I didn’t say “count for everything” and I’m not talking about running an HR department. The WSJ article posted here moments ago is really the first article ve seen posted here that isn’t just some CEO’s think piece on remote work and how it’s really bad for junior employees oh no! Let junior employees decide what they prefer.
It wouldn’t be hard to simply put your money where your mouth is and pay differently for in person if it’s so much better and fire people remote if they don’t produce. If they do, there’s something else going on, but it’s not employee welfare or productivity in most cases.
No one wants to point out the super obvious elephant in the room: remote work works worse and worse over time because more and more people realise they can scam their employers. Too many people work for 3-4 full time employers at once (and many solved all their money issues and even saved for retirement in these short 3 years, this way, without changing the nature of work they do).
There are only two reasons why employees may like remote work. "You can slack off easier because the boss isn't looking", and "you can make 3-4x more money". These go hand in hand because as productivity falls so do the expectations and one who doesn't want to make more by scamming, can simply slack off more and get away with it easily.
at scale, all endevours between people invite this kind of risk. Shops routinely have to deal with 1-5% lossage of stock for reasons that might be customers or staff, or both. Some employers wind up doing a-social things like videoing staff and intrusive body searches (Amazon, South African gold mines) and others reward their staff so the motivation to petty fraud is less than the benefits of being well paid.
You write as if this "elephant" is "it" for all time, for all remote workers. It's not, because there has been (and will continue to be) a cohort of remote workers from before Covid, who realise there is a cost/benefit here, and who do not commit fraud, they just work from home at the intensity they work and their employer is just fine with that
Sure, sending everyone home, and then wanting them to come back highlighted that people who aren't self selected up front to WFH include a cohort who cheat. So what? They probably cheat in other ways at their desk.
SOME remote work works worse and worse over time because SOME people realise they can scam their employers. But, what % it is, against overall work-life rebalancing, value for money, increased work time because of not spending time commuting, reduction in other costs (ok, dealing with sunk cost in the office is an issue) .. It's nothing like as elephant-in-the-room as you think it is.
No, one of the elephants in the room is that a fucktonne of Management KPI are built around offices, and the people who demand return to office want to return to achieving those KPI. And, a fucktonne of corporate future profit and tax offset is predicated on property retaining its value and those office blocks are dropping like stones in a deep pond: Thats why Google and Salesforce both unloaded huge property investments (rental or lease) recently.
Managers and CEOs and Boards want return to office because they have "REI-ified" beliefs around the nature of work and the value of office work, and they have set deliverables which will make them personally wealthy by achieving this.
Its not dissimmilar to the mass firings: there was no across the board need to shed 10% of staff. It was a KPI which benefited a cohort of managers and CEOs. Thats all (in my opinion)
Workers and Bosses are always in tension. The factory model was designed to increase production at the expense of craft work done in the home by weavers and spinners. Was the "product" better? For some things yes, but for others no: it was about profit extraction, Taylorism, and hourly rates.
This is simply assigning remote work an outcome that happens all the time in office, and I think more often because in person there are fewer discussions about explicit deliverables or milestones.
Well, in the office most people can slack off, but can't work for two employers at once, or more - that will surface way too quickly. So an additional incentive is added.
If management cannot tell the difference between the output of one person doing the job, that's the fault of remote work? I disagree with that assertion.
If the outputs are all that are asked of the job are being met, why do they care? If it's about committed energy and time spent working, why waste the time and energy of of all workers with a required commute to prevent a vanishingly small number of cases of double-booking. It just seems like banning remote work with a bizarre justification for bad management.
Having worked over 25 years in offices, I can assure you: being in an office was never a means to prevent people slacking off to extreme degrees. We had plenty of dead weight that contributed nothing even when we were all sitting in our silly little cubes or open office plan dystopia.
I also think you vastly over estimate the number of people who are willing to commit fraud to make more money.
Do you commute to an office every day, sit at a desk in a 4 person shared cubicle, have monthly "performance reviews" by someone unqualified to manage your subject area, have to deal with 3 children's weekly scheduled school-caused sickness, own an old car and only 1 so it is out of service when it needs repair?
I worked from home for years ... scratch that, I "lived at work" while at home for years. If you believe that getting your work done on time only during 9-5 then you've never had to deal with after-hours emails demanding results by the next morning.
Take a job that requires a 1-hour "10 minute standup" every morning at 8:30am so it "doesn't impact the work day". Take a job that needs at least a week to complete with no external progress (e.g. programming) and listen to the constant requirement for "progress updates". Note how there is a built-in assumption that because you're home you're slacking.
Fight through heavy snow or rain, struggle to find a parking space, find out there is no coffee in the break room, that only 1 of 3 toilets are working, that the internet connection is down, and your other 3 cube-mates are all loudly sick of something "going around in the office".
