These people probably are miserable in a remote only setting.
I'm not at work to make friends, I'm not at work to chit chat. I'm not at work so we can talk about who won the last football game .
I go to work in exchange for currency, which is required to acquire goods and services. All this other crap, all these holiday parties, all of this let's dance in diversity videos, no that's not what I'm here for .
Most of the time coming to the office actually adds a bunch of unnecessary crap that is completely unneeded. If you can't get your job done remotely, what's the stop you from also slacking off in the office. I have to go back to the office for a while last year times were hard and I didn't have another option .
We're just talking to each other, shooting the s**, and it was cool to meet some Junior Devs who were just starting their career. But none of that made me a more productive worker.
If I had to think, I imagine the entire point of RTO mandates is to keep cities sustainable.
If every single office job went remote, what's the point of a city like New York. Who's going to willingly pay $6,000 for an apartment, ride the trains for over an hour a day, if you can just sit at home in a much cheaper city .
However, to quote a famous philosopher, it's a big club and you ain't in it. The powers that be one as many people in office chairs as possible, so they're real estate holdings appreciate in value.
Billy Bob's bagels also benefits from this, although I'd imagine he's not able to have the same amount of pool as the real estate titans
I find slacking off in the office so much easier than slacking off at home, mainly because people (like CEOs of companies with RTO mandates) automatically assume people in the office == people being productive. You could leave your seat and go to a meeting room, and people won't know if you are having a genuine meeting or if you are just talking to yourself. Or you could bring your laptop to a meeting room and people won't know if you focusing or if you are slacking off. You could even stay in your seat, and people won't easily notice that the GitHub page you have open on your monitor is actually for your side project. You could open a long and useless company email on your monitor and daydream for a few minutes. In contrast, when people know you are at home, they default to thinking you are slacking off. You need to actively work to prove you are working.
> If every single office job went remote, what's the point of a city like New York.
The point is to enjoy the city (whether museums or bars) after work hours.
1999 had it nailed https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=veoXCgwyZq8
In a few cases (certainly not all), it's to keep the c-suite's reputation sustainable.
If you're a CEO that signed a lease or construction contract on any piece of property since, idk, 2015, you have, in some way, burned a lot of money on a piece of ground that could have, in many cases, been replaced with a far cheaper internet connection and suite of remote work applications.
You have two options at this point:
1) explain this bonfire of cash to the board and possibly to shareholders, which is a pretty good way to see yourself shown the door
or
2) justify your expense by telling the rank-and-file to get back in the office and make use of the capital you are now locked into having.
>1) explain this bonfire of cash to the board and possibly to shareholders, which is a pretty good way to see yourself shown the door"
I don't get it? Is this supposed to be bad look for the CEO because he wasn't prescient enough to predict the covid pandemic and the wfh revolution 5 years before it happened? Given how frequent next quarters' forecasts get revised, I don't think the board expects CEOs to be that prescient.
For companies that own, Low occupancy = asset write downs = higher cost of capital.
Social currency is also a thing, which is much more difficult to gain in a remote setting - if not impossible. I don't go to work to socialize either, but I'm not naive enough to think that without an extremely established career and reputation at an org that I'll be promoted or employed strictly on merit. there is always some degree of social-ness involved in those kinds of decisions. I'm not saying that's how things should be, it's just how they are.
The industry is very unsettled right now: credible (or at least loud) opinions on AI range from “fancy autocomplete nothingburger” to “programmers are obsolete starting now”, RTO is in some weird ass place where it’s really unclear the merits or lack thereof, consolidation of half the S&P into ~7 companies and the whole startup pipeline running through guys who fit in a banquet room is uh, not highly not a working free market.
This is how you get a chorus of “talent shortage” on one side and a chorus of “CS is cooked fam” on the other: software engineering jobs are experiencing a market failure, price discovery isn’t happening, and shit is going to be weird until the market starts working again.
Is it perhaps that there are specific people, who are doing the ideation, or are particularly good at helping you think? Or is it anyone and everyone? If it’s anyone, then is it a social / biological quirk? Is it something else?
For everyone reading, this is worth reflecting upon, if only to move our regular WFH / RTO discussions on HN forward.
In person and remote both have advantages and will work better or worse for different people, organizations, or situations.
There is some hesitancy people have to contact others remotely.
The entire point is to get you to quit because firing people is hard, and they don't care if their best talent leaves.
Pizza and Bagels. If the rest of the country got their shit together and figured out how to make acceptable pizza and bagels then I could leave this city.
I solved an incredibly difficult technical problem while grabbing lunch during PAX with fellow co-workers.
Spending time face-to-face with team members as a lead help me keep track of who needed some extra time off, who was at risk of burn out, and who was being harassed out of band by PMs.
One of the most powerful things my team did was have cookies out in front of her desks everyday. Other devs would stop by the chit chat and it let us keep a pulse on how the entire war was doing. My team was able to get a lot more done and hope everyone succeed because we had not just technical connections but personal connections throughout the building.
Those personal connections also let me transfer top performers onto my team, people who would otherwise have left the org due to dissatisfaction with their current team.
Knowing individual developers one-on-one also helps me know what problems they're going to have with their code and blind spots in their technical knowledge.
