WFH is becoming a benefit again Wonder if the war will push companies back to WFH to keep gas pricing and supplies in check. Hard make it to work if gas station is out of gas or there's a one hour wait. |
WFH is becoming a benefit again Wonder if the war will push companies back to WFH to keep gas pricing and supplies in check. Hard make it to work if gas station is out of gas or there's a one hour wait. |
But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more offices should operate more like this.
This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored.
People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc.
The post above as well is predicated on a 1973 style consumer transport shock. At least in most developed countries, the average MPG has dramatically increased [0].
In 1973, the average MPG was around 12 MPG. In 2015 (before EVs were normalized) it was almost 25 MPG. In 2026, numbers would be significantly higher.
A more realistic prior is what happened in 2006-07: your boss will expect you to go to work.
[0] - https://public.websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2017-5.p...
[Edit: source: I led a consulting team of about eighty Brazilians and Ecuadorians]
> People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc.
Not necessarily true. A company that operates 100% remotely in country X not necessarily can hire people from other countries (and let them work there). I work for a french company, 100% remote. The company doesn't have branches in other companies, and so everyone works within France. This is ideal, because the HQ is in Paris, and many people don't (want to) live in Paris. Having to go to the office 2-3 times per week, makes it impossible for my company to hire outside of Paris... which is idiotic
https://www.business.pitt.edu/return-to-office-mandates-dont...
The benefits are so obvious, yet here we are.
A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.
The owners of commercial real estate are not these people. And it doesn't seem likely that these commercial real estate owners would have sufficient push by themselves to make such a large scale RTO mandate.
That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.
That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.
My pipe dream for the future of work is it's remote by default with in-office being a decision that's made at a team level. Ideally there would be no hard requirement to come to the office X days per week, it would be a team coming together and saying "hey, how about we all go into the office on Tuesday to collaborate on this thing" (this assumes buy in from the entire team).
All that said, working from home is so awesome. I'm more productive, have no commute, and get to do things like take care of background tasks like laundry and start my workouts at a reasonable hour after work.
Hybrid is a comfortable spot for me.
The problem is that "in-person" meetings are still Zoom calls for those that didn't come in, so it's the worst of both worlds.
It's getting lonely. :(
Without an office, entire layers of communication get stripped out. The "ownership" of all those channels by your company only compounds the problem. You're not going to bitch about your boss, your PM, your project in the same way in slack as you might over lunch, with your co workers. Communication becomes burdened with layers of "nice". It is much easier to be brusk and professional in a request to someone you just spent the last hour eating with while you had a conversation about family, life, and what you did on the weekend.
Meanwhile there are entire layers of informal communication that can go on when teams intermingle. The cross pollination between accounting, customer service, design that can happen when you're in the same location simply wont occur when every one is on their own island.
I agree that ONE can be far more productive when stripping away the commute, and having the privacy that comes from NOT being in a crappy open floor plan. But it's a sub optimization problem: optimized parts don't always result in a better over all organism (organization).
Can it work: it sure can. Might it be optimal for you, maybe. But that doesn't mean it is applicable in every case.
I've made the switch to biking to work about half the time and it's freaking amazing. I turn 20-30 mins of absolute dead time where I'm spending money, polluting, and using up infrastructure into 50 minutes of getting healthier and having a blast. It's a great trade, especially if you were going to work out anyway... which you should, of course.
I'm effectively spending 25 extra minutes of my day to get a 50 minute workout and save some money, and not pollute, and not contribute to traffic problems, parking congestion, etc. etc.
It's not necessarily easy to make this happen, cycling safely is a whole other can of worms, you kind of need a shower at the office (or take it easier on an ebike), but the benefits are massive if you can do it.
Honestly the only thing that would making work from the office better is if the senior in my team _wasn't_ remote. Nothing against his decision, but I do feel like I've missed out on the organic growth opportunities from collaborating in person with them.
Businesses and commercial real estate did this to themselves. I especially hope commercial real estate enters a death spiral and we stop building offices unless they are absolutely needed and free up some of the land for residential use (and not converting the buildings).
I'm getting some serious deja-vu.
[1] https://fortune.com/2026/03/11/iran-war-fuel-crisis-asia-wor...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/iran-oil-crisis-fuel-rationing...
If people can't make remote collaboration work, perhaps they should study how gaming groups achieve this.
A number of jurisdictions require some amount of office usage for subsidizes, it's harder for managers to justify not offshoring if everyone is 100% WFH, and some employees just suck (eg. Overemployed, exfiltrating data, quiet quitting).
https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion...
After a year line managers were not enforcing it, despite repeated reminders
They started counting badge-ins, and lowering performance ratings for managers with reports not showing up.
They had to force the managers to act, almost none of them thought it was needed.
The actual in-person collaboration in the office: 50-100 person open space office with everyone wearing noise canceling headphones all the time to drown out everyone else talking in zoom/teams calls, not talking to anyone in person, reading reddit and watching youtube on the second monitor while waiting to clock out for the day.
Nah it comes from them trying to keep their real estate "investment" relevant.
This WFH shit was the worst for me - Ive lost more than 20kg due to eating not enough at home, I like to go to the office: I can go out and have several lunch options and I dont have to cook for one person and then clean up 20 Min.
:-)
I guess, then, that one of the big benefits of my daily is that we don't swing wildly between WFH and RTO with whatever trend/fashion/panic/wind/fart is in the zeitgeist/ether/air/media?
With the exceptions of the occasional client meeting that must be onsite, or the occasional conference, and our monthly team lunches, I've been 100% WFH since mid-2020, not pandemic related (I was mostly WFH for since sometime in 2019 (waves vaguely), and it was changing from consultant to senior wage slave that sealed the deal).
