I don't see how this is ironic. How are people going to attend meetings on any day if they are only coming 2 days a week. Similarly, Zoom has multiple offices so even if people had to go to the office 5 days a week there would still be a point to have zoom for calling between offices.
> How are people going to attend meetings on any day if they are only coming 2 days a week.
By... using Zoom to connect to those meetings?
> Similarly, Zoom has multiple offices so even if people had to go to the office 5 days a week there would still be a point to have zoom for calling between offices.
What's the point of joining a Zoom call from an office when you could join it from home?
i still think every single one of these return to office orders are from investors that are heavily portfolio'd (new word!) in commercial real estate and are trying to keep the bubble from bursting like it should.
There is soooo much vacant office space right now and no one is lowering prices like should happen with this much surplus.
Yes, I believe this conspiracy theory too. All of the vcs are double dipping, they own a ton of real estate in sf and invest in sf based companies because they know they get the money back through rent
I mean, you are adding more to my claim by stating it "exists due to SF real estate".
I never said that's the only reason it exists, but you know what, that might be the only reason it's so hyper localized to one place.
Let's look at the incentives:
Pretend you are a wealthy VC with tens of millions invested in San Francisco real estate.
You have been given billions by LPs to manage.
If I, as the person that has control over how this money can be distributed, only invest those billions in the bay area and bring all these high skilled workers to this one place I can actually impact the price of real estate and triple the tens of millions I already have invested. Once those high skill workers move here they will remain, even after the initial startup goes under because they will move to a different startup.
Now if all the VCs are doing this and they all control large multi billion dollar funds...
Any good investor will diversify their investments, so maybe the funds themselves are not investing in real date but the investors of the funds and probably the managers do it.
The fund isn't doing the investing in real estate, the individuals controlling the funds are. Anyway, that's why I said it's a conspiracy theory but the incentives line up like I mentioned in another comment.
But it's a conspiracy theory that doesn't even require a explicit coordination, just people acting in their own self interest.
Because that would involve these people caring about their "boots on the ground" or thinking in the long term.
Those two things to happen less and less as things scale up and become public respectively.
I think they realize the truth which is that productive people can be productive anywhere. Do they care about the toll a 2-hour commute takes on the workers or how that translates into deliverables and timelines? Ask yourself if this sounds likely.
Also they understand that most of these companies are 100% losses anyway, but real estate investments are much less likely to go to zero. (Plus rent is just cold hard cash.)
It's entirely plausible this is true just one layer up, where major partners at SF VCs are separarely invested in real estate investment firms without actually making that part of the VC strategy.
Which VCs own real estate that remotely measures up to their portfolio companies such that they would risk their portfolio company productivity for their real estate returns?
It seems hard to believe that a company’s managers would want to do their landlords a favor by paying more rent when they don’t have to. How would investors even ask for that?
"We happen to have some cheap rental space near other companies we own, no credit checks, and you're near <insert other SaaS companies that can be used so you have close accss to them>"
If you're a startup, getting office space without much bullshit is worth a premium.
Investors are the landlords, if indirectly. To be honest, I always wondered how much of the venture capital would turn into revenue for other investments.
Assume, you own Microsoft stock and are a venture capitalist. How do you react to your latest investment considering to buy AWS vs. Azure? The same pattern might apply in many more direct forms. Where does that fruit basket come from? What headhunting agancy do you trust with your top-level hiring?
I wouldn't be surprised if most VCs would mitigate their risks by funneling a startup's expenses back to their own investmentsnin one way or another. Vacant office space is just another such investment.
As folks have said... investors are not actually concerned about the companies they invest in... they are concerned about the balance sheet of their portfolios.
Real Estate holdings going deeply negative may affect their balance sheet more than one or two or all of their companies carrying extra lease OpEx.
I am involved in a real estate selection process right now and I can definitely see this sort of stuff going on. I don't like it but folks with the money make the rules.
Definitely some of that going on, and SF government begging companies to bring workers back downtown. But also, and I feel this even as an IC, working in person is better for the company and for some types of people. I work much better in person, company culture can actually exist in person, career development is easier.
I think this is right. It is also a tactic to increase attrition without having to announce layoffs. A big chunk of people will just move jobs instead of wasting 10-15 hrs a week to a commute.
Or maybe instead of a conspiracy companies are just finding work isn't getting done and although people are loudly proclaiming productivity the work isn't materializing.
Why? Why would an employer care about studies? They have either seen a drop in productivity or they haven't. They couldn't care less about what other employers are experiencing.
> They have either seen a drop in productivity or they haven't.
Some of them are claiming that they have, but none have shown anything resembling evidence or numbers, there’s been nothing but hand waving about the value of water cooler talk. There’s no reason to believe a word they’re saying.
Employers have no obligation to provide studies. They set the rules if they pay the salaries. Employees can choose to leave. In the end, the decisions by both will determine winners and losers. That’s a market!
The conversation is about whether there is a drop in productivity and what evidence we have of it, not whether employers have an obligation to collect or share such evidence.
Without an actual formal study, I'm skeptical that an employer can accurately measure productivity. Unless of course they are in a stagnant industry where the tasks today are exactly the same as yesterday, like counting widgets built on an assembly line.
When looking at my employer - they’re enforcing a 3/2 hybrid model during the last 6 months. Before that more or less everybody worked from home 100%.
During the WFH period we had more deployments & less incidents than ever. In addition we had less sick leaves (due to tolerance being higher when WFH). Yet - the leadership is ignoring this and enforcing the hybrid model.
They havent done them yet, the researchers are too busy 'working from home,' getting sidelined by Youtube shorts and Facebook reels for hours on end.
Jokes aside, the topology of the office<->employer relationship has inverted.
Productivity has fallen even further, as people get too comfortable and start to resent the lack of a "third place", or even a second one; the allure of working, playing, and leisure from the same place all day turns out to be less ideal than others prothetized.
As for the middle management's productivity themselves, that is a function of their subordinates work, and their own office water cooler politics. Between unconfident, unreliable, and gamed reports of employees' activity status, and the increased difficulty of socializing horizontally, of course middle management wants a return to office. Without it, eventually they will boil themselves as it is most apparent how little management actually is needed with modern companies.
Productivity can increase on the individual levels and decrease on the team or company level, and it can be difficult for individuals to recognize this. It also isn’t necessarily the same effect across companies.
I think in these discussions everyone oversimplifies to one single conclusion that should apply to all companies in all locales and all employees. There’s way more nuance to this.
This is a non-sequitur. Sure that’s possible, and sure it’s case by case, and sure it’s nuanced.
What’s especially helpful to such nuanced and detailed debates is data. So my question is why isn’t data being brought out in support of the RTO argument?
Two pretty obvious potential reasons are that they don’t have data or the data doesn’t support the argument they’re making, which reflects rather poorly on management and their decision-making.
I’m personally skeptical of the explanation “they have the data and it supports their argument but they just don’t wanna show it to their employees as they beg them to come back to office.” Just makes a lot less sense than the other explanations IMO.
> So my question is why isn’t data being brought out in support of the RTO argument?
No one’s bringing out data to support WFH either, so I really don’t understand this demand. WFH at scale only has around 3 years of history where in office has decades and decades.
The only data I’ve seen supporting WFH is that some percentage of employees prefer it and will quit their job if required to go back to the office and other jobs exist that do not require the office.
There are plenty of anecdotes by employees stating that they are definitely, for sure, 100% more productive at home. But I have seen very few by top level execs stating that this is true and that it also scales to teams, divisions, etc. Even the definition of productivity seems very, very loose in these discussions - is it that an employee feels more productive because they don’t have to commute? Because they write more code or better code? Because they can do the laundry at lunch rather than outside work hours?
The people saying “in office is more productive” don’t have to answer to anyone because they pay the salaries. The employees who are saying “I prefer it” have the right to quit.
There really isn’t a debate here that requires scientific studies backing it. It’s like asking whether Elon Musk had any studies showing X was a better name than Twitter. Companies can do what they want and employees can vote with their feet. If the job market weakens then it becomes a harder vote in the negative.
WFH is really no different a perk than free lunches or unlimited PTO. it will be offered when the labour market demands it, but I think we are heading into a weaker market and employees will be up shit’s creek.
Your skepticism is unsolvable, as it is for the majority of managers who have this data, individually.
Imagine, for a moment, that I have collected metrics on the members of the teams that I manage that measure productivity against work from home, things like sprint burn down versus work from home, and things of that nature. Suppose that I have this information for 50 people. I can’t share it externally due to corporate policy, and I can’t extend its scope to other teams that don’t use Jira in the way we do.
I can use it to try to discuss WFH with my teams directly, but even starting this conversation is liable to upset WFH stalwarts, but if I do I cannot present this information in a way that is both deidentifiable and satisfyingly comprehensive. If I aggregate it I get something like “we’re 10% better at task completion while in the office”, I have people who claim to be an exception to the rule (and the loudest complainers are disproportionately actually the worst when it comes to WFH productivity), and if I present it unaggregated then I have people complaining about being called out publicly as under-performers (rightfully so) and people complaining since their productivity didn’t slip 10% they should be able to work from home.
