"Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated."
My guess is that you're also more likely to lose your best performers - since they will have higher confidence in being able to find a remote-friendly job somewhere else.
There's a belief among folks who already favor RTO that the highest performers will also dislike permanent WFH, it seems to me. And given how notoriously difficult it is to reliably measure developer quality, that may be a belief they can harbor long past when you'd expect evidence to have mounted against it.
Your parent does not really say that though. Assuming that WFH/RTO preference is distributed equally across highest and lowest performers his statement will be true. As lowest performers will be stickier (regardless of preference) and highest performers won't be so you may lose 50% of your highest performers but a lower amount of lowest WFH-loving performers. Effectively averaging down the skill level of your company.
It's not really a WFH/RTO thing so much as a benefits thing. The same would be true for another variable like free lunches.
A study like that would be nearly impossible to measure.
What we do know is anecdotal evidence of very influential and high performers at various FAANG type companies that have ended up leaving due to forced RTO.
Everyone has anecdotes that support their opinion.
Anecdotally, I work at a large company that fully supports 0% to 100% remote work, and I work with a wide mix. Some people, and some roles, just do better in the office. Others don’t. I’d be very suspicious of forming beliefs based on anecdotes, especially if they coincidentally align to your expectations.
I do agree some roles. e.g. sales, have to be done in office. If you want to snooze someone over dinner a remote call is a poor shadow of an option.
Less certain about roles that are generally technical. The strongest claim for in-office work, collaboration, is mostly a well solved problem for at least software, possible simple administration that just relies on some collaborative spreadsheets. Sitting everyone in a stuffy boardroom all staring at the same boring spreadsheet is likely to cause stress and mental fatigue, not increased collaboration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7889069/ This is a well known effect.
Even large "interactive" meetings in remote settings can be counter productive - of course not all meetings are bad and one key to being an excellent manager is picking the right people for the right meetings, but the idea that your "top performers" objectively speaking will be the ones experiencing the most stress is seriously suspect.
What is more likely is some combination of workers who either "do well" in high stress environments, usually implying they are healthy and have some effective stress management techniques and as such are recognized as top performers compared to those unable to effectively manage their stress, or those in mainly technical areas have not yet experienced (somehow) the benefits of less stressful remote-work environments. E.g. parents or partners in cramped personal quarters being more distracted compared to e.g. a private office space.
Finally, for those workers that have an active job component where they must e.g. be on site for customer testing or perhaps they are a technical liason, some hybrid approach may work better - in office for resources which are cost prohibitive to simulate or when their role requires them to interact in an another capacity e.g. as a technician, security guard, or triage such as a front desk.
There is also the case where "top performers" are leeching off their colleagues e.g. where they can "get more done" because they can interrogate and corral others but where others are mostly experiencing productivity hits as a result of the constant interruption.
Just because they think they can justify it doesn't mean they're right. If the best performers are leaving, but management is stubbornly or ignorantly refusing to admit it, that only hides the problem, and the company will eventually fail.
There's a number of kind of obvious reasons for that belief.
Firstly the people who are mandating RTO want to think of themselves as high performers. They want RTO so "high performers want RTO" is obvious to them.
Secondly a lot of non-doing managers want to be able to justify their existance. To do that they need people in the office to distract by walking around and having conversations etc. They can't do this when people are just WFH doing deep work.
Thirdly, if they know a manager wants RTO, then people who want to suck up to that manager will say they want RTO and will come in to the office to actively suck up to the manager. The manager will see these sycophants as high performers because they are spending their time fluffing the ego of the aformentioned manager.
Not every job is Office space, in fact I've never experienced one in my 20 years of coding in 3 countries. You find bits and pieces if you look hard enough in some places, but that's it.
Behavior you describe would never get my any promotion anywhere I worked. Maybe I was just lucky, who knows.
We'll get a lot more hybrid offices: some people in the office, others at home. This is far from ideal, but it's what we'll get. Managers will get to keep some of their precious oversight—err, excuse me, serendipitous collaboration—but workers with any leverage will stay home if they want. Over time, we'll hit an equilibrium that is less WFH than today, but more than in 2019.
> A late-stage SaaS startup decided to embrace this wave of change. They worked with me to introduce flexible work policies, and the result was almost immediate - they noticed a sharp decrease in employee turnover and an uptick in job applications. Their story echoes the collective message from all three reports: companies must adapt to flexible work policies or risk being swept away.
I'd love to see current hiring stats on committed work from home or flexible companies. There are more places that allow WFH than ever, but as some companies are forcing a return to the office, I bet the remaining WFH companies could exploit the fact that the majority of people don't want to do that. At least some people are willing to switch jobs over it, and so WFH companies should get an influx of talented applicants.
Unless hybrid means all the employees are mandated to be in the office on the same days. And they can WFH or RTO on the remaining days. At least that's what I am seeing among my social circle.
It doesn't have to be a fight. If you want to work remotely, apply for remote jobs at remote companies. There is no need to negotiate or bargain or convince anyone of anything.
> There is no need to negotiate or bargain or convince anyone of anything.
With a third of your life spent at work (at least, but hopefully less), this is no way to go through life. Everything is up for negotiation.
People who want to attempt to unionize to get the right to work remote can do so, as organizing is federally protected activity in the US and it only takes 30% of employees of a bargaining unit to petition the NLRB to hold a union vote: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/conduct-elections
This is a labor rights issue, plain and simple. It makes little sense to be subjugated to management edict “because they say so” when there are labor tools available.
>Employees, having tasted the fruits of flexible work, felt averse to relinquishing these newfound freedoms.
Translation for sociopathic leaders: never let your workers taste something good. It only took a global pandemic that forced people home in order for us to experiment with something that a huge portion of the population sees as beneficial to their well-being. Where were the small scale experiments before the pandemic, and why did they never catch on?
People could say trials are exceptions that don't generalize. Now that everybody's tried it successfully at scale for long enough to eliminate short-term effects, the excuses are discredited.
I think there were small scale experiments. Look at Gumroad, which not only is fully remote but only pays by the hour, so you aren’t actually obligated for the full 40hs/wk if you don’t want it. Look at Gitlab that was fully remote. They don’t catch on because large institutions that functioned on an office culture by definition are only led by people who thrive in said culture. Those people re highly unlikely to go with something that they wouldn’t thrive in (like wfh) unless forced to, and they actually have the political power to ensure it so.
I was working at home on and off for many years before the pandemic. It wasn't that unusual. Which is why so many companies could switch over to it fairly easily when the need arose.
"Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. Imagine that — nearly half!"
Does this mean that 58% of companies that mandated a return underestimated attrition? And 71% are doing fine with recruitment?
I haven't read the underlying report since it is behind a wall. Having said that, when companies make predictions, they rarely predict a specific number. It is likely that a significant amount of companies saw attrition that was within the expected range. Having said that, they certainly should also report the number that saw less then expected. There is really no way to make sense of just the number presented.
The real first advantage in a long time that small companies and startups have over big FAANG players and similar is 100% remote. The edge on hiring is real and by putting remote-OK in your job description you get a much better swath of employees willing to get paid less to avoid the commuting nightmare and live anywhere.
I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution.
Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab's is a good start) to start grasping it.
But it will happen and the companies/startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc
And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).
You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight.
This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.
Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.
Wife works for a retail bank. Front-line employees didn't go remote - they need to be in retail bank locations serving customers. Back-office employees were 98% in-office prior to COVID. In several weeks, the company pivoted to remote work, including procurement of laptops (most non-managers had desktops). During the 2.5-3 years of COVID-induced WFH, their engagement numbers and measured productivity went up.
I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces.
While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative.
All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.
My company went permanent full remote. We are much less productive, velocity per engineer is about half what it was. I'll freely admit it's because the company is poorly managed, but in my experience tons of companies have leadership that isn't able to quickly pivot in the way needed for WFH to be successful. It requires a lot of effort to get remote engineers to communicate well and at least here it basically just doesn't happen anymore.
Are you referring to individual employees or the companies? Clearly many companies are mandating RTO despite remote/self-determined hybrid supported by a strong majority of employee sentiment (and often performance data)
How many people do you know? When WFH was mandated, I hated it. When the mandate was finally kicked, I loved going back to the office, and have spent almost every workday at the office, despite having the possibility to do 40% WFH if I wanted. No, I don't want that, thank you. Not a coder, working as admin. I like people, that is why I work in an office. And personal experience is definitely that working together with people who are currently at home usually slows down processes quite a bit. Besides, sometimes, WFH-people are just not reachable, because reasons... Daughter has sneezed the first time, or wife has decided she needs to go for her yoga class and coworker suddenly needs to care for a 4-year-old... And, god forbid, if you ever say anything when these blatantly shameless things happen, you are the bad guy.
The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.
Nah, admin of course means rapist, didn't you know?
WFH-advocates turning to "arguments" like your post is one reason why I oppose this new trend of entitlement. You people really think you are on top of the world and everyone has to dance to your tunes, right? I hope the market will fix this. Go and find a WFH company that lets you slack-off from home all day long. And then, shut up!
Sure, as a disabled person, I totally like it when abled-body people like you call me "ableist", that is so funny that I almost forget how shitty that move is. Yes, you didnt know, I know, but, keep disability out of your arguments please, people with real disabilities will thank you for that.
And there is a difference between "care duties" and the "papa is at home so we can pester him with family stuff all day long". We have 2 weeks of extra leave for parents, they already have extra priviledges compared to non-parents. If someone declares a few days off because they have to fix something important with their family, that is fine and never was an issue.
But WFH people suddenly realizing at 10 AM that they can not be bothered to work for the next 3 hours is definitely unfair and overstretching the priviledges.
I assume the point, not that it's being put very well, is that the bar for events that render one unavailable, possibly for some unpredictable period, is now lower. Things that previously might not even have registered can now take people away from their metaphorical desk, and there's no scope for simply searching the office until you find them. The average development project is a team effort, and as such, as a developer you are paid for short-notice ad-hoc availability for collaboration or questioning as well as for producing pre-planned individual work items that you mark done on Jira.
"Besides, sometimes, WFH-people are just not reachable, because reasons... Daughter has sneezed the first time, or wife has decided she needs to go for her yoga class and coworker suddenly needs to care for a 4-year-old... And, god forbid, if you ever say anything when these blatantly shameless things happen, you are the bad guy."
I guess I’m one who likes the office. Not every day. But frequently. And I think I could build a culture with in-office time that would out-compete a remote-only competitor, domestic only or offshore hybrid.
> What part of this culture would make it more competitive than any remote-only equivalent?
