Why do they care? I don't have a commute, so I now work longer hours. I assume they are using spyware to track my hours spent anyways. Isn't this mutually beneficial for the employer and employee? I work more hours and they spend less on office rent and perks.
> Isn't this mutually beneficial for the employer and employee?
Employers don’t want mutually beneficial, they want control. Working from home gives people the ability to work while handling other priorities as well. I’m sure the employer time tracking plays a role, but they’ve always had the ability to do that, the pandemic didn’t create that.
I think it’s because companies love to push their corporate propaganda in person, upper level management loves to feel that they’re making a meaningful impact on team morale, but it just sucks when done over zoom.
I don't know where you take such knowledge from, is there any scientific paper on psychology and social behavior of employer class? I think most people are reasonable and rational in their expectations, and the unfortunate employers who have to deal with tech/it workers have to develop extraordinary patience and self-restraint in order to have anyone doing any work at all.
Think about the fact that office space and it's maintenance are the second largest overhead after personell, and these companies want that overhead back. What is it worth to them? I'd say a big part of it is inertia, they have leases and procedures presuming physical presence and what not, I'd be willing to bet some governments are leaning on the biggest ones to prevent a collapse of the commercial real estate market (this is big business, pensions rely on it, this is a systemic risk) and then there's the control. All in all I'd say if you let the first 2 shake out by staying the course, the third one won't seem as appealing, but shaking them out is a very painful process.
State, county, and city tax breaks.
Here’s an article about a company I used to work for and the associated tax breaks from the City of Atlanta government. I don’t believe the article includes any sort of state tax breaks they were given when they moved the HQ from Dayton to Metro Atlanta.
Not to mention being in the office is more about Management controlling and observing.
In addition to liability concerns, most people have really poor writing skills. Half the time, in my experience, management has only the vaguest notion of a plan or strategy, and writing it down would reveal how poorly thought-out their ideas are. I have had a VP tell me that it’s “too much work” to write down their thoughts, and that they would “never” do such a thing. Maybe it’s just my employer … but I doubt it.
It's easy to make fun of executives but in my experience this is absolutely true. I've now had 3 remote jobs, 2 were in office and then transitioned remote. The culture is not good at any of the jobs, with the 2 that transitioned becoming obviously much worse a year or so after the transition. Is it possible to keep your culture in a full remote environment? Yes of course, but in my experience it requires leadership that most companies do not have. Forcing everyone back to the office is much easier for most companies than firing leadership and replacing them with people who have experience scaling remote work while keeping a strong culture.
Team building means, well team building. It is difficult to turn a comaraderie with your fellow workers when you never meet them face to face.
While I believe that upper management likes working on the office to make it easier for them to manage, not everything they say is double speak. This is coming from someone who has worked from home for 12 of the last 15 years.
There are definitely advantages of working from the office, that you can't really get working remotely. But I think the advantages of working remotely, at least for me, outweighs the in person advantages.
If employers really wanted employees to abandon remote work, that would be obviously visible as a significant difference in remuneration.
If some employer is paying on-site workers 20% more than the exact same work for the same company remotely, then I'll believe that they truly want people to be on-site; but if not, then those are just empty words, not real preferences.
On the other hand, I do see employees choosing a lower-paid role/employer just to ensure remote work, so that preference seems genuine.
> If some employer is paying on-site workers 20% more than the exact same work for the same company remotely, then I'll believe that they truly want people to be on-site
That would effectively mean increasing salary of the current employees that choose to go to the office by 20%. Alternatively, that'd mean reducing salary of current employees that choose not to.
Either way, that seems like a horribly inefficient way to deal with the problem. Most companies choose much more subtle approaches, such as:
0) Stop hiring remote -> build a new workforce that does not expect remote conditions
1) Mandate RTO (just like Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple, and others did)
2) Start putting people who do not respect RTO on PIP, or on some other bullshit process that'll threaten to fire those that do not conform while giving you, the company, enough time to replace them with new hires.
3) Slowly and silently follow through 2) until remote is a thing for <10-15% of the workforce.
This gives the company a number of advantages, such as:
1) Not appearing evil
2) Not dealing with disruptions caused by mass employee exit
Companies that really want RTO don't have to do it in a "big bang" way. Such companies would rather do it silently while telling you how they value your opinions on what the future workplace policy should be.
They'll get away with it IIF point 0 is possible. I hope it is not, but who knows.
My company had a mandatory come-to-office for every but people who are truly remote. For the truly remote (e.g. me) they cut all fringe benefits. They also have gone out of their way to find subtle ways to rub it in our face: expensive lunches and dinners for people who come in, all "fun events" happen locally and to attend you have to pay your own way, etc. So remote workers like me are second-class citizens. I've even heard "remote work will hurt your ability to advance in the company".
They'll never stop hiring remote. Remote workers will simply become second class citizens at a company with fewer benefits for the same work. Most people, including myself, will happily sacrifice beer coolers and ping pong for the privilege of never having to deal with an office again.
I do feel bad for people who are coming into the office. I hope those fun events and food are worth the gas money, increased risk, and reduced health going into the office entails.
