I think of the word in the context of the attempt, rather than the outcome. We agree on the situation, but I do think folks are “falling for it” as they are the storyline of job scarcity (also pure BS as we sit, though it may become true).
yep. A few of us meet once a week in a shared office, and those who can't always attend are somehow ridiculed by one of the founders. I think this is idiotic, why hire people from hundreds of kilometers away then?
I think you’re both right, they’re attempting to gaslight people but everyone actually on the ground knows the truth. They’re saving time and money while accomplishing all the same goals.
All the commercial real estate “gurus” are looking quite foolish now with all the assets they can’t unload or refinance. If someone tells you the party is going to last forever, they’re a fool. Look at Airbnb “gurus” too, they priced themselves out. It’s cheaper to stay at a hotel now.
The economics are undeniable. I also think it means wages will not grow meaningfully for knowledge workers in urban locales, so you almost have no choice but to go remote and move to a LCOL area to increase your real income.
Fair. But in the context of remote tech work, SFBA salaries & costs of living is usually what’s being compared to, and you can get all that stuff in places that are not rural at all (such as the cities I mentioned) at a way lower cost of living.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, this is true.
However, as a suburbanite, I have no problem “commuting” to entertainment in the city once every weekend, when previously I had to commute 5 times a week for work. And when I go to the city, it’s a day full of fun/activities because I know I’m not coming back for a week. You can get the best of both worlds that way.
The suburbs aren’t necessarily a low cost of living area, especially suburbs of SF, NY, Seattle, etc. The LCOL areas would be more rural or non-coastal states in general.
depend on your social circle. I can barely get my local pals together for lunch once a week. no chance I can arrange a getaway downtown without planning weeks in advance.
They seem to be just as important when you‘re not single, maybe even more. Also the type of entertainment may change, but I think people like this at all ages.
Everyone likes those things but if the way to get it is to live in a shoebox or send your kids to bad schools to accomplish it the price doesn’t seem as worth it. Yuppies getting married and moving to the suburbs to raise kids a pretty common eventuality.
I think it’ll eventually lead to them being paid more, because now you can job search without as much risk to your current employment. Once we hit equilibrium again and demand outpaces availability then they’ll be forced to pay competitive wages or deal with attrition.
Everything is supply and demand. Now workers are orders of magnitude more sourceable and fungible, meaning the supply went way up.
Wages will stop going up and even start to slide backwards for new hires. I've already seen it. I was making just over $400k at my last job, and new positions at the same level aren't listed over $200k total comp.
And if hypothetically AI brings down demand in the future (big if), then the wage curve is under even further pressure.
You’re not wrong, but I’m not talking about the highest end of the spectrum. I’m saying that as a whole I believe the employees will benefit. There are many that are underpaid right now because of wages scaled to the employees location. California and New York workers will lose out, I think the rest of us will see an increase when this normalization occurs.
Companies already tried offshoring several years ago. It was a disaster for any core competencies, and companies already make extensive use of offshoring (and near shoring). This isn’t going to happen suddenly.
Several years ago, we didn't have remote working tools neither we had remote working cultural norms. All of those were forcibly established during the pandemic. So now is a different time for offshoring. I am seeing a lot of companies having headcount outside the US these days. If remote work works, then why even bother paying someone in the US?
No doubt. But at least bow people can drop the “working hard act”. We all know how little you guys work.
Previously people would take new tasks on weekly basis, now every single task takes the whole sprint.
And no, there is nothing that can be done since labor laws haven’t been updated and most likely won’t be before we hit AGI. I just wish I could coast like my colleagues or had the balls to start another job on the side
I’m good at asserting myself at work. I’m no workaholic and no company man. But I like to get a lot done and move quickly. Like how some people actually enjoy running. So I went to a seed stage startup.
I wouldn’t call myself a workaholic either. I do my 38 hours and be done, but often it feels like there is couple people who do all of the work and then bunch of free loaders who struggle with any task for weeks just because they know they can get away with it
You shouldn’t envy people who are slacking. If it’s causing you trouble then it sounds like a management issue. Or maybe you just want to slack off, in which case you should.
I really got this sense at my last job. Folks became emboldened to do way less work. Or take on busy work and proclaim it as important.
Previously you'd see lots of people hanging around at the office at 8 and 9 PM still working, often even white boarding solutions and having meetings. In WFH, you'd never see folks online and responses would take time. Sprint productivity definitely dropped.
I think WFH == work 20 hours or less for a whole lot of people. We had hundreds of people tenured 6 - 10 years at the place, and they immediately started dropping and finding other work.
I'm now at a startup and we're working nights and weekends. It's a much better environment.
WFH is going to calcify and sink a lot of companies.
Since I am European we don’t have that kind of work culture. No one did overtime unless they wanted to take some extra time off. But effectively yes it feels like most people are doing around 4 hours of work per day.
In the beginning it was funny to see people literally playing WoW in the middle of the day
It’s good that people are emboldened to work less hours, so that those of us working normal hours don’t feel the need or pressure to work nights and weekends
I was making over $400k doing critical five nines engineering on billion dollar payment flows. We had excellent engineering culture and the stock was going up too, so all told I was fine with it.
I'd understand if it was doing plumbing at a departmental business cost center, though.
The issue is the amount of money spent on commercial restate leases and maintaining space is quite high.
Once upon a time people thought “hey if we could let people use their phones instead of a corporate blackberry we could save like $5mm a year!” BYOD was born.
Now, as passions cool and leases come up for renewal, they’ll look quite hard at the hundred million spent on real estate per year. Most companies compute a per head occupancy cost. I know for banks on walls street it was $30,000/person/year before 2020. With hybrid that’s becoming nearly $60,000/person/year because the people only occupy the seat half the time.
Thats eye watering numbers. It’s going to be increasingly hard to justify without concrete returns on investment. “I prefer,” “serendipity,” “corporate values,” “think of the children’s careers,” etc only have weight for so long. Right now there are enterprising finance directors preparing slides to help secure their next promotion proposing eliminating most office space once tax agreements and leases expire. Boards will see a nice uptick in EPS as the conclusion of that deck, and when the almost retired CEO starts lamenting the loss of the way they grew up, they’ll buy them a horse and buggy whip and shut down the office.
This will pale compared to the wage savings they’ll reap when they level the wage distribution nationally. There’s no reason to pay inflated rates for Bay Area or New York City employees, beyond the very few that are genuinely differentiated.
It has nothing to do with preference at the end of the day. And there will likely be some much smaller offices for people who really insist on working in an office. But for most people it’ll just be a thing of the past
The looming commercial real estate economic catastrophe aside, everyone who fought to keep work remote fought for the opportunity to compete directly in a global wage market.
BuzzFeed-journalists enjoy sniping middle managers-as-petty-autocrats from the peanut gallery in a "fight the power!" attitude using gender-war headline bait, but I expect zoomer MBAs still living in their grandparents basements into their 40s, overseeing the cheapest possible globally remote gen alpha ICs and AIs, are going to do just fine.
Property taxes will have to skyrocket to compensate for the lost tax revenue in many cities. Whether we like to admit it or not, the infrastructure costs are a shared cost and if we lose a lot of commercial tax revenue that was indirectly gathered from residents, it will have to be gathered directly from residents.
Increased property taxes will push people on the margins out and compound the issue while also decreasing real-estate value.
You’re trying to scare people into thinking another real estate crisis on the scale of 2008/2009 is looming. Stop. The commercial real estate market is a fraction of the residential real estate market.
Further, actual local businesses in communities are benefiting from WFH workers.
I didn’t say that. I don’t see how businesses in these commercial areas do not suffer, and I don’t see how that does not translate into job losses, and I don’t see how this combination does not result in lost tax revenue.
WFH likely means people spend less on gas and eating out. This is one of the benefits touted by WFH proponents, myself included. I am spending at least $300 less a month since WFH.
Yes I’m certain some tax revenue shifted to the city I live in, but it definitely shifted away from the city my office was in.
This is the sentiment I hear from my circles. While remote work is great for finding top talent and all (productivity arguments aside). The commercial real estate market is essentially Wile-E-Coyote running in air after running off the cliff.
