Ask HN: Are companies preparing to end Remote?
Today we got an email that our entire global staff would be getting a long weekend, just because.
I also happened to see that tweet about Tesla staff and WFH.
My gut is telling me that a lot of companies will seek to leverage this economic downturn and layoffs to threaten staff into returning.
The dialogue until now has been fairly conciliatory, but we will start to see more come or go type of ultimatums...I am convinced.
What do you think?
184 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadEventually we will reach a Nash equilibrium [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
I don't see why there is so much uproar about going into the office. If you were hired with the expectation that you go in, it's not unreasonable for your employer to ask you to return, regardless of productivity gain/loss.
Have a talk with your manager, and if it doesn't go the way you want it to, stay and commute or quit.
You don't get to (a) keep wages low for existing employees in a market where wages have been increasing by 10% a year for years and (b) make demands of them that they almost universally disapprove of.
My point is that even if I can choose it's just not as nice as before so I certainly hope some companies will revert. Remote work is simply not for me and I want to work at a company that doesn't have these drawbacks. I want to come into work, have my desk and know who I will meet there every day.
I just hope that there will be companies that are fully onsite and proud of it. Now they are getting shamed for it even when there are people like me who wants to a work at such a company.
The key is "and talk to your coworkers" though. Video calls just don't do it for me.
Recently I tried to see how those tradeoffs stack up against each other. I had an insight. A lot of what I missed about working from the office had nothing to do with working from the office. It had a lot to do with me being younger, without so many family commitments, and a lot of free time and flexibility. Concretely, in my 20's and early 30's, I would have preferred working from an office. But later on, I vastly prefer working from home. The tradeoffs get weighed differently depending on what stage in life I am at.
Jokes, ping pong, lunches, going to the gym, coffee breaks, beers, useless meetings, company parties.
Most of my time in the office wasn't productive but I was sure happier about the company.
Working remote it's easier not to give a crap about your employer. Still, at least you have time to get stuff done without anyone bothering you and then have some extra free time.
Personally, I like the freedom of choosing every day and I have bursts of office weeks when I feel social and burts of home office weeks when I feel anti-social. I have colleagues who haven't seen the office since February 2020, others come in every single day... it varies a lot.
A third data point: Every other office our company has is now open, and employees have to (or are strongly encouraged to cough cough) return.
If Elon thinks great products can be shipped only from the office, it's fine. We continue to ship "subpar" stuff from wherever. Our products are still useful to a lot of people, get the job done and is profitable and making lots of money.
Modern tech and knowledge work seems like it would happen in a hybrid of office and home (or wherever).
The FAANGs have spent millions of dollars building or leasing their current offices, it's not hard to see the Finance/Accounting folks escalating that those investments should to be utilized. (Not saying that it's a primary driver here - but surely it's a factor.)
IMO certain professions may be ok with remote but for the most part, the kind of work Tesla does, remote work is suboptimal.
We are going to see a bifurcation of companies that adopt either strategies. Time will tell.
What's _the kind of work Tesla does_? Sure, remote assembly may be suboptimal. What about software development? Operations? Etc.
You don't need face to face all the time. But sure, be a dick and give a one week deadline for people to adjust again and see how it goes.
I am having trouble thinking of a job that requires a minimum of 40 hours in the office plus untold many hours that can be done either remotely or in the office.
If you have an axe to grind about WFH, probably should work as a non-software engineer or talk to someone who does and have a sense that perhaps your view is biased towards a particular type of personality that you may have.
Even amongst software engineers, there is a debate about how well WFH works.
The factory workers are already in the factories. The ones remote are the ones who can do their work remote and the company has only broken records since the pandemic started with remote work.
Elon himself says, you can do remote work, after you’ve been in the office for 40 hours, implying, that remote work is totally possible
You took that seriously? It was clearly a joke.
You could say this about any shitty part of tech work though. Software devs won't be put on 24/7 on-call rotations because they can just quit and work somewhere else. Software devs won't be forced to put together a quick hack because they can just quit and work somewhere else. Software devs won't be forced to work nights and weekends to meet an arbitrary deadline because they can just quit and work somewhere else.
For whatever reason, it doesn't end up being that simple.
A lot of what makes people want to leave companies is the simple nature of working with other people in a for-profit enterprise. That is not going to change by moving to another for-profit enterprise. So those people probably feel pretty stuck regardless of how good the market is.