Sure. Go ahead. Assume the worst of your employees. Like children, make sure you can see them at all times.
We have to face realities. It's obvious that companies have found that working from home negatively affects productivity. Companies are all about saving money and maximizing productivity. If working from home had been at an even level, or even a bit less, to working from the office then they would had chosen it over having people go into the office since maintaining an office, and all that goes with it, is very expensive.
Yes, some of us tried hard to make it work but like always there was a minority that probably did not and now we all have to pay for it.
At this point, the best we can hope for is a hybrid work schedule. It's not what we want or wish for but, if we are lucky, it's what we can get.
> It's obvious that companies have found that working from home negatively affects productivity. Companies are all about saving money and maximizing productivity. If working from home had been at an even level, or even a bit less, to working from the office then they would had chosen it over having people go into the office since maintaining an office, and all that goes with it, is very expensive.
Or middle management forces this on everyone so they can keep pretending they're useful, while most of middle management is absolutely useless. Most managers are there to ask something one person and forward the answer to another person, or gather multiple ones to sum them up in a single sentence. That's literally the job. People who have actual business influence sit at 'the top', people who have technical influence sit near 'the bottom', most people in between are just... there. I know, I worked with middle management heavily in my last corporate gig, those people usually barely even know what we do, they are incapable of making any decision without 'running it through upper management', most of them are not even trained properly to resolve interpersonal issues or work with people in general. Going to the office just so you can sit in your cubicle or on a random desk in the open space and spend whole day on calls with other people is just... pointless.
> It's not what we want or wish for but, if we are lucky, it's what we can get.
This sentence reads like corporate management is your overlord and you're happy if they let you do something. Working in IT you're privileged enough to be able to actually choose who you work for, thinking you're 'lucky' because you can work 2 days from home, is kind of... sad really.
By realities, do you mean middle management neuroses driven anecdotes, or actually statistics and study? Because the latter shows that it's more productive to wfh
Your list of first-world grievances also describes: healthcare workers, literally anyone in the trades, grocery store employees, retail, etc. At some point tech employees have convinced themselves that they are likewise "essential" employees and deserving of special exceptions. But the fact of the matter is most tech jobs, apps, etc. could go away tomorrow and life would continue unabated (in contrast to the list above). Sure, with mild inconveniences, but society will find a way. It also proves how easily replaceable you are by employees in developing countries who are glad to show up in person to the office (for 1/6th the pay).
Also, who doesn't bring their own coffee from home vs. drinking the three-day-old moldy diarrhea at the office?
My old offices had two espresso machines and a drip machine, all cleaned on a bi weekly cadence by professionals. Fresh coffee arrived from a local roasters every Monday morning. Seven different varieties of milk are provided for the frother. Much better than my home setup... And yet here I am, still working from home.
I hope this serves as an example of why tethering your understanding of working needs to your extremely limited experience - as it is for all of us - makes your argument a bunch of weak anecdotes that add little to the debate.
Talking of limited experience - you think that the tech industry can disappear overnight and life will just "continue unabated"? Yikes.
"We can always go back to the stone ages", sure, sure we can.
The biggest loss from homeworking is the learning element for newer or more junior staff. Many of the learn the job by watching, listening or being shown in person. You can still do it remotely but it's way more difficult. The benefits of bouncing ideas off one another is also gone, that can affect creativity. Talking to each other, arguin, breaking down ideas or processes, drawing quick diagrams or knocking up a prototype. Most of that spontaneity is gone and for a company that tells on innovation it's a huge loss. The other important thing lost is the personal development of the employee. The social interaction with others. Having to deal with people and learning, changing adapting any really be done online. If you're an introvert, WFH is perfect for you and you'll never change.
Clearly there are benefits, especially for people with families,or a long commute. Hiring is also made easier.
I don't think a blanket return to work is what's needed, a more targeted appropriate one might be though, identify who's presence is required and pay them commensurately to be in the office. Working from home gets you less but you get the flexibility.
I agree with your first part. Your proposed solution, I disagree with.
>I don't think a blanket return to work is what's needed, a more targeted appropriate one might be though, identify who's presence is required and pay them commensurately to be in the office. Working from home gets you less but you get the flexibility.
And how exactly do you do this? What if the person who's presence is required in the office depends on people who don't need to be in the office? What now? And how is it fair to everyone that some people can WFH but others can't?
It comes with the job description. People will be intelligent enough to recognise that they need to be in the office, and they'll be rewarded more for it. I think it was the boss of Goldman that told remote workers don't expect a New York salary if your not working in New York.
Heavily disagree with that first part; I have never worked at a company where the juniors learned by watching a senior do his job over his shoulder. They learned by absorbing information over time, doing work, going through code reviews, looking at architecture diagrams, etc. Anything else was done mostly over screen sharing even before COVID.
