side, coupled with someone on the other side that do not answer because he/she like async work even if hes/shes works can't be done asynchronously (yes, remote work is not only for devs, it's also from various kind of office works who have no asynchronicity).
As far as your quarterly meetings comment is concerned, even that is a variation of hybrid. I worked at a company once that had the quarterly meetups. It worked, but sometimes it was a disruption to a normal routine, especially for some co-workers who flew cross-country. Another company (100% remote company) had the annual weekly retreat which I liked better. You got your face time/watercooler collaboration bullshit/whatever out of the way, then 358 days of peace til the next one.
You can dedicate those days to meetings and conversations and keep the remote days for more heads down work.
And if you can’t make it to the office due to snow or travel, you’re prepared for remote work.
One of those days is the Friday so you get the half day automatically while being sociable.
What would be really cool is reconceptualizing hybrid work as quarterly retreats, where the company provides housing and other amenities for 1 to 2 weeks every quarter. This gives everyone time to bond and work on harder problems.
I get this wouldn't work as well for those with families because being away for that long is tough, but this would be great for say juniors and seniors with greater flexibility. It also solves some of the other issues, ie I could move to an MCOL and just fly in once a quarter to work together with everyone. The "retreat" aspect of it would also incentivize more people to be there.
Your whole post is a series of contradictions where you hand wave gigantic problems and exaggerate small ones
Best of both world to me.
I really don't want to commute every day, that becomes exhausting. And given how miserable offices are these days (open offices everywhere), I wouldn't get anything done in an open office every day.
I've done 100% remote and while it sounded great on paper, it is a lot easier to built rapport with people if you can see them once in a while. I worked at one remote-only company for a couple years and never met anyone, everyone just tiny boxes on a zoom screen. Never felt I knew anyone.
Going to the office once a week is great. I get to know people personally and while the open office is miserable I don't even pretend to sit down and work on the office day, I stack it with meetings (both formal and informal).
As to the HCOL area it still helps. A commute that would be insane every day becomes a lot more palatable if it's once a week.
If you lived near a major airport with a direct flight, you could live almost anywhere.
Maybe a lot of the WFH opposition is really just managers projecting their own work ethic onto others?
We have crossed the rubicon on remote work. The shift has been well and truly paradigmed.
To choose to restrict your candidate pool to a small geographical location, pay relocation, pay higher salaries, have a lower employee NPS, have higher company carbon emissions, whilst your competitors have a much larger non-geographically constrained talent pool, with more attractive, flexible, family-friendly working conditions and pay less for those employees, making their companies more competitive.
It’s a no-brainer. The status quo has completely shifted. Any CEO that doesn’t yet realize that should consider quitting.
If a company is no longer limited to just hiring people physically nearby, then you're competing for jobs against a whole lot of people who'd accept much lower salaries.
I live in the Bay Area, but if I moved back to the low cost of living area I'm from with low income taxes, I'd come out ahead even with 30% pay cut. I like living in a HCOL area, so I'm not happy about fully remote work.
The most I can hope for is that the wage drop doesn't too far outpace the concomitant drop in the cost of living in these expensive areas.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240322-us-salaries-hi...
The problem is, most jobs people do have an element of mindlessness and aren't cutting edge, innovating spaces. Most white-collar jobs people work in are satellite offices of large companies where the day-in day-out is simply maintaining and attending to larger systems, applying general verbal reasoning, keeping up appearances, etc. A lot of it is bullshit work, as has been articulated before. This work, stripped to its productive essence, can be done faster, more efficiently and in a fraction of the 9-5 work day at home, but part of the charade is for employers and managers to not admit this truth.
Meanwhile, people at home feel like they need to prove their worth and make sure their impact is being felt, so they work harder.
I never found this to be the case in office.
However I would agree with you on the shift out. 30 mins into the gym or drive home and I was able to stop thinking about work. Whereas now it's often 8-9pm at home before I go "whoa, I should dim these blue lights and do something with my life"
Note: this is bad advice.
And the habits and practices are far from settled at this point.
I think that most companies are doing remote wrong, too many meetings, not enough async communication, not enough written communication overall.
The open source world is a good example of the possible efficiency.
Uh, yeah, no.
Offices are havens of particulates, volatile organics, carbon dioxide, etc.
How long does it take that burnt popcorn smell to disappear from your office? That gives you an idea of how bad your office is.
HVAC systems can have HEPA filters, UV lights, good air exchange, etc. But the cheap ones don't. And, without pressure, nobody is going to install good ones.
Welcome to the pressure.
