Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?
Apple, Meta, Amazon, and now even LinkedIn have asked workers to come back into the office. They’ve all made passing comments that they will continue to support remote workers, but from my perspective the writing is ultimately on the wall. Meta has even implemented limits on how often these workers hired as remote are allowed to come into the office, but have not divulged the reason for doing so. Given that many of these companies began hiring and marking certain employees with designated offices as far back as 2 years ago, would signify this has been a long tail deliberate plan.
What are the odds (0-100%) that these permanently remote workers will be heavily targeted in the next large wave of layoffs?
111 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadRemote gigs will always be more tenuous than prison-jobs.
You also can't correct things when you're in an office when meetings are had that exclude you. So even with that sweet commute you can still be reference while "in the office", just not in the room where Big Decisions are made.
When I worked in a building, I would go to meetings, and there I would see co-workers and people would talk to each other in meetings. When I work remotely, I join virtual meetings, and I see co-workers and people talk to each other.
In both cases, people can use chat to say things without me seeing. If I am physically in a building, but people are not in the same room as me, they can talk to each other without me hearing.
The only premise that could be true is that within one organization, people that cannot be remote may resent people that can.
This isn't a problem by itself, however remote companies need to have a lot more processes around information transfer and team building, which is something companies don't need to actively think about for the most part if they build on-site teams.
Someone senior who didn't quite understand some point but didn't want to ask about it in the meeting* will ask a version of it in the hallway just outside the door.
They'll appreciate and increase trust in the person who gave them the answer. There's not even anything nefarious about that; it's just normal human behavior.
* Positively: because they didn't want to derail the meeting and slow everyone down, or negatively: because they didn't want to admit to not being omniscient. Either way, it happens.
And what would you do if you are there in person? Challenge them to a duel?
This whole scenario sounds very paranoid to me. In my experience if you treat people decently and perform OK most co-workers won't talk negatively about you behind your back. Or maybe I just never noticed... it did have 0 impact on me though if it happened.
Eh. Since the advent of chat systems like Slack I think this happens anyway, remote or not.
I know my job I feel like is kinda invisible. There are a few key people I talk too on a regular basis but outside of those small handful of people most of the company don't know I exist except for the rare times I show up the office.
I will also say that as much as I prefer WFH, there is still something lost that just can't be replicated at home without a constant video connection (which... NO). That is the random conversations that can happen that may lead to just a friendship or actually lead to a change at work. I have been part of a lot of projects that would have never happened if it wasn't for a conversation over lunch, in the elevator, or whatever.
People have pain points or ideas that are never formally made for one reason or another.
Personally what I would really like is a mix. WFH 4 days a week and come in 1 day for a meeting, social, etc day. I barely knew my coworkers until we started actually going in every once in a while and doing things outside of work as well.
There shouldn't be, but I agree that in reality there is something to simply being visibly toiling. I learned on HN a month ago, this is called the "Costanza Disposition"[1] based on a Seinfeld episode.
You walk the halls in the office with a very serious, determined look on your face, always with laptop in hand. Always drifting past where the Directors and VPs sat. Always striking up conversations with people in leadership. Always visibly demonstrating vague "bustle" and "activity." A naive manager would observe this behavior and think to himself "Ahh, yes, the glorious buzz of Business™ Being Done! My empire is so active!"
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8PzhNuh7w
If you're in an environment where people are treating you like that, remote or not, it's not due to how you work. You just have shitty coworkers or managers.
I think it is more productive to do a good job. If someone says false things and decision makers takes them at face value there is some other problems at an organization.
> you are not there when people talk and you can't correct them or defend yourself
And you'll never suspect it from the people who are doing it the most / worst. As a mid level, I worked under a lead who was 100% in-office and who was, on a daily basis, stealing credit for all of my work with engineering management while at the same time pushing for me to get a promotion! His career / role catapulted into the high-rises, he threatened to leave unless X, Y, and Z demands were made, they capitulated because they believed he was so crucial, I had no idea any of this was going on until years after the fact, and I made Senior. Whoopity fucking doo.
I was later told that this person was eventually fired, because he found his personal Peter Principle level and had run out of subordinates to abuse, but he's still out there in industry fucking things up for other people, I'm sure.
If you have found that to be true, you may have had a streak of pettiness in your work culture. I've found that the healthy organizations I've been a part of don't resent each other - if they have a concern they raise it, discuss it, resolve it, and leave it be.
SWE salary numbers would suggest otherwise
The simplest answer is that they literally don't have enough space for all of the workers to be in the office at the same time, right? They probably didn't have enough space to begin with if a lot of the workforce was remote.