Simply getting in your car and driving to work increases your all-cause mortality significantly. I'd wager more people die in car accidents on their way to work than DUIs. Anecdotally I've been nearly killed several times because someone was late for work and ran a red light, cut me off, etc. Road rage incidents increase because you have to be in the office by X hour.
Reduced health, of course, because of driving. You can also consider most employers aren't going to stock a full kitchen so you're probably eating more fast food and garbage snacks. You're more sedentary because you typically can't walk out of the office for a quick trip to the gym, etc. Oh, also, your sleep is probably worse because you have to be up 2 hours early to get ready for work and drive.
Even if you're not driving to get to work, simply going outside and taking any form of transport (even walking) increases your risk.
And for most people, if you can reasonably walk to work, you're probably going to be exposed to all sorts of particulates from the roadway you're likely walking along. Exhaust fumes, rubber particulates..etc, none are exactly health-boosters.
Most people don't realize how dangerous automobiles really are. Accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the US until people get to be 45+ and cancer starts overtaking it. Even in 2020-2021 CDC data that probably has less people driving than usual: https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home. One thing I liked about living in a city was being able to walk to work. I'm reluctant to work anywhere I have to commute because the last few years have likely significantly reduced my chance of accidental death purely due to remote work.
In some ranges it's the leading cause, although overdose deaths sometimes win out. It's kind of absurd that this isn't brought up in articles about remote work. Newspapers run articles about gun violence every day despite it being wwaaaayyyy less likely than dying in an automobile accident, but the far greater danger of commuting is almost never discussed.
"one"of. "Accidental" death is there leading cause of death. But that doesn't mean "car accidents" it just means accidents. For the 35-44 rage 22k died from poisoning and 6k died from car accidents.
It is still a lot, but not the #1 cause of death. About 42k out of near 3 million deaths are due to car accidents (each year)
You don't have to drive to work, some of us walk and use transit.
If the reason to not go into the office is to not risk some accident out in the world, then you might as well also not go to stores, out to restaurants, or movies or shows. You shouldn't even go to a park, and certainly never travel just for fun. Just stay in your house at all times.
That sounds like a horrible way to live to me. There are other reasons to prefer WFH, but fear of the world shouldn't be one of them, IMO.
This is truly amazingly poor reasoning rhetoric. Your entire argument is two straw men.
Fallacy 1: I can work from home; I can't see a movie on the big screen or visit a park from home. Your analogy has improper premises.
Fallacy 2: Many offices, work locations, and entire cities are not walkable and have poor transit. This is your first straw man argument.
Fallacy 3: The activities you listed are presumed to be more enjoyable than driving into work, so the cost benefit risk profile for traveling to them is different.
Fallacy 4: Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
Fallacy 5: Work driving will occur much more frequently and over typically much longer periods of time than the events you listed. As your risk of accidents rise proportionally to time on the road, these again are not equally weighted.
In short: nobody with a driving-only commute who does not want to RTO is also saying they don't want to go to parks or restaurants or travel. This is your second straw man.
They aren't trying to disprove your argument, simply stating that "increase health concerns" is a poor argument to begin with. You can agreed with a stance and disagree with the arguments.
>Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
In most major US cities, there honestly isn't much difference anymore. There's always too much traffic, even at the slowest parts of the day.
> There are other reasons to prefer WFH, but fear of the world shouldn't be one of them, IMO.
I'm not afraid of the world. When I am not paid commensurate to the risk I won't take it. If they paid me for the transit time in from home to the office and back I'd be worth $50-60k more. It gets worse with pagerduty. You're on-call and can't take an hour to get home lest there be an incident to need to respond to. So now you're stuck at the office until late at night doing unpaid labor. Driving home tired is a lot of fun too, aint it!
The "drive to work" situation is not only dangerous it's outright wage theft. Why should I want to collaborate.
>I'm not afraid of the world. When I am not paid commensurate to the risk I won't take it.
Do you need to be paid to go to the grocery store or is everything Insta carted to you because you care about your health more than finances?
It's just such a werid argument to make. It is more convinent, but let's not act like the act of getting outside (an act our industry is stigmatized against) is endangering our health.
>I hope those fun events and food are worth the gas money, increased risk, and reduced health going into the office entails.
I just want fellow passionate coworkers to talk to. I slightly prefer in-office, but if the company is too far and the pay is good it's not the worst sacrifice to make.
My location is most important: nothing short of some crazy $500k salary is gonna get me moving into Silicon Valley. Even then, I'm lucky to own land; that much STILL isn't getting me a house out there.
The reality is, video conferencing gives you almost all of the benefits of being in office and of face to face communications. While efficiency of using meeting recordings and not being stuck wasting time at the meetings stays. You can cut away useless air travel, hotels costs, remove rush time traffic. And give employees more flexibility. Source global workforce efficiently.
Or you can try copying Google and Apple. Without having a $1B half-empty campus that is currently pretty pleasant to work at, because it is not crowded. The results will be very predictable.
Wish Grindr's relatively new CEO was reading your comment. The company was remote-first/friendly since day 1 years ago, and along comes this guy, and gives a RTO ultimatum to all employees. That was couple of weeks ago. 3/4 (no joke) of engineering dept took severance. Other departments lost more than a half too. The company lost more than 60% of employees in 2 weeks.