Finally, there's a fact that trust is earned through time spent together. As a junior member of a team, I was able to propose some radical alternative solutions to problems because of how much time I'd spent talking to the tech leads above me.
That said, the working conditions in most offices are so bad, I see what people want to stay home myself included.
Even Microsoft, who years ago commissioned studies showing the massive productivity gains from individual offices, has gone against their own best practices and resorted to loud open office nightmare environments.
I think part of this is because corporations no longer expect individual engineers to come up with radical solutions to hard problems and are okay with mediocre solutions to everyday problems instead.
In my opinion, this results in massive numbers of employees being hired to create complex solutions. When one quarter of the employees could have got the job done if they were treated well.
Another aspect of everything going wrong is that American cities are so poorly designed with constrained housing that commute times have gotten way out of hand. Even in the early to mid 2000s when I started my career it was possible for people to live 15 minutes from work or buy a house 20 minutes away. I used to have a round-trip commute time of under 10 minutes so of course I didn't mind coming into the office.
Yikes, if the only reason you’re in NYC is a job and you don’t go out I highly recommend you find a new job/city.
The end effect is employees schlepping to the office to sit down and hop on a zoom call.
The main important factor IMO is mentorship of junior talent. (I'm speaking for technical orgs)
Viewing the organization as a living organism where an employee is a "cell", then there are material benefits in the "cellular replication" of talent and rejuvenation of the next generation.
It can definitely be true that RTO is worse for an individual engineer but better for the health of the organization long-term. Both can be true.
In my experience, remote only companies tend to prefer a higher ratio of senior employees for this reason. It's plug-an-play.
What is abhorrent is employers changing these terms as if they're trivial. We probably need legal protections treating swapping workplace requirements as requiring someone to relocate or accept lower pay.
> If every single office job went remote, what's the point of a city like New York
You really don't see the value of New York beyond its office buildings?
> it's a big club and you ain't in it. The powers that be one as many people in office chairs as possible, so they're real estate holdings appreciate in value
This is a Bay Area conspiracy theory that doesn't make a lot of sense, particularly when the cost and need for layoffs explains the effect more parsimoniously.
>You really don't see the value of New York beyond its office buildings?
I like to visit NYC a couple times a year, but absolutely don't want to live there. If the number of people who physically work there goes down, so will the reasons it's nice to visit.
I don't think I can properly explain my thought process here, but I do think of big cities as anachronistic and little inhuman. All those nice things in a city depend on a large number of lower income people being forced to live there by economic opportunity. That's not necessarily bad but frequently lower income residents don't get to enjoy the services they provide.
I say anachronistic because as people increase in economic freedom, their desires adjust and they frequently move, e.g. everything else being equal people will choose a 700 sq.ft. apartment over a 180 sq.ft. apartment. If the ratio of high income to low income residents shifts too far in either direction, cities go through a painful re-balancing process that may or may not land on it being good or pleasant (by some subjective standards) place afterwards.
Oldhead here. This was a common thought pattern before lockdowns, but only among the ~5% of people who personally negotiated for a work-from-home/telecommuting arrangement. And it was not normal. It was vaguely looked down upon by superiors, unless you had been with the company for a long time and had proven your value. And among peers it was a little "weird."
"Return to office" post-lockdown is not the same thing as "Work from home" pre-lockdown. The RTO thought pattern is similar, but the social feeling around it has flipped - is normal and not weird. (Yet still vaguely looked down on by some management)
People don't want to chit chat, just clock in clock out. Layoffs threat is ever present. Remote & odd-time zone meetings are still here. Can't turn off my computer after 5pm. In office benefits are limited. Mentoring, learning-seminars and after-work activities are soft discouraged.
Why even come in ? _____________
> what's the point of a city like New York
I agree that RTO mandates have to do with keeping downtown office space prices high. But, if you could work from anywhere, why wouldn't you want to be in the coolest city in the world? You don't need to be in Manhattan. But you can get some pretty great apartments while still being a 30 minutes subway ride from downtown.
I visited NYC regularly through Covid, and it seemed quite lively.
Remember, us programmers are a famously introverted & indoor bunch. Most people want to be in places with rich social lives apart from their smaller intimate communities.
Large cities are like black licorice. The people who like them, really like them, but most of us think they're kind of gross.
In may ways, the pandemic was a blessing for me. Remote work allowed me to move to a small city, closer to a rural area. If depends solely on my desire, I will never again live in a major city.
My experience is just so different. I love the vibe and the camaraderie of my office. It makes it fun to work there.
Just sitting at home working, never interacting with people in person sounds really dull and boring and cold to me. I had to do that in 2020 and I hated it.
Productivity is nice, but IMO it's not all about productivity. As a worker I value my enjoyment of the job, and just being a robotic super productive worker is not as enjoyable as actually feeling like you are part of a team or community and having fun with your fellow coworkers.
We spend so much of our lives on the clock, I would hate to have it all just be serious productive work 100% of the time.
Me too! If we had free teleporters I'd probably go into the office for at least half my work day, just about every day, voluntarily.