Converting modern office buildings to residential can be difficult because commercial buildings often have more interior (windowless) space and we insist (often by law) that bedrooms have windows. Sometimes it can be done, depending on the building’s shape, but “wasted” interior space can be a big financial loss, which is essentially about acknowledging that the building isn’t as useful as people expected. (Though I’m sure some use could be found for the space.)
Charles Munger tried to do it differently with beds on the inside, but this is unpopular [1].
One reason that companies go for an open design is to get more natural light into the interior, which makes for a good first impression, but has other downsides like noise. (Sometimes homes don’t have enough rooms with doors either.)
Not only commerical real estate but the adjacent businesses that depended upon that traffic, and the shortfall in tax revenue cities / counties were getting from that activity.
Oh well. It's not like you have the right to recoup or profit from buying a house. You paid what it was worth to live there at the time. It's a place to live, not a stock.
Employee productivity is at an all time low. Low performers are being laid off left and right (see: Google, Discord, Etsy, Salesforce, ...). Tell me again how remote work is "winning"?
Did you really prescribe to the narrative that these companies that doubled, tripled, or more in size over the pandemic are laying off people because "no one wwants to work anymore?"
That website shows that it's easier to find a company that did NOT layoff in the last 12 months. Seeing all these company statements on "focusing on core products" as justification as they cancel products and entire product lines suggests fear in the market instead of complaints about their labor.
Listened to an episode of the “The Daily” podcast on what they called hybrid malaise about 15 min ago. It was so obviously biased toward RTO I was yelling at the radio and my wife had to tell me to calm down. Gaslighting was exactly what they were doing with things like “you’re not going to get promoted unless you go back to the office” and “when looking for workers to layoff the ones remote are the first to go “ etc. really pissed me off because some people will take the podcasters seriously and not see the manipulative motive behind them.
(1) RTO can be used as an excuse to fire employees, especially the older, higher paid ones who moved away from city centres or are reluctant to move back.
(2) People have investments in commercial real-estate, and forcing RTO is a way to profit from those investments even if it immiserates the workers (article discusses this point).
(3) Cities offer tax breaks to encourage businesses to move, on the basis that the workers will use ancillary services (transport, restaurants, shopping, etc). If the tax breaks go that will negatively affect the companies. If the ancillary service businesses go that will negatively affect the city's revenues.
(4) Bad middle managers feel they lack control if a worker isn't present.
Reading about this subject on this site feels like having fallen into the twilight zone.
No one I know working outside of tech is even close to this in their attitudes towards remote work. Nowhere else is anyone who disagrees "gaslighting". Nowhere else is this all a "plot by commercial real estate".
Most want the flexibility to work remotely when they need to (or a few days a week), but prefer working alongside their coworkers for a variety of reasons. The complaints about entire divisions or floors being ghost towns and it being impossible to find the person for help with something are perennial.
I know there's some selection bias in who comments on the topic, but I think there's more to it: most people here work in a context where they take a ticket, work on it, etc with ideally minimal synchronization points or meetings. Of all forms of work it's among the most well suited (there are others) to working remotely.
Not to mention the absolutely horrific Bay Area commutes. I don't blame you all.
I mean, its not much different on general communities. It may be a bubble, but it's much larger than HN. May be one of the bigger generational divides.
if you grew up with the internet and are used to navigating it to fill technical, social, and personal gaps, you can see RTO as a waste of efficiency. Regardless of the industry. Meanwhile if you work with folk who struggle to plug something into a USB, you may be more inclined to simply be there in person, for multiple reasons. But of course, any online discussion will be full of somewhat tech saavy users, at the very least ones comfortable enough to browse and post on social media.
My biggest problem with the RTO argument is that it's not quantitative. Give me the numbers not the feels.
If you are a massive company, by allowing full remote you could be saving hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate, office upkeep, electricity, etc. You can recruit employees from all over the country so your access to talent is superior and you can afford to pay talent less.
These benefits are easy to analyze, it's just a massive amount of money and time being saved.
Now to go to the less tangible benefits that don't necessarily positively impact the business itself, employees can live in cheaper cost of living areas and actually have the ability to one day own property. Massive reductions in carbon emissions because of 0 commute. Massive time savings for employees because of 0 commute that they can then use to spend more time with family or friends, exercise, or sleep more (all of which could lead to healthier employees). Oh, and they will actually be able to live close to family since they will not need to move to a different state / city. There will be much more efficient use of space, office space is basically redundant when employees can work from home. This freed up space could be used for housing which we desperately need. I'm sure I could come up with a million more benefits of wfh.
To advocate for return to office you need to make all these logical leaps that somehow being together in person will result in us making more money than what we save from being remote and is better for employees somehow.
The number of companies with a large holding or commercial real estate is staggering. Entire buildings were built as investments for companies who are not in the real estate/development business.
Notice how many jobs in Texas are on-site only? Texas is aggressively enforcing the tax deals they had with companies to have XX% of their workforce on site, spending money locally to keep the tax benefit.
> My biggest problem with the RTO argument is that it's not quantitative.
I have never seen any reasonable examples of what could be "quantified" here though. To be clear, leaders at big tech companies are not so worried about "number of tickets closed in office vs. remote" or some such related easily quantifiable metric. And the jobs that are easily quantifiable are the ones that leaders are least worried about doing remotely (both up and down the spectrum, from call center workers who can be measured on number of calls, to diagnostic radiologists who can be measured in RVUs).
Corporate leaders, especially in tech, are largely worried about a slow deterioration/decline in innovation, general employee dedication (i.e. employees feeling less connected to their job), and overall quality. Those things are extremely difficult if not impossible to measure, especially since they can take years to pan out. I'm certainly open to hearing counterpoints, but I haven't heard any yet that sound believable to me.
"I have a worry about X that I can't justify in any way" isn't a good basis for forcing people into a decision that (as the GP mentions) has dozens of obvious, immediate, and measurable benefits in the other direction. The simplest explanation for why "leaders" are fighting for RTO is not that office work was, improbably, a perfect global maximum for productivity, innovation, esprit de corps, or whatever, but merely that office work is how things used to be done and a lot of people got used to it both organizationally and economically. From that perspective, I think the burden of proof is completely on those who are fighting for a return to status quo to argue why workers (and society at large!) should be willing to trade all of the obvious benefits of remote work for these supposed intangibles.
He's not saying it can't be justified; he's saying it can't be measured. Big difference.
Anyway I think you're both wrong about this. The reason for RTO is two-fold:
* Working in an office is much better for higher ups because their job is much more talking to people than doing "actual work". If you're spending literally all day in meetings it is worth the commute to avoid Zoom. If you're only spending 1-2 hours in meetings it definitely isn't.
* They have a fear that people will do no work if they're at home. Honestly I think it's completely unfounded, and it's just as easy to do no work at work. But it's a real fear.
Actually I think hn_throway_99 has a point about them being worried about disinvestment too.
But it's mostly the fact that WFH is way worse for management than it is for the bottom rung.
I think that's an oversimplification of the argument being made.
For people early in their careers, face time on site can be invaluable. They get to learn from people who get things done, and emulate them (or not). On-site, they learn from both positive and negative examples. This is simply less effective through meetings only.
The counterpoint also ignores human behavior. The person getting promoted is likely to be the person who shows up every day and visibly contributes when compared head-to-head against an equivalently performing employee WFH. First time people managers will likely be expected to manage people where their boss can keep an eye on them before entrusting them with remote teams. This could create a career choke point.
the advantages you mention are real, but WFH is poor career advice unless you can compete on price with low-cost foreign workers who are just as remote as the person I am paying a US salary to
> leaders at big tech companies are not so worried about "number of tickets closed ... or some such related easily quantifiable metric ... Corporate leaders, especially in tech, are largely worried about a slow deterioration/decline in innovation, general employee dedication
So, why is there so much (corporate anti-)Scrum everywhere?
I mean, most employees hate it with a passion, and the typical excuse is that it makes velocity more predictable, even if slower. Now you are telling me that the corporate leaders in tech do not care about quantifiable things, and are worried about innovation and employees. How can both of this be true at the same time?
I guess I will stay with my null hypothesis that most corporate leaders have no idea what they are doing, and just randomly do whatever feels right at the moment.
They may all be under one company, but I think we all know different teams even within the same org can have very different cultures. I think that's the issue.