This trend has nothing to do with productivity and is all about the egos of control-freak managers "maintaining control" over employees in a way that wastes employees' time and money and harms the company's reputation.
Pre covid I would be able to doorstep them, book a trip to Glasgow or london or singapore or whatever and catch up with all number of people reliably with just a quick “you free for coffee” message.
Since covid it needs effort on both sides to be at the same location. It’s not impossible, but it does need people to appreciate the benefits of meeting physically and make it happen.
Employees have learned to look out for themselves and themselves alone. CEOs and productivity can go die.
If someone on my team had that attitude I would hate to work with them. They would hold me and my projects back.
So I’m glad you’re not my colleague.
whoops. who’s reading these before pressing publish in wordpress?
Excellent! Vote with your feet people. That’s the only thing CEO’s will respect. I will only send my CV to a non-WFH company if there is literally no other choice available to me.
There was a lot of grumbling about people quitting, but anecdotally I didn't notice much uptick in turnover at all. It's very hard to tell what will really make people quit. If the labor market hadn't softened a bit I'm sure we'd have seen more, but my guess is the disgruntled people weren't able to get full WFH without a salary decrease larger than they wanted to tolerate.
I think it’s very brave of employees to recognize the writing on the wall and help make themselves more easily replaceable.
That's no reason to throw out hybrid work wholesale, though, and if that's the only thing keeping a workplace from going full remote the full costs and benefits need to be weighed appropriately.
Would this be mandatory? If so, a team member might be inclined to sabotage a new hire.
> People often don't perceive you as an actual human if you've only ever been a video square to them.
My remote company does regular on-sites and off-sites, which for me strikes a perfect balance between not having to deal with the headaches of an office (mostly commute and open floor plan) while still having time to meet my coworkers face-to-face.
> quick collaboration just doesn't happen anymore, or happens in a much slower and more frustrating way on Slack
Slack's huddle feature is great for the times where you need to quickly drop into collaboration mode with someone. Doing that occasionally and then structuring your work to be more parallel works very well in my experience.
> Juniors especially struggle and I watch them take many times longer to ramp up than pre-pandemic.
This is one that I actually have seen, even in my current org. I think the root of it is that going remote revealed just how much time senior engineers spend mentoring juniors by requiring that that time be scheduled. The most successful junior onboarding I've seen is when people make a conscious effort to schedule in lots of time for mentoring and training and to ensure that there's a space where juniors can get feedback quickly on Slack.
It's not that you need more time than you'd otherwise need, it's that you have to be intentional about creating the learning spaces, which doesn't come naturally to many organizations.
This is the big thing I've noticed in general with WFH, I miss those interactions where the junior members of the team ask me a quick question because I happen to be in their area. Those questions never get asked now beacuse they have to make the effort to send a message over chat and there is an extra mental barrier about asking something potentially stupid over text. So many people are more comfortable interrupting me when sitting on a call than they are sending the chat message.
I've also seen it with a new team that the company recently spun up that does work related to my team. The manager wanted to leave the new hires to somewhat figure it out on their own and just be available to provide guidance if they ask for it. Their onboarding and getting up to speed has been super slow because of it.
I don't have a camera, so I'm just a picture of Uncle Fester. No one I work with (across 3 jobs) has seen me in nearly 5 years.
Alternately, they're projecting their own home environment, which won't always be the same level of distractions/benefits across different employees life-styles/situations.
"My house is filled with screaming two-year-olds and my commute is five minutes away, so obviously office-work is superior."
Doing what? And I ask this not as someone who is a junior, or even mid-level, far above it.
But this legitimately seems like "make-work."
UBI would go a long way to resolving a large class of these problems.
The absurdity of driving into an office, to get on video calls is not a new absurdity or problem, but we already proved its pointless. And yet people stick to it.
Maybe they shouldn't be in charge of people, let alone working.
But now it turns out that almost every email exchange degrades into "let's get everybody together and have a quick video chat about this"
Ha ha.
I don't think UBI would help the situation as much as people being bold enough to make decisions on their own without a bunch of useless "consultation"
That might be. But it more likely they are traditional managers or leaders and don't want to learn how to navigate WFH team members (i.e., work in the 21st Century). It's not as simple as just-add Zoom or just-add Slack.
Thinking WFH is going away is like saying "The Internet... It's just a fad." We've been to this rodeo before. Managers and leaders who are in denial - and unwilling to learn new teicks - aren't worthy of their current role.
Ah yes, some people will use any excuse to get away from their family/kids.
Before WFH these people were traveling to any meeting or conference they could find.
