>Indeed, as reported by The Washington Post, 50% of job applications on LinkedIn last month were for remote work positions, despite the fact that from-home postings made up just 15% of the listings on the site.
This doesn't actually tell us anything nor did the source linked in the article clarify further.
And if you're looking for work, you apply to the in-person jobs near you or near where you'd be willing to live, and you can apply to every single remote job anywhere that looks decent.
This is a bold claim made on a very shaky set of data. Most companies aren't going to explicitly post jobs for remote, just because a lot of talent management platforms don't really support it well. I think the goto is to post the job as available in every location the company has an office, and see what the applicant wants to do.
Of course employers want people to come back. They have millions if not billions of dollars in real estate liabilities that are effectively useless. As an aside, I wonder if there is some clever way to get a tax write off for office space that went unused due to a global pandemic - or writing off an office entirely as a loss.
> I think the goto is to post the job as available in every location the company has an office, and see what the applicant wants to do.
Yep. I started a job early this year and the job posting said it was in person but I'm the only one on my team in my state. My manager just didn't have company approval to post a remote position but the fact that there's an office near me gave her the ability to hire me. Now that I'm employed, it's a fairly easy process to switch to remote if I want. I personally just use the office space like a wework so haven't applied to be remote but it's definitely an option.
> Of course employers want people to come back. They have millions if not billions of dollars in real estate liabilities that are effectively useless.
If employers able to get productive work out of employees who aren't using that real estate, the real problem is getting the real estate costs off their books, not getting the butts back in seats in some arbitrary office location.
I have literally never worked for a non-billion dollar business who owns their real estate and has remote work. Businesses just kinda expect to rent. But also once the national real estate bubble collapses, a lot of people are going to be left "holding the bag"
This logic (we have billions in real estate investments that somehow we need to use. So let's use them by bringing people back to the office) is an example of cost sunk fallacy. The 3 multinationals I worked for are aware of this fallacy. Amazon is another example of company writing-off hundreds of millions right away (FirePhone). All this preamble just to point that there are other things beyond just "we must fill these offices". Probably productivity decreased?
BTW - my current employer (big tech company) also wants to bring everyone back into the office, even though it increased the headcount during the pandemic and there was no campus expansion for 1 and half year due to COVID lockdowns and there is no space for everyone.
It's worse than that. It presumably costs more to operate a building than to mothball it and at least try to sublease it. If there's really no value in filling the building up with people, it's a bit like deciding to drive your car around aimlessly because "I own it so I should use it."
And workers have no choice in the current setup, hence the need for labor regulation to allow for remote work if the work can legitimately be performed remotely. Otherwise, "make my assets worth it plebs." (half joking)
It's not guaranteed that it's a sunk cost fallacy.
I'm going to make up some dumb numbers: suppose people are 5% more productive in the office, but the office has an amortized cost of 10% total compensation. You shouldn't open an office. But say you've purchased an office outright, and maintenance is now only 2% of the cost of total compensation (8% of cost was paid up front). In that case, you would want people in the office.
In the real world, this is more complicated, because you also add in employee preferences as a reason for or against an office, you can't neatly measure productivity, you probably didn't buy the office in cash, you leased it, or borrowed money to buy it...).
Short term yes, long term unclear. I’ve personally experienced something that could be cranked out in a multi day white boarding session stretch out for months of on/off meetings. It’s harder to collaborate remotely.
That is an issue right now at a lot of places. Distributed teams are pretty much stuck with video calls. But you deal with it. Most people aren't going to move cities at their own expense to avoid video calls.
You're probably an extrovert if you experience greater productivity from a whiteboard session than an email conversation.
I used to do this, too; get the whole team together around a whiteboard and sketch a new thing out. Some of the team made very little contribution in the sessions; I always put this down to them not being very quick (they made good contributions later over email). When I took some management training later I learned that this style of collaboration doesn't suit everyone: the "quiet" folks were just extremely uncomfortable sharing their ideas in the public forum of the whiteboard session.
Now I create a slack channel for this, and stretch the process out over a couple of days. I get more input and better ideas this way.