Some cutting edge R&D team may have legitmately worries about innovation. the team maintaining decade old legacy code, less so. But for several reasons these kinds of mandates need to be company wide, not just opt in/out per team (though yes, there will be exceptions for the exceptional, as always).
So I can see both yours and the GP's idea both being correct, to some degree.
you arent being gaslit, but you also take the time to understand the rules of the game you were trying to "win."
there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024. its so monumentally important the president of the united states even threw his weight behind it in symbolic gesture (arguably because he and his friends have investment portfolios they dont want to see take a haircut in a recession)
https://www.hrdive.com/news/mandatory-return-to-office-400k-...
remote work means the death of major cities and a cascade failure of major economic sectors that are barely back after covid as it is. once office space cant be leased the property holders will declare bankruptcy. states then get hit with budget shortfalls as tax revenue is lost, small businesses and service industries in the cities fall apart and the unemployment rate rises, urban blight sets in and an entire legion of major real estate spends 20 years moribund and zombified, with bankrupt property holdings and trusts owning most of the decayed ruins as crime rises. Think cabrini green and watts during the mid eighties. All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare.
make no mistake, your relative comfort will be exchanged for the status quo, its just a matter of when not if. the president even earmarked 10bn dollars as a sign of goodwill to the landed gentry in order to "remodel" downtown high rises from commercial to residential, although anyone with even a cursory understanding of how real estate and development works (including the biden administration) understands this will almost certainly be pocketed to pay near-term creditors and stave off immediate foreclosures of properties instead.
to prevent something like this you'd have to have an administration that could act against its vested interests as a ruling class in order to secure a more verdant employment for you (and you probably wont find that in the gerontocracy.) the current fight isnt remote-vs-office, its a fight to get a handful of major companies still "hybrid" and "remote" to toe the line. Whether this happens in time to avert a real estate crisis is yet to be seen, but it hasnt made much headway in 2023, so theres not a lot of incentive to think 2024 will differ.
> there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024
Total BS.
Total.bs.
Forcing people back to the office won’t make bad investments good. The bank bailouts of 2008/9 are still fresh enough wounds that another one is not on the table. Inflation finally going down also underlines that point. No money printing is on the table either.
The bubble will pop and the investors will lose their money and the stone will continue to roll.
> All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare.
This seems a little hysterical. Cities functioned extremely well, perhaps even better, before the advent of lengthy car commutes, office work, and mass commercial real estate. The businesses you mention - grocery stores - aren't even usually patronized by commuters, and their recent appearance in city centers has been precipitated by downtowns shifting from commercial-only blight to round-the-clock mixed use, something that will only accelerate as downtowns are liberated from massive buildings that sit empty 2/3 of the day, small businesses that have to shut down at 6pm and all weekend, and peaky congestion that requires all facilities to overinvest in capacity to handle a couple of hours on weekdays with much lower usage otherwise. Anyone who has walked around the ghost town of SF's financial district on a Sunday should know CRE is not conducive to vibrant city life.
I really hope people let what happened in the last few years sink in.
We had a global pandemic. Government spending had a massive impact on eviscerating poverty, raising some 11.2 million Americans out of poverty [1]. To keep companies afloat and to avoid the healthcare system collapsing, people stayed indoors and worked from home. Many took pay cuts or loss of benefits to do this. A lot of people realized they didn't need to go into the office at all and they could have a substantial improvement in the quality of life by not wasting hours a day in a car and/or moving somewhere more affordable.
Demand did drop in 2020/2021 but it came roaring back and companies saw an ppportunity to recoup lost profits with predatory price incresaes. They saw massive profits and inflation shot through the roof as a result [2].
To compare to the oil shock of the 1970s, Nixon instituted price and wage freezes to stave off shock inflation [3].
The Fed responded to inflation by raising interest rates. They government had a far more effective tool available: corporate taxation. Some countries like Spain instituted a windfall profits tax. Taxes fill government coffers. Interest rates enrich bankers.
Certain workers gained wage increases in the pandemic as they were essential. Inflation eroded much of this and employers took further opportunity to suppress or claw back wage incresaes through layoffs. Layoffs increase the workload of those workers who remain and reduce the ability for workers to demand wage increses, even cost-of-living adjustments.
Return to office mandates are soft layoffs. They're cheaper too since if people quit they don't get a severance payout.
The only effective wage increases gained during the pandemic were through labor organization, such as with the UAW and the Big Three automakers.
So here are the lessons to draw:
1. Government policy exists almost entirely to transfer wealth from the poor to the already wealthy;
2. Employers are not your friends. You owe them absolutely no loyalty. In fact, given the trend to rescinding job offers, I would strongly advise people not to quit their job before starting their new one. Just don't show up. Two weeks notice is a courtesy not a legal or even contractual requirement. "At will" employment goes both ways.
3. Government spending is a way to redistribute wealth from the ultra-wealthy to the poor and it is incredibly effective. Post-GFC we've had many countries operate with austerity measures. This is simply propaganda to stop this wealth transfer.
4. Greed is the primary driver in inflation. Taxation would at least allow the government to help those worst affected;
5. Companies use layoffs and return to office mandates to suppress your wages; and
6. The only effective counter to wage suppression is labor organization ie unions.
>The only effective counter to wage suppression is labor organization ie unions.
I don't think even unions can fight against th above 5 points you made. Unions are collective bargaining, and you just showed that the government and the ultra-wealthy hold all the chips. We saw this happen as is with nurses and the train industries in the past year.
Short of a country-wide walkout no union can properly fight the government. And the working class US is divided enough as is.
Did worker bees escape from the corporation's office-based system of control, or did they just bring the corporation into their home?
> "First, a little background. Monitoring software programs entered the workplace a decade or so ago and initially were popular in call centers and warehouses. Fast forward to 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the monitoring industry exploded as employers in nearly every sector saw an urgent need to monitor employees who were suddenly working from home."
Saving time and energy on commuting is an undeniably positive benefit, but IMO the optimal remote-work situation is in a separate space from one's home, ideally a walkable local office space with its own dedicated network and power.
I've grown pretty tired of these kinds of missives that are so one-sided that they don't even attempt to do an honest "pros/cons" look at widespread remote work. For me, I certainly agree with all of his noted pros: less time wasted in traffic, more flexibility especially for working parents, and even some things he didn't mention, like fewer distractions when you need "heads down" time. Even before the pandemic I always preferred working from home when I knew I just needed a long stretch of coding time, and things like huge open-plan offices terrified me. I also agree that RTO plans are largely useless; you often just get the "people come in and then just spend half their time on Zoom because some colleagues are still remote" dynamic.
But I do worry about the long-term effects of so much remote work, primarily:
1. When I was new in my career, I learned a ton just "through osmosis" by being around more experienced colleagues. I also built good relationship and friendships early in my work career (to be honest, I always felt kind of sad for people who took the "colleagues aren't your friends" mindset. Perhaps not all of them, but why not make friends with people you spend a lot of time with?) I certainly understand married people with kids and with well-developed friend groups being much more happier with remote work, but I think it's much harder to develop those relationships in the first place if you start out remote from the get go.
2. I really worry about overall isolation, and also an increase in polarization. We used to talk about the loss of "third spaces" when countries became much less religious, and now we're seeing the loss of that "second space" (the office) as well. I go into the office multiple times a week just because I get stir crazy staying in my house all the time. The average number of people I have contact with in any week is way, way down, and that doesn't help my tendency toward depression.
In other words, yes, I agree that remote work has won, but given that, I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives.
Totally agree that these are issues worth thinking about and mitigating.
One thing I’ve started doing at work is documenting workflows in various ways: not just docs but talks and screencasts where a new engineer could see my workflow. (I also give new engineers advice to keep a digital notebook! I still learn tons by doing this.)
For the isolation bit I just wonder what we will see replacing that. It’s possible we never see anything and everyone just deals with it but I hope shared office spaces or something similar picks up. I get plenty of socialization elsewhere but little breaks in the workday to not focus on productivity and just chitchat were nice and maybe important some days.
Point (1) is a function of the team's culture around new hires and working relationships generally. Occupying the same building, the same floor, or even the same room as a coworker is simply not equivalent to having a beneficial work culture.
You can neglect new hires just as effectively in an office, and you can support new hires just as effectively over Teams.
I 100% agree that in office doesn't make up for a bad work culture. But I don't think that negates that being in-office with a good work culture can have significant benefits over being remote with a good work culture.
