Did you read the article? Even if you didn't - "Big tech" generally refers to... the big tech companies... several of which are mentioned by name in the article..and have trillion+ valuations...
I did hardware from home during the lockdown, as part of an R&D group. It was actually quite pleasant. Granted this doesn't work for everybody, but my family had space. My colleagues and I used it as a chance to come up to speed on using things like quick turn machine shops etc., and to re-think how we do some of our prototyping. And we were already collaborating across multiple physical locations.
Nope. I'm in a hardware-dependent job. I've been WFH at both this job and the previous one.
I just run into the office occasionally if there's a board re-spin.
better to have private offices since that will maintain the social distancing. with open plan offices, if someone gets something, the spread will be faster
Any given company has the right to make their employees work in an office, but they better be prepared for the consequences of that decision. They are either going to lose out on talent or they are going to lose out on the cost of said talent (higher salaries/better benefits to convince someone to unnecessarily sit in an office). It’s just a silly hill to die on for so many of these companies.
Also the cost of wasting interviewing resources on people who, knowing the job is on-site, will interview solely for practice with zero intention of joining.
Would that not work the other way around too? People interviewing remote-only companies for practice when they have no intention to join. IMO, that's a lot easier too, since you can get a lot of practice time in without having to commute to places.
This is a very under-discussed set of people; I left a job mid-2021 to work in an office (and threw away a promotion), and it's been the best decision ever. I even gave up some freedom to use the tools I enjoy most, because the new position had meaningful problems for me to solve.
I completely agree. This is just magical thinking by corporate executives and "thought leaders" who all think they have the power to dictate these things. They don't. The horse left the barn in 2020.
And they’ll be in a terrible position if/when the next Covid variant forces everyone home again. Having to live close enough to commute to work but still WFH full time is the worst of both worlds.
Meh. Of course they will double down on huge real estate deals they can't bail out of because they're likely long-term.
But the companies will try to make it sound literally every other way except the truth. They have to save face after all, plus "admitting defeat" has real consequences on your stock price.
So business as usual really.
I'll be eating a lot of popcorn in the next few years. I can bet many people will leave their jobs if the company enforces return to office. The fallout will be long and interesting to watch.
Yes, and? The world is big; the huge corps can suffer by reduced hiring pool -- or reduced quality in their newer hiring pool -- and the world, surprisingly, will not end.
The strong talent will move someplace else. You can dangle big pay checks and perks only for so long.
> double down on huge real estate deals they can't bail out of
I wouldn't assume that's a big factor. If you own office space you don't need, you can lease it out. Or if you don't own but lease it, then you can often sublease it out.
Depending on market conditions (whether remote working is a trend or a permanent change), the demand may not be that high, so it's unclear how much money you'll get. But whatever it is, it's more money than not leasing it out.
Sure, I'm kind of assuming they don't do that because it might be a loss of prestige (imagine Google admitting they have to lease part of their offices). I could be wrong there, admittedly.
I save money and time not having to commute, not having to buy lunch to be social, and best of all I get to spend more time with my growing kids (priceless).
I prefer working in an office, and I dislike working with people remotely. I'm just glad that things are going back to normal, and that there are also many people at my job who also prefer to show up in office even though they have the option to work from home.
Sam Jones, a co-founder of a nonfungible token start-up, Honey Haus, said his company had been renting a four-person space within WeWork for $1,850 a month since October.
“I am just way less productive at home,” Mr. Jones said. “People are definitely, I think, realizing that physical space just has something special to it.”
We have articles like this one with quotes like the one above that run counter to other research and discussion in this area like this article from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/work-from-... which offers up stats that ~33% of people want to be fully remote and another 20% want to be home more than 3 days a week.
Why do people have to ruin this for the rest of us. No, I don't want to go back to the office (I don't have to; my team is now fully remote forever) and I see it as a huge perk and a MASSIVE boost to our productivity to be at home.
The fact that you assign innovation purely to science/engineering is why many startups fail. You don't seem to recognize that innovation happens across all segments of the business. Plenty of ingenious products never reach critical mass because engineering founders dismiss all other aspects of business building. Facebook's toe-hold that helped them beat MySpace and Friendster wasn't an act of innovative engineering as much as it was their go-to-market plan starting in Universities.
Engineering will remain flexible because of all the virtue signaling big tech is doing in order to retain their talent. It's almost comical that they are struggling to bring people back to the office after being the biggest promotor of work-remote while the rest of the service-economy had to show up every day to their Walmart jobs...
This is a pretty odd comment given that I EXPLICITLY mention science, engineering, and innovation as three separate categories.
Look at how I used the slashes in the earlier part of that science ("sales/marketing"). Do you think I think that sales and marketing are the same thing? If not, why would you think that I think engineering = innovation? It's the exact same grammatical structure.
What I did say is that an NFT startup probably isn't doing anything innovative, and also is probably doing mostly sales and marketing, and that this combination of factors means that their in-person stance makes sense. I stand by that. My mental image of an NFT startup is that it's a boiler room of the sort that pump-and-dumped penny stocks in the 90s. That type of work benefits from rapid feedback loops among staff. The boiler room structure makes sense for a business trying to generate revenue from the NFT ecosystem.
The rest of your post is an odd rant that has almost nothing to do with how I think about businesses or the world. It's not even a strawman... just kind of a completely off topic rant from my perspective.
I have no idea what stereotype you're projecting onto me, but I'm not even an engineer.
I think the implication is that in a hybridized company the people who are there in-person will have a leg up on promotions over people who are fully-remote.
I think this is pretty obviously true - even though I don't endorse the state of affairs.
This is already true - even pre-pandemic those in remote offices far from HQ have a distinct advancement disadvantage vs. those who have face-time with senior leadership on the regular.
While I do agree there is a certain bias here, let me offer an anecdote...
I've been remote for years prior to the pandemic. I've found more advancement since.
It's certainly from a disadvantaged position, not to imply otherwise. I attribute this more to my employer and personality - if something is wrong/broken I make it known
Being essentially on the speed dial for everyone and maintaining this image of vocal participant has helped mitigate this. Fix a couple incidents in stellar fashion and the C suite starts to love your Slack alias
Well those people can always been in office. 95% of people in tech are just drones churning out same old CRUD service nth time. With the kind of saturation hitting in most tech jobs, even working China style 6-6-7 will not bring 10% more than their current compensation.
How do you think about the world your kids will grow up in? I just find it very strange, that I would sit at home on Zoom my whole life to better facilitate having kids who will themselves sit at home on Zoom their whole lives. Is this really the human experience we are passing on?
> I just find it very strange, that I would sit at home on Zoom my whole life to better facilitate having kids who will themselves sit at home on Zoom their whole lives.
Is this not conflating one's work life with one's life outside of work?
I don't doubt that being at work with people is good for socializing with them since people seem to be better suited to that format of in-person interaction (even though that's not necessarily "doing work"), though there's also nothing preventing you from seeking out events outside of work, be it with your coworkers or other people.
I think that claiming that you'll spend your "whole life" on Zoom calls is a bit far fetched, unless all of your life is work and the kind that is done primarily throughout meetings. While the argument that you make is noteworthy, i think i should point that out.
Personally, i rather enjoy being able to step away from the computer and into fresh air, to go and play with my dogs or so on, as well as to not have to spend hours during commute for no good reason or live in a city with polluted air (there was black soot on the edges of my windows when i did live there).
The logic of "remote first" is that there's no need to be located near the people we spend our lives interacting with, since we can just mediate all interactions via the internet. Why would that stop with work? Personally I have already taken that leap in a large part of my personal life; my desire to "shoot the shit" is not fulfilled by the topics on offer at the local bar, so I come to HN and Reddit. Also my friends from past in-person school and work are scattered to the winds; I mainly interact with them via the internet too.
Schools are taking the leap. If commuting is obsolete then catchment areas are stone age. Education is poised to finally free itself from the Achilles heel that has plagued its entire existence: the fact that other children in the room are more interesting than the lesson. It's poised to be a renaissance -- in student performance broadly, but especially in equity, whether other students being disruptive or creating an anti-learning social climate are the actual nuts-and-bolts makings of a "bad school." There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences. Room and board costs for college will be a thing of the past; even the parking dramas that plague commuter students seem silly now.
Now of course human beings can't be "on" 100% of the time; there are also downtime activities like going for walks, playing with pets, and consuming media. Maintenance activities like cooking, cleaning, and exercise. It's true that remote workers, remote students, and remote socializers also partake in these activities. But I don't think that's life. I think the things you do with the majority of your focus and energy, with the majority of your daylight hours, are life. And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and plenty of like-minded friends, why not also work together in person there? And if you're going to live any old place, without any good schools or a reliable supply of like-minded friends, then how are education or socialization going to happen in person?
> Personally I have already taken that leap in a large part of my personal life; my desire to "shoot the shit" is not fulfilled by the topics on offer at the local bar, so I come to HN and Reddit.
This is a personal choice and one i can get behind: seek out whichever people satisfy your need for social interaction in whatever medium you're comfortable with. However, my argument is also that work isn't the same as your private life or at the very least those shouldn't be inherently coupled with one another.
> There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences.
This is debatable.
While the argument sounds nice in principle, at least in my country it appears that students are having difficulties with passing tests as well as they did previously, though it remains to be seen whether that's due to their environments not being adequate for learning, them not having external motivating factors to learn (e.g. a paid pedagogue of some sort who encourages them to pay attention and discourages the opposite), a lack of skills necessary to study productively in a remote setting (which could be solved with time), or something else.
On the bright side, it seems like nowadays many younger people are coming together and having digital study groups, for example, on platforms like Discord. I actually maintained a forum for my fellow students in university to help them deal with unclear questions in study subjects etc., way before the pandemic, but either way a technologically capable new generation is probably something to strive towards!
> And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
That's just the thing - if i can do my dayjob in X hours and spend the rest doing whatever i want, why should i have that X number be inflated to something larger due to a variety of inefficiencies?
Sometimes meaningless small talk in the office with people who don't always respect the fact that others need to concentrate which could be replaced by a call when both parties have the time or even a Slack thread or e-mail (for the more formal inquiries), even other engineers that want to do a bit of bikeshedding that might be replaced by an async thread in a merge request discussion, or being stuck for hours in commute even though there aren't always good reasons to be in the office?