... I don't like it enough to pay about 15 days per year, every year (5 hours commuting per week, times 50 weeks, divided by 16 waking hours per day[1]), hundreds of dollars a month commuting (gas, plus insurance and depreciation on a car), and make every single thing that happens at home and requires my attention less convenient and more disruptive in ways that probably also amount to at least several hundred dollars per year, one way or another, and quite a few extra micromorts/micro-chances-of-crippling-injury per year (risk of that ~250 hours of extra driving). Plus increased restrictions on where you can live, which can come with significant (tens of thousands per year) costs in many ways, including in raw dollar terms.
It's nice, but the cost is really high. I'd also probably really have fun with a supercar, but I'd rather not buy one just the same. Far too pricey for the benefit, to me.
[1] Perhaps more to the point, that means over six entire work-weeks of extra work time per year, uncompensated, just to get to and from work. A month and a half of extra work every year. And that's with an hour a day spent, lots of people have more than 30 minutes lost per day (nb you'd need to include extra gassing-up stops, and extra car maintenance visits, divided by commute days per year, to properly account for this—so your commute time would need to average somewhat under 30 minutes each way to hit only an hour lost each day, probably closer to 25 minutes than 30).
I hate that it's either full RTO or full WFH at so many places.
You average Joe/manager in the office judges you based on this.
( I too don't like it)
You're not the only employee of the company. They aren't trying to maximize _your_ output, they're trying to maximize the company's output. You being present for a junior dev to ask quick questions to (the type that don't get asked if they have to message you) will increase their productivity much more than your productivity loss. It isn't all about you.
> If I had to think, I imagine the entire point of RTO mandates is to keep cities sustainable.
This is, essentially, a conspiracy theory. RTO is happening because management thinks it will increase productivity. Right or wrong, it's crazy to assume the are all working together to keep cities alive.
Eh, I will be honest. At this point, one has to be willfully unwilling to read the news[1] to state something like this. There absolutely are interests intent on keeping cities alive. I almost wonder if we finally reached a point where 'conspiracy theory' is automatically not only not 'a way to diminish a view', but 'a way to enhance it'.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/17/new-york-c...
Bingo
On the same point, gosh you sound like a fun person! I know, I'm sure it's not part of your job to be personable. Though, I do wonder how an approach like that will work for most people.
Yeah, but that's the heart of the problem here. The suburbs that many flocked to when WFH became acceptable are largely subsidized by city income. Cities are largely funded by employers paying hefty taxes to operate within them. Non-negligible portions of municipal budgets are also funded by small businesses that cannot exist without people working centrally somewhere.
Until municipal governments figure out a different operating model, I don't think any major city can survive big companies pulling out en masse unless your desired end state looks like Detroit circa 2000.
> I go to work in exchange for currency, which is required to acquire goods and services. All this other crap, all these holiday parties, all of this let's dance in diversity videos, no that's not what I'm here for .
What of the people whose jobs aren't WFH compatible? "They get what they get?"
What's your proposal here? Should I be forced into the office because it increases the chances I'll buy coffee instead of making it at home?
Macro economic changes are always painful. This is a gross simplification, but cities exist because of an economic network effect based on proximity. Network effects tend to be somewhat stable because they tend to change slowly, but they do change.
Most of my great friends I met at work
Some people prefer meeting others outside of work and there’s nothing wrong with it. My coworkers are wonderful folks but, frankly, won’t become beer-buddies.
Professionalism is learned largely or even exclusively by socialization.
More like to keep cities unsustainable. If a few major real estate companies went bankrupt, forcing the rest to lower the rents, a lot of wealth would be destroyed. At the same time, cities like New York would become even more desirable due to being more affordable.
NYC is still the #1 city in the world. There are plenty of things you can't find anywhere else. Cities like that – cities that offer something unique – would benefit from being more affordable. Mid-tier cities that exist primarily for economic reasons would probably suffer from a real estate crash.
Let me take the $4,000 a month I save by not living there, I'll spend 90$ on a flight, see a concert and eat some pizza.
Then I can fly back home the next day and enjoy my mid tier city with my giant apartment. My mid-tier City where we have this newfangled invention called trash cans behind the apartment, unlike New York where there's no space so trash is just overflowing everywhere.
I actually tried New York for relatively short time, it's an amazing city to visit. But living there sucks. I don't want to go back, but of the way things are going, I'm probably going to end up back there or having to go to Seattle or something which I don't really want to do.
Going back to commutes, wasting time, for no obvious reason - yeah, that did wake up people.
EDIT: I'm talking about rigid 5 days a week RTO policy. As other have pointed out, having a flexible WFH policy is often "good enough" for most people. Not all want 100% WFH, but taking away the flexibility of WFH a couple of days a week, if you want, feels like a shitty deal.
SWE in a place with good process, remote is probably fine. Generally similar for jobs with clear deliverables on that kind of time scale. if it's more research oriented, there is a huge benefit to being in-person in front of a whiteboard. For a job with shifting requirements day to day (like some legal or banking work), it is easier to coordinate everyone in the same office.
unclear if this overcomes cost to employees of the commute, housing, etc., but the value is there.
however there is also "worst of all possible worlds" RTO, where you have to commute to the office because the office is the place you are required to sit for your 4+ hours of Zoom calls per day with other colleagues in other offices. I expect a lot of companies are going to do this, which is totally stupid.
The key discussion should not be WFH vs. RTO - it should be why do people hate the office they are expected to return to?