Also, my issue isn't just with "new hires", it's with new inexperienced hires. I started my career in a company that had a "boot camp"-like training environment for new grads, and I found it hugely, hugely beneficial for both learning new things and for developing strong relationships that have lasted 25 years later. I disagree that kind of experience can be replicated over Teams, though I fully acknowledge that kind of experience is rare to begin with.
There’s over $120B in enterprise value of remote first enterprises. Feelings are fine, the data shows the model is effective. You can hire the best talent anywhere, talent that has options. That is a material competitive edge vs hiring a cohort that is willing to tolerate a non remote operating model.
My hot take: Don’t hire helpless people, and the people you do hire, make sure they are fully supported to know what they need to do their job (internal mentor/buddy, knowledge base, frequent check ins until they’re more autonomous, etc). In person onboarding can help, as can week long in person on sites every quarter or twice a year (team cohesion).
> There’s over $120B in enterprise value of remote first enterprises.
1. Where is this number from?
2. In the grand scheme of things that is a teeny number. Not really surprised given as remote work is relatively new, but that number in and of itself is not really evidence for remote work's advantages over in person.
My Excel model. As someone passionate about the concept of remote work, and having a material component of my net worth invested in remote orgs, it is top of mind (and important to bring evidence for people's feels about the topic of remote vs office). I should probably just publish it as an Airtable.
> 2. In the grand scheme of things that is a teeny number. Not really surprised given as remote work is relatively new, but that number in and of itself is not really evidence for remote work's advantages over in person.
I value more ability to socialize and have fun with coworkers physically, than maybe more money in high value enterprise where I would work from my room and be alone most of the day.
> You can neglect new hires just as effectively in an office, and you can support new hires just as effectively over Teams.
My experience is that some people are just much less likely to ask questions over Slack or start a Zoom call, which hurts them.
My productivity is higher if I don't have people asking me stuff, but if those questions just never get asked it's bad for new hires' growth.
There might be ways to fix this but I don't know what they are. Just telling people "feel free to ask questions whenever" doesn't always work. Having regular meetings just results in people withholding questions until those meetings.
I don't think it's possible to lower the bar for questions to the same level as just opening your mouth and speaking, maybe with a constant Zoom call but no-one wants to do that.
If the organization has a widespread issue where employees hesitate to ask questions via impromptu Slack messages or phone calls, then managers need more training on establishing an effective organizational culture.
Here is a guide from Forbes that could be considered.
The bar for delaying an ongoing project needs to be higher than just opening your mouth. Batching questions works well; not all of your tasks should be completely blocked. I like using a team Slack channel and seeing who happens to become available to respond, because other people also see the answer when they have time.
I dont think anyone is denying that remote can be great with the right culture. The claim is that building that culture is much more difficult when remote. Some companies just dont have the leadership needed to pull it off. Its not like the culture at those companies is great in office, but in my experience it is significantly better.
also, fairly unrelated to what you mentioned...
I hate the junior engineers "its so easy to ask a more experienced engineer a _quick_ question" comments..
If you're asking me a 'quick' question - google it dammit. Interrupting more senior engineers should be reserved for more 'difficult' problems - specialized domain knowledge you can't find anywhere else, etc.
If you're interrupting me for stuff you could find by browsing the repos, or googling - I'm gonna be annoyed. If its something more technical/nuanced and it takes me 10+ minutes to resolve, I'm going to be impressed.
Again, I realize you made no claims about this, but the conversation always seems to pop up in these WFH articles
The problem is "easy" is relative. "quick" for a senior =/= "quick" for a junior who may not even know what terms to google.
> specialized domain knowledge you can't find anywhere else, etc.
so most of the proprietary workplace tools, likely with shoddy or outdated documentation? Yeah, that sounds like a big issue that is definitely not the junior's fault.
I'm sorry, I don't find a junior not knowing what terms to google to be a compelling argument. Nor do I find "proprietary workplace tools" to be a compelling arguement. Either the on-boarding sucked, or they didn't pay attention to it, either way that "is definitely not the" seniors fault.
If you can't expend the basic effort, don't expect someone else to bail you out...
In that case I am glad you've only had properly functional workplaces with perfect on-boarding, documentation that properly explains all jargon and tribal knowledge, lack of legacy code with random landmines that would take weeks to understand from scratch, and no directors that will change the entire trajectory of a project on a whim. My reality is a lot more bleak.
That and/or you went straight into a truly elite workplace where a "junior" is still someone with years of experience in industry. It is hard to sympathize with truly green workers when you have none. And industry seems to be leaning towards that as of late.
>>If you can't expend the basic effort, don't expect someone else to bail you out...
Wow - you really went out of your way to ignore that basic statement I made (and I stand by). No one expects juniors to come in with perfect knowledge (wouldn't that make them a senior/god? :-P) but they do expect them to do the basics. Why does that seem to sound so unreasonable to you?
>>legacy code with random landmines that would take weeks to understand from scratch
I also specifically mentioned something like this would be something I don't expect juniors to know and would have no problems helping a junior dev. with (it takes more then 10 minutes to explain...) Also, if a junior dev is getting a project like that either the Team Lead or the 'resident expert' will probably go out of their way up front to point out the 'landmines'.
Seniors know the organizations don't have perfect training. We got bit by it when we were juniors, we saw what all the juniors before had problems with ... we understand that (and often try to help with some stuff when you walk in the door eg "oh - the company directory is out of date, here's a list of updated names and phone numbers for people" or "Neteng doesn't use jira anymore, they use XXX - ask Mr. Foo to give you access")
By the same token, seniors can tell when you haven't "expended the basic effort" on something and thats when it gets annoying. If the answer to something is "search your email for 'onboarding' - all your logins are in that", we're gonna wonder why you didn't read it to begin with.
P.S. if the situations you describe above are what you consider 'bleak', you're probably not gonna have much fun in tech as it sounds pretty average to me. Especially Directors/Mgmt changing project scopes/priorities/etc on a whim - that probably happens daily :-P (Also, it probably accounts for 50%+ of the issues with on-boarding docs and 'landmines')
I think ultimately the issue here is we won't ever come to an agreement of what is "basic effort." and this is why juniors can get mixed signals between "struggle for days on something that can be resolved with one quick question to slack". And "ask any question that comes to mind with zero thought".
I personally hit the former extreme a lot due to early careers outright refusing to give me help as some sort of "proving grounds" to show I can setup my own admin portal (I wasn't even in IT, I asked one and they were told by management not to help me), and that caused some extreme correction in later roles who encouraged me to simply ask. I see it a lot more often than a junior asking what what some language keyword is. So my advice will be biased toward encouraging juniors to "asked stupid questions". It just feels like bad faith (again based on my experiences) to assume juniors are stupid, lazy, and don't respect others' time.
>P.S. if the situations you describe above are what you consider 'bleak', you're probably not gonna have much fun in tech as it sounds pretty average to me.
Been in for a while, I'm just numb to it.
But just because I suffered doesn't mean I want everyone else coming in to go through the same things. The top comment here is talking about society becoming more and more isolated and this attitude of chastising newcomers for their lack of experience will just discourage them further from using their co-workers as a relationship to give and take from, instead of some cold evaluator to gain approval of.
At the end of the day a lot of work relationships isn't different from social relationships; co-workers remember how you made them feel, and not as much how many PRs you merge in. So even if you have some machine like efficiency you will simply be seen as an avatar on a chat screen if you don't make attempts to reach out. And being afraid of "stupid questions" will make you afraid of asking about anything else.
>> I think ultimately the issue here is we won't ever come to an agreement of what is "basic effort."
Yeah - probably just talking past each other... :-D
>> I personally hit the former extreme a lot due to early careers outright refusing to give me help...
Wow - sorry you had such a shitty introduction (see below)
>> But just because I suffered doesn't mean I want everyone else coming in to go through the same things
FWiW, I've never actually seen seniors want that either. Generally, when I've seen people 'setup to fail' - its been a management decision (didn't like your tie, had to reduce head count etc.). I bet the IT guys in your first gig WANTED to help, but as you said, they were told not to..