There is a flip side to it, of course. Team building exercises and in person interaction, though perhaps those are better done as informal events (laser tag, gokart racing, escape rooms etc. come to mind from my current workplace), in person workshops that are also recorded so they can be viewed later and quite possibly the fact that the older, less tech savvy, or maybe the differently inclined people might not have organic async discussions because they're just not used to those, much like how another segment prefer them to in-person interaction in many cases.
There is a lot of nuance to all of this, as there are different types of people, all of which have their preferences which will oftentimes be the exact opposite. The push of many developers for remote are just an example of one group realizing that things can be done differently, who are now attempting to ensure further comfortable experiences for themselves, which might be at odds with other groups of people.
Either way, one shouldn't let their work become their life and vice versa, so conflating those is bad in my eyes. Similarly, one could drill down and say the same about "getting things done" at work vs just interacting with others (and the reasons for doing so - for some people work is most if not all social interaction that they get).
> Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and ple...
Add up the numbers in that Atlantic article you cited: 33% + 20% is only 53%. That means almost half the people surveyed do not want to work remotely at all, and a substantial majority want to be in the office at least a few days per week.
I think the idea comes from the fact that it's always been hard to find fully-remote options. And even the most stubborn companies were forced by covid to relinquish some control to their workers.
If, to get work done, you need your ass in a seat of your employer's selection, fine, but almost all jobs have already been like that since the beginning of time and there's no shortage of those. So I understand "you're ruining for the rest of us!" to chirp too loudly about it just when WFH is finally gaining real traction but doesn't necessarily feel like it's here to stay.
The covid-induced WFH option at most companies seems precarious, like any moment the company will reverse it.
How does that run counter to anything? If only 33% want to be fully remote why are you surprised a 4 person startup wants an office space? That seems pretty reasonabls statistically?
Then go to your office and sit there parked as an employee spending your life in a cubicle. But don’t expect people who value their life outside to show up.
That is fine, but don't expect us to want to work with people who are not present and can only be contacted via mail/chat/video conferencing. Just as you expect others to respect your wish not to show up, you'll have to respect other peoples wish to work with people who do show up.
I am not sure there is a majority who agrees with your views. I want to go in maybe 2 days/week. But I certainly don't want to fire people working fully remote. Firing those people isn't merely "respecting" someone's wishes.
I'm fine with people coming in maybe 3 instead of 5 days a week. I'm not fine working together with people who are not here at all. It's wildly inefficient and communication via video conferencing is horrible.
Nobody cares about individual preferences as in the end we vote with our feet. So you not wanting to work by yourself should have no bearing on what others in the same group do. Once you start mandating what others should do based on your needs, people will either not listen, leave or you will leave.
So wasting 1-2 hours a day being non productive is your bar for a valuable employee.
I’d suggest your view comes from a bias towards red queen races being arbitrators of value rather than… you know… productivity.
A few years ago the bar was wearing a suit to work every day with sock suspenders. Look up IBMs uniform dress code. Now we all accept that as antiquated, distracting waste.
Comparing dress code to working in person is pretty ridiculous. Is your claim that there is literally zero value to seeing your coworkers in person? Also not everyone has a long and/or unproductive commute.
I'd go one further and say there is often negative value to seeing coworkers in person. Distractions and idle chit-chat that can't be turned off as easily as a Slack notification can decrease productivity.
I've actually timed it, any time I would go into the office almost half of the day would be filled with idle distractions and the like.
Which wouldn't be so bad if, you know, I found the experience relaxing or had the slightest inclination to get to know these people [beyond how they can help solve a given problem].
Maybe I just see work differently from everyone... but we're here to do the thing and get paid. I'm not putting in anything more than what's required.
[ edit: if Bob won't do $thing because we don't have enough social points, that's between him and our employer ]
'Team building' through things like these idle pleasantries and bombastic 'collaborative' seat-filling meetings are draining for people like me.
Put it on my calendar, if I think I can help or have an interest - I'll stop by the call... I'm already on your side if we're trying to make things better.
I really like to exercise my salary benefits of finishing my work and doing something else. Seeing the meatbags breaks asynchronous work
The world has moved on. We came to cities looking for work. Now the internet is availible ANYWHERE, people can LIVE ANYWHERE.
If your business wants to demand in-person, then you know what kind of people who you will get:
- people with kids who dont have a good grasp on what work life balance is (maybe because of extended debt)
- people who are single or otherwise unhappy at home, looking for companionship
- people who cant feel good about themselves without chit-chat
- people looking to increase their social circle
- people who will think they can use social engineering to forward their career
Ah, yes, the famously productive Zoom meeting. Barking dogs, construction, echo cancellation artifacts, lag, “no you go ahead,” endless monologues, creepy pseudo-ASMR from people’s giant gamer headsets, Bluetooth glitches, “let me try turning off my video” for 6 hours a day. So much fucking value generation. It’s just palpable, isn’t it?
You know, you’re right. It probably is the most efficient way to work, to continuously subject employees to this torture. The problem is I’m a fucking human being and there’s only so much abuse I’m going to take from you. And by being a remote worker you are, necessarily, subjecting your coworkers to this abuse every second they have to work with you. It is inherent to the notion of video calling with consumer-grade hardware on a packet switched network.
Really, none of your coworkers have flaky internet or noisy surroundings? None of them are using Bluetooth or onboard microphones or speakers? Is this a company full of audio engineers working from their personal broadcast studios?
> Really, none of your coworkers have flaky internet or noisy surroundings?
While one shouldn't discount those that are stuck in circumstances like that, no, we don't. And when their surroundings are noisy, they can just mute their microphones until they'd like to say something, which is just basic etiquette for communicating online. Or you can even pic up a microphone with a polar pattern that doesn't pick up much background noise for about 20$, which is what i did.
My view comes from my dislike of communicating via mail or video conferencing, and that I just don't want my home to be a place of work. Communicating online is wildly inefficient and lacks the nuance of doing things directly in person. It's so much easier to explain/teach things in person, and also get things thought in return. One of the best experiences I've had was an internship that involved so many hands-on experiences that would never have been possible remotely.
> So wasting 1-2 hours a day being non productive
Wasting in what way? Commuting? I love my commute, it's a nice 25 minute morning stroll on the cycle and provides the necessary motivation/pressure to get out of the house. I'm fine with people wanting to work remotely, I'm just not okay with working together with them (unless they're here at least 2-3 times a week) as it's wildly inefficient, and also not okay with people demanding that any company must offer full 5 days WFH as if it's a god given right.
>I'm just not okay with working together with them (unless they're here at least 2-3 times a week)
Good for you as you can always vote with your feet. If others don't want to come in and work with you, then you must find a new job. But don't expect anyone else to conform to your idea of how work should be. If for nothing else but for the same reasons you are using, personal preference.
This is obviously a "to each his own" issue. Work where you perform the best and for the best of the team. For my small startup WFH has been a blessing. Outside of physical face-to-face interaction there have been no downside because we have adjusted our process and technologies accordingly. We also work very comfortable in video chat all day. We occasionally meet and have lunch. I can honestly say I will never go back to working in an office and most of my co-workers feel the same. The few that wouldn't mind working in an office occasionally are those that have distractions at home (family that don't respect boundaries, usually with young children).
Commute time is a choice against other expenses. I live 10 minutes from the office because I didn't want to commute. I don't begrudge you for living further but I will say it was a WLB choice the employee made, not the employer.
I begrudge people who demand their colleagues come into the office which governs their living arrangements if a commute is required.
Remote is absolutely possible if your job doesn't require meatspace/atom manipulation as part of your work product, and to say that it isn't possible 3 years into a global pandemic demonstrating sustained levels of productivity while remote across various sectors is simply laziness and stated in bad faith. I understand that we are just randos throwing opinions back and forth, and that the only recourse available in countries where remote work isn't mandated by law as an option is to hope for remote orgs to continue to cannibalize non-remote/less-remote orgs for top talent, until non-remote orgs concede on their physical presence demands.
Not really weighing in on any of that. I just find it disingenuous to claim its a work life balance thing when the balance was the choice of the employee to begin with.
I understand the desire to have a cake and eat it but the job was to show up and put in the time. To go back and argue that showing up is now a WLB violation for previously existing jobs is just not defensible.
That said, sure, more jobs should just be WFH. If you want that, find it.
> I understand the desire to have a cake and eat it but the job was to show up and put in the time. To go back and argue that showing up is now a WLB violation for previously existing jobs is just not defensible.
Based on your reply, I don't think you truly understand the situation. The work arrangement is always negotiable, and demanding remote when it's proven it can be done at a reasonable productively level is entirely reasonable from an employee perspective. One does not need to put up with unreasonable employer demands in the current job market, and showing up on site five days a week is arguably unreasonable. The job expectations are to deliver results, not warm a chair with colleagues. Of course, if your job performance was based on warming the chair versus delivering, of course, measure that instead of results.
If you want to work on site, wonderful, go for it. That does not appear to be the direction the market is going based on available data.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/jobs/2022/02/24/why-remo... (Why remote jobs are changing work for good — if you’re working in the right place; Over 40% of employees say they would look for a new job if required to go to a worksite five days a week.)
> Working from home is a relatively new experience for a majority of workers with jobs that can be done remotely – 57% say they rarely or never worked from home prior to the coronavirus outbreak. For those who have made the switch to telework, their work lives have changed in some significant ways. On the plus side, most (64%) of those who are now working from home at least some of the time but rarely or never did before the pandemic say it’s easier now for them to balance work with their personal life. And many (44%) say working from home has made it easier for them to get their work done and meet deadlines, while very few (10%) say it’s been harder to do this. At the same time, 60% say they feel less connected to their co-workers now. Most (72%) say working from home hasn’t affected their ability to advance in their job.
> Looking to the future, 60% of workers with jobs that can be done from home say when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time. This is up from 54% who said the same in 2020. Among those who are currently working from home all or most of the time, 78% say they’d like to continue to do so after the pandemic, up from 64% in 2020.
It's not entirely a free choice. At least in the Bay Area, your ability to live close to work depends to a great degree on your compensation. I'd love to live on the Peninsula right next to work, but there's no way I could afford the rent or a mortgage there. I'd gladly walk to work and work-from-office every day if I was paid what our division's VP was paid. I think the normal-paid people who are within an acceptable commute to work are either willing to live in a shoebox-sized apartment or single and willing to live with many roommates. I guess that's technically a choice, but not a great one.
