In-office work needs to be compensated differently than WFH. They will try to decrease WFH compensation initially, like the loss of benefits threat in the article, but the number of potential employers is higher for WFH workers, giving them leverage.
It gets easier all the time, the pay gets better, and I actually have a much better setup at home then I've ever had in an office (Granted, I've had 20 years to set it up...)
I'm not concerned about 'losing out' in any capacity going forward, especially now when its become so common.
I'm currently a full time employee at a contract firm. Befor e that, I was full time with an international firm and before that I was full time with a local CDN provider. that goes back about 10 years...
In tech there have always been a relatively large number of remote friendly companies. I worked for the better part of a decade fully remote, in full time, reasonably well paying positions at a wide range of companies. I only returned to an office a bit before pandemic broke out and don't have any intention of returning to an office full time now.
After the pandemic there was an even larger number of companies that are at the very least remote friendly. Most < 1000 employee tech companies I know are never planning on returning to an office full time. I also believe a fairly large number of the major tech companies are also planning to be fully remote friendly going into the future.
Pre-pandemic getting a fully remote job didn't take too much work find, and now nearly all companies I've talked to in the last few months are willing to support remote roles.
I've been working remote since 2002. I've done both full time and contracting. I've been full time only since 2011 at two different employers.
There are _enough_ employers that will allow fully remote employees that it's not hard to find jobs, and it's only gotten easier in the time I've been doing it.
> In-office work needs to be compensated differently than WFH.
Why?
A company hires an employee because they think they can make more profit than that employee costs them.
My expenses have nothing to do with the equation except when the company wants to be cheap and figures out they can up their profit margin per employee by lowering salaries due to low competition for employees.
Your expenses also do not determine your value to the company. It's simple supply and demand.
If you require $250/hr but a smart person in say Brasil will do the same work, to the same standards, for $100/hr, what is the rationale for the company to keep paying you? You might complain that the Brasilian is leaving money on the table but that's not in your control.
> In-office work needs to be compensated differently than WFH.
Do you mean pay you more because the office no longer needs to provide space and power for you, but you provide it for yourself? ... and because you can be called 'in' faster without the 45 minute commute?
For one, I'd argue that working from home probably requires additional pay over working in the office. I'm sure some people have a "spare" bedroom that they can convert into an office, but there's a lot of people, including almost all the tech-oriented professionals under 30 that I know, that don't even have their own one bedroom apartment, let alone are able to pay for a second bedroom just in case. Working at the kitchen table all day around roommates (or partners, or children if you're a parent, or maybe even disruptive pets) is not exactly a recipe for deep work productivity.
If workers are also now expected to provision their own work space (space, desk, chairs, monitors, etc.), then the compensation model around those jobs also needs to be adjusted to account for that.
Companies will make offers. Prospective employees will negotiate based on conditions and salary. For some, working from home reduces costs (raises hand). No commute and no real incremental costs; I have a dedicated office and have never had free food offered in an office. For others it's a big cost.
If someone wants to live in a dense urban core and a company is 100% remote, that may not be a good deal.
>> If workers are also now expected to provision their own work space (space, desk, chairs, monitors, etc.), then the compensation model around those jobs also needs to be adjusted to account for that
I've been working from home for 5 years. Standing desk, Aeron chair, dual ultra wide monitors, it goes on and on.
It all adds up to about 1% of my compensation over those years.
I spend whatever it takes to have a great working environment, if I see something that will incrementally improve the 8 hours a day I spend working I immediately buy it. As far as my income goes it amounts to a rounding error.
>> there's a lot of people, including almost all the tech-oriented professionals under 30 that I know
That's called selection bias.
You have chosen to live in a location with expensive real estate. Good for you. Other people made different choices. I have rooms in my house I haven't been in for months.
I'm sorry, I think we definitely have a "pot meet kettle" situation here. You're (pretty patronizingly) describing noting selection bias, then basing things on your own situation.
The median income for mechanical engineers in the US is around $88k, with many (especially early-career) people making meaningfully less than that. I'm glad your income is high enough that thousands of dollars in equipment, and far more importantly, extra space in your living quarters, is a blip. I really am. But statistically, your situation is not representational of the hundreds of thousands of other workers.
Yeah, I'd want to be paid at least 25% more, since by requiring me to commute to the office, you are taking two hours a day from me that's of no use to either of us.
"One worker’s company “had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago,” according to a post"
Some of the stuff companies do truly baffles me. It's only the beginning of June, you can't really assume your whole team is fully vaccinated. Why would you bring everyone in for lunch and then send them home? All downside and near-zero upside. It'd be another matter if it was a full day event where you did some meetings or seminars in addition to the meal, but are you really going to make people commute in, eat, and go home?
Vaccines have been readily available to anyone who wants them (in the US) since mid April, even in the highest demand parts of the country. If you are not vaccinated, at this point, there is no excuse.
(edit: obviously, I’m assuming the article is talking about a company in the US, since the article is about the US.)
IANAD, but I'm sure there are some medical contraindications for certain individuals, such as people who are immunocompromised, that may legitimately keep them from being vaccinated. That's why achieving herd immunity is important, and my understanding is that we aren't quite there yet.
Herd immunity is not a fixed vaccination percentage pulled from Anthony Fauci’s latest media appearance. It’s the immunity level at which cases stabilize and begin to decline. It is defined by observation.
Cases are at all-time lows in the most vaccinated locations, and are dropping rapidly nationwide.
No, it's the level at which people not eligible for vaccination are no longer at risk because most of their peers are incapable of spreading the disease. The political aspects are just some stuff some people made up.
Sure, but this thread is about an employer bringing everyone in for a luncheon. People who are not vaccinated for medical reasons should be taking responsibility for their health in these situations and declining to attend an event like this. (If the employer will count this absence against them despite their medical situation, that's a shitty employer that might be violating ADA laws.)
The issue is with the anti-vaxxer types (including people who won't get vaccinated for religious reasons) who seem to be more likely to attend an event like this without caring about their (or others') vaccination status.
I do believe it is true that everyone in the US who both wants and is able to medically tolerate a vaccine should have been able to get at least their first dose by now.
Regarding herd immunity, I'm honestly not expecting that to ever happen in the US. There are too many people who are skeptical of these vaccines, some for the regular disappointing anti-vax reasons, others who do have serious concerns and/or have been swayed by misinformation. The fact that states and municipalities are resorting to crazy incentives like cash lotteries and even stuff like trucks and guns for people to get vaccinated really illustrates how bad it is.
I read that something like 3-4% of the US might be immunocompromised, easily an order of magnitude higher than I would have initially guessed, which means that if you have a staff of 20, it’s possible that vaccines might not be effective when administered to one of them.
It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.
> I read that something like 3-4% of the US might be immunocompromised, easily an order of magnitude higher than I would have initially guessed
Wow, agreed, I would not have guessed that high a percentage.
> It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.
Right, and I explicitly said that I would hope people with medical conditions would decline these kinds of in-person meetings if they weren't comfortable with them just yet.
So, I made a comment about how vaccines are widely available in the US, on an article about the US, and you’re nitpicking it because you have an ideological problem with what I wrote.
Only if you are in certain parts of the world. If you aren't, then no. No they are not. For the record: I'm in Norway. Vaccine rollout has been slow - and it hasn't been my turn yet.
I'll paraphrase the reply I put under a post that's about to also get buried in a flurry of downvotes:
Seattle area has had access since mid-April, and I drove 90 minutes to get that shot as early as I could. I hit full vaccination status on Monday of this week, so no outdoor lunches for me last week. But math is hard, amirite?
At least 10% of Americans don't live within 5 miles of any pharmacy, and nearly 10% don't have access to a vehicle, a number which is higher among no non-white populations.
Depending on what area they're in and local policies, undocumented immigrants may have difficulty getting the vaccine.
Those are just a few examples of situations that, due to your unexamined privilege, you're apparently incapable of imagining.
We've only just reached the 50% mark for vaccinated people. Certainly some percent of those don't want the vaccine, but included in the remainder are people who have difficulty getting time off work, difficulty with transportation, etc.