Hiring, the same way RO outfits can access unique talent, and information transfer, particularly to newer team members. Also, in industries where over-documentation is an unnecessary liability.
I'm a software engineer, and I think the fully remote-work culture can often be less personally fulfilling.
I enjoy going to an office, having a change of scenery, interacting with people (both close friends and casual acquaintances), brainstorming ideas with a small group around a whiteboard, getting lunch with colleagues, etc, etc...
Sure, the "writing code" part of the job is easier when there are fewer distractions. And a crowded open office can be an annoying source of distractions.
And I definitely enjoy having lunch more often with my family, or hanging out with the dogs, or sitting out on my deck under the trees while I read my morning email.
But working in an office was nice too, and I miss it.
> with little evidence that’s a better way to work.
You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
You are assuming that they see high attrition of their best talent as something bad. Sometimes they don't seem to care if the numbers in Excel look good.
> My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
Speaking as a senior manager at a smallish software company (300 people), absolutely, decision makers are in my experience smart and competent.
But what they don't do is necessarily make decisions based on data.
I don't believe for a second that most RTO debates are based on meaningful measurement. As with a lot of corporate decisions, I suspect it's a lot of HIPPOs, fingers in the air, and herding behavior.
When I joined my current employer the biggest drawback was that unlike my previous job they did not allow remote work. Managers were against it because they were paranoid about people slacking off.
The pandemic hit, we transitioned to remote work, I was happy. Everyone quickly adapted and learned how to efficiently work from home. About two years later, two things happened:
1. Surveys and postmortems showed that remote work lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity at our company.
2. Company leadership started talking about a mandated return to office.
People of course challenged this decision, pointing to the data, and no real explanation was given. Those who wanted to returned to office, but the mandated return was indefinitely postponed and eventually silently dropped as the manager primarily pushing for a return left the company.
> My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
That's precisely the problem. The decision makers suffer from extreme confirmation bias and Dunning-Kruger effect. So what happens is they run surveys, polls etc which are loaded and indicate that employees would 'love' to return to the office. They mandate RTO and are then surprised when people leave en masse because the data they've collected is wrong.
That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect.
They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office.
They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distance.
They may not be dumb, but their idea of "normal" is not what covid hath wrought, and therefore a return to the office is a return to "normal", and thus a heaving sigh of relief can be had that we're now past that extended weirdness.
They may not be dumb, but they may not be able to understand that people are motivated differently from themselves and from each other. "I work better in the office, therefore y'all do too". (admittedly there's a bit of dumbness in that one, however that's far from saying it's unrealistic or rare).
> according to data they are seeing
Anecdotal warning: Outside of the "best of the best" kinda places, my experience is that most decision makers work on 'feel' and not data - whether data is available or not.
KPIs adapt to circumstances but the thing about power is correct. I seen many power plays and the size of the "army" of the managers and how much they could assert control were important parts of them. If employees are dispersed they can't help the "generals" too much.
The "best of the best" places are also managed by feel and not data. There's even some kind of rationalization for that: at a sufficiently high management level, they have to make a decision every 30 seconds on average. That's mostly gut-driven by necessity...
Thing is, that normally works out, but large shifts like the "new normal" during the pandemic can take a while for the gut to pick up, and so the default is to get back to the known-good state...
Let's flip this around: do you (or decision makers) have any evidence that remote work is worse? Without that data, and barring ulterior motives (such as attrition without severance), reversing the status quo and enforcing return to office is, by definition, not a sound data-driven decision.
They might be making the "best decision", but best decision for whom? Their own career, social standing and property investment portfolio? Or the best decision for the company and employee well-being and productivity?
> My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
I agree. They are seeing the data that their skills of busy-bodies bouncing between meetings and impromptu conversations at other employees desks don't translate well to remote work and they understand that their nice 3mil$ house in the valley will cost much less in couple of years if everyone embraces full remote, so they are doing their best to preserve the status quo.
Decision makers are politicians, their job is to take the most politically efficient decision according to data. Deciding if it was the best decision to take or not is the job of historians.
I've done a lot of remote work over the decades. It starts out well, because you know your coworkers well. But, over time, those relationships fade, and people come and go at work. You lose the connection with them, and they with you.
It’s all roses. I see my coworkers in person once a year at the Christmas party. Other than that I’ve only every worked with them online since I started working here 2.5 years ago. It’s all roses.
People are complex and different. If something is white for one person, and black for another, when you put them next to each other you get... black and white.
Reducing people's different experiences to a homogeneous grey mush is overly reductive.
This is what is meant by the "big corps haven't cracked it".
More progressive corps embraced online socializing earlier, and honestly that's all I need. To be sure something is lost socially by not being in person, but the workplace is not social-drinks club, or if it is that's where your productivity went.
You still build connections with people you only meet online, older folk might have more trouble with that, which makes sense why they might struggle to manage if they heavily depend on "making friends" to do their job.
Training and onboarding can be issues, but barring a straight up lack of talent generally focused efforts are probably better than just assuming the new employee will "make connections" and learn via osmosis.
>You lose the connection with them, and they with you.
I work in an organization with 10s of thousands of workers across the United States. I will never, in the best circumstances, see more than a handful of them in person, other than in-person team meetings, which have themselves become increasingly rare as the team is more geographically diverse than ever and travel budgets are slashed due to ready electronic collaboration tools. So ... what connection? I mean, I don't really care about having a personal connection with these folks anyway. I like them and enjoy having a positive professional relationship with them, but they're my coworkers and we have amazing tools to build those relationships. If some of them become friends, that's fine, but it's not anywhere close to a prerequisite for me to be successful and fulfilled at work.
My entire career I've worked successfully with people I never met who live on the other side of the planet. The whole discussion about the necessity of in-person collaboration over the last 3 years has struck me as one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I haven't had a conference call in 3 years. I cannot emphasize how revolutionary and positive that change is. I see my coworkers' faces more now than I ever did in the past thanks to Zoom and Teams. It's nothing short of miraculous how much better things are now.
In return for giving up a pointless commute to use a different Internet connection and for spending less time pandering to bosses who want to promote buddies who look like them instead of competent leaders, I can spend more time with people and things I actually care about and more time doing work I love. Every single bit of this new arrangement is roses.
I've been in my current project for over two years now, never met the team in person, but we have a good connection - chiefly because we insert some chit-chat into the meetings.
I don't think most did so successfully. A lot of companies did it without any sort of software or procedures to support remote working and never managed to implement it during the time. They still rely on Skype.
The combination of a bigger remote talent pool and enhanced productivity with AI tools is going to make it pretty rough for mediocre programmers in the medium term, I think.
Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here.
As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).
I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares.
With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...this trend is hostile to human nature and relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales.
Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal".
You've been lucky and haven't experienced a regular company that is not remote ready. I'm sure most tech companies are in a much better position then the ones where the only communication software is Skype. It's a serious uphill to convert such a company to a remote one.
Most IT and engineering (and probably other "IP based") companies are "remote ready" for the right person. It's not some vast change or investment they have to make, really. You use the laptop they give you and connect from a different place, and continue to go about your job more or less the same way as does everybody who works with you, since most places are perfectly used to remote meetings and have been for decades. If they want you they'll make the accommodation. That goes for prominent companies that have been implementing strict back to office policies.
There's no "not ready", it entirely a choice by management.
I'm not talking about IT or engineering. Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here? They clearly want it to be a remote company.
Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software. It's even worse there. Their remote culture is highly dysfunctional and she goes into the office 5 days a week even though she doesn't need to.
Remote work and collaboration requires a very different skillset in order to be effective. So if a company clearly wants to do that (both leadership and staff trying to make things work), it is probably time to bring in a consultant — maybe someone with an anthropology or sociology background that can look at how everyone interacts together with the technology, and can suggest gradual changes there.
An example: in some companies, the receptionist knows who has entered and exited the building, and can sometimes become the defacto person that can help people find each other. Someone whose effectiveness depends upon this informal role of the receptionist will find that they can’t work like this anymore when the company goes remote.
> Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here?
I don't know what you're talking about. What result? What company? Can you give some more detail or did I miss a post?
I have many concrete examples right in front of me, which is the number of companies and government agencies that went to remote extremely rapidly during covid shutdowns.
> Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software.
Like I said, that's just a simple choice. Most probably by some self-important bureaucrat who wants to sabotage the remote work scheme. All they would have to do is use normal software like many other places permit, and that would be most of the battle.
Lots does. I work for a company that among other things makes leading edge ASICs. The tools and probes and things required to test and handle wafers and the chips that come back from packaging can't be sent to peoples' houses. Some people have to work various manual steps in that process at times. It's surprisingly hands-on, especially in early stages of characterization and yield and performance tuning.
The vast, vast majority of person-hours required to go from drawing board to bits of silicon running in customer's computer can be done entirely without physical presence though.
I know mechanical and structural engineers and it's much the same for them.
Having the tech to allow a few employees to work remotely is one thing. Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely. You have to transform a lot of things like:
* On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company.
* Socialising - there needs to be a regular opportunity (not mandatory) to meet up in person, even if there's no office.
* Communication - this is a biggie. The company can't just install Teams/Slack/Skype everywhere and expect collaboration to continue as before. Instant messaging apps are terrible for building asynchronous communication habits, since they incentivise quickfire messages. The company needs to publish guidelines on how to give status updates and ask for support, and potentially make communication skills be part of employee evaluation (if not already).
* Evaluation - remote work gives senior management a bad feeling because they don't feel like they know what's going on in the company. The root cause of this is that they're not actually evaluating employee output, but rather something else (e.g. how the employee contributes to meetings or responds to in-person questions). This kind of works in the office since those things correlate somewhat with employee quality. But remote work forces managers to think about how to objectively measure employee productivity solely on their work output... and some of them either resent the extra effort or just aren't imaginative enough.
None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
To add to that about Slack — speaking is a distinct skill from writing, engaging in different part of the brain. The skills you use for speaking in person does not automatically translates to writing, let alone the various social nuances that comes with text based communication.
The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.
True. Anticipating context is one example of a skill that verbal communicators sometimes lack. For someone to understand your statement/question, it needs to be framed in the language they use everyday, and not to lack any crucial information.
In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.
I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"
> Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely.
It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).
> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.
This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.
> all electronic onboarding anyway
That's not true, you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office. And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
> This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.
Right. Far from the "few and far between" narrative here, isn't it?
> That's not true,
I'm talking about HR onboarding. Signatures, payroll, boilerplate regulatory compliance training etc.
> you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office.