Those previously existing jobs with inordinately long commutes were always WLB violations, some workers just were willing to put up with them, even when they were very suboptimal.
You're right, that is a horrible thing to force employees to do. To manage their entire lives and where they lived for their employer. Glad we're seeing an end to this.
You need to find a spot where you can work outside. I have an outdoor office along with an indoor office. In nice weather it's great to go outside and work. You don't have to work all day outside, either. Even spending an hour or two outside will really boost your mood.
I'd like to know where people are working that they used to work with people in an office. I've been developing software for 35 years - a lot of start ups even - and have always worked with an engineering team that's geographically distributed - either in different countries or in different locales. Yeah, most of us went to an office to work, but we were working with maybe 1 or 2 people in the office. About the only thing I got out of working in an office was soul-destroying gossip. For some reason WFH has cut that crap out by at least 75%.
Working from the office is the default; you likely have this in your contract (I do) and you did that most of your life. Now if your life in the office was reduced to being parked in a cubicle, then no wonder you hate it, but don't project that on everyone.
Who has to show up is decided by the company and to a lesser extent by the market: if your contract says you have to show up, then you get fired if you don't.
And frankly this is what I expect to happen to many of those which discovered working from home during the pandemic and now behave like extremists and want to force companies and their colleagues to change for their sake.
By all means, argue for hybrid or home office, but don't pretend this is normal and anyone that's against it is some barbarian.
Except it’s not “let us have an office”! It’s “let’s force everyone back to the office”!
The cynical view is that a lot of people are lonely at home, and can already go back to the office but it’s too empty for their tastes and want to force people back.
I just professionally blew a gasket about this at work. I sit in a lab, and for the past 2 months there have been a steady stream of people walking in all day long starting a conversation with a work question and then spend the next 30+ minutes just trying to bullshit. Said question could be answered with a chat or an email.
I’m happy to bullshit for a minute, ideally not when I’m trying to concentrate. I tried things like putting headphones in, not making eye contact, cussing at my screen while they’re mid sentence, nothing worked. (Engineers amirite ;) )
I finally escalated it and the visits have since stopped. I get the questions over email and chat now. I still chat with the same people for a minute if I see them in the hall or a break room.
I don’t go to work to entertain people. I have 3 young kids at home. I don’t have time to work hardly at all when I’m not in the office. I have come to resent people who essentially expect me to entertain them AND can’t seem to take a fucking hint.
However there is a balance because that bullshitting is serving an important function: creating social capital and a sense of camaraderie. There needs to be room to develop relationships otherwise you lose the team part of work.
It's been almost 2 years now in full remote for a bunch of us. I don't think we're working less as a team than compared to previous places I worked in.
I know way less about the other persons lives for sure, and there is less "personal" discussions (perhaps half less ?). But regarding work related communication, dealing with emergencies or anything that mattered in a work context I don't see critical missing bits.
Have you tried not hinting? I don’t mean tell them to fuck off and die or anything, make it tactful of course. Lotta people out there who don’t notice your hints or will even actively ignore them if they’re only hints.
Sounds like you got what you wanted when you stopped hinting. Don’t hint, say!
Trying the same thing over expecting different results etc etc is madness etc
I understand your point. I didn't try the same thing, I tried lots of different things. There were a few times where I would even say "hey I need to get back to this is there anything else you needed?" which worked maybe 30% of the time. "Oh no thanks for the help... hey did you hear about $THING?"
Friends and a social circle are complementary to professional socialisation. And no, going to meet-ups and conferences isn't a replacement either.
It's very nice to be able to discuss with colleagues impromptu about new projects, what they're working on, what new tech they're studying, etc. Or to walk into a discussion in the kitchen about a refactoring, new libraries, etc.
But if one just stays on their chair X hours with their head in the monitor and never talks to anyone they won't miss the above either. Same for people working for 5 person start-ups where everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
Exactly. We're getting the option to return. One of my co-workers asked "Who's coming in to see me?!" No one said anything. Nobody is going in but her, because she hates working with her kids at home. She's now swapped to complaining there will be nobody from her team there.
It's a bit unfortunate because there's like... there's a way to have pretty periodic meeting up in the office, if you plan ahead. Ultimately people are a bit whimsical but if you're like "hey, I'm coming to the office on Thursday, you want to come in too, and have lunch?" then it could be a good booster if the option is available.
I don't really blame people who want to socialize with their coworkers (I want to as well, sometimes!), it's just unfortunate that we've gotten to this point where leadership seems to be really insistent on choosing the worst way to go about this.
> I don't really blame people who want to socialize with their coworkers
It's an unpopular and superficially brash opinion, but I honestly do. If someone wants social contact during work hours there's a really good chance that they have multiple neighbors who they could meet up with for lunch. Instead, work is misappropriated as a social venue.
I'm not suggesting that we should be unsociable robots for 8 hours each day, either, or that productivity is paramount. Quite the opposite. If someone can only get 4 hours of (highly) productive work every day, and used to spend half the day chatting with coworkers, then double their pay and halve their time.
Then there's also the environmental and infrastructural impact of people commuting daily for no practical reason. Everyone else, especially essential workers (who's job is usually casually linked to a workplace), suffers in traffic.
Need time away from kids? A stipend for a shared workplace would cover that, instead of renting huge amounts of unused office space.
Commuting (where remote work is possible) is a terrible and selfish idea no matter how you look at it.
Some of best friends were coworkers. It makes sense. We have a shared background and a shared interest. We already spend 1/2 of the time awake together, so why not more?
I think your real complaint is socializing at the office. I had a German coworker once who complained about the same thing. He said,
"In Germany we come to work at 9am, we work until 4pm with a 15 minute break for lunch, and we don't talk to anyone about anything other than work. Then we go to the beer hall and drink and chat until 7pm and then go home to our family. Here in America I come to work at 9am, chat with my coworkers all day about personal things, take a 1 hour lunch to chat some more, and then go home at 7pm. It's the same amount of work but none of the drinking!".
>In Germany we come to work at 9am, we work until 4pm with a 15 minute break for lunch
45 minute is the usual break in Germany, who can eat lunch in 15 minutes? Usual workday is 8h work + 45 min break. So 9-17:45 would be usual. Or 8-16:45. There are people in union jobs with 35h work week though, that work one hour less, but if they go in at 9 they stay until 16:45.
If you work over 6h in a day you have to do a minimum break of 30 minutes by law.
So in your example I guess Americans stay 1:15h longer per day than what is normal in Germany.
I'm sure he was exaggerating when he said it, but his overall point was that they work at work and then socialize after work, instead of mixing the two.
It’s no different than before Covid - some people stayed in the office late because it was a quiet place to finish up work, some people went home and wrapped things up.
There are many places where management are demanding people come into the office. Those are "forcing", for all intents and purposes.
There are people who want to work in the office. My understanding is that those people can all do that if they choose so. They can even choose to go every day of the week if they want to.
So what is the problem? Why is there a debate? People can do what _they_ want, after all, right? Except that some people not only want to be in the office, but they want their coworkers to be in the office as well.
That is what is meant by "forcing" in this discussion. And that is where I have read the most pushback (especially for the big tech companies with huge, mostly unused, offices.
Yes, same principle. By overproducing you're betraying your fellow workers by setting expectations for self-exploitation. Don't do more than you're paid to do.
Employment conditions are a constant tug of war between employees wanting a better life and employers wanting to extract more value from them. Don't pull on the wrong end of the rope.
If you're the manager and call a team meeting with required attendance, then yeah, you are. Which is essentially what most of these companies are doing. Requiring attendance at in person events. Or not providing the tools necessary to attend remotely when most of the team is in person. That is basically forcing people to come in.
A hybrid environment doesn't work if just a couple of people from a team or department go to the office and the rest are permanently working from home. You lose most of the advantages and still have to pay for office space, etc.
That's why in my company the hybrid solution will probably look like "everyone from the team has to be in the office on day X of the week".
But that's the key thing - people don't just want to work in offices themselves - they also want to force other people to work in offices. People who want to work from home don't want to force anyone else to do anything - they just want to work at home themselves.
The reality for many is logging in to MS Teams or Zoom to have virtual meetings even within the office. That is what a significant number of my professional colleagues did even while at the office: many of them would just dial in from their offices, even when the meeting room was right down the hall.
A significant portion of companies already accommodate hybrid work environments, whereby some meeting attendees are remote. This would be no different.
There may be legitimate cases where physical proximity is a key advantage for a specific team, but the current WFH situation has demonstrated that those cases have likely been exaggerated, as people are demonstrably productive (in the case of my company, results in record profits) while completely remote.
So do the companies. When it's convenient for them, they have no problem splitting up a team over multiple timezones/countries/continents. If physical presence in a shared space was really that important, they wouldn't do that.
I've been developing software for over 35 years now and I've never worked in a environment where the development team/engineering team isn't geographically dispersed - even across countries. That includes the startups I've worked for. You might have 1 or 2 people at your location working with you on the same team. In my experience a critical part of being able to do this job is to be able to work on a team comprised of members residing in different parts of the world. Doesn't really matter to me whether they're going to an office or staying at home.
I disagree. One of the reasons why WFH during the pandemic has been so difficult is because it's often completely isolating. Being able to work in coworking spaces, or even in public spaces like cafes, libraries, and the like is attractive for those who want to be around human presence, but not coworkers who would break your flow state with random requests.
Not everyone has a good work space at home. Offices provide a big desk, ergonomic stuff, etc. Then you factor in kids potentially being at home, and it's pretty unfair to say everyone wants to work remotely.
This is what's keeping me from using a wework membership. At home I have a second monitor, my external mouse and keyboard, my aeron chair; and if I need a change, i can go work from the kitchen.
Even if my company opened the office again, I've now got all of the ergonomics they can offer with no sneezing colleague next to me. And it's on me if there are dishes in the sink or the coffee needs a rebrew. Plus, at least one member of each team is geo-remote, so every meeting will be a better experience without being "hybrid"
Isn't this situation a side effect of the “old ways”, where you had to go to work? So you optimized differently: smaller space, and no work space at home because you had one at the office where you had to go anyway, so it was better to live closer.