Seniors WANT juniors to succeed - if only for selfish reasons: if a junior 'fails' - the seniors will probably have to clean up the mess, but if a junior 'succeeds' it allows the work to be spread out across another person. Also, the juniors might have some ideas about smoothing out rough spots, improving on-boarding, etc. Bonus points if they can help clear the 'landmines' (I've actually seen juniors do that - fresh set of eyes and all that..) So naturally, you want juniors to succeed.
As you mentioned above, I think it probably just comes down to what is 'basic effort' and what does it mean to respect people's time. As you said "co-workers remember how you made them feel" - Juniors that make you feel like they don't respect your time definitely get remembered too.
P.S. - I _hate_ being the 'smartest guy in the room'...I love working places where there's lots of people to learn from and I definitely ask a lot of 'stupid questions'...But I do try to do initial research before asking.
Anyway, Glad that first gig didn't sour you on the whole career :-)
> I think it's much harder to develop those relationships in the first place if you start out remote from the get go.
There are many coworkers I met during Covid and have only known then remotely for years. I feel pretty close to them and know their kids, hobbies, etc.
In some cases I’ve gotten to meet them in person and it feels like I sat next to them for years.
In some ways it’s easier because I can have these virtual connections to more people, but in IRL I would only sit next to 1-3 people.
What I do miss is going to lunch every day. That was really nice. But at my current org, there’s no lunch culture so it was rare to eat lunch with people before remote work.
>In some ways it’s easier because I can have these virtual connections to more people, but in IRL I would only sit next to 1-3 people.
interesting, it's the opposite for me. I was in a small satellite office but I felt I got to know half of the 30 people in my area fairly quickly.
once the office shut down I never saw nor talked to most of those people. Just my immediate team of 3-5 people (2 of which came after the pandemic). The main upside was that I did talk more to people in the main office than I did before, but there was no chance of any get together when we're 500 miles apart.
I agree with missing lunch. That was definitely the best time to talk to people you'd never have a chance to otherwise.
In my company we solved this problems many years ago before the pandemic.
* As the project is quite large, every time a new person appears (no matter if junior or senior), for each sprint they get someone to show them around, answer their questions etc. That guardian angel changes each sprint - and it lasts several months.
* We have open channels for ad-hoc meetings and the culture encouraging joining them even if the topic discussed is not directly related to your current task. In other words, you can just listen to what other people are trying to solve when doing your task and are free to interrupt them if you feel interested in so on.
* Every 3 months we try to get together as much as possible for 2-3 days (it never happened 100% as we live on different continents, the rest joins from their local offices or homes) - and it feels great!
* My teammates are really cool and our bosses too, so we have the necessary space to communicate without worrying it will impact our performance.
And if someone really wants, they can always come to a local office - but most of the time they are empty as everybody loves WFH and NO WE ARE NEVER COMING BACK.
> why not make friends with people you spend a lot of time with?
All well and fine if you can, but you shouldn't be forced to. And it shouldn't be the only way to make friends. People with that mindset typically have other social groups.
> I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives
Agreed, and this is something we should've been doing starting decades ago (see: Bowling Alone). We already link health insurance to peoples jobs, it shouldn't be a persons entire social life.
>And it shouldn't be the only way to make friends.
I'm all ears on current ways to make friends as an adult, or at least ideas on where to go. Like the GP said, 3rd places are down and instead of talking about ways to build more 3rd places we're potentially seeing the collapse of 2nd places. And I don't think people are exactly comfortable going or inviting people into their 1st place as of now.
It's not a solution but it is the current best alternative that is currently falling by the wayside.
I think the negatives apply to new/inexperienced workers and it's unfortunate that it wasn't addressed in the article, but this affects the smaller population of the entire workforce and will be one of those things that will be improved on over time. I imagine there being new processes to get new workers on-boarded and adjusted to remote work and that could be having them temporarily in the office.
I also started my career in a cubicle farm with a lot of other software engineers which was great for my growth, but I think that could be replaced with adjustments to the process of ramping up juniors. Perhaps colleges or training programs will incorporate training to deal with the lack of seniors or assign juniors with seniors to work together in a mentorship with guidelines.
>but this affects the smaller population of the entire workforce and will be one of those things that will be improved on over time.
I'm not as optimistic. that class of 2020-2022 (high school and college) got socially stunted in a way that I feel will only break the physical divide further. Those kids in 20 years won't even see it as a problem that they never got a proper prom, a chance to walk the stage, a chance to properly onboard into their first step of their career and form connections that will help them grow. It'll just be a new normal, a colder normal facilitated by the false platitudes that is modern social media.
The only possibly good long term (20+ year) ramifications will be that a lot of old crusty government processes will definitely be streamlined through the net. Having platforms livestream electorial forums to a populace who treat the internet as a natural extension of their bodies will completely change the dynamics of how candidates argue and pander.
1) While I'm sure there's always going to be some imposter syndrome, I simply feel like I'm not growing the same in a post pandemic world. People in general are less connected and that osmosis from random lunch conversations or overhearing other engineer's problems may be a big part of how the pioneers of yester-decade could take command of a system or entire product and truly thrive. not only do I not get that knowledge, but I feel I get less opportunities to really show I can push to the next level. I'm not as trusted with unfamiliar areas because I'm less a face and more a name that pings for PRs. I can't branch out as much because it's even harder to converse with other teams, I find it harder to get promoted as it's hard to point to "significant impact" (which I never get a chance to) and if I go looking for jobs I get less impressive things to talk about that may help with a more senior role.
This may indeed be a young/old divide as someone who was surrounded by older folk with families who feel elated (and after consulting my own family with young kids, I start to get it). Whereas I always felt more ambivalent on the situation. It does feel great once you get to a point where you feel no need to grow, but I very much do.
2) isolation is also a huge problem as well, especially since I moved to a town where none of my college friends are. Now with remote work I have to physically force myself to get out for the sake of sanity. I live alone so I can legitimately go a week without seeing another physical face if I fell into my usual habits. to call it "loneliness" is an understatement, and it doesn't feel healthy at all.
And yet technology surrounding remote work has failed us, curious. Bad internet, bad software, bad hardware, the holy trinity of communication enshittification.
I can code anywhere and I can text anywhere just fine. 1:1 calls work more often than not. But boy do I abhor remote workshops. They suck in every way possible, and even in some previously thought impossible!
I'm sorry to hear you feel that way. I participated in many "offline" workshops and most of them were great. They allow for real debate by offering the full range of human communication.
I never once had the same experience in a remote or hybrid workshop.
Well if you were working in “endless cubicle farms” and “wasting your lives in traffic” then, yes, removing those two things from your life is a smart thing to do. Being socially isolated from the other members of your team and only having VC is, in my mind, just as poor of an alternative.
Imagine instead if you and (the majority of) your colleagues came to work by cycling for 20 minutes through green pastures, parks, under willow trees along the river, and through the centre of one of the most famous historic towns in England. That’s what we do here in Cambridge.
We also do not operate a cubicle farm. Our office is spacious, filled with breakout spaces, relaxation spots, a library (aka quiet room), VC equipped rooms of all sizes, with a mini- and a maxi-kitchen and free snacks and meals.
We come and go as we please with two days a week all together and frequently other in-office days for sub teams too, agreed by consensus not fiat. I often work at home in the morning or go home after lunch for the afternoon if I need uninterrupted focus / maker time. We have a personal IT budget for our home offices so I don’t need to cycle with my laptop (which btw is an Ubuntu Dell XPS, because our IT team know what they’re doing — you can have a MacBook if you insist.) Cambridge has gigabit fibre which is handy when pushing and pulling models from the A100 machines in our remote data centre.
We still allow people to be as remote as they want and we also have a satellite office in London. It is rare though for the core eng team to not see each other in person for more than five days on the trot. It’s just so much more productive to build and plan stuff in person around a whiteboard, with pair programming, or in a war room.
Back in the 00’s I worked for a fortune 300 company. My day consisted of working with sales (always remote), executives (always traveling), and operations (distributed across the country). My day consisted of conferences calls, emails and accessing files on the network. The only reason needed to be in the office was to answer the phone and use the network. One cellphone and vnc running on a spare desktop I really didn’t need to be there.
Unrelated, can we stop using the term "gaslight" so much? It hit out collective lexicon so hard and has been rubbed of any meaning. Just use lie, mislead, or any other more accurate but less trendy words.