It's often said that tech workers have no need for unions and (not to reopen that box yet again!) this is exactly the kind of scenario where tech workers could benefit from union representation, even if they're highly paid. Absent that these companies can do more or less whatever they want with remote workers, they're not a protected class.
I'm just pointing out that unions don't mean you get everything you want.
Sure, a crap union is a crap union. But union representation in general is more likely to result in the rights of remote workers being protected than, what, asking nicely?
In most countries, this didn't happen out of nowhere.
900 US school districts because they can't retain teacher talent otherwise: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-districts-4-day-week-tea... | https://www.ncsl.org/education/four-day-school-week-overview
If Meta faced a complete strike similar to writers' strike, their workers could achieve similar goals like writers did.
Or not - but nobody promises it, that's silly.
Maybe not, but if the companies can band together and collectively decide what is best for employers[1], then it's only fair that employees should be able to band together and collectively decide what is best for employees.
Unions are for collective negotiation; getting what you want is a nice side-effect of collective bargaining.
[1] Yeah, don't tell me that they don't collude. Actual communications between them is not required for collusion.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's unfair for employees to form unions if they want. Employees who want to do that absolutely should be able to.
Not everyone wants to be in a union and employees who don't want to be should also be able to do that.
For example, if the Games Industry (using them as an example because they're notoriously the worst work-life) unionized, a shop could tell their management "No, we will not engage in crunch for a month."
Like how a fire suppression system doesn't prevent you from burning your food, unions are there to prevent bigger issues.
One was a programme manager in the country that I am (EU) and at the same time was also running a programme in Saudi Arabia. He enjoyed the 'teleworking', and he had to go to the office 1 day per week and 1 day per month in Riyadh.
The local 1d per week, was 4.30-5.00 on Fridays (yes it counted as normal day). For the Riyadh gig he would take a day off from the local job, and fly over on a Thursday evening, and return on Saturday.
He was making LOADS of $, and when the locals pushed for 3 days, he just quit and kept the Saudi gig, as he wasn't able to be seen with two laptops in the office.
If you know how to do your job well and fast you can pull it through with 10h per day (combined work).
So, when the employers insist on getting people back in the office 2-3-4 days a week, I think they are on to something. I do not imply that 99% of people do this, but some/many do.
I was working remotely before the pandemic and will continue to work remotely in the future. It's great that we have more opportunities now than before, but they always existed. So what the "mainstream" or "big tech" world does in current year is their own business. I won't judge anyone who works for them, we all have our reasons for making the choices we do, but I don't think it makes tons of sense to ascribe too much weight to what the largest tech companies do. They might represent a significant portion of the market but it's a big world and there's tons of smaller companies out there doing much "better" things in much "better" ways.
My philosophy is that I'm going to live the life I want to and not worry about what companies I don't like do. I don't work for them and, with the exception of Amazon, I don't use what that they produce either.
My first was Canonical. Since then I worked at a startup and when they went office first, I left even though I had not fully vested. I choose life over career and its a tough choice at times but I’m happy with it :)
I personally loved working for Google. Low workload, great work-life balance, amazing perks, mind blowing salary, potential to do really cool stuff that hundreds of millions will use, doing really cutting edge things that almost noone else can do, ridiculously good internal infrastructure and tooling so I can focus just on my tasks, kind and friendly colleagues, nice offices. Everything about my day job and things I worked on (at Google Research) was great.
I disapprove of many other things company does, but they were completely separate from my work.
I have many friends at Meta, company I disapprove way more - but their sentiment is exactly the same.
But from what I hear, it really depends where in google you work. I hear juniors/new grads are worked to the bone
And about the cognitive dissonance - but to me, personally, it's not like there is one Google, but it's many companies with completely separate goals and ways of acting. And it's not just a metaphor; different orgs really do operate on sometimes opposing goals (like Android vs Pixel vs Research - I was in the middle of that, but won't elaborate publicly). I think long term it should be broken up by regulators, but that's a different and polarizing/political topic.
But back to my original point - a lot of people have amazing experiences there, so my question to the person posting it remains - how is everything about those jobs horrible? This brings me a huge cognitive dissonance, as it's so different from my and my colleagues experiences.
The workload is not too much, but there's a lot of ambiguity and very little hand holding. Even as a newer senior engineer, my work is hard. Not 50+ hours a week hard, but a somewhat stressful 45 hours a week.
But it's fun and interesting so I'm happy, plus the comp is extremely good (not quite Netflix or JS/TGS level, but pretty great).
I'd rather be a little stressed than a lot bored.
I know people who worked at Amazon and hated it. And facebook and loved it. Google people did the google world tour (transfer offices every 6-9 months and live everywhere in the world). Pretty great experiences at Dropbox.