Also, not all offices provide decent work spaces. The permanent humming of the AC, background chatter, cheap monitors, ridiculously low quality peripherals, wonky chairs… I could go on all day.
In the end, it's almost as if there wasn't a single, universal best case…
And I think this is what grates people, trying to apply a universal blanket policy when each person's situation and preferences are different, and they could all (or most of them) be satisfied at the same time.
I mean, anecdotes for andcdotes, but my office is on top of a subway station and isnt fully insulated around the windows (And today it was -15 C here in Toronto). My home office has neither of these two factors.
Truth be told the best way to protect the unexpected windfall of widespread remote work is to organize and to form some sort of professional association or guild [0] that can preserve tech worker leverage past current economic conditions.
But no one is currently talking about that very much right now (the Tech Workers Coalition seems pretty quiet lately), because we're all dazzled by the roaring market and unable to see the dim future when it cools down and we're no longer hot commodities.
If you have a workplace where the vast majority want to work remotely but management doesn’t, it could work. But stats posted elsewhere in the comments suggest that (in general) only slightly more than half of employees want to do so, which I don’t believe is enough for efficient collective action.
The collective action oughta just be support for choice for all. My suspicion is the end result would be hybrid for most- I think most pro-office folks would be content to work remotely at least a day or two per week- and remote for some who really want it. Pre-pandemic, most companies already had at least some remote workers who reside in different regions from the company, anyway.
Collective action should preserve work location choice, not enshrine any one specific choice for all cases.
Nobody is ruining anything for anybody. Those who want to work remote, go work somewhere where they can work remote. If you don't want to work remote, you find an employer that offers premises. Either way no one forces you to choose employer that doesn't suit you.
I quite like my employer, but their return-to-office policy is non-negotiable, so I am going to start looking for a new employer.
This literally ruins an otherwise wonderful working relationship and likely will result in years of tribal knowledge lost (as the senior engineer on my team).
And yes, I have reached out to my manager, and this policy is non-negotiable (as it is company-wide), so the writing is on the wall.
That exact situation could (and is) happening to people who want to work in an office but whose company is going remote. It's not specific to people who want to WFH.
WFH was instituted as an emergency response to COVID-19, thus it can't really be stated that employers forced WFH upon employees capriciously.
Enlightened employers can and have seen the value of hybrid policies that take employee preferences into account: those who prefer at-office can choose to come in, and those who prefer remote can choose WFH.
The disagreement is when an employer is unwilling to work with the employee to reach an understanding that benefits both mutually.
Taken from the other perspective, were a company to become entirely remote, then it could be seen to ruin the relationship for employees who had wanted to come into the office.
That is the case here: what is ruined is that no attempt has been made to reach a middle ground, whereby those who wish to remain at the office can do so, and those who prefer WFH can do so.
It is this reluctance to appreciate the learnings from our collective covid experience: that WFH is a significant boon to a large percentage of employees, and indeed is a competitive advantage, that has ruined an otherwise wonderful working relationship with an employer.
And thus, the only response is to look for employers who appreciate WFH as the competitive advantage it is.
Senior engineers at many companies were 95% WFH for years before covid19 hit. I know of entire ISPs that have:
a) datacenter/telecom space
b) field technicians with vans, sets of tools and diagnostic equipment. and in metro areas a storage room/logistics space in a warehouse or industrial area somewhere to receive incoming shipments and keep spare inventory, consumables inventory.
c) fully remote engineering staff, admin staff, literally no office whatsoever.
Yes, but that was an agreement they made before the pandemic.
That is very different from a situation where an engineer works in the office, works from home during the pandemic, is asked to go back to the office after the pandemic is over (which they agreed to do before the pandemic!) and decides not to do it.
Except on one side I have to either spend a high percentage of my waking life commuting or a huge portion of my income living close in a city in what’s probably not a great place to raise a family. On the other side, someone has to talk to me over a webcam. Which penalty is higher?
It's reasonable to ask to be able to work from home, but it's equally reasonable for the company to refuse the request.
Going to a physical location to work is how things were done and continue to be done for most people on the planet. This is what you signed up for when you accepted the job; if you don't like that and the company does not allow you to work from home you always have the option of quitting and finding another job. You signed a contract and now want to force a renegotiation. That's not how things work.
Of course the company has the option, that’s not the issue at hand. The issue is that the post above is equating being forced to work in an office with being forced to work with other employees that work from home, and it’s not a valid comparison.
My company backflipped after this happened an masse. Bleed 1000yrs experience in months. They stemmed the bleeding and commited to 100% flexibility going foward. it was the only way they could re-hire.
A place is not only a place indeed. I think work is more about the structure. A bad office group will make you like and be a lot more productive at home. A good one will make you miss going to work. Also I kinda believe that brains associate places with moods.. so if you struggle too long alone in the same spot, it becomes easier to stay stuck in this mode. Maybe office not being a single space for one person can dillute that effect.
0% ? That's being rather generous. If we take an account all the costs associated with shitcoin, this is a climate destroying ponzi scheme. He can definitely lose more than he put in.
> No, I don't want to go back to the office (I don't have to; my team is now fully remote forever)
It sounds like it's impossible for anybody to ruin it for you, then!
That's great. Same here: I was fully remote before the pandemic, and will continue to only work at fully remote or remote-optional companies.
So, if other people want to return to offices, it doesn't affect me at all. I wish them well (and secretly think they're nuts, but: different strokes for different folks).
Maybe some companies will insist on people returning to the office, but it's really hard for me to imagine a future where it's harder to find a remote job than it was a few years ago. So I don't feel threatened by this. This feels like there's more variety than there used to be, that's all.
> and secretly think they're nuts, but: different strokes for different folks
I don't know. I'm switching next week to a fully remote position, partly because of the fully remote work aspect. I am looking forward to work in a team that can handle asynchronous and well written communication and use that by default because I think that's way more efficient for me and such a team. I'm also looking for saving the commute time so I can spend more time on my own things and friends, the possibility to take breaks at random times in the day, the possibility to cook for lunch if I haven't had the chance to cook the days before, and many other things.
However, I have been enjoying my last days in the office at my current position, in particular the in person discussions, lunch and peer programming. I appreciate that people are seeking this. I also know people who just can't focus very well at home, and that's not always because of the children. My flatmate is one of them. I don't think they are nut for preferring office work as a consequence.
Yeah, I moved out of the city and have a 100% remote job now, and am enjoying the lower housing costs. If you didn't job search during the lockdowns, now is the time to do it.
The media is just out of touch or pure shills writing marketing pieces. There are three dipshits on planet earth that want to be in the office. The royal king that’s treated like a king (the boss), the dipshit royal assistant to the king, and the newly birthed dumbass intern that for the first time feels professional dressing up for work.
I think the big picture is that all working arrangements, including blended arrangements, create winners and losers. This was true before the COVID, it will be true after.
I have a hunch that there might have been a trend towards remote work even before the COVID, but it was happening gradually under the radar, people had a choice based on their choice of job, and could arrange their lifestyles and workstyles (making up a term) to be more or less compatible. Of course companies that paid more, could also demand more of their workers, including inconveniences of commuting and office life.
I think the deal with the pandemic was how sudden it was. My work group agreed to clear out of the office, and we were gone that day. Managers didn't know what hit them, and had to re-imagine their own jobs.
It strikes me that we are still coming out of the phase where the situation was forced on us, but we haven't figured out long term who the winners and losers are going to be in the future. It will be interesting to watch certain people: The ones who are strongly motivated to advance their own careers, and see what workstyles they choose for themselves.
As a data point to the above, GitHub was almost fully remote as early as 2012.
Plus, "telework" has been effective since the late 2000's. People might say "yeah but there was no video conferencing back then" to which I reply that I worked at a large bank in that timeframe and 99% of all interactions with people not physically in our location were over the phone.
Indeed. I find it funny how we see a big push to return to office these days. I've been in 'hybrid mode' for years before the pandemic. Sometimes fully remote and sometimes with irregular visits to the office if there was an actual purpose.
Pre-covid, my wife and I were musing that my job would likely be fully remote within a decade. This has certainly pushed the timeline closer.
Recently changed jobs to a company that is adamantly opposed to remote working. However the compensation was too amazing to give up, and aside from the anti-WFH bit, is otherwise my dream job. Goal is to get into a fully remote company within the next five years, even if the compensation is lower.
The ability to donate a painting to a museum and get a giant tax deduction is a big part of their value as an asset. I’m waiting for someone to have the chutzpah to try this with an NFT
> Why do people have to ruin this for the rest of us.
It's a mix of extroverts who see the office as a way to socialize, sandbaggers who see the office as a way to waste time and not do work, asskissers who just say whatever they think their bosses want, and control freaks who think the only way to manage people is by seeing them in a chair for 8 hours.
In short, it's mostly people who are already ruining something for us even at the office.
In 2014 an artist made an interactive work intended to capture the existential anguish of the conference call [0]. Slate calls it, "Like David Lynch Directed a Remake of Office Space.” I don't know about you, but it sure works on me. Try it [1]. That is how I feel every time I have to be part of a collaboration that includes a remote worker.
Which is of course every meeting for the last two years, but a national emergency is bound to cause some low-grade suffering. Making the vile space of Zoom into the center and essence of working life permanently is a whole other thing that I didn't sign up for and I'm not on board with.
It's because in every company I've been a part of, a substantial number of meetings are unproductive bikeshedding.
I'm a lead, my job isn't 100% hands on coding anymore. But the number of "this could have been an email" meetings I have attended in my life is high. Mostly in person.
IT workers like to ignore the fact that most other professions in most countries are returning to the office (or never left) and for good reasons. Face to face communication and collaboration is the gold standard to doing any kind of work together.
There are many reasons why one would want to work in an office at least part of the time besides efficient communication/collaboration: socialising, access to equipment, access to facilities, cafeteria/restaurants, change of scenery, biking/walking, etc and so on.
Any of these can be argued against or replaced by other things, but when the office can give them to you in a package why go to the extra effort? For many people things were fine before the pandemic and now they want to get back to their lives.
Working from home is an exceptional situation available to very few professions and only to parts of the staff that has yet to prove how good it works at scale in the long term. Based on my own experience before and during the pandemic, people painting home office as some kind of heaven were either in a terrible situation (commute, noise, etc.) or haven't figured out what the costs are yet (isolation, loss of professional social support, less chances for promotion, blurring of borders between work/home, slacking off, etc.)