I cannot manage 50 different WFH policies due to incoming complaints about fairness, mandating RTO upsets the team, allowing unrestricted WFH nets a productivity loss, and anyone who says “fire the people who are underperforming from home” knows nothing about management.
So my personal response here is to just allow the productivity loss: 10% productivity means less to me than the major impact on the happiness of the teams, but it must be recognised that this pick is the “best of bad options”, if you’re trying to maximise business output.
Clearly, at some level of management, the happiness is less important that the profit, but that’s beyond my pay grade.
Yeah this is a thoughtful comment rooted in the (complicated) reality of management. I’m curious in your specific experience: do you feel like you have that data and what type of data are you looking at? (Without sharing the figures of course)
By virtue of my role I have access to all sorts of data, even down to how many emails a day any given person might be reading or how many Teams calls they're in. I don't ever dig into this on an individually-recognisable level (because that is overreach), although I do look into anonymised trends & aggregates, because it is useful and interesting to know these trends across teams.
I also have access to other more obvious task-tracking metrics like the number of pull requests, or Jira task completion, or stack deploys.
I also have team calendars where team members plug in whether they're working from home or from the office.
It's fairly trivial to punch a bunch of this data into BI tooling to get an approximation of how work from home makes a difference to how much actually gets done. Is it 100% accurate? Certainly not. Would I ever use it for an actual performance conversation? Nope. But it does help as a component of the gestalt that is my understanding of WFH performance.
The other major component of my understanding is more direct. I go out for lunch with my teams or for beers with my teams, and I listen to what they have to say. I know that a reasonable number of my team members head out at 3PM to pick their kids up from school every time they work from home, because they tell me that to my face. The guy with the new baby is not 100% focused on work when he's home, because he's got tiny human to deal with.
It's also very important to note that performance is squishy and hard to quantify at the best of times, before you even get into things like Goodhart's Law. For example. employee retention is important and as a rate of turnover fairly easy to measure, and is a significant factor for total velocity, but causes of turnover are almost always orthogonal to the root cause of job dissatisfaction... More importantly, though, do we decrease the negative impacts of turnover commensurate to the loss of productivity by allowing WFH? Who knows!
I have way way way more that I could say on the topic, but I might be being a bit hypocritical by continuing to talk about it while at work. ;]
So where are all the studies showing that it’s better? All I ever hear is individual anecdotes claiming increased productivity and then it always centers around all sorts of individual benefits generally unrelated to productivity for your organization. i.e. “My commute”, “More time to do…”
I work from home and dont want to change. I can make a case why it’s better for me, but I can’t make a case why it’s better for my employer.
Right, so that’s why I’m not asking them for productivity data. A lot of people just like working from home.
It’s the companies saying that productivity has gone down, so I’m very curious: how do they know? They never seem to say.
Management could say “come RTO because I prefer it that way” in which case asking for productivity data would be silly, but management doesn’t say that because it’d be unconvincing and indicative of vibe-based management.
It’s certainly vibe based, most executive decision making to degree is. However, it’s their prerogative to manage that way. Employers have always had control over where the work is performed. As employees we can choose to not work there if the location of the work doesn’t meet our needs.
More than once in my career I have worked for companies that have moved office locations. In all the cases I certainly wasn’t consulted ahead of time or given a vote. To my knowledge, no one beyond the executive leadership had a vote in the location. I am not sure why RTO vs WFH is any different.
It’s telling that even here in this thread, the answer to “what’s the evidence” is “employers aren’t required to produce evidence.”
Correct! They are obviously not required to produce evidence! But the question wasn’t “are they required to produce evidence,” it was “what’s the evidence,” and so the provided answer here amounts to “I don’t know/I don’t have any/I don’t know if they have any”
And maybe work is getting done but the quality, speed, and creativity are suffering immensely.
I don’t require my employees to be in office, and given that 60% of my team is non-local it’s not an option anyways. Given a magic wand I would 100% have everyone be around for at least a hybrid 3/2.
There are so, so many information and communication inefficiencies that could be solved by an off the cuff 1m in-person chat. Idea generation as well. Being in a zoom occasionally and chatting on Slack is a shit replacement for this in a creative field like video game development.
And to be clear, I am wildly productive remote but I’d be willing to trade 33% of that for the benefits my team would have by being in-person.
Chances is that if you used your magic wand, over time you wouldn't be able to find the best employees (as many people are refusing WFO and hybrid) and your team would suffer anyway.
I think a best use of your magic wand would be for you to acquire the skills to manage a highly productive remote team.
Why is this an insult? You are
assuming that the problem with your team is WFH and not yourself.
There are hundreds of managers with remote teams that don't need to propose hybrid work as a solution for collaboration problems. Instead of looking at yourself for the solution, you're choosing to send your poor team to the office.
BTW, my highly remote teams are very productive. While some like the office, we never had to resort to mandatory attendance/hybrid to improve our communication.
You assume my issues with full-remote stem from a leadership failure. That's the insult.
I've been making games for 15 years across three companies, two of which ended up full remote. I can judge the effectiveness of a team, and I can say for certain that there are some situations and needs that benefit greatly from in-person. YMMY, especially if you are not in a creative field like games where a team comp is designers, artists, and eng. all mixed in a chaotic pot.
This is a what everyone who wants WFH assumes to be true but simple logic itself points that it’s not realistic.
If/As WFH gigs start to become scarce or more the exception to the rule, you will still have top level folks ready willing and able to go work in an office.
‘Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.’ [0]
Oh well then of course!!!
There is no data to back it up.
Managers I’ve talked to have in fact said their figures show productivity has gone up but who knows. How do you measure productivity in a knowledge economy?
In the absence of a compelling argument for return to office it’s reasonable to assume this is driven by other factors.
I think it's going to burst regardless. Plenty of companies have fully embraced the remote model, and many more are only doing hybrid. Even if they don't completely sell off their buildings they're not going to use as much. One company in my city is already closing their HQ and reorganizing their other offices: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/07/progressive-to-close-...
It’s also a tactic to do a mass layoff without doing a layoff. Return to office, people quit, no layoff politics or severance needed. I’ve even heard of companies doing this and then quietly backpedaling on return to office requirements once they’ve shed some staff.
Terrible strategy since the people who leave are likely to be more experienced or higher performers able to land remote jobs more easily. It’s also slimy.
This is exactly it. When you see story after story from corporate news outlets, pushing the idea that work from home causes all these mental health issues for everyone, work from home is isolating, work from home is bad for the company. It’s all because there is a vested interest somewhere. When you understand their base motivations, you understand why certain stories are ran on the news and others are not. Their base motivations are always money.
For some organizations, they do care about money, and people which is a shocking thing and yes it can be done. If employees are making their performance requirements, and the choices left to the employee that seems like the best case to support people and profit. It’s when that choice is taken away from people that you know the pure motivation is a vested interest in commercial real estate somewhere.
Also, no amount of complaining online is going to change any of this. News outlets have armies of reporters and endless amounts of money to run story after story until the narrative becomes what they want it to be. So, stepping out of the negative mindset for just a minute, just go work somewhere else that’s remote.
Do you have any actual, hard, direct evidence to support the claim that there is some deliberate, large-scale campaign by the media to propagate such (alleged) false narratives? If there were, it would have to be a conspiracy involving hundreds of people across (or within) a large number of news outlets; there would be no way to keep that a secret.
It's quite possible that people have good-faith reasons for disagreeing with you and writing stories expressing perspectives that you dislike.
The question doesn't really make sense though. Who is going to come out and admit to this? It's a subjective topic that's been carefully crafted to avoid backlash, so you're not going to get actual hard direct evidence.
Ever read the "work-life" articles for this topic on the BBC website? They are so obviously hit pieces against remote working that it almost forces you to think there's a campaign against it, whether you want to believe it or not.
Why do they need to hide it? It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy! There’s no law that fund managers have to look out for employee preferences. This whole idea of a vast conspiracy has zero support for it other than paranoia.
> it would have to be a conspiracy involving hundreds of people across (or within) a large number of news outlets
Do you eat when you're hungry? Oh, you do?! Guess what? I do, too. And so do everone I know of. But have we all met before and arrived at this surprising consensus?
In the same vein, when some sort of global consensus is observed, one possibility is that it's driven by innate needs of actors, instead of due to explicit agreement, or it's some form of "social pressure".
Granted, it's just a hypothesis. But considering that corporations amassed huge profits while WFH scheme was in place, but now want to undo all that without any other rationale (yeah, I'm not buying the "collaboration" and productivity shit), you'd wonder if this driven by some nth order profit motive alone.
