A random online dictionary says it means "(fully or partially) covered with water" and I hereby declare that this means that only singular water molecules are not wet.
Recently had a phone screen. The job posting said "Remote". The person on the line said "Actually, we don't offer remote, the job posting was wrong. We're hybrid, in office 3 days a week."
That's either a very wasteful mistake or a series of poor decisions by that company. They are going to have a lot of candidates who are unhappy and waste a lot of time on screening.
My company is starting to do this. People are actively leaving, and the company is just doubling down even more and just added an additional day of required office time, slowly clawing back to full time in office.
I literally told my boss if this happens for me I both won't come in anyways and will actively start seeking other opportunities.
Engineers who have been called back have already started leaving, but they seem to just hinge on hopefully surviving the storm.
Additionally we are already a global company, anybody who comes into an office will be on zoom meetings with other team members riddled across the country anyways.
we really need more flags for “REMOTE”; I hire remote (not hybrid) but people think they can work from the Principality of Sealand, Madagascar or Timbuktu. It’s really frustrating as: for tax reason, I can only hire in Germany and Sweden (where we have business entities).
But when I file a position (even where this is very clearly stated) I get literally hundreds of applications that are impossible for me to pursue- since they are never open to relocation either.
Its a pretty huge waste of resources on my side because we really try to assess each application and give a clear reason why we don’t continue with them-
A bit off topic, but one of the things that’s been killing me is instead of just posting a job labeled as remote, companies that post the same exact job listing for what seems to be every single city in the US.
I feel your pain, I moved to Boston from Buffalo due to this in 2017, and now I have 3x the rent, for 1/4 the space, and a non-existent social sphere due to perma-WFH.
That really sucks, I moved out to the Bay Area and most of my friend group here came from places I worked at, take them away and I’d have like 2 people in the area. Would be very isolating.
You didn’t ask for help but I’m going to offer: there are some great options in Boston for expanding your friend group. There is a maker space in Somerville, there are kickball leagues, trivia nights, a race track in NH, dirt biking or mountain biking all around. That’s how I met my friends in Boston when I moved there. Takes a little extra work rather than organically happening at work, but it’s better than playing video games inside all weekend.
I won't even apply for a job if it has compulsory office attendance. I'm okay if there's a physical office I can visit of my own free will, if the mood strikes. I'm in my employers office at least twice a month currently.
I know that this is not a popular opinion here.
I think its hard to put the genie back in the bottle, but I also think a tremendous amount of innovation happens in person.
Existing companies will probably continue to operate just fine, but the next wave of game changing companies will be small and in person.
A tremendous amount of innovation happens in person and not in person. Alone and working in teams.
The next wave of game changing companies will be the ones to hire the best people. I find it very unlikely that being 100% in person will be a competitive advantage versus companies that can simply hire the best and ask them to work in the way they consider the most productive.
Some of the most important software I use in my day to day work (neovim, git, alacritty, plus all the CLTs that assist me) are all created in distributed teams around the world.
How do we know that saying in-person innovation isn't a post hoc justification? You can't mandate innovation, you can't order innovation, innovation only comes from individuals; I doubt they would have been less innovative if they worked in person or remotely, and we'll unlikely ever know since we can't run a perfect experiment to verify this.
The next wave of game changing companies will be solely due to individuals being at the right place at the right time, whether that's remotely or in person I doubt that one aspect would be critical.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc may have offices, but half of them are in other countries around the world. Teams are constantly having remote meetings to meet up with their counterparts on the other side of the world. That's not in-person work. That's remote work in an office.
If you have to meet virtually with people in other offices, and do sync-ups with them, and use out of band tools to collaborate, are you really in-person? Why am I doing 9pm meetings when my job is in-office? What kind of in-person collaboration are you doing when you're not meeting in-person?
> If you have to meet virtually with people in other offices, and do sync-ups with them, and use out of band tools to collaborate, are you really in-person?
Obviously there is a spectrum, but having worked at multiple FAANG companies, teams are generally collocated and a majority of your interactions are within your team. And of course these companies are only able to have many offices because they experienced a large amount of success when there was only one office.
Well, people are too different today, to the point they can not tolerate close proximity to each other.
I am right with conspiracy nut job. If we cooperate in person, you would be exposed to my rants and other quirks. With remote there is no such issue. We can cooperate just fine.
I think some people just hate remote, because they do not have their own social circle. They also have no working habits to be productive with async communication. They expect prepackaged deal of friendship, mentorship and support.
"Innovation" is a hand-waving term. If you absolutely need to have a brainstorming meeting in-person, schedule it. That's likely the exception, not the rule. Too often, I see people who head to the office to have loud social conversations while not doing any real work. (Do they have a bullshit job? How much does said bullshit job make? How does one guarantee they meet their performance ranking threshold for said bullshittery?)
Otherwise, commuting and interruptions isn't conducive to focus and getting shit done. Fuck, my monitors at home are bigger than anything in any office and I have my keyboard tray, so why on Earth would I want to go into an office with a shittier setup? Also, most offices took away their snacks in the trendy spirit of being cheap and enshitifying their culture.
At the same time, anecdotally it seems like the worst job market in tech since 2008. For instance, we had the ex Meta employee yesterday who had applied for 2500 roles.
Everyone is hiring, but HR uses very exactly keyword reviews, related, HR wants a top performer (based on some meaningless resume heuristics), but wont pay for it.
The thing is, people have told me HR has been doing this for years. Hell I remember people doing crap like keyword stuffing the bottom of their resume and just making the text color match the background color (not that this is a great strategy)
But this is the first time I’ve ever struggled to find a job in my career. I had a much much easier time when I was 18 and didn’t even have any real experience.
The other part of this is "meaningless resume heuristics" - If you have the skillset for it, and are looking - look for software jobs outside of the traditional tech sector, in telecommunications for example.
I had a friend who made this transition, and hes much happier now.
Everyone says they are hiring, but in reality most are just sitting there holding fishing rods with their lines in the water. I don't believe any company that says they are unable to find candidates after these recent layoffs, and watching actual candidates getting ghosted after applying to hundreds (thousands) of jobs.
WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000. For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware.
Remote meetings are just one problem, I cant imagine trying to run SMB (or even the somewhat lighter NFS) calls over an 144 kbit ISDL or ISDN connection, even on an ADSL connection with a 384 or 768 upstream would be painful.