The same is the case at my current company, and the new juniors have had zero troubles with learning. Why? Because all of that can be done remotely.
You only need to learn by watching if you are engaging in the physical world, and software itself is not physical at all, so there is never a reason to do anything in "real life" unless your software happens to be operating a robot or other physical device of some kind. There are endless wonderful cheap or free tools to enable everything that was previously in the physical world to be done remotely now, and if a company and it's employees can't use them right then it is a mix of organizational and personal failings.
Are people still going to try to blame office lease agreements for management wanting workers back in the office?
When are remote workers going to start blaming themselves? Clearly, companies big and small are recalling their workers back to their office. Clearly, they have data showing that their productivity metrics have declined. Tech management are usually very data-driven compared to other industries. So if they're recalling workers, then they must see something.
The simplest explanation is that remote/hybrid culture is less productive on some metric - whether it's total company output or less creativity or whatever it is. So while an individual remote worker might perceive himself or herself as being more productive, they often do not think at the level of the total company output.
And no, management isn't going to come out and explicitly say that their WFH workers are lazier and less productive. That's just bad PR. But you can infer what management is seeing from their actions.
They'd never come out and say "We are recalling our workers because we have data showing they're less productive while working from home.".
Saying something like that would cause a lot of bad PR. Piss off your workers even more. The media, pro-WFH people, HN will pan the company for saying something like that. There's no winning for the company to take this risk. It's best to say something generic like "culture".
The issue is that data is the opposite or wfh and in the office are on par in terms of productivity. Of course they'll use every trick in the book to get people into the office - even economy cooling and will try to work on your feelings like 'let's support the economy by having buzzing city centres'. Then 'culture', 'energy' and all other bits and pieces. They'll even give you a carrot in terms of pay rise and bonus which will then get eaten by transport costs making your actual pay in reality less than last year due to inflation, etc.
I am thankful that our company doesn't do that. We have data that proves wfh is at least the same and better in terms of productivity. Oh, and also, we listened to our employees when they wanted complete flexibility. It was not just HR exercise sending questionnaire out and then ignoring it saying something like 'we hear you but...'.
>The issue is that data is the opposite or wfh and in the office are on par in terms of productivity.
But clearly, the tech companies recalling workers disagree.
PS. I don't believe in 3rd party studies since they rely surveys and the subjectiveness of remote workers. Companies actually have access to employee data. Also, studies need to be multi-year because while people were likely enthusiastic and motivated 3 years ago, they might have checked out while WFH by now.
If remote working "doesnt work" does that mean that all the money I have invested in YC funded companies or paid to YC funded companies for remote work adjacent products and services was extracted from me through fraud?
Like all generalisations, this one is wrong. What companies need to do is work out a hybrid approach or prove to their employees that it is necessary to come to the office. If you are working on a prototype robotics project you do need to be in the office, but if you are writing microservices you do not need to come to the office to watch the chest thumping antics of your CEO or sales people. I don't write better code when I'm being told to crush it, I write better code when the specification for it is clear and makes sense. Nothing to do with being in the office.
The problem is not that work like micro services can be done remote. The problem is remote workers end up doing other things than working. It makes a mess for meeting scheduling and collaboration. Effectively slowing the progression of the project down.
I work at a company who his hybrid and has remote. Every remote engineer is damn near impossible to work with, a forget anything happening on Mondays or Fridays.
“Oh sorry, the contractor is here”
“Sorry, the lawn guy”
“I will be afk, doing this thing I totally would never leave work to do, but it is so important now because I am at home”.
People simply can’t separate home life with work life, and the job becomes a hobby.
Surely if that's happening regularly then it's up to the manager to sit down individually with such employees and make it clear that it's no more acceptable to be regularly unavailable during the work day when remote than it is when at the office.
FWIW, it's not a problem I ever noticed particularly. There are always occasions when the exact person you might need help from or to collaborate with at some particular moment isn't available, and undoubtedly some things are better done working together in person, but I've never experienced the situation of "damn-near impossible to work with" with any work colleague, even during extended periods of working remotely (which I've been doing on & off since about 2005, sometimes in entirely different time zones to my coworkers!).
That sounds like more of a managerial or organisational fuck-up rather than a problem with remote on itself.
Several companies I worked for used a very similar set of processes as when they were working in the office, paired with a set of wrong expectations with the employees.
Moving away from this and understanding how to work at best took several months, and entirely flipped around the team's ability to perform, to the point that being remote was even more productive both on a subjective and objective scale (e.g. lead/cycle time).
Some people are and will always be assholes, dishonest, crooks, borderline criminals. We shouldn't all be imprisoned in the office because management is incapable of at least dealing with these offenders.
After COVID we switched to almost 100% work from home. Office became mandatory 3 days a week but only on paper. In practice workers applied "passive aggressive" method, just didn't show up. And management didn't do squat since most of them were also working from home.