Similar issues apply for voting. If these factors weren't important, Republicans wouldn't spend so much effort trying to disenfranchise voters by exploiting these factors to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The idea that pointing these issues out is "posturing" is either a sad commentary on your obliviousness, or indicates that you're perfectly aware of the status quo and want it to stay that way. Neither is a good reflection on you.
Anyone can catch anything and potentially pass it on all the time. But at least the CDC thinks the risk is sufficiently low that it is not worth worrying about:
>If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
I don't know what this caveat right after that is about though.
>However, if you live or work in a correctional or detention facility or a homeless shelter and are around someone who has COVID-19, you should still get tested, even if you don’t have symptoms.
CDC has lost a fair bit of credibility from my perspective over the past several years. A lot of their guidance, or lack of it, has been politically influenced.
Guidance for masks and COVID shutdowns under a government led by people publicly denouncing masks and shutdowns was politically influenced?
Guidance for opening up and removing mask mandates under a government led by people publicly for masks and for extra caution for opening back up is politically influenced?
Sounds like some terribly ineffective political influence.
Seattle area has had access at least as long, and I drove 90 minutes to get that shot as early as I could. I hit full vaccination status on Monday of this week, so no outdoor lunches for me last week. Which makes me kinda wonder what point you're trying to make.
Yeah, that's my model here. I'm still waiting on full immunity and I got shot 1 a day after eligibility opened up. I am not particularly concerned about my safety but I'm still wary of accidentally exposing someone who's unvaccinated and it bothers me to see businesses and other organizations just dismiss the risks posed by actions they could simply avoid taking.
I'm finding there are a certain group of people who are really struggling socially, and to them this is a good thing, even with the risks. Some people lost their whole social network when the office went home, and they long for it to come back.
As a person who can only handle so much social interaction, it is baffling, but to others, it is baffling to stay home all the time.
A lot of those people are only struggling in the first place because the broken office-first model required them to relocate to a metro where they have no family or social network. This is particularly bad in the tech industry, because the major tech metros are notoriously unsocial. People on the West Coast tend to have fewer friends and be less outgoing[1], so it's particularly hard to meet people when you relocate there from somewhere friendly like the Southeast.
In a remote-first model people could stay located in the areas that suit them best socially. They could live in the hometowns they grew up in, or by their families, or in their college towns. Concentrated industries like tech are particularly bad, because there are so few metro options, compared to the geographic flexibility of doctors or accountants. Office-first in tech is a siren song of loneliness. First it draws us far away from our loved ones, which leaves us with no other option for meaningful human connection outside the workplace.
I won't argue with this being a difficult issue, but I also want to push back a little bit on this notion that forcing people into a situation is a totally net bad thing.
As an adult, you have precious few opportunities to make lasting, deep friendships. I consider myself an outgoing person with lots of shallow friendships, but my best, deepest friends are still the ones from High School, College, and the surrounding activities -- places I was, more or less, forced to be.
Being forced to be somewhere, be it the office, your college dorm, or the US West coast, gives you a sense of shared experience. Is it ideal? Maybe not, but a lot of people are, for better or worse, forced into experiences that (can) lead to deep and lasting friendships.
Candidly, I actually miss the office, even with all its warts. It builds a shared experience that is difficult to replicate digitally. I can see it in the faces of new hires since WFH started - despite best attempts at inclusion, they're still a little bit on the outside looking in.
To be frank, my life energy is not yours to consume. Your "shared experience" requires interaction from others, many of whom do not want to be giving it. Your perspective of "being forced to be somewhere" as a positive thing is selfish and unempathetic.
> I also want to push back a little bit on this notion that forcing people into a situation is a totally net bad thing.
Hey brother! I think slavery was a good idea too. The South will rise again!
Seriously, that looks like some major Stockholm syndrome you have going there.
Let's say you didn't have to go into the office every day. That gives you more time to socialize in your community. You can volunteer, take classes, go to a bar or club, whatever.
If you want some sort of "hair shirt" experience, you can choose that. I once volunteered at a long term care facility to teach the residents about computers, computer programming, etc. It was fascinating because in doing that, you find people with those inclinations who may not have had the opportunity during their working lives to learn about such things.
If you need to "be forced" to do things, I guess you do you. But that's something you really shouldn't be projecting onto other people.
People that have been struggling socially are not the sort of people I would want to be stuck in an office with, if for no other reason that they are going to be wasting my time at work.
Maybe it's a bit rude of me but I'm fine letting the socialites struggle in isolation for a bit.
Pay close attention to how you feel during all of this, extroverts, and remember it. You probably make introverts feel like that every day with your pushy social behaviour.
Depends on whether you get everything right. If done correctly, yes. But for example in my local area, most "outdoor dining" was inside tents with poor ventilation and tables at most 6 feet apart where nobody was wearing masks. Once we understood the aerosol transmission model it became obvious that this was bad, but it kept being done.
In a sense, an outdoor lunch event is potentially much worse than a seminar or meeting since at least during a seminar/meeting people don't have an excuse for taking off their masks and they can socially distance more easily vs sitting at a table together.
If you have proper tracing and know there's small infection rates in your area, we do this all the time, but still keep the distance.
You could go all isolation and lockdown mode for over a year. Either due to fear, or due to lack of control. However, at some point the costs outweigh those risks.
My entire team has been fully vaccinated for weeks at this point. If we did get everyone together we would obviously make exceptions for anyone who isn't vaccinated yet or even just doesn't feel comfortable yet. My wife and I have been fully vaccinated for awhile, and even then, doing things in public has been weird.
We were told for years, there is no flex time, don't even think about it. While the higher ups obviously flexed whenever they wanted to. Suddenly covid hits and I'm scrambling to get everyone setup so they can work remote. We go a whole year working remote with almost no issues or lost productivity. And now we're back in the office and the mood has definitely changed.
> We go a whole year working remote with almost no issues or lost productivity
I've heard a lot about this claim "no lost productivity". However that is for the employer to be evaluated, not for the employees. The complaining employees lose credibility when they make claims like that in complex fields, because productivity is very complex metric to be measured in many jobs.
Unless you're talking about something that can be objectively measured--widget output from an assembly line, average times to retrieve/place something in a warehouse, and so on--the "complexity" you note is just fertile ground for gaming. It's downright trivial for an employer to massage "productivity" numbers in a way that supports their agenda.
The flip side is that if remote work is absolutely the same, then offshoring and outsourcing are also.
Why have your employees work remotely in a city 100 miles from their original office at 80-90% of the cost when you can have them be 1000 miles from the office at 30-40% of the cost.
If you find employees in Central and South America they would also be in the same timezone.
We just have twenty years of experience that any initial cost savings generated by outsourcing are illusory and come due with interest on the back end.
I agree that has been the case but I don't think it is a certainty that it will continue to tbe the case. Certainly many immigrant workers in IT do good work and are well paid. Why could they not do the same thing from their home country?
Depends what you're outsourcing. We outsourced manufacturing and those cost savings were certainly not illusory.
A lot of communications type work suffered from outsourcing due to language barriers and poor connectivity and poorer skillset from workers in other areas of the world (or even the US). That may not always continue to be the case.
I'm guessing the top 10% or 20% of workers do not need to be worried since they can provide so much value that outsourcing is not worth it. But if you're in the bottom 4 quintiles, I would be wary.
> We outsourced manufacturing and those cost savings were certainly not illusory.
Sure they are. The expertise and factories to build a lot of components are no longer in the US, which has a ton of knock-on effects in the economy - job loss, decline, etc.
That's a hidden cost that offsets whatever cash savings were experienced on the front end.
Those are societal costs, not costs for the company making the decision to outsource or not. A company taking into account those societal costs while others do not will end up not being able to competitively price their products.
Not only did we lose the ability to manufacture things locally which has impeded our ability to innovate in certain fields, many companies were wiped out by new overseas low cost competitors who took the expertise they learned from our training in the initial outsourcing.
Essentially for short term gain for some, entire companies were destroyed.
Cognizant and TCS and Infosys and the like have this market on lockdown, and nobody cares that the experience is terrible because it's just a cost center.