Maybe remote over connections that slow is fine if you're using version control - checking out the changes to the source tree, making changes, and checking them back in - its not okay if you're trying to open/change/save multi-meg excel files, things where you cant make incremental writes to.
tbh, the most common way I saw people working remote in the 90's and early 00's was Citrix or similar other remote work tools.
The broad thing is, the size of say.. software or scripting when I'm doing that, is a fraction of the size of my project docs, and are often stored to the server asynchronously - when I have to make drawings, its a different world.
I wish upper management would understand that some of us need silence to work due to sensory issues and the office doesn't provide something of that nature. Sound blocking headphones don't solve everything.
Wishful thinking. For upper management, facetime is the work.
They spend 7 hours in meetings, 1 hour reviewing spreadsheets, then they go home and sip wine. While engineers go home and log in again to finally do actual work or to go on-call.
Upper management has their own offices. Of course they don't understand what open offices are like. It's like planes, they only suck if you're in economy class, first and business are great. Why would you want to fly faster when you have an actual bed?
I hate flying. Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times. It helps very much for sure. There's no comparison between peasant class and business.
That said, it's still a crappy experience for me. There's the commute to and from the airport. There's the waiting, which is not good even if you have access to good lounges. There's more waiting, sometimes for many hours, if you're making connections. Finally, and the worst of all for me, there's noise, crappy toilets and especially the low pressure in the cabin which makes everything in my body ache.
My own office would be a clear and obvious improvement over a shared seat in an open plan. It would still not be anywhere near as good as my home office.
I never really had an issue with passport queues. Most airports I travel through have automated gates and it takes literally seconds to get through. When there's a queue, it's usually no more than 1-5 people getting through 5-10 gates so it takes no time at all.
Changing class won't make any of the issues I pointed out better, with the possible exception of the toilets.
Not to mention, some of us have to frikkin crap too!
It's kinda a daft reason but for people with irritable bowels or other conditions work from home is an absolute godsend. No more terrible cramped toilet stalls with attendant embarrassment.
I suffered in literal intense pain the first 6 years of my career, I don't know I could go back to that, ever.
That’s something i had never considered and it makes so much sense! Plus I found that after like 15 seconds the lights shut down which is … pretty crappy design if it’s not malicious.
I like having company hardware. But agreed on the first premise. Open offices are an abomination. That being said, I do think younger engineers can be a bit better off from the human perspective joining an office just do to getting a lot of social interaction, and hanging out with higher level engineers.
I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote.
Being remote works for me (even when I was younger cause I love sitting and hammering my head on shit until I figure it out), but a fair number of my coworkers genuinely enjoy going into the office.
It's interesting. But yes, agreed for the most part. Can't imagine wanting to go 5 days a week though lol.
> I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote.
This I agree with. I've worked on small 4-6 person teams that had people from different backgrounds and at different skill levels and we all got along and worked really well together and a ton of knowledge was shared. It's very rare to find something like that, but when you do it's exciting and you start to get the feeling that together you could solve anything.
Looking back though, almost all of the actual learning and camaraderie took place when we weren't working on actual work. Most of it was while we were showing off personal accomplishments or weird side projects or arguing about random things.
Any time you get a bunch of friends together who share common interests you get that sort of thing. Very rarely do you get lucky enough to have that in a workplace though.
Still, I think remote workers can still find like-minded people from diverse backgrounds themselves outside of the office to help them grow and develop without being forced to spend hours every single day with a group of people they aren't ever going to be friends with.
If a company requires me to bring my own hardware they better offer a "sign on bonus" equivalent to the cost of said hardware. Coz I ain't gonna install whatever corporate Spyware they require to be installed onto my hardware. Heck even their corporate hardware sits on a separate vlan that has no access except to the internet.
New hires should also be skeptical of a company that too-blindly trusts people to BYOD arbitrary workstations. Like, how do you really know that the person's BYOD workstation is fully up to date on patches for its relevant OS, doesn't have any viruses or trojans or screenshot/screen recording tools running on it? Or unauthorized Anydesk/Teamviewer, etc?
It's indicative of a company that doesn't take security seriously as something that should be built into a product from its foundation, or as a general corporate philosophy.
I have been fortunate enough to work from home since early 2000s. For many reasons I don't want to use my own hardware for doing that though. The main one being e-discovery. If your company is forced to go through a discovery process, if you've accessed company resources via your personal hardware, it becomes part of that discovery process. Additionally, licensing issues crop up, etc.
But it doesn't surprise me that companies who are forcing people into the office are having a hard time recruiting. If Covid showed us anything, it was that we could all work from home and be just as productive, if not more so, doing it.
IMHO, forcing me into an office is actually a punishment. Why punish me for the high cost of your real estate?
Great point about discovery and the importance of keeping work and personal devices strictly separate. There was a story making the rounds on HN last year about someone who kept... well... intimate pictures on their mixed personal/work device and had to surrender the device when their company was involved in a lawsuit. Don't cross the streams!
> WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000.
At a certain level of network engineering and in the telecom business it has been such since 2002 or so. Many of the people who run certain large ISPs have been fully remote (or at least 85-90% remote, if you count time with meetings and conferences) since 2000.
>> For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware.
It took a long time for employees to convince companies they can be productive when they're left to their own devices.
I've seen both sides of it.
Back in 2010, I worked for a large company that was experimenting with some ROWE "Results Orientated Work Environment" which was basically people working off site three days a week. As long as you're productive and hit your metrics, you were good and left alone.
We had a major project and two contractors just completely stopped coming in, did barely any work and left the team high and dry three days before a major release of the site we were building. After that, the company killed the experiment and required everybody to be in the office 5 days a week no matter what, no excuses.
I also worked for another company that slowly rolled out a similar program. We had three pilot developers. Then you had to apply to be able to get approved to WFH three days a week. Therefore, management was only allowing people who were hitting their numbers and had good metrics to get into the program. This went on for two years until they started relaxing a lot of the rules until they hit some hard times and shut it down completely.
I work for a huge health care company and they were VERY leery about letting people WFH even during COVID because they were petrified that production was going to drop off too much. Even at the height of the pandemic they tried several times to get people back into the office - but as usual, there were rarely any takers. It was a bit of a running joke at the time, but after a full calendar year, they relented and they were able to confirm that production had instead actually increased and essentially gave a vote of confidence for a lot of teams they were fully capable of WFH full time without a drop off in productivity.