But I did have bad apples as colleagues. One guy in my team would be idle for long swathes of time although it would appear "green" on Teams - first sign someone's an asshole: they put a mouse move program but don't reply for hours. At least be honest and let your status be idle when you're not at your desk - we're all humans and I get that. Anyhow problem wasn't as much that he wasn't at his desk, when sometime I did manage to contact him in dire need of some crosscheck on the project we had to deliver, guy exceeded himself in being a passive aggressive jerk: he'd reply one or two questions then just disappear again IN MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE. For hours on end. Like I'm talking with him, ask him something, replies so I know he's there, immediately I ask him something else and he's gone. Sometimes until next day.
At some point I blew a gasket on him, called him on Teams when he was accidentally available and unloaded dicks and Christs and Gods and what else involves swearing in my native language. He was much more responsive for about two days then reverted to default behavior.
I thought of reporting him to my manager but I knew it would be useless. I tried naming things before in daily scrum with the management and upper management and didn't go well, reckoned what I need to do to keep my job. Eventually the company tanked and fired everyone (me included), so at least there's some divine justice. I found a new job in less than a week nevertheless, being around since the 1970s these guys might be more sensible than my previous employer.
I guess the moral of the story is: when bottom layer workers are dishonest, management pulls the strings and gets them in line. But what do you do when management itself is corrupted to the core? ... which I think is by far the rule rather than the exception. Who is policing "the police"?
> One guy in my team would be idle for long swathes of time although it would appear "green" on Teams - first sign someone's an asshole: they put a mouse move program but don't reply for hours.
Maybe his job was not to be on standby for your service 8 hours a day. Maybe he also had a job to do? Why would he be obliged to reply to your messages immediately?
The whole point of Slack / Teams communication is that it can be async, meaning you can ask people something and they will get back to you when it is convenient for THEM, not for YOU. If urgent, just call.
Sometimes I just leave people on read for a bit because I have more important things to be dealing with. This happens to me too sometimes with people leaving me on read,and I understand because there is almost always something more important than whatever someone is messaging about. If it were important, they would have told me explicitly or sent a meeting request.
I sincerely doubt everything you were asking this guy was very important, so perhaps you need to learn how to handle more of your own issues and ask more people for help other than that one guy. It is not that guy's job to do your job; it is your job to do your job.
Strangely that it worked well with the vast majority of other team members, except for liars and scum who couldn't even handle properly having multiple jobs and not giving a fuck.
This point is moot, because those people would be out of office on PTO dealing with those contractors anyway. At least they can hop in and out of the meetings when working remotely, which is an upgrade from them not even being there to be honest. If tools like Outlook or Google Calendar are not enough to help someone schedule meetings without a struggle, that is a personal failure.
Agreed. The issue is that currently most hybrid approaches seem to be a basic "you work in office 2 days a week", which is not useful for, say, software devs: There is no benefits to anyone in coding in office vs. at home. Instead, days in office should be special, meaning days of personal interactions.
"But remote-first won't be the default." doesn't sound like much of a generalisation to me, and indeed is arguably saying the same thing as you - that a hybrid approach is likely the best fit for most tech companies.
There’s no right answer to remote work versus in-person.
In person is better for collaboration, for social interaction, and for a sense of a company on a mission. Some of the jobs I had were fantastic experiences and that was because of the people. And not just your direct team, but you also get to know lots of people outside your team. You learn from them, you have fun with them. It’s well known that many people meet their partner at work - or they used to anyway.
But remote is what people … especially developers … want. And remote is what makes sense, what’s the point of traveling 2 hours a day to sit at a desk and do what you would do at home?
On the other hand, some people do exploit remote working…. they work less, the slack off, or even have two jobs or freelance clients. This is well documented.
I have worked remotely for 10 years in smaller companies before going to a large FAANG and working in office for 10 years, then remotely since 2020.
Working remotely for the smaller companies and startups was much faster faced and productive. Part of it is due to company size and not remote vs. non-remote. We met regularly (once a month or so) to set direction, we executed at 2x - 3x the speed than at a larger company.
The FAANG company never embraced remote work fully. 2 years after I started remote, HR still messes up counting local holidays. Newly hired remote workers were promised they could travel for 2 weeks per year to meet face to face with their team. In my experience, it did not happen. Travel was severely restricted and new team members were not allowed to travel.
Now, leaders are complaining that remote worker productivity is lower than hybrid workers because of face to face interactions after they sabotaged remote workers and failed to deliver on the exact promises that would have solved this problem.
Fully remote is hard, but there is a spectrum between that and fully on-site.
Software developers can work from home most of the time and meet in person for meaningful interactions (i.e. not just work in office instead of at home) periodically and when needed.