Non-coding collaboration is so much easier in person, and it's the main reason I don't want 100% remote. It's so much easier to have meetings in person with a whiteboard to draw a flowchart/diagram/brainstorm than doing it remotely, even with virtual whiteboards, it's still not great. Digital also encourages people to have longer and bigger meetings, which is still just a huge waste, sitting in a meeting on mute with a camera off doing other work and listening for the 30 seconds that matter is far more draining than going to an office and meeting a sane number of people for 15-30 minutes.
I’m not saying that remote work can’t be effective (companies like Gitlab and others show that it can be) but what employees want and what companies want are not necessarily in any way related.
I think people wildly underestimate the huge biases towards capital expenditures in accounting and tax structures that are in place from past efforts to support the economy, while it is only putting a drag on and distorting the economy now in several ways and for several reasons.
Crossing the remote work gate and getting off the fence will provide a massive advantage to companies. I think the only advantage that many co-located companies will have is higher pay due to the massive monopolization/concentration that has been going on where, e.g., Google can pay a staggering larger amount to persuade you to work in their offices the only they can afford in the Valley. We shall see if they have enough money and wherewithal to shift expectations.
I wouldn't take the opposite side of Google's bet. They're spending a couple of billion on the bet. GOOG, AAPL, FB, that's about a week's worth of earnings to them. And if they're wrong, they have a depreciable asset that they can spend the next 30 years writing down. NBD.
See, when people sit elbow to elbow and can smell each other, they collaborate more. They use those headphones all day to keep their ears warmed up for the next Impromptu Collaboration Session. Really, the biggest problem is the fire dept keeps complaining about having too many in too small a space and we're all like, dude, do you even collab?
In my experience lonely people are happy to go back and those with a life outside of work (family, friends, hobbies) are happy about the time they save not commuting in order to have more time for the things they live for.
I have friends and hobbies, but I like separation of work and home, having work in my home has felt like a violation of a personal tenet of mine for the last few years. It may also have to do with the fact my commute is 30 minutes so I use that time to tune out and read on public transport. With that I've always enjoyed working in the office and find my commute to be a pleasant context switch.
Yes, I enjoyed my commute and did things personally useful to me like read. A commute doesn’t require me to think about or organize that time where as consciously fitting reading into my schedule is a pain.
I work from home and I turned my commute from 50 minutes of hell into a 30 min yoga session and a 5 minute walk around the block with a mug of coffee in my hand. I do something similar at the end of the work day. I think having that mental break between work and home is important, but you can still get it from a work from home situation, and I like being able to chose exactly how my 'commute' manifests vs trying to catch a train and being stressed out about missing my transfer. My home office is also outside on my patio under the sun vs inside, so I don't feel like I'm sacrificing any living space and its certainly far more luxurious than the windowless room with the bad chair I had at the office.
Personally having to intentionally organize things like that just doesn’t happen with me, I’ll just work for another 30minutes unless something forces that separation. Consistently working out is about all I can budget for.
That’s great, I’m happy for you. Luckily we live in a world where I’m sure you can find wfh employers long term and I’ll look for in office employers.
Not my experience. Some people just like to have people around, some don’t have space for an office at home, some need the socializing at the office and so one. People are different. I prefer working at the office even though I have a life outside of work and I have an office at home. Granted, my commute is only 15-30 minutes depending on traffic.
I commute into the office 5 days a week even though it's a 60 minute commute each way.
It's for my own mental health. The complete and legally enforced isolation during the lockdowns was too much. I can't work in permanent isolation. It really made me realise that I'm not actually antisocial, just very introverted.
Don't get me wrong, I was super productive for several weeks. Less distractions and I got in hours of solid coding and loved it. But after several weeks my motivation just fell off a cliff, and I started going back one or two days a week.
It very much depends on one's specific situation. I'm working with hardware and software, so I do need to be onsite for some time out of necessity. But one point which I haven't seen brought up in the rest of this discussion is that the nature of our discussions can differ greatly online vs in person. Also depends upon the company/team culture. There is value in face-to-face time. Meetings tend to be focussed upon specific topics, but informal chat about random stuff also leads to useful discussion about things which wouldn't be covered by meetings, and those can also be of high value. And there's also the camaraderie and team-building aspects as well.
I downvoted this comment because I think you’re being extremely condescending towards people who don’t like working from home.
I go into the office explicitly because I have a family. It’s hard to work from my house now that my wife and I have a baby. We have two bedrooms so now my workspace is in the living room and working while there is a screaming baby in the background is not great for concentrating.
It isn't going to be big tech's choice for much longer. We are nearing a critical mass of developers who will just not consider a job that doesn't offer flexible work options. This is the new normal, whether they like it or not.
Funny enough this reminds me of ~20 years ago when hot startups like Google started spending big money on fancy campus facilities and perks like free meals and massages. The establishment at that time scoffed at the idea, but soon those who couldn't adapt to this new office concept were weeded out.
After fighting for years to work from home full time (and loving it now). I see one big problem I have no fix for, training new grad / junior engineers.
Feel free to correct me if you have tools to do it, but I found training someone new like that over Video calls way too hard. It slows them down it slows me down, and their time to become productive goes up 4x. While I don't want to return to commuting I'm willing to compromise 1-3 days a week (at my discretion) to make training possible.
Honestly I think it works better, in some ways. I can share my screen and demo what I am doing, and they can follow along on their machine or vice versa. You can also take control of their machine. Rather than huddled together staring at the same screen. If something doesn't work on their machine, I can try it locally on my machine without having to walk back to my office to try whatever commands they were trying. Don't get me wrong, in person training is valuable, but even if we are in the office, sometimes we still setup a video call for some tasks.
We park in an open team chat for hours at a time. And by open I mean its unscheduled, open for any dev and people just pop in and out as they desire. Someone is always screen sharing and we work on problems together, a new person can absorb or drive things, get realtime feedback. You can popout and just focus as needed, its casual.
Sort of like discord but its code instead of games.
Screenshare with audio only. Video occupies too much mental bandwidth (human brains prioritize face recognition to the detriment of all other processes)
Why are you making them use video calls. How much business was conducted over audio phone calls before the pandemic? Most of it, I'd bet. Just call them and chat as if they were in a satellite office.
What exactly are you missing? With screen sharing its the same thing if not easier than looking back and forth at two laptop screens parked next to eachother. If its about those serendipitous questions, you could sit on a zoom call with your team all hard at work for the entire day and just don't say anything until someone has a question about something. It would function exactly the same as just sitting around some office, only better because zoom breakout rooms for more specific discussions with a few people are orders of magnitude easier than finding a free conference room for a impromptu work meeting in my experience.
I think it's too early to call them wrong. Wait a couple years after we're done with this pandemic, see how things play out. Some people do like to work in the office. Some are ambivalent. Some die-hard WFH. Thing is, if any kind of critical mass of workers head back into the office and start enjoying the career benefits to being onsite with management, it'll end up dragging the ambivalent back as well so they don't get left behind.
I can't believe it took this much scrolling to find a reasonable take. I think personal preference is clouding people's judgement. Of course it will depend on your employer and how much the office was part of company culture prior to covid, but I think what you're predicting will largely bear out.
Yesterday at our company, our management made an announcement to team leads, developers can work from home for the foreseeable future, despite the CEO hinting in his weekly emails about mandatory 2 days a week in the office. Apparently developers in exit interviews were indicating the "office uncertainty" was a factor in their departure.
I'm curious how many people will make the jump to preferring remote when they realize that the office culture they had prior to covid will no longer exist in the future.
My gut tells me that a lot of people are expecting for things to go back to the way they were when they won't. If half your team is OOO whenever you're at the office, is it as exciting as it was before? It wouldn't be for myself.
Wonder if any of these "physical-first" office-oriented companies might consider potential incentives to get people to go in:
1. Besides hybrid <5 day per week in-office cultures, what about expecting only half-day attendance? Would it be feasible to expect employees to only be in office during a certain set of core hours, where in-person meetings and collaboration takes place? Almost like Khan Academy but for work.
2. Getting rid of open office layouts and giving people their own offices. That will drastically improve the in-office experience for nearly the majority of workers. People have forgotten about the scourge of open offices but pre-pandemic, they were almost universally despised, at least on places like HN.
Sure, but that’s not universal. Certainly the best approach is to offer remote to those who prefer that. But for those who live close enough to the office, and are positive to agnostic about going in, maybe a half day is a good way to feel not trapped in the office, and to beat the traffic.
If a company is 100% remote that’s one thing, but in any hybrid scenario those that consistently appear in an office will unavoidably be at a significant advantage. Those informal coffee chats, grabbing lunch together and such are invaluable and it’s hard/impossible for someone on a screen somewhere to get the same benefits.
There will be those that dig their heels in hard but unless the company is 100% remote forever such stubbornness is likely a career limiting move.
Is there research that proves that in-person teams are more successful than remote/hybrid ones?
If not, I think remote/hybrid employees should be equal class citizens to on-site employees, and that should be reflected in a consistent composition of those roles thru all levels of leadership.
I think the point GP is making is that hybrid Teams are worst off. And that was my experience also pre pandemic. Actually the people who always were remote felt a huge improvement, because suddenly all had the same 'distance' and needed to put in the same effort to stay connected.
The internet is a waste of an invention if we can use it to not commute, eliminate all the attendant ills of commuting, spend all day in an office, etc., but we don't use it that way because middle managers can't have butts in seats or whatever other lame excuses they come up with to maintain their grip on the lives of workers. We have remote surgery for chrissakes! Tech workers and many others can all get along just fine remotely, with in-office as on option for those who choose it.
For me, this is nice because I can make those companies to pay for my flights to their offices for interviews so I can visit the city. I am absolutely not going back to the office. I'll come visit their office for a day long interview to see what's up though!
I personally wouldn’t mind going into the office once a week to see everyone, chat, throw ideas around, etc. maybe do some work together. But I’ve never found “office” work to be more productive than working from home.
day to day no, it’s more likely you can do more on an average day at home. some days it’s really helpful to see certain people to get past a problem. in the grand scheme a team that has an empathetic relationship is going to grow more. doesn’t mean they do more, but i think the peoples skills will grow faster. and most people develop this kind of relationship better in person
Surely, part of the resistance isn't about productivity its about cost of living. If you had halved your living expenses would you be voting to double them again in order to go to the office? I doubt many people would do this.