Looking at it from a sympathy-for-the-devil standpoint, WFH is a serious dilemma for management. The problem is that almost everybody has traditionally been OK with working in an office (necessarily so), and management as a class is tasked and structured accordingly.
As for the workers themselves, some people are OK either way, some people insist on WFH (raises hand), and some people absolutely can't deal with WFH. Maybe the latter people have stronger-than-usual social needs by the standards of stereotypical engineering workers, and genuinely contribute more as part of a physically-present team. Asking those folks to adapt to a solitary work life is like asking me to get up at 6 AM and hit the freeway every morning. It's not going to happen... at least, not for long.
Or maybe they live in a one-bedroom apartment with a spouse and child or three. It's easy for some of us hardcore WFH advocates to forget how privileged we are.
So now, management has to decide how to get the most out of all of these workers. I believe that those who put their foot down and demand RTO will eventually be outcompeted by those who don't, but that doesn't make the job of converting a previously office-oriented culture to hybrid or exclusive WFH an easy one. Middle management without appropriate IT support, for example, is going to fail at the WFH transition no matter what they do.
Now, throw ML into the mix, and it's easy to see that we are in for a tumultuous couple of decades. I keep recalling the words of Nikola Tesla at the dawn of electrification: Humanity will be like an anthill stirred up with a stick. The changes that are coming are bigger than any of us probably think.
The data is perfectly compatible with the "return to office" mandates being hidden layoffs, and there being no actual difference besides this.
Personally, I'm having a hard time explaining the cause being on the direction implied on the title. The number of available candidates does not usually constrain the number of people hired, and the entire thing is too recent for any difference in competence to have that large impact.
I don't know if it has been popular recently, but my dad told me that when companies he worked for wanted to do a layoff they just transferred positions to offices on the other side of the country.
As a founding engineer for a pandemic-era company, I can see both sides of this argument.
We've had a very challenging time hiring and maintaining teams across the company. People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen. Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack.
IMO Seed-stage teams should spend lots of time together so that trust and understanding is built in-person. Hiring should be done very carefully, and people should be onboarded again, in-person. Once trust is there, and good work flows are established, teams can go 100% remote, but I still think it's good to get together at least once or twice a year.
> People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen.
I don't fully disagree with you but this is also something to put some long, hard thought into by the C-level whoever is running the company, if it's something new, how to put in place the communication methods, chat groups, information sharing SOPs and such to prevent isolation from happening in the first place. Deal with it as a structural/business operation and methodology issue first.
Get the SOPs set up before you start adding more than a couple of team members.
100% agree, just left a highly functioning, high performance org that I led at one of the big tech companies and strongly feel this “bonding problem” is a feature of piss poor management. It’s not as easy, and it’s not the same, but running remote teams well means that you really don’t have people defecting every 15 minutes, accountability is high and (assuming compensation is fair) so is employee satisfaction.
A lot of these leaders are trying legislate away the impact of their unwillingness to evolve and adapt to a market that has fundamentally changed. Two of the tech giants I was at during the pandemic saw at least a 20% jump across the board in key productivity metrics and in some orgs as high as 30%. Other than Zoom/meeting fatigue and work/life issues that are pretty easily solved, it’s a win-win.
*unless your company has heavily invested in commercial real estate and you need to force employees back into it, to avoid losing a ton of value.
After iterating on this process for years now we just haven't found a solution that works.
Some orgs can do this through meticulous documentation (Amazon comes to mind), but that hasn't worked here. People have a hard time digesting huge volumes of textual information from multiple parties.
I tried this for a while, but no one would engage with my docs or collaborate with me that way.
So far the only thing that's been reliable has been regular zoom pairing sessions. But this too can be very exhausting unless you are in an IC role that has very clear directives (this doesn't really exist at seed-stage).
Remote workers falling through the cracks is wholly on the company and not on the remote worker. It takes a very concerted effort on the companies part, to ensure that everything is remote first.
None of the other things you mention (bonding, siloes, etc.) happen because a worker is remote. They happen because companies treat remote workers the same as in office workers, without putting in any effort to become a remote first company.
Indeed, it is on the company. My point is that it is hard to do this well at a fully remote and async company. Especially when collaboration needs to be tight and delivery needs to be quick.
Naturally, when in person, you sit with your team and you have opportunities to have lunch with people and get to know who they are. These opportunities don't work as well at remote companies. Especially with different timezones involved.
Not saying it can't be done, but I haven't found a way that isn't extremely contrived.
Videoconferencing is fatiguing as hell and is not at all the same as gathering in-person.
I think it is impossible to recreate the "small" bonding events that happen in-person, and I also think that many in-person events that are recreated virtually are (a) significantly less engaging and (b) easier to dip from.
That's me, though. Everyone is different. I also haven't experienced working at a 100% remote-first company, so I might not have experienced better alternatives yet.
I find in person meetings more fatiguing than zoom meetings.
In a zoom meeting, when the topic turns for my particular focus I can refocus myself either by getting up (wireless headphones) stretching, maybe nipping out on the porch and getting some fresh air or taking care of some other task on my computer without disrupting the meeting in any way.
In an in-person meeting, these things would be seen as rude and/or distracting.
This is less of a concern in both cases in 1:1 type meetings where the conversation is generally focused or it's easier to call a break.
I was a developer in a small startup many years ago, ~20 person company and ~8 developers. We were all in cubicles, everyone got to hear every conversation, and there were still a few people that either fell through the cracks or were listening to a different drummer.
In-person is no guarantee for trust and understanding, and in my opinion it obscures bad habits.
Three to five: starts to be problematic working around so many schedules.
Once or twice: you aim for two, you'll get at least one, and if 10/12 people show up each time, you'll get at least some of the benefits of working together with people you know well.
It's arbitrary, but it's practical.
From an end user's perspective: I am a doctor. I am the end-user for my specialty on my site that is the main point of contact for the backroom team in a different location that admins my electronic medical record. We have a once a month virtual meeting that is usually brief (15-20 minutes) to go over issues.
