Ask HN: Are you going to quit?
September looks to be crunch time for (some, mostly big) tech companies looking to get people back to the office. Apple being the most notable to lay out the demand.
So... those of you working at companies demadning a return-to-office... are you going to quit?
105 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadLiving your life in a 12ft radius of your bed ain't great lol.
With respect, the question was what about I am going to do.
(I typically don't officially track work hours anyway (only informally for myself to keep track of my work/life balance), and just worry that I get my week's worth of work done. So I wouldn't even know how to do any extracurricular activity 'on company time'.)
I much prefer the lifestyle out here to living in cities, so as long as a large number of companies are sticking with remote work, I should be good. Companies like Apple that invested in massive new campuses in recent years understandably have an incentive to get people in them.
I don't understand it. It's a sunk cost, getting people there will just increase the costs and make many unhappy.
I thought the level of intelligence on HN was higher than this.
It's easy for them to lash out against an outgroup. I wouldn't take it personally.
That and the fact that we're still in the covid pandemic (though I'm rooting for the univeral vaccine) and monkeypox looks to be getting worse.
My worst case-scenario would be something like:
- back to school, covid and/or monkeypox cases silently spreading - September "come back to office or be fired" mandate brings people back to office - covid and/or monkeypox spread from back to school merges with back to office
The setup won't be as ideal for a remote worker as it could be. The dev environments will assume you are in the office physically, and not be quite as good otherwise. You might need to remote desktop or VPN, so any internet downtime (or even just shit latency) and you are off work.
Also culturally ... it will be an office based company still. Whether it be silly jokes about being the one working from home full time, for example, or needing to feel like you have to be there for your career. It can come through in subtle ways. Also things like regular synchronous meetings will prevail.
What's "snowflaky" about not wanting to waste your personal time commuting?
Until companies are paying for commute time and transportation costs, they can kiss my ass about returning to an office. It's always been bullshit, now it's just more obvious that its also unnecessary.
So if you want me in the office you better pay me for the extra time and cost.
I have a WeWork office, which I pay for with my own money. The change of scenery is nice, and I like commuting farther than 10 steps again, but what I really miss is being in one building with all my teammates. I cannot replicate that with a WeWork. I feel like I don't even know anyone in my company hired after March 2020.
Video call them? Work on something together?
Why are you being a "snowflake" and judging people on some personal decisions which doesn't affect you at all?
By the way, I really don't like that word ("snowflake" to mean too-sensitive, fragile) and you could as well say that people are making a big deal out of it, and with that you are just judging individual actions, and not labeling people.
This is the sort of toxic colleague people are choosing to avoid at the office.
That being said, a bunch of Apple and Googlers who get freaking bused to work for free, with wifi, complaining that they now need to work from home permanently instead of the beautiful campuses they built look like "snowflakes", yes. Not everyone.
Flexibility is important. My own team has flexibility to make decisions which best help them, however there is none-the-less a reasonable expectation to come into the office once or twice a week. It helps with collaboration, and they're freaking 20 miles away at most.
The critical part of the pandemic is done, I can't believe that's the excuse. It's more convenience at this point. I'm not saying that out of a heavy hand, but that's the reality as I see it.
Face-to-face working is a privilege. Why are people treating it like it's a punishment?
However I’m moving to the Bay Area to fulfill my dream of living (hopefully someday in the future thrive lol) in the tech hotbed
Think really hard about switching jobs now. If you do, have liquid reserves to fall back on(cash or cash equivalents, T-Bills, not stocks), and pick a company with good cash flow.
I understand folks who have ridden out the last two recessions and will tell you you'll be fine, and you probably will be, but don't be hasty right now. A lot of big companies are going to be under growth pressures in the next few quarters and one easy way to cut expenses is to fire people.
If you quit you don't get EI, you don't get any kind of payoff from the company, and it looks worse than "I was let go due to company downsizing" when interviewing.
I knew a guy at Apple that was given 60 days to find a new job or move to LA or be terminated. He found a job in another team just as his 60 days was running out.
It's good in theory, but in practice you can't count on that money, and you must find another job ASAP to feed your family.
I found a better job and I will quit because it's way faster for me to get out of my current company's mess.
You (nor anyone else) can forecast neither recessions nor 'stock bubbles'.
Otherwise they'd have already made a fortune in the financial markets.
Of course, a recession is always possible.
Recessions just aren’t well defined, and you’re not going to know for sure if you’re in one/were in one until months or even years after it started because you need to collect a whole lot of data on the economy. But you do start getting early signs. It doesn’t have to come all at once in a huge market crash. That is actually pretty rare. It’s totally possible for an economy to slowly wither and then falter.
Both China and Europe are in trouble. Europe’s energy shock could be painful, but it has the potential to be short lived. China’s property market looks like a real mess, and could have huge political consequences that extend beyond its borders.
You seem to suggest that financial markets are decoupled from the economy?
To be precise: my thesis is that you can not forecast recessions better than the market consensus. And not just in stocks:
For example, If you can forecast that industrial activity will be slowing, you can make a lot of money in commodities futures markets.
If you can forecast an increase in defaults, you can make a lot of money trading credit-default-swaps.
Slightly less finance-y: if it was easy to forecast recessions, wouldn't you expect to see that reflected in business inventories?
In general, if forecasting a recession was easy enough that you and me can do it, you'd expect businesses in general to anticipate the coming recession, and that anticipation would look exactly like a recession. Thus making the forecast a now-cast.
In my current job, I have that flexibility and that is worth at least a couple of 10 thousand euros per year to me (well if the inflation can't be controlled for some more time then maybe not).
