> The announcement about returning to the office came a day after Lyft said in an SEC filing that it would cut 1,072 employees – or 26% of its workforce – and eliminate 250 open positions.
Another company hoping some number of workers would self-select and leave so the company can evade the consequences of firing people to puff up a falling stock value. Anyone want to bet they'll do a buyback in the next couple of quarters?
It’s like they wanted to say it’s just 3 days back. When really it’s 4 as who’s going to wfh Tuesday when they are working at the office on Mondays, weds, Thursday.
Any sources to back up the second statement? It doesn't match up with my experience.
FWIW, I've worked from home since 2020 for a company that is remote friendly. We've had employees that want to work from home but they don't do very much work when they do. Doesn't go for everyone but it's my anecdotal experience.
Some of them were more productive when they worked in an office. I'm 3-4x more productive when I work beside someone.
In discussions about WFH/RTO, people are usually split into two groups: the ones who work well unsupervised and those who want to slack off. There's the third group - the ones that want to work but are unable to do it due to chronic procrastination issues (which are often caused by ADD/ADHD ).
That has everything to with the employees. WFH is just the excuse.
One thing about WFH is that it exposes such employees. In office, it's easy to look busy and blend in. In fact, you just realized this only now and not when they were in office tells all about it.
There are some cases, like ADHD where body doubling actually helps productivity. So I wouldn’t be surprised if in office productivity was higher for those people.
I also think ADHD is significantly more prevalent among software engineers (mostly inattentive type) in my experience. My random guess would be close to 25 percent:)
There is well over $100b in enterprise value in remote first companies. Are they not productive? It seems like they very much are.
Examples (non exhaustive list in no particular order) that came to mind: AirBnB, Allstate Insurance (divested from their Chicago headquarters), Automattic, Dropbox, GitHub, Gitlab, Hashicorp, PagerDuty, Zapier
How much work someone accomplishes is a function of effective management and objective measurement, not where they sit. If you have to sit over someone’s shoulder for the work to get done, you’ve already failed. Your hiring system is optimizing for autonomous folks who can operate in unstructured work ideally. People who don’t want to work can do that equally well from both home or the office.
I bet he actually thinks this is what most of his employees do. Like huddling around a whiteboard connecting boxes with lines or some shit until they all solve the "problem" and then give each other big high fives. Absolute doofus running this company.
I think people who run businesses see this as a purity test of who is “really invested in the company”. But the reality is that your best employees know they can move on and do, and you’re left with the desperate. Terrible strategy for innovation, but maybe ok if your company doesn’t foresee any big changes coming.
To me, Lyft's entire brand is "not as good as Uber, but not as shitty to drivers as Uber". Maybe they've done something else innovative, but their PR is so vapid that I've never noticed. Your "maybe ok if your company doesn't foresee any big changes coming" is exactly what I expect of Lyft.
At this point you can really just give a recipe for this type of article.
- business-brain CEO is flailing
- no better justification than "whiteboards" and "personal connection"
- leadership actually lied when they promised to support remote work
- trying to sell a hybrid setup as "balance" rather than half-assed and distracting
And the totally expected outcome which is of course that everyone ignores it, and a couple months later the CEO has to start counting to 3 in a parental tone for the umpteenth time.
If you have <100 software engineers, I feel that being in the office lets you move super fast - conversations with sales folks, support staff, management, investors, etc in a very fast iteration loop. I've experienced this positive hyper communication mode.
But... when I think about my current job, where there isn't a single team located 100% in the same office... and certainly not along with most of the people they work with as well... it seems all for show.
These execs seem unable to either admit they haven't thought it through, or make the much more radical choice that imo would pay off - relocating everyone to be in the same location to increase communication bandwidth.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade. I don’t doubt that there are some people who are more productive in the office, but there are also a lot of people who are more productive from home as well. And there’s an undeniable competitive advantage when your company isn’t spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on Bay Area office real estate while your competitors are.
The incumbents have decided that RTO is a top priority, whether because the types of personalities that tend toward leadership positions like being at the office better (and are probably more extroverted if I had to guess), or perhaps RTO is a convenient alternative to layoffs. Whatever the reason, there are hundreds of new startups that began as remote companies during the pandemic and will continue working that way with remote work ingrained into the culture from the beginning, and I am very curious to see if there is any noteworthy difference in success outcomes based on this factor a few years from now.
My personal guess is that in the short-term remote work will start to disappear, but in the long-term it will make a strong and permanent comeback as a lot of these startups begin to displace the previous tech companies that once led the market.
Requiring in-office means both a massive cost for office buildings and losing a large portion of the hiring pool, particularly those that can most afford to be picky (top talent). I don't understand what advantage this gives a company.
> It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade.
The next decade has enough people who know the past & will squabble over what works for them.
The decades after the next 10 years are much more interesting. People who never knew office culture, people who never really have committed to 9-5, people who haven't worked closely with teams, people who haven't been part of water cooler conversations, people who haven't shoulder surfed important technical discovery.
I personally don't see a ton of value in rto for myself. I do a little right now & it's awful & pathetic cargo culting, a failed play acting at an earlier time. But I also don't see how we maintain a useful industry & raise up new people if the level of sharing & connecting stays as abysmally low as where we are at. We are headed for a crash.