I don’t think this is a conspiracy as much as motivated people with deep pockets making sure reporters, legislators, etc. keep hearing that message until they start thinking it’s newsworthy. Many of the stories have involved things like studies on productivity or health, or surveys of what businesses intend to do or have found to be productive – and those almost inevitably were funded by commercial real estate or retail business groups. Those groups have a ton of money to spend on PR teams who’ll keep their talking points in circulation and are constantly looking for new ways to link it to other things in the news. This can be self-reinforcing: write a “study” saying that working from home leads to people getting less exercise (oops, we meant their cars), make sure it’s covered in as much of the business press as you can, make sure every local official hears about it, and then you can repeat the whole process by running a survey finding that business leaders have heard that WFH is unhealthy. Since there isn’t a WFH trade group, there’s no counterbalance in those stories or a spokesperson getting asked to provide a response.
A lot of this comes back to the new to write new stories constantly. Remember a few years back when you’d see stories in news outlets about how cryptocurrency would transform daily life or a certain activity like going to concerts? That was the same mechanism: nobody really believed that, and nobody’s boss told them to write the story or they’d be fired, but a heavy promotion effort meant that journalists kept hearing about it until some of them wrote stories in case it turned out to be a real trend.
I can appreciate the coinage of novel lexicology moreso than many, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the exacting nature of "invested" as an extant nomination of the given subject and thier relationship to the noun
Many of those investors (who sit on company boards) also participated in the decision to sign those 10 year leases or outright purchase or build massive offices.
Rather than looking stupid by having hugely expensive, empty, office space that you’re contractually obligated to keep paying for because of a decision you made pre-Covid, you encourage the he company to utilize so the asset doesn’t sit unused. (For better or worse)
If you purchased or built the office, it might hurt your balance sheet to sell the asset at a loss.
That loss might be greater than the cost of filling the office with people.
I could see a CFO making a pretty compelling argument like this to a board filled with investors.
> i still think every single one of these return to office orders are from investors that are heavily portfolio'd (new word!) in commercial real estate and are trying to keep the bubble from bursting like it should.
Is there any actual evidence of this? Why do you believe it?
What percentage of venture capital firms do you think have real estate funds attached? I am betting quite a small percentage given that the risk and return profiles are dramatically different. And even where a parent fund owns both VC funds and real estate funds, how many VC fund managers do you think would sacrifice returns (the argument by pro-WFHers is that everyone is more productive at home) and consequently their promotes in favour of their sister-real estate fund managers’ returns? I am guessing none.
I just think this whole argument is so far fetched as to border on idiotic.
> i still think every single one of these return to office orders are from investors that are heavily portfolio'd (new word!) in commercial real estate and are trying to keep the bubble from bursting like it should.
I run a fully distributed company where work from home is standard. It works for us but has major downsides related to sharing of information that we struggle with every day. We have to overcommunicate every decision to ensure everyone gets the memo. Plus collaborative problem-solving is very hard, especially when the team crosses timezones. It's a constant threat to our competitiveness. At a more basic level, many people simply can't stay motivated or work productively a fully distributed environment. This reduces the pool of people to whom we can offer jobs.
I love work from home and we have no plans to change. At the same time I am skeptical that it is a general solution that can work across the entire economy. It's just too difficult to manage.
Thanks! It works for us. We're also saving because we're not in Silicon Valley or any of the other high cost tech centers like New York or Seattle. It's harder to do bootstrapped companies in those locations and be profitable.
I've heard plenty of people with various opinions on this, but I suspect that you've cut to the heart of it here.
It's not that it can't work.
It's just harder to make it work.
...and that hard work has to be done by people who previously just sat everyone in a room and expected them to do their things with no additional effort required; and having to do that extra effort on top of what they normally do is uncomfortable for them.
There's no denying that remote work makes some people's lives more difficult; but it indubitably makes the life of others easier.
It's a trade off; and anecdotal 'it works' or 'it doesn't work' comments are just people commenting on their personal situation; what is much less clear, is if it actually has a meaningful impact at scale, or what that impact is.
SF commercial real estate prices being offered to startups are way lower. Sources: girlfriend leased office for her company pre and post covid. Also they talked about in in all-in podcast.
What joke, insecure managers. Heck every company which has international offices is remote but with localised offices just to access servers across the continent once again.
It’s not the managers that are pushing for return to office, they’re just the messengers for senior leadership who have spent millions buying real estate and want the return on investment.
I think there’s a bit of both. Ineffective middle management (which is most of it) has no place in a world where they cannot lord over their minions in an office setting. So builds an echo chamber between executives (with real estate investment) and middle management (the existence of whose very job requires them not to understand and promote remote work), at the expense of the actually productive.
I’ve met plenty of people, currently remote, who suffer in a 100% remote setup, and frankly I care about them way more than the “how dare you put me around people” crowd.
Those people may want to develop hobbies where they meet people who want to be around them rather than forcing their coworkers to spend hours every week commuting so they can have work friends.
You also are attempting to transparently reframe your selfish desire in terms of caring about others while spinning the rational desire to be maximize ones personal well-being as being somehow ridiculous or antisocial.
It's a bad pitch and if you are going to sell it next time start with the manufacturered concern it would play better.
Wow, I didn't know Zoom stock is now worth only 12% of what it was at its pandemic highs, putting it almost exactly back to how it was right before the pandemic. https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+stock
Zoom got a huge boost of non-commercial use. Everything from book clubs to AA meetings started Zoom sessions during COVID. These are very localized sort of meetups without too much out-of-area participation. Once restrictions on in-person meet ups were eased or obviated Zoom wasn't really offering anything special so usage dropped off.
Google Meet and Microsoft Teams also beefed up their offerings. My current gig is an Office 365 shop (or whatever the brand is) so it's all Microsoft cloud stuff. Meetings including broadcast type things like all-hands are all done via Teams which integrates directly into Outlook and ActiveDirectory. I know Google has equivalent integration with their offerings.
So Zoom in my experience doesn't quite offer anything all that unique to a lot of COVID era adopters. It completely makes sense their usage would drop back to their pre-COVID numbers. Remote work isn't dependent on Zoom nor does it offer the same integration as other platforms.
COVID will be forever with us from now on just like the flu has been since forever and I haven't heard of a currently realistic/feasible way to snuff it out. It will be just one of those infectious diseases everyone gets the yearly shots for.
That the lockdown situation wouldn't last forever however was clear to anyone who hadn't gotten high off the farts of <insert any conspiracy theorist nut's name here>.
In the end society mirrored the body's immune system with their reaction to new viral threats:
- active defense mode: fever (lockdown) and try to sweat most of it out (first vaccines for broad herd immunity), followed by
- continual defense mode: producing and tuning antibodies to ever new mutations to the original viral aggressor (releasing lockdowns step-by-step, yearly boosters, learning to live with the chance of catching another of the myriad of diseases out there).
And it was always correlated with bad covid news / good wfh news. Telling their employees to go back might even hurt their own stock, not that it really impacts the market but it just looks bad.
It's a comically bad look. But screw Zoom. I've never been a fan of Zoom or Slack, yet somehow they came out on top of the pile of video/chat message platforms.
I sometimes wonder if people just slack off if working remote. Honestly, it‘s the only real „problem“ I can imagine. And wouldn‘t there be better options to fix that than having everyone come to the office?
Large screens, whiteboards, audio and video are almost perfect nowadays.
edit: I don‘t understand the downvotes. I‘ve been working myself fully remote for years and I do my work. I just see zero drawbacks in terms of efficiency.
I say this as someone who’s been working remotely for the past 10+ years: could it be that the productivity has actually been affected? I know that (sadly) remote work is not for everyone and in some cases productivity nosedives.
I don't think it'd work like that. If anyone's underperforming should they be identified and handled through the process you'd normally follow, not by specifically retracting home-office priviledges as a punishment.
From what I've seen (anecdotally of course, a few friends) these "no more home office" orders don't tend to come as a response to any objectively measured drop in productivity, they come from CEOs and managers who benefit from being able to control things or crack the whip in-person.
Eh, if you treat it as a perk for good performance, like a salary increase, bonus, or additional PTO, then I don't see the problem? Either you earn it or you don't.
If it was the case of some individual contributors' productivity dropping because of WFH then yes, you can pinpoint that person, return him to the office and put a manager next to him to make him work
But recent years brought me to conclusion that many people have a need for in person communication, and your morale, productivity and even mental health going down little by little every day you interact with others only digitally.
You can not fix this, if you bring back to office only selected few. You have to bring back the whole teams — so if a person goes to the office, everyone he works with and interacts with are also there
The beautfiul thing about these situations is that if the company demanding no WFH is doing it for productivity reasons, they could much more simply demand employees reach a minimal productivity threshold or be let go. No need to mandate what methods an employee uses to be productive, be it working from the home or office, if productivity is the goal, productivity should be the target.
When there is a mandate to return to the office, it really makes me wonder if the employer can even tell if their employees are productive at all, much less know that they are more productive in the office. If they could tell, they would simply use that measure directly.
That's the dilemma with modern work, it's almost impossible to measure. That feature you added this morning in four hours and 100 lines of code. Who is to know whether it could have been done in half the time and ten lines or whether most programmers would have taken twice as long.