> BTW - my current employer (big tech company) also wants to bring everyone back into the office, even though it increased the headcount during the pandemic and there was no campus expansion for 1 and half year due to COVID lockdowns and there is no space for everyone.
My current company hasn't made such a demand, but I've also heard that in others in this country about 20% of people actually prefer to work in person daily, everyone else seems to work remotely a lot of the time.
Now, I'm probably under a certain sampling bias here, but the few times I recently went into the office, it seemed comparatively empty, unless a team had decided to meet up in person for whatever reason.
I guess not everyone enjoys the commute, especially in pretty cold weather (or just thrives while working remotely for a plethora of reasons).
> My current company hasn't made such a demand, but I've also heard that in others in this country about 20% of people actually prefer to work in person daily, everyone else seems to work remotely.
That 20% probably also expects/demands everyone else show up, because they prefer everyone else to be there, too! :)
If there's an equal distribution of talent/productivity among the remote-demanding group and the on prem-demanding group, and only 20% demand on prem, the smart move is to cut the smaller group loose. They offer a smaller talent pool and most of the highest-performing talent will be in the remote group.
I’m a part of the 20% who enjoys going into the office a few times a week. There are three other folks who show up regularly; the rest rarely — if ever — make an appearance. I’m fine with this arrangement and I don’t see a need to force everyone else back in.
With the the exception of misguided upper management, I suspect most people take a more nuanced view of remote work.
I suspect that most people who would like more coworkers to come back into the office appreciate that they have very little say in the matter and should probably largely keep quiet about their preferences--and perhaps seek out somewhere where things are different if they care.
I suspect many have preferences but not strong enough ones to take imminent action.
Honestly idk if even 50% of that 20% care. Maybe nobody cares! It's all good. :)
My guess was that a lot of the management demanding people to return to the office, are the kinda people that want to be around a lot of people, so they ask everyone to come back so they feel better. That's all.
I don't know where I fit in all this. I went full remote and at my company they don't allow everyone to do that - it's more of an "ask your boss and maybe they'll let you" kinda thing lol.
I'm not even an introvert. At least, I don't consider myself one. I like being around others and chatting and socializing and stuff. I just don't care for the expectation to be there at the same time for many hours every day. My office is big and noisy and there's a ton of people in the room making noise. It is distracting as hell.
It's also not in my favorite place to hang out. It's a kinda boring commercial area on a busy street with no good places to walk or hang out outside the office. IDK. I do visit sometimes.
> That 20% probably also expects/demands everyone else show up, because they prefer everyone else to be there, too! :)
This hasn't been my experience exactly, though I've also participated in the occasional get-together at the office when the team collectively decided to work together in person.
As for the motivations of those who prefer to be at the office, some might have living conditions where the office environment is a more pleasant for work (especially given some family situations), others like to have clear boundaries between a work place and a rest place... whatever those motivations might be, I don't judge.
Though I can see how it would be annoying if someone demanded that everyone fit their preferred way of work. I once talked to someone who was dead set on only doing synchronous communication and rejected the idea of someone being able to respond to their question an hour later or so as acceptable - something like that would definitely cause problems, though that's just a particular mindset to look out for.
Sounds like a pretty toxic environment. Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office.
Consider the pre-pandemic prevalence of "phone booths" and one person conference rooms, so you can be in a meeting as the only local attendee. As far as the other location is considered, you are remote just with access to a bigger coffee maker.
The reality with a lot of teams at many large companies is that meetings of any size will involve people in different offices/fully remote/traveling/etc. Even if I and others nominally assigned to my local office all came in, I'm not sure I'd know a single person on a given day.
I work at a large company based in Seattle and this is exactly my experience. I go into the office maybe once every few weeks and maybe talk to one or two people from my org.
We do coordinate to get together in the office every couple months which is kind of fun but not worth doing on a weekly basis as our team is already distributed across the country and world.
I might have used a different word than toxic. But, in general, it's unrealistic for many teams at many larger companies to expect everyone to be local and physically available for a random meeting. On my team people are scattered all over the US and at least one is in Europe. And that's not at all unusual.
Well ok, but its also quite realistic for many teams and for many careers its the only option. Why are we pretending that in person work isn't still the norm for most people? I'm not sure I understand what point you're making, exactly.