The life-changing salary is also pretty great.
I also know people who got so bored at those jobs working on the same one tiny thing all day long.
So many varied experiences. To say they all suck would be quite disingenuous.
I would never work there, personally. I will (and have!) walk from any employer who regularly demands more than 40 hours a week out of me.
I'm happy to hear of a counter-example with respects to Google. Since I've tried to de-Google my life as close to 100% as possible (though I do watch YouTube and I own a Pixel so I can use GrapheneOS so there's that, sigh) I don't think I could bring myself to work for them on the sole basis that job satisfaction suffers when I don't like what I'm making. But that's separate from toxic company culture, which is what I hear from these places (but to be fair these companies have so many employees that individual experiences can't NOT vary).
1) These are colleagues I know and trust and have a lot to say about their time there. I wouldn't pay attention to them if we didn't have certain things in common, re: cultural expectations and opinions on what a good place to work for looks like, which increase their weight. It's not like I'm reading random Tweets or something (I don't have a Twatter account and wouldn't work there either).
2) I have worked with a lot of middle managers that came from FAANG. They have had this weird kink / fetish about FAANG companies and how projects and people should be managed, and they constantly talk about their time at those companies and how they are taking these processes and cultural opinions directly from that world. Many are some the worst people I have ever met and they are directly representing those companies. It might be a small sample-set, but if that is any indication of the types managers that work at those places then it's enough for me to not be willing to take the risk.
3) Facebook gave us React and GraphQL, Microsoft gave us Windows & Telemetry, Google gave us a world of tech surveillance and Apple gave us... well... every Apple product ever. Those companies can't NOT be toxic based on their products. It might not be fair to single them out since they're not the only companies to produce evil but I can infer what goes on in those corporate offices after 30 years in this industry, and seeing how people from that world operate. That was implied in my initial comment. You don't have to agree with me about how evil they are, it's not a crime to have wrong opinions :P
eh, this hasn't been my experience working for pre-seed, series A, F50, and FAANG companies.
In my experience, small companies often let product or MBA folks dictate a lot of what happens, and generally engineering is looked down on as worker bees. At FAANG, this isn't the case. ICs have the same level or respect and authority as managers and individual engineer opinion is taken seriously.
Because there's so much infra in big tech, you can spend an entire career barely interacting with MBA/PMs/process people.
like what, adding more ads in the already ad-covered search page? It doesn't need tens of thousands of engineers for that and it is not rocket science. It is gone the time that working at google and being a worker at google means something amazing. Lots of normal low achieving people at big tech nowadays which the only achievement is getting to Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Uber/whatever and then benefiting from it.
But being one of those ants doing the work? Nah, not impressed.
They're still market movers: if they dump a lot of talent, that will affect wages, and the people who work at those companies learn habits that they bring to other companies. I don't particularly "like" them, but I'm very concerned that they slowly fizzle out rather than make sudden moves.
And, for clarity, compensation isn't just the money — which they generally do max out — but it's also all the intangibles. It's the free gyms and laundry services, the vast campuses with endless free restaurants and kitchens, and, yes, the formerly-free-wheeling remote-work policies and location strategies.
Once these firms start slashing comp [1] and their stock prices are unaffected (or even boosted), it "inspires" everyone else to start looking around and seeing how they can pay their own engineers less.
Today, it may just be FAANG that's slashing remote perks — tomorrow, all the other companies will follow, and maybe they'll be "inspired" to "adjust" their health insurance benefits at the same time, too.
[1]: It is also a fascinating coincidence to me that all these firms declared RTO around the same time.
If they do it, it means the market doesn't value software engineers as much anymore so what could you do? That isn't what is going to happen though. But all of those big techs can become next IBMs, HPs, Yahoos.
I've been remote since 2015 and, arguably, it's made it harder. Before COVID it was mostly a niche thing, but now the cat is out of the bag and I'm competing with a lot more.
The RTO backlash is also in force, so the big F500 companies I used to snipe roles from are now fully owned by corporate overlords.
I'm not aware of any of them continuing to support remote other than for select roles in the internal or external messaging.
Small/middle-sized companies will fight for those talents in the market and offer the remote work flexibility they want.
But I doubt those big employers that pay top salary will continue to have remote workers at all.
The top Big Tech companies are clear monopolies in a way or another and need to continuously find new markets to not be dependant only on their monopolies, because they know it's just time until regulators just jump in and tear apart their dirty money making machines.
In order to do that, they'd rather have people working in a office in the hopes of them being more commited to support them on that goal.