Sort of, yeah. When GP says "it's almost impossible to measure", that does not mean that upper management does not in fact have some sort of metric that says "productivity" on the label. But what they're measuring is most likely going to have a tenuous relation to actual productivity.
A common problem is that they’ve noticed something real but are misattributing the cause. Sales are down - is it because the salespeople are slacking or because the mid-pandemic buying spike wasn’t the new normal? A big project is behind schedule - is that because people are working from home or because you have some senior managers playing politics?
In this case, the commercial real estate industry has been making a huge PR push trying to keep the value of their portfolios up so senior managers at most companies are regularly hearing that WFH causes problems - and anyone distrustful and/or looking for an excuse to shift blame is likely to seize on it.
Do you want stack ranking? Because this is how you get stack ranking. If you don't have a standard for productivity, then all you can do is say who is more "productive" than whom.
This assumes that RTO strictly only affects one's own productivity, but it's really the network effects that matter, so some Happy Hermit may be perfectly productive on their own objectives when exclusively working from home, but may be reducing other people's productivity through their absence.
If productivity is down just hold people accountable for their deliverables. Increase the number of milestones and have the managers actually manage. Do you know what people get away with at these companies? There are people that get away with not working for months (in companies like google, make that years).
edit: by increase the number of milestones i don't mean increase the amount of work, i mean increase the amount of times people need to demonstrate they actually did something.
What is a deliverable, though? You can deliver output but the question should be if the quality of the work is better wfh or wfo. The quality of work increases with face to face time with my colleagues. The quality decreased when I was all alone at home. So for some people with very straight forward deliverables it might be great, but for others that quality may have gone down.
I've actually been thinking about ways to align incentives of employees and the company they work for because from working in tech in SF I don't think the Google / Facebook incentive system works.
I have some ideas for how to measure output:
1. Code output: I know this one is controversial but at the end of the day code needs to be written. People wouldn't get penalized for missing this minimum output, it's just a signal that their work needs more detailed review. Rather than incentivize people to write more code I would say that some minimum amount of lines of code should be changed or a more detailed review of your work needs to be done.
2. Document output: Designs are obviously important to launching quality software so the work put into design documents should be taken into consideration but it should also result in actual features and products being launched.
3. Feature / Product launches: People actually shipping software and running and completing experiments should be tracked. This should be tracked and rewarded separately from the actual result of the experiment.
4. Feature / Product success: If feature and product launches are successful this should also be tied to employee performance but obviously the employee is not in complete control of this outcome. Sometimes things can be executed on well and just fail so this should be used for a bonus system of some sort.
There are obviously ways people can game a system and the system should be adjusted to account for them as they come up.
Either way, I think anything that encourages actual accountability is superior to the system people have blindly copied from Google and Facebook where you are rewarded for getting into management and building a tiny kingdom of people that do nothing.
I think a lot of what you have described is flawed. It feels more like trying to systemize something that cannot be systemized.
One time I spent 6 months in a brutal migration of a critical system. Lines of code in production in those 6 months = 20 lines. By your measure, I did not accomplish much.
But where exactly did my time go? It went in getting stakeholders together, performing significant experiments to identify the problem, performing more experiments to find solutions, carefully roll out the experiments in various production datacenter - often over weekends. The output? Migration completed.
It was hard work, stressful and took a lot from me. But for a manager strictly follows your rubric, I was unproductive. And now, I get a poor performance rating. I would likely have to sink more time to produce tons of artifacts to prove that that rating was incorrect. Other engineers sees it. Learn to never take up hard problems ever. Just smash more lines of code to be safe.
You have single handedly shot the success of engineering by having an uninformed performance review criteria.
You missed the nuance of the code output just being one of many signals. But I have to say, if you are hired to produce software and you are doing things like "coordinating stakeholders" then there is already systemic rot in the company.
There is a systematic rot. And often management uses a performance review rubric only to protect themselves or to gut out engineers they don't jive with. It sets the wrong incentives by suggesting that any work outside of these items is worthless.
> There are people that get away with not working for months (in companies like google, make that years).
That's a myth. Google's performance reviews, as flawed as they are, still require one to provide references to deliverables like reviewed commit history and reviewed documents written. Doing no work will result in poor performance ratings after a couple review cycles, since you will have no deliverables to your name. Those who produce nothing at all are routinely put on performance plans and then fired if things don't change. I've seen that happen.
That said, the Google performance review system, at least in my experience, can favor those who are strategic about choosing and promoting their work even if it is lower in quantity, and disadvantage
those who do the a lot of work but aren't strategic about choosing and promotion it. That's almost by design, since in theory Google favors "impact" over lines of code.
A couple bad review cycles to firing is if you are significantly under-performing, not doing no work at all.
If you do absolutely no work, your manager will generally inquire about your state of motivation pretty quickly. You will be referred to internal or external resources to help you find your motivation, but if you refuse help or don't change course, you will be generally fired well before 2 review cycles. It's pretty rare for people to produce absolutely nothing though.
I think most companies do not know. Productivity of knowledge workers is pretty hard to measure at a level more granular than an entire department.
In my anecdotal experience the leadership of organizations is mostly flying by feel on this issue. And, by nature of their position, they skew heavily towards extroverts who value lots of work interactions. So their gut feels more face to face contact is important and that’s what they mandate.
It is not that hard to measure, at the end of the day code needs to be written. If the work you are doing is design heavy, then documents and charts need to be created. And then code needs to be written. Then finally, a product or feature needs to actually be launched.
Not everyone works in software. It can be hard to measure deliverables in a position that isn't deliverable-oriented. Maybe you're crucial to the department but your output isn't measurable directly.
> It is not that hard to measure, at the end of the day code needs to be written. If the work you are doing is design heavy, then documents and charts need to be created. And then code needs to be written. Then finally, a product or feature needs to actually be launched.
Very naive. If this was my manager, I would immediately know that my manager is unskilled.
Well I'm not a manager so it is naive but I've been working at these companies for close to a decade now and they produce nothing and there is rampant waste everywhere.
So the current management philosophy just sucks.
Also I'm very good at what I do (developing software), the common thing among the people that produce actual value to companies is that they are high output. Whether it's code or designs or whatever. And I'm talking about quality output obviously.
Was that feature the right feature though? How do you measure the org’s ability to ship another feature after that at an engineering level (ie, is it easy to maintain? Did they do good documentation or mentor others?)
You very quickly end up with giant spreadsheets of tons of variables trying to model this without “customers gave us more money” which rarely works at the individual or even team level.
Personally, working from home and not seeing my teammates and colleagues in person for long periods of time makes me more depressed and increases anxiety level. Effect is very subtle and at first it was hard to notice and pinpoint the exact reason — but in the end zoom colored squares or even webcams lacks something of IRL communication.
Nobody can make you work in an office if you don't want to. Organizations should obviously be free to demand it and you should be free to work somewhere else if you don't want to.
1. Nobody’s stopping anyone. If you’ll only work for a remote company, nobody’s forcing you to come back into the office. Just get a new remote job and quit.
2.Even if your job is forcing you to do something you don’t like, that’s not a problem. If I want to use Windows and the company only lets people use Macs, then that’s not a problem. It’s a rule that either I’ll comply with or I won’t work there anymore.
If a company decides to be in-person-only then the people who want to work at a remote-only company won’t work there (or they will).
This sounds good in theory. I have a problem with giving bogus reasons for RTO. If corpos would be honest about this and provide the right incentives we wpuld not have a problem
1) Nobody is preventing you from working for a tyrant like Twit…er X and be forced to work in the office everyday (as long as they’ve paid their rent). Forcing 100% in office is nothing less than tyrannical behavior. If you don’t like their WFH policy, go work somewhere else
To sum up your summary, that’s why we’re seeing companies lose employees faster than they anticipated.
> Forcing 100% in office is nothing less than tyrannical behavior. If you don’t like their WFH policy, go work somewhere else
From the perspective of those who prefer in-office work, how is this any different from forcing a WFH policy on everyone? Why is that not tyrannical behavior?
How do we effectively give that minority what they want without forcing it on the majority? If you have 8 guys who don't come in and 4 who do its not really like working in an in office company you will end up relying on remote tools in order to include the other fellows anyway. It logically will be almost like working remotely but with a commute. At that point do you want to drive in to have a zoom meeting?
For many people the separation between home and work has real value and for many people (particularly younger people with roommates in smaller apartments) their homes don’t have a dedicated workspace with a desk.
The WeWorK I go to has nicer furniture, Internet, and lighting than my home. It is in no way logical for me to work out of my apartment.
You need a minimum of 4x5 workspace and a full size mattress is about 5.5 x 6 a twin closer to 3x6.
Even an apartment bedroom 10x12 can accommodate both in an L. Gig internet is also a lot cheaper than commuting or we work. If you are a professional there is little excuse not to have a desk and fast Internet at home.