Moving 100 miles is one thing. When you move countries/continents, language, work culture & social norms needs to be taken into account, even if the timezone is the same.
It shouldn't matter who I am, but I say this as someone who immigrated into North America after having worked several years in South America. There are real barriers to collaboration that prevent outsourcing from being a silver bullet. They don't make collaboration necessarily impossible or difficult, but these barriers need to be taken into account.
Offshoring and outsourcing can be a nightmare. It doesn't have to be though. I've seen at least one example that works very well.
Of course it was less about cost and more about the ability to quickly provide additional resources, and it was done with the upmost care to make it still feel like one team, but it doesn't have to be a nightmare.
This is what's interesting about the 'remote work doesn't work' group. My first bigCo programming job in the late 90s was at a satellite office with another single developer. We built a lot of software with developers from other satellite offices using only email and phone calls. /shrug
If I went into my office every day--which I haven't had a desk in for a while--I'd spend a decent chunk of time every week on calls with people across 2 continents, multiple offices, and fully remote.
That depends upon your communication patterns & architecture. If your outsourced/offshored workers are tightly knit into your development team, then they're basically the same as WFH workers.
But if they are discrete teams, working on discrete services, then the issues tend to be around management, collaboration & communication patterns (both human and technical). Those are the areas which many companies can't handle or don't have correct to enable useful outsourcing.
One worker complained that the manager “wanted butts in seats because we couldn’t be trusted to [work from home] even though we’d been doing it since last March,” adding: “I’m giving my notice on Monday.”
I've seen this with my current employer. Their message has been that going forward at some point, "Working remotely is not an option."
There's really no reason I can't work from home. I've been doing it since March 2020. I don't have any customer-facing responsibilities; I administer servers and write code. The only thing that requires my physical presence is the occasional need to install or replace hardware.
It was one thing to not support remote work in 2019 when it was an unknown. In 2021, we've proven it can work; workers know it, and employers should know it. There's no un-ringing that bell.
I'm older, and have no desire to return to the startup lifestyle again but there's no doubt I can find remote work. As I see it, the choice is mine, and taking a mini-retirement and looking for new opportunities if my employer wants to be inflexible is not exacly unappealing.
All great points. It is similar for me. Server/App admin plus some coding. Most meetings happen over webex because teams are distributed across cities in different time zones. But working from home is not an option. Also actually flying to different offices to collaborate face-to-face is not an option either because "Hehe who flies mere devs for meetings, isn't there a slack / zoom / webex?"
If you know how to code and admin boxes, you have your pick of jobs. There’s no reason to ever go back to an office if you don’t want to unless you’re on some terrible immigration twist-your-arm situation where you get deported if you get fired from that particular job.
I've been doing remote contract work since I became a digital nomad in 2018. Before the pandemic it was absolutely a minority of companies that were comfortable with the concept. A lot of them from the Basecamp school of thinking.
Since the pandemic kicked off, this has changed. Despite the fact that there are many employers out there trying to force everybody back into the office, there is also a large pool of companies that have realised the wheels didn't fall off during the pandemic.
I've been speaking to a lot of current and ex-colleagues in the tech industry. Both on the management and on the employee side. Even the managers are increasing looking at where they're going to work from long term. Realising that they really can move to cheaper cities (in Europe), possibly with better weather, and keep working just the same.
I think there will be a bit of tension this year, but I can't see it just going back to the way it was previously. So many of the previous objections are just obviously false now. In a lot of cases I've seen teams become more productive (not to mention happier), because they're not sitting in an office.
I've seen the faces of most of their kids and pets now, and it turns out that's pretty cool as well.
I've had this argument pre-covid too. WFH has some trade offs but it works fine at scale. I worked at a place that was occasionally hostile to WFH (depended on the team) even when we had teams split across offices around the world. Like why would I need to sit at a desk in New York to talk to people over video in Chicago and London?
As far as I can tell this article contains fewer arguments about whether work from home is better or not, and more arguments about how certain companies are messing up the transition through bad communication.
The one argument, #3, about corporate culture is in favor of not WFH. They are saying that research shows corporate culture is important, but the methods used to build corporate culture when people are WFH are failing badly. Which indicates that if corporate culture is indeed important, then the only way to really build it without pointless BS is by having people working together in a physical location.
Office is a space where complete strangers can become a collective, sharing common goals and establishing bonds that can help achieve great things.
This is possible with remote work, but much harder. In my experience, remote workers are generally rather detached from their colleagues and projects. YMMV, but I vastly prefer working from office.
This has only been my experience in very small startups with all the people in the same room or at least the same building.
In all my other jobs, including the startups that have grown into more traditional businesses, I have been pretty much a heads-down worker. I come in, do my work, and go home. There's not really much bonding or common culture going on that remote/on-site would really change anything.
This strikes me as a very romantic view of what offices are.
Maybe it is possible for an office to be like this, but I would suspect that it is an exceptional case.
Mostly offices are where people go to do sufficient work to get paid, and the only real goal coworkers have in common there is a desire to receive paycheques and make sure the company doesn't go under so they can continue receiving paycheques.
If people didn't have to make money they absolutely would not spend their days pushing paperwork around and sending emails as part of some shared collective goal.
I wasn't talking about what all offices are, but about what some of them can be.
It is clear that many offices are dull hives that suck the life out of their occupants. But why be in such office? Why should someone have a job just to get a paycheck, getting miserable in return? There are always options.
To look at it from a different side, office is a tool, which, used correctly, can give a tremendous boost to productivity. But it is not a given. It has natural advantage - like physical proximity between people and disadvantages - the need to commute being one of them.
Again, this strikes me as an extremely romanticized view of life and employment.
> Why should someone have a job just to get a paycheck
Because we need some amount of money to survive in our society and we need lots of it to thrive in our society.
> There are always options.
Not really. There are always options if you have highly in demand skills with no external responsibilities that prevent you from relocating to better work or risking a job change.
Most average office workers cannot risk a job change (because job changes ARE risky) due to family or other responsibilities. They also don't possess terribly in-demand skills.
> office is a tool, which, used correctly, can give a tremendous boost to productivity
This is employer talk. It's unclear to me why a worker should care about their productivity more than their paycheque, or their comfort, or their time spent commuting.
> It has natural advantage - like physical proximity between people
This has just as much potential to hurt productivity because the #1 timewaster at offices is other people.
> They also don't possess terribly in-demand skills.
Such workers shouldn't be calling BS on their leaders on return to offices, they should keep their heads down and do as they told.
Regarding your points about needing money, the audience here is blessed to be in such high demand, that they can freely choose projects and leadership they like. We have just one life, why earn money doing something that you don't love?
> Such workers shouldn't be calling BS on their leaders on return to offices, they should keep their heads down and do as they told.
So people shouldn't have any say just because they have lesser in-demand skills?
Note that I didn't say these people were useless, they fulfill some role, just one that could easily be done by many others.
They might be extremely loyal, productive people who just want to continue working from home for whatever reason but because their skills are less in-demand, they should shut up and do as they're told?
> So people shouldn't have any say just because they have lesser in-demand skills?
Actually, yes, that's how it works. If you are valuable and hard to replace, management has to account your desires and listen to your feedback, allowing work from home, 3 month vacations, and even for you 'calling out their BS', if you are very valuable. Because your skills are the leverage you have over management.
If you can be replaced easily without much cost, then you don't have leverage, and you are in no position to oppose your bosses. More so, if you are economically dependent on this job and you know that you wouldn't be able to find a new job easily, the situation is even worse because your bosses have very big leverage over you. If management says, 'working from the office', such workers can only say 'sir yes sir!', and do as they are told.
That's how it works in real life, and it is natural, so wow dude yourself.
However, every non-mentally impaired person is gifted with a capability to learn and acquire new skills, greatly increasing own worth at a workplace and improving job prospects.
The whole pushback against remote work is absolutely nuts. When the companies were staring at shutdowns and loss of revenue, everyone gladly accepted the idea that people can work from home. And contrary to the popular belief, productivity increased (our own CEO admitted at one point in an all hands). But the minute there was a sign things are opening up, there's a complete opposite viewpoint being pushed from the same people.