Nope, not if HR is located elsewhere. It's phone, email, electronic meetings.
> And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
"If you're in the office you'll be in the office".
All of this stuff is trivial to do online. I don't pretend it has exactly the same results, and one possibly valid concern is monitoring and hepling newer and less proven employees. It doesn't mean that just because there are certain pros and cons that the whole idea falls in a heap at the first hurdle though, so those kinds of anecdotes do not address what I wrote.
> In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
None of this is rocket science, and all of the tools to do it trivially exist in any software suite any company uses even ones that aren't remote. Email, calendar, chat. Or a physical pen and notepad if you must. Checking in on people isn't some incredible and complicated new skill managers have to learn, that's what they do.
When most people use “on-boarding”, they don’t mean just the legal/HR/benefits paperwork, but rather the effective integration into the fabric of the company. The original post to which you replied even specified that as including “learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503709
And there's nothing that's particularly prohibitive about doing that remotely. You can't just call a bunch of dot points like "on boarding" refuting what I wrote. Sure it's what you might read in your CEO's email or whatever, but that doesn't make it true.
The point you seem to be making - that remote working is a cinch as long as all the managers already know what they need to do and how to do it - is both correct and missing the point.
That's not the point I'm making and I have to say it's pretty outlandish if it seems that way to you.
The point I'm making is that it's not because an organization is "not ready" that remote work is not permitted. Implying there is some set of steps or purchases they need to make and then they are ready. It's because the people who can make the decision don't want to.
I thought that I repeatedly made it clear that I made no value judgement on the remote work and didn't claim that is a bad decision to make.
You've consistently asserted that most companies would find it easy to switch to remote work.
I absolutely disagree with this. At least I disagree that most companies can do so and be confident of maintaining productivity. I believe it requires a big shift in organisational and operational processes and attitudes within the company.
No I haven't, and "easy" is not a well defined term here. What I said is that it's not a matter of being ready or not, it's a matter of choosing to or not. And lots of companies can and actually did choose to do that at very short order when covid was causing shutdowns, so if you want to make extraordinary claims to the contrary then you'll need to bring a lot of evidence.
I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a mode of work that more or less helped out the rest of the company.
These things were not free. The pioneer had to really put himself out there to implement the remote best practices. By the time I got there, most of that was in place.
I think I have only read a couple articles about it, but I don’t have them.
Just off the top of my head, unorganized:
- manage outcomes instead of time spent
- Explicit presence: as a remote worker, you have to be explicit and deliberate about making your presence known. Status emojis, socialization, and “thinking out loud” threads
- Use [async] tags in messages whenever you can to help manage urgency of reply. Same with statuses
- Daily standups become even more important in order to promote social bonding, including brief chit-chat right before everyone shows up. Video if you can. It is about the only time the team bonds together
- Use the zoom chat for backchannel, so that you can still get something out without interrupting the speaker
- Having said that: Slack history records everything. Do not use Zoom chat as meeting notes. Put that into Slack, and then into Confluence/Notion/OneNote.
- Shared documents to work out a plan over Zoom helps keeps things focused
- You will be exercise writing a lot more. Leverage that. Be more thoughtful about replies. You can always link to conversations in tickets and documents
- Make use of do not disturb and periods when not to recieve notifications
- Keep your calendar up to date. Make sure to block out maker time (focus time), lunch, async times, and when you are running errands. That way, people can quickly schedule a time with you if needed
- Slack huddles in open channels can simulate drop-in calls. If you like pairing, you can start a huddle with yourself and work there. Rename the huddle to make it clear that you are open to drop ins, add a summary in the huddle thread to make the work visible
- hybrid meetings suck. People in person have to make more of an effort to make people who are remote in known. Conference rooms should be setup to put zoom folks on the wall, and zoom folks should put their video up. (It works better as all in person or all zoom meeting)
- team, dept, and maybe company should periodically bring everyone together onsite to do the things you cannot do remote
Somebody has to serve you at restaurant, stack shelves at store and about gazillion other jobs that are done physically at location, or they are not done at all. Such claims are so desperately out of touch with reality its a bit sad. There will always be traffic in the cities.
Or do you want police or ambulances or surgeons to also work remotely?
Your tone sounds like you're criticizing the parent comment but the content of your reply is pretty strongly supporting/backing up the parent comments assertion so I'm having a hard time figuring out if you're trying to disagree or agree lol
>Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).
Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications.
When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting French truck drivers the EU pushed through new regulations that required the drivers and the trucks (!!) to visit their home country at least every 2 months.[0]
>The most controversial measure is an obligation for trucks to return to their country of establishment at least every eight weeks
I think political entities will fight a lot with dirty tricks like this to keep the tax revenue and employment in their jurisdiction.
There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms (and anything in between). I am here in Thailand as an expat, with my own business, working remotely for European clients. I am taxed at the Thai rate, and have a work permit, because there is no large Thai talent pool competing for the same business and opportunities I am. So far I am not seeing any dirty tricks, there are other countries competing for this exact type of expat too. "Dirty tricks" would drive them away to other countries.
> There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms
Bulgaria (and Romania, per linked article) were on the receiving end of said dirty tricks. The problem is Western EU trucking companies did not want the much cheaper to operate Eastern EU truckers eating their lunch. The "dirty tricks" did not come from Bulgaria/Romania in this case.
Similar thing is happening here in Philippines. The government basically gave tax breaks to companies who will utilize their office spaces in city centers. To no one's surprise, most of the local companies are now forcing return-to-office. The government justification is: people spend more when they regularly go the the office thus, stimulating the economy.
I doubt it motivates you to travel home for lunch!
It sounds like you'd be very unlikely to enter downtown for any other reason. Also, may I suggest you move your home or employment? 3 hours is a lot of commuting and that is bad for you.
What do you mean by “crack” remote? It’s been “cracked” and has been pretty run of the mill for years now. You have a point about big companies with overhead being slow to turn but there are already very well established ways for remote companies to work.
>And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).
This is somewhat wishful thinking: most companies cannot have employees that live outside their country. These workers instead need to become consultants, and contract to the client companies. Employing someone overseas is not easy at all, and most companies just aren't set up to do it. There is a new industry of companies that specialize in "employing" digital nomads, and then contracting their services to their employers back in the other country, but of course this adds extra cost to the client. For US-based remote jobs, they usually plainly say "US residents only" to avoid these hassles.
Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins.
It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown in boats, stay in detention centres, leave the EU to keep the Poles out of the job market etc. exist primarily to protect local working markets. IMHO a people doing the same job in SF and Bangalore must be compensated the same but the fact that they aren't is exactly why it's much better to live in USA. That's also why you have H-2B visa quota.
I'm still puzzled about this, don't you think that this could have the same effect on your industry as the manufacturing moving to China? Especially for coders, don't you think that people in poor countries can code just fine? Technology is not only making the distance a non issue - recent developments are also removing the language barriers.
The money that even the junior US tech workers are making is at life changing level for most of the world. This will be tapped.
> Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins.
Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison.
Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway.
I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.
I agree, it wasn't a mainstream success so far but there are teams who cracked it. There are some companies who are proudly WFH-only and global.
The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results.
I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.
People in different countries/continents work differently, have different expectations around how much initiative non-managers should take, etc.
I’m not saying one is worse than the other. What I’m saying is that trying to mix these levels and hoping to exploit cheap labor to offshore doesn’t work well in my experience and what’s saved on paper is paid tenfold in customer attrition, employee turnover, high severity outages, that kind of thing.
For example, having had experience with Indian sweatshops, the people working there were paid a pitance compared to us, had to use their own equipment, no paid sick days, forced to commute several hours to work and back… imagine how interested they were in the work, being treated like subhumans by their employer. And whenever we’d talk about technical problems, they’d always say yes even if it turned out they had no clue what needed to be done or how to do it. I believe it was a factor of the tyrannical management there, but also a cultural thing. Same with asking for feedback, we had a culture (country, not corporate) where it’s common to ask for and receive honest feedback. The offshored staff could never wrap their heads around it. Or being asked to do something unclear/stupid: onshore would bring it up/challenge it/ask for clarifications, offshore would just go ahead and do… something, anything. Then we’d have to spend time redoing it and rethinking it losing weeks of work. But it was cheap, look how much were saving!!
I hope this doesn’t come as racist. I do t mean that the Indian offshores were worse people than onshore employees! What I mean is that there was a huge values gap between the two, very different ways of working, different expectations, different power dynamics and that they absolutely didn’t mesh together well at all.
We were appalled at the conditions offshore had to work under. One of the workers had cancer and couldn’t really afford the treatment because apparently health insurance isn’t really a thing in India and had to come work sick because they couldn’t afford the treatment otherwise… it was a disgrace and we tried to pressure management to face the human cost of their penny pinching.
It’s not impossible to have offshore and onshore working together and save money but I’ve never seen it done well so I’m very doubtful it can work.
And I think that’s our moat: we work differently, have different values, and different levels of initiative that local comapnies benefit from more than the marginal amount saved on exploiting offshore labor (in the context of sweatshops)
Completely agree on the culture, it's not that people in one place are inferior to the other - it's just that that's the way how work is done in their country and they keep doing it as long as they are in that environment. When the same people physically move to another country, they end up absorbing the local culture and adopt and behave like the rest of the team.
That said, with all the communications in place today I think the culture is becoming global with newer generations having less and less difference between countries.
Time zones still matter though. I have been in same-time-zone remote teams and different-time-zone ones. The dynamic is very different.
Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones.
As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to affect why that doesn't work.
Right, the time zone differences are a hard one. In some places people work in the hours of the client when doing remote work but it's still hard and taxing.
Exactly. When you do async comms and have a question, skip the chit chat and just send the question and an appropriate infodump.
As a matter of fact, even when you chit chat do it in self contained units. You don't know how much time passes till your co workers read your joke in #general.
Somewhat, but I suspect that it’s not as bad as it may seem.
The pandemic made it clear that there are naturally forming windows of better collaboration around longitudinal time zones. Outside of +/- 2 time zones becomes fairly difficult on a regular basis. West coast to East coast is difficult.
For Americans, there may be some interesting competition coming out Mexico and perhaps a few of the more advanced countries of South America like Brazil and Argentina.
For Europeans I would expect the same from Africa, from countries like South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, etc.
But once you are outside of +/- 2 time zones you either need one side to shift schedules or have zone local orgs.
At that point it’s less about remote work and more about outsourcing. We already know what outsourcing looks like, and it’s very different from remote work.
Bottom line, I do expect to see increased competition for remote jobs, but for the good roles that matter the competition is not truly global.