Doing tech support I was always shocked to see some folks including techies angry that their elcheapo Internet plan with 10 year old rented equipment downstairs wasn't working well for their hyper important job.
> If you are a professional there is little excuse not to have a desk and fast Internet at home.
Jesus Christ, here’s my excuse: Before the pandemic I didn’t work at home. After the pandemic, I work at WeWork.
WeWork is $150 a month btw and includes free coffee and A/C in the summer (my apartment doesn’t have A/C) as well. Plus I can walk there in 30 minutes so the dollar-cost of commuting isn’t an issue.
You realize picking a nearby office of your choosing is nothing like coming into the office right. You selected it for proximity to obviate 99% of the downsides of the office and if you don't like the situation you can pick up and change it without changing jobs.
It’s actually further than where my office used to be pre-pandemic. I’d have a similar bike/walk commute to probably 70% of the office jobs in my city.
I hate remote work but I happen to like my current job enough to stick with it despite it being remote. My next job will be in-office.
> How do we effectively give that minority what they want without forcing it on the majority
You don’t have to. Somebody at the company (owner, board, leadership team, etc.) decides if they want to be remote, on-site, or hybrid. Then leave it up to everyone who works there to make a decision about whether that’s something they can live with.
I was doing this pre-pandemic and it was the happiest I've ever been in a work situation. Most meetings would wait for the in-person time and my WFH days as a result were usually heads down. We were able to lean into the best parts of both work styles, and the people who preferred to work in an office would be there every day.
It depends on the team and work but I definitely feel a lot more disconnected being fully remote these days. Seeing my team (and broader org) every quarter was a nice compromise that combatted this somewhat but I miss the energy of the hybrid model.
This. I've been going back to the office three days a week and it has been much better for my mental health. I thought it was just being alone but when my husband started working from it didn't really get much better. I am enjoying the 30 minute commute to listen to my podcasts. Two months into this schedule and I just feel better.
Five days in the office would probably grind me down but 3 has been a great hybrid for me.
> Personally, working from home and not seeing my teammates and colleagues in person for long periods of time makes me more depressed and increases anxiety level.
That sounds unhealthy. Do you have family and community relationships? Work should be professional relationships. You provide services in exchange for money. If you are getting anxious and depressed from not seeing the people you work with, I think something is wrong with work life balance.
By the way, it is the company that benefits from this one sided attachment. If you feel emotionally attached to the company you are less likely to leave for higher pay or tolerate more abuse from the company. Believe me, the company will have no regrets parting with you if they feel you are not adding to their business value.
Companies love selling their employees on how they are a part of a family and how they are all on mission together. They are trying to inspire loyalty. In reality, the company has pretty much zero loyalty to you.
I think one of the reasons companies are trying to get rid of WFH, is that it is harder to make people emotionally dependent on the company and inspire one sided loyalty if they are working remotely.
This is kind of risible. No, it does not sound "unhealthy" to express a desire to spend time around colleagues as part of the work day. I can hardly imagine a more natural or healthy desire.
I think, in fact, "not being around other people makes lots of healthy, ordinary people feel depressed and anxious" is just about as robust a finding in human psychology as you're likely to find.
Agreed. But if the only people you are around and depend on for your mental health is your coworkers, that is unhealthy. There should be other relationships in your life that are meeting your social needs outside of work. If that is not the case, it is unhealthy.
One of the best periods in my life was working with people who became my friends.
> Believe me, the company will have no regrets parting with you if they feel you are not adding to their business value.
"The company" doesn't exist. Its a somewhat useful abstraction. The people involved can and will keep people on long after they "should" have been fired. At least here is Europe.
Sorry it sounds like you don't have a satisfying life outside of work, and that has nothing to do with WFH vs RTO.
Learning to WFH is as much a skill as learning to operate in an office environment. The difference, when you learn the former you also have increased freedom.
Yeah but you’re an office worker, probably not generating any sincerely net new ideas and just performing routine data entry to keep up rate of US dollar exchange.
Any net new work is too abstract and complex for the HN CRUD engineer crowd to be central too.
Go find a local job onsite. No one is going to miss you at your office because we all know implicitly this is just busy work to preserve nation state status quo.
I’m always surprised to see these accusations. “Oh you don’t like not seeing human beings for 40-60 hours a week? You must not have a life or any friends.” WTF. Is it really that unfathomable that other people are different from you?
Plenty of people enjoy in-person interactions with their colleagues, and it's quite reasonable for them to prefer an environment where such interactions are possible.
People aren't obligated to shut up and tolerate working conditions they dislike. Changing their lives outside of work won't make them enjoy those working conditions more.
> Sorry it sounds like you don't have a satisfying life outside of work,
When you spend 40 hours of your week doing something, it's going to influence you.
No amount of "satisfying life outside of work" can make up for a workplace that you don't enjoy. That's true for toxic workplaces, it's true for people who can't stand in-office work, and it's true for people who can't stand remote.
It's unfair to try to blame it all on the person's personal life. Different people work well in different environments. The WFH maximalists and in-office maximalists need to stop acting high and mighty like their way flawless.
After a year in full remote I noticed counter intuitive effects. I'm still pro WFH (for energy, time, social reasons). But I had moments where anxiety shot up due to being alone with my stuff. So I can understand. And it's weird cause I don't like most of the other employees (nothing bad, just never clicked) but there's a little thing about sharing a space to contribute to a common corporation.
It also depends on the crowd. On old jobs (public services) I felt there was more warmth (a lot more problems but still) whereas as a dev the spirit is a lot more dull and nerdy. I don't miss that.
I've felt the same but working in-person is just not an option for me with my current company. I deal with it in other ways that are outside of the job. Spend more time with my partner, take care of my dog, go for frequent walks and have a side hobby that really interests me.
I feel for you, and anyone who has emotional difficulty with this shift to remote work.
However, consider the fact that the old status quo of working in open concept 'feed lot' style office spaces makes people feel awful too.
I do not mean to discount your experience or feelings. Just pointing out that people are different, and you are just on the other side of the fence post shift.
Remote working isn't for everyone, and seemingly not for you. I don't think that makes it a problem per se. If you are not allowed back into the office you have a dispute with you employer.
> Personally, working from home and not seeing my teammates and colleagues in person for long periods of time makes me more depressed and increases anxiety level.
Anecdotal but my otherwise-entirely-remote (small) company just finished a 5 day week of all-day in-person meetings and did an incredible amount of planning for the next ~year that would have otherwise taken at least a month if we tried it over video calls and didn't work at a pace that would have burned us out. It was not particularly exhausting as one would expect.
So get people together once a year for an offsite in a central-ish city. Not that hard. Almost every team which is naturally distributed (sales is a good example, where regional coverage is required) do this once per quarter.
I've seen planning marathons, but not the way I would do them. How much peace and quiet did people have to think about the plans and take notes, before the talking? Did they record the final decisions and reasons to refer to next year?
There's plenty of citations available at a quick search.
I've worked primarily remotely for north of 10-15 years and love it. But it isn't 100% effective or the best choice for every situation and continuously.
Especially for people at the start of a career or position. Lots of meaningful mentoring and coaching that can't be measured or limited to text chat or video calls.
As someone who mentors their fair share of juniors starting out in software and product development, meeting my mentees in person after mentoring them during the lock downs did not compare.
Mostly, the smiles, the genuine happiness for the success and learning that has been happening, and most of all knowing there's openness to talk about what's next and a challenge to learn.
The very starts of projects and startups can often be much cleaner and faster in person, until you don't need to be.
I understand and also don't like commutes. There's also no shortage of people who report the value of getting out of the house and seeing things differently
Beginners often onboard much easier in person, and quicker to be productive and feel like valued members of the team. Understanding and designing new things, for example is one. Discovery or design sprints can be another.
There is a good amount of merit for hybrid work and teams for producing results faster that can create profitabilty quicker, and pay those raises quicker.
> Zoom, which remains a leader in the post-pandemic remote work trend, is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
This doesn’t seem like all that stringent a requirement.
Why 50 miles this is actually something I've seen quite a bit. Depending on specifics 50 miles could be 2 hours. I don't understand why it isn't defined in terms of average commute time.
There has been a vast increase in understanding in the myth of meritocracy [1] and increased awareness of the adversarial (and, really, exploitative) nature of work in the last few years. What you are seeing is a concerted effort to suppress wages and make labor more compliant through greater insecurity. That's all. Poor leaders want their underlings dressed to a certain standard, driving into the office and sitting at their desks as long as possible as a method of control.
There may be an element of commercial real estate usage but I honestly think bad leadership and control explains most of this.
So if no ones been doing work for 3 years and these companies are cracking out record profits, wouldn't it be the logical thing for the C suite to just fire everyone in the company, ride like 12 more quarters of amazing results and then just hire back a new workforce.
Btw, I know this is about real estate. It's happening to me too.
There are no massive network effects here. If this is a bad move for Zoom, start a teleconferencing company that works all-remote. Delete "news." From the domain name in your URL bar and apply.