Just like the rest of my team. OK, sure, we're small, and OK, sure, perhaps we use the available communication channels more effectively than others seem to, and OK, sure, while some of us are friends, I don't think any of us make the category error of assuming that coworkers are supposed to double as our social life, but seriously, if people are effective working from home, and we are, then let them.
The world started WFH, we changed nothing. The world started RTO, we changed nothing. The world started complaining about gas prices, well, those of us who own trucks and/or off-road did too, but we changed nothing about how we work.
Triple the price of 1Gbps fibre to the home and we might get a bit more upset. </s>
Can't speak for French companies aside from some players in DefenseTech and Quantum, but for most American companies this is a solved problem already - we already have a legal entity in most jurisdictions or the ability to spin one up within a couple days.
Additionally, if an organization is spending enough to open a dedicated branch in a country (even if it's only going to house 20-30 people), we tend to get FDI grants and subsidizes unlocked.
Pasqual did something similar when opening up their American campus in Chicago.
> Having to go to the office 2-3 times per week, makes it impossible for my company to hire outside of Paris... which is idiotic
There's no reason to - you aren't getting a significant cost benefit shifting hiring from Paris to (eg.) Toulouse, and are only incurring an additional operational headache.
At that point you may as well open a Francophone development office in Rabat or Tunis, or shift the office to Bucharest or Prague because the CEE countries can outcompete France in ICT hiring subsidies.
And those people own other things too. Sometimes they own commercial real estate directly. Sometimes they're just investing in it. But they all rub elbows with those who do own it. They sit on boards together. They have common interests and let me tell you -- those interests ain't about what's good for you and me.
It's almost as if we should find an economic system that doesn't rely on forced consumption, waste, etc in order to be "prosperous."
The smackdown of this idea is that office spaces have different requirements than living spaces and the conversion of those buildings is too expensive to make it viable. As an unrepentant optimist, I would hope that could be mitigated by supporting those transitions via tax rebates, collaborative zoning and permitting processes, and investing in methodologies that could address the infra needs (plumbing, etc).
These people are simply a problem when working remotely, and while they're certainly present at the bottom of the ladder, they are particularly numerous among management. There are really very few who understand IT well enough not to cause issues and actually be productive.
The handful of people who have a financial interest in keeping the masses enslaved in the city, namely those with financial interests in office spaces, ready made food, fast-tech, fast-fashion, ... prey on this.
This is the real problem. The way out is to teach IT, not CS, not CE, at school, starting from early childhood, and to really teach it: FLOSS desktops, not cloud+mobile is mandatory. And since we don't have enough teachers, the only way is through video lessons, but to do something like that at a national level requires a level of understanding and commitment that currently seems largely absent among most people.
Like, we have a log of all our work done, it's git. It tracks and timestamps each individual commit. But my manager can't use our git frontend. I guess it's too hard? Not sure. So, we then re-enter our time in Jira.
Of course, his manager can't open up Jira. So, we also create a word document every week documenting everything we have done. We actually also spell out and link the Jira issues (???). And then that gets sent to him.
Some of this I can understand. Reporting and distilling data is important. But nothing is being distilled, it's the same information just duplicated. This could all be automated but, of course, it's not.
I admit among my coworkers, for a few, I wonder how they manage to work remotely and be productive. These same people are the one who suck up all the oxygen out of meetings; and leave a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day.
Looks like you have not done much work outside the US if this is what you believe
Source: having directly worked with people from about 60 countries for 30 years
Part of the dynamic is that with wages and costs here being high, the bar for acceptable is higher so there's a filter effect. Another part is that a lot of people emigrate and the costs associated means only the better people get to do so. If your international collaboration experience is from working in FAANG/whatevs or the best augmentation houses (e.g. Thoughtworks), you'd have very different experiences than are the common case. In that case you're not benefiting from financial arbitrage so much which is another relevant dynamic. That same dynamic means you're less likely to be outsourcing or nearshoring from other high cost of living places that tend to have better schools (although the US seems to be struggling on this). You could replace US with HCOL places and the statement would be improved. Further, those that are good who don't emigrate can demand wages on the global scale (even if adjusted for local COL) which means they aren't working offshore contracts unless they're early in their career and you got lucky (in which case their team isn't similarly great) or, again, you're working with one of the premium houses and outsourcing isn't a cost saving exercise. In the places where wages are strangely low (e.g the UK & some other HCOL parts of Europe) the industry draws a smaller proportion of the brightest minds because the premium is smaller.
So I believe your statement about your experience. I also think the general refutation of my sub-claim as distilled is correct. Yet the comment was in the context of outsourcing/nearshoring and implicitly about the median places, statistically speaking, looking to cut costs and exert downward pressure on wages. For those the local talent demanding the higher wages is higher skilled on top of having the meatspace/hand shaking advantage.
For two people with the same "work quality" let's say, one in France and one in the US and both wanted to work in a high-paced industry or startup -- the US is much, much better. From the perspective of the US person, hiring someone in France is a road of problems not because they are not good enough, but because they will be a bureaucratic burden.
For both US and France, hiring someone in India will be problematic because of major cultural differences, and given the size of the country, quality of work. There are very good Indian engineers, they are just much more difficult to find.
There is of course a lot of historical bias too, not to mention racism.
If you are in France today, it is economically better to hire someone from India, but the major differences in basically everything make it difficult. Hiring someone in Poland does not have this problem. The language would be the barrier, mostly (they would need to speak English, and our Frenglish is pitiful). So we hire for economic reasons, but the gap is closing quickly, especially for the top jobs (for the very top ones it is actually more interesting in Poland).
We could hire someone in the US but the salary structure is completely broken, and effectively we have people emigrating to the US (and sometimes coming back to France when they have a problem expecting that they will be taken care of, but that's another problem)
So yes, there are gaps between countries -- but not all countries.