I think there's a lot of different things going on here:
1. Control freaks are losing their minds in the Pandemic and they want some of the control back.
2. Extroverts are losing it and want things to be social again.
3. People who have bullshit jobs and absolutely don't add any value except look busy on "make work" are having a hard time justify their need in the company.
4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.
And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace.
At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.
> Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few.
You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market for remote work. I think things were moving in that direction but slowly (as things tend to do) - COVID just accelerated the trend.
Inertia, perhaps. We certainly have been seeing reports of digital nomads growing over the last decade, but major shocks can be useful in speeding up transitions. Likely very few CEOs previously imagined how robust the remote work infrastructure had become, and certainly didn't have obvious incentive to implement all the tools until now.
Adjusted for inflation it does look like it was down a bit during last year, but Q1 there seems to be a rise again. What's interesting is that it looks like the Dublin prices have seen a wild 10 years of volatility.
Nope, maybe a 2% drop in prices from the peak, rent still crazy expensive and not falling, once the government remove rent freezes, it will go up again. Anecdotally a few non Irish techies are leaving but it won't be enough to affect house prices and there are 10k people waiting to buy behind them.
No they won't. The very reason of the management chain is manage people, in arm distance, not remotely. The execs understand this best kept secret better than anyone else.
On point 4, I think this is where co-working spaces have a moment to shine. A fully remote environment that you still get to leave the house to go to and no impact on how the rest of the team live their lives.
College was by far the best time in my life because of the environment of campus, even with the pitiful dorm room sizing and sub-average dining options. If I could move to a campus - perhaps that was focused on people in their thirties - where people from many companies would go to work remotely and live, that would be an absolute game-changer for me.
I feel exactly the same way. College had just the right amount of private space, lots of shared spaces for social occasions / group working and a maintenance department to look after all the tedious domestic repairs. Bliss
I think it really comes down to urban planning and the burden of most people's commutes. Worth noting that from my experience the interpersonal negativity index of my previous work environments is highly correlated with longer commute times and larger city size.
If I were running a large company I would create many small satellite offices around the metro area that employees could sign up to work from. Might even be worth purchasing a few large RVs and renting space and power hookups in good locations while figuring out employee preferences.
Just want to provide a counter-story to your anecdote. Many of my colleagues are excited to go back to the office to increase collaboration and work satisfaction. Personally, wfh is really difficult for me and I can't wait to get back in the office. Working from home feels like grinding away at an endless list of tasks and waiting for the day to be over. Working at an office feels like playing a sport with a team - every day is significantly more enjoyable and satisfying.
Granted: I am a young, single person working in design/product and my job requires a ton of collaboration. I don't really consider myself an extrovert FWIW
I've been effectively remote (albeit with a lot of work travel) for a number of years now and won't ever return to an office. That said, and appreciating that it's a different world from a few decades ago in terms of comms and so forth, it feels to me that coming out of school and shortly thereafter and being in this situation would have been extremely difficult.
Personally I think being junior is so so difficult to do remotely. It must be insanely hard to get things done and have the confidence to organise people who are more senior than you to have those random conversations and exploration meetings that make a product worthwhile (and that you can learn from). It is possible but you need to manufacture the spontaneity if you see what I mean. Most of the people who love WFH seem to be very advanced in their careers.
Worker productivity is not measured in GDP. It is a component of it, but asset and resource prices also factor into the equation. Nobody is going to suggest taxi drivers can go fully remote and work from home, yet that still feeds into GDP.
The problem with fully remote work is that once you accept that a job can be done from anywhere, you have to compete on a global level. It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people willing to work for less than you! So don't get too excited about it ;-)
This is why it's good to be a lawyer. It's one of the last remaining guilds of knowledge workers with any power. It's literally illegal to have someone from wherever do certain tasks if they are not properly licensed.
There are Indian universities that specialize in US law and train their students in US law. Law firms that have those lawyers work overnight on items that in the past were given to new grads. Experienced lawyers then review those documents, fix any issues, and put their signature on the document.
You could argue that there still has to be a US lawyer in the loop, but that's still true of software projects as well, that there is one Sr. software person overseeing the outsourced team.
That's one good reason to be a lawyer. However, if you speak with actual attorneys, they all have a hundred reasons to not become a lawyer. I have yet to find one that recommends it as a career path.
I know a patent lawyer and a divorce lawyer who really like their work. The patent lawyer is an ex-engineer and likes the technology. The divorce lawyer is a funny jerky guy and loves all the drama. It's not for everyone though.
In the immediate term, instead of competing with people in a 60 square mile radius, you have to compete against the rest of the country. That’s great if you are really good at what you do. If you aren’t, it isn’t.
Also remote workers are easier to automate because employers know precisely what they are doing.
There are still barriers to truly global labour - time zones, language barriers, complicated tax systems etc. I'm in New Zealand where there's little overlap in working hour time zones with most major markets.
People have been making this threat for decades now but here is the thing: you always get what you pay for.
High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work.
The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the US.
You are also wildly underestimating some of the tech markets. I know plenty of people that are heading back to China because they are being offered amazing positions over there.
This isn't true. Yeah statistically maybe. In practice if you are willing to endure some hassle you can save a lot of money by using offshore freelancerds/contractors. However it requires lots of patience and also depends on the field.
Most people hire locals because they want to feel comfortable. It is just nicer to communicate with someone from the same culture, and it is easier to trust that guy.
Well, you could still arbitrage expenses. In SF a highly paid developer is paying $4-5K a month on rent and another $1-2K on food - the same developer living in India would probably be paying 1/10th of that sum for the same expenses. Plus taxes and such. I'm not sure what the delta really comes out to though.
One of the reasons I went with a 99% remote job. I'm an hour from the office. There's nothing I can't do from home a vast majority of the time, but the proximity to the office means that when there is value in me showing up, I can, on very short notice. They definitely paid me more for that ability, even though they were fine with me only planning on coming in maybe once a quarter. And I like that I'll still be getting some face time.
Relatedly, after my previous job tried to force everyone back in the office a majority of the time, and I gave them my notice after accepting an offer a week later, my former boss was suddenly very willing to discuss working from home 3 days a week if it meant I stayed. They can do it, they know remote work has been fine for a year+, they just don't want to. If you're an employer, make your peace with a hybrid or remote environment and make the accommodations clear now, not after all your people have started interviewing places that will. No matter what you're paying your tech folks, someone else will pay them more right now, and then it'll be too late.
But that's always been true. And companies are going to do that if they can, regardless if we WfH or WfW. More than a few of us have seen the mass firings, and training some barely-comprehensible foreign workers, whom wreck the place, and then the company calls and begs us to come back.
That's literally the same argument about the "Fight for $15" - the argument is 'yer gonna get automated'. That's going to happen no matter what.
> It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people
Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan?
Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap?
It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021.
I hesitate to earmark this as competence, but what I see again and again is that my colleagues in Asia (India, China, Russia on one occasion) have a much higher tolerance for pain than the majority of their North American and Western European contemporaries.
This is not a good thing. The dominant form of 'bullshit' in code is pointlessly self-inflicted pain, and so people who don't hit the 'enough is enough' point are wallowing in bullshit code most of the time, and writing more bullshit the rest of the time. We politely call this 'accidental complexity' to water it down and not point fingers. It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate, or thoughtless.
Anyone who hits the 'enough' point now starts to consider high threshold people as mess-makers. As being less than 1x employees (worst case, -x employees). Doing that kind of janitorial work for long is a quick road to burnout. It's taking and challenging to explain to people that 'okay' is not universal and just because you think something is 'okay' doesn't mean anyone else does and as you work on a team you need to adjust your levels to match expectations.
I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of effort involved in getting something done by someone locally to someone remote.
Time zone is the first hurdle. Although, in my opinion, this can still be overcome in a relative short period of time.
The second hurdle is familiarity with work culture and style. For a person who's worked already in your office, knows the system, knows all the procedures, knows the nooks an crannies of how all the softwares behave, who to call in case of issues, how to resolve them. All these aspects add to a significant amount of non-quantifiable knowledge which lots of organizations don't consider while outsourcing initially.