The main challenge seems that leadership is so poor at making the case for what they believe will be gained. It's always vague things like networking, training or energy.
Add to that the point that the few stated examples are usually available if staff come in even a modest amount of the time, ie they are an argument against full remote rather than an argument against majority remote.
It is not about productivity, it has never been about productivity.
It is about power and control.
Remote workers can have a life, can see their children and friends, and may even have energy to go chasing other job offers.
HR and CxO hate all of that with a passion that would outshine a thousand suns.
If they have non-negligible amounts of office space then staffing said office space to a certain level will end up in the local government granting some tax breaks to the company (for that property and possibly for other things).
Companies that were remote before COVID-19 anyway are not suddenly realizing that remote work doesn't work (because it does work), so they are staying remote. They had no offices and aren't getting any so there is no incentive to bring people into an office.
Companies that weren't remote before COVID-19 are usually locked into long term leases, and conveniently enough, these are the same companies extolling the "benefits" of in-office work and the "downsides" of remote work that (also very conveniently) only they have observed.
This all boils down to whether or not the company has a significant amount of skin in the game with regard to office space.
The problem with remote work is that it effectively solves more problems than it creates and this is a nightmare for those who live off speculation under the guise of "changing the world".
Now they have at risk the millionaire rents they charge their employees.
The worst part is that the decentralisation of talent puts their monopoly at risk.
Personally, I have team members from 3 countries, and we collaborate just fine from home, and a lot of people have decided to move hundreds of kilometers away from our office.
Forcing everyone to move back into the office would probably be impossible for like 2/3rds of our team-members anyway and would probably require either letting those people go, or more likely, reorganize the teams and replacing them with local workers.
I can't stress how much economic damage it would cause, and how difficult it would be to hire and train people on the specialist skillsets we need.
Industry leaders complaining the lack of productivity of remote work is like a joke. They are the ones who infuse the organization with countless useless administrative tasks, mandatory meetings, and endless disruptions with their push for open offices.
They are the last people I would trust on Earth for productivity advice.
I thought it was ABSOLUTELY CRAZY that so many people actually trusted their employers enough to think that they would be totally okay with highly-paid-because-of-location employees moving to low cost of living areas with zero changes to their comp structure.
If leadership at big companies were actually 100% sold on remote work, then they would have given up their offices long ago.
It's pointless arguing with the remote naysayers at this point, which apparently now includes pg.
Like the title of an oft shared post on this site says: "You Can't Tell People Anything."
Show them instead. Just create successful remote companies and stop wasting your time arguing with these people. Or if you just sold your remote-first company, start a remote-first only vc fund and do well.
A random SEO-driven post says PagerDuty, Dropbox, Unquork, Coinbase, Superhuman, Twitch, Gitlab etc. are remote companies. Is this even true?
If it is, then pg should try to argue against this self-evident reality. If he has the intellectual honesty to do so that is.
The past few years has been so saturated with "Never expect a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it"-type low quality pontificating that it's become unbearable nauseating.
I suppose a significant aspect of this to upper management is their need to face-to-face in person interaction to for some of their sociopathic non-verbal control behaviors to work. You know the sort, where some senior manager says something banal about goals or performance but his body language is clearly threatening or intimidating. Stuff that doesn't work over video.
The problem was the pandemic improvised remote work.
Remote work is a cultural thing more than anything. You can't turn remote and still take hours to answer a simple yes/no Slack message. You can't push everyone into remoting without emphasing the need of keeping written documents and meeting notes accessible to the team. You can't turn remote and just use Slack like an extended mail inbox you check three times a day. Remote will not work if don't have a documented onboarding.
Remote needs people to embrace this change and embrace other collaboration tools, such as Discord, Teams, Zoom, VSCode Live Share etc. Remote needs a commitment from everyone involved, it's not just sitting at your couch and doing everything like you did back in the office. And needs a different management mindset too, managers need to push people into doing remote right too, or the whole team gets penalised.
Until people figure it out we will keep having examples of "wow remote works great for X company" and "remote was a disaster for Y". I've been in productive and unproductive remote workplaces. I hated remote before until I saw it done properly.
And yes, remote won't work for everyone. And that's fine. If you hate Slack and Discord, that's not a problem, offices exist for a reason. Just don't try to measure the whole world with your ruler.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadAnd if you give companies exactly what they want, then they'll eventually want talented people to work for them for free.
So the two groups meet in the middle usually - depending on how competitive the job market it.
It wouldn’t be hard to simply put your money where your mouth is and pay differently for in person if it’s so much better and fire people remote if they don’t produce. If they do, there’s something else going on, but it’s not employee welfare or productivity in most cases.