It's not entirely unlikely this is related to that as well.
JPMorgan reportedly ending remote work for more than 300k employees
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42669143
JPMorgan Chase Disables Employee Comments After Return-to-Office Backlash
Push back too hard on RTO and you may not have a job at all in five years.
One difference is how they gain leverage. Labor unions seem to rely on the fact that they are the ones _right there_ who can work in a factory, clean a facility, etc. But capital sort of did an end run around some of that by literally packing factories up and shipping them overseas. That seems pretty easy to do to knowledge workers as well. At least to some degree and at some level.
This is far outside anything I've read extensively about, and it'd be interesting to read more.
Please explain—knowledge workers are still workers and the same benefits that labor unions provide to other workers apply just as much here.
Secondly, why would I ever care about a professional organization if I can't use it to collectively bargain? It doesn't seem to work this way for doctors; why would it work this way for us?
If it came down to RTO, or a 4 day work week, It would be an unbelievably simple choice: 4 day week.
THe worst part is the commute. Just such a waste of human life.
It's the largest bank in the world, "too big to fail" and apparently "too big to employ the people who are on the hook for their bailout".
Unionization is the answer. For a long time, tech workers were gaslighted into thinking that unions will not let them get paid high salaries.
Guess what, without unions, tech workers don't even have job stability. Forget high salaries.
Vote for unions.
Unionizing tech workers may or may not be a good idea, but finances would be comparatively down the list.
In Austria, every year the unions negotiate salary increases for almost all job groups (IT, metal work, etc.) and this is very important to keep our wages at least up with inflation. No-one would ever think this is a bad idea here.
AND not alone, it's time to prepare a mass resign for all companies pushing RTO stating clear that they are against human evolution, so harmful for humanity AND their heads must resign to end the strike.
Naturally, this means that JPM will take extraordinary efforts ( OWS level ) to ensure it does not come to pass.
It's becoming increasingly clear that there is a trade-off and an inverse relationship between career growth and family formation.
Collective bargaining? Nope.
A way to push back on being required to go to the office which has been a requirement since forever (before 2022): bring on the workers' power Revolution, comrade!
This is truly a past way of being. A real past, we cannot go back.
We have a way of solving this for many workers and any company not in tune with this beautiful thing is unacceptable to my heart (and hopefully many others).
If it has no meaningful impact on productivity, and workers don't like it (including a lot of managers), why push it?
That's why I believe that companies have some evidence (or belief) that work from home employees are not as productive, enough so to wage this political battle and pay loads in office expenses.
For ICs with good experience/independence, I haven't noticed any benefit.
I think that WFH substantially shifts the power balance to the worker. if I don't have to worry about my commute, or which city or country I'm actually working in, then the barriers to me changing employer start to really drop to zero. so if I feel bad enough about the situation, I can just spin up a new job without changing .. anything.
I understand if everyone else is WFH and I'm only hiring in office, that puts me at a disadvantage. I'm still willing to consider this thesis.
Imagine you are a new grad who just got hired but all the senior employees all work remote. How do you learn the trade? It’s much harder to become established.
However senior employees who were established already pre covid don’t experience this problem.
If you are the leader of the company, you realize that one day all of these senior ppl will retire one day and the people who are juniors today will be the main work force. Will they be just as good in this remote-first environment?
Maybe yes, maybe no, either way it’s a huge unknown and that means big risk.
In office work is more social and fun, that's for sure. But I've heard many VP+ managers comment, "Yeah, I'm WFH today because I need to focus and gets some things done."
The opposite has happened. Workers are craving jobs harder than since the financial crisis.
Those are two hours every single week-day that I could use to either do more work for the company or, more realistically, do self-improvement tasks or hobbies.
A lot of companies have commuter benefits that cover bus fare at a minimum. Sometimes it is "free" money, sometimes it is "pay for your bus pass with pre-tax money".
Of course management doesn’t like to hear this. They’d rather you stare at a wall when there is nothing in front of you I guess.
I’ve not had to do this. I’ve been fully remote for over a decade.
If I am hired as remote and then the company changes its policy later requiring me to go in, that is a change of the employment contract. AWS was particularly insidious as people are required to go to the office where the work/team they are part of are assigned to.
My one bedroom apartment is my home. Not an office to work in.
Maybe if I had a spare room, but I like the feeling of leaving work at work and coming home not to know I need to work here tomorrow.
They hate it because it's designed to be hated. The discomfort is the point. You're meant to know your place and be reminded of it everyday.
Even blind statistics are not in your favor.
Anyway, I am mentioning it, because the usual issues with quality of work that had to be QC'ed immediately came up. To be honest, there is nothing stopping corporate, but none of the jobs most of us do are so easily done that it can be just put in a simple step by step process ( and even then its hardly a way to guarantee accuracy ). I guess what I am really saying is: if they could, they would have already.
But they can't, because you get what you pay for.
Only way to ensure worker rights (and a greater share of your company's profits) is to fight for them and that's where unions come in.
My take is that this assumes the job - any job - that can be done remotely, can also be done by just anyone, and that there is someone in India or elsewhere with the same or higher level of critical thinking and IQ and who is willing to do it for a lot less pay.