But I've met most of the people on the call at least once, when they traveled to my hospital to set it up. It helps to match name to face. And be able to recognize their voices. And if we were officially working together all the time, having a physical meeting once or twice a year would be a great chance for everyone to go out and grab a drink and learn how the others are personally. I'm not hypersocial, but even if you don't want to hang out with your coworkers (I usually don't), it's useful to have some interaction with them that isn't entirely business.
> Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack
I would think that remote workers would be a forcing function for communications clarity.
Is there some deeper reason for this problem than "bad tools?" I see assertions that in-person is better somehow, but no reasons why that works better or why the same techniques can't apply to remote work. Is it all about pheromones or maybe some chemical sprinkled on the pizza?
I think the fidelity of unspoken information is so much higher in person. Over zoom and most certainly via text-based comms like slack, it's hard to tell if you are being understood, and if you are understanding.
Beyond just the technical understanding, then there is emotional understanding. I find that it's much easier to encounter apathy and malice over digital comms. In person, you have limited access to someone else's attention. On slack, you can be pestered by dozens of "very important" walls of text every day.
I don't think any of that has to do with WFH. It boils down to company culture. I've seen it all from small startups to large enterprises.
The constant for great teams was just an open, trusting, collegial culture without a lot of top-down management.
When you inspire people, pay them well, and treat them like adults you would be surprised how much they go to bat for you.
This is true, bug again, how is the company culture formed in the first place? Was there ever a company culture that formed from fully remote individuals who never ever met in person even once?
I can't think of an example to be honest.
I very much agree with your point of view, but I've seen it go sideways when the culture is not well established and rooted deeply throughout the organization.
When you remove top-down management, pay well, and "treat people like adults" then they will have to autonomously align with the greater mission and purpose of the company and work quickly towards delivering positive outcomes for the business.
What I've seen happen instead, is people just start working on things that tickle their curiosity, wandering off into left field and the team is struggling to row in the same direction.
It is my belief, that in an office, or at least in a company that has an established culture, this is less of a problem. There are more mechanisms available to our innate human biology to reach a group homeostasis.
I recently left a FAANG adjacent tech job because of RTO. In the job search here’s what I found on what companies are requiring:
1. RTO with no exceptions
2. RTO, but allowing exceptions for some roles
3. Limited RTO, 2-3 days a week
4. No RTO, but office availability
5. Fully remote
I ended up joining a company with #4, but I was surprised with how much that ended up being a factor in my final decision, because I do like going into the office and I still do. I left a lot of money on the table despite actually being okay with RTO because the freedom it brings with it. Waking up one day and just working from home because you can is just priceless.
There's a lot to this. Where I am (not tech) we are generally in the office 3-4 days/week (some of us 5 days) but I have the flexibility to WfH close to whenever I want, on the day (barring having an external meeting and work travel). The flexibility is worth way more than the number of days, to me and many of my colleagues.
I'm on level #4 too and I think that's the sweet spot for me.
Everyone on the team has the ability to come to the office when needed. Most never do. Some are there every day.
I usually go to the office when the alternative would be endless zoom meetings all day, I'll rather do those live if possible and gather them all in one day. (Or if I want to catch a movie after work at the IMAX that's near the office)
I don't think companies in #4 are safe, mostly because commercial real estate is expensive. Consulting firms will advise them to either not renew building leases or have a hybrid/RTO policy as one of the first cost cutting measures.
Commercial real estate is cratering in most cities. Companies are actually having much more success renegotiating leases. When you can do that, you can resize your footprint and make it reasonable based on usage.
I'm more curious about difference in wages. On the one hand, I would imagine that if two jobs pay is roughly in the same neighborhood, folks would choose based on WFH policy. On the other hand, offering remote work should really help in attracting great (high salary) talent who have the freedom to choose what they want to do with their life.
There are too many companies offering fully remote for it to be even worth interviewing for a non-remote job. At this point I'll happily accept 10-15% lower total compensation if it means fully remote.
I think there's some concerns about commercial real estate and office leases driving some of these attempts to put the genie back in the bottle but for a lot of employers I think the biggest issue is the change in the power dynamic, particularly in the US. So many things gave the employer the lion's share of power like unhealthy work-life balance, lack of safety nets, dependency on your employer for healthcare, accruing decent vacation time, etc. Work from home opened a lot of eyes and shifted a small amount of power back to employees and made them start questioning things.
WFH for the past couple of decades, gives me the choice to live where I want to live (internet dependent and time zone dependent of course). I can make a West Coast salary and live in the midwest if I so choose.
Having lived in PDX and commuting there, what would sometimes take me a 30 min drive early in the morning, would be a 2-3 hour drive coming home. Absolutely absurd and guess who it was costing? Certainly not my employer for sitting in traffic for 2-3.5 hours each day...
I cannot even begin to tell you how much my work/life balance has evened out since I stopped having to be in an office. Additionally, I get far more hours of singular concentration at home versus an office.
I have conversations all the time over Teams with any peers that I'm interested in having relationships with outside of work. This gives me the opportunity to be selective in doing that because I'm not interested in being friends/pals with everyone at work.
Also when we lived in the same city, we would meet in physical locations for a beer and a burger.
Now that I don't even live in the same state, we make plans to fly to each other's cities and get together. We'll also carry over convos to Slack or Telegram and phone calls.
Peer group as in friends? Or peer group as in coworkers?
I'm friendly with my coworkers, and some I may even call friends, but I certainly don't need my job to be able to make friends wherever I live. I can do that without the company stepping in to do the decision making for me. Companies all argue we should all be family, and my coworkers should de-facto be my friends, which is wrong to assume.
If you mean peers as in coworkers, well usually most people are just assigned to teams. So you meet people through that and eventually get to know them, remotely or in-person, doesn't really matter imo. I'm relatively close with plenty of my coworkers whom I've only met a couple times in person over the course of 2-3 years.
Given how beneficial it is to employees and it's ubiquity, quality workers are reasonable to expect this flexibility when looking for their next company to join.
> I can make a West Coast salary and live in the midwest if I so choose.
For now, until the execs realize that they don't need to pay West Coast salaries, just whatever gets them the engineering output that they need. If the job can be done with Latin American and Canadian engineers for less, or even less if they are open to other timezones, then West Coast salaries for remote work will go away in many instances.
I'm definitely enjoying working remotely, but I doubt that the high salaries from the good times in the tech industry will be there forever for remote work.