> Its toxic to not want to be on zoom or have to book a meeting room to talk?
Refusing to work with people because of their office situation is toxic behavior.
How would the PM who is in remission from cancer or the engineer with a disabled child supposed to feel when someone says that they prefer to not work with them because they need to stay home?
> Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office
This is just a straight up lie, the speed of communication is literally 50% in real life by my reckoning. The huge vocal delay pauses, the having to focus more to get information out of low bandwidth sound, lack of body language (camera body language doesn't translate the same as in person). That's before we get to "ummmmmm.... errrr..." "Sorry can you repeat that" "oh sorry no you go first" "Oh can you mute your mic please I can hear myself" and videocall bandwidth only allowing 1 person to talk at once with a 2 second barrier either side of each thought from the sound delay and mute dance.
Literally video calls are so broken that you can't do creative discussions in them, if the tech was magnitudes better then maybe but these small delays and lack of presence make it a objectively different beast to working in the same space.
Something the in-person crowd might want to consider is that a lot of interesting roles are going to involve lots of work with people who aren't in the room with you no matter whether you're in office or WFH. If you go in being highly vocal about no remote work, you may not be considered for roles that aren't fully remote but do involve a lot of videoconferencing.
And maybe that's OK with you, but do think about it.
As one of these people, that is explicitly why I don't want to work remotely.
I don't want to spend my life doing Zoom calls. A quick telephone audio call for 5 minutes along the lines of "hey, are you nearly at the store" - sure. A call to avoid literally flying 5000 miles or something - if we have to.
But in general, for actual communication I want to be in the room with someone, and I think that a combination of colocating people and spending an hour or whatever on travel for clients is normally worth it for that. Hybrid office environments are an absolute non starter for me for that reason.
The standard is 200 sqft of office space per employee (this factors in conference rooms, common space, bathrooms, etc). That means best case, you are looking at approximately 300 people per football field of office space.
Colocating functional teams together, and by extension the teams they need to work with, is a great idea but the math just doesn't work out for a company of more than a few hundred employees. At the minimum you are still traveling to other buildings on the same campus to have meetings.
None of us want to spend our life on Zoom. But I'll take a few hours a day of calls to get back 2 hours a day in traffic that I can spend having coffee with my wife and petting my dogs.
Also seeing enough whole companies buing fully into remote, and more and more remote teams happily working together.. and tbh there sure are jobs/people for which this doesn't work out - but then good that there is more for both sides?
For those it works it is not just a lot of saved time, the flexibility to hire anyone anywhere (a lot of people are not ready to move their whole life for a new work) but also just great for environmental impact, imo.
Interesting from a dev perspective - every dev I've spoken to or read about is very against office working, and usually very against meetings (in-person or remote). And the studies have shown that devs are more productive when left alone, and especially when working from home and not put in an open-plan office where we're constantly interrupted.
If this is not shared with the non-engineering staff, then we'll end up with (even more of) a two-stream staffing problem - non-engineers will be social at work hanging out together, engineers will be productive at work being ignored.
And the implied threat of "you're less employable if you want to work remotely" is utterly pointless when applied to engineers. We're employable based on productivity not sociability. Thus it has always been.
This seems a little ridiculous, probably a backlash against shittily-handled hasty retreats to full-remote for the pandemic, from companies and teams that didn't handle it well. Putting aside that my current company is 100% distributed, doesn't have offices, and I'm the only one in the company that lives in my city, so they can't ask us back, I haven't had a job since I managed a bar nearly 20 years ago that didn't involve remote teams.
Even my last fully-classified job, where had to be in office because we could only work from a SCIF, we still had SCIFs in Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and PA and that worked fine. Maybe because we weren't Scrum and there were only 2-3 meetings a week everyone had to go to? Theoretically, software development should be a job that is possible to do in a mostly asynchronous, largely work alone manner. Linux, GNU, and other gigantic open source projects seem to have gotten along fine for decades without needing offices. Even when I was last in the Army working in the 1st CAV HQ at Fort Hood, we had brigade HQs in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, and South Korea and that worked fine. And, of course, when I was at Platoon/Company level, I was a tank commander. Obviously, during maneuvers, you can only communicate with the other tank crews via radio. We managed somehow.