Read Wealth of Nations for an explanation of why this might not be the disaster for the wealthy countries as most mercantlists think it will.
Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.
Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.
With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.
Virtually the entire VFX industry has shifted to remote. Let that sync in.
The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now.
They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.
I'm curious (and not really familiar with modern VFX workflows).
Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.
My wife works from home in a related industry, and she is quite frequently transmitting work files (up to 100s of GiB) over our residential connection. We have multi-gigabit symmetric FTTH though.
I think it depends on what they're doing. If they're doing animation (which includes moving elements in live-action footage) and mostly checking the quality of motion, they might get away with proxy renders. But anyone doing critical color or compositing I would think need to do local renders on a calibrated system, and then commit the work to a remote render farm for consistency and accessibility by other team members.
Source: Worked at a ~2k employee multinational when covid hit, it got bought by a bigger corp and got turned into an ~11k employee company later on.
Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones.
COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option.
People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was.
Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events.
Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties.
I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.
I think companies should be inclusive, and bring people to the office. Because people who don't like working from home will feel excluded when they're lonely in the office.
There have been a lot of, at least to me, somewhat unsubstantiated criticisms that fully remote work is difficult for new graduates. I can only provide n=1 sample data, but back when I was working for a company that was fully remote, we brought on many junior engineers who lived across the United States and didn't have any problems onboarding them by keeping a continual slack team huddle running during office hours.
In a lot of ways, it was actually better for them because they could have a multi monitor set up and be looking at one of our shared screens while taking notes on the other one instead of a bunch of people crammed up against one laptop screen in an office.
At least in software engineering, this is a great opportunity to start understanding how to cooperate and work with a team in this field. There should be a little bit of friction involved in tapping someone on the shoulder, and if you can only code within arms reach of a senior engineer you won’t make it very long.
Sometimes I think the college mindset of “if my code doesn’t compile, the TA must have made a mistake giving it to me like this, I’ll ask him what’s wrong” persists into a first job. And there are jobs (and senior engineers) who encourage this pattern too, so it can be a while before anyone encounters a different atmosphere unfortunately.
The thing is the way it used to be done was you'd mill around the office and then when there was a free moment, you'd ask the senior guys some questions. It wasn't really structured.
What you're describing has some merit, but it also means you are being watched all day, just like if you were in the office. Not being watched is probably a major benefit of WFH.
I've heard this too, but my employer is 99% remote and we've made some excellent hires over the last few years. It's part of my responsibilities to do ongoing mentorship, after others do more intense onboarding, so schedule regular (~monthly) video chats, and be available to work on incidentals together. No office required.
Everyone is still compiling data from different vantage points. I don’t think anyone knows what it means yet.
2008 implosion? Nothing? A new evolution? Unemployment armageddon? Something totally new we don’t have a model for yet?
Some people thinking history repeating itself as usual and nothing new? Then those people should tell us what’s next if they claim to know everything. After all, it’s a repeat, so they should know already.
I used to just leave my work laptop back in the office locker, coz apparently we can't work from home anymore so no 'emergency/important' work after 5PM lol.
This is the kicker for me. Work can’t be done productively from home? Fine then. My laptop goes in my backpack at 5pm when I get into my car, and it stays there until I pull it out at the office at 9am tomorrow.
Most people doing software are salaried, not hourly, so this doesn't really apply very cleanly.
Would you rather get paid $100k and be paid extra for oncall, or $350k and not be compensated for oncall? That's the real comparison that's being made, and why people consistently choose the FAANGs where on-call is an expectation -- the extra on call pay isn't going to make up for the big gap in total comp.
I’m wondering if some residential buildings will start incorporating luxury co-working office areas where remote workers can stroll into and work amongst other people who WFH in the same building. Kind of like a WeWork. A place for people to find a desk and hang out for a change of scenery, and perhaps meet some locals. It seems like this would almost be necessary for remote workers who don’t have fancy homes but just have a simple studio or 1 bedroom apartment that gets very boring after a while.
This would probably kill off whatever co-working space businesses are left out there.
I think a good solution is industries should standardize on pay differential between working at the office full time, vs hybrid, vs full time work from home.
Here is just an example: Looking at the same exact job. Office workers would make 20% more than the WFH employees and Hybrid workers would make 10% more than WFH employees.
Now employees have incentives to pursue jobs on both ends of the spectrum. Maybe the employee values the freedom of working from home, not having to endure the cost of commuting or living in a major metro area.
You could argue about the percentages, but basically a pay differential could be the thing that settles the WFH struggle.
I think the parent is trying to say that if employers value workers in their corporate offices more than workers at home, then they should pay more to get that higher value.
Remote-first jobs are still in the minority (low labor demand), and a lot of devs across the time zone are eager to take them (high labor supply), so we should expect to see lower offers.
They apparently value people being in the office. Let them put their money where their mouth is. This is a textbook capitalist approach to the problem.
Compensation is determined by how much it takes to get someone to do the work, not the work itself. Generally speaking, it takes more money to convince someone to come into an office. If an employer finds value in having people in an office, they have to pony up, else nobody will show up.
Companies who mandate return to the office should pay employees for the additional commute time at their hourly rate. If this becomes too expensive then productivity gains from being in the office are apparently not worth it.
I agree with you 100%, they should, but companies would look at you like you're demanding an absolutely bonkers amount of money. (They'd much rather the employees come back for free! And they'll complain about the higher than expected attrition the whole way…)
I agree with you that it's not realistic, but you understand the point I'm trying to make. In the end of the day you are taking a pay cut with this. With a one way 1h commute and 8h of work it's a 20% pay cut. I'm not surprised that smart people treat it accordingly.
Careful with this kind of demand. It’s possible that companies may pay the office workers their increased rate simply by reducing pay to remote workers.
If they think that this is good allocation of their resources, why shouldn't they? (rhetorical question, it's because remote workers are not 2h of commute time per day less productive).
They will do that anyway, by offshoring fully remote jobs. There will be a minority of very high-level experts who will be able to dictate their terms, as indeed happened even before Covid, but the vast majority will not.
Who said anything about slight? Assume your average commute is 1 hour each way. According to most HN users, the average dev can’t do more than 3-4 hours of “intense focus” work per day. Instead of paying you for “10” hours of being in the office and commuting to, I’d pay you for 3-4 hours of “intense focused” work. That’s 50%, being generous.
what an insane standard. it's easy to find sources for an average commute [0], your assumption is more than double the total of <1h both ways. and as far as I know nobody has ever paid by hours of "intense focus," not sure how that's at all relevant to this conversation.
we're really talking about 1h of an 8h workday, so about 11-13% depending on your denominator. not trivial but something I'd happily do.
I once worked some place where my manager loved to tell this allegedly true story (happened before my tour) as a hilarious joke to onboard new devs on how to fill the timesheet:
There was this IC who was working on cross departmental stuff. Things like pipelines, UI component libraries, build tools, etc. He would frequently go on walks to think, either during the work day and return to the office or to go back home and work some more. At this amazing place, we had extensive timesheets to fill in (with 15 min granularity, was great). That guy used to count his walks as work time on specific projects (15–30 min walks.) The joke is that management came down hard in him because you can’t get paid to walk as you’re paid to be writing code. Thinking about code for the company isn’t a paid activity unless it happens in the office. What a sucker this guy was, asking to be paid for taking a walk harharhar!
My colleagues then added (after the manager left the room) that as a result the guy in question took much longer “walks” to think things through in an empty conference room every day instead. Nobody saw the stupidity in that and he left shortly after this new policy was enforced.
This was the single most toxic worst company I’ve ever worked at.
My point is that employers still think that butt not in seat = not working, and since I’m paying you I can make you suffer and I own you for that duration. My job sucks and I can’t work remote so why should I allow you, puny peasant, to have it better than me when you didn’t “work” or “deserve” it?
> employers still think that butt not in seat = not working
This is a huge red flag for companies. Currently I can just go for a 15-30 minute walk with my dog if I get stuck and still count it as work time.
If I'm at the office I can go grab some snacks and go sit on the break area sofas and watch some crap on my phone - still working.
It's actually been scientifically proven that a change of environment brings more creativity and makes problem-solving easier.
---
At a company I worked years ago we had "work reatreats" where we booked a conference room from a random hotel or office for a day. Breakfast and afternoon tea was catered.
Everyone had to pick a few tasks they thought they could finish during the day, we turned off all communication devices and started working roughly on a Pomodoro system monitored by one person. No talking allowed unless we were on a break, where we all got up and left the room for a while.
Pretty much everyone was finished with all their tasks before our lunch break. We did this multiple times.
It's amazing how much work you can get done when you're in a novel environment with the knowledge that you will have zero distractions for the next 8 hours. Nobody can just pop in for a "quick question" or ping you on any communication tool.
>It's actually been scientifically proven that a change of environment brings more creativity and makes problem-solving easier.
If you need a citation for this, "Learning How to Learn" and its sequel "Mindshift", MOOCs created by an engineering professor and a neuroscientist. The former is the most popular MOOC in the world.
Ha, almost thought you were describing me there. I used to go for walks to think. I was pulled up on it for not being at my desk and thus presumably not "working".
They also had 15 minute timesheets. I used to fill them in accurately. I was pulled up on that for not doing my full 8 hours a day on assigned projects. I pointed out that filling in the timesheet alone took half an hour a day, and I also talked to colleagues, made drinks and did other things that were not attributable to project work... Just like all my colleagues did who were claiming 8 hours. I was told to make the timesheet add up to 8.
> employers still think that butt not in seat = not working
I don't like coffee breaks because I just drink water and I find small-talk very tiresome. I also don't smoke. So I never take breaks except for when I'm stuck on something and I need a walk to think it through.
Multiple times, managers or people even higher have complained of both : not taking coffee breaks and taking walking breaks.
To me it's not exactly "butt not in seat = not working", it's more "not behaving like everyone else = not working".
But when you come with a solution/idea that none of the regular coffee break takers had, now they're glad that you're not like everyone else.
Weird.
Logistically, how does this work? Do employees need to install trackers on their phones to catalog hours?
Not saying it wouldn’t be ideal to have that segment of the day paid for, but I’m just trying to get my head around how the tightwad money folk deal with such a nebulous target.
Leave home at the start time, such as 9am. The rest is the outside world and not up to you. Maybe one day traffic will be bad or trains will be late or whatever the commute variability is. That's the employer's risk to incur by forcing office attendance. Leave at the most reasonable time you are likely to arrive home by finish time, such as 5pm.