But maybe none of this matters. Maybe the company is OK with a below average warm body in a 3rd world country that can do a version of the job for 1/3 of the pay.
Quality of work, communication challenges in time zones, language barriers, and setting a company culture are huge barriers to entry for workers remote from India.
Minimum required wages of at least the prevailing wage and limited access for W2's are major ones for bringing them here. Even doubling the W2's wouldn't cover replacing all jobs.
I like to think the quality of my work and ability to be more than just a coder (setting priorities, goals, innovating on the product, etc) prevents that.
Ultimately most tech jobs are replaceable but that’s not a good enough reason not to. Especially since there’s already pressure making this happen. I recently watched a previous employer offshore most of the dev work and it seems to be going ok to bad for them.
These companies already offshore every change they can get, you aren't going to preserve your job by going in each day and staring at your boss with giant sad eyes like Puss in Boots.
If I was at an office, I'd be spending hours on zoom anyway.
Knowledge workers did this to themselves by moving everything to the cloud and remote work. My boss was literally told by one of our private equity overlords that if a job can be done from home, then it can be done from India. They proved good on their word by doing it to my job within two years. And that was before the current era of mass layoffs. I was here warning people to this effect and making myself rather unpopular back during the boom times.
The threat of jobs being exported just means that members of the union or association have to embrace innovation like unions do in Germany rather than focus on job retention.
Being able to have robust discussions about software engineering, best practices and design patterns and all that good stuff and have other engineers hear that discussions happening and stop by to give their input is incredibly valuable to both personal growth and oftentimes the success of a product.
Both sides are absolutely doing this. It's like the concept of multiple equilibria has temporarily left the zeitgeist.
You sure you picked the right example category to service your point?
Arguably, for example, pair programming is far easier, remotely, with screen sharing.
But that said, you're also both ignoring relocation of the enterprise as a whole: employ Indians in India.
I'd even say that having kids is one major factor in wanting to move out of big cities.
For example, if you want a good amount of space in NYC you're in Brooklyn or Queens.
Your spending 45 minutes to an hour each way just getting to your Manhattan office.
Or you live in Manhattan and spend 6k a month.
Just from a raw math perspective, assuming I make 100$ an hour in NYC, and my Brooklyn apartment is 3k.
That's 1000$ a week for the 2 hour commute if I value my time and apply the same rate.
Let's just say a Manhattan apartment is 6k, but it's right across the street from the office.
To make the math easy, let's estimate your BK to Manhattan commute time to be worth 3k a month.
Vs 2K for an apartment in Philly or Chicago with a remote job.
4k extra a month to work in Manhattan, meaning 48k per year. Once you factor in taxes, you have to make about 70k more to make the in person NYC make sense.
If the option is 150k remote or 200k in NYC you *lose* money going to NYC. Plus, you don't need to live in a city at all .
If I want to I can move out to some small town in Ohio and buy myself a ranch. As long as I have stable internet I'm fine .
Of course this is a moot point if RTO becomes industry standard which it quickly is. With my luck the options are probably going to be have no job or go to New York or San Francisco and make 170 meaning I get the worst of both worlds.
I live in a suburb and work at a company that is in the suburbs. It's a manufacturing company, but they need software developers all the same.
I don't know, sometimes I feel like a bit of an outlier. I arrange my life for fun and convenience and joy. I don't try to maximize money at the expense of those things. Making say 20% more but having a long commute or working in an office that I don't enjoy being in is not worth it to me because time is money, and my day to day joy and happiness are more important to me than a little more money as well.
People seem so unhappy all the time. I just don't get it. I go for what makes me happy and it seems to work great for me.
It’s not usually a choice to be unhappy, as you seem to be framing it. You live ten minutes from work, but you get a partner, and how far away is your place from their employer? You have kids and all the schools within 20 minutes of your employer are fairly bad, plus the above issue of conflicting partner commutes, and also you can’t just move them between school districts frequently to move around near your current employer.
So yes, lots of people end up with shitty commutes because the alternatives are worse. They’re not choosing that because they’re dumb or choosing to be unhappy, but because of conflicting interests. WFH for one or both adults in a household removes a ton of that tension in ways that basically nothing else can (short of “stay single and never have kids”)
Examples: - talkative/noisy areas - lighting level - speakerphones/headphones/cellphone conversations - kitchen/ping pong/foosball noises - privacy/divider existence/divider height - personalization - lighting/glare/sunlight/color reproduction - start/stop/break schedule - "cool" versus "comfortable", "public" vs "private" - "corner office" versus "bull pen"
In my new office, I was given the choice to rank my preference from nine desks in a small area (group/team cluster, because "synergy"). I didn't even bother asking if I could sit closer to people I like or identify with (the parents of children at home subgroup).
Many people I've worked with gave a damn but were constantly ignored due to costs. Just my experience
Policy equivalent to tariffs to make it unfavorable to offshore vs hiring onshore talent. I.R.C. §174 implements this concept with an amortization delta between US and non-US based development and R&D cost accounting, for example.
"We can make you come into the office because we say so or we'll just offshore." might be challenging in the current zeitgeist.
Nothing about a labor union implies this, either, just that labor is necessary to produce revenue. This is still true for service-based companies, even if it takes longer for underinvesting in labor to hurt.