The third is process. Most organizations have their processes worked out over time. And this is rarely, if ever, documented. Even for people coming to office, there's a certain amount of time till they get familiar with this.
However, the biggest challenge is communication. This means everything - grammar, vocabulary, diction, accent, familiarity with jargon, parts of speech, colloquialisms, everything. To make a requirement understood itself is a challenge. Asking questions about that requirement when faced with a roadblock, is again a bottleneck.
As an Indian, who's worked in most of the English speaking countries, and now working from India, I can just humbly say this - never outsource to cut costs. This will bite you hard in the short run. Only if you have processes set, softwares used correctly, procedures documented, should you look into outsourcing. And that too it should be for reasons other than purely financial. As an example, having remote workers across time zones helps in maintaining support for your global customers better. Similarly, time zone differences can be used to your advantage. Finally, interacting with different cultures can only improve your organization's awareness, maturity, communication and global reach.
Since my dad ran a software company, I've been hearing these worries about jobs moving to India etc... for most of my life. I worried about it 20 years ago, worried about it 15 years ago, and I don't worry about it anymore. As other commenters have said, not only has the pay gap for skilled engineers diminished significantly over that time, but there are other significant barriers to offshoring.
> 4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.
I don't think this is fair characterisation. If you have kids, working from home can be quite stressful.
> And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Generally almost no one gives a shit if you work from home or not. The only one caring about that is your employer, and you should negotiate with your employer about that. No need to complain about everyone and everything if you can't find an employer willing to let you work remote.
We had higher billable hours during the summer lockdown than ever, though they still came up with the excuse for 2% raises; “well the economy is not good”.
I'm trying and failing to think of any important part of "company culture" that only works for people in the same room. Culture is made of shared values (codified in actions, not PowerPoints), communication norms, peer reactions, shared history, inside jokes...all of that stuff can work remotely. If your company has more than one office it already has to work remotely.
In this instance, corporate culture is a stand in for 'what the boss wants the boss gets'. I can't think of a company culture that is healthy and also different from what it appears everyone wants: flexibility in their work location and schedule. Who are these worker-bees that prefer to waste 2 hours of their day in stressful transit to get to a stressful environment that have no negative health consequences from the stress?
If your company has more than one office, they each have their own culture, which hews more or less closely to the cultural commonalities between offices.
Shared values, communication norms, peer reactions, shared history, and inside jokes can exist when people aren't in the same room, but that culture tends to be a lot thinner. It would be more fruitful to discuss whether that's a good or bad thing—the bare existence of culture isn't what anyone is talking about here.
I don't think the managers the article describes are making the distinction you're making. They're concerned about the loss/thinness of culture, not only company-wide but also at the individual office level. It's also reasonable to think that thin office cultures provide a poor foundation for a thick company culture.
I miss doing jigsaw puzzles with my coworkers. Online games don't feel the same. Culture things are mostly tiny and each seem like no big deal, but collectively, I do think it's really hard to replicate remotely.
I'm firmly in camp "office time sounds wonderful" because I live alone, and as it turns out, not having any humans nearby is downright depressing. I'm also somewhat introverted (weird, right?) and while I was living with other people, I desired quite the opposite; staying at home was much less distracting than being in the chaos of a shared space most days.
So which do I prefer? Ehh, it depends. I'm not planning to live alone forever, it's just where I'm at right now. I'd imagine others are in a similar boat; we're different, and not necessarily constant either. So, as much as I encourage opening the offices back up and will take part in that space if given the chance, I wouldn't force that on anyone. I think the responsible thing to do is to measure performance rather than seat-in-chair, and so long as everyone's pulling their weight, let each employee make their own informed decision. It's their health on the line, after all, and healthy employees do better work.
Sounds like... you want some office time and probably some "non-office" work time, and that you'd want that to be at least partially under your control (both now and long term). And you probably recognize the benefits in having people have a (large) degree of autonomy in how they do their work. There are some things which are better done face to face, in person, and some things where... working solo (in surroundings of your choice) can allow one to be more productive.
IMO, there's no one "right" answer on this issue beyond "more autonomy", and I suspect we'll see more contractors/freelancers in Coworking spaces and more WFH arrangements to accommodate that, even if it's not touted publicly much.
It's somehow fine to have a group of people you've never met work in India, and they can get their work done OK, but you can't do the same thing from 15 miles away from your main office? Just insane.
While I think a hybrid situation is perfectly fine, there are also a bunch of solutions to this that don't require a permanent office. For example, co-working can facilitate some of the desired interaction while at the same time putting the power in your hands.
I'm an introvert and WFH all the time has made me borderline crazy, but it is sure nice not to have to drive to an office 30-minutes away when most days I could just starting working.
The pros and cons of remote work have posted many times here. Just like most things, it is going to come down to market forces determining whether remote work will stick.
If employers discover that they can pay less (in real estate and salary!) if they offer remote work as an option, while keeping the efficiency of an office worker, then the companies that do this will have a competitive edge. If companies discover that having employees in the office is a competitive advantage, then I don't care how harshly HN lambasts office work, it will make a comeback.
I expect the result will be somewhere in the middle. Certainly different jobs and industries are going to be affected differently. As HN is mostly computer jockeys, I have no doubt that remote work will be more common to the people here.
Is it possible that this pushback against working from home might (at least in part) be motivated by a desire of keeping real-estate prices up? After all, if offices aren't needed anymore, prices would probably plummet, and real estate is a very popular asset among a certain group of people.
And housing prices as well, if people weren't tied to geography by a commute they can work from wherever they like and a lot of them would move somewhere a lot cheaper.
I really believe that if the push to return to the office continues, we're going to see articles crying as to how "entitled workers" are leaving companies who push for limiting/ending remote work.
As an anecdote, I had a conference call with coworkers from another company who said that there were lots of people from their company that were leaving because the company had reneged on their promise to continue full time remote work.
Here’s the thing, while remote work this year has been a net positive in productivity for many tech companies, that wasn’t necessarily the case for all companies, mainly because of their inability to measure it. Many companies were more concerned about trying to keep a iron grip on employees than enabling them to be successful as remote workers.
There are some naive executives who believe having an office is a big part of what helps them operate successfully. These executives are just entrenched in the old ways. They can’t fathom a world where their employees can work efficiently in a remote environment because they build all their management based on the idea of personal face to face interactions.
There’s another group of executives that’s even worse. Those who simply operate from mistrust. They need to have their employees in the office because otherwise they can’t validate and measure their employees output (although this is just as hard to measure in person). They need to see the employee physically present because for them employees salaries can only be justified when they add working hours, not based on the merits of their output.
But a reality check is here for all of them. One positive outcome from Covid is that it’s fully rebalancing the power between employer and employee. Definitely eager to see how this plays out.
If enough people hold firm this is a chance to change the corporate office paradigm for good. There are a lot of good reasons to WFH and a lot of bad reasons managers have for not allowing it. I programmed from home for 12 years, then worked in corporate offices for 5 years. I did my best work at home. I was really happy with my work output and quality of work I produced. Then working in offices I could never adjust and both myself and my employers were disappointed in my output. It's due to a lot of small things, like I sometimes get burned out thinking about a problem and need to take a quick nap to refresh. This was never possible in an office. It was better for my wife too. If she wanted to run out while the kids were napping, I was there for them while I worked. It was just so nice compared to the hell of being stuck in some office park with people I didn't know that well and didn't even like that much.
I wish it were only leaders who are desperate to get back to the office, but it seems like the other force pushing for return to office time is the cohort of people where work IS their social circle. I can't relate to that crowd - even when I was young and single, my social circle was largely outside work and in grad school I tended to socialize outside my department.
This social argument I sympathize with - nobody likes to be lonely. But please - don't force everyone to go back to one model of working simply to support a subset of people who've chosen to make their life revolve around their employment.
As a software engineer, I will never, ever work from an office again. There are zero reasons to.
And this isn't even related to Covid, I've been working remotely for 6 years.
Everything I do is carefully tracked. Every line of code is logged and timestamped. All my assigned tasks are viewable by anyone, with every associated line of code one click away. When I am connected to the VPN to access work resources, everything is carefully logged.