Connecting with video calls and shared collaboration workspaces has actually been more collaboration than the usual meeting room. Global company work has been going on with offshore teams online for decades already. So I strongly disagree with you
I personally feel quite lucky & fortunate to have companies that have been quite social. Well over 50% of conversations only happen because of physical immediacy.
One person grumbles or just looks stressed. Someone asks. A conversation starts.
Two people start chatting about some implementation. Someone else overhears & suggests another idea.
Going to lunch and people chat over plans or things they want.
I strongly disagree with you. Meetings are a godforsaken hellish awful replacement for socialization.
Even under an RTO mandate to a sinking ship, people will still go in. Who are are they going to run to? Nobody is hiring and paying the same rates unless your resume say AI.
Screw these in-person bosses. If you didn't have culture before COVID you're not going to magically have it after coming back either. Employee gatherings need to be intentional & not stuffing people on the same floor & hoping to sneak in a conversation or two between back to back team calls with geographically spread out team members ironically
As an employee, if you make a push to change the parameters of your job, how close do you get the definition of being a contractor?
According to the IRS:
"The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done."
RTO really feels like you want miserable people. People who spend an hour or more commuting. People who pay super-high rents just to avoid the commute. People who can't relax because there's no nature...
I moved to the suburbs next to the mountain. Takes me > 1.5h to get to the office, but I never do.
37 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 91.0 ms ] threadAnother company hoping some number of workers would self-select and leave so the company can evade the consequences of firing people to puff up a falling stock value. Anyone want to bet they'll do a buyback in the next couple of quarters?
Employees are more productive when they work from where they likemost
FWIW, I've worked from home since 2020 for a company that is remote friendly. We've had employees that want to work from home but they don't do very much work when they do. Doesn't go for everyone but it's my anecdotal experience.
In discussions about WFH/RTO, people are usually split into two groups: the ones who work well unsupervised and those who want to slack off. There's the third group - the ones that want to work but are unable to do it due to chronic procrastination issues (which are often caused by ADD/ADHD ).
One thing about WFH is that it exposes such employees. In office, it's easy to look busy and blend in. In fact, you just realized this only now and not when they were in office tells all about it.
I also think ADHD is significantly more prevalent among software engineers (mostly inattentive type) in my experience. My random guess would be close to 25 percent:)
Examples (non exhaustive list in no particular order) that came to mind: AirBnB, Allstate Insurance (divested from their Chicago headquarters), Automattic, Dropbox, GitHub, Gitlab, Hashicorp, PagerDuty, Zapier
How much work someone accomplishes is a function of effective management and objective measurement, not where they sit. If you have to sit over someone’s shoulder for the work to get done, you’ve already failed. Your hiring system is optimizing for autonomous folks who can operate in unstructured work ideally. People who don’t want to work can do that equally well from both home or the office.
https://builtin.com/awards/fully-remote/2023/best-places-to-...
(remote for a decade as both IC and leadership of team of ~10, including a tenure at a fully remote org)
Lyft is screwed. Can't imagine how this goes any other way.
- business-brain CEO is flailing
- no better justification than "whiteboards" and "personal connection"
- leadership actually lied when they promised to support remote work
- trying to sell a hybrid setup as "balance" rather than half-assed and distracting
And the totally expected outcome which is of course that everyone ignores it, and a couple months later the CEO has to start counting to 3 in a parental tone for the umpteenth time.
If you have <100 software engineers, I feel that being in the office lets you move super fast - conversations with sales folks, support staff, management, investors, etc in a very fast iteration loop. I've experienced this positive hyper communication mode.
But... when I think about my current job, where there isn't a single team located 100% in the same office... and certainly not along with most of the people they work with as well... it seems all for show.
These execs seem unable to either admit they haven't thought it through, or make the much more radical choice that imo would pay off - relocating everyone to be in the same location to increase communication bandwidth.
The incumbents have decided that RTO is a top priority, whether because the types of personalities that tend toward leadership positions like being at the office better (and are probably more extroverted if I had to guess), or perhaps RTO is a convenient alternative to layoffs. Whatever the reason, there are hundreds of new startups that began as remote companies during the pandemic and will continue working that way with remote work ingrained into the culture from the beginning, and I am very curious to see if there is any noteworthy difference in success outcomes based on this factor a few years from now.
My personal guess is that in the short-term remote work will start to disappear, but in the long-term it will make a strong and permanent comeback as a lot of these startups begin to displace the previous tech companies that once led the market.
The next decade has enough people who know the past & will squabble over what works for them.
The decades after the next 10 years are much more interesting. People who never knew office culture, people who never really have committed to 9-5, people who haven't worked closely with teams, people who haven't been part of water cooler conversations, people who haven't shoulder surfed important technical discovery.
I personally don't see a ton of value in rto for myself. I do a little right now & it's awful & pathetic cargo culting, a failed play acting at an earlier time. But I also don't see how we maintain a useful industry & raise up new people if the level of sharing & connecting stays as abysmally low as where we are at. We are headed for a crash.
One person grumbles or just looks stressed. Someone asks. A conversation starts.
Two people start chatting about some implementation. Someone else overhears & suggests another idea.
Going to lunch and people chat over plans or things they want.
I strongly disagree with you. Meetings are a godforsaken hellish awful replacement for socialization.
As an employee, if you make a push to change the parameters of your job, how close do you get the definition of being a contractor?
According to the IRS: "The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done."
I moved to the suburbs next to the mountain. Takes me > 1.5h to get to the office, but I never do.
I feel so much better...