I don’t think you realize how hard it is to find good engineers abroad. And if you do find them, they’re already likely employed at a good job and would want a significant pay bump to leave.
A "significant pay bump" could be an increase from the equivalent of $100k to $130k. Well below west-coast tech salaries.
Anecdotally, I had a total comp of (roughly) $400k as a senior engineer at Dropbox with a tier-1 salary (Seattle area). I asked about moving to the UK. The move would result in my base being cut from $220k to £120k, which, at the time I asked, was equivalent to about $140k. So, just over a 35% paycut. Now, because I already had RSU grants from the US, I'd continue to do better than that, and would have been making an extra $150k/yr in stock, roughly -- but a new-hire in the UK wouldn't have that advantage.
And Dropbox is one of the best-paying non-finance tech employers in the UK. Most tech employers in the UK are paying <$200k/yr total comp for senior engineers. Most tech employers in Europe are paying even less. And I'm talking about top-tier companies in terms of comp, here -- Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, etc.
So, yes, good engineers may already have a good job, but unless they're at quant hedge funds, US-based employers can probably offer 30-40% less than they'd offer to a west coast engineer, and it will still be a huge increase in comp.
I thought WFH was great until the inevitable result of increased Slack messages and Zoom meetings. In fact, I think there were fewer hours wasted to context shifting and loss of concentration in the office. But it really depends on the company/team in the end.
It no longer makes sense to require people to be in the office if your company has more than one office. Your people will sit on conference calls all day anyway.
If you have a single office, it might make sense to have everyone come in, because you can't deny that the collaboration and camradarie are better when everyone is in the same building. When every meeting is fully in person, a lot more gets done.
I dunno, we used to sit around the first 10 minutes waiting for everybody to show up. Spend time fucking with hooking up to the sound system and projector...wait for all the chatter to quiet down. Talk productively for 10 minutes, spend another 10 chatting on our way out... then two people with more ideas would go off and talk on their way back to the desk, and the rest of the team gets left out of that one.
I see almost exactly the same patterns with remote work.
Everyone, especially "important people," gradually wander in. This happens even when the meetings are scheduled for 5 after the hour, to try to avoid lollygagging [edit to describe behavior, not people].
There's the small talk. Unlike in-person work, I get weather reports from different places on the planet.
There's always the "can you hear me," "your audio is off," "you're breaking up," and "how do I share this on whatever meeting app we're using" time once we're all there.
An actual meeting often occurs.
We still often run late, just like in-person meetings.
A few people will connect more directly, excluding the rest of the group, often not telling us at all until afterward. They tell everyone it's "more effective," just like in-person work, meaning they didn't want anyone else's input.
This is just what happens with badly-organized (or unorganized) meetings.
Full-time remote now and planning an exit out of CA in 3 months now that I have a baby on the way.
One thing I think we should all consider is that the WFH sea-change is, in large part, enabled by the continuing tech boom. If we hit a recession at some point(and who knows if/when that will happen) we may see unstoppable pressure to return to the office. Just something to keep in mind.
I always see people complain in these threads about how much more productive they are doing wfh, but I doubt a company would force people back in if it wasn't to their benefit. At this point it's clear to me that wfh is a zero sum game between employer and employee.
I don't disagree. But when the most competitive and data driven companies go in one direction, I would be surprised if the evidence wasn't pointing in one direction.
Don't assume that hacker news / reddit anecdots are 100% honest, generalizable, and not self serving delusions.
WFH means an employee can easily interview elsewhere. It is harder to manipulate them into working an unhealthy amount. It is less likely their entire social circle will be at the job which hurts employee retention.
Also you have to manage people based on outcomes which raised the bar for managers. Most managers really aren’t capable and have been mostly coasting on looking busy and watching attendance. That doesn’t work for a remote team.
I have been working remote for almost 7 years now though. I am never working from an office again but hey that’s what works for me.
The benefit to the employer is that they get to recruit in as many localities as they are willing to do the taxes for. Also they have an easier time recruiting and retaining people if they aren’t toxic.
I have had enough leverage to be 100% remote for the last 7 years. I don’t expect to ever have to go into an office again. But, I also have no desire to work at a FAANG company or startup these days. My priorities center much more around having a healthy work life balance.
There are obviously benefits, and there are also downsides. But is it worth it? The most competitive companiese don't seem to think so, and I'm tired of people pretending that they know better.
You might doubt it, but companies are doing it, and they're facing the consequences. Uncompetitiveness. Companies are led by irrational people who learned how to manage in the 90s and care more about keeping things the same than actually making their place of work succeed.
It's not obvious that companiese are actually facing consequences. Nothing in the article suggests that office companies are doing poorly, just that there is a correlation between increasing head count and openness to wfh. Dunno if you've been paying attention, but every well established company has been very conservative in hiring the past year. These numbers are not particularly meaningful.
You have to remember where you are. Hacker News is going to have some selection bias on people who _enjoy_ their job. By trying to stay up-to-date on the latest software news, they're probably career driven people.
Imagine how many people who are fully WFH who don't have this attitude. Do you think they're also more "productive" than if they were in an environment that forced them to do their work?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadWhere this came from, and how the conversation got this far without this point being made... I don't know
I did not pursue the "opportunity".
I’m exploring other “opportunities.”
I literally told my boss if this happens for me I both won't come in anyways and will actively start seeking other opportunities.
Engineers who have been called back have already started leaving, but they seem to just hinge on hopefully surviving the storm.
Additionally we are already a global company, anybody who comes into an office will be on zoom meetings with other team members riddled across the country anyways.
But when I file a position (even where this is very clearly stated) I get literally hundreds of applications that are impossible for me to pursue- since they are never open to relocation either.
Its a pretty huge waste of resources on my side because we really try to assess each application and give a clear reason why we don’t continue with them-
Its not solved in an EU level, FWIW the same issue exists in the US, your company has to pay taxes to states that people work in, which can be hugely complicated: https://www.payroll.org/compliance/compliance-overview/hot-t...
E.g., when living in Rhode Island, I had a few interview processes cut short after HR announced they we're prepared to have employees in that state.
You didn’t ask for help but I’m going to offer: there are some great options in Boston for expanding your friend group. There is a maker space in Somerville, there are kickball leagues, trivia nights, a race track in NH, dirt biking or mountain biking all around. That’s how I met my friends in Boston when I moved there. Takes a little extra work rather than organically happening at work, but it’s better than playing video games inside all weekend.