I was so full of questions those 2 years we worked in the same office but couldn't really ask without it being touchy.
But when I am in the office, I take full advantage of face to face meetings. I take team members out for coffee to have one on ones.
People behave differently behind a screen even if incentivised by money. This becomes a problem at the scale of big companies.
Eg - without body language, tone and context - everyone needs to be extra charitable to avoid miscommunication or distrust. This might cause people to be overly defensive in their approach to communicate.
or OSS like Linux?
Instead we have these open floor plan monstrosities for the hoi polloi and private offices for the masters of the universe.
I have no idea what brain damage causes this but if you can't work efficiently in the space you give to your workers to work in how do you expect them to work?
A more or less verbatim conversation between the CEO and myself as CTO shortly before I quite:
>The new office is so stuffy. I'm going to work from home.
>>We need to get a new office.
>No we paid too much to break the lease.
>>But you can't work there.
>I can work from home most of the time. I'll only come in for the big company meetings.
Two decades ago we had an hilarious all hands meeting where we scrambled to get to the office at 9AM while the big big boss would appear on screen from the corner of his kitchen table.
They just didn't want everyone to do the same.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that most CEOs and COOs use private offices as private, perpetual conference room space. I know my own executive manager has office space he barely uses because he's in conference rooms all day.
The funny thing always was "everyone has the same space" and the SVP/ CEO reserved this conference room all day, the one with suspiciously nice furniture that is never available.
Who benefits from keeping everybody in these offices? People who have a financial interest in maintaining those real estate prices high.
https://mcmillan.ca/insights/employment-and-privacy-implicat...
This is a complex, multifaceted issue that doesn't have one root cause or solution. Claiming otherwise shows extreme inexperience or lack of imagination.
Flights were in state and I was buying them ahead of time, so I got them for cheaper than an Amtrak ticket.
Timezones are a barrier, but 650 million people live within three timezones of the SF Bay Area.
You can get a little clever with GTM coming in on different days than Eng but it's tradeoffs all the way down. (In a value-neutral way)
But again, this all depends on a lot of variables. I think in the past, few people knew what remote work was and now that many of us have tasted it, there are lots of pros/cons to any remote/hybrid/office choice.
It is 2024. COVID was 2020.
If you don’t own your building you should be thinking hard about your new negotiating position with your landlord.
Two possible approaches to leverage quickly come to mind:
- The carrot: "You've got a loan with us for $xM at y%. If you show you are committed to this office by maximizing occupancy, that lowers our risk and we can give you a 0.1% discount."
- The stick: "Your loan term is expiring soon. I know it'd hurt to need to make that big balloon payment. Let's discuss our conditions for rolling you over into a new loan."
And if not, maybe make a change?
I was forced to move to another state (pre-pandemic). The people on my team were in offices, but 5 different offices. So I moved to another state to be in an office, so I could sit on the phone all day, every day. There is no sense to that. It’s no exaggeration that the forced move cost me tens of thousands of dollars… and for what?
I recently had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me and when I brought up this concern when I was told I’d need to relocate to an office location, I was told the recruiter was in a similar portion on her team, spending all day on the phone because her team is spread across multiple offices.
In person meetings are great, but if the reality of the office strategy isn’t going to make them possible, then there is no point. I think the occasional in-person meetup can do a lot to build rapport with members of the team without being in an office all the time, or on a weekly hybrid schedule.
I’d go a step further to say that a meeting where 3 people are in a conference room and others are remote, is worse than everyone joining remote or from their desk. Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience. I think it’s a safe bet that any company making news about return to office strategies has multiple offices with teams spread across multiple cities, states, and even countries. This makes meetings a poor justification for workers being in the office.
Agreed, even one person joining remotely completely changes the meeting. The remote person is slightly out of sync with everyone, can't participate in any whiteboarding sessions, and you lose the connection because they are a face (or icon) on the screen and they are looking at a wide angle feed of the entire room.
WHF means better home usage, since you both rest, eat, etc and work in the same building, while the company needs no buildings, meaning a far simplified real estate:
- homes
- factories
- special buildings (hospitals, army, politics etc)
- sheds
Instead of the various forms of multi-storey buildings, high-rise, towers and so on alongside their incapacity to evolve, very high construction and operational costs etc just to pack more humans in a tight space.
Similarly for workers being at home means better time usage, no need for commuting, ability to do something at home while working, like run the washing machine, pre-loaded, when the Sun start to allow p.v. self-consumption and so on.
WFH means far better usage of time, space, tools. Witch is a natural evolutionary move.