So true, I was paying $1300 per month living in the Bay with 5 roommates crammed into a 4 bedroom hacker house. Now I pay $500 per month living not in the bay and have an entire house to myself. It's amazing and I never want to go back, yet they keep talking about bringing us all back in and how they "can't wait to be together again".
I was able to save up enough money living in CA to pay off a house in a cheaper state. Now I just pay property tax, which is a little less than $500 per month.
Ship has sailed. Working from home has so many benefits it's ridiculous people were forced to go in five days a week.
I do concede that going in once a week is terrific. Those days of face to face spawn the best conversations and brainstorming sessions -- but those days I get zero code work done.
t. worked from home as a software dev since day 1 of my career for 14 years.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadThere really are too many MBAs given out these days!
EDIT: Oops my comment doesn't make sense, they mean "trillion dollar companies", not "there are trillion+ companies."
Given that, I don't think there are a lot of "trillion dollar companies" period. So lots of smaller companies making bets on offices.
Source: 8marketcap.com
McMaster-Carr and Mouser Electronics, thank you!
Am a free range human now, can’t be crammed in with 20 other nerds coughing and burping and sneezing everywhere all day
And if you want to attract both groups, well... you still need office space, even if everyone doesn't come in every day.
... if they live close, or are otherwise easily able to relocate to be close.
... and the cost of relocation and commuting doesn't erode the advantages of that employer.
Whereas remote employment gives you a much larger talent pool to draw from, without all the considerations of relocation and commuting.
Housing and transportation - two of the biggest expenses anyone has (along with food.)
But the companies will try to make it sound literally every other way except the truth. They have to save face after all, plus "admitting defeat" has real consequences on your stock price.
So business as usual really.
I'll be eating a lot of popcorn in the next few years. I can bet many people will leave their jobs if the company enforces return to office. The fallout will be long and interesting to watch.
The strong talent will move someplace else. You can dangle big pay checks and perks only for so long.
Any other Notables?
Nvidia completed a huge new campus in late 2020 and it just sits empty.
I wouldn't assume that's a big factor. If you own office space you don't need, you can lease it out. Or if you don't own but lease it, then you can often sublease it out.
Depending on market conditions (whether remote working is a trend or a permanent change), the demand may not be that high, so it's unclear how much money you'll get. But whatever it is, it's more money than not leasing it out.
I save money and time not having to commute, not having to buy lunch to be social, and best of all I get to spend more time with my growing kids (priceless).
Why do people have to ruin this for the rest of us. No, I don't want to go back to the office (I don't have to; my team is now fully remote forever) and I see it as a huge perk and a MASSIVE boost to our productivity to be at home.
I imagine an NFT startup is 100% sales/marketing and 0% engineering/science/innovation, so going fully in-office might make sense for them.
Engineering will remain flexible because of all the virtue signaling big tech is doing in order to retain their talent. It's almost comical that they are struggling to bring people back to the office after being the biggest promotor of work-remote while the rest of the service-economy had to show up every day to their Walmart jobs...
Look at how I used the slashes in the earlier part of that science ("sales/marketing"). Do you think I think that sales and marketing are the same thing? If not, why would you think that I think engineering = innovation? It's the exact same grammatical structure.
What I did say is that an NFT startup probably isn't doing anything innovative, and also is probably doing mostly sales and marketing, and that this combination of factors means that their in-person stance makes sense. I stand by that. My mental image of an NFT startup is that it's a boiler room of the sort that pump-and-dumped penny stocks in the 90s. That type of work benefits from rapid feedback loops among staff. The boiler room structure makes sense for a business trying to generate revenue from the NFT ecosystem.
The rest of your post is an odd rant that has almost nothing to do with how I think about businesses or the world. It's not even a strawman... just kind of a completely off topic rant from my perspective.
I have no idea what stereotype you're projecting onto me, but I'm not even an engineer.
Remote work eliminates a lot of career climbing opportunities and a meaningful class of tech workers depend on that.
I don't understand - do you think fully remote companies never promote anyone?
I think this is pretty obviously true - even though I don't endorse the state of affairs.
This is already true - even pre-pandemic those in remote offices far from HQ have a distinct advancement disadvantage vs. those who have face-time with senior leadership on the regular.
I've been remote for years prior to the pandemic. I've found more advancement since.
It's certainly from a disadvantaged position, not to imply otherwise. I attribute this more to my employer and personality - if something is wrong/broken I make it known
Being essentially on the speed dial for everyone and maintaining this image of vocal participant has helped mitigate this. Fix a couple incidents in stellar fashion and the C suite starts to love your Slack alias
Quite the opposite in my experience!
Even today in the snow, I kitted up and went in. Working from home really makes me unproductive.
Is this not conflating one's work life with one's life outside of work?
I don't doubt that being at work with people is good for socializing with them since people seem to be better suited to that format of in-person interaction (even though that's not necessarily "doing work"), though there's also nothing preventing you from seeking out events outside of work, be it with your coworkers or other people.
I think that claiming that you'll spend your "whole life" on Zoom calls is a bit far fetched, unless all of your life is work and the kind that is done primarily throughout meetings. While the argument that you make is noteworthy, i think i should point that out.
Personally, i rather enjoy being able to step away from the computer and into fresh air, to go and play with my dogs or so on, as well as to not have to spend hours during commute for no good reason or live in a city with polluted air (there was black soot on the edges of my windows when i did live there).
I actually wrote more about this cultural divide in preferences on my blog, which i mentioned in another post in this thread: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...
I think both one's personality and preferences in regards to modes of work are relevant here!
Schools are taking the leap. If commuting is obsolete then catchment areas are stone age. Education is poised to finally free itself from the Achilles heel that has plagued its entire existence: the fact that other children in the room are more interesting than the lesson. It's poised to be a renaissance -- in student performance broadly, but especially in equity, whether other students being disruptive or creating an anti-learning social climate are the actual nuts-and-bolts makings of a "bad school." There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences. Room and board costs for college will be a thing of the past; even the parking dramas that plague commuter students seem silly now.
Now of course human beings can't be "on" 100% of the time; there are also downtime activities like going for walks, playing with pets, and consuming media. Maintenance activities like cooking, cleaning, and exercise. It's true that remote workers, remote students, and remote socializers also partake in these activities. But I don't think that's life. I think the things you do with the majority of your focus and energy, with the majority of your daylight hours, are life. And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and plenty of like-minded friends, why not also work together in person there? And if you're going to live any old place, without any good schools or a reliable supply of like-minded friends, then how are education or socialization going to happen in person?
This is a personal choice and one i can get behind: seek out whichever people satisfy your need for social interaction in whatever medium you're comfortable with. However, my argument is also that work isn't the same as your private life or at the very least those shouldn't be inherently coupled with one another.
> There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences.
This is debatable.
While the argument sounds nice in principle, at least in my country it appears that students are having difficulties with passing tests as well as they did previously, though it remains to be seen whether that's due to their environments not being adequate for learning, them not having external motivating factors to learn (e.g. a paid pedagogue of some sort who encourages them to pay attention and discourages the opposite), a lack of skills necessary to study productively in a remote setting (which could be solved with time), or something else.
On the bright side, it seems like nowadays many younger people are coming together and having digital study groups, for example, on platforms like Discord. I actually maintained a forum for my fellow students in university to help them deal with unclear questions in study subjects etc., way before the pandemic, but either way a technologically capable new generation is probably something to strive towards!
> And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
That's just the thing - if i can do my dayjob in X hours and spend the rest doing whatever i want, why should i have that X number be inflated to something larger due to a variety of inefficiencies?
Sometimes meaningless small talk in the office with people who don't always respect the fact that others need to concentrate which could be replaced by a call when both parties have the time or even a Slack thread or e-mail (for the more formal inquiries), even other engineers that want to do a bit of bikeshedding that might be replaced by an async thread in a merge request discussion, or being stuck for hours in commute even though there aren't always good reasons to be in the office?
There is a flip side to it, of course. Team building exercises and in person interaction, though perhaps those are better done as informal events (laser tag, gokart racing, escape rooms etc. come to mind from my current workplace), in person workshops that are also recorded so they can be viewed later and quite possibly the fact that the older, less tech savvy, or maybe the differently inclined people might not have organic async discussions because they're just not used to those, much like how another segment prefer them to in-person interaction in many cases.
There is a lot of nuance to all of this, as there are different types of people, all of which have their preferences which will oftentimes be the exact opposite. The push of many developers for remote are just an example of one group realizing that things can be done differently, who are now attempting to ensure further comfortable experiences for themselves, which might be at odds with other groups of people.
Either way, one shouldn't let their work become their life and vice versa, so conflating those is bad in my eyes. Similarly, one could drill down and say the same about "getting things done" at work vs just interacting with others (and the reasons for doing so - for some people work is most if not all social interaction that they get).
> Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and ple...
Add up the numbers in that Atlantic article you cited: 33% + 20% is only 53%. That means almost half the people surveyed do not want to work remotely at all, and a substantial majority want to be in the office at least a few days per week.
If, to get work done, you need your ass in a seat of your employer's selection, fine, but almost all jobs have already been like that since the beginning of time and there's no shortage of those. So I understand "you're ruining for the rest of us!" to chirp too loudly about it just when WFH is finally gaining real traction but doesn't necessarily feel like it's here to stay.
The covid-induced WFH option at most companies seems precarious, like any moment the company will reverse it.
We're not 'ruining it' for you, we just want to work in an office.
I’d suggest your view comes from a bias towards red queen races being arbitrators of value rather than… you know… productivity.
A few years ago the bar was wearing a suit to work every day with sock suspenders. Look up IBMs uniform dress code. Now we all accept that as antiquated, distracting waste.
Which wouldn't be so bad if, you know, I found the experience relaxing or had the slightest inclination to get to know these people [beyond how they can help solve a given problem].
Maybe I just see work differently from everyone... but we're here to do the thing and get paid. I'm not putting in anything more than what's required.
[ edit: if Bob won't do $thing because we don't have enough social points, that's between him and our employer ]
'Team building' through things like these idle pleasantries and bombastic 'collaborative' seat-filling meetings are draining for people like me.