It's not the same though. Saying "I have a girlfriend, she just lives in Canada" is a lie. Pointing at a blue pen and saying "this is a red pen" is gaslighting.
I only really browse here and I feel like it's used correctly. Either the bosses know you know they're lying about RTO or they just think we're idiots. When they kill people's teams and say "you're not fired, you just have to find another job yourself in the same company. You have 3 months." or "we're not firing you, we're just moving your job to the other side of the country and you have to work at the office." that's gaslighting. They're just trying to make you believe you're not fired so they don't have to pay you.
I’ve asked this same question when leaders have had entire webinars about how awesome the office is and how nice it is to be back to work. I’m still not sure if their work life is just that different from mine, or they are super stupid, or they are gaslighting.
It’s made worse as they interview 20 employees and every one of them talks about how much better the office is than remote. And then me and every coworker I know feels differently.
I'm on team "it should be up to the employee to decide".
I like the flexibility that remote work gives me, but at the same time I also enjoy going to the office because it forces me to get out of the house, and interact with people at the office.
Admittedly, if I were full remote, I'd probably rent a desk at a co-working space, so I could get that office-like feeling.
I think society converges to you last proposal: People get local co-working spaces.
That is also for the employees advantage. Your social circles are not bound to your employment anymore and will outlive new jobs.
However, this will also commoditise jobs even more as the main thing you need to change is the Zoom like you login to work weekly meetings, which is to a detriment for the employer.
What won? There are different scenarios that work best for different people and organizations. Maybe remote work won as an option on the table, but it’s like saying “hamburgers won.” They’re a dinner option, one of a variety of solutions to the problem.
The notable change is simply the expanding set of options available to employers and workers depending on their jobs, personal needs, costs, etc. Which is great!
out of something like 20 year IT career, i only worked in office for 2 out of those 20. early in the career i definitely traded income for wfh option, but it was my choice, i also had to structure my life significantly around the requirements of wfh: i've never documented my home setup, but if you've read accounts of elaborate remote work setups, that people like stephen wolfram have, mine's pretty much the same. i have _lights_ for my conference calls.
i never advocated for wfh though, and the last few years have convinced me that it is not an option that should be available to everyone: i have data to support the argument that for a certain type of worker productivity dropped somewhere between 20 and 40%. i've extracted that data out of repositories of the various companies i'm contracting for, so this is all obviously non publishable, but that's a research that anyone can do. my experience is with small to medium size business, 9-90 developers, where COVID essentially forced wfh, that was never corrected. and the productivity drop correlates with the overall initial productivity of the respective person. type-A developers, remote developer specialists had almost no perceptable drop. but the space fillers, the 9 to 5-ers, entire teams of them, who also account for the bulk of contributors, that is the main body of the company's workforce drop by 20-40%. there are also interesting outliers, people whose productivity dropped by something like 80-90%, i guess that's the silent quitter types. (i tried to control for as many things as possible, but of course you can't account for, for example, stylistic changes.)
Winston, where did you go? The Telescreen can't see you now, and we need to monitor your every activity. Time for your exercises! I enjoy the present freedom snd flexibility of telework, but seriously this is a case of careful what you ask for, as some years into the near future you may be wishing you had never been allowing your corporate / government overlords into your once private spaces. And sure, we will be able to control all of that, just like the Goongles of the world would never be prying into every personal aspect of our lives, to their advantage. Utmost caution warranted!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadSt Louis, Eindhoven and Bordeaux do not have hospitals, good restaurants and entertainment.
However, as a suburbanite, I have no problem “commuting” to entertainment in the city once every weekend, when previously I had to commute 5 times a week for work. And when I go to the city, it’s a day full of fun/activities because I know I’m not coming back for a week. You can get the best of both worlds that way.
Everything is supply and demand. Now workers are orders of magnitude more sourceable and fungible, meaning the supply went way up.
Wages will stop going up and even start to slide backwards for new hires. I've already seen it. I was making just over $400k at my last job, and new positions at the same level aren't listed over $200k total comp.
And if hypothetically AI brings down demand in the future (big if), then the wage curve is under even further pressure.
Previously people would take new tasks on weekly basis, now every single task takes the whole sprint.
And no, there is nothing that can be done since labor laws haven’t been updated and most likely won’t be before we hit AGI. I just wish I could coast like my colleagues or had the balls to start another job on the side
Previously you'd see lots of people hanging around at the office at 8 and 9 PM still working, often even white boarding solutions and having meetings. In WFH, you'd never see folks online and responses would take time. Sprint productivity definitely dropped.
I think WFH == work 20 hours or less for a whole lot of people. We had hundreds of people tenured 6 - 10 years at the place, and they immediately started dropping and finding other work.
I'm now at a startup and we're working nights and weekends. It's a much better environment.
WFH is going to calcify and sink a lot of companies.
In the beginning it was funny to see people literally playing WoW in the middle of the day
I'd understand if it was doing plumbing at a departmental business cost center, though.
I do prefer in-office work by a huge margin, to the point where working remotely or having more than a few colleagues remote would be a no go for me.
Once upon a time people thought “hey if we could let people use their phones instead of a corporate blackberry we could save like $5mm a year!” BYOD was born.
Now, as passions cool and leases come up for renewal, they’ll look quite hard at the hundred million spent on real estate per year. Most companies compute a per head occupancy cost. I know for banks on walls street it was $30,000/person/year before 2020. With hybrid that’s becoming nearly $60,000/person/year because the people only occupy the seat half the time.
Thats eye watering numbers. It’s going to be increasingly hard to justify without concrete returns on investment. “I prefer,” “serendipity,” “corporate values,” “think of the children’s careers,” etc only have weight for so long. Right now there are enterprising finance directors preparing slides to help secure their next promotion proposing eliminating most office space once tax agreements and leases expire. Boards will see a nice uptick in EPS as the conclusion of that deck, and when the almost retired CEO starts lamenting the loss of the way they grew up, they’ll buy them a horse and buggy whip and shut down the office.
This will pale compared to the wage savings they’ll reap when they level the wage distribution nationally. There’s no reason to pay inflated rates for Bay Area or New York City employees, beyond the very few that are genuinely differentiated.
It has nothing to do with preference at the end of the day. And there will likely be some much smaller offices for people who really insist on working in an office. But for most people it’ll just be a thing of the past
The looming commercial real estate economic catastrophe aside, everyone who fought to keep work remote fought for the opportunity to compete directly in a global wage market.
BuzzFeed-journalists enjoy sniping middle managers-as-petty-autocrats from the peanut gallery in a "fight the power!" attitude using gender-war headline bait, but I expect zoomer MBAs still living in their grandparents basements into their 40s, overseeing the cheapest possible globally remote gen alpha ICs and AIs, are going to do just fine.
Increased property taxes will push people on the margins out and compound the issue while also decreasing real-estate value.
Further, actual local businesses in communities are benefiting from WFH workers.
WFH likely means people spend less on gas and eating out. This is one of the benefits touted by WFH proponents, myself included. I am spending at least $300 less a month since WFH.
Yes I’m certain some tax revenue shifted to the city I live in, but it definitely shifted away from the city my office was in.
it's not 2008 levels, because as you said residents outpace business. But it is a significant factor and I'd say it is looming.
>actual local businesses in communities are benefiting from WFH workers.
I'm not so sure about that (I feel less inclined to go out when WFH), but I'd love to see data on this.
Young people still want to live in cities. It's how they find people to date and things to do.
All the new high rise construction in my city is now residential, and there's quite a lot of it going up.
My city curiously just bought an empty high rise office building with the intent of converting it into affordable housing.
Charles Munger tried to do it differently with beds on the inside, but this is unpopular [1].
One reason that companies go for an open design is to get more natural light into the interior, which makes for a good first impression, but has other downsides like noise. (Sometimes homes don’t have enough rooms with doors either.)
[1] https://www.archpaper.com/2023/08/university-california-aban...
That website shows that it's easier to find a company that did NOT layoff in the last 12 months. Seeing all these company statements on "focusing on core products" as justification as they cancel products and entire product lines suggests fear in the market instead of complaints about their labor.
As far as I know, most evidence points to there being no difference in productivity between remote and in-office workers.
(2) People have investments in commercial real-estate, and forcing RTO is a way to profit from those investments even if it immiserates the workers (article discusses this point).