There are lawsuits now because 2 weeks before RTO ultimatum, a employee union was formed so a lot of people think that RTO ultimatum was a Unfair Labour Practice or a union busting move.
The move was so boneheaded and uncomprehensible that a lot of people suspect that the CEO simply wanted to destroy the union even if that takes sinks the company.
Exactly. Now they want up the employee to again pick up the costs of 1-2 hours of commuting each day, just to be physically in a meeting room to take a zoom call that they could have taken at home.
Oh, now you have to take hotel seating instead of your own desk and setup, where you have to take whatever equipment is available.
Pay me 20% more and give me a dedicated desk, and I'll go into the office.
A dedicated, exclusive office. When I'm not in the building, I still don't want my office space being used by someone else. As far as I am concerned, I need to have a dedicated exclusive work area that is used only by me when I am physically present, and used by no one when I am not.
Yes you are, because (presumably) you live in an area that has cheaper/larger housing, and perhaps better natural environment, then accept the trade-off of a longer commute.
Those trade-offs are best made by the employee, not the employer. Everyone's preferences and family situations are different.
> On the other hand, I do see employees choosing a lower-paid role/employer just to ensure remote work, so that preference seems genuine.
That implies that other employers could have offered lower salaries if they had allowed remote work - and thus that they are paying a premium for getting/keeping people in the office, no?
There's a risk of significantly upsetting the employees by discriminating against remote work, so this experiment is probably not worth trying.
Another reason it's not worth trying is that the conclusion might be already evident - many top-skilled people are leaving their jobs and taking a pay cut to work in companies that respect their work-life balance. A pay differentiation will not make the best employees self-neglect.
I think the pandemic reset a lot of things, made a lot of us look at the bigger picture. Certainly not everyone, but some people probably thought they wouldn't be proud of their lives if they died of Covid when all they've achieved after school, college and uni was wage-slaving in an open office, sandwiched in between two rounds of commute each day.
Aye - this seems like a genuine problem for employers pulling people back to the office. Rents are pushing 2-3k per bedroom to be within 45 minutes of an office. This puts folks at around a 150k minimum compensation to not feel rent burdened as a single person.
Many employees avoided the expense of moving during Covid. Unless employers want to pay these new found expenses… people won’t go back to the office. I’m sure there is a good chunk of staff who are insulated from this reality due to home ownership and seniority - but that won’t last long when people realize market rates for junior staff have risen to that of tenured staff.
I'd choose a lower paid role, I'd be a minority but I don't think I'd be the only one, two reasons come to mind why 20% less would be appealing:
- People like me value their work/life balance and satisfaction with the job. I could easily be making 2x what I do now but I'd hate every single second of my job. My old boss taught me "Work is 1/2 of your waking day so you better enjoy it".
- I'm currently working remote for a german company for their average salary. The italian average salary for a developer is around half that. So realistically unless I moved to Germany working remote would still be the most profitable option.
The problem is that pay cute are a huge feel-bad moment; many employees who are otherwise perfectly happy will simply quit rather than accept one. Some companies did it anyway in the first RTO wave, typically under the fig leaf of location-based pay. Others look towards a less disruptive strategy (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/07/12/1110510488/lea...) of slow rolling raises and inflation adjustments for remote roles.
I think once a privilege has been given (to employees) it's impossible to take it away without a fight. Suddenly something that was a non-issue became a life or death matter. So you're right, now people would expect to be paid extra for working in the office, even if they did that for free two years ago.
Work is a voluntary contract for both sides and the terms are agreed before signing it, not dictated afterwards . And the standard so far was that the work is done at location specified by the employer. So it's not something that's suddenly been invented to oppress the employees.
I mean, it is a privilege. One many industry are physically unable to do even if they wanted to. We shouldn't forget that tech really is in a special situation for a lot of these factors that are being treated as novel in the 2020's.
In the recent tech layoffs, how do you figure the distribution of WFH employees was among those who were let go, higher or lower than average at the company?
Also, with the office attendance being part of performance review in some companies [1], how do you think the compensation will look for a WFH individual after a couple of review cycles?
>If employers really wanted employees to abandon remote work, that would be obviously visible as a significant difference in remuneration.
"We've tried nothing and we're out of options".
I'm sure they do have preferences, but they don't care enough to put work into the solution. so, bringing people back into office isn't worth a 20% raise in this case. But that's not surprising; nothing seems to be worth a raise compared to hiring and re-training new employees. As companies have long since abandoned retention.
Commuting when it isn't necessary is economically inefficient. Employees are required to pay the entirety of the cost. The only way this is likely to equalize out in favor of increased time on site is if employers start paying employees extra in some way for those days that they are required to be in the office.
Employers like this should go to therapy instead of externalizing their pathology to other people. Just take the DMS-5 and go through the bullet points of Anxiety Disorders, Paranoid Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it fits very well.
wanting people to RTO is a valid preference. It doesn't mean they also don't have a stronger preference to not pay employees more money. We see what wins out here.
No, because then the employer is subsidizing commuting, but giving the employee the choice of the travel/work blend.
In the limit, you could choose to live 4.5 hours away from work and spend all day commuting, compared to someone who lives next to the office and does a full day's work.