Much better to my mind than the monoculture we had before, where remote was extremely exceptional.
Existing companies will probably continue to operate just fine, but the next wave of game changing companies will be small and in person.
The next wave of game changing companies will be the ones to hire the best people. I find it very unlikely that being 100% in person will be a competitive advantage versus companies that can simply hire the best and ask them to work in the way they consider the most productive.
How do we know that saying in-person innovation isn't a post hoc justification? You can't mandate innovation, you can't order innovation, innovation only comes from individuals; I doubt they would have been less innovative if they worked in person or remotely, and we'll unlikely ever know since we can't run a perfect experiment to verify this.
The next wave of game changing companies will be solely due to individuals being at the right place at the right time, whether that's remotely or in person I doubt that one aspect would be critical.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc may have offices, but half of them are in other countries around the world. Teams are constantly having remote meetings to meet up with their counterparts on the other side of the world. That's not in-person work. That's remote work in an office.
If you have to meet virtually with people in other offices, and do sync-ups with them, and use out of band tools to collaborate, are you really in-person? Why am I doing 9pm meetings when my job is in-office? What kind of in-person collaboration are you doing when you're not meeting in-person?
Obviously there is a spectrum, but having worked at multiple FAANG companies, teams are generally collocated and a majority of your interactions are within your team. And of course these companies are only able to have many offices because they experienced a large amount of success when there was only one office.
I am right with conspiracy nut job. If we cooperate in person, you would be exposed to my rants and other quirks. With remote there is no such issue. We can cooperate just fine.
I think some people just hate remote, because they do not have their own social circle. They also have no working habits to be productive with async communication. They expect prepackaged deal of friendship, mentorship and support.
Otherwise, commuting and interruptions isn't conducive to focus and getting shit done. Fuck, my monitors at home are bigger than anything in any office and I have my keyboard tray, so why on Earth would I want to go into an office with a shittier setup? Also, most offices took away their snacks in the trendy spirit of being cheap and enshitifying their culture.
What’s going on to stop the market from clearing?
I got laid off for the first time ever a few months ago, and I've been surprised how hard it is to find a job that will pay the bills.
(I'm also surprised by how badly I've done on live coding tests. Apparently it's a skill that needs practice.)
The thing is, people have told me HR has been doing this for years. Hell I remember people doing crap like keyword stuffing the bottom of their resume and just making the text color match the background color (not that this is a great strategy)
But this is the first time I’ve ever struggled to find a job in my career. I had a much much easier time when I was 18 and didn’t even have any real experience.
I had a friend who made this transition, and hes much happier now.
Because there's more to work than meetings. Developers have been very productive in remote-only teams since the 90's.
Maybe remote over connections that slow is fine if you're using version control - checking out the changes to the source tree, making changes, and checking them back in - its not okay if you're trying to open/change/save multi-meg excel files, things where you cant make incremental writes to.
tbh, the most common way I saw people working remote in the 90's and early 00's was Citrix or similar other remote work tools.
The broad thing is, the size of say.. software or scripting when I'm doing that, is a fraction of the size of my project docs, and are often stored to the server asynchronously - when I have to make drawings, its a different world.
They spend 7 hours in meetings, 1 hour reviewing spreadsheets, then they go home and sip wine. While engineers go home and log in again to finally do actual work or to go on-call.
I hate flying. Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times. It helps very much for sure. There's no comparison between peasant class and business.
That said, it's still a crappy experience for me. There's the commute to and from the airport. There's the waiting, which is not good even if you have access to good lounges. There's more waiting, sometimes for many hours, if you're making connections. Finally, and the worst of all for me, there's noise, crappy toilets and especially the low pressure in the cabin which makes everything in my body ache.
My own office would be a clear and obvious improvement over a shared seat in an open plan. It would still not be anywhere near as good as my home office.
Fly first and report back. The rest of it is because you're still in the peasant launge. First class even gets its own passport queue.
Changing class won't make any of the issues I pointed out better, with the possible exception of the toilets.
It's kinda a daft reason but for people with irritable bowels or other conditions work from home is an absolute godsend. No more terrible cramped toilet stalls with attendant embarrassment.
I suffered in literal intense pain the first 6 years of my career, I don't know I could go back to that, ever.
I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote.
Being remote works for me (even when I was younger cause I love sitting and hammering my head on shit until I figure it out), but a fair number of my coworkers genuinely enjoy going into the office.
It's interesting. But yes, agreed for the most part. Can't imagine wanting to go 5 days a week though lol.
This I agree with. I've worked on small 4-6 person teams that had people from different backgrounds and at different skill levels and we all got along and worked really well together and a ton of knowledge was shared. It's very rare to find something like that, but when you do it's exciting and you start to get the feeling that together you could solve anything.
Looking back though, almost all of the actual learning and camaraderie took place when we weren't working on actual work. Most of it was while we were showing off personal accomplishments or weird side projects or arguing about random things.
Any time you get a bunch of friends together who share common interests you get that sort of thing. Very rarely do you get lucky enough to have that in a workplace though.
Still, I think remote workers can still find like-minded people from diverse backgrounds themselves outside of the office to help them grow and develop without being forced to spend hours every single day with a group of people they aren't ever going to be friends with.
It's indicative of a company that doesn't take security seriously as something that should be built into a product from its foundation, or as a general corporate philosophy.
But it doesn't surprise me that companies who are forcing people into the office are having a hard time recruiting. If Covid showed us anything, it was that we could all work from home and be just as productive, if not more so, doing it.
IMHO, forcing me into an office is actually a punishment. Why punish me for the high cost of your real estate?
My current setup changes from work to private mode by switching one USB-C cable from my work laptop to my own Mac Mini.
At a certain level of network engineering and in the telecom business it has been such since 2002 or so. Many of the people who run certain large ISPs have been fully remote (or at least 85-90% remote, if you count time with meetings and conferences) since 2000.
It took a long time for employees to convince companies they can be productive when they're left to their own devices.
I've seen both sides of it.
Back in 2010, I worked for a large company that was experimenting with some ROWE "Results Orientated Work Environment" which was basically people working off site three days a week. As long as you're productive and hit your metrics, you were good and left alone.