And at least in the company my brother works (a big tech co but not FAANG) almost 20% of the staff resigned when it was made mandatory for employees to come to office. So I think that is gonna be a huge factor for a lot of these companies.
However, being laid off is just a completely different matter. Depending on the company, the motivation for the layoff could significantly differ. Some did it to save costs, others have quotas to meet, etc. But I believe it is fair to say there is no observable correlation between remote work and chances of being laid off.
Honestly, I think people didn't realize just how much they slacked off while in the office. It was just a lot less fun and a lot less free.
Over a long period, I can sustain about 3-5 hours of truly hard productive work per workday. I can grind out an all-nighter once in a while; I can do an isolated back-to-back 10-12 hour day, but I can't sustain 8 hours of actual, hard nose-to-grindstone work per day on average (and I'm not ashamed to admit it).
In the office, this looked like dicking off with co-workers. At home, it looks like throwing in a load of laundry or taking the dog for a 20 minute walk. Those "feel" much better (because they are) and that feeling better I think people report as a form of guilt that they're slacking off more.
Talking to your co-worker about the TV show you both follow or the local sports team is every bit as much slacking off; it just doesn't engender any feeling of guilt.
I dont see how one anonymous poll at a FAANG company proves that. Just because you are doing busywork doesn't mean it's efficient. FWIW I agree with your other points.
For me:
When I was in the office I would be fairly regularly distracted by coworkers (which does have some advantages but is a loss when its every day) which causes me to loose my focus. Now I am "distracted" by my cat wanting on my lap which doesn't cause me to loose focus (if anything that keeps me in my chair for longer).
I would need a break from something and browse news and the internet A LOT in the office. I needed that mental break.
I would often try to force myself to not take a break for appearances causing the actual work output over the same period of time to go down.
I feel more comfortable in my home environment since it is decorated how I want so I am less stressed.
Finally the biggest one? I work more hours now than I did before. I am no longer commuting so I don't feel stressed if I need to finish something before going offline. Or if I am doing something that only needs half my focus I may work on it at night while doing something else (like maybe the final rounds of finishing a script that has a fair amount of downtime while it runs each time). Or if I just turn on my computer a bit earlier in the morning and do a quick something and then get back to my coffee, breakfast, whatever.
I love working remote for the same reasons you do. Doesn't mean I think it's good for the company though.
Slacking off but then returning to focused, deep work, without distraction can absolutely be more productive than working consistently in a distracting environment. I've even found that "slacking off" is embraced by companies who have worked remotely. In one prior gig, letting the team know, "Hey, I'm going skiing for a couple hours and will be online this evening" was not at all an unusual message to see. People work when they are going to be productive and "slack" when they wouldn't be productive anyway. Remote work means you can optimize for your personal productive times... and still slack off more. Best of both worlds.
This is applicable to all jobs in all industries, full-time or remote -- produce, and make your employer feel good about you being there, and sometimes even that's not enough to avoid the chopping block... but you know what? That's just showbiz, baby.
Meanwhile, to me (guy from Midwest), the maneuvering and relationship management is second nature. Exhausting at times, yes, irrational, always, but in most cases people just want to get things done, and IMO simply being patient, present and available to reduce friction for all involved goes a long way towards success in your chosen field.
right now there is a big logistics problem with bringing teams back to the office. Office campuses were never designed for 100% occupancy, some percentage of teams are going to be on vacation, traveling, sick, or WFH.
Managers know this and they're leveraging it against their bosses as an explanation for why they can't force their teams back in the office- there's not enough space!
So the property management folks are getting squeezed to figure out how to fit 1000 people in an 800 person building, even though they'll realistically never see more than 500 at once.
so no, remote work os definitely here stay
https://collabfund.com/blog/the-seduction-of-pessimism/
I do think the data shows that people are happier and more productive when they can work remotely. It means less time commuting, less distractions, and reduced cost having to pay for buildings that remain empty at night. It seems like the benefits are numerous but I get why the arrangement doesn't work for every company.
I work for a large corp who's CTO is fully remote. As an engineer, that gives me confidence, & the fact a decent % of other CxOs, VPs, &c. are too just bolsters that.
A sibling commenter - @keikobadthebad - described it well: if decision-makers are meeting all in-office folk in person, you'll be naturally excluded from the important conversations. In contrast, if decision-makers are fully remote, those important conversations are more likely to be a level playing field.
At some point, workers will feel the pressure as remote offers become scarce. This will affect everyone. Even the best have bills to pay.
Then when ~50% of workforce comes back to office, the remote ones will loose a lot of influence on the market. Is possible that we'll see a wave of layoffs on that moment.
I have no odds to bet. But maybe is time to think about were we want to live in the next 5 years.