If we need to do a meeting, we use Microsoft Teams. You can chat with me whenever you want, and can schedule a video call whenever you need to.
At least with my job, a senior software engineer, there is zero need for an office.
I realize not everyone is in my position, and there are plenty of jobs that do require you to go into a physical office space. This career is not one of them.
The observation that many office jobs are meaningless must have been made many times before the pandemic, and I/we can't be the only ones to have made it.
Maybe the purpose of many workplaces, from the perspective of some managers and workers, is not only related to the output of the company. I have come to the belief that part of the purpose of "work" for some people is "live role playing" careers, and thus they want to fill the roles for the other co-players.
From this perspective, it's not surprising that people want to return to the office.
Yeah well, I think it depends of your workplace. I would never want to trade back my quiet home office with a view and my high end gear for my company's fully crowded and super loud openspace and the low cost gear waiting for me at my desk. I don't want to waste my time commuting anymore as it doesnt make any sense. But I admit that I miss eating lunch with some of my coworkers or taking a cofee break with them.
I wonder if returning to a more human/intimate offices size (vs open spaces) would not solve a big part of the frustrations about productivity. (Only because I remember my first offices +20 years ago).
Offering remote work is a competitive advantage. You get access to a larger pool of talent. The smart companies realise this. If you are a manager and you can’t figure out how to manage people remotely, then you are an incompetent manager.
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[ 168 ms ] story [ 1550 ms ] threadIt gets easier all the time, the pay gets better, and I actually have a much better setup at home then I've ever had in an office (Granted, I've had 20 years to set it up...)
I'm not concerned about 'losing out' in any capacity going forward, especially now when its become so common.
After the pandemic there was an even larger number of companies that are at the very least remote friendly. Most < 1000 employee tech companies I know are never planning on returning to an office full time. I also believe a fairly large number of the major tech companies are also planning to be fully remote friendly going into the future.
Pre-pandemic getting a fully remote job didn't take too much work find, and now nearly all companies I've talked to in the last few months are willing to support remote roles.
There are _enough_ employers that will allow fully remote employees that it's not hard to find jobs, and it's only gotten easier in the time I've been doing it.
Why?
A company hires an employee because they think they can make more profit than that employee costs them.
My expenses have nothing to do with the equation except when the company wants to be cheap and figures out they can up their profit margin per employee by lowering salaries due to low competition for employees.
If you require $250/hr but a smart person in say Brasil will do the same work, to the same standards, for $100/hr, what is the rationale for the company to keep paying you? You might complain that the Brasilian is leaving money on the table but that's not in your control.
He's not though. He's undercutting someone else to get the business. Race to the bottom is one of the most fun features of capitalism!
Do you mean pay you more because the office no longer needs to provide space and power for you, but you provide it for yourself? ... and because you can be called 'in' faster without the 45 minute commute?
:P
If workers are also now expected to provision their own work space (space, desk, chairs, monitors, etc.), then the compensation model around those jobs also needs to be adjusted to account for that.
the other question is should employers pay a share of your property tax contribute to a sinking fund for repairs
If someone wants to live in a dense urban core and a company is 100% remote, that may not be a good deal.
I've been working from home for 5 years. Standing desk, Aeron chair, dual ultra wide monitors, it goes on and on.
It all adds up to about 1% of my compensation over those years.
I spend whatever it takes to have a great working environment, if I see something that will incrementally improve the 8 hours a day I spend working I immediately buy it. As far as my income goes it amounts to a rounding error.
>> there's a lot of people, including almost all the tech-oriented professionals under 30 that I know
That's called selection bias.
You have chosen to live in a location with expensive real estate. Good for you. Other people made different choices. I have rooms in my house I haven't been in for months.
The median income for mechanical engineers in the US is around $88k, with many (especially early-career) people making meaningfully less than that. I'm glad your income is high enough that thousands of dollars in equipment, and far more importantly, extra space in your living quarters, is a blip. I really am. But statistically, your situation is not representational of the hundreds of thousands of other workers.
Some of the stuff companies do truly baffles me. It's only the beginning of June, you can't really assume your whole team is fully vaccinated. Why would you bring everyone in for lunch and then send them home? All downside and near-zero upside. It'd be another matter if it was a full day event where you did some meetings or seminars in addition to the meal, but are you really going to make people commute in, eat, and go home?
(edit: obviously, I’m assuming the article is talking about a company in the US, since the article is about the US.)
Never change, HN.
Cases are at all-time lows in the most vaccinated locations, and are dropping rapidly nationwide.
Herd immunity is when Rt = 1, or 1 - 1/R0
It is the point when infections begin to decline due to acquired immunity.
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/set-c/set-c...
The issue is with the anti-vaxxer types (including people who won't get vaccinated for religious reasons) who seem to be more likely to attend an event like this without caring about their (or others') vaccination status.
I do believe it is true that everyone in the US who both wants and is able to medically tolerate a vaccine should have been able to get at least their first dose by now.
Regarding herd immunity, I'm honestly not expecting that to ever happen in the US. There are too many people who are skeptical of these vaccines, some for the regular disappointing anti-vax reasons, others who do have serious concerns and/or have been swayed by misinformation. The fact that states and municipalities are resorting to crazy incentives like cash lotteries and even stuff like trucks and guns for people to get vaccinated really illustrates how bad it is.
It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.
Wow, agreed, I would not have guessed that high a percentage.
> It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.
Right, and I explicitly said that I would hope people with medical conditions would decline these kinds of in-person meetings if they weren't comfortable with them just yet.
Seattle area has had access since mid-April, and I drove 90 minutes to get that shot as early as I could. I hit full vaccination status on Monday of this week, so no outdoor lunches for me last week. But math is hard, amirite?
You know, I don't often use the phrase "Check your privilege", but this is one case where you need to Check. Your. Privilege.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.newsobserver.com/news/coron...
Depending on what area they're in and local policies, undocumented immigrants may have difficulty getting the vaccine.
Those are just a few examples of situations that, due to your unexamined privilege, you're apparently incapable of imagining.
We've only just reached the 50% mark for vaccinated people. Certainly some percent of those don't want the vaccine, but included in the remainder are people who have difficulty getting time off work, difficulty with transportation, etc.
Similar issues apply for voting. If these factors weren't important, Republicans wouldn't spend so much effort trying to disenfranchise voters by exploiting these factors to make it more difficult for people to vote.
The idea that pointing these issues out is "posturing" is either a sad commentary on your obliviousness, or indicates that you're perfectly aware of the status quo and want it to stay that way. Neither is a good reflection on you.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...
>If you’ve been fully vaccinated:
>If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
I don't know what this caveat right after that is about though.
>However, if you live or work in a correctional or detention facility or a homeless shelter and are around someone who has COVID-19, you should still get tested, even if you don’t have symptoms.
Guidance for opening up and removing mask mandates under a government led by people publicly for masks and for extra caution for opening back up is politically influenced?
Sounds like some terribly ineffective political influence.
As a person who can only handle so much social interaction, it is baffling, but to others, it is baffling to stay home all the time.
In a remote-first model people could stay located in the areas that suit them best socially. They could live in the hometowns they grew up in, or by their families, or in their college towns. Concentrated industries like tech are particularly bad, because there are so few metro options, compared to the geographic flexibility of doctors or accountants. Office-first in tech is a siren song of loneliness. First it draws us far away from our loved ones, which leaves us with no other option for meaningful human connection outside the workplace.
[1]https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/We-seem-to-be-missing-0-...
As an adult, you have precious few opportunities to make lasting, deep friendships. I consider myself an outgoing person with lots of shallow friendships, but my best, deepest friends are still the ones from High School, College, and the surrounding activities -- places I was, more or less, forced to be.
Being forced to be somewhere, be it the office, your college dorm, or the US West coast, gives you a sense of shared experience. Is it ideal? Maybe not, but a lot of people are, for better or worse, forced into experiences that (can) lead to deep and lasting friendships.