> The GP is suggesting companies thinking that if we don't need in-office workers, why not just offshore it altogether?
This is true regardless of if you're in a union or not. I'm not going just to toss the baby out with the bathwater. There isn't a situation where I don't want a union outside of maybe self-employment.
What are managers doing if they're only measure for who stays is "who is willing to drive or train to work?"
That's not management imho.
It isn't. I made this point on this forum before, but I personally think management class has been largely skating by for multiple decades now with covid ( and maybe very briefly OWS ) being the only few things remotely changing the balance of power in a way that forced them to re-asses the situation.
The amusing complaint that I heard was that remote management is harder ( it is likely true ) when compared to in-person.
<< "who is willing to drive or train to work?"
This is the part that is interesting to me for several different reasons. I don't consider myself a top player ( and I objectively am not ), but I know people who are. Those people tend to be capable enough to go on their own if needed, but are sufficiently comfortable that they won't unless pushed too far. In simple terms, either companies find ways to make exceptions undermining the whole spirit of this exercise ( because that is all it is -- show of power ) losing the few people that make things happen or stick to their guns to ease managerial discomfort and keep commercial property values in place.
I don't have to make those decisions, but having seen some recent projects lately, I don't think management can afford to lose those key individuals, because I can say with all certainty that throwing a bunch of contractors on it will not work; I will even go a little further, throwing contractors on it will only make things worse.
edit: Removed last line. It sounded better in my head.
That plus a few years of new successes might get the megacorps to start hiring en masse and possibly see the value in WFH again, but it'll take a lot of these stars aligning to produce several new unicorns that can eat a few lunches to get there, which will probably take the rest of the 2020s and possibly part of the 2030s (based on the last time this happened, going from 1999 crash to the 2010/2011 renaissance)
If I was a betting man, I'd guess the first wave of new startups will be unifying a huge dataset of local info with AI into like the AirBNB-of-local-whatever personal concierge sort of thing, like OpenTable on steroids. but I'm frequently wrong, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My guess is that RTO mandates act as a lay off.
Unless, and I do mean unless, because I did not work at JPM, JPM is so well run, that it truly does not matter.
We dont know. Ive gone through at least 3 research papers, all of which come to the same conclusion, hybrid outperforms RTO. Whatever decision is being made, its not based on the economic evidence. We will find out eventually.
But that's not what I'm seeing in the market, I'm seeing recruiters tell me for another 10k I can have the privilege of moving to the NYC or The Bay.
Americans start conversations with assumptions like:
* We need space because all amenities must be privately owned at home
* You should be able to drive everywhere
* 30 minutes driving is the same as 30 minutes on transit
* Street walking & biking are unsafe hobbies, not modes of transport
* The average American city is a representative city.
It's impossible to have conversations with someone who starts from these base assumptions.
Given that cities are uniformly more desired in the rest of the world, the American city hate has to do with deliberate actions that stripped-out cities from 1950s-2000s. In other countries and cities insulated from these changes, the criticisms fall flat.
Yes and no. Much of the world does a better job with their cities than the U.S., and as a result there is a little more demand for that type of development.
But overall, preferences are shockingly similar across cultures.
Anywhere people have the means to afford automobiles, they tend to buy them and increasingly embrace a suburban life style, at least at an aggregate level. If you look at new construction in places like Western Europe or China, a lot of new development is very similar to what you see in the U.S., with a bit of local flavor thrown in.
Suburban lifestyle can only exist in a world where urban areas already exist. They rely on the city-dwellers to create the experiences, entertainment & economic hubs. Then suburbanites separate themselves from the city, reducing geographic inflow and tax outflow, while demanding equal access to all of those amenities. It's a one-way street.
Cities around the world are becoming wise to it. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Amenities like free parking for all, wide streets, downtown interstates & property taxes based sequestering defined the 1950s-2000s suburban chokehold. As a result, city dwellers experienced suburbanite imposed forced misery. With the return of bike lanes, traffic calming, interstate removal and congestion pricing, city dwellers are beginning to reclaim the city for themselves. Or so I hope.
Uhm, yeah, Trump is president.
Do you live in a city?
Here are some of the real and assumed reasons that companies are pushing for this:
- They have accepted tax breaks or other financial benefits from cities tied to specific headcounts or jobs created
- They are locked into longer term leases or own the building outright and want to make use of their sunk costs
- They found that (on average?) remote employees are less productive
- They want to encourage employees to find another employer
- It's a control/showing-off thing
There seems to be a financial motivation behind this and apparently employee happiness/productivity doesn't appear to be part of it. I [anecdata warning] don't see employers mentioning any sort of commute benefit/subsidy for returning to the office nor do I see 'remote employment' touted as a benefit so these decisions are being made without any consideration for employees.
I guess pick from one of the above and figure out which way a company stands to benefit - there's your answer.
I don't think that's how tax cuts work. No matter the incentives, it's cheaper to not have office space than to have office space and get some write off. I doubt some city is saying "For every $100 of office expenses, we'll give you $200 of tax credits". If anything, companies track days worked from home so they don't have to pay as much city taxes
> They are locked into longer term leases or own the building outright and want to make use of their sunk costs
You can always sublease and many do. There are also variable expenses (insurance, maintenance, etc)
> They found that (on average?) remote employees are less productive
This is my belief
> They want to encourage employees to find another employer
Maybe, as a filtering mechanism. Kind of like soft layoffs, but its very risky.