Someone asked that in my company. Answer was: you signed the contract in the past, before the covid, and you were coming to the office, and the commute time was included in the compensation. So there will be no increases.
I guess you could use this card when applying for new job.
But honestly, I would rather stay home and earn lesser than agree to coming to the office for additional hourly pay, covering commute time.
I have to return to office since I left my previous remote one, been remote for 3 years.
Silver lining (cope) for me is losing weight and slowing down passage of time.
Also interacting with people IRL is nice, seeing physical people. I don't get out much other than going to the bars once in a while.
But it sucks... Losing an hour a day for driving and I gotta get up earlier to get ready/drive. And I'll be working in a cubicle... Oh well got my cans for tunes.
My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. Thanks for mentioning this in the context of working from home. I feel a little better now.
> My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older.
The theory behind this is that your brain "compresses" memories. Identical days are just stored as "and here I spent 5 days working". And if your weekends are mostly similar, then it's just "And then I spent 12 weeks doing routine shit".
For kids time seems to move slower because everything they experience is new and can't be "compressed".
As an adult you can emulate this by doing things you haven't done before, getting new experiences.
This is why backpacking around some crazy 3rd world countries is so intense, 2 weeks feel like few months, and 3 months felt like several lifetimes. It was so surreal when I first experienced it, after ie 2 months in India the memory of life back at home was a distant memory of a dream since every single day was an endless stream of completely new experiences and encounters.
Do yourself a favor, anytime you have vacation try to do and see something different, new, every day. Even now with small kids, when we try this our vacations feel much longer than they actually are. But prepare to be more exhausted, although I call it 'good exhaustion'.
I call it prolongation of life mentally, the best we have for now (apart from physical aspect of living healthier obviously).
What's worse to me is the return to the "hybrid" office we keep getting threatened with. (My company has not actually done a RTO … yet. I don't know if we ever will.)
Now instead of a lousy 4' desk in an open office plan … I also get a desk that isn't mine? I'm supposed to … what, lug a keyboard¹ & mouse & laptop in? It seems like literally nobody has imagined what it might be like for a SWE to actually attempt to do work in the machinations that get proposed. (And in my case, luckily, never seem to materialize.)
¹between the insistence on MBPs, and my RSI, an external keyboard is a requirement, not a nicety
An external keyboard and mouse is a necessity for any non-emergency work. 100% of laptop keyboards and trackpads suck for anything other than emergencies, and many suck for emergencies as well.
Sizes from a 10" ASUS eeePC to a Toshiba 17" monster desktop replacement, generic brands, a 14" Lenovo Thinkpad, a 13.3" Dell XPS, Samsung (real puurty silver slimline thing I was sad to say goodbye to), current work laptop is an HP Elitebook, a 15" ASUS, a 13.3" ASUS, and at least a couple of other work ones that aren't memorable enough. Plus my kids' school chromebooks.
No macs though, I've not crossed that border yet.
I can deal with any keyboard, but for actual proper typing in an environment where one is meant to be working, gotta be an external keyboard. I've got a mechanical at home, but I'm fine with non-mechanical at work, so I don't think I'm too much of a prima donna - I won't say that's inarguable fact though ;)
I know the thread has drifted a bit here, but in the context of employment, I don't have the option to try different laptops. I've never worked at an employer that permitted BYOD for the laptop, and so you're stuck with what they issue, which is generally a single choice, as they don't want to put in the IT work to support more than that.
If that choice is a MBP … then you're stuck with not only an infamous keyboard, but also one that causes me (and many people I've worked with) RSI … it's that, or an external.
… if only it were so simple! Employers are incredibly stingy¹.
But what I was trying to convey in the previous comment is that I already have an ergo keyboard. (So do many of my coworkers. It is also mine, purchased with my own money, because of the above.)
The point is not really obtaining the keyboard … it's transiting it to-and-fro the office, day-in, day-out, in these hybrid RTO plans. "Hotdesking" is inherently incapable of supporting this as the desk is no longer dedicated to a specific employee, but nobody in power making these plans appears to have thought it through.
(¹but frankly, a part of me would rather just say "give me that in cash as part of salary" and I can make a better purchase & management then than trying to deal with what amounts to being partially paid in keyboards. This extends to more than just keyboards: employees should absolutely not forget we bear costs in order to be employed for the company in the form of depreciating hardware costs)
Having worked in two companies practicing hybrid office with no nominative desks but two very different ways of doing it, I can say that it can be great. Or a nightmare.
In the first one they just converted regular nominative desks to free ones. Every desk had different screens with different cable standards, no ergo stand for the screens, some had shared keyboards, each had different chairs, some had drawers, some had accessible outlets, other were hidden behind the desk... You had to come with your stuff from home. And the cleaning was done once a week.
The second one, every desk is the same. The same two screens on ergo stands. A USB-C dock with network connected to the screens. Easily accessible on the desk to plug USB devices. Same chairs at each desk. Each employee has a big personal locker to put stuff like keyboard, headset, coffee mug... Cleaning done every evening so when you arrive in the morning everything is perfectly clean.
You can see which is which.
The second is by far the best place I worked at in my 10+ years career. Depending on what is your main topic of the day, you just pick the next near the people with whom you'll work. Don't want to be bothered with your coworkers most of the day? Just go near another team. And you can also meet new people this way. You can even change desk during the day if need to change context. Just unplug your laptop.
I know people prefer having their own desk with pictures, goodies and other junk. And I thought I was one of them. Until I tried free office the right way.
Great, I can hear about sports and eat shitty complimentary pizza while eavesdropping on some 20 ur old intern get bullied by his superior for driving an old car/having bad facial hair.
Corporate environments bring out the worst in people. I don’t believe 70% of workers are looking to be lazy by wfh. We want to sift thru the toxic bullshit so we can actually do our FUCKING work.
> 20 ur old intern get bullied by his superior for driving an old car/having bad facial hair.
It seems that, for whatever reason, covid has increased the intolerance of shitty behaviour like this. Possibly because remote working meant people could choose to have less contact with toxic co-workers, and so upon return to the office it was far more obviously toxic than before covid when it may have been somewhat normalised.
I cherish the days I go to the office, the two hours commute each way. But that's because I do it about once or twice a month. And the rest of the week I need it to recover from all the strong emotions.
Going to the office everyday would, for me, feel like drinking every day. Probably not very good in the long run.
It’s been super easy for me to recruit people from my network. Yesterday texted an old friend and he straight up said “sign me up”. Just placed another friend who was extremely competent at our previous job but he got swept up in layoffs. Big layoffs at my old jobs that are in industries that saw huge booms because of the pandemic, whereas I’m in a nice stable industry at a very large company that has a decade+ worth of huge contracts lined up.
They made the home office return to work, but for our sizable satellite office they’re literally building a new 4-story building so the devs can come back in 2025 or so.
Business is booming if you’re in the right industry, and for tech workers it’s not that hard to switch it up.
I am grateful for a remote job. Sometimes being at home for too long I get stir crazy and if I plan my day well I can schedule in time for breaks and walks and feel better. If I had a 45+ minute commute each way again I'd be stir crazy in traffic. No thanks.
The hardest part for me is balancing slack and video conferences. Slack can be useful but it's hard to have more nuanced conversations and make complex decisions. Those really need conversation to make them effective.
A friend recently mentioned that they are on a forced return to office 3 days a week and they spend most of their day on calls with people in other cities and countries. If I had a job I was mildly disinterested in and was forced to commute for no reason, that would nudge me to quietly apply for other jobs. Any company claiming to be climate friendly and forcing people to commute is hypocritical (cough cough Amazon).
If someone wants to be in an office, then accommodate them. Then for everyone else shift the office space budget to the travel budget. Done.
"Any company claiming to be climate friendly and forcing people to commute is hypocritical (cough cough Amazon)."
But on the other hand it's Amazon and its ilk that allow people to be at home all the time, not out running errands. Don't get me wrong: I'm no fan of Amazon. But on one hand you have a lot of self-proclaimed car-haters pretending that nobody needs a car, but then wanting to take away the street capacity that makes carlessness possible by enabling delivery.
I've started enjoying in-person shopping more lately. It's a way to get out of my WFH bubble and feel that I can get in and out of the stores in about the same time as shopping online with Amazon.
I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more. Even without online shopping I'd still prefer remote work.
I frequently prefer in-person shopping too, but inventory control gets ever worse. At this point, I'm shocked if I find anything in stock anywhere... even staple items. I do prefer to support brick-&-mortar businesses, and will pay a bit extra to do so.
"I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more"
Yeah but I don't understand the point you're trying to make. If people couldn't have stuff delivered, and couldn't shop during business hours, then what?
I've found that I can shop during business hours fine. And if not during business hours I can shop for what I need in the evenings before stores close. It comes down to time management.
For example, yesterday I took an hour break for lunch and ran a couple errands while I was out. No big deal.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadMy guess is that you're also more likely to lose your best performers - since they will have higher confidence in being able to find a remote-friendly job somewhere else.
It's not really a WFH/RTO thing so much as a benefits thing. The same would be true for another variable like free lunches.
What we do know is anecdotal evidence of very influential and high performers at various FAANG type companies that have ended up leaving due to forced RTO.
Anecdotally, I work at a large company that fully supports 0% to 100% remote work, and I work with a wide mix. Some people, and some roles, just do better in the office. Others don’t. I’d be very suspicious of forming beliefs based on anecdotes, especially if they coincidentally align to your expectations.
Less certain about roles that are generally technical. The strongest claim for in-office work, collaboration, is mostly a well solved problem for at least software, possible simple administration that just relies on some collaborative spreadsheets. Sitting everyone in a stuffy boardroom all staring at the same boring spreadsheet is likely to cause stress and mental fatigue, not increased collaboration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7889069/ This is a well known effect.
Even large "interactive" meetings in remote settings can be counter productive - of course not all meetings are bad and one key to being an excellent manager is picking the right people for the right meetings, but the idea that your "top performers" objectively speaking will be the ones experiencing the most stress is seriously suspect.
What is more likely is some combination of workers who either "do well" in high stress environments, usually implying they are healthy and have some effective stress management techniques and as such are recognized as top performers compared to those unable to effectively manage their stress, or those in mainly technical areas have not yet experienced (somehow) the benefits of less stressful remote-work environments. E.g. parents or partners in cramped personal quarters being more distracted compared to e.g. a private office space.
Finally, for those workers that have an active job component where they must e.g. be on site for customer testing or perhaps they are a technical liason, some hybrid approach may work better - in office for resources which are cost prohibitive to simulate or when their role requires them to interact in an another capacity e.g. as a technician, security guard, or triage such as a front desk.