(3) Cities offer tax breaks to encourage businesses to move, on the basis that the workers will use ancillary services (transport, restaurants, shopping, etc). If the tax breaks go that will negatively affect the companies. If the ancillary service businesses go that will negatively affect the city's revenues.
(4) Bad middle managers feel they lack control if a worker isn't present.
No one I know working outside of tech is even close to this in their attitudes towards remote work. Nowhere else is anyone who disagrees "gaslighting". Nowhere else is this all a "plot by commercial real estate".
Most want the flexibility to work remotely when they need to (or a few days a week), but prefer working alongside their coworkers for a variety of reasons. The complaints about entire divisions or floors being ghost towns and it being impossible to find the person for help with something are perennial.
I know there's some selection bias in who comments on the topic, but I think there's more to it: most people here work in a context where they take a ticket, work on it, etc with ideally minimal synchronization points or meetings. Of all forms of work it's among the most well suited (there are others) to working remotely.
Not to mention the absolutely horrific Bay Area commutes. I don't blame you all.
But have some humility.
You don't represent the norm in work.
I think it's because the tech people are young and single/live alone. Many people need the office to separate life from work and dont prefer remote.
It has a lot to do with the fact that lives are built around tiny real estate.
if you grew up with the internet and are used to navigating it to fill technical, social, and personal gaps, you can see RTO as a waste of efficiency. Regardless of the industry. Meanwhile if you work with folk who struggle to plug something into a USB, you may be more inclined to simply be there in person, for multiple reasons. But of course, any online discussion will be full of somewhat tech saavy users, at the very least ones comfortable enough to browse and post on social media.
If you are a massive company, by allowing full remote you could be saving hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate, office upkeep, electricity, etc. You can recruit employees from all over the country so your access to talent is superior and you can afford to pay talent less.
These benefits are easy to analyze, it's just a massive amount of money and time being saved.
Now to go to the less tangible benefits that don't necessarily positively impact the business itself, employees can live in cheaper cost of living areas and actually have the ability to one day own property. Massive reductions in carbon emissions because of 0 commute. Massive time savings for employees because of 0 commute that they can then use to spend more time with family or friends, exercise, or sleep more (all of which could lead to healthier employees). Oh, and they will actually be able to live close to family since they will not need to move to a different state / city. There will be much more efficient use of space, office space is basically redundant when employees can work from home. This freed up space could be used for housing which we desperately need. I'm sure I could come up with a million more benefits of wfh.
To advocate for return to office you need to make all these logical leaps that somehow being together in person will result in us making more money than what we save from being remote and is better for employees somehow.
If enough companies have vested interests in keeping real-estate prices high in the cities it will happen.
Notice how many jobs in Texas are on-site only? Texas is aggressively enforcing the tax deals they had with companies to have XX% of their workforce on site, spending money locally to keep the tax benefit.
I have never seen any reasonable examples of what could be "quantified" here though. To be clear, leaders at big tech companies are not so worried about "number of tickets closed in office vs. remote" or some such related easily quantifiable metric. And the jobs that are easily quantifiable are the ones that leaders are least worried about doing remotely (both up and down the spectrum, from call center workers who can be measured on number of calls, to diagnostic radiologists who can be measured in RVUs).
Corporate leaders, especially in tech, are largely worried about a slow deterioration/decline in innovation, general employee dedication (i.e. employees feeling less connected to their job), and overall quality. Those things are extremely difficult if not impossible to measure, especially since they can take years to pan out. I'm certainly open to hearing counterpoints, but I haven't heard any yet that sound believable to me.
Anyway I think you're both wrong about this. The reason for RTO is two-fold:
* Working in an office is much better for higher ups because their job is much more talking to people than doing "actual work". If you're spending literally all day in meetings it is worth the commute to avoid Zoom. If you're only spending 1-2 hours in meetings it definitely isn't.
* They have a fear that people will do no work if they're at home. Honestly I think it's completely unfounded, and it's just as easy to do no work at work. But it's a real fear.
Actually I think hn_throway_99 has a point about them being worried about disinvestment too.
But it's mostly the fact that WFH is way worse for management than it is for the bottom rung.
For people early in their careers, face time on site can be invaluable. They get to learn from people who get things done, and emulate them (or not). On-site, they learn from both positive and negative examples. This is simply less effective through meetings only.
The counterpoint also ignores human behavior. The person getting promoted is likely to be the person who shows up every day and visibly contributes when compared head-to-head against an equivalently performing employee WFH. First time people managers will likely be expected to manage people where their boss can keep an eye on them before entrusting them with remote teams. This could create a career choke point.
the advantages you mention are real, but WFH is poor career advice unless you can compete on price with low-cost foreign workers who are just as remote as the person I am paying a US salary to
So, why is there so much (corporate anti-)Scrum everywhere?
I mean, most employees hate it with a passion, and the typical excuse is that it makes velocity more predictable, even if slower. Now you are telling me that the corporate leaders in tech do not care about quantifiable things, and are worried about innovation and employees. How can both of this be true at the same time?
I guess I will stay with my null hypothesis that most corporate leaders have no idea what they are doing, and just randomly do whatever feels right at the moment.
Some cutting edge R&D team may have legitmately worries about innovation. the team maintaining decade old legacy code, less so. But for several reasons these kinds of mandates need to be company wide, not just opt in/out per team (though yes, there will be exceptions for the exceptional, as always).
So I can see both yours and the GP's idea both being correct, to some degree.
there is a 1.2 trillion dollar corporate real estate debt bubble caused by speculative investing during COVID that absolutely cannot be allowed to crash in 2024. its so monumentally important the president of the united states even threw his weight behind it in symbolic gesture (arguably because he and his friends have investment portfolios they dont want to see take a haircut in a recession) https://www.hrdive.com/news/mandatory-return-to-office-400k-...
remote work means the death of major cities and a cascade failure of major economic sectors that are barely back after covid as it is. once office space cant be leased the property holders will declare bankruptcy. states then get hit with budget shortfalls as tax revenue is lost, small businesses and service industries in the cities fall apart and the unemployment rate rises, urban blight sets in and an entire legion of major real estate spends 20 years moribund and zombified, with bankrupt property holdings and trusts owning most of the decayed ruins as crime rises. Think cabrini green and watts during the mid eighties. All those Erewhon, whole foods and trader joes will turn into boarded window crack houses and garrisons for gang warfare.
make no mistake, your relative comfort will be exchanged for the status quo, its just a matter of when not if. the president even earmarked 10bn dollars as a sign of goodwill to the landed gentry in order to "remodel" downtown high rises from commercial to residential, although anyone with even a cursory understanding of how real estate and development works (including the biden administration) understands this will almost certainly be pocketed to pay near-term creditors and stave off immediate foreclosures of properties instead.
to prevent something like this you'd have to have an administration that could act against its vested interests as a ruling class in order to secure a more verdant employment for you (and you probably wont find that in the gerontocracy.) the current fight isnt remote-vs-office, its a fight to get a handful of major companies still "hybrid" and "remote" to toe the line. Whether this happens in time to avert a real estate crisis is yet to be seen, but it hasnt made much headway in 2023, so theres not a lot of incentive to think 2024 will differ.
If the market see no need for commercial real-estate in cities, it ought to bankrupt. That is the free market.
Forcing people to work from an office in order to plan for economic outcomes could be deemed plan-economy - the US communism (How ironic).
Total BS.
Total.bs.
Forcing people back to the office won’t make bad investments good. The bank bailouts of 2008/9 are still fresh enough wounds that another one is not on the table. Inflation finally going down also underlines that point. No money printing is on the table either.
The bubble will pop and the investors will lose their money and the stone will continue to roll.
This seems a little hysterical. Cities functioned extremely well, perhaps even better, before the advent of lengthy car commutes, office work, and mass commercial real estate. The businesses you mention - grocery stores - aren't even usually patronized by commuters, and their recent appearance in city centers has been precipitated by downtowns shifting from commercial-only blight to round-the-clock mixed use, something that will only accelerate as downtowns are liberated from massive buildings that sit empty 2/3 of the day, small businesses that have to shut down at 6pm and all weekend, and peaky congestion that requires all facilities to overinvest in capacity to handle a couple of hours on weekdays with much lower usage otherwise. Anyone who has walked around the ghost town of SF's financial district on a Sunday should know CRE is not conducive to vibrant city life.