You write as if this "elephant" is "it" for all time, for all remote workers. It's not, because there has been (and will continue to be) a cohort of remote workers from before Covid, who realise there is a cost/benefit here, and who do not commit fraud, they just work from home at the intensity they work and their employer is just fine with that
Sure, sending everyone home, and then wanting them to come back highlighted that people who aren't self selected up front to WFH include a cohort who cheat. So what? They probably cheat in other ways at their desk.
SOME remote work works worse and worse over time because SOME people realise they can scam their employers. But, what % it is, against overall work-life rebalancing, value for money, increased work time because of not spending time commuting, reduction in other costs (ok, dealing with sunk cost in the office is an issue) .. It's nothing like as elephant-in-the-room as you think it is.
No, one of the elephants in the room is that a fucktonne of Management KPI are built around offices, and the people who demand return to office want to return to achieving those KPI. And, a fucktonne of corporate future profit and tax offset is predicated on property retaining its value and those office blocks are dropping like stones in a deep pond: Thats why Google and Salesforce both unloaded huge property investments (rental or lease) recently.
Managers and CEOs and Boards want return to office because they have "REI-ified" beliefs around the nature of work and the value of office work, and they have set deliverables which will make them personally wealthy by achieving this.
Its not dissimmilar to the mass firings: there was no across the board need to shed 10% of staff. It was a KPI which benefited a cohort of managers and CEOs. Thats all (in my opinion)
Workers and Bosses are always in tension. The factory model was designed to increase production at the expense of craft work done in the home by weavers and spinners. Was the "product" better? For some things yes, but for others no: it was about profit extraction, Taylorism, and hourly rates.
If the outputs are all that are asked of the job are being met, why do they care? If it's about committed energy and time spent working, why waste the time and energy of of all workers with a required commute to prevent a vanishingly small number of cases of double-booking. It just seems like banning remote work with a bizarre justification for bad management.
I also think you vastly over estimate the number of people who are willing to commit fraud to make more money.
Do you commute to an office every day, sit at a desk in a 4 person shared cubicle, have monthly "performance reviews" by someone unqualified to manage your subject area, have to deal with 3 children's weekly scheduled school-caused sickness, own an old car and only 1 so it is out of service when it needs repair?
I worked from home for years ... scratch that, I "lived at work" while at home for years. If you believe that getting your work done on time only during 9-5 then you've never had to deal with after-hours emails demanding results by the next morning.
Take a job that requires a 1-hour "10 minute standup" every morning at 8:30am so it "doesn't impact the work day". Take a job that needs at least a week to complete with no external progress (e.g. programming) and listen to the constant requirement for "progress updates". Note how there is a built-in assumption that because you're home you're slacking.
Fight through heavy snow or rain, struggle to find a parking space, find out there is no coffee in the break room, that only 1 of 3 toilets are working, that the internet connection is down, and your other 3 cube-mates are all loudly sick of something "going around in the office".
Sure. Go ahead. Assume the worst of your employees. Like children, make sure you can see them at all times.
Yes, some of us tried hard to make it work but like always there was a minority that probably did not and now we all have to pay for it.
At this point, the best we can hope for is a hybrid work schedule. It's not what we want or wish for but, if we are lucky, it's what we can get.
Or middle management forces this on everyone so they can keep pretending they're useful, while most of middle management is absolutely useless. Most managers are there to ask something one person and forward the answer to another person, or gather multiple ones to sum them up in a single sentence. That's literally the job. People who have actual business influence sit at 'the top', people who have technical influence sit near 'the bottom', most people in between are just... there. I know, I worked with middle management heavily in my last corporate gig, those people usually barely even know what we do, they are incapable of making any decision without 'running it through upper management', most of them are not even trained properly to resolve interpersonal issues or work with people in general. Going to the office just so you can sit in your cubicle or on a random desk in the open space and spend whole day on calls with other people is just... pointless.
> It's not what we want or wish for but, if we are lucky, it's what we can get.
This sentence reads like corporate management is your overlord and you're happy if they let you do something. Working in IT you're privileged enough to be able to actually choose who you work for, thinking you're 'lucky' because you can work 2 days from home, is kind of... sad really.
I have yet to hear any company even robustly define productivity for tech workers.
I kid you not.
Maybe your managers are lazy or incompetent?
Also, who doesn't bring their own coffee from home vs. drinking the three-day-old moldy diarrhea at the office?
I hope this serves as an example of why tethering your understanding of working needs to your extremely limited experience - as it is for all of us - makes your argument a bunch of weak anecdotes that add little to the debate.
Talking of limited experience - you think that the tech industry can disappear overnight and life will just "continue unabated"? Yikes.
"We can always go back to the stone ages", sure, sure we can.
Clearly there are benefits, especially for people with families,or a long commute. Hiring is also made easier.
I don't think a blanket return to work is what's needed, a more targeted appropriate one might be though, identify who's presence is required and pay them commensurately to be in the office. Working from home gets you less but you get the flexibility.