Personally, when I was consulting I really wanted to want multiple clients at once but I actually found myself most happy with just one.
My guess is yes, the tech industry will largely be back in offices by the end of 2022, for a very simple reason: most of the tech giants have returned to working in-office or announced that they will be returning in the near future. Twitter is the notable exception, but of course if Elon's takeover goes through, they will no longer be. The rest of the tech industry largely copies whatever MANGA does, for better or for worse. Remote jobs and fully-remote companies will still exist, but they will be notable because they're unusual.
I don't think Amazon is entirely back to the office for corporate workers either.
AFAIK Microsoft is one of the few that dove head first into back to office.
I think Apple and Google will follow.
But there are many other companies who found themselves just as productive (if not more so) during covid and are happy to embrace the lower costs associated with not needing so much office space and hiring workers from areas with lower cost of living
Some will feel compelled to move, others much less so.
I cannot see it going back any time soon. The advantages are too numerous.
We still have offices and are encourage to use them like any other resources. They have became hubs where we meet when needed to increase productivity instead of obligatory energy drains. New hubs were recently purchased and customized to our needs. Some even have private cafés and bars in them.
This requires trust from the management team, which we have proved over and over for decades.
If anything, people are working slightly longer hours now. The 2 hours people would use to do commute are no longer existent so a lot of people are willing to throw extra hours.
It's common for people to voluntarily stay in chatrooms while cooking diner and using the time to do teambuilding and also casually talk about work related issues. Similar to how people used to gather in common spaces after work. We even had events where the company would send us ingredients so that we could all cook the same recipes together and enjoy a remote lunch (on paid time).
Some of my coworkers are even living the digital nomad lifestyle where they travel across the world yet work their full time. Meetings where people have a beach or forest behind them are common -- and they are not static image backgrounds.
I do not miss the previous model and would never go back to it willingly.
I cannot imagine the company going back either as they would now need to fire all the new hires who are not close to the offices... and those offices have been converted into hubs with meetings rooms and a small amount of workstations. Even if the entire company wanted to go back tomorrow, there would not be enough workstations.
How is this related to companies ending remote?
(btw this week the UK has a 4-day weekend starting tomorrow)
edit: Also if your company is in manufacturing, typically a 'pause' of operations is a big warning sign that orders are down and layoffs are coming soon.
Can't require masking or the vax but if you want to keep working from home, you're being selfish.
It was fun! I had to fly into SF. We had a nice time.
Came home. Covid positive. Me and my partner. Hooray.
So yeah, I think there is a balance.
I am not one of those "we need to stay inside forever" people. All activity has an inherent risk, and we are not robots that do everything perfectly every day. However, in retrospect I think having us fly in without a working vaccine was reckless.
So I guess my point is that covid is still out there and forcing people to congregate on a regular basis isn't the move yet. People are still getting sick.
For me, it was a very mild sickness. My poor partner is MISERABLE today.
Less money means pressure to lower salaries.
That creates a pressure to hire outside the US, thus remote.
So, given that we understood that remote is possible, the downturn will make remote more likely.
* I think that relatively few companies will return to "back to office = 5d / week"
* I think that many companies will return to "back to office = 1-4 days / week" or "back to office = everyone is in the office for a full work-week every month"
But I think that some amount of essentially 100% remote roles will endure, just as they existed pre-pandemic. If I were guessing 5-15% of the workforce will settle into that state.
Companies are practical. If 5d / week in office means a lot of employee retention issues, and you aren't ok with that, rational actors aren't going to intentionally floor the car off a bridge.
WFH 100% roles don't do innovation and collaboration the same way that happens in person and even flying folks together for planning sessions is subpar for our goal to impact the communities we operate in positively. With a critical mass volunteering for causes the local team cares about, getting involved with schools, setting up internship programs, etc. are all much easier to achieve.
My long-term belief is we'll see a sorting of companies deciding on how they want to operate, then advertising that in recruiting, and finding people who are also passionate about the same. While we go through the changes it will be turbulent for both employee and employer.
But why 2+ days per week? It feels like you're really limiting your pool of candidates when you insist that people come into the office multiple days a week. Why not try an "innovation week" once per quarter to get that work done, and ad-hoc team meetups instead? With the expenses you'd save from ditching the office lease, you could run a lot of social events for employees that serve a similar purpose.