I've made long enduring friendships with people at various jobs. Everyone acting like work should be strictly professional has missed out on a lot in life clearly. It almost borders on anti-social, but I guess I should expect as much from a lot of engineers.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadWhat does being in-office accomplish other than face-to-face meeting?
Zoom is a replacement for face-to-face meeting, but they themselves want to meet face-to-face.
Hence the irony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jne9t8sHpUc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVSTkAXg
By... using Zoom to connect to those meetings?
> Similarly, Zoom has multiple offices so even if people had to go to the office 5 days a week there would still be a point to have zoom for calling between offices.
What's the point of joining a Zoom call from an office when you could join it from home?
It was a rhetorical question pointing out that zoom would still be used for meetings.
>What's the point of joining a Zoom call from an office when you could join it from home?
Because you are already in the office.
There is soooo much vacant office space right now and no one is lowering prices like should happen with this much surplus.
I never said that's the only reason it exists, but you know what, that might be the only reason it's so hyper localized to one place.
Let's look at the incentives:
Pretend you are a wealthy VC with tens of millions invested in San Francisco real estate.
You have been given billions by LPs to manage.
If I, as the person that has control over how this money can be distributed, only invest those billions in the bay area and bring all these high skilled workers to this one place I can actually impact the price of real estate and triple the tens of millions I already have invested. Once those high skill workers move here they will remain, even after the initial startup goes under because they will move to a different startup.
Now if all the VCs are doing this and they all control large multi billion dollar funds...
But it's a conspiracy theory that doesn't even require a explicit coordination, just people acting in their own self interest.
Also they understand that most of these companies are 100% losses anyway, but real estate investments are much less likely to go to zero. (Plus rent is just cold hard cash.)
Why would you accept my data without checking the methods?
The onus is on you to prove a very reasonable human behavior false.
Whole lot of people saying we ought not fiddle kids been arrested for diddling kids.
Reasonable real world, if emotionally “wrong” feeling does not make the notion wrong.
You want data the sun rose in the east, go outside.
So many demand technical correctness in others, think without checking themselves, they know what’s true.
If you're a startup, getting office space without much bullshit is worth a premium.
What do you mean "ask"? They demand because it's their capital that fuels the company.
It's not like a VC gives money to a company and then cannot do anything but wait for returns.
Assume, you own Microsoft stock and are a venture capitalist. How do you react to your latest investment considering to buy AWS vs. Azure? The same pattern might apply in many more direct forms. Where does that fruit basket come from? What headhunting agancy do you trust with your top-level hiring?
I wouldn't be surprised if most VCs would mitigate their risks by funneling a startup's expenses back to their own investmentsnin one way or another. Vacant office space is just another such investment.
I am involved in a real estate selection process right now and I can definitely see this sort of stuff going on. I don't like it but folks with the money make the rules.
Some of them are claiming that they have, but none have shown anything resembling evidence or numbers, there’s been nothing but hand waving about the value of water cooler talk. There’s no reason to believe a word they’re saying.
The conversation is about whether there is a drop in productivity and what evidence we have of it, not whether employers have an obligation to collect or share such evidence.
During the WFH period we had more deployments & less incidents than ever. In addition we had less sick leaves (due to tolerance being higher when WFH). Yet - the leadership is ignoring this and enforcing the hybrid model.
Because sharing these insights could help convince at least some employees to RTO?
Because it’s good to have credibility and look like a sensible decision-maker in the eyes of your employees?
Note: Studies includes internal studies or analysis of a company’s own performance.
Jokes aside, the topology of the office<->employer relationship has inverted.
Productivity has fallen even further, as people get too comfortable and start to resent the lack of a "third place", or even a second one; the allure of working, playing, and leisure from the same place all day turns out to be less ideal than others prothetized.
As for the middle management's productivity themselves, that is a function of their subordinates work, and their own office water cooler politics. Between unconfident, unreliable, and gamed reports of employees' activity status, and the increased difficulty of socializing horizontally, of course middle management wants a return to office. Without it, eventually they will boil themselves as it is most apparent how little management actually is needed with modern companies.
I think in these discussions everyone oversimplifies to one single conclusion that should apply to all companies in all locales and all employees. There’s way more nuance to this.
What’s especially helpful to such nuanced and detailed debates is data. So my question is why isn’t data being brought out in support of the RTO argument?
Two pretty obvious potential reasons are that they don’t have data or the data doesn’t support the argument they’re making, which reflects rather poorly on management and their decision-making.
I’m personally skeptical of the explanation “they have the data and it supports their argument but they just don’t wanna show it to their employees as they beg them to come back to office.” Just makes a lot less sense than the other explanations IMO.
No one’s bringing out data to support WFH either, so I really don’t understand this demand. WFH at scale only has around 3 years of history where in office has decades and decades.
There are plenty of anecdotes by employees stating that they are definitely, for sure, 100% more productive at home. But I have seen very few by top level execs stating that this is true and that it also scales to teams, divisions, etc. Even the definition of productivity seems very, very loose in these discussions - is it that an employee feels more productive because they don’t have to commute? Because they write more code or better code? Because they can do the laundry at lunch rather than outside work hours?
On the other hand you have people saying “in office is more productive.”
Note how it only makes sense to ask one of those parties for data to substantiate their position.
There really isn’t a debate here that requires scientific studies backing it. It’s like asking whether Elon Musk had any studies showing X was a better name than Twitter. Companies can do what they want and employees can vote with their feet. If the job market weakens then it becomes a harder vote in the negative.
WFH is really no different a perk than free lunches or unlimited PTO. it will be offered when the labour market demands it, but I think we are heading into a weaker market and employees will be up shit’s creek.
That is irrelevant to the conversation going on here.
Imagine, for a moment, that I have collected metrics on the members of the teams that I manage that measure productivity against work from home, things like sprint burn down versus work from home, and things of that nature. Suppose that I have this information for 50 people. I can’t share it externally due to corporate policy, and I can’t extend its scope to other teams that don’t use Jira in the way we do.
I can use it to try to discuss WFH with my teams directly, but even starting this conversation is liable to upset WFH stalwarts, but if I do I cannot present this information in a way that is both deidentifiable and satisfyingly comprehensive. If I aggregate it I get something like “we’re 10% better at task completion while in the office”, I have people who claim to be an exception to the rule (and the loudest complainers are disproportionately actually the worst when it comes to WFH productivity), and if I present it unaggregated then I have people complaining about being called out publicly as under-performers (rightfully so) and people complaining since their productivity didn’t slip 10% they should be able to work from home.
I cannot manage 50 different WFH policies due to incoming complaints about fairness, mandating RTO upsets the team, allowing unrestricted WFH nets a productivity loss, and anyone who says “fire the people who are underperforming from home” knows nothing about management.
So my personal response here is to just allow the productivity loss: 10% productivity means less to me than the major impact on the happiness of the teams, but it must be recognised that this pick is the “best of bad options”, if you’re trying to maximise business output.
Clearly, at some level of management, the happiness is less important that the profit, but that’s beyond my pay grade.
It isn’t beyond your pay grade. If your team underperforms because of your decision, then you risk the entire team being let go in the next downturn.
I also have access to other more obvious task-tracking metrics like the number of pull requests, or Jira task completion, or stack deploys.
I also have team calendars where team members plug in whether they're working from home or from the office.
It's fairly trivial to punch a bunch of this data into BI tooling to get an approximation of how work from home makes a difference to how much actually gets done. Is it 100% accurate? Certainly not. Would I ever use it for an actual performance conversation? Nope. But it does help as a component of the gestalt that is my understanding of WFH performance.
The other major component of my understanding is more direct. I go out for lunch with my teams or for beers with my teams, and I listen to what they have to say. I know that a reasonable number of my team members head out at 3PM to pick their kids up from school every time they work from home, because they tell me that to my face. The guy with the new baby is not 100% focused on work when he's home, because he's got tiny human to deal with.
It's also very important to note that performance is squishy and hard to quantify at the best of times, before you even get into things like Goodhart's Law. For example. employee retention is important and as a rate of turnover fairly easy to measure, and is a significant factor for total velocity, but causes of turnover are almost always orthogonal to the root cause of job dissatisfaction... More importantly, though, do we decrease the negative impacts of turnover commensurate to the loss of productivity by allowing WFH? Who knows!
I have way way way more that I could say on the topic, but I might be being a bit hypocritical by continuing to talk about it while at work. ;]
I work from home and dont want to change. I can make a case why it’s better for me, but I can’t make a case why it’s better for my employer.
It’s the companies saying that productivity has gone down, so I’m very curious: how do they know? They never seem to say.
Management could say “come RTO because I prefer it that way” in which case asking for productivity data would be silly, but management doesn’t say that because it’d be unconvincing and indicative of vibe-based management.
More than once in my career I have worked for companies that have moved office locations. In all the cases I certainly wasn’t consulted ahead of time or given a vote. To my knowledge, no one beyond the executive leadership had a vote in the location. I am not sure why RTO vs WFH is any different.