There is also the case where "top performers" are leeching off their colleagues e.g. where they can "get more done" because they can interrogate and corral others but where others are mostly experiencing productivity hits as a result of the constant interruption.
Forcing in office work for everyone means all the people who work better remotely now…simply don’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36501068
We’ll just find out in a couple years or decades by observing who is still standing.
I think the RTO folks are in the latter group. If their work was measured objectively by results, they wouldn't be considered high performers.
Firstly the people who are mandating RTO want to think of themselves as high performers. They want RTO so "high performers want RTO" is obvious to them.
Secondly a lot of non-doing managers want to be able to justify their existance. To do that they need people in the office to distract by walking around and having conversations etc. They can't do this when people are just WFH doing deep work.
Thirdly, if they know a manager wants RTO, then people who want to suck up to that manager will say they want RTO and will come in to the office to actively suck up to the manager. The manager will see these sycophants as high performers because they are spending their time fluffing the ego of the aformentioned manager.
Behavior you describe would never get my any promotion anywhere I worked. Maybe I was just lucky, who knows.
> A late-stage SaaS startup decided to embrace this wave of change. They worked with me to introduce flexible work policies, and the result was almost immediate - they noticed a sharp decrease in employee turnover and an uptick in job applications. Their story echoes the collective message from all three reports: companies must adapt to flexible work policies or risk being swept away.
I'd love to see current hiring stats on committed work from home or flexible companies. There are more places that allow WFH than ever, but as some companies are forcing a return to the office, I bet the remaining WFH companies could exploit the fact that the majority of people don't want to do that. At least some people are willing to switch jobs over it, and so WFH companies should get an influx of talented applicants.
It's not ideal, but it's also almost no different than the teleconferencing with satellite offices that we had previously anyways.
Just instead of calling other offices overseas or whatever, you're calling people at their homes or their own chosen offices.
If everyone is dialing in to the daily stand-up from their desks, what is the point of having everyone commute to the office to do it?
Only if we're not willing to fight for more.
With a third of your life spent at work (at least, but hopefully less), this is no way to go through life. Everything is up for negotiation.
People who want to attempt to unionize to get the right to work remote can do so, as organizing is federally protected activity in the US and it only takes 30% of employees of a bargaining unit to petition the NLRB to hold a union vote: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/conduct-elections
This is a labor rights issue, plain and simple. It makes little sense to be subjugated to management edict “because they say so” when there are labor tools available.
Translation for sociopathic leaders: never let your workers taste something good. It only took a global pandemic that forced people home in order for us to experiment with something that a huge portion of the population sees as beneficial to their well-being. Where were the small scale experiments before the pandemic, and why did they never catch on?
Does this mean that 58% of companies that mandated a return underestimated attrition? And 71% are doing fine with recruitment?
(Also a really nice, clean website redesign.)
Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab's is a good start) to start grasping it.
But it will happen and the companies/startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc
And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).
Why do the people living in those cities feel so strongly that this isn't the case[1]? How does the city administration deal with skyrocketing rents?
[1] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-...
You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight.
This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.
There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut.
Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too?
Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?
I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces.
While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative.
All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.
Speaking personally, everyone I’ve spoken to on the matter (myself included) have zero desire to return to a traditional office.
The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.
WFH-advocates turning to "arguments" like your post is one reason why I oppose this new trend of entitlement. You people really think you are on top of the world and everyone has to dance to your tunes, right? I hope the market will fix this. Go and find a WFH company that lets you slack-off from home all day long. And then, shut up!
1) pathologically envious enough to punish people because they work from home
2) motivated by ordering colleagues around, which becomes harder if not in person
3) unable to appreciate the comfort of working from home and the importance of having a life.
Do you, as an "admin", feel entitled to be "on top of the world"? Everyone has to dance to your tunes, right?
And there is a difference between "care duties" and the "papa is at home so we can pester him with family stuff all day long". We have 2 weeks of extra leave for parents, they already have extra priviledges compared to non-parents. If someone declares a few days off because they have to fix something important with their family, that is fine and never was an issue.
But WFH people suddenly realizing at 10 AM that they can not be bothered to work for the next 3 hours is definitely unfair and overstretching the priviledges.
Unless you own the company what do you care?
This is obviously hyperbole for... living a life?
Hiring, the same way RO outfits can access unique talent, and information transfer, particularly to newer team members. Also, in industries where over-documentation is an unnecessary liability.
I enjoy going to an office, having a change of scenery, interacting with people (both close friends and casual acquaintances), brainstorming ideas with a small group around a whiteboard, getting lunch with colleagues, etc, etc...
Sure, the "writing code" part of the job is easier when there are fewer distractions. And a crowded open office can be an annoying source of distractions.
And I definitely enjoy having lunch more often with my family, or hanging out with the dogs, or sitting out on my deck under the trees while I read my morning email.
But working in an office was nice too, and I miss it.
You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
Speaking as a senior manager at a smallish software company (300 people), absolutely, decision makers are in my experience smart and competent.
But what they don't do is necessarily make decisions based on data.
I don't believe for a second that most RTO debates are based on meaningful measurement. As with a lot of corporate decisions, I suspect it's a lot of HIPPOs, fingers in the air, and herding behavior.
The pandemic hit, we transitioned to remote work, I was happy. Everyone quickly adapted and learned how to efficiently work from home. About two years later, two things happened:
1. Surveys and postmortems showed that remote work lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity at our company.
2. Company leadership started talking about a mandated return to office.
People of course challenged this decision, pointing to the data, and no real explanation was given. Those who wanted to returned to office, but the mandated return was indefinitely postponed and eventually silently dropped as the manager primarily pushing for a return left the company.
That's precisely the problem. The decision makers suffer from extreme confirmation bias and Dunning-Kruger effect. So what happens is they run surveys, polls etc which are loaded and indicate that employees would 'love' to return to the office. They mandate RTO and are then surprised when people leave en masse because the data they've collected is wrong.
That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect.
They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office.
They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distance.
They may not be dumb, but their idea of "normal" is not what covid hath wrought, and therefore a return to the office is a return to "normal", and thus a heaving sigh of relief can be had that we're now past that extended weirdness.
They may not be dumb, but they may not be able to understand that people are motivated differently from themselves and from each other. "I work better in the office, therefore y'all do too". (admittedly there's a bit of dumbness in that one, however that's far from saying it's unrealistic or rare).
> according to data they are seeing
Anecdotal warning: Outside of the "best of the best" kinda places, my experience is that most decision makers work on 'feel' and not data - whether data is available or not.
Thing is, that normally works out, but large shifts like the "new normal" during the pandemic can take a while for the gut to pick up, and so the default is to get back to the known-good state...
I agree. They are seeing the data that their skills of busy-bodies bouncing between meetings and impromptu conversations at other employees desks don't translate well to remote work and they understand that their nice 3mil$ house in the valley will cost much less in couple of years if everyone embraces full remote, so they are doing their best to preserve the status quo.
It's hardly all roses.
Reducing people's different experiences to a homogeneous grey mush is overly reductive.
More progressive corps embraced online socializing earlier, and honestly that's all I need. To be sure something is lost socially by not being in person, but the workplace is not social-drinks club, or if it is that's where your productivity went.
You still build connections with people you only meet online, older folk might have more trouble with that, which makes sense why they might struggle to manage if they heavily depend on "making friends" to do their job.
Training and onboarding can be issues, but barring a straight up lack of talent generally focused efforts are probably better than just assuming the new employee will "make connections" and learn via osmosis.
And yes this might mean going to the office once in a while or to a company event etc
Not an unsurmountable problem but it's not negligible neither (as much as it is slowly growing)
I work in an organization with 10s of thousands of workers across the United States. I will never, in the best circumstances, see more than a handful of them in person, other than in-person team meetings, which have themselves become increasingly rare as the team is more geographically diverse than ever and travel budgets are slashed due to ready electronic collaboration tools. So ... what connection? I mean, I don't really care about having a personal connection with these folks anyway. I like them and enjoy having a positive professional relationship with them, but they're my coworkers and we have amazing tools to build those relationships. If some of them become friends, that's fine, but it's not anywhere close to a prerequisite for me to be successful and fulfilled at work.
My entire career I've worked successfully with people I never met who live on the other side of the planet. The whole discussion about the necessity of in-person collaboration over the last 3 years has struck me as one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I haven't had a conference call in 3 years. I cannot emphasize how revolutionary and positive that change is. I see my coworkers' faces more now than I ever did in the past thanks to Zoom and Teams. It's nothing short of miraculous how much better things are now.
In return for giving up a pointless commute to use a different Internet connection and for spending less time pandering to bosses who want to promote buddies who look like them instead of competent leaders, I can spend more time with people and things I actually care about and more time doing work I love. Every single bit of this new arrangement is roses.
Tech companies are not representative.
Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here.
As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).
- proximity to family and community support
- quality of schools for kids
- some people want to live out in the boonies, with a hobby farm or a real homestead
- shared cultural or political values
- some folks want to be nomadic, couch surfing or living out of a souped up van or rv
- some folks want to be able to stay with extended family for longer
- some folks want to cowork locally
- I know one guy who lives in a low cost of living area and reinvest the arbitrage back into his local community while still living comfortably
In my family’s case, I have been regularly going to the local indoor play gym so that my toddler can wear himself out. It’s too hot to play outside.
Also, flexibility != remote
There are remote work places which installs invasive software to monitor “butt-in-seat”, and you don’t really get flex time.
I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares.
With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...this trend is hostile to human nature and relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales.
Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system
There's no "not ready", it entirely a choice by management.
Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software. It's even worse there. Their remote culture is highly dysfunctional and she goes into the office 5 days a week even though she doesn't need to.
An example: in some companies, the receptionist knows who has entered and exited the building, and can sometimes become the defacto person that can help people find each other. Someone whose effectiveness depends upon this informal role of the receptionist will find that they can’t work like this anymore when the company goes remote.
What are you talking about then?
> Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here?
I don't know what you're talking about. What result? What company? Can you give some more detail or did I miss a post?
I have many concrete examples right in front of me, which is the number of companies and government agencies that went to remote extremely rapidly during covid shutdowns.
> Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software.
Like I said, that's just a simple choice. Most probably by some self-important bureaucrat who wants to sabotage the remote work scheme. All they would have to do is use normal software like many other places permit, and that would be most of the battle.
Most companies attempt to have office culture and working style while working remotely, which absolutely sucks.