We had a major project and two contractors just completely stopped coming in, did barely any work and left the team high and dry three days before a major release of the site we were building. After that, the company killed the experiment and required everybody to be in the office 5 days a week no matter what, no excuses.
I also worked for another company that slowly rolled out a similar program. We had three pilot developers. Then you had to apply to be able to get approved to WFH three days a week. Therefore, management was only allowing people who were hitting their numbers and had good metrics to get into the program. This went on for two years until they started relaxing a lot of the rules until they hit some hard times and shut it down completely.
I work for a huge health care company and they were VERY leery about letting people WFH even during COVID because they were petrified that production was going to drop off too much. Even at the height of the pandemic they tried several times to get people back into the office - but as usual, there were rarely any takers. It was a bit of a running joke at the time, but after a full calendar year, they relented and they were able to confirm that production had instead actually increased and essentially gave a vote of confidence for a lot of teams they were fully capable of WFH full time without a drop off in productivity.
As for the workers themselves, some people are OK either way, some people insist on WFH (raises hand), and some people absolutely can't deal with WFH. Maybe the latter people have stronger-than-usual social needs by the standards of stereotypical engineering workers, and genuinely contribute more as part of a physically-present team. Asking those folks to adapt to a solitary work life is like asking me to get up at 6 AM and hit the freeway every morning. It's not going to happen... at least, not for long.
Or maybe they live in a one-bedroom apartment with a spouse and child or three. It's easy for some of us hardcore WFH advocates to forget how privileged we are.
So now, management has to decide how to get the most out of all of these workers. I believe that those who put their foot down and demand RTO will eventually be outcompeted by those who don't, but that doesn't make the job of converting a previously office-oriented culture to hybrid or exclusive WFH an easy one. Middle management without appropriate IT support, for example, is going to fail at the WFH transition no matter what they do.
Now, throw ML into the mix, and it's easy to see that we are in for a tumultuous couple of decades. I keep recalling the words of Nikola Tesla at the dawn of electrification: Humanity will be like an anthill stirred up with a stick. The changes that are coming are bigger than any of us probably think.
Personally, I'm having a hard time explaining the cause being on the direction implied on the title. The number of available candidates does not usually constrain the number of people hired, and the entire thing is too recent for any difference in competence to have that large impact.
We've had a very challenging time hiring and maintaining teams across the company. People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen. Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack.
IMO Seed-stage teams should spend lots of time together so that trust and understanding is built in-person. Hiring should be done very carefully, and people should be onboarded again, in-person. Once trust is there, and good work flows are established, teams can go 100% remote, but I still think it's good to get together at least once or twice a year.
I don't fully disagree with you but this is also something to put some long, hard thought into by the C-level whoever is running the company, if it's something new, how to put in place the communication methods, chat groups, information sharing SOPs and such to prevent isolation from happening in the first place. Deal with it as a structural/business operation and methodology issue first.
Get the SOPs set up before you start adding more than a couple of team members.
A lot of these leaders are trying legislate away the impact of their unwillingness to evolve and adapt to a market that has fundamentally changed. Two of the tech giants I was at during the pandemic saw at least a 20% jump across the board in key productivity metrics and in some orgs as high as 30%. Other than Zoom/meeting fatigue and work/life issues that are pretty easily solved, it’s a win-win.
*unless your company has heavily invested in commercial real estate and you need to force employees back into it, to avoid losing a ton of value.
I'm talking more about seed-stage startups and starting 100% remote companies from scratch. It's a whole different ballgame.
Some orgs can do this through meticulous documentation (Amazon comes to mind), but that hasn't worked here. People have a hard time digesting huge volumes of textual information from multiple parties.
I tried this for a while, but no one would engage with my docs or collaborate with me that way.
So far the only thing that's been reliable has been regular zoom pairing sessions. But this too can be very exhausting unless you are in an IC role that has very clear directives (this doesn't really exist at seed-stage).
None of the other things you mention (bonding, siloes, etc.) happen because a worker is remote. They happen because companies treat remote workers the same as in office workers, without putting in any effort to become a remote first company.
Naturally, when in person, you sit with your team and you have opportunities to have lunch with people and get to know who they are. These opportunities don't work as well at remote companies. Especially with different timezones involved.
Not saying it can't be done, but I haven't found a way that isn't extremely contrived.
I think it is impossible to recreate the "small" bonding events that happen in-person, and I also think that many in-person events that are recreated virtually are (a) significantly less engaging and (b) easier to dip from.
That's me, though. Everyone is different. I also haven't experienced working at a 100% remote-first company, so I might not have experienced better alternatives yet.
In a zoom meeting, when the topic turns for my particular focus I can refocus myself either by getting up (wireless headphones) stretching, maybe nipping out on the porch and getting some fresh air or taking care of some other task on my computer without disrupting the meeting in any way.
In an in-person meeting, these things would be seen as rude and/or distracting.
This is less of a concern in both cases in 1:1 type meetings where the conversation is generally focused or it's easier to call a break.
In-person is no guarantee for trust and understanding, and in my opinion it obscures bad habits.
I'm curious why you think that and why such an arbitrary number? why not three or five times, or zero?
Three to five: starts to be problematic working around so many schedules.
Once or twice: you aim for two, you'll get at least one, and if 10/12 people show up each time, you'll get at least some of the benefits of working together with people you know well.
It's arbitrary, but it's practical.
From an end user's perspective: I am a doctor. I am the end-user for my specialty on my site that is the main point of contact for the backroom team in a different location that admins my electronic medical record. We have a once a month virtual meeting that is usually brief (15-20 minutes) to go over issues.
But I've met most of the people on the call at least once, when they traveled to my hospital to set it up. It helps to match name to face. And be able to recognize their voices. And if we were officially working together all the time, having a physical meeting once or twice a year would be a great chance for everyone to go out and grab a drink and learn how the others are personally. I'm not hypersocial, but even if you don't want to hang out with your coworkers (I usually don't), it's useful to have some interaction with them that isn't entirely business.
I would think that remote workers would be a forcing function for communications clarity.
Is there some deeper reason for this problem than "bad tools?" I see assertions that in-person is better somehow, but no reasons why that works better or why the same techniques can't apply to remote work. Is it all about pheromones or maybe some chemical sprinkled on the pizza?