Unless you're sitting within speaking range of every person you work with, you're surely sending them messages via some chat platform or e-mail anyway, aren't you?
>shittily-handled hasty retreats to full-remote for the pandemic
That's more than a bit unfair. From what I've seen a lot of companies that were completely unprepared to switch to remote, handled it a lot better than they thought they could.
Yeah this, but a lot more than three. I’ve seen companies spam so hard it seems like they’re making a new post for every goddamn MSA in the US To cover the remote roles.
None of the engineers I know want to be back in the office, including a lot of folks whom I'd call a "manager." At best, we want to be there 1 or 2 days of the week, or month, or financial quarter. We always knew that we got the short end of the stick with office politics, with petty concerns like how well-dressed we were, or how tall we were, or what elitist culture people think we're from (or not).
The pandemic really showed up how much we were the losers of that whole game because of how it shifted the dynamic so that it really did become about what you did for your team. And the thing about engineering, at least on the software side, is that it's still mostly ground-up and flat. Except for a company here or there that's actually led by a McKinsey consultant, the entire engineering org isn't interested in those games, and that includes our bosses.
Anecdotally this is true for me. I was looking for a new role a few months ago, and a friend recommended me for a position that wasn't posted as remote, but made it clear I needed a remote position. The company is slowly shifting to allow fully remote workers, but hasn't started listed the positions as such. I've been the (hopefully successful) experiment for remote first hiring.
Where’s the evidence you can deliver if it’s never been seen.
Definitely people I trust no matter what their schedule. Definitely people who worked fine before pandemic and people I hired during the pandemic that are close to useless and just pretend to work if they’re not in the office.
I think this is what my current place had in mind when they wrote my contract. They have the option to bring me on site 'if the business needs' it. But they're happy with my work and only ask me to come in for specific meetings, which average one every 8 weeks.
This is not a remote/in-office question, though. You can hire someone who can't perform in-person just as easily as a remote person who can't perform. You still have to actively evaluate the performance of your new employees and ensure they have proper guidance if they need it. The leadership techniques need a bit of refinement, but it can all be done remotely.
It is not. But you do get some information about a person's work ethic from being in person, than you do being at home:
* overhearing organic topics of conversation
* walking by their desk and observing random 'snapshots' of tasks
* observing general work patterns
* observing any red flags of poor work ethic
When someone is remote, you have to explicitly work to gather this information (many don't, and simply wait to judge output at a deadline), rather than the implicit gathering you'd get from being in physical proximity.
It also helps when people are new in their career and/or come from different backgrounds, and don't fully understand productivity expectations. You can easily provide quick feedback, and you can set examples of expected behavior by doing it in front of them.
These are by far the most mediocre metric of productivity.
I've worked remote for my entire career. I nap. I work out of my pajamas. I go out on walks to think. And I delivered a solution for a hedge fund client that couldn't for the life of itself find or hire even moderately competent devs to create the solutions myself and my associates built for them.
You're just defending the "adult kindergarten" thesis of employee productivity.
I absolutely agree with what you're saying. I'm not saying that those things are measures of productivity, or that they're disqualifying. I'm saying, there's part of a holistic understanding of work ethic... (which is a different thing than productivity). If someone is goofing off occasionally, but delivers their work, that's a good thing. Having a healthy amount of goofing off is not only not a problem, it's part of a healthy work environment.
But, over my career I have literally seen egregious instances where someone, habitually, up against a deadline shows up to work late, sits down in their cube, puts on a gaming headset and plays an MMORPG for a few hours, then shows up to the standup and says they need more time to get their work done. These situations are something that even the most Theory Y manager would need to address.
Luckily I now work in workplaces where I have the luxury of hiring people with a track record of success, but in places where many hires might not be aware of commonly accepted workplace expectations, these things do happen. That doesn't mean you should treat everyone like children, as you say, but it does mean you need to be aware of your employee's attitudes and expectations.
>just pretend to work if they’re not in the office.
What makes you think they'd be any different in an office? Have you actually walked around an office before? A Significant portion of people are faffing about for the majority of the day. But in remote there's no need to do kabuki and swap tabs whenever your boss walks by so you look busy.