Candidly, I actually miss the office, even with all its warts. It builds a shared experience that is difficult to replicate digitally. I can see it in the faces of new hires since WFH started - despite best attempts at inclusion, they're still a little bit on the outside looking in.
Hey brother! I think slavery was a good idea too. The South will rise again!
Seriously, that looks like some major Stockholm syndrome you have going there.
Let's say you didn't have to go into the office every day. That gives you more time to socialize in your community. You can volunteer, take classes, go to a bar or club, whatever.
If you want some sort of "hair shirt" experience, you can choose that. I once volunteered at a long term care facility to teach the residents about computers, computer programming, etc. It was fascinating because in doing that, you find people with those inclinations who may not have had the opportunity during their working lives to learn about such things.
If you need to "be forced" to do things, I guess you do you. But that's something you really shouldn't be projecting onto other people.
Pay close attention to how you feel during all of this, extroverts, and remember it. You probably make introverts feel like that every day with your pushy social behaviour.
In a sense, an outdoor lunch event is potentially much worse than a seminar or meeting since at least during a seminar/meeting people don't have an excuse for taking off their masks and they can socially distance more easily vs sitting at a table together.
You could go all isolation and lockdown mode for over a year. Either due to fear, or due to lack of control. However, at some point the costs outweigh those risks.
I've heard a lot about this claim "no lost productivity". However that is for the employer to be evaluated, not for the employees. The complaining employees lose credibility when they make claims like that in complex fields, because productivity is very complex metric to be measured in many jobs.
Why have your employees work remotely in a city 100 miles from their original office at 80-90% of the cost when you can have them be 1000 miles from the office at 30-40% of the cost.
If you find employees in Central and South America they would also be in the same timezone.
A lot of communications type work suffered from outsourcing due to language barriers and poor connectivity and poorer skillset from workers in other areas of the world (or even the US). That may not always continue to be the case.
I'm guessing the top 10% or 20% of workers do not need to be worried since they can provide so much value that outsourcing is not worth it. But if you're in the bottom 4 quintiles, I would be wary.
Sure they are. The expertise and factories to build a lot of components are no longer in the US, which has a ton of knock-on effects in the economy - job loss, decline, etc.
That's a hidden cost that offsets whatever cash savings were experienced on the front end.
Essentially for short term gain for some, entire companies were destroyed.
So there were heavy costs on the backend.
It shouldn't matter who I am, but I say this as someone who immigrated into North America after having worked several years in South America. There are real barriers to collaboration that prevent outsourcing from being a silver bullet. They don't make collaboration necessarily impossible or difficult, but these barriers need to be taken into account.
Of course it was less about cost and more about the ability to quickly provide additional resources, and it was done with the upmost care to make it still feel like one team, but it doesn't have to be a nightmare.
This is what's interesting about the 'remote work doesn't work' group. My first bigCo programming job in the late 90s was at a satellite office with another single developer. We built a lot of software with developers from other satellite offices using only email and phone calls. /shrug
But if they are discrete teams, working on discrete services, then the issues tend to be around management, collaboration & communication patterns (both human and technical). Those are the areas which many companies can't handle or don't have correct to enable useful outsourcing.
I've seen this with my current employer. Their message has been that going forward at some point, "Working remotely is not an option."
There's really no reason I can't work from home. I've been doing it since March 2020. I don't have any customer-facing responsibilities; I administer servers and write code. The only thing that requires my physical presence is the occasional need to install or replace hardware.
It was one thing to not support remote work in 2019 when it was an unknown. In 2021, we've proven it can work; workers know it, and employers should know it. There's no un-ringing that bell.
I'm older, and have no desire to return to the startup lifestyle again but there's no doubt I can find remote work. As I see it, the choice is mine, and taking a mini-retirement and looking for new opportunities if my employer wants to be inflexible is not exacly unappealing.
Since the pandemic kicked off, this has changed. Despite the fact that there are many employers out there trying to force everybody back into the office, there is also a large pool of companies that have realised the wheels didn't fall off during the pandemic.
I've been speaking to a lot of current and ex-colleagues in the tech industry. Both on the management and on the employee side. Even the managers are increasing looking at where they're going to work from long term. Realising that they really can move to cheaper cities (in Europe), possibly with better weather, and keep working just the same.
I think there will be a bit of tension this year, but I can't see it just going back to the way it was previously. So many of the previous objections are just obviously false now. In a lot of cases I've seen teams become more productive (not to mention happier), because they're not sitting in an office.
I've seen the faces of most of their kids and pets now, and it turns out that's pretty cool as well.
That BBC host was a real trendsetter :D
The one argument, #3, about corporate culture is in favor of not WFH. They are saying that research shows corporate culture is important, but the methods used to build corporate culture when people are WFH are failing badly. Which indicates that if corporate culture is indeed important, then the only way to really build it without pointless BS is by having people working together in a physical location.
This is possible with remote work, but much harder. In my experience, remote workers are generally rather detached from their colleagues and projects. YMMV, but I vastly prefer working from office.
In all my other jobs, including the startups that have grown into more traditional businesses, I have been pretty much a heads-down worker. I come in, do my work, and go home. There's not really much bonding or common culture going on that remote/on-site would really change anything.
Maybe it is possible for an office to be like this, but I would suspect that it is an exceptional case.
Mostly offices are where people go to do sufficient work to get paid, and the only real goal coworkers have in common there is a desire to receive paycheques and make sure the company doesn't go under so they can continue receiving paycheques.
If people didn't have to make money they absolutely would not spend their days pushing paperwork around and sending emails as part of some shared collective goal.
It is clear that many offices are dull hives that suck the life out of their occupants. But why be in such office? Why should someone have a job just to get a paycheck, getting miserable in return? There are always options.
To look at it from a different side, office is a tool, which, used correctly, can give a tremendous boost to productivity. But it is not a given. It has natural advantage - like physical proximity between people and disadvantages - the need to commute being one of them.
> Why should someone have a job just to get a paycheck
Because we need some amount of money to survive in our society and we need lots of it to thrive in our society.
> There are always options.
Not really. There are always options if you have highly in demand skills with no external responsibilities that prevent you from relocating to better work or risking a job change.
Most average office workers cannot risk a job change (because job changes ARE risky) due to family or other responsibilities. They also don't possess terribly in-demand skills.
> office is a tool, which, used correctly, can give a tremendous boost to productivity
This is employer talk. It's unclear to me why a worker should care about their productivity more than their paycheque, or their comfort, or their time spent commuting.
> It has natural advantage - like physical proximity between people
This has just as much potential to hurt productivity because the #1 timewaster at offices is other people.
Such workers shouldn't be calling BS on their leaders on return to offices, they should keep their heads down and do as they told.
Regarding your points about needing money, the audience here is blessed to be in such high demand, that they can freely choose projects and leadership they like. We have just one life, why earn money doing something that you don't love?
So people shouldn't have any say just because they have lesser in-demand skills?
Note that I didn't say these people were useless, they fulfill some role, just one that could easily be done by many others.
They might be extremely loyal, productive people who just want to continue working from home for whatever reason but because their skills are less in-demand, they should shut up and do as they're told?
Wow dude.
Actually, yes, that's how it works. If you are valuable and hard to replace, management has to account your desires and listen to your feedback, allowing work from home, 3 month vacations, and even for you 'calling out their BS', if you are very valuable. Because your skills are the leverage you have over management.
If you can be replaced easily without much cost, then you don't have leverage, and you are in no position to oppose your bosses. More so, if you are economically dependent on this job and you know that you wouldn't be able to find a new job easily, the situation is even worse because your bosses have very big leverage over you. If management says, 'working from the office', such workers can only say 'sir yes sir!', and do as they are told.
That's how it works in real life, and it is natural, so wow dude yourself.
However, every non-mentally impaired person is gifted with a capability to learn and acquire new skills, greatly increasing own worth at a workplace and improving job prospects.
I think there's a lot of different things going on here: 1. Control freaks are losing their minds in the Pandemic and they want some of the control back. 2. Extroverts are losing it and want things to be social again. 3. People who have bullshit jobs and absolutely don't add any value except look busy on "make work" are having a hard time justify their need in the company. 4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.
And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace.