Correct! They are obviously not required to produce evidence! But the question wasn’t “are they required to produce evidence,” it was “what’s the evidence,” and so the provided answer here amounts to “I don’t know/I don’t have any/I don’t know if they have any”
I don’t require my employees to be in office, and given that 60% of my team is non-local it’s not an option anyways. Given a magic wand I would 100% have everyone be around for at least a hybrid 3/2.
There are so, so many information and communication inefficiencies that could be solved by an off the cuff 1m in-person chat. Idea generation as well. Being in a zoom occasionally and chatting on Slack is a shit replacement for this in a creative field like video game development.
And to be clear, I am wildly productive remote but I’d be willing to trade 33% of that for the benefits my team would have by being in-person.
I think a best use of your magic wand would be for you to acquire the skills to manage a highly productive remote team.
There are hundreds of managers with remote teams that don't need to propose hybrid work as a solution for collaboration problems. Instead of looking at yourself for the solution, you're choosing to send your poor team to the office.
BTW, my highly remote teams are very productive. While some like the office, we never had to resort to mandatory attendance/hybrid to improve our communication.
I've been making games for 15 years across three companies, two of which ended up full remote. I can judge the effectiveness of a team, and I can say for certain that there are some situations and needs that benefit greatly from in-person. YMMY, especially if you are not in a creative field like games where a team comp is designers, artists, and eng. all mixed in a chaotic pot.
If/As WFH gigs start to become scarce or more the exception to the rule, you will still have top level folks ready willing and able to go work in an office.
Oh well then of course!!!
There is no data to back it up. Managers I’ve talked to have in fact said their figures show productivity has gone up but who knows. How do you measure productivity in a knowledge economy?
In the absence of a compelling argument for return to office it’s reasonable to assume this is driven by other factors.
[0] https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
Terrible strategy since the people who leave are likely to be more experienced or higher performers able to land remote jobs more easily. It’s also slimy.
For some organizations, they do care about money, and people which is a shocking thing and yes it can be done. If employees are making their performance requirements, and the choices left to the employee that seems like the best case to support people and profit. It’s when that choice is taken away from people that you know the pure motivation is a vested interest in commercial real estate somewhere.
Also, no amount of complaining online is going to change any of this. News outlets have armies of reporters and endless amounts of money to run story after story until the narrative becomes what they want it to be. So, stepping out of the negative mindset for just a minute, just go work somewhere else that’s remote.
It's quite possible that people have good-faith reasons for disagreeing with you and writing stories expressing perspectives that you dislike.
Ever read the "work-life" articles for this topic on the BBC website? They are so obviously hit pieces against remote working that it almost forces you to think there's a campaign against it, whether you want to believe it or not.
Do you eat when you're hungry? Oh, you do?! Guess what? I do, too. And so do everone I know of. But have we all met before and arrived at this surprising consensus?
In the same vein, when some sort of global consensus is observed, one possibility is that it's driven by innate needs of actors, instead of due to explicit agreement, or it's some form of "social pressure".
Granted, it's just a hypothesis. But considering that corporations amassed huge profits while WFH scheme was in place, but now want to undo all that without any other rationale (yeah, I'm not buying the "collaboration" and productivity shit), you'd wonder if this driven by some nth order profit motive alone.
A lot of this comes back to the new to write new stories constantly. Remember a few years back when you’d see stories in news outlets about how cryptocurrency would transform daily life or a certain activity like going to concerts? That was the same mechanism: nobody really believed that, and nobody’s boss told them to write the story or they’d be fired, but a heavy promotion effort meant that journalists kept hearing about it until some of them wrote stories in case it turned out to be a real trend.
Rather than looking stupid by having hugely expensive, empty, office space that you’re contractually obligated to keep paying for because of a decision you made pre-Covid, you encourage the he company to utilize so the asset doesn’t sit unused. (For better or worse)
If you purchased or built the office, it might hurt your balance sheet to sell the asset at a loss.
That loss might be greater than the cost of filling the office with people.
I could see a CFO making a pretty compelling argument like this to a board filled with investors.
Is there any actual evidence of this? Why do you believe it?
https://youtu.be/NVVsdlHslfI
I just think this whole argument is so far fetched as to border on idiotic.
I run a fully distributed company where work from home is standard. It works for us but has major downsides related to sharing of information that we struggle with every day. We have to overcommunicate every decision to ensure everyone gets the memo. Plus collaborative problem-solving is very hard, especially when the team crosses timezones. It's a constant threat to our competitiveness. At a more basic level, many people simply can't stay motivated or work productively a fully distributed environment. This reduces the pool of people to whom we can offer jobs.
I love work from home and we have no plans to change. At the same time I am skeptical that it is a general solution that can work across the entire economy. It's just too difficult to manage.
I wouldn't trust a person like this to work very well in the office either to be honest.
Your company and approach sound great tho, you must be saving a ton in office space expenses.
Bold words.
I've heard plenty of people with various opinions on this, but I suspect that you've cut to the heart of it here.
It's not that it can't work.
It's just harder to make it work.
...and that hard work has to be done by people who previously just sat everyone in a room and expected them to do their things with no additional effort required; and having to do that extra effort on top of what they normally do is uncomfortable for them.
There's no denying that remote work makes some people's lives more difficult; but it indubitably makes the life of others easier.
It's a trade off; and anecdotal 'it works' or 'it doesn't work' comments are just people commenting on their personal situation; what is much less clear, is if it actually has a meaningful impact at scale, or what that impact is.
It seems possible that Zoom got more of the first sort of person.
You also are attempting to transparently reframe your selfish desire in terms of caring about others while spinning the rational desire to be maximize ones personal well-being as being somehow ridiculous or antisocial.
It's a bad pitch and if you are going to sell it next time start with the manufacturered concern it would play better.
Google Meet and Microsoft Teams also beefed up their offerings. My current gig is an Office 365 shop (or whatever the brand is) so it's all Microsoft cloud stuff. Meetings including broadcast type things like all-hands are all done via Teams which integrates directly into Outlook and ActiveDirectory. I know Google has equivalent integration with their offerings.
So Zoom in my experience doesn't quite offer anything all that unique to a lot of COVID era adopters. It completely makes sense their usage would drop back to their pre-COVID numbers. Remote work isn't dependent on Zoom nor does it offer the same integration as other platforms.
COVID will be forever with us from now on just like the flu has been since forever and I haven't heard of a currently realistic/feasible way to snuff it out. It will be just one of those infectious diseases everyone gets the yearly shots for.
That the lockdown situation wouldn't last forever however was clear to anyone who hadn't gotten high off the farts of <insert any conspiracy theorist nut's name here>.
In the end society mirrored the body's immune system with their reaction to new viral threats:
- active defense mode: fever (lockdown) and try to sweat most of it out (first vaccines for broad herd immunity), followed by
- continual defense mode: producing and tuning antibodies to ever new mutations to the original viral aggressor (releasing lockdowns step-by-step, yearly boosters, learning to live with the chance of catching another of the myriad of diseases out there).
Large screens, whiteboards, audio and video are almost perfect nowadays.
edit: I don‘t understand the downvotes. I‘ve been working myself fully remote for years and I do my work. I just see zero drawbacks in terms of efficiency.
It's what's being done with junior employees anyway.
From what I've seen (anecdotally of course, a few friends) these "no more home office" orders don't tend to come as a response to any objectively measured drop in productivity, they come from CEOs and managers who benefit from being able to control things or crack the whip in-person.
But recent years brought me to conclusion that many people have a need for in person communication, and your morale, productivity and even mental health going down little by little every day you interact with others only digitally. You can not fix this, if you bring back to office only selected few. You have to bring back the whole teams — so if a person goes to the office, everyone he works with and interacts with are also there
When there is a mandate to return to the office, it really makes me wonder if the employer can even tell if their employees are productive at all, much less know that they are more productive in the office. If they could tell, they would simply use that measure directly.
One accusation is that they’ve noticed nothing and are demanding changes on entirely false pretenses.
In this case, the commercial real estate industry has been making a huge PR push trying to keep the value of their portfolios up so senior managers at most companies are regularly hearing that WFH causes problems - and anyone distrustful and/or looking for an excuse to shift blame is likely to seize on it.
edit: by increase the number of milestones i don't mean increase the amount of work, i mean increase the amount of times people need to demonstrate they actually did something.
I have some ideas for how to measure output:
1. Code output: I know this one is controversial but at the end of the day code needs to be written. People wouldn't get penalized for missing this minimum output, it's just a signal that their work needs more detailed review. Rather than incentivize people to write more code I would say that some minimum amount of lines of code should be changed or a more detailed review of your work needs to be done.
2. Document output: Designs are obviously important to launching quality software so the work put into design documents should be taken into consideration but it should also result in actual features and products being launched.
3. Feature / Product launches: People actually shipping software and running and completing experiments should be tracked. This should be tracked and rewarded separately from the actual result of the experiment.