Put it on my calendar, if I think I can help or have an interest - I'll stop by the call... I'm already on your side if we're trying to make things better.
I really like to exercise my salary benefits of finishing my work and doing something else. Seeing the meatbags breaks asynchronous work
If your business wants to demand in-person, then you know what kind of people who you will get: - people with kids who dont have a good grasp on what work life balance is (maybe because of extended debt) - people who are single or otherwise unhappy at home, looking for companionship - people who cant feel good about themselves without chit-chat - people looking to increase their social circle - people who will think they can use social engineering to forward their career
You know, you’re right. It probably is the most efficient way to work, to continuously subject employees to this torture. The problem is I’m a fucking human being and there’s only so much abuse I’m going to take from you. And by being a remote worker you are, necessarily, subjecting your coworkers to this abuse every second they have to work with you. It is inherent to the notion of video calling with consumer-grade hardware on a packet switched network.
While one shouldn't discount those that are stuck in circumstances like that, no, we don't. And when their surroundings are noisy, they can just mute their microphones until they'd like to say something, which is just basic etiquette for communicating online. Or you can even pic up a microphone with a polar pattern that doesn't pick up much background noise for about 20$, which is what i did.
> So wasting 1-2 hours a day being non productive
Wasting in what way? Commuting? I love my commute, it's a nice 25 minute morning stroll on the cycle and provides the necessary motivation/pressure to get out of the house. I'm fine with people wanting to work remotely, I'm just not okay with working together with them (unless they're here at least 2-3 times a week) as it's wildly inefficient, and also not okay with people demanding that any company must offer full 5 days WFH as if it's a god given right.
Good for you as you can always vote with your feet. If others don't want to come in and work with you, then you must find a new job. But don't expect anyone else to conform to your idea of how work should be. If for nothing else but for the same reasons you are using, personal preference.
Sure, that's fine. It's why I'd never apply for remote positions. Luckily, where I work people still come into office.
Commute time is a choice against other expenses. I live 10 minutes from the office because I didn't want to commute. I don't begrudge you for living further but I will say it was a WLB choice the employee made, not the employer.
Remote is absolutely possible if your job doesn't require meatspace/atom manipulation as part of your work product, and to say that it isn't possible 3 years into a global pandemic demonstrating sustained levels of productivity while remote across various sectors is simply laziness and stated in bad faith. I understand that we are just randos throwing opinions back and forth, and that the only recourse available in countries where remote work isn't mandated by law as an option is to hope for remote orgs to continue to cannibalize non-remote/less-remote orgs for top talent, until non-remote orgs concede on their physical presence demands.
I understand the desire to have a cake and eat it but the job was to show up and put in the time. To go back and argue that showing up is now a WLB violation for previously existing jobs is just not defensible.
That said, sure, more jobs should just be WFH. If you want that, find it.
Based on your reply, I don't think you truly understand the situation. The work arrangement is always negotiable, and demanding remote when it's proven it can be done at a reasonable productively level is entirely reasonable from an employee perspective. One does not need to put up with unreasonable employer demands in the current job market, and showing up on site five days a week is arguably unreasonable. The job expectations are to deliver results, not warm a chair with colleagues. Of course, if your job performance was based on warming the chair versus delivering, of course, measure that instead of results.
If you want to work on site, wonderful, go for it. That does not appear to be the direction the market is going based on available data.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/jobs/2022/02/24/why-remo... (Why remote jobs are changing work for good — if you’re working in the right place; Over 40% of employees say they would look for a new job if required to go to a worksite five days a week.)
https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/recruitment/west-co... (West Coast tech firms increase hiring throughout U.S.)
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b... (Are Firms Using Remote Work to Recruit and Retain Workers?)
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/workers-quitting-ov... (The People Who’d Rather Quit Than Give Up Remote Work)
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/02/16/covid-1... (excerpts from this link below)
> Working from home is a relatively new experience for a majority of workers with jobs that can be done remotely – 57% say they rarely or never worked from home prior to the coronavirus outbreak. For those who have made the switch to telework, their work lives have changed in some significant ways. On the plus side, most (64%) of those who are now working from home at least some of the time but rarely or never did before the pandemic say it’s easier now for them to balance work with their personal life. And many (44%) say working from home has made it easier for them to get their work done and meet deadlines, while very few (10%) say it’s been harder to do this. At the same time, 60% say they feel less connected to their co-workers now. Most (72%) say working from home hasn’t affected their ability to advance in their job.
> Looking to the future, 60% of workers with jobs that can be done from home say when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time. This is up from 54% who said the same in 2020. Among those who are currently working from home all or most of the time, 78% say they’d like to continue to do so after the pandemic, up from 64% in 2020.
Extreme example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15942945
> If you want that, find it.
And create it, if possible. By putting market pressure in favor of WFH so that employers are forced to adjust to worker demands.
I'd like to know where people are working that they used to work with people in an office. I've been developing software for 35 years - a lot of start ups even - and have always worked with an engineering team that's geographically distributed - either in different countries or in different locales. Yeah, most of us went to an office to work, but we were working with maybe 1 or 2 people in the office. About the only thing I got out of working in an office was soul-destroying gossip. For some reason WFH has cut that crap out by at least 75%.
That's substantial. For many people it adds up to hours per day.
Really. I have no problem with people executing tasks from wherever. But Zoom is vile.
Who has to show up is decided by the company and to a lesser extent by the market: if your contract says you have to show up, then you get fired if you don't. And frankly this is what I expect to happen to many of those which discovered working from home during the pandemic and now behave like extremists and want to force companies and their colleagues to change for their sake.
By all means, argue for hybrid or home office, but don't pretend this is normal and anyone that's against it is some barbarian.
The cynical view is that a lot of people are lonely at home, and can already go back to the office but it’s too empty for their tastes and want to force people back.
I’m happy to bullshit for a minute, ideally not when I’m trying to concentrate. I tried things like putting headphones in, not making eye contact, cussing at my screen while they’re mid sentence, nothing worked. (Engineers amirite ;) )
I finally escalated it and the visits have since stopped. I get the questions over email and chat now. I still chat with the same people for a minute if I see them in the hall or a break room.
I don’t go to work to entertain people. I have 3 young kids at home. I don’t have time to work hardly at all when I’m not in the office. I have come to resent people who essentially expect me to entertain them AND can’t seem to take a fucking hint.
/rant
I know way less about the other persons lives for sure, and there is less "personal" discussions (perhaps half less ?). But regarding work related communication, dealing with emergencies or anything that mattered in a work context I don't see critical missing bits.
Sounds like you got what you wanted when you stopped hinting. Don’t hint, say!
Trying the same thing over expecting different results etc etc is madness etc
It's very nice to be able to discuss with colleagues impromptu about new projects, what they're working on, what new tech they're studying, etc. Or to walk into a discussion in the kitchen about a refactoring, new libraries, etc.
But if one just stays on their chair X hours with their head in the monitor and never talks to anyone they won't miss the above either. Same for people working for 5 person start-ups where everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
I don't really blame people who want to socialize with their coworkers (I want to as well, sometimes!), it's just unfortunate that we've gotten to this point where leadership seems to be really insistent on choosing the worst way to go about this.
It's an unpopular and superficially brash opinion, but I honestly do. If someone wants social contact during work hours there's a really good chance that they have multiple neighbors who they could meet up with for lunch. Instead, work is misappropriated as a social venue.
I'm not suggesting that we should be unsociable robots for 8 hours each day, either, or that productivity is paramount. Quite the opposite. If someone can only get 4 hours of (highly) productive work every day, and used to spend half the day chatting with coworkers, then double their pay and halve their time.
Then there's also the environmental and infrastructural impact of people commuting daily for no practical reason. Everyone else, especially essential workers (who's job is usually casually linked to a workplace), suffers in traffic.
Need time away from kids? A stipend for a shared workplace would cover that, instead of renting huge amounts of unused office space.
Commuting (where remote work is possible) is a terrible and selfish idea no matter how you look at it.
I think your real complaint is socializing at the office. I had a German coworker once who complained about the same thing. He said,
"In Germany we come to work at 9am, we work until 4pm with a 15 minute break for lunch, and we don't talk to anyone about anything other than work. Then we go to the beer hall and drink and chat until 7pm and then go home to our family. Here in America I come to work at 9am, chat with my coworkers all day about personal things, take a 1 hour lunch to chat some more, and then go home at 7pm. It's the same amount of work but none of the drinking!".
45 minute is the usual break in Germany, who can eat lunch in 15 minutes? Usual workday is 8h work + 45 min break. So 9-17:45 would be usual. Or 8-16:45. There are people in union jobs with 35h work week though, that work one hour less, but if they go in at 9 they stay until 16:45.
If you work over 6h in a day you have to do a minimum break of 30 minutes by law.
So in your example I guess Americans stay 1:15h longer per day than what is normal in Germany.
It’s no different than before Covid - some people stayed in the office late because it was a quiet place to finish up work, some people went home and wrapped things up.
Nobody was forced to stay late.
There are many places where management are demanding people come into the office. Those are "forcing", for all intents and purposes.
There are people who want to work in the office. My understanding is that those people can all do that if they choose so. They can even choose to go every day of the week if they want to.
So what is the problem? Why is there a debate? People can do what _they_ want, after all, right? Except that some people not only want to be in the office, but they want their coworkers to be in the office as well.
That is what is meant by "forcing" in this discussion. And that is where I have read the most pushback (especially for the big tech companies with huge, mostly unused, offices.
If someone decides to come in and you work remote that’s not forcing anything.
Employment conditions are a constant tug of war between employees wanting a better life and employers wanting to extract more value from them. Don't pull on the wrong end of the rope.
That's why in my company the hybrid solution will probably look like "everyone from the team has to be in the office on day X of the week".
So rent your own office. Why does it have to involve anyone else?
This is a bit un-self-aware isn't it? The other 50% of us could ask the exact same thing.
A significant portion of companies already accommodate hybrid work environments, whereby some meeting attendees are remote. This would be no different.
There may be legitimate cases where physical proximity is a key advantage for a specific team, but the current WFH situation has demonstrated that those cases have likely been exaggerated, as people are demonstrably productive (in the case of my company, results in record profits) while completely remote.