Not trying to criticize or change your mind -- I'm just curious how you came to the conclusion that hybrid is the answer, since it sort of feels like the worst of both worlds to me.
...one of the 2 days teams are all in together, they focus on internal team activities.
...the other of the 2 days team members spread out across the week, they focus on collaboration with other teams.
It does limit our prospective candidates to being in specific geographies or being willing to move to them, the trade-off is we're seeing many people who voluntarily are in more than 2 days per week, they really missed the separation of home/work, the getting to meet and know new people (WFH video/phone/chat is works for getting work done with each other, it isn't great at really getting to build relationships, it happens much more slowly).
This is an area where we're still innovating on overall as a company and we will continue to do so, also what works for us may not work for others, there isn't a global monoculture. One of our [4] core values is, "People First -- We provide an opportunity for people to do meaningful work with people they love to work with", and as we live the value, we find people enjoy being at the office because they enjoy being around their team members.
I'm introverted and used to be bullish on remote work, but I did a mix of remote and in-person collaboration in grad school and observed first-hand that there really is no comparison. Consequently, starting my job during COVID I was skeptical about remote work and was gratified to seemingly find that it at least kind-of worked. Things got done, the ball kept moving...
But now that we have in-person days there's no question. The level of engagement, collaboration, ideas, 'hallway conversations' that crop up is massively higher...to the point that it feels like a waste of time. I'm so distracted from my main focus of making widgets to talk about hypothetical futures that it feels like I'm falling behind my main 'assigned' duties, but already the fruits of this are starting to be born out and we're probably avoiding mishaps and more fully sucking talent out of everyone due to lower barrier of participatory entry.
I understand not everyone feels this way, but I will note that some of our team is still (and will forever be) remote. In mixed meetings they're the same as they ever were, which is to say, mostly silent. The in-person people are much more engaged.
Bottom-line: if your work is well-defined or scoped at the individual or perhaps small-team level, remote might work. If you're pushing boundaries I'm skeptical--not that remote work can't work, but that it works best.
Is it really volunteering then?
I'm not programming to 'get involved with the community'.
We understand this isn't what all folks want and don't mandate involvement.
Previously, remote was basically for people that had been with the company before and left the area, but that we wanted to keep.
The pandemic finally wore down the last bit of resistance to embracing remote fully. We still have our (scaled down) office location, but new hires need not have ever set foot in the area.
Second scenario. The California employee decides to work in Mumbai. Why not? Cost of living is lower and relatives are near. The employer then gets a tax bill because it is "doing business" in India. Or the ED VA. Or anywhere the employee decides to rent an apartment.
These issues have been put aside during the force majeure pandemic {in war and plagues the laws are silent, or at least, temporarily shut up} but a return to normalcy now means there is no more force majeure excuse.
It's almost as if no company ever in existence of the universe has had regional sales employees.
This sounds so American: Insurance and litigation for every little thing.
So to his second point, does the employer get a tax bill because a worker is in a region? The employee might get an income tax bill in the region, and that seems to be the accepted norm. Maybe the company does get a bill.
Companies can easily set policies to only allow work in jurisdictions they have tax and legal infrastructure to handle.
This isn't the same as requiring all your employees to come in the office.
We are all-remote with hundreds of employees as you noted.
You can read more about how things work at GitLab via our handbook and our all-remote guide:
- https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
- https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/
Unknown companies doing remotes will pay more if you're decent at negotiating and selling yourself.
Buffer has better salaries, I may explore that at the next switch.
It'll probably take another 2-3 years before most companies have processes in place that can sustain a mass exodus. In the meantime they're going to allow remote and keep future plans as ambiguous and non-committal as possible...
Tesla makes cars. I think it helps to be as close to the cars as possible if your goal is to put out the best products.
But to be fair I do think that commute should be paid at some rate.
Believe it or not, I don't say that in a spiteful way. I respect that the people who own companies have the right to declare rules for their company. But at the same time, we get to set our own rules for our own lives. If those sets of rules do not match... then do not work there. There is enough variety in this world to find a place that works for you. There might not be enough variety for people like Musk to find all the workers they need.... but that is their problem. I'm just going to find a good place for myself and enjoy my work.