Beyond just the technical understanding, then there is emotional understanding. I find that it's much easier to encounter apathy and malice over digital comms. In person, you have limited access to someone else's attention. On slack, you can be pestered by dozens of "very important" walls of text every day.
When you inspire people, pay them well, and treat them like adults you would be surprised how much they go to bat for you.
I can't think of an example to be honest.
I very much agree with your point of view, but I've seen it go sideways when the culture is not well established and rooted deeply throughout the organization.
When you remove top-down management, pay well, and "treat people like adults" then they will have to autonomously align with the greater mission and purpose of the company and work quickly towards delivering positive outcomes for the business.
What I've seen happen instead, is people just start working on things that tickle their curiosity, wandering off into left field and the team is struggling to row in the same direction.
It is my belief, that in an office, or at least in a company that has an established culture, this is less of a problem. There are more mechanisms available to our innate human biology to reach a group homeostasis.
I never understood why WFH is not the norm for the past 15 years or so anyway.
Good, resist going to the office and they will eventually give up on this policy.
1. RTO with no exceptions 2. RTO, but allowing exceptions for some roles 3. Limited RTO, 2-3 days a week 4. No RTO, but office availability 5. Fully remote
I ended up joining a company with #4, but I was surprised with how much that ended up being a factor in my final decision, because I do like going into the office and I still do. I left a lot of money on the table despite actually being okay with RTO because the freedom it brings with it. Waking up one day and just working from home because you can is just priceless.
Everyone on the team has the ability to come to the office when needed. Most never do. Some are there every day.
I usually go to the office when the alternative would be endless zoom meetings all day, I'll rather do those live if possible and gather them all in one day. (Or if I want to catch a movie after work at the IMAX that's near the office)
Having lived in PDX and commuting there, what would sometimes take me a 30 min drive early in the morning, would be a 2-3 hour drive coming home. Absolutely absurd and guess who it was costing? Certainly not my employer for sitting in traffic for 2-3.5 hours each day...
I cannot even begin to tell you how much my work/life balance has evened out since I stopped having to be in an office. Additionally, I get far more hours of singular concentration at home versus an office.
Also when we lived in the same city, we would meet in physical locations for a beer and a burger.
Now that I don't even live in the same state, we make plans to fly to each other's cities and get together. We'll also carry over convos to Slack or Telegram and phone calls.
I'm friendly with my coworkers, and some I may even call friends, but I certainly don't need my job to be able to make friends wherever I live. I can do that without the company stepping in to do the decision making for me. Companies all argue we should all be family, and my coworkers should de-facto be my friends, which is wrong to assume.
If you mean peers as in coworkers, well usually most people are just assigned to teams. So you meet people through that and eventually get to know them, remotely or in-person, doesn't really matter imo. I'm relatively close with plenty of my coworkers whom I've only met a couple times in person over the course of 2-3 years.
This news is what I was hoping for.
For now, until the execs realize that they don't need to pay West Coast salaries, just whatever gets them the engineering output that they need. If the job can be done with Latin American and Canadian engineers for less, or even less if they are open to other timezones, then West Coast salaries for remote work will go away in many instances.
I'm definitely enjoying working remotely, but I doubt that the high salaries from the good times in the tech industry will be there forever for remote work.
Anecdotally, I had a total comp of (roughly) $400k as a senior engineer at Dropbox with a tier-1 salary (Seattle area). I asked about moving to the UK. The move would result in my base being cut from $220k to £120k, which, at the time I asked, was equivalent to about $140k. So, just over a 35% paycut. Now, because I already had RSU grants from the US, I'd continue to do better than that, and would have been making an extra $150k/yr in stock, roughly -- but a new-hire in the UK wouldn't have that advantage.
And Dropbox is one of the best-paying non-finance tech employers in the UK. Most tech employers in the UK are paying <$200k/yr total comp for senior engineers. Most tech employers in Europe are paying even less. And I'm talking about top-tier companies in terms of comp, here -- Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, etc.
So, yes, good engineers may already have a good job, but unless they're at quant hedge funds, US-based employers can probably offer 30-40% less than they'd offer to a west coast engineer, and it will still be a huge increase in comp.
If you have a single office, it might make sense to have everyone come in, because you can't deny that the collaboration and camradarie are better when everyone is in the same building. When every meeting is fully in person, a lot more gets done.
Everyone, especially "important people," gradually wander in. This happens even when the meetings are scheduled for 5 after the hour, to try to avoid lollygagging [edit to describe behavior, not people].
There's the small talk. Unlike in-person work, I get weather reports from different places on the planet.
There's always the "can you hear me," "your audio is off," "you're breaking up," and "how do I share this on whatever meeting app we're using" time once we're all there.
An actual meeting often occurs.
We still often run late, just like in-person meetings.
A few people will connect more directly, excluding the rest of the group, often not telling us at all until afterward. They tell everyone it's "more effective," just like in-person work, meaning they didn't want anyone else's input.
This is just what happens with badly-organized (or unorganized) meetings.
One thing I think we should all consider is that the WFH sea-change is, in large part, enabled by the continuing tech boom. If we hit a recession at some point(and who knows if/when that will happen) we may see unstoppable pressure to return to the office. Just something to keep in mind.
Don't assume that companies act 100% rationally. Personal agendas emerge and triumph all the time - some for better and some for worse.
Don't assume that hacker news / reddit anecdots are 100% honest, generalizable, and not self serving delusions.
Especially those praising in-office work
"We Will Watch Your Career With Great Interest" (every HR director everywhere)
WFH means an employee can easily interview elsewhere. It is harder to manipulate them into working an unhealthy amount. It is less likely their entire social circle will be at the job which hurts employee retention.
Also you have to manage people based on outcomes which raised the bar for managers. Most managers really aren’t capable and have been mostly coasting on looking busy and watching attendance. That doesn’t work for a remote team.
I have been working remote for almost 7 years now though. I am never working from an office again but hey that’s what works for me.
I have had enough leverage to be 100% remote for the last 7 years. I don’t expect to ever have to go into an office again. But, I also have no desire to work at a FAANG company or startup these days. My priorities center much more around having a healthy work life balance.
Imagine how many people who are fully WFH who don't have this attitude. Do you think they're also more "productive" than if they were in an environment that forced them to do their work?