There are not a lot of companies (And employees) who have figured out how to do remote well.
The vast, vast majority of person-hours required to go from drawing board to bits of silicon running in customer's computer can be done entirely without physical presence though.
I know mechanical and structural engineers and it's much the same for them.
* On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company.
* Socialising - there needs to be a regular opportunity (not mandatory) to meet up in person, even if there's no office.
* Communication - this is a biggie. The company can't just install Teams/Slack/Skype everywhere and expect collaboration to continue as before. Instant messaging apps are terrible for building asynchronous communication habits, since they incentivise quickfire messages. The company needs to publish guidelines on how to give status updates and ask for support, and potentially make communication skills be part of employee evaluation (if not already).
* Evaluation - remote work gives senior management a bad feeling because they don't feel like they know what's going on in the company. The root cause of this is that they're not actually evaluating employee output, but rather something else (e.g. how the employee contributes to meetings or responds to in-person questions). This kind of works in the office since those things correlate somewhat with employee quality. But remote work forces managers to think about how to objectively measure employee productivity solely on their work output... and some of them either resent the extra effort or just aren't imaginative enough.
None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.
In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.
I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"
It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).
> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.
This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.
> all electronic onboarding anyway
That's not true, you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office. And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
Right. Far from the "few and far between" narrative here, isn't it?
> That's not true,
I'm talking about HR onboarding. Signatures, payroll, boilerplate regulatory compliance training etc.
> you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office.
Nope, not if HR is located elsewhere. It's phone, email, electronic meetings.
> And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
"If you're in the office you'll be in the office".
All of this stuff is trivial to do online. I don't pretend it has exactly the same results, and one possibly valid concern is monitoring and hepling newer and less proven employees. It doesn't mean that just because there are certain pros and cons that the whole idea falls in a heap at the first hurdle though, so those kinds of anecdotes do not address what I wrote.
> In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
None of this is rocket science, and all of the tools to do it trivially exist in any software suite any company uses even ones that aren't remote. Email, calendar, chat. Or a physical pen and notepad if you must. Checking in on people isn't some incredible and complicated new skill managers have to learn, that's what they do.
Studies in the UK demonstrate that feeling isolated and making connections with colleagues in a remote environment is a major concern for younger employees: https://universumglobal.com/blog/the-leadership-gap-young-wo...
This is an organisational issue which isn't solved just by making tools like email and calendar available.
The point I'm making is that it's not because an organization is "not ready" that remote work is not permitted. Implying there is some set of steps or purchases they need to make and then they are ready. It's because the people who can make the decision don't want to.
I thought that I repeatedly made it clear that I made no value judgement on the remote work and didn't claim that is a bad decision to make.
I absolutely disagree with this. At least I disagree that most companies can do so and be confident of maintaining productivity. I believe it requires a big shift in organisational and operational processes and attitudes within the company.
I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a mode of work that more or less helped out the rest of the company.
These things were not free. The pioneer had to really put himself out there to implement the remote best practices. By the time I got there, most of that was in place.
Just off the top of my head, unorganized:
- manage outcomes instead of time spent
- Explicit presence: as a remote worker, you have to be explicit and deliberate about making your presence known. Status emojis, socialization, and “thinking out loud” threads
- Use [async] tags in messages whenever you can to help manage urgency of reply. Same with statuses
- Daily standups become even more important in order to promote social bonding, including brief chit-chat right before everyone shows up. Video if you can. It is about the only time the team bonds together
- Use the zoom chat for backchannel, so that you can still get something out without interrupting the speaker
- Having said that: Slack history records everything. Do not use Zoom chat as meeting notes. Put that into Slack, and then into Confluence/Notion/OneNote.
- Shared documents to work out a plan over Zoom helps keeps things focused
- You will be exercise writing a lot more. Leverage that. Be more thoughtful about replies. You can always link to conversations in tickets and documents
- Make use of do not disturb and periods when not to recieve notifications
- Keep your calendar up to date. Make sure to block out maker time (focus time), lunch, async times, and when you are running errands. That way, people can quickly schedule a time with you if needed
- Slack huddles in open channels can simulate drop-in calls. If you like pairing, you can start a huddle with yourself and work there. Rename the huddle to make it clear that you are open to drop ins, add a summary in the huddle thread to make the work visible
- hybrid meetings suck. People in person have to make more of an effort to make people who are remote in known. Conference rooms should be setup to put zoom folks on the wall, and zoom folks should put their video up. (It works better as all in person or all zoom meeting)
- team, dept, and maybe company should periodically bring everyone together onsite to do the things you cannot do remote
I disagree. As long as i still see traffic in cities, it means remote work is still a tiny minority
Or do you want police or ambulances or surgeons to also work remotely?
Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications.
When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting French truck drivers the EU pushed through new regulations that required the drivers and the trucks (!!) to visit their home country at least every 2 months.[0]
>The most controversial measure is an obligation for trucks to return to their country of establishment at least every eight weeks
I think political entities will fight a lot with dirty tricks like this to keep the tax revenue and employment in their jurisdiction.
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logisti...
Bulgaria (and Romania, per linked article) were on the receiving end of said dirty tricks. The problem is Western EU trucking companies did not want the much cheaper to operate Eastern EU truckers eating their lunch. The "dirty tricks" did not come from Bulgaria/Romania in this case.
I can say with the utmost confidence that spending more time and money downtown is the last thing that my 3 hour round trip commute motivates me to do
It sounds like you'd be very unlikely to enter downtown for any other reason. Also, may I suggest you move your home or employment? 3 hours is a lot of commuting and that is bad for you.
Unfortunately, they will have a lot to lose by not being cheap anymore. At least for the locals. See Lisbon or Boise, for example.
This is somewhat wishful thinking: most companies cannot have employees that live outside their country. These workers instead need to become consultants, and contract to the client companies. Employing someone overseas is not easy at all, and most companies just aren't set up to do it. There is a new industry of companies that specialize in "employing" digital nomads, and then contracting their services to their employers back in the other country, but of course this adds extra cost to the client. For US-based remote jobs, they usually plainly say "US residents only" to avoid these hassles.
It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown in boats, stay in detention centres, leave the EU to keep the Poles out of the job market etc. exist primarily to protect local working markets. IMHO a people doing the same job in SF and Bangalore must be compensated the same but the fact that they aren't is exactly why it's much better to live in USA. That's also why you have H-2B visa quota.
I'm still puzzled about this, don't you think that this could have the same effect on your industry as the manufacturing moving to China? Especially for coders, don't you think that people in poor countries can code just fine? Technology is not only making the distance a non issue - recent developments are also removing the language barriers.
The money that even the junior US tech workers are making is at life changing level for most of the world. This will be tapped.
Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison.
Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway.
I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.
The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results.
I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.
People in different countries/continents work differently, have different expectations around how much initiative non-managers should take, etc.
I’m not saying one is worse than the other. What I’m saying is that trying to mix these levels and hoping to exploit cheap labor to offshore doesn’t work well in my experience and what’s saved on paper is paid tenfold in customer attrition, employee turnover, high severity outages, that kind of thing.
For example, having had experience with Indian sweatshops, the people working there were paid a pitance compared to us, had to use their own equipment, no paid sick days, forced to commute several hours to work and back… imagine how interested they were in the work, being treated like subhumans by their employer. And whenever we’d talk about technical problems, they’d always say yes even if it turned out they had no clue what needed to be done or how to do it. I believe it was a factor of the tyrannical management there, but also a cultural thing. Same with asking for feedback, we had a culture (country, not corporate) where it’s common to ask for and receive honest feedback. The offshored staff could never wrap their heads around it. Or being asked to do something unclear/stupid: onshore would bring it up/challenge it/ask for clarifications, offshore would just go ahead and do… something, anything. Then we’d have to spend time redoing it and rethinking it losing weeks of work. But it was cheap, look how much were saving!!
I hope this doesn’t come as racist. I do t mean that the Indian offshores were worse people than onshore employees! What I mean is that there was a huge values gap between the two, very different ways of working, different expectations, different power dynamics and that they absolutely didn’t mesh together well at all.
We were appalled at the conditions offshore had to work under. One of the workers had cancer and couldn’t really afford the treatment because apparently health insurance isn’t really a thing in India and had to come work sick because they couldn’t afford the treatment otherwise… it was a disgrace and we tried to pressure management to face the human cost of their penny pinching.
It’s not impossible to have offshore and onshore working together and save money but I’ve never seen it done well so I’m very doubtful it can work.
And I think that’s our moat: we work differently, have different values, and different levels of initiative that local comapnies benefit from more than the marginal amount saved on exploiting offshore labor (in the context of sweatshops)
That said, with all the communications in place today I think the culture is becoming global with newer generations having less and less difference between countries.
Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones.
As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to affect why that doesn't work.
https://www.nohello.com
As a matter of fact, even when you chit chat do it in self contained units. You don't know how much time passes till your co workers read your joke in #general.
The pandemic made it clear that there are naturally forming windows of better collaboration around longitudinal time zones. Outside of +/- 2 time zones becomes fairly difficult on a regular basis. West coast to East coast is difficult.
For Americans, there may be some interesting competition coming out Mexico and perhaps a few of the more advanced countries of South America like Brazil and Argentina.
For Europeans I would expect the same from Africa, from countries like South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, etc.
But once you are outside of +/- 2 time zones you either need one side to shift schedules or have zone local orgs.
At that point it’s less about remote work and more about outsourcing. We already know what outsourcing looks like, and it’s very different from remote work.
Bottom line, I do expect to see increased competition for remote jobs, but for the good roles that matter the competition is not truly global.
Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.
Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.
With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.
The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now.
They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.
Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.
Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones.
COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option.
People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was.
Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events.
Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties.
I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.
In a lot of ways, it was actually better for them because they could have a multi monitor set up and be looking at one of our shared screens while taking notes on the other one instead of a bunch of people crammed up against one laptop screen in an office.
Sometimes I think the college mindset of “if my code doesn’t compile, the TA must have made a mistake giving it to me like this, I’ll ask him what’s wrong” persists into a first job. And there are jobs (and senior engineers) who encourage this pattern too, so it can be a while before anyone encounters a different atmosphere unfortunately.
Edit: I worded that a bit poorly. The point I wanted to convey was that the physical location isn't what determines accountability.
What you're describing has some merit, but it also means you are being watched all day, just like if you were in the office. Not being watched is probably a major benefit of WFH.
2008 implosion? Nothing? A new evolution? Unemployment armageddon? Something totally new we don’t have a model for yet?