Luckily I live 15 minutes door-to-door on the bus away so I’ve been going in for not even a full day once per week. I do now think it’s nice to see people, but really that’s all I’m going in for, I find I am far more comfortable and therefore work better at home.
Don’t see myself ever working in an office again, and I look back on the days where I would actually take two flights a week to go and work in other people’s offices with amazement that I actually put up with it
For working my home office is far superior.. less disruptions, better ergonomics, no commute. The only thing that I think is really better in person are whiteboard sessions. Sure you can do it online via whatever collaborative tool but it is not the same.
If they start to insist I move to one of the cities they have an office in, I will refuse and they can terminate me if they want.
I'm not doing it.
If they open an office in town, I'll consider going in once a month or so
Commuting sucks, paying for parking sucks, shared kitchens suck, open floor plans suck, office politics suck, being at the whim of people "just dropping by your desk to ask a quick question" sucks. Getting sick all the time when people don't stay home and they spread it around the office sucks. No seriously, I haven't had a cold or flu since the pandemic started, I love not getting sick every flu season.
What is good about offices? Why do you like them?
I can understand the not getting sick part, but I guess I never really suffered from colds that often. (Though I know some people who get them four times a year -- if this is you, I sympathize)
I know this website has a selection bias for introverts but surely I cannot be the only human who feels this way. The worst part is that anyone who wants WFH can have it, but I cannot have what I need. I pay for a WeWork just to get me out of the house, but that's basically nothing more than an expensive home office. My job is still 100% slack and zoom with everyone else in their bedrooms. WFH makes me depressed.
As people are discussing if they should quit over having to come to the office, you can also think about quitting because you don't have an office to go to?
There are many companies which have offices you and people with similar preferences as yours can go to. Do you mean you want your colleagues also having to come to the office even if they don't want to?
I don't want to "force" you to do anything. I would like to find a workplace where I can thrive.
Some employers are mandating back to office, so this option is being taken away. Those that prefer to WFH are not able to have what they need/want.
I'm always curious why those who like to work in the office are opposed to letting employees choose what they wish to do.
>>My job is still 100% slack and zoom with everyone else in their bedrooms. WFH makes me depressed.
I feel that most WFH proponents are in the minority, or on the spectrum of wanting to have the option to go in sometimes. So hopefully you won't be 100% on Slack/Zoom if employees are given the choice.
I think it's because they know that a lot of their coworkers will choose not to come into the office anymore, so the office will feel empty and that will make them feel lonely and sad.
That was probably true during the pandemic, but anecdotal conversations I've had with non-tech colleagues and friends surprised me by echoing what many in this thread are saying: that they'd like the option to go into the office on certain days, but not necessarily 100% either way.
It feels like the true minorities are those that that are 100% in either direction, except that there seems to be a higher percentage of leadership teams in the 100% minority.
This really makes it sound like you think other people should be forced back to offices so that you can get what you "need"
Office work shouldn't be your substitute for a social life.
Someone who prefers WFH can do this.
The last two years of the pandemic is a huge outlier where remote work has been the norm. Most workplaces before the pandemic were full time in-office and it seems there's a huge push starting to get everyone back in offices across a lot of industries now.
Many companies might wind up settling on a hybrid approach, but I can almost guarantee you that will lean more towards office than remote.
I'm sorry that the forced remote has been hard for you, but get over it. Society is still built by extroverts for extroverts. You will be able to get those jobs a lot more easily going forward than I will be able to find fully remote jobs, I guarantee it.
You can not seriously suggest that people who can do (and have done the last 2 years) their job remotely and want to keep doing that, come to the office to satisfy these... desires?
Why not get a job that gives that to you, naturally like a sales person or bartender or something.
Which implies you want "me" back in the office to satisfy your social desires and NOT because of improved productivity.
You can have what you need, just not with me / your colleagues. But you seem not to want an alternative solution.
Be better.
If anything, being back in the office would be welcome for me. Sure, commute is a bit inefficient, but a lot of time is wasted when no one goes to the office ever.
Three times a week seems like a good balance to me.
Anecdotally Ive continued to receive a similar amount of recruiter emails as I did before the market downturn a few months ago. So my current thinking is that tech layoffs are companies force purging to please the Wall Street gods while demand continues to stay stratospherically high for technology.
I will quit in a few days due to a combination of various factors. I found out, way too late in my professional life, that I was exploited by all the companies I worked for. My salary being too low, and the ridiculous number of days working from home are important factors but it's not limited to this.
An old friend called me recently and offered me a job at his company. I thought about it for a few days, talked to my wife about it, and accepted an interview. That's where I discovered that I was being "exploited."
I will have interesting tasks, I'll work on modern C++ again which is good since I have been lazy about it and didn't improve for those past few years, I will have up to 4 days of WFH per week if I want, and I managed to get a 40% salary increase (yes, 40%).
My current employer refused all my demands: salary, WFH, support from the managers, budget, ... I will get most of that elsewhere. I will miss my colleagues who are very competent, but I will NOT miss the management and the crazy answers from the HR department. They will freak out though when I send my resignation letter as I became a central point across all the teams, but it's their loss.
End of the rant!
I'm in a fairly odd situation, however. Prior to lockdown I was already WFH. Oddities are coming...
After the lockdown started we went through at least two leadership changes. Now I'll [eventually] have to self report by 'filing a request' to make the WFH status official.
It doesn't sound like it's something likely to be denied, but rather something I'll regret later.
I'm now having to basically have this same negotiation again six years later.
If I have to do that, I may as well do it for more money. I don't recognize my role [or team] anyway after going through the tumbler
As with most situations of this nature, it's infinitely easier to make this decision if you already have a decently competitive job offer in-hand.