As I said some used to be productive when we worked in the office for years and now it's extremely obvious to everyone who has to work with them that they don't do anything if they're not visible.
Is it really? I feel like I can easily tell who is easy to replace or who is not in my team.
If you can't tell if you are a special snowflake or not, you can check if your company behaves you like one. Getting promotions, extra RSUs or very high bonuses should be an indicator
Most non-trivial software projects require at least 3 months of onboarding to be fully productive. Hiring takes even in the best of cases about as long.
I would not consider that to be "easily" even for mid-tier devs.
This is like saying "There aren't enough high-paying jobs".
Remote is one property of a job to select for.
You may not value it high enough to compromise on other parameters.
Sure, there aren't enough remote jobs for everyone to have one.
But everyone doesn't want a remote job, just like everyone wants a high-paying job. (Sure, everyone wants money. But they want to work excessive hours, or work in a field they find questionable? Well, maybe high pay isn't always a good trade-off either.)
In my social circle, most of the people complaining about RTO work in big tech. They just want to keep their massive salaries without having to go into the office a set # of times per week. Others just want to GTFO of California but keep the same salary.
There are endless startups that are hiring which are 100% remote, but they aren't handing out 500k comp packages for staff level engineers though. It's a pretty obvious case of wanting your cake and eating it at the same time.
My company is breaking big leases and even in the formerly overcrowded HQ it feels at most half full (or maybe half empty??). I don't think most people come in 5 days a week even if they're RTO (return to office).
I personally think the remote work genie is out of the bottle and it's here to stay! Unless it's a very collaborative phase or (big) hardware related like automotive there will be plenty of remote jobs.
If there is a mismatch then in-person offices will need to offer higher salaries and/or lower their standards to attract in-person workers. (Or put another way, remote positions will be able to attract comparable candidates while offering lower salaries.)
Whether that salary difference is +10% or +90% I would expect it to show up in salary data eventually, and that might be a more accurate indication of the magnitude of the mismatch than job postings.
> Indeed, as reported by The Washington Post, 50% of job applications on LinkedIn last month were for remote work positions, despite the fact that from-home postings made up just 15% of the listings on the site.
Another explanation could be: High-paying tech industry jobs are more likely to offer WFH, and are more competitive than low-paying service-industry jobs. There are more service industry job postings, but more people applying for each tech job posting. Thus, 15% of postings offer WFH, but 50% of applications go to WFH positions. Though true, this is not evidence for the conclusion they're drawing.
Not saying this is the explanation, I'm saying that they're picking out one element of a job posting and drawing conclusions from it.
Tech is indeed something of a bubble from what I can tell. Rush hour traffic looks at least as bad as ever around where I live--though the driver who picked me up at the airport a few weeks ago told me Monday and Friday are appreciably lighter.
Remote work for a lot of people simply does not work. It is not the interaction makes progress but the intensity of interactions makes progress. And for a large number of people remote communication does not give the necessary intensity.
In my opinion very few jobs should be posted as remote but adjusted to remote if that does not hurt productivity.
50% of applications were asking for remote work in one of the positions that offered remote work (15% of the total LinkedIn openings). That's a 3:1 applications to jobs ratio.
So what!?
Saying "there aren't enough remote jobs" makes the assumption of a 1:1 match ratio: 1 job opening will be filled by 1 applicant. But that's never true. Forget about the remote jobs. What's the applications to job openings ratio for the ones that do not offer remote work?
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadThis doesn't actually tell us anything nor did the source linked in the article clarify further.
Of course employers want people to come back. They have millions if not billions of dollars in real estate liabilities that are effectively useless. As an aside, I wonder if there is some clever way to get a tax write off for office space that went unused due to a global pandemic - or writing off an office entirely as a loss.
Yep. I started a job early this year and the job posting said it was in person but I'm the only one on my team in my state. My manager just didn't have company approval to post a remote position but the fact that there's an office near me gave her the ability to hire me. Now that I'm employed, it's a fairly easy process to switch to remote if I want. I personally just use the office space like a wework so haven't applied to be remote but it's definitely an option.
If employers able to get productive work out of employees who aren't using that real estate, the real problem is getting the real estate costs off their books, not getting the butts back in seats in some arbitrary office location.