My company has roughly ~60 employees and leased a building with 60 offices and 5 conference rooms. They tried to get us to come in more often (than once a week), saying they couldn't justify giving everyone their own office if we continued at 20% capacity. Everyone basically said fine, whatever, we're cool with sharing. So we just moved to a new building with like 20 offices and 7 conference rooms, for $25k less per month rent; and it's actually way nicer. The day I go in is stacked with meetings and collabs, so I'm never in an office anyway. Mgmt is happy (for now) they are saving on overhead (100% indirect, so double-good); I think they've accepted there's no going back.
> Businesses gave mixed results on remote work productivity, with 30% saying it boosted output, and 40% saying it reduced it.
So basically, there's no impact to productivity. Which is the bottom line.
The bigger issue is commercial real estate leases, which often have occupancy requirements imposed by the city to keep area's tax base healthy. See: downtown Portland, downtown San Francisco, etc.
The city needs local businesses to thrive, so the building owner needs the buildings occupied, so the company leasing it needs butts in seats.
If 70% of businesses reported a change in output, it seems weird to conclude “there’s no impact to productivity” as it concerns an individual business setting policy.
I see it as evidence to do more granular research. What productivity increase/decrease so you see per company? In what industries? are these based on perceptions or hard metrics? what's the retention rate of companies, and do they correlate?
> Businesses gave mixed results on remote work productivity, with 30% saying it boosted output, and 40% saying it reduced it.
Given that spread, my guess here is either that their data collection and analysis is bad, or that there are other factors involved in productivity other than just where the worker is located. It is probably a very very very complicated question that is collapsed down into this "work from home: good or bad" way that is the fashion of most (all) business related pseudoscience.
Anecdotally, on the subject of work culture and community, I have a lot of friends I met at old jobs whom I still hang out with. What we bonded over was how much we disliked our customers, managers, and coworkers, and how much goofing off we could get away with in the office. We pushed a lot of chairs down hallways, and took a lot of very long lunches. That's about all I miss from working in the office: the not working part. It is true that I haven't developed similar communities in remote work, but I don't know where that fits in the "community building" argument for RTO.
> Given that spread, my guess here is either that their data collection and analysis is bad, or that there are other factors involved in productivity other than just where the worker is located.
The article doesn't get into the methodology of the survey, but another possibility is that respondents were just answering based on their feelings rather than any hard data at all. This sort of thing happens all the time; a well-known example is that if you survey Americans about crime, a large percentage will say crime has increased regardless of what's happening with actual levels of crime [1].
>That's about all I miss from working in the office: the not working part. I
To be fair, I don't think anyone except the most mission-centric individuals will ever "miss work". Many people wouldn't work if they could avoid doing so.
>It is true that I haven't developed similar communities in remote work, but I don't know where that fits in the "community building" argument for RTO.
Isn't it just that? They want people to feel like they are working with a team, not as some remote drone from home that tags in.
As you'll see from many comments on HN, some simply don't care about that, so it falls on deaf ears. But this sort of PR isn't really for employees, let alone ones who will quit rather than RTO. They are a lost cause in the company's eyes.
My employer is big into coworking. The offices are plain hell. Some of the perks are people shouting on top of their lungs, crappy toilets (quite literally), theft, and a spaghetti access control system that malfunctions and locks you up. My former employer rented a similar space, with similar features. I just don't wanna spend 1/3 of my life in hell.
You get up, wash - eat - dress, then you go to your car - and your clock starts, your time, car time, miles, gas - the entire work day is on the clock, your lunch is paid for - you drive home and the clock stops.
Currently this transit time/gas/miles/stress = unpaid.
Make this all paid time and far fewer would want to drag you in and pay all that added $$ = wasted $$ that remote work obviates.
As someone who relocated himself to be closer to an office, I’m ecstatic about it. I live within walking distance of my office, and I basically have it to myself most of the time. A bright, clean, air condition, professionally managed placed where I can just focus on work, and when I’m done, I leave it all there. As soon as I badge out, I’m in family mode.
If a colleague decides to come in, it’s like seeing an old friend from college. We catch up, get some work done in a different way, and maybe get coffee.
I’m not concerned about productivity either way. What will get is what will get done, and I’m happy about it.
The part you like sounds financially unviable… you have most of the office to yourself. In RTO, offices aren’t empty, they’re loud and full of people who don’t want to be there.
Are you "ecstatic" about living close to an office or RTO mandates? The former is totally understandable. Shit, who wouldn't want to live next to a sparsely populated office, optional to use whenever you want. If you're stoked mgmt is pushing RTO because more chums at the water cooler... not great Bob
The headline of the article is "Remote work is here to stay," and I'm ecstatic about that, because my employer is one of those that will probably never give up their real estate footprint. I get the flexibility to work from home if I want and the option to come into an office that is cleaned and maintained by someone else. I can easily afford where I live, and it's in near other non-work things that I enjoy.
I don't work in the finance department. The company stock keeps going up and I'm enjoying my job. If either of those stops being true, I'll re-evaluate.
This is good because people who choose to go to an office without being forced are self-selecting themselves for social interaction. Anyone you see there wants to be there so they should be fair game for pleasantries.
I do not want to be approached. When 5pm rolls around, Slack stops sending notifications, and when I slam my laptop shut, it doesn’t open until 9am the next business day at the earliest.