> It's a control/showing-off thing
Also very risky because you just piss people off and pay to do it.
The rest of the time I'm going through emails, filling out endless bureaucratic forms/documents, doing mandatory training, and every now and again I get to actually write some code (more likely: reviewing PRs), LOL! My performance reviews are always spectacular and I'm the only one in our (much) larger team that's actually 100% in compliance/up-to-date with everything and completing all my work on time.
The one thing all those tasks have in common? They can wait five minutes while I take care of something and if I'm on the phone I can do something else entirely while I'm listening. Just the other day I did--the horror!--laundry while I was on a call discussing how we should move forward to solve a problem. And I was the one speaking most of the time while I folded my laundry and put it away!
I could easily watch a 6yo and do my job at the same time. Based on how much real "work" comes out of your average corporate office employee I'm certain they could do the same.
Employers should give zero fucks about what their employees are doing while they're at work as long as they get all their work done on time and don't cause the company any problems (and no conflicts of interest). We hire people to get things done not to dress a certain way or keep a chair warm in a very specific place all day!
But no.. you want 110% and everyone looking busy, because.. manamagement does not know how to manage..
No offense, but to me it shows severe lack of skill in management class.
I have a pretty chill WFH tech job at the staff level, and a pretty easygoing child, and this sounds like the kind of thing no one who has been a parent would say. My daughter was six during the pandemic when she and her mother and I were all stuck at home, the two of us trying to split our time between watching her and working our jobs, and it was hell.
Assuming a 5 day week, and an 8 hour day, thats a 10% salary bump. In practice it’s much more, since thats time you get back to spend on a variety of things, that just getting more money wont provide. Being at home, means breaks or down time help you get stuff done, and save even more time.
WFH allows for many virtuous cycles to be set up, IT moves wealth away from down town areas, and into lower cost of living regions, letting people save more money, and invigorating local commerce.
MY guess is that WFH is what society needs as a whole, wherever it can get it. Cities and municipalities should plan and compete to get the largest number of people working from home within their boundaries. Get reliable and safe mass transit up and running, and you can even cut down on short hop fuel consumption.
Money concentration is great when it helps generate more wealth for humanity at large. If it’s only going to a small group, then distributing it amongst the broader populace will (should) drive up demand, resulting in more economic activity, and therefore a stronger economy.
Heck, extend that logic to a global scale, and you’ve basically created a reflection of outsourcing. Do WFH instead.
Being there to pickup the kid from school is important.
Getting lunch with your SO is important.
Being in your neighborhood is important.
Those two hours of sleep is important.
What nonsense perks can a company can offer me compared to things like that. I don't even know if you can pay me enough to go without that (If I have the means to get that, that's what I'll do).
We were having "disaster recovery" days at my old employer in 2015. You found a place outside the office to attempt to do your work from, and made adjustments to make your various pieces of technology work. It worked, and the implications of it working should have been obvious to our betters.
Taking this at face value, what does that have to do with getting an office in 2015? It seems like the same "hindsight is 20/20" problem as before. Maybe the CEO was busy transforming the company to use blockchain or something. You can't expect a CEO to nail every bet. Microstrategy is (was?) doing great because of their bitcoin treasury strategy, but I doubt many boards are getting upset that their CEOs didn't buy bitcoin, even though that would arguably be a better return than not leasing an office.
Odds are, if they were "busy transforming the company to use blockchain" they blew absolutely massive amounts of money.
The presumption that we're all rational actors with access to reliable information is not borne out by history. Anxiety and ego trump reason every time, and those at the top are often trapped in misinformation bubbles that make them think a fire is nothing but smoke.
Do you have a single example of a CEO being fired or even chastised for this?
If anything, it's exactly the opposite. If remote work is genuinely good for the company, a good CEO will acknowledge that and work to minimize downside from unnecessary leases.
IMO execs are often wrong about RTO, but for simple cause/effect reasons, not elaborate conspiracies to retroactively justify office leases.
It's not credible. It's stuff folks make up from a myopic view of the situation. I have had more than a few intimate very open conversations with executives on the topic and not a single one has stated this as a reason. In fact, many are happy to be able to cancel expensive office leases when able.
The executives may be wrong, but as a group they certainly understand sunk cost theory. Most of them are even smart enough to not to fall for the fallacy by the time they reach that point in their careers. Of course lots of self-serving myopic behavior in that group as well.
It's difficult for some to empathize that there is genuine disagreement on what makes for a more productive workforce. That an individual's performance is irrelevant - group and team performance is the metric that actually matters. One does not necessarily correlate with the other.
It's very interesting to me that folks can hold the opinion remote learning is far deficient to on-campus classrooms, but simultaneously state that WFH is good for everyone. I think it's far more nuanced - and certain types of personalities and life stages will do better in one or the other.
I've worked remote most of my career since the late 90's - I have hired dozens if not hundreds of remote employees over this time. There is absolutely a group of workers who do quite well under such conditions, and some who do horribly. And it doesn't mean the latter can't be productive anywhere - or that these groups are static over an individual's entire career. This was not a controversial opinion prior to the pandemic.