4. Feature / Product success: If feature and product launches are successful this should also be tied to employee performance but obviously the employee is not in complete control of this outcome. Sometimes things can be executed on well and just fail so this should be used for a bonus system of some sort.
There are obviously ways people can game a system and the system should be adjusted to account for them as they come up.
Either way, I think anything that encourages actual accountability is superior to the system people have blindly copied from Google and Facebook where you are rewarded for getting into management and building a tiny kingdom of people that do nothing.
I think a lot of what you have described is flawed. It feels more like trying to systemize something that cannot be systemized.
One time I spent 6 months in a brutal migration of a critical system. Lines of code in production in those 6 months = 20 lines. By your measure, I did not accomplish much.
But where exactly did my time go? It went in getting stakeholders together, performing significant experiments to identify the problem, performing more experiments to find solutions, carefully roll out the experiments in various production datacenter - often over weekends. The output? Migration completed.
It was hard work, stressful and took a lot from me. But for a manager strictly follows your rubric, I was unproductive. And now, I get a poor performance rating. I would likely have to sink more time to produce tons of artifacts to prove that that rating was incorrect. Other engineers sees it. Learn to never take up hard problems ever. Just smash more lines of code to be safe.
You have single handedly shot the success of engineering by having an uninformed performance review criteria.
Which is why I disagree with a strict rubric.
That's a myth. Google's performance reviews, as flawed as they are, still require one to provide references to deliverables like reviewed commit history and reviewed documents written. Doing no work will result in poor performance ratings after a couple review cycles, since you will have no deliverables to your name. Those who produce nothing at all are routinely put on performance plans and then fired if things don't change. I've seen that happen.
That said, the Google performance review system, at least in my experience, can favor those who are strategic about choosing and promoting their work even if it is lower in quantity, and disadvantage those who do the a lot of work but aren't strategic about choosing and promotion it. That's almost by design, since in theory Google favors "impact" over lines of code.
So after 1.5 years?
If you do absolutely no work, your manager will generally inquire about your state of motivation pretty quickly. You will be referred to internal or external resources to help you find your motivation, but if you refuse help or don't change course, you will be generally fired well before 2 review cycles. It's pretty rare for people to produce absolutely nothing though.
In my anecdotal experience the leadership of organizations is mostly flying by feel on this issue. And, by nature of their position, they skew heavily towards extroverts who value lots of work interactions. So their gut feels more face to face contact is important and that’s what they mandate.
Very naive. If this was my manager, I would immediately know that my manager is unskilled.
So the current management philosophy just sucks.
Also I'm very good at what I do (developing software), the common thing among the people that produce actual value to companies is that they are high output. Whether it's code or designs or whatever. And I'm talking about quality output obviously.
I think about stories like this:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
> How about a face to face meeting once per quarter?
The problem comes when you try to stop what others want.
2.Even if your job is forcing you to do something you don’t like, that’s not a problem. If I want to use Windows and the company only lets people use Macs, then that’s not a problem. It’s a rule that either I’ll comply with or I won’t work there anymore.
If a company decides to be in-person-only then the people who want to work at a remote-only company won’t work there (or they will).
To sum up your summary, that’s why we’re seeing companies lose employees faster than they anticipated.
From the perspective of those who prefer in-office work, how is this any different from forcing a WFH policy on everyone? Why is that not tyrannical behavior?
For many people the separation between home and work has real value and for many people (particularly younger people with roommates in smaller apartments) their homes don’t have a dedicated workspace with a desk.
The WeWorK I go to has nicer furniture, Internet, and lighting than my home. It is in no way logical for me to work out of my apartment.
Even an apartment bedroom 10x12 can accommodate both in an L. Gig internet is also a lot cheaper than commuting or we work. If you are a professional there is little excuse not to have a desk and fast Internet at home.
Doing tech support I was always shocked to see some folks including techies angry that their elcheapo Internet plan with 10 year old rented equipment downstairs wasn't working well for their hyper important job.
Invest in yourself a bit.
Jesus Christ, here’s my excuse: Before the pandemic I didn’t work at home. After the pandemic, I work at WeWork.
WeWork is $150 a month btw and includes free coffee and A/C in the summer (my apartment doesn’t have A/C) as well. Plus I can walk there in 30 minutes so the dollar-cost of commuting isn’t an issue.
I hate remote work but I happen to like my current job enough to stick with it despite it being remote. My next job will be in-office.
You don’t have to. Somebody at the company (owner, board, leadership team, etc.) decides if they want to be remote, on-site, or hybrid. Then leave it up to everyone who works there to make a decision about whether that’s something they can live with.
It depends on the team and work but I definitely feel a lot more disconnected being fully remote these days. Seeing my team (and broader org) every quarter was a nice compromise that combatted this somewhat but I miss the energy of the hybrid model.
Five days in the office would probably grind me down but 3 has been a great hybrid for me.
That sounds unhealthy. Do you have family and community relationships? Work should be professional relationships. You provide services in exchange for money. If you are getting anxious and depressed from not seeing the people you work with, I think something is wrong with work life balance.
By the way, it is the company that benefits from this one sided attachment. If you feel emotionally attached to the company you are less likely to leave for higher pay or tolerate more abuse from the company. Believe me, the company will have no regrets parting with you if they feel you are not adding to their business value.
Companies love selling their employees on how they are a part of a family and how they are all on mission together. They are trying to inspire loyalty. In reality, the company has pretty much zero loyalty to you.
I think one of the reasons companies are trying to get rid of WFH, is that it is harder to make people emotionally dependent on the company and inspire one sided loyalty if they are working remotely.
This is kind of risible. No, it does not sound "unhealthy" to express a desire to spend time around colleagues as part of the work day. I can hardly imagine a more natural or healthy desire.
When someone implies it’s a character flaw or because you don’t have a social life it’s offensive. My life is fine outside of work.
Sounds like a cultural thing.
One of the best periods in my life was working with people who became my friends.
> Believe me, the company will have no regrets parting with you if they feel you are not adding to their business value.
"The company" doesn't exist. Its a somewhat useful abstraction. The people involved can and will keep people on long after they "should" have been fired. At least here is Europe.
Learning to WFH is as much a skill as learning to operate in an office environment. The difference, when you learn the former you also have increased freedom.
Any net new work is too abstract and complex for the HN CRUD engineer crowd to be central too.
Go find a local job onsite. No one is going to miss you at your office because we all know implicitly this is just busy work to preserve nation state status quo.
People aren't obligated to shut up and tolerate working conditions they dislike. Changing their lives outside of work won't make them enjoy those working conditions more.
When you spend 40 hours of your week doing something, it's going to influence you.
No amount of "satisfying life outside of work" can make up for a workplace that you don't enjoy. That's true for toxic workplaces, it's true for people who can't stand in-office work, and it's true for people who can't stand remote.
It's unfair to try to blame it all on the person's personal life. Different people work well in different environments. The WFH maximalists and in-office maximalists need to stop acting high and mighty like their way flawless.
It also depends on the crowd. On old jobs (public services) I felt there was more warmth (a lot more problems but still) whereas as a dev the spirit is a lot more dull and nerdy. I don't miss that.
However, consider the fact that the old status quo of working in open concept 'feed lot' style office spaces makes people feel awful too.
I do not mean to discount your experience or feelings. Just pointing out that people are different, and you are just on the other side of the fence post shift.
For some, it is exactly the opposite.
Once or twice a month? Sure. Once or twice a week? Can be ideal especially as a company is finding it's repeatable and scalable path.
I love remote, but it's just a tool. Same for hybrid, and being in the same office.
That's how my entire team operates (since before the pandemic!) and have never had an issue with it.
I've worked primarily remotely for north of 10-15 years and love it. But it isn't 100% effective or the best choice for every situation and continuously.
Especially for people at the start of a career or position. Lots of meaningful mentoring and coaching that can't be measured or limited to text chat or video calls.
As someone who mentors their fair share of juniors starting out in software and product development, meeting my mentees in person after mentoring them during the lock downs did not compare.
Mostly, the smiles, the genuine happiness for the success and learning that has been happening, and most of all knowing there's openness to talk about what's next and a challenge to learn.
The very starts of projects and startups can often be much cleaner and faster in person, until you don't need to be.
I understand and also don't like commutes. There's also no shortage of people who report the value of getting out of the house and seeing things differently
Beginners often onboard much easier in person, and quicker to be productive and feel like valued members of the team. Understanding and designing new things, for example is one. Discovery or design sprints can be another.
There is a good amount of merit for hybrid work and teams for producing results faster that can create profitabilty quicker, and pay those raises quicker.
Eben after rto I'd never climb a few floors to find a meeting room for f2f anyway.
This doesn’t seem like all that stringent a requirement.
There may be an element of commercial real estate usage but I honestly think bad leadership and control explains most of this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
Btw, I know this is about real estate. It's happening to me too.
> all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
Brilliant!
I'm glad you like the social aspect of work. My friends are mainly not work related.
We are all different and one size does not fit all.
What a world we live in. This applies to all companies to make video conferencing software including Google...