That said, a whole office just to placate such people seems like a gratuitous expense.
I knew of one company where it was uncomfortably stuffy after 6 pm when they turned the hvac off. The office was so crowded that there literally was not enough oxygen in the building.
One of the arguments I keep seeing for going back to the office boils down to 'I don't know something, being in the office means it's easy to walk over and ask someone'.
I can see at least two problems: your company code, systems and processes are either poorly documented or complex, and you are happy to interrupt someone that is probably busy.
The interruptions are often no better with remote. Unless you completely disable Slack notifications, you'll be subject to annoying DMs and unnecessary @heres, and perhaps summoned to pointless Zoom calls where a not-actually "urgent" issue must be dealt with.
>. No one in my company does anything like that, thank goodness. Though I'm sure others do.
on the contrary, I have yet to work at a company that had proper up to date documented systems and processes. It's always suggested to ask a co-worker or a producer and get answers that way.
Of course, we're professionals so I've never heard of the cases where someone is pinging someone 10 times a day for micro-questions. There's a hierarhy you should try to follow before pinging someone specifically, and for larger questions you should rearrange a meeting time, ideally 1+ days in advance.
But we also acknowledge that there's tons of tribal knowledge in the company and industry as a whole that you can't simply Google. So you shouldn't treat asking questions as something to discourage.
if 100% of the companies say that my profession (data analyst) will be in person at the office, starting tomorrow, I'll leave the profession and look for something else to do with my life.
To quote the popular Jeremy Clarkson meme, "Oh no! Anyways..."
On a more serious note, once we return to a more jobseeker friendly market, I'm curious how companies that insist on RTO will be perceived by jobseekers. I imagine that those RTO companies will either change their tune very quickly or be considered a third rate place to work.
I find this kind of article pointlessly inflammatory. Oh, some aggregation of nameless finance chiefs want more workers in the office, what does the proletariat think of that!? This just breeds division and blanket accusations.
Meanwhile, where I work, we're still allowed to be 100% remote, but also recognize this has pros and cons, especially for juniors and new members of the team who haven't met each other. Productivity is up, but team connection and cohesion is down. Generally people are happy with the tradeoff, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved via thoughtful tweaks (periodic get-togethers, hybrid meeting protocols, etc).
The key is some level of trust and dialogue with management, not this adversarial hand-wringing-for-pageviews noise.
>Meanwhile, where I work, we're still allowed to be 100% remote, but also recognize this has pros and cons, especially for juniors and new members of the team who haven't met each other.
Where working remotely is practical, 100% RTO doesn't make a lot of sense IMO. On the other hand, you can't really dismiss concerns about company culture, team cohesion with new employees, mentoring new grads, etc. as the product of evil executives trying to prop up their commercial real estate portfolio or whatever. (I'd also argue that the situation is probably worsened because so many companies are carefully scrutinizing expenses for travel, meetings, etc.)
> you can't really dismiss concerns about company culture, team cohesion with new employees, mentoring new grads, etc. as the product of evil executives trying to prop up their commercial real estate portfolio or whatever.
Many people do dismiss the concerns because their goals pre-pandemic did not reflect these values. So they see it as a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I live ~175 miles to the closest tech hub, so changing to in-office work isn't an option unless I move. If I was forced to move, an equivalent house to what I have now would cost about 3 times as much and I'd have at least an hour commute each way.
I save a lot of money not commuting and eating at home, and a lot of issues I'd otherwise have to miss work for if I went into an office (family illness, childcare issues) are super easy to adjust my schedule to work around.
Similar story here. I've been remote for 9 years. I don't live that far from a minor tech hub, but it would still be an hour commute each way.
Housing here is below the national average, so there is a huge savings there. I've only put maybe 10k miles on my 2007 Corolla in the last 5 years, so I pay much less in gas/maintenance/replacing vehicles. I can have delicious, healthy food every day for half the cost. If I need someone to come to my house for repairs (or other reasons), I don't need to take a day off or miss hardly any work time. I don't have to be mad when they don't show up (maybe a little). My daughter can attend a great school that requires pickup, because being away from my PC for 30 minutes every day in the afternoon is just not a big deal. If I want to take a break and get in a quick jog in the middle of the day, it costs almost nothing in lost time; I just walk outside and start running.
I don't know what sort of raise I would have to get to convince me to give all of that up. I think I've settled on 40%, which is untenable without relocation.
In the UK, the move to WFH saved me £7000 per annum (the cost of a annual rail season ticket), the equivalent of £10,000 gross salary (taxed to £7k net).
Would like to hear opinions of people who are actually CEOs or leaders of large orgs today.
I think it’s a generational thing and that the next Google or Apple when it arrives will be fully remote and that will be one of its differentiating advantages as an employer. It will show that things can be done differently and then set the direction for other employers of that time. Until then, the current mentality of “you can only be productive when you are in person” will prevail.
Everything just worked magically during the pandemic. Once it was gone it don’t work. It doesn’t really sound logical.
>Once it was gone it don’t work. It doesn’t really sound logical.
A lot of things can work reasonably well--and maybe even better than expected--over the short-term but there can be tolls as a "new normal" as time goes on.