You can go further into company/team structure and communication methods as well. Some have the culture to do remote well, some do not.
In the end I'm confident the market will figure out the right mix. Companies will be punished for making the wrong choices for themselves here.
And that's just it: a lot of them aren't able.
Especially if they own the facility.
That said, before I address what I think you mean, could you elaborate a little? I want to give you a chance to explain your point further.
Also, I'm glad for you that you know what you think. Thanks for sharing that!
Sounds like you're more upset about CEO compensation than anything else.
>The presumption that we're all rational actors with access to reliable information is not borne out by history. Anxiety and ego trump reason every time, and those at the top are often trapped in misinformation bubbles that make them think a fire is nothing but smoke.
Except in this case, you don't even have to invoke "Anxiety and ego trump reason every time", because even someone who was perfectly rational couldn't have predicted covid 19 and the wfh revolution.
We are a social species. Body language, eye contact and facial expressions are more important than the spoken word during a conversation. They're also extremely subtle. You don't think about someone leaning in or mimicking your position (that's a thing!) when you're saying something interesting, but we instinctively pick up on these cues and use them to steer conversations (or, in this case, know to double-down on whatever we're talking about).
None of these transmit well over VC.
Consider eye contact, for example. Maintaining eye contact with someone means that you're staring almost directly at your webcam's lens, which is at best unideal (if you're use to being on camera) and, at worst, impossible (since you're, naturally, staring at the facsimile of a person in the box on the lower-left-hand corner of your Zoom window). Webcams are AWKWARD.
Furthermore, a Zoom meeting has to compete with the billions of other things that you're doing on your computer. A face-to-face meeting competes with your calendar and your inner thoughts. This matters a lot for key conversations.
There’s definitely roles which have to be in person, and those people should come to office.
Everyone else - they don’t need to in the same way sales people would.
Not all conversations lead to insights, what’s going on then?
There’s some specific things happening to lead to the productivity benefit. Because this is what it is in the end, it’s productivity we care about, not socializing.
For Eng Mangers to do their job effectively, they need engineers in office too. I discussed that in detail in a sibling comment to your parent one.
For that matter, post-it notes on a wall are better than JIRA.
At one workplace everyone had glass table so they could draw on with markers. People could literally come up to your desk and you could work through problems together on one end of the table.
The best online tools are garbage compared to physicality.
I'll never understand this. All my whiteboard diagrams look like shit. My drawing skills suck, my writing is nearly illegible.
Most online tools have excellent diagram shapes, nice and customizable arrows, good templates, etc.
I can make nice diagrams much faster on any of those than in a real whiteboard. A lot less messy as well.
I also worked in a place where we could draw on desks. I fucking hated it, it was the worst possible place to brainstorm anything, and made the place very noisy because people were invited to have those discussions on desks, and it was an open office plan where others were trying to work.
It is small wonder that I became extremely more productive at home. I don't need to wear headphones all day long, meetings tend to be more focused (since people don't like sitting on online meetings as long), online tooling for communication ia top notch these days.
I can't think of a single upside of being in the office.
Also I've been to plenty of meetings where engineers split off into multiple sub groups and diagramed different ideas on parts of the board and then everyone joined back up to discuss. Can zoom technically do that? Sure but it sucks.
I submit that this isn’t my reality.I never spontaneously break out a whiteboard., the same way I dont spontaneously break out into a dance routine.
I do hope I’m in the majority, otherwise I’m really unsure of what to make of all the work places I’ve been at.
Countless times I've walked up to someone and asked "hey can I work through this problem on a whiteboard with you."
And while I haven't done so myself, I have had coworkers spontaneously break into dance routines before. (Ok that has only happened once...)
Post-it notes are not something I've seen used except for random sessions usually run by a consultant. JIRA sucks except for support issues, but most everyone just uses a google doc or spreadsheet and moves on with life.
Beyond that, we are just getting started with remote work, the tools will improve, not so with physical space tools.
I have. Here is why in person interaction works better for me. I learn a lot from someone's body language and multiple subtle cues - eye contact, fidgeting, arms and hands, direction in which toes are pointing etc.
They tell me if someone is not telling the truth, or under stress, or is uncomfortable. Then I can coax further details out of them using appropriate means. And most of the times, people want to share a lot of uncomfortable details but have a big mental block preventing them. As a manager, I can also observe the body language of my team members when they interact with each other and identify the dynamics. Whether they are getting along well or whether they have issues with each other.
None of this is available on Zoom. "Hey how is it going?" "Good" is not going to tell me really if you are struggling with something and are not able to share your problems. "What do you think about the new guy on our team?" "He is good" doesn't tell me what you really think of the new guy.
After talking about this to dozens of people, whose job it is to deal with other people, I have realized that this is a widely shared problem. Luckily, the decision makers about RTO are also the ones whose job involves dealing with people.
You have infinity times more dance routines in your time line than in mine.
To the point - they’re talking about having water cooler conversations, which spontaneously lead to ideas.
If all we really need is better white board tech, people can simply meet twice a week and white board, I.e. hybrid.
I have however blogged about it! https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/history-of-microsoft... for the start of the journey.
Turns out if you are designing an embedded OS (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/cooperative-multitas...) you end up doing a lot of white boarding.