>I don't think a blanket return to work is what's needed, a more targeted appropriate one might be though, identify who's presence is required and pay them commensurately to be in the office. Working from home gets you less but you get the flexibility.
And how exactly do you do this? What if the person who's presence is required in the office depends on people who don't need to be in the office? What now? And how is it fair to everyone that some people can WFH but others can't?
The same is the case at my current company, and the new juniors have had zero troubles with learning. Why? Because all of that can be done remotely.
You only need to learn by watching if you are engaging in the physical world, and software itself is not physical at all, so there is never a reason to do anything in "real life" unless your software happens to be operating a robot or other physical device of some kind. There are endless wonderful cheap or free tools to enable everything that was previously in the physical world to be done remotely now, and if a company and it's employees can't use them right then it is a mix of organizational and personal failings.
When are remote workers going to start blaming themselves? Clearly, companies big and small are recalling their workers back to their office. Clearly, they have data showing that their productivity metrics have declined. Tech management are usually very data-driven compared to other industries. So if they're recalling workers, then they must see something.
The simplest explanation is that remote/hybrid culture is less productive on some metric - whether it's total company output or less creativity or whatever it is. So while an individual remote worker might perceive himself or herself as being more productive, they often do not think at the level of the total company output.
And no, management isn't going to come out and explicitly say that their WFH workers are lazier and less productive. That's just bad PR. But you can infer what management is seeing from their actions.
They'd never come out and say "We are recalling our workers because we have data showing they're less productive while working from home.".
Saying something like that would cause a lot of bad PR. Piss off your workers even more. The media, pro-WFH people, HN will pan the company for saying something like that. There's no winning for the company to take this risk. It's best to say something generic like "culture".
I am thankful that our company doesn't do that. We have data that proves wfh is at least the same and better in terms of productivity. Oh, and also, we listened to our employees when they wanted complete flexibility. It was not just HR exercise sending questionnaire out and then ignoring it saying something like 'we hear you but...'.
But clearly, the tech companies recalling workers disagree.
PS. I don't believe in 3rd party studies since they rely surveys and the subjectiveness of remote workers. Companies actually have access to employee data. Also, studies need to be multi-year because while people were likely enthusiastic and motivated 3 years ago, they might have checked out while WFH by now.
I work at a company who his hybrid and has remote. Every remote engineer is damn near impossible to work with, a forget anything happening on Mondays or Fridays.
“Oh sorry, the contractor is here” “Sorry, the lawn guy” “I will be afk, doing this thing I totally would never leave work to do, but it is so important now because I am at home”.
People simply can’t separate home life with work life, and the job becomes a hobby.
Several companies I worked for used a very similar set of processes as when they were working in the office, paired with a set of wrong expectations with the employees.
Moving away from this and understanding how to work at best took several months, and entirely flipped around the team's ability to perform, to the point that being remote was even more productive both on a subjective and objective scale (e.g. lead/cycle time).
After COVID we switched to almost 100% work from home. Office became mandatory 3 days a week but only on paper. In practice workers applied "passive aggressive" method, just didn't show up. And management didn't do squat since most of them were also working from home.
But I did have bad apples as colleagues. One guy in my team would be idle for long swathes of time although it would appear "green" on Teams - first sign someone's an asshole: they put a mouse move program but don't reply for hours. At least be honest and let your status be idle when you're not at your desk - we're all humans and I get that. Anyhow problem wasn't as much that he wasn't at his desk, when sometime I did manage to contact him in dire need of some crosscheck on the project we had to deliver, guy exceeded himself in being a passive aggressive jerk: he'd reply one or two questions then just disappear again IN MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE. For hours on end. Like I'm talking with him, ask him something, replies so I know he's there, immediately I ask him something else and he's gone. Sometimes until next day.
At some point I blew a gasket on him, called him on Teams when he was accidentally available and unloaded dicks and Christs and Gods and what else involves swearing in my native language. He was much more responsive for about two days then reverted to default behavior.
I thought of reporting him to my manager but I knew it would be useless. I tried naming things before in daily scrum with the management and upper management and didn't go well, reckoned what I need to do to keep my job. Eventually the company tanked and fired everyone (me included), so at least there's some divine justice. I found a new job in less than a week nevertheless, being around since the 1970s these guys might be more sensible than my previous employer.
I guess the moral of the story is: when bottom layer workers are dishonest, management pulls the strings and gets them in line. But what do you do when management itself is corrupted to the core? ... which I think is by far the rule rather than the exception. Who is policing "the police"?
Maybe his job was not to be on standby for your service 8 hours a day. Maybe he also had a job to do? Why would he be obliged to reply to your messages immediately?
The whole point of Slack / Teams communication is that it can be async, meaning you can ask people something and they will get back to you when it is convenient for THEM, not for YOU. If urgent, just call.