You also have to take into account something that should have been more noted at the time. Pretty much no executive in June 2020 was going to say "If we can't get people back into an office in three months we are so totally screwed as a business!" Of course, they had an incentive to say everything's fine--even better than fine.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadEmployers don’t want mutually beneficial, they want control. Working from home gives people the ability to work while handling other priorities as well. I’m sure the employer time tracking plays a role, but they’ve always had the ability to do that, the pandemic didn’t create that.
I think it’s because companies love to push their corporate propaganda in person, upper level management loves to feel that they’re making a meaningful impact on team morale, but it just sucks when done over zoom.
I will "8 and skate", be it a remote or in person job. They dont pay me for overtime, so I don't donate it to a for-profit enterprise.
* team building = observation & control, attendance & attention monitoring i.e presenteeism.
* communication = verbal. i dont want to put myself at liability [because i often am] by putting things in writing
* workplace culture = lmao. the bs we use to justify paying you less and/or guilting you into working above your compensation.
also remember all those zoom recordings that got shared online of people being fired by some sociopath ceo. yeah we dont want that to happen again.
Not to mention being in the office is more about Management controlling and observing.
https://www.ajc.com/business/incentive-package-for-ncr-could...
If employers really wanted employees to abandon remote work, that would be obviously visible as a significant difference in remuneration.
If some employer is paying on-site workers 20% more than the exact same work for the same company remotely, then I'll believe that they truly want people to be on-site; but if not, then those are just empty words, not real preferences.
On the other hand, I do see employees choosing a lower-paid role/employer just to ensure remote work, so that preference seems genuine.
That would effectively mean increasing salary of the current employees that choose to go to the office by 20%. Alternatively, that'd mean reducing salary of current employees that choose not to.
Either way, that seems like a horribly inefficient way to deal with the problem. Most companies choose much more subtle approaches, such as:
0) Stop hiring remote -> build a new workforce that does not expect remote conditions
1) Mandate RTO (just like Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple, and others did)
2) Start putting people who do not respect RTO on PIP, or on some other bullshit process that'll threaten to fire those that do not conform while giving you, the company, enough time to replace them with new hires.
3) Slowly and silently follow through 2) until remote is a thing for <10-15% of the workforce.
This gives the company a number of advantages, such as:
1) Not appearing evil
2) Not dealing with disruptions caused by mass employee exit
Companies that really want RTO don't have to do it in a "big bang" way. Such companies would rather do it silently while telling you how they value your opinions on what the future workplace policy should be.
They'll get away with it IIF point 0 is possible. I hope it is not, but who knows.
They'll never stop hiring remote. Remote workers will simply become second class citizens at a company with fewer benefits for the same work. Most people, including myself, will happily sacrifice beer coolers and ping pong for the privilege of never having to deal with an office again.
I do feel bad for people who are coming into the office. I hope those fun events and food are worth the gas money, increased risk, and reduced health going into the office entails.
Reduced health, of course, because of driving. You can also consider most employers aren't going to stock a full kitchen so you're probably eating more fast food and garbage snacks. You're more sedentary because you typically can't walk out of the office for a quick trip to the gym, etc. Oh, also, your sleep is probably worse because you have to be up 2 hours early to get ready for work and drive.
And for most people, if you can reasonably walk to work, you're probably going to be exposed to all sorts of particulates from the roadway you're likely walking along. Exhaust fumes, rubber particulates..etc, none are exactly health-boosters.
In some ranges it's the leading cause, although overdose deaths sometimes win out. It's kind of absurd that this isn't brought up in articles about remote work. Newspapers run articles about gun violence every day despite it being wwaaaayyyy less likely than dying in an automobile accident, but the far greater danger of commuting is almost never discussed.
If the reason to not go into the office is to not risk some accident out in the world, then you might as well also not go to stores, out to restaurants, or movies or shows. You shouldn't even go to a park, and certainly never travel just for fun. Just stay in your house at all times.
That sounds like a horrible way to live to me. There are other reasons to prefer WFH, but fear of the world shouldn't be one of them, IMO.
Fallacy 1: I can work from home; I can't see a movie on the big screen or visit a park from home. Your analogy has improper premises.
Fallacy 2: Many offices, work locations, and entire cities are not walkable and have poor transit. This is your first straw man argument.
Fallacy 3: The activities you listed are presumed to be more enjoyable than driving into work, so the cost benefit risk profile for traveling to them is different.
Fallacy 4: Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
Fallacy 5: Work driving will occur much more frequently and over typically much longer periods of time than the events you listed. As your risk of accidents rise proportionally to time on the road, these again are not equally weighted.
In short: nobody with a driving-only commute who does not want to RTO is also saying they don't want to go to parks or restaurants or travel. This is your second straw man.
Please bring logical arguments and not straw men.
>Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
In most major US cities, there honestly isn't much difference anymore. There's always too much traffic, even at the slowest parts of the day.
I'm not afraid of the world. When I am not paid commensurate to the risk I won't take it. If they paid me for the transit time in from home to the office and back I'd be worth $50-60k more. It gets worse with pagerduty. You're on-call and can't take an hour to get home lest there be an incident to need to respond to. So now you're stuck at the office until late at night doing unpaid labor. Driving home tired is a lot of fun too, aint it!