Some people thinking history repeating itself as usual and nothing new? Then those people should tell us what’s next if they claim to know everything. After all, it’s a repeat, so they should know already.
Would you rather get paid $100k and be paid extra for oncall, or $350k and not be compensated for oncall? That's the real comparison that's being made, and why people consistently choose the FAANGs where on-call is an expectation -- the extra on call pay isn't going to make up for the big gap in total comp.
This would probably kill off whatever co-working space businesses are left out there.
Here is just an example: Looking at the same exact job. Office workers would make 20% more than the WFH employees and Hybrid workers would make 10% more than WFH employees.
Now employees have incentives to pursue jobs on both ends of the spectrum. Maybe the employee values the freedom of working from home, not having to endure the cost of commuting or living in a major metro area.
You could argue about the percentages, but basically a pay differential could be the thing that settles the WFH struggle.
The Law of Supply & Demand.
we're really talking about 1h of an 8h workday, so about 11-13% depending on your denominator. not trivial but something I'd happily do.
0 https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...
There was this IC who was working on cross departmental stuff. Things like pipelines, UI component libraries, build tools, etc. He would frequently go on walks to think, either during the work day and return to the office or to go back home and work some more. At this amazing place, we had extensive timesheets to fill in (with 15 min granularity, was great). That guy used to count his walks as work time on specific projects (15–30 min walks.) The joke is that management came down hard in him because you can’t get paid to walk as you’re paid to be writing code. Thinking about code for the company isn’t a paid activity unless it happens in the office. What a sucker this guy was, asking to be paid for taking a walk harharhar!
My colleagues then added (after the manager left the room) that as a result the guy in question took much longer “walks” to think things through in an empty conference room every day instead. Nobody saw the stupidity in that and he left shortly after this new policy was enforced.
This was the single most toxic worst company I’ve ever worked at.
My point is that employers still think that butt not in seat = not working, and since I’m paying you I can make you suffer and I own you for that duration. My job sucks and I can’t work remote so why should I allow you, puny peasant, to have it better than me when you didn’t “work” or “deserve” it?
This is a huge red flag for companies. Currently I can just go for a 15-30 minute walk with my dog if I get stuck and still count it as work time.
If I'm at the office I can go grab some snacks and go sit on the break area sofas and watch some crap on my phone - still working.
It's actually been scientifically proven that a change of environment brings more creativity and makes problem-solving easier.
---
At a company I worked years ago we had "work reatreats" where we booked a conference room from a random hotel or office for a day. Breakfast and afternoon tea was catered.
Everyone had to pick a few tasks they thought they could finish during the day, we turned off all communication devices and started working roughly on a Pomodoro system monitored by one person. No talking allowed unless we were on a break, where we all got up and left the room for a while.
Pretty much everyone was finished with all their tasks before our lunch break. We did this multiple times.
It's amazing how much work you can get done when you're in a novel environment with the knowledge that you will have zero distractions for the next 8 hours. Nobody can just pop in for a "quick question" or ping you on any communication tool.
If you need a citation for this, "Learning How to Learn" and its sequel "Mindshift", MOOCs created by an engineering professor and a neuroscientist. The former is the most popular MOOC in the world.
They also had 15 minute timesheets. I used to fill them in accurately. I was pulled up on that for not doing my full 8 hours a day on assigned projects. I pointed out that filling in the timesheet alone took half an hour a day, and I also talked to colleagues, made drinks and did other things that were not attributable to project work... Just like all my colleagues did who were claiming 8 hours. I was told to make the timesheet add up to 8.
I don't like coffee breaks because I just drink water and I find small-talk very tiresome. I also don't smoke. So I never take breaks except for when I'm stuck on something and I need a walk to think it through.
Multiple times, managers or people even higher have complained of both : not taking coffee breaks and taking walking breaks.
To me it's not exactly "butt not in seat = not working", it's more "not behaving like everyone else = not working".
But when you come with a solution/idea that none of the regular coffee break takers had, now they're glad that you're not like everyone else. Weird.
Not saying it wouldn’t be ideal to have that segment of the day paid for, but I’m just trying to get my head around how the tightwad money folk deal with such a nebulous target.
Silver lining (cope) for me is losing weight and slowing down passage of time.
Also interacting with people IRL is nice, seeing physical people. I don't get out much other than going to the bars once in a while.
But it sucks... Losing an hour a day for driving and I gotta get up earlier to get ready/drive. And I'll be working in a cubicle... Oh well got my cans for tunes.
My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. Thanks for mentioning this in the context of working from home. I feel a little better now.
Maybe I should get an office job too.
If you really want to undercut that effect, inject new experiences into your life as often as possible.
I’m only half-joking.
that is the plan... gotta save/invest
The theory behind this is that your brain "compresses" memories. Identical days are just stored as "and here I spent 5 days working". And if your weekends are mostly similar, then it's just "And then I spent 12 weeks doing routine shit".
For kids time seems to move slower because everything they experience is new and can't be "compressed".
As an adult you can emulate this by doing things you haven't done before, getting new experiences.
Do yourself a favor, anytime you have vacation try to do and see something different, new, every day. Even now with small kids, when we try this our vacations feel much longer than they actually are. But prepare to be more exhausted, although I call it 'good exhaustion'.
I call it prolongation of life mentally, the best we have for now (apart from physical aspect of living healthier obviously).
https://fortune.com/2023/06/26/forced-return-to-office-is-th...
from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36499167
Now instead of a lousy 4' desk in an open office plan … I also get a desk that isn't mine? I'm supposed to … what, lug a keyboard¹ & mouse & laptop in? It seems like literally nobody has imagined what it might be like for a SWE to actually attempt to do work in the machinations that get proposed. (And in my case, luckily, never seem to materialize.)
¹between the insistence on MBPs, and my RSI, an external keyboard is a requirement, not a nicety
This is inarguable fact.
Sizes from a 10" ASUS eeePC to a Toshiba 17" monster desktop replacement, generic brands, a 14" Lenovo Thinkpad, a 13.3" Dell XPS, Samsung (real puurty silver slimline thing I was sad to say goodbye to), current work laptop is an HP Elitebook, a 15" ASUS, a 13.3" ASUS, and at least a couple of other work ones that aren't memorable enough. Plus my kids' school chromebooks.
No macs though, I've not crossed that border yet.
I can deal with any keyboard, but for actual proper typing in an environment where one is meant to be working, gotta be an external keyboard. I've got a mechanical at home, but I'm fine with non-mechanical at work, so I don't think I'm too much of a prima donna - I won't say that's inarguable fact though ;)
If that choice is a MBP … then you're stuck with not only an infamous keyboard, but also one that causes me (and many people I've worked with) RSI … it's that, or an external.
Then again if your employer doesn't even have monitors at hotdesks then maybe it's time to look for greener pastures.
… if only it were so simple! Employers are incredibly stingy¹.
But what I was trying to convey in the previous comment is that I already have an ergo keyboard. (So do many of my coworkers. It is also mine, purchased with my own money, because of the above.)
The point is not really obtaining the keyboard … it's transiting it to-and-fro the office, day-in, day-out, in these hybrid RTO plans. "Hotdesking" is inherently incapable of supporting this as the desk is no longer dedicated to a specific employee, but nobody in power making these plans appears to have thought it through.
(¹but frankly, a part of me would rather just say "give me that in cash as part of salary" and I can make a better purchase & management then than trying to deal with what amounts to being partially paid in keyboards. This extends to more than just keyboards: employees should absolutely not forget we bear costs in order to be employed for the company in the form of depreciating hardware costs)
In the first one they just converted regular nominative desks to free ones. Every desk had different screens with different cable standards, no ergo stand for the screens, some had shared keyboards, each had different chairs, some had drawers, some had accessible outlets, other were hidden behind the desk... You had to come with your stuff from home. And the cleaning was done once a week.
The second one, every desk is the same. The same two screens on ergo stands. A USB-C dock with network connected to the screens. Easily accessible on the desk to plug USB devices. Same chairs at each desk. Each employee has a big personal locker to put stuff like keyboard, headset, coffee mug... Cleaning done every evening so when you arrive in the morning everything is perfectly clean.
You can see which is which.
The second is by far the best place I worked at in my 10+ years career. Depending on what is your main topic of the day, you just pick the next near the people with whom you'll work. Don't want to be bothered with your coworkers most of the day? Just go near another team. And you can also meet new people this way. You can even change desk during the day if need to change context. Just unplug your laptop.
I know people prefer having their own desk with pictures, goodies and other junk. And I thought I was one of them. Until I tried free office the right way.
Corporate environments bring out the worst in people. I don’t believe 70% of workers are looking to be lazy by wfh. We want to sift thru the toxic bullshit so we can actually do our FUCKING work.
Yes I’m bitter
It seems that, for whatever reason, covid has increased the intolerance of shitty behaviour like this. Possibly because remote working meant people could choose to have less contact with toxic co-workers, and so upon return to the office it was far more obviously toxic than before covid when it may have been somewhat normalised.
This is how it should be. Penalise the fouls.
Going to the office everyday would, for me, feel like drinking every day. Probably not very good in the long run.
They made the home office return to work, but for our sizable satellite office they’re literally building a new 4-story building so the devs can come back in 2025 or so.
Business is booming if you’re in the right industry, and for tech workers it’s not that hard to switch it up.
The hardest part for me is balancing slack and video conferences. Slack can be useful but it's hard to have more nuanced conversations and make complex decisions. Those really need conversation to make them effective.
A friend recently mentioned that they are on a forced return to office 3 days a week and they spend most of their day on calls with people in other cities and countries. If I had a job I was mildly disinterested in and was forced to commute for no reason, that would nudge me to quietly apply for other jobs. Any company claiming to be climate friendly and forcing people to commute is hypocritical (cough cough Amazon).
If someone wants to be in an office, then accommodate them. Then for everyone else shift the office space budget to the travel budget. Done.
But on the other hand it's Amazon and its ilk that allow people to be at home all the time, not out running errands. Don't get me wrong: I'm no fan of Amazon. But on one hand you have a lot of self-proclaimed car-haters pretending that nobody needs a car, but then wanting to take away the street capacity that makes carlessness possible by enabling delivery.
I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more. Even without online shopping I'd still prefer remote work.
"I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more"
Not sure what the point is there.
> it's Amazon and its ilk that allow people to be at home all the time, not out running errands.
I was addressing that line
I've found that I can shop during business hours fine. And if not during business hours I can shop for what I need in the evenings before stores close. It comes down to time management.
For example, yesterday I took an hour break for lunch and ran a couple errands while I was out. No big deal.