At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.
You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market for remote work. I think things were moving in that direction but slowly (as things tend to do) - COVID just accelerated the trend.
Adjusted for inflation it does look like it was down a bit during last year, but Q1 there seems to be a rise again. What's interesting is that it looks like the Dublin prices have seen a wild 10 years of volatility.
If I were running a large company I would create many small satellite offices around the metro area that employees could sign up to work from. Might even be worth purchasing a few large RVs and renting space and power hookups in good locations while figuring out employee preferences.
Granted: I am a young, single person working in design/product and my job requires a ton of collaboration. I don't really consider myself an extrovert FWIW
Did it, though? GDP has just reached pre-pandemic levels.
Worker productivity is not measured in GDP. It is a component of it, but asset and resource prices also factor into the equation. Nobody is going to suggest taxi drivers can go fully remote and work from home, yet that still feeds into GDP.
You could argue that there still has to be a US lawyer in the loop, but that's still true of software projects as well, that there is one Sr. software person overseeing the outsourced team.
If you want a laugh about why not to be a lawyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs-UEqJ85KE
Also remote workers are easier to automate because employers know precisely what they are doing.
High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work.
The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the US.
You are also wildly underestimating some of the tech markets. I know plenty of people that are heading back to China because they are being offered amazing positions over there.
This isn't true. Yeah statistically maybe. In practice if you are willing to endure some hassle you can save a lot of money by using offshore freelancerds/contractors. However it requires lots of patience and also depends on the field.
Most people hire locals because they want to feel comfortable. It is just nicer to communicate with someone from the same culture, and it is easier to trust that guy.
Relatedly, after my previous job tried to force everyone back in the office a majority of the time, and I gave them my notice after accepting an offer a week later, my former boss was suddenly very willing to discuss working from home 3 days a week if it meant I stayed. They can do it, they know remote work has been fine for a year+, they just don't want to. If you're an employer, make your peace with a hybrid or remote environment and make the accommodations clear now, not after all your people have started interviewing places that will. No matter what you're paying your tech folks, someone else will pay them more right now, and then it'll be too late.
That's literally the same argument about the "Fight for $15" - the argument is 'yer gonna get automated'. That's going to happen no matter what.
Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan?
Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap?
It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021.
[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732
This is not a good thing. The dominant form of 'bullshit' in code is pointlessly self-inflicted pain, and so people who don't hit the 'enough is enough' point are wallowing in bullshit code most of the time, and writing more bullshit the rest of the time. We politely call this 'accidental complexity' to water it down and not point fingers. It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate, or thoughtless.
Anyone who hits the 'enough' point now starts to consider high threshold people as mess-makers. As being less than 1x employees (worst case, -x employees). Doing that kind of janitorial work for long is a quick road to burnout. It's taking and challenging to explain to people that 'okay' is not universal and just because you think something is 'okay' doesn't mean anyone else does and as you work on a team you need to adjust your levels to match expectations.
Time zone is the first hurdle. Although, in my opinion, this can still be overcome in a relative short period of time.
The second hurdle is familiarity with work culture and style. For a person who's worked already in your office, knows the system, knows all the procedures, knows the nooks an crannies of how all the softwares behave, who to call in case of issues, how to resolve them. All these aspects add to a significant amount of non-quantifiable knowledge which lots of organizations don't consider while outsourcing initially.
The third is process. Most organizations have their processes worked out over time. And this is rarely, if ever, documented. Even for people coming to office, there's a certain amount of time till they get familiar with this.
However, the biggest challenge is communication. This means everything - grammar, vocabulary, diction, accent, familiarity with jargon, parts of speech, colloquialisms, everything. To make a requirement understood itself is a challenge. Asking questions about that requirement when faced with a roadblock, is again a bottleneck.
As an Indian, who's worked in most of the English speaking countries, and now working from India, I can just humbly say this - never outsource to cut costs. This will bite you hard in the short run. Only if you have processes set, softwares used correctly, procedures documented, should you look into outsourcing. And that too it should be for reasons other than purely financial. As an example, having remote workers across time zones helps in maintaining support for your global customers better. Similarly, time zone differences can be used to your advantage. Finally, interacting with different cultures can only improve your organization's awareness, maturity, communication and global reach.
I don't think this is fair characterisation. If you have kids, working from home can be quite stressful.
> And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Generally almost no one gives a shit if you work from home or not. The only one caring about that is your employer, and you should negotiate with your employer about that. No need to complain about everyone and everything if you can't find an employer willing to let you work remote.
Those initial waves of offshoring were nothing compared with what COVID did. Wait until this affects labor prices.
Shared values, communication norms, peer reactions, shared history, and inside jokes can exist when people aren't in the same room, but that culture tends to be a lot thinner. It would be more fruitful to discuss whether that's a good or bad thing—the bare existence of culture isn't what anyone is talking about here.
So which do I prefer? Ehh, it depends. I'm not planning to live alone forever, it's just where I'm at right now. I'd imagine others are in a similar boat; we're different, and not necessarily constant either. So, as much as I encourage opening the offices back up and will take part in that space if given the chance, I wouldn't force that on anyone. I think the responsible thing to do is to measure performance rather than seat-in-chair, and so long as everyone's pulling their weight, let each employee make their own informed decision. It's their health on the line, after all, and healthy employees do better work.
IMO, there's no one "right" answer on this issue beyond "more autonomy", and I suspect we'll see more contractors/freelancers in Coworking spaces and more WFH arrangements to accommodate that, even if it's not touted publicly much.
It's somehow fine to have a group of people you've never met work in India, and they can get their work done OK, but you can't do the same thing from 15 miles away from your main office? Just insane.
If employers discover that they can pay less (in real estate and salary!) if they offer remote work as an option, while keeping the efficiency of an office worker, then the companies that do this will have a competitive edge. If companies discover that having employees in the office is a competitive advantage, then I don't care how harshly HN lambasts office work, it will make a comeback.
I expect the result will be somewhere in the middle. Certainly different jobs and industries are going to be affected differently. As HN is mostly computer jockeys, I have no doubt that remote work will be more common to the people here.
As an anecdote, I had a conference call with coworkers from another company who said that there were lots of people from their company that were leaving because the company had reneged on their promise to continue full time remote work.
There are some naive executives who believe having an office is a big part of what helps them operate successfully. These executives are just entrenched in the old ways. They can’t fathom a world where their employees can work efficiently in a remote environment because they build all their management based on the idea of personal face to face interactions.
There’s another group of executives that’s even worse. Those who simply operate from mistrust. They need to have their employees in the office because otherwise they can’t validate and measure their employees output (although this is just as hard to measure in person). They need to see the employee physically present because for them employees salaries can only be justified when they add working hours, not based on the merits of their output.
But a reality check is here for all of them. One positive outcome from Covid is that it’s fully rebalancing the power between employer and employee. Definitely eager to see how this plays out.
This social argument I sympathize with - nobody likes to be lonely. But please - don't force everyone to go back to one model of working simply to support a subset of people who've chosen to make their life revolve around their employment.
Is there anyone who doesn't think "company culture" is bullshit?
There shouldn't be, but if life has taught me anything, it's that there's always an audience for whatever bullshit someone is selling.
Politics in the US over the past few years provides proof of this that's so far past reasonable doubt it's not funny.
And this isn't even related to Covid, I've been working remotely for 6 years.
Everything I do is carefully tracked. Every line of code is logged and timestamped. All my assigned tasks are viewable by anyone, with every associated line of code one click away. When I am connected to the VPN to access work resources, everything is carefully logged.
If we need to do a meeting, we use Microsoft Teams. You can chat with me whenever you want, and can schedule a video call whenever you need to.
At least with my job, a senior software engineer, there is zero need for an office.
I realize not everyone is in my position, and there are plenty of jobs that do require you to go into a physical office space. This career is not one of them.
Maybe the purpose of many workplaces, from the perspective of some managers and workers, is not only related to the output of the company. I have come to the belief that part of the purpose of "work" for some people is "live role playing" careers, and thus they want to fill the roles for the other co-players.
From this perspective, it's not surprising that people want to return to the office.