The "drive to work" situation is not only dangerous it's outright wage theft. Why should I want to collaborate.
Anyway, nice strawman.
Do you need to be paid to go to the grocery store or is everything Insta carted to you because you care about your health more than finances?
It's just such a werid argument to make. It is more convinent, but let's not act like the act of getting outside (an act our industry is stigmatized against) is endangering our health.
I just want fellow passionate coworkers to talk to. I slightly prefer in-office, but if the company is too far and the pay is good it's not the worst sacrifice to make.
My location is most important: nothing short of some crazy $500k salary is gonna get me moving into Silicon Valley. Even then, I'm lucky to own land; that much STILL isn't getting me a house out there.
Or you can try copying Google and Apple. Without having a $1B half-empty campus that is currently pretty pleasant to work at, because it is not crowded. The results will be very predictable.
There are lawsuits now because 2 weeks before RTO ultimatum, a employee union was formed so a lot of people think that RTO ultimatum was a Unfair Labour Practice or a union busting move.
The move was so boneheaded and uncomprehensible that a lot of people suspect that the CEO simply wanted to destroy the union even if that takes sinks the company.
Oh, now you have to take hotel seating instead of your own desk and setup, where you have to take whatever equipment is available.
Pay me 20% more and give me a dedicated desk, and I'll go into the office.
A dedicated *office*.
I neither want to see, hear, or smell the guy at the open-plan desk next to me eat his lunch at his desk.
Because I'm sure as hell not doing it for my benefit ...
Those trade-offs are best made by the employee, not the employer. Everyone's preferences and family situations are different.
why just a desk though? i want a dedicated office.
That implies that other employers could have offered lower salaries if they had allowed remote work - and thus that they are paying a premium for getting/keeping people in the office, no?
Another reason it's not worth trying is that the conclusion might be already evident - many top-skilled people are leaving their jobs and taking a pay cut to work in companies that respect their work-life balance. A pay differentiation will not make the best employees self-neglect.
I think the pandemic reset a lot of things, made a lot of us look at the bigger picture. Certainly not everyone, but some people probably thought they wouldn't be proud of their lives if they died of Covid when all they've achieved after school, college and uni was wage-slaving in an open office, sandwiched in between two rounds of commute each day.
Many employees avoided the expense of moving during Covid. Unless employers want to pay these new found expenses… people won’t go back to the office. I’m sure there is a good chunk of staff who are insulated from this reality due to home ownership and seniority - but that won’t last long when people realize market rates for junior staff have risen to that of tenured staff.
- People like me value their work/life balance and satisfaction with the job. I could easily be making 2x what I do now but I'd hate every single second of my job. My old boss taught me "Work is 1/2 of your waking day so you better enjoy it".
- I'm currently working remote for a german company for their average salary. The italian average salary for a developer is around half that. So realistically unless I moved to Germany working remote would still be the most profitable option.
A more accurate wording might be "once you stop imposing a hardship" ... it's hard to convince people to let you re-impose it (for free).
Also, with the office attendance being part of performance review in some companies [1], how do you think the compensation will look for a WFH individual after a couple of review cycles?
1. https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/06/google-makes-office-a...
"We've tried nothing and we're out of options".
I'm sure they do have preferences, but they don't care enough to put work into the solution. so, bringing people back into office isn't worth a 20% raise in this case. But that's not surprising; nothing seems to be worth a raise compared to hiring and re-training new employees. As companies have long since abandoned retention.
Then see how much they want workers in the office.
This is a classic case of Stated Preference vs. Revealed Preference
In the limit, you could choose to live 4.5 hours away from work and spend all day commuting, compared to someone who lives next to the office and does a full day's work.
So basically, there's no impact to productivity. Which is the bottom line.
The bigger issue is commercial real estate leases, which often have occupancy requirements imposed by the city to keep area's tax base healthy. See: downtown Portland, downtown San Francisco, etc.
The city needs local businesses to thrive, so the building owner needs the buildings occupied, so the company leasing it needs butts in seats.
It's a start, not something to conclude from.
Given that spread, my guess here is either that their data collection and analysis is bad, or that there are other factors involved in productivity other than just where the worker is located. It is probably a very very very complicated question that is collapsed down into this "work from home: good or bad" way that is the fashion of most (all) business related pseudoscience.
Anecdotally, on the subject of work culture and community, I have a lot of friends I met at old jobs whom I still hang out with. What we bonded over was how much we disliked our customers, managers, and coworkers, and how much goofing off we could get away with in the office. We pushed a lot of chairs down hallways, and took a lot of very long lunches. That's about all I miss from working in the office: the not working part. It is true that I haven't developed similar communities in remote work, but I don't know where that fits in the "community building" argument for RTO.
The article doesn't get into the methodology of the survey, but another possibility is that respondents were just answering based on their feelings rather than any hard data at all. This sort of thing happens all the time; a well-known example is that if you survey Americans about crime, a large percentage will say crime has increased regardless of what's happening with actual levels of crime [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/16/voters-pe...
To be fair, I don't think anyone except the most mission-centric individuals will ever "miss work". Many people wouldn't work if they could avoid doing so.