Yeah, he had a second job, that's what he had. In parallel to running a brick and store business (set up a bar and organized events).
I sincerely doubt everything you were asking this guy was very important, so perhaps you need to learn how to handle more of your own issues and ask more people for help other than that one guy. It is not that guy's job to do your job; it is your job to do your job.
In person is better for collaboration, for social interaction, and for a sense of a company on a mission. Some of the jobs I had were fantastic experiences and that was because of the people. And not just your direct team, but you also get to know lots of people outside your team. You learn from them, you have fun with them. It’s well known that many people meet their partner at work - or they used to anyway.
But remote is what people … especially developers … want. And remote is what makes sense, what’s the point of traveling 2 hours a day to sit at a desk and do what you would do at home?
On the other hand, some people do exploit remote working…. they work less, the slack off, or even have two jobs or freelance clients. This is well documented.
There’s no right answer.
Working remotely for the smaller companies and startups was much faster faced and productive. Part of it is due to company size and not remote vs. non-remote. We met regularly (once a month or so) to set direction, we executed at 2x - 3x the speed than at a larger company.
The FAANG company never embraced remote work fully. 2 years after I started remote, HR still messes up counting local holidays. Newly hired remote workers were promised they could travel for 2 weeks per year to meet face to face with their team. In my experience, it did not happen. Travel was severely restricted and new team members were not allowed to travel.
Now, leaders are complaining that remote worker productivity is lower than hybrid workers because of face to face interactions after they sabotaged remote workers and failed to deliver on the exact promises that would have solved this problem.
This sly behavior is unacceptable.
Software developers can work from home most of the time and meet in person for meaningful interactions (i.e. not just work in office instead of at home) periodically and when needed.
Add to that the point that the few stated examples are usually available if staff come in even a modest amount of the time, ie they are an argument against full remote rather than an argument against majority remote.
It is about power and control.
Remote workers can have a life, can see their children and friends, and may even have energy to go chasing other job offers. HR and CxO hate all of that with a passion that would outshine a thousand suns.
Companies that were remote before COVID-19 anyway are not suddenly realizing that remote work doesn't work (because it does work), so they are staying remote. They had no offices and aren't getting any so there is no incentive to bring people into an office.
Companies that weren't remote before COVID-19 are usually locked into long term leases, and conveniently enough, these are the same companies extolling the "benefits" of in-office work and the "downsides" of remote work that (also very conveniently) only they have observed.
This all boils down to whether or not the company has a significant amount of skin in the game with regard to office space.
Now they have at risk the millionaire rents they charge their employees.
The worst part is that the decentralisation of talent puts their monopoly at risk.
Forcing everyone to move back into the office would probably be impossible for like 2/3rds of our team-members anyway and would probably require either letting those people go, or more likely, reorganize the teams and replacing them with local workers.
I can't stress how much economic damage it would cause, and how difficult it would be to hire and train people on the specialist skillsets we need.
They are the last people I would trust on Earth for productivity advice.
If leadership at big companies were actually 100% sold on remote work, then they would have given up their offices long ago.
Like the title of an oft shared post on this site says: "You Can't Tell People Anything."
Show them instead. Just create successful remote companies and stop wasting your time arguing with these people. Or if you just sold your remote-first company, start a remote-first only vc fund and do well.
A random SEO-driven post says PagerDuty, Dropbox, Unquork, Coinbase, Superhuman, Twitch, Gitlab etc. are remote companies. Is this even true?
If it is, then pg should try to argue against this self-evident reality. If he has the intellectual honesty to do so that is.
The past few years has been so saturated with "Never expect a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it"-type low quality pontificating that it's become unbearable nauseating.
I am sure there are plenty of others
why do we need slack and teams and online chat windows if "in person" and phones will work? let alone VR?
Remote work is a cultural thing more than anything. You can't turn remote and still take hours to answer a simple yes/no Slack message. You can't push everyone into remoting without emphasing the need of keeping written documents and meeting notes accessible to the team. You can't turn remote and just use Slack like an extended mail inbox you check three times a day. Remote will not work if don't have a documented onboarding.
Remote needs people to embrace this change and embrace other collaboration tools, such as Discord, Teams, Zoom, VSCode Live Share etc. Remote needs a commitment from everyone involved, it's not just sitting at your couch and doing everything like you did back in the office. And needs a different management mindset too, managers need to push people into doing remote right too, or the whole team gets penalised.
Until people figure it out we will keep having examples of "wow remote works great for X company" and "remote was a disaster for Y". I've been in productive and unproductive remote workplaces. I hated remote before until I saw it done properly.
And yes, remote won't work for everyone. And that's fine. If you hate Slack and Discord, that's not a problem, offices exist for a reason. Just don't try to measure the whole world with your ruler.