This is a problem for landlords, not employers.
The UK has a law where workers have the right to request flexible work arrangements, for example: https://www.gov.uk/flexible-working
I'm going to make up some dumb numbers: suppose people are 5% more productive in the office, but the office has an amortized cost of 10% total compensation. You shouldn't open an office. But say you've purchased an office outright, and maintenance is now only 2% of the cost of total compensation (8% of cost was paid up front). In that case, you would want people in the office.
In the real world, this is more complicated, because you also add in employee preferences as a reason for or against an office, you can't neatly measure productivity, you probably didn't buy the office in cash, you leased it, or borrowed money to buy it...).
I used to do this, too; get the whole team together around a whiteboard and sketch a new thing out. Some of the team made very little contribution in the sessions; I always put this down to them not being very quick (they made good contributions later over email). When I took some management training later I learned that this style of collaboration doesn't suit everyone: the "quiet" folks were just extremely uncomfortable sharing their ideas in the public forum of the whiteboard session.
Now I create a slack channel for this, and stretch the process out over a couple of days. I get more input and better ideas this way.
My current company hasn't made such a demand, but I've also heard that in others in this country about 20% of people actually prefer to work in person daily, everyone else seems to work remotely a lot of the time.
Now, I'm probably under a certain sampling bias here, but the few times I recently went into the office, it seemed comparatively empty, unless a team had decided to meet up in person for whatever reason.
I guess not everyone enjoys the commute, especially in pretty cold weather (or just thrives while working remotely for a plethora of reasons).
That 20% probably also expects/demands everyone else show up, because they prefer everyone else to be there, too! :)
I’m a part of the 20% who enjoys going into the office a few times a week. There are three other folks who show up regularly; the rest rarely — if ever — make an appearance. I’m fine with this arrangement and I don’t see a need to force everyone else back in.
With the the exception of misguided upper management, I suspect most people take a more nuanced view of remote work.
I suspect many have preferences but not strong enough ones to take imminent action.
My guess was that a lot of the management demanding people to return to the office, are the kinda people that want to be around a lot of people, so they ask everyone to come back so they feel better. That's all.
I don't know where I fit in all this. I went full remote and at my company they don't allow everyone to do that - it's more of an "ask your boss and maybe they'll let you" kinda thing lol.
I'm not even an introvert. At least, I don't consider myself one. I like being around others and chatting and socializing and stuff. I just don't care for the expectation to be there at the same time for many hours every day. My office is big and noisy and there's a ton of people in the room making noise. It is distracting as hell.
It's also not in my favorite place to hang out. It's a kinda boring commercial area on a busy street with no good places to walk or hang out outside the office. IDK. I do visit sometimes.
This hasn't been my experience exactly, though I've also participated in the occasional get-together at the office when the team collectively decided to work together in person.
As for the motivations of those who prefer to be at the office, some might have living conditions where the office environment is a more pleasant for work (especially given some family situations), others like to have clear boundaries between a work place and a rest place... whatever those motivations might be, I don't judge.
Though I can see how it would be annoying if someone demanded that everyone fit their preferred way of work. I once talked to someone who was dead set on only doing synchronous communication and rejected the idea of someone being able to respond to their question an hour later or so as acceptable - something like that would definitely cause problems, though that's just a particular mindset to look out for.
The rest of us judge. That's part of being human and trying to understand situations. (Judge strongly but lightly?)
I only mention this because that comment seemed a bit like shaming for using judgement.
Something the remote crowd might not realize is happening.
Consider the pre-pandemic prevalence of "phone booths" and one person conference rooms, so you can be in a meeting as the only local attendee. As far as the other location is considered, you are remote just with access to a bigger coffee maker.
True, but it's possible that a company had nearly 100% co-located teams prior to COVID.
>no different than working with someone in another office
Given the choice, they'd likely prefer someone local in this case as well.
Refusing to work with people because of their office situation is toxic behavior.
How would the PM who is in remission from cancer or the engineer with a disabled child supposed to feel when someone says that they prefer to not work with them because they need to stay home?