>It is true that I haven't developed similar communities in remote work, but I don't know where that fits in the "community building" argument for RTO.
Isn't it just that? They want people to feel like they are working with a team, not as some remote drone from home that tags in.
As you'll see from many comments on HN, some simply don't care about that, so it falls on deaf ears. But this sort of PR isn't really for employees, let alone ones who will quit rather than RTO. They are a lost cause in the company's eyes.
Look on the bright side, at least you get to choose your version of hell
Wasn’t the case for most of human history
(Edit: man, Y’all really don’t like this joke :P)
> dress
Hold up, these are on the clock too.
If a colleague decides to come in, it’s like seeing an old friend from college. We catch up, get some work done in a different way, and maybe get coffee.
I’m not concerned about productivity either way. What will get is what will get done, and I’m happy about it.
I don't work in the finance department. The company stock keeps going up and I'm enjoying my job. If either of those stops being true, I'll re-evaluate.
I do not want to be approached. When 5pm rolls around, Slack stops sending notifications, and when I slam my laptop shut, it doesn’t open until 9am the next business day at the earliest.
That said, a whole office just to placate such people seems like a gratuitous expense.
And how did you feel when it was crammed full?
I can see at least two problems: your company code, systems and processes are either poorly documented or complex, and you are happy to interrupt someone that is probably busy.
If we get '@here'd it's an actual fix-it-now production problem. Then again, my soft-phone, and cell would also be ringing like crazy as well.
on the contrary, I have yet to work at a company that had proper up to date documented systems and processes. It's always suggested to ask a co-worker or a producer and get answers that way.
Of course, we're professionals so I've never heard of the cases where someone is pinging someone 10 times a day for micro-questions. There's a hierarhy you should try to follow before pinging someone specifically, and for larger questions you should rearrange a meeting time, ideally 1+ days in advance.
But we also acknowledge that there's tons of tribal knowledge in the company and industry as a whole that you can't simply Google. So you shouldn't treat asking questions as something to discourage.
i. don't. want. to. work. in. the. office.
i don't need office's bullshitism.
I had to read this two times as it’s poorly worded.
An any rate, it should be 80% and not 35%. You don’t need to go into an office to make software.
There’s something just sinister how employers are handling this as it’s got nothing to do with actual output.
On a more serious note, once we return to a more jobseeker friendly market, I'm curious how companies that insist on RTO will be perceived by jobseekers. I imagine that those RTO companies will either change their tune very quickly or be considered a third rate place to work.
Meanwhile, where I work, we're still allowed to be 100% remote, but also recognize this has pros and cons, especially for juniors and new members of the team who haven't met each other. Productivity is up, but team connection and cohesion is down. Generally people are happy with the tradeoff, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved via thoughtful tweaks (periodic get-togethers, hybrid meeting protocols, etc).
The key is some level of trust and dialogue with management, not this adversarial hand-wringing-for-pageviews noise.
Where working remotely is practical, 100% RTO doesn't make a lot of sense IMO. On the other hand, you can't really dismiss concerns about company culture, team cohesion with new employees, mentoring new grads, etc. as the product of evil executives trying to prop up their commercial real estate portfolio or whatever. (I'd also argue that the situation is probably worsened because so many companies are carefully scrutinizing expenses for travel, meetings, etc.)
Many people do dismiss the concerns because their goals pre-pandemic did not reflect these values. So they see it as a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I live ~175 miles to the closest tech hub, so changing to in-office work isn't an option unless I move. If I was forced to move, an equivalent house to what I have now would cost about 3 times as much and I'd have at least an hour commute each way.
I save a lot of money not commuting and eating at home, and a lot of issues I'd otherwise have to miss work for if I went into an office (family illness, childcare issues) are super easy to adjust my schedule to work around.
Housing here is below the national average, so there is a huge savings there. I've only put maybe 10k miles on my 2007 Corolla in the last 5 years, so I pay much less in gas/maintenance/replacing vehicles. I can have delicious, healthy food every day for half the cost. If I need someone to come to my house for repairs (or other reasons), I don't need to take a day off or miss hardly any work time. I don't have to be mad when they don't show up (maybe a little). My daughter can attend a great school that requires pickup, because being away from my PC for 30 minutes every day in the afternoon is just not a big deal. If I want to take a break and get in a quick jog in the middle of the day, it costs almost nothing in lost time; I just walk outside and start running.
I don't know what sort of raise I would have to get to convince me to give all of that up. I think I've settled on 40%, which is untenable without relocation.
I think it’s a generational thing and that the next Google or Apple when it arrives will be fully remote and that will be one of its differentiating advantages as an employer. It will show that things can be done differently and then set the direction for other employers of that time. Until then, the current mentality of “you can only be productive when you are in person” will prevail.
Everything just worked magically during the pandemic. Once it was gone it don’t work. It doesn’t really sound logical.
A lot of things can work reasonably well--and maybe even better than expected--over the short-term but there can be tolls as a "new normal" as time goes on.
Remote work is fine and some people like it a lot but I think if we're being honest the jury is still out on what the value is to the business.
- most productive days, writing a complete new windows 3.x course at home using my own pc and my company provided copy of framemaker
- most enjoyable, back at the office/training rooms teaching the course
different strokes etc