> No, I don't want to go back to the office (I don't have to; my team is now fully remote forever)
Even if my company opened the office again, I've now got all of the ergonomics they can offer with no sneezing colleague next to me. And it's on me if there are dishes in the sink or the coffee needs a rebrew. Plus, at least one member of each team is geo-remote, so every meeting will be a better experience without being "hybrid"
Also, not all offices provide decent work spaces. The permanent humming of the AC, background chatter, cheap monitors, ridiculously low quality peripherals, wonky chairs… I could go on all day.
In the end, it's almost as if there wasn't a single, universal best case…
And I think this is what grates people, trying to apply a universal blanket policy when each person's situation and preferences are different, and they could all (or most of them) be satisfied at the same time.
But no one is currently talking about that very much right now (the Tech Workers Coalition seems pretty quiet lately), because we're all dazzled by the roaring market and unable to see the dim future when it cools down and we're no longer hot commodities.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388223
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502195
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083633
Collective action should preserve work location choice, not enshrine any one specific choice for all cases.
yes they are.
I quite like my employer, but their return-to-office policy is non-negotiable, so I am going to start looking for a new employer.
This literally ruins an otherwise wonderful working relationship and likely will result in years of tribal knowledge lost (as the senior engineer on my team).
And yes, I have reached out to my manager, and this policy is non-negotiable (as it is company-wide), so the writing is on the wall.
It takes two sides to have a disagreement like that, and it's wrong to portray it as though one side is responsible for ruining everything.
WFH was instituted as an emergency response to COVID-19, thus it can't really be stated that employers forced WFH upon employees capriciously.
Enlightened employers can and have seen the value of hybrid policies that take employee preferences into account: those who prefer at-office can choose to come in, and those who prefer remote can choose WFH.
The disagreement is when an employer is unwilling to work with the employee to reach an understanding that benefits both mutually.
Taken from the other perspective, were a company to become entirely remote, then it could be seen to ruin the relationship for employees who had wanted to come into the office.
That is the case here: what is ruined is that no attempt has been made to reach a middle ground, whereby those who wish to remain at the office can do so, and those who prefer WFH can do so.
It is this reluctance to appreciate the learnings from our collective covid experience: that WFH is a significant boon to a large percentage of employees, and indeed is a competitive advantage, that has ruined an otherwise wonderful working relationship with an employer.
And thus, the only response is to look for employers who appreciate WFH as the competitive advantage it is.
a) datacenter/telecom space
b) field technicians with vans, sets of tools and diagnostic equipment. and in metro areas a storage room/logistics space in a warehouse or industrial area somewhere to receive incoming shipments and keep spare inventory, consumables inventory.
c) fully remote engineering staff, admin staff, literally no office whatsoever.
That is very different from a situation where an engineer works in the office, works from home during the pandemic, is asked to go back to the office after the pandemic is over (which they agreed to do before the pandemic!) and decides not to do it.
Going to a physical location to work is how things were done and continue to be done for most people on the planet. This is what you signed up for when you accepted the job; if you don't like that and the company does not allow you to work from home you always have the option of quitting and finding another job. You signed a contract and now want to force a renegotiation. That's not how things work.
This is exactly how things work. Contracts are renegotiated all the time and either of the parties can initiate it.
Yours will too.
He's zero percent productive regardless of location.
It sounds like it's impossible for anybody to ruin it for you, then!
That's great. Same here: I was fully remote before the pandemic, and will continue to only work at fully remote or remote-optional companies.
So, if other people want to return to offices, it doesn't affect me at all. I wish them well (and secretly think they're nuts, but: different strokes for different folks).
Maybe some companies will insist on people returning to the office, but it's really hard for me to imagine a future where it's harder to find a remote job than it was a few years ago. So I don't feel threatened by this. This feels like there's more variety than there used to be, that's all.
I don't know. I'm switching next week to a fully remote position, partly because of the fully remote work aspect. I am looking forward to work in a team that can handle asynchronous and well written communication and use that by default because I think that's way more efficient for me and such a team. I'm also looking for saving the commute time so I can spend more time on my own things and friends, the possibility to take breaks at random times in the day, the possibility to cook for lunch if I haven't had the chance to cook the days before, and many other things.
However, I have been enjoying my last days in the office at my current position, in particular the in person discussions, lunch and peer programming. I appreciate that people are seeking this. I also know people who just can't focus very well at home, and that's not always because of the children. My flatmate is one of them. I don't think they are nut for preferring office work as a consequence.
Everyone else just ain’t having it.
I have a hunch that there might have been a trend towards remote work even before the COVID, but it was happening gradually under the radar, people had a choice based on their choice of job, and could arrange their lifestyles and workstyles (making up a term) to be more or less compatible. Of course companies that paid more, could also demand more of their workers, including inconveniences of commuting and office life.
I think the deal with the pandemic was how sudden it was. My work group agreed to clear out of the office, and we were gone that day. Managers didn't know what hit them, and had to re-imagine their own jobs.
It strikes me that we are still coming out of the phase where the situation was forced on us, but we haven't figured out long term who the winners and losers are going to be in the future. It will be interesting to watch certain people: The ones who are strongly motivated to advance their own careers, and see what workstyles they choose for themselves.
Plus, "telework" has been effective since the late 2000's. People might say "yeah but there was no video conferencing back then" to which I reply that I worked at a large bank in that timeframe and 99% of all interactions with people not physically in our location were over the phone.
There was, I remember reading a paper that said it had gone from 5% to 10% of the working US population over the previous decade.
Recently changed jobs to a company that is adamantly opposed to remote working. However the compensation was too amazing to give up, and aside from the anti-WFH bit, is otherwise my dream job. Goal is to get into a fully remote company within the next five years, even if the compensation is lower.
It just goes on to show that there is a lot of excess money in SV, not to mention greed and arrogance.
Once the government gets better at cracking down on them I suspect their values will plummet.
It's a mix of extroverts who see the office as a way to socialize, sandbaggers who see the office as a way to waste time and not do work, asskissers who just say whatever they think their bosses want, and control freaks who think the only way to manage people is by seeing them in a chair for 8 hours.
In short, it's mostly people who are already ruining something for us even at the office.
Which is of course every meeting for the last two years, but a national emergency is bound to cause some low-grade suffering. Making the vile space of Zoom into the center and essence of working life permanently is a whole other thing that I didn't sign up for and I'm not on board with.
[0] https://slate.com/business/2014/01/the-existential-despair-o...
[1] http://conferencecall.biz/
I'm a lead, my job isn't 100% hands on coding anymore. But the number of "this could have been an email" meetings I have attended in my life is high. Mostly in person.
There are many reasons why one would want to work in an office at least part of the time besides efficient communication/collaboration: socialising, access to equipment, access to facilities, cafeteria/restaurants, change of scenery, biking/walking, etc and so on. Any of these can be argued against or replaced by other things, but when the office can give them to you in a package why go to the extra effort? For many people things were fine before the pandemic and now they want to get back to their lives.
Working from home is an exceptional situation available to very few professions and only to parts of the staff that has yet to prove how good it works at scale in the long term. Based on my own experience before and during the pandemic, people painting home office as some kind of heaven were either in a terrible situation (commute, noise, etc.) or haven't figured out what the costs are yet (isolation, loss of professional social support, less chances for promotion, blurring of borders between work/home, slacking off, etc.)
Crossing the remote work gate and getting off the fence will provide a massive advantage to companies. I think the only advantage that many co-located companies will have is higher pay due to the massive monopolization/concentration that has been going on where, e.g., Google can pay a staggering larger amount to persuade you to work in their offices the only they can afford in the Valley. We shall see if they have enough money and wherewithal to shift expectations.
That’s great, I’m happy for you. Luckily we live in a world where I’m sure you can find wfh employers long term and I’ll look for in office employers.
It's for my own mental health. The complete and legally enforced isolation during the lockdowns was too much. I can't work in permanent isolation. It really made me realise that I'm not actually antisocial, just very introverted.
Don't get me wrong, I was super productive for several weeks. Less distractions and I got in hours of solid coding and loved it. But after several weeks my motivation just fell off a cliff, and I started going back one or two days a week.
It very much depends on one's specific situation. I'm working with hardware and software, so I do need to be onsite for some time out of necessity. But one point which I haven't seen brought up in the rest of this discussion is that the nature of our discussions can differ greatly online vs in person. Also depends upon the company/team culture. There is value in face-to-face time. Meetings tend to be focussed upon specific topics, but informal chat about random stuff also leads to useful discussion about things which wouldn't be covered by meetings, and those can also be of high value. And there's also the camaraderie and team-building aspects as well.
I go into the office explicitly because I have a family. It’s hard to work from my house now that my wife and I have a baby. We have two bedrooms so now my workspace is in the living room and working while there is a screaming baby in the background is not great for concentrating.
Funny enough this reminds me of ~20 years ago when hot startups like Google started spending big money on fancy campus facilities and perks like free meals and massages. The establishment at that time scoffed at the idea, but soon those who couldn't adapt to this new office concept were weeded out.
Feel free to correct me if you have tools to do it, but I found training someone new like that over Video calls way too hard. It slows them down it slows me down, and their time to become productive goes up 4x. While I don't want to return to commuting I'm willing to compromise 1-3 days a week (at my discretion) to make training possible.
Sort of like discord but its code instead of games.
My gut tells me that a lot of people are expecting for things to go back to the way they were when they won't. If half your team is OOO whenever you're at the office, is it as exciting as it was before? It wouldn't be for myself.
1. Besides hybrid <5 day per week in-office cultures, what about expecting only half-day attendance? Would it be feasible to expect employees to only be in office during a certain set of core hours, where in-person meetings and collaboration takes place? Almost like Khan Academy but for work.
2. Getting rid of open office layouts and giving people their own offices. That will drastically improve the in-office experience for nearly the majority of workers. People have forgotten about the scourge of open offices but pre-pandemic, they were almost universally despised, at least on places like HN.
There will be those that dig their heels in hard but unless the company is 100% remote forever such stubbornness is likely a career limiting move.
If not, I think remote/hybrid employees should be equal class citizens to on-site employees, and that should be reflected in a consistent composition of those roles thru all levels of leadership.
it’s not black and white
I do concede that going in once a week is terrific. Those days of face to face spawn the best conversations and brainstorming sessions -- but those days I get zero code work done.
t. worked from home as a software dev since day 1 of my career for 14 years.