This is just a straight up lie, the speed of communication is literally 50% in real life by my reckoning. The huge vocal delay pauses, the having to focus more to get information out of low bandwidth sound, lack of body language (camera body language doesn't translate the same as in person). That's before we get to "ummmmmm.... errrr..." "Sorry can you repeat that" "oh sorry no you go first" "Oh can you mute your mic please I can hear myself" and videocall bandwidth only allowing 1 person to talk at once with a 2 second barrier either side of each thought from the sound delay and mute dance.
Literally video calls are so broken that you can't do creative discussions in them, if the tech was magnitudes better then maybe but these small delays and lack of presence make it a objectively different beast to working in the same space.
Something the in-person crowd might want to consider is that a lot of interesting roles are going to involve lots of work with people who aren't in the room with you no matter whether you're in office or WFH. If you go in being highly vocal about no remote work, you may not be considered for roles that aren't fully remote but do involve a lot of videoconferencing.
And maybe that's OK with you, but do think about it.
I don't want to spend my life doing Zoom calls. A quick telephone audio call for 5 minutes along the lines of "hey, are you nearly at the store" - sure. A call to avoid literally flying 5000 miles or something - if we have to.
But in general, for actual communication I want to be in the room with someone, and I think that a combination of colocating people and spending an hour or whatever on travel for clients is normally worth it for that. Hybrid office environments are an absolute non starter for me for that reason.
Colocating functional teams together, and by extension the teams they need to work with, is a great idea but the math just doesn't work out for a company of more than a few hundred employees. At the minimum you are still traveling to other buildings on the same campus to have meetings.
None of us want to spend our life on Zoom. But I'll take a few hours a day of calls to get back 2 hours a day in traffic that I can spend having coffee with my wife and petting my dogs.
One has free form ideation and camaraderie the other is people sitting in silos in a chatroom
Not ironclad, a place could be implementing it decently, but they'd have to do some convincing. (Being remote pre-pandemic would help.)
Also seeing enough whole companies buing fully into remote, and more and more remote teams happily working together.. and tbh there sure are jobs/people for which this doesn't work out - but then good that there is more for both sides?
For those it works it is not just a lot of saved time, the flexibility to hire anyone anywhere (a lot of people are not ready to move their whole life for a new work) but also just great for environmental impact, imo.
If this is not shared with the non-engineering staff, then we'll end up with (even more of) a two-stream staffing problem - non-engineers will be social at work hanging out together, engineers will be productive at work being ignored.
And the implied threat of "you're less employable if you want to work remotely" is utterly pointless when applied to engineers. We're employable based on productivity not sociability. Thus it has always been.
Even my last fully-classified job, where had to be in office because we could only work from a SCIF, we still had SCIFs in Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and PA and that worked fine. Maybe because we weren't Scrum and there were only 2-3 meetings a week everyone had to go to? Theoretically, software development should be a job that is possible to do in a mostly asynchronous, largely work alone manner. Linux, GNU, and other gigantic open source projects seem to have gotten along fine for decades without needing offices. Even when I was last in the Army working in the 1st CAV HQ at Fort Hood, we had brigade HQs in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, and South Korea and that worked fine. And, of course, when I was at Platoon/Company level, I was a tank commander. Obviously, during maneuvers, you can only communicate with the other tank crews via radio. We managed somehow.
Unless you're sitting within speaking range of every person you work with, you're surely sending them messages via some chat platform or e-mail anyway, aren't you?
That's more than a bit unfair. From what I've seen a lot of companies that were completely unprepared to switch to remote, handled it a lot better than they thought they could.
Yes, and now, let's define "employers."
None of the engineers I know want to be back in the office, including a lot of folks whom I'd call a "manager." At best, we want to be there 1 or 2 days of the week, or month, or financial quarter. We always knew that we got the short end of the stick with office politics, with petty concerns like how well-dressed we were, or how tall we were, or what elitist culture people think we're from (or not).
The pandemic really showed up how much we were the losers of that whole game because of how it shifted the dynamic so that it really did become about what you did for your team. And the thing about engineering, at least on the software side, is that it's still mostly ground-up and flat. Except for a company here or there that's actually led by a McKinsey consultant, the entire engineering org isn't interested in those games, and that includes our bosses.
No wonder I never find many jobs in "Remote, OR!"
For real though if you aren’t aware- it’s a social media platform for work(ing ‘professionals’).
Seriously musha68k, steer clear - Facebook but with even weirder content
A lot of things like 'I ignored my family for work' with applauding
Definitely people I trust no matter what their schedule. Definitely people who worked fine before pandemic and people I hired during the pandemic that are close to useless and just pretend to work if they’re not in the office.
Someone sitting at a desk is not evidence of productivity.
* overhearing organic topics of conversation
* walking by their desk and observing random 'snapshots' of tasks
* observing general work patterns
* observing any red flags of poor work ethic
When someone is remote, you have to explicitly work to gather this information (many don't, and simply wait to judge output at a deadline), rather than the implicit gathering you'd get from being in physical proximity.
It also helps when people are new in their career and/or come from different backgrounds, and don't fully understand productivity expectations. You can easily provide quick feedback, and you can set examples of expected behavior by doing it in front of them.
I've worked remote for my entire career. I nap. I work out of my pajamas. I go out on walks to think. And I delivered a solution for a hedge fund client that couldn't for the life of itself find or hire even moderately competent devs to create the solutions myself and my associates built for them.
You're just defending the "adult kindergarten" thesis of employee productivity.
But, over my career I have literally seen egregious instances where someone, habitually, up against a deadline shows up to work late, sits down in their cube, puts on a gaming headset and plays an MMORPG for a few hours, then shows up to the standup and says they need more time to get their work done. These situations are something that even the most Theory Y manager would need to address.
Luckily I now work in workplaces where I have the luxury of hiring people with a track record of success, but in places where many hires might not be aware of commonly accepted workplace expectations, these things do happen. That doesn't mean you should treat everyone like children, as you say, but it does mean you need to be aware of your employee's attitudes and expectations.
What makes you think they'd be any different in an office? Have you actually walked around an office before? A Significant portion of people are faffing about for the majority of the day. But in remote there's no need to do kabuki and swap tabs whenever your boss walks by so you look busy.
For me return to office would be 60% pay cut. Good luck finding another developer :)
If you can't tell if you are a special snowflake or not, you can check if your company behaves you like one. Getting promotions, extra RSUs or very high bonuses should be an indicator
I would not consider that to be "easily" even for mid-tier devs.
Everywhere I went companies had bold plans regarding hiring, but somehow never managed to realise them.
Remote is one property of a job to select for.
You may not value it high enough to compromise on other parameters.
Sure, there aren't enough remote jobs for everyone to have one.
But everyone doesn't want a remote job, just like everyone wants a high-paying job. (Sure, everyone wants money. But they want to work excessive hours, or work in a field they find questionable? Well, maybe high pay isn't always a good trade-off either.)
There are endless startups that are hiring which are 100% remote, but they aren't handing out 500k comp packages for staff level engineers though. It's a pretty obvious case of wanting your cake and eating it at the same time.
I personally think the remote work genie is out of the bottle and it's here to stay! Unless it's a very collaborative phase or (big) hardware related like automotive there will be plenty of remote jobs.
Whether that salary difference is +10% or +90% I would expect it to show up in salary data eventually, and that might be a more accurate indication of the magnitude of the mismatch than job postings.
Another explanation could be: High-paying tech industry jobs are more likely to offer WFH, and are more competitive than low-paying service-industry jobs. There are more service industry job postings, but more people applying for each tech job posting. Thus, 15% of postings offer WFH, but 50% of applications go to WFH positions. Though true, this is not evidence for the conclusion they're drawing.
Not saying this is the explanation, I'm saying that they're picking out one element of a job posting and drawing conclusions from it.
In my opinion very few jobs should be posted as remote but adjusted to remote if that does not hurt productivity.
50% of applications were asking for remote work in one of the positions that offered remote work (15% of the total LinkedIn openings). That's a 3:1 applications to jobs ratio.
So what!?
Saying "there aren't enough remote jobs" makes the assumption of a 1:1 match ratio: 1 job opening will be filled by 1 applicant. But that's never true. Forget about the remote jobs. What's the applications to job openings ratio for the ones that do not offer remote work?