We had a global pandemic. Government spending had a massive impact on eviscerating poverty, raising some 11.2 million Americans out of poverty [1]. To keep companies afloat and to avoid the healthcare system collapsing, people stayed indoors and worked from home. Many took pay cuts or loss of benefits to do this. A lot of people realized they didn't need to go into the office at all and they could have a substantial improvement in the quality of life by not wasting hours a day in a car and/or moving somewhere more affordable.
Demand did drop in 2020/2021 but it came roaring back and companies saw an ppportunity to recoup lost profits with predatory price incresaes. They saw massive profits and inflation shot through the roof as a result [2].
To compare to the oil shock of the 1970s, Nixon instituted price and wage freezes to stave off shock inflation [3].
The Fed responded to inflation by raising interest rates. They government had a far more effective tool available: corporate taxation. Some countries like Spain instituted a windfall profits tax. Taxes fill government coffers. Interest rates enrich bankers.
Certain workers gained wage increases in the pandemic as they were essential. Inflation eroded much of this and employers took further opportunity to suppress or claw back wage incresaes through layoffs. Layoffs increase the workload of those workers who remain and reduce the ability for workers to demand wage increses, even cost-of-living adjustments.
Return to office mandates are soft layoffs. They're cheaper too since if people quit they don't get a severance payout.
The only effective wage increases gained during the pandemic were through labor organization, such as with the UAW and the Big Three automakers.
So here are the lessons to draw:
1. Government policy exists almost entirely to transfer wealth from the poor to the already wealthy;
2. Employers are not your friends. You owe them absolutely no loyalty. In fact, given the trend to rescinding job offers, I would strongly advise people not to quit their job before starting their new one. Just don't show up. Two weeks notice is a courtesy not a legal or even contractual requirement. "At will" employment goes both ways.
3. Government spending is a way to redistribute wealth from the ultra-wealthy to the poor and it is incredibly effective. Post-GFC we've had many countries operate with austerity measures. This is simply propaganda to stop this wealth transfer.
4. Greed is the primary driver in inflation. Taxation would at least allow the government to help those worst affected;
5. Companies use layoffs and return to office mandates to suppress your wages; and
6. The only effective counter to wage suppression is labor organization ie unions.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/who-was-lifte...
[2]: https://thehill.com/business/economy/4057722-greedflation-is...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#:~:text=Nixon
I don't think even unions can fight against th above 5 points you made. Unions are collective bargaining, and you just showed that the government and the ultra-wealthy hold all the chips. We saw this happen as is with nurses and the train industries in the past year.
Short of a country-wide walkout no union can properly fight the government. And the working class US is divided enough as is.
> "First, a little background. Monitoring software programs entered the workplace a decade or so ago and initially were popular in call centers and warehouses. Fast forward to 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the monitoring industry exploded as employers in nearly every sector saw an urgent need to monitor employees who were suddenly working from home."
https://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/voices/article/Opinion-Em...
Saving time and energy on commuting is an undeniably positive benefit, but IMO the optimal remote-work situation is in a separate space from one's home, ideally a walkable local office space with its own dedicated network and power.
But I do worry about the long-term effects of so much remote work, primarily:
1. When I was new in my career, I learned a ton just "through osmosis" by being around more experienced colleagues. I also built good relationship and friendships early in my work career (to be honest, I always felt kind of sad for people who took the "colleagues aren't your friends" mindset. Perhaps not all of them, but why not make friends with people you spend a lot of time with?) I certainly understand married people with kids and with well-developed friend groups being much more happier with remote work, but I think it's much harder to develop those relationships in the first place if you start out remote from the get go.
2. I really worry about overall isolation, and also an increase in polarization. We used to talk about the loss of "third spaces" when countries became much less religious, and now we're seeing the loss of that "second space" (the office) as well. I go into the office multiple times a week just because I get stir crazy staying in my house all the time. The average number of people I have contact with in any week is way, way down, and that doesn't help my tendency toward depression.
In other words, yes, I agree that remote work has won, but given that, I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives.
One thing I’ve started doing at work is documenting workflows in various ways: not just docs but talks and screencasts where a new engineer could see my workflow. (I also give new engineers advice to keep a digital notebook! I still learn tons by doing this.)
For the isolation bit I just wonder what we will see replacing that. It’s possible we never see anything and everyone just deals with it but I hope shared office spaces or something similar picks up. I get plenty of socialization elsewhere but little breaks in the workday to not focus on productivity and just chitchat were nice and maybe important some days.
You can neglect new hires just as effectively in an office, and you can support new hires just as effectively over Teams.
Also, my issue isn't just with "new hires", it's with new inexperienced hires. I started my career in a company that had a "boot camp"-like training environment for new grads, and I found it hugely, hugely beneficial for both learning new things and for developing strong relationships that have lasted 25 years later. I disagree that kind of experience can be replicated over Teams, though I fully acknowledge that kind of experience is rare to begin with.
My hot take: Don’t hire helpless people, and the people you do hire, make sure they are fully supported to know what they need to do their job (internal mentor/buddy, knowledge base, frequent check ins until they’re more autonomous, etc). In person onboarding can help, as can week long in person on sites every quarter or twice a year (team cohesion).
1. Where is this number from?
2. In the grand scheme of things that is a teeny number. Not really surprised given as remote work is relatively new, but that number in and of itself is not really evidence for remote work's advantages over in person.
My Excel model. As someone passionate about the concept of remote work, and having a material component of my net worth invested in remote orgs, it is top of mind (and important to bring evidence for people's feels about the topic of remote vs office). I should probably just publish it as an Airtable.
> 2. In the grand scheme of things that is a teeny number. Not really surprised given as remote work is relatively new, but that number in and of itself is not really evidence for remote work's advantages over in person.
What number would no longer be teeny?
My experience is that some people are just much less likely to ask questions over Slack or start a Zoom call, which hurts them.
My productivity is higher if I don't have people asking me stuff, but if those questions just never get asked it's bad for new hires' growth.
There might be ways to fix this but I don't know what they are. Just telling people "feel free to ask questions whenever" doesn't always work. Having regular meetings just results in people withholding questions until those meetings.
I don't think it's possible to lower the bar for questions to the same level as just opening your mouth and speaking, maybe with a constant Zoom call but no-one wants to do that.
Here is a guide from Forbes that could be considered.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/07/1...
If you're asking me a 'quick' question - google it dammit. Interrupting more senior engineers should be reserved for more 'difficult' problems - specialized domain knowledge you can't find anywhere else, etc.
If you're interrupting me for stuff you could find by browsing the repos, or googling - I'm gonna be annoyed. If its something more technical/nuanced and it takes me 10+ minutes to resolve, I'm going to be impressed.
Again, I realize you made no claims about this, but the conversation always seems to pop up in these WFH articles
> specialized domain knowledge you can't find anywhere else, etc.
so most of the proprietary workplace tools, likely with shoddy or outdated documentation? Yeah, that sounds like a big issue that is definitely not the junior's fault.
If you can't expend the basic effort, don't expect someone else to bail you out...
That and/or you went straight into a truly elite workplace where a "junior" is still someone with years of experience in industry. It is hard to sympathize with truly green workers when you have none. And industry seems to be leaning towards that as of late.
Wow - you really went out of your way to ignore that basic statement I made (and I stand by). No one expects juniors to come in with perfect knowledge (wouldn't that make them a senior/god? :-P) but they do expect them to do the basics. Why does that seem to sound so unreasonable to you?
>>legacy code with random landmines that would take weeks to understand from scratch
Seniors know the organizations don't have perfect training. We got bit by it when we were juniors, we saw what all the juniors before had problems with ... we understand that (and often try to help with some stuff when you walk in the door eg "oh - the company directory is out of date, here's a list of updated names and phone numbers for people" or "Neteng doesn't use jira anymore, they use XXX - ask Mr. Foo to give you access") P.S. if the situations you describe above are what you consider 'bleak', you're probably not gonna have much fun in tech as it sounds pretty average to me. Especially Directors/Mgmt changing project scopes/priorities/etc on a whim - that probably happens daily :-P (Also, it probably accounts for 50%+ of the issues with on-boarding docs and 'landmines')Enjoy the Weekend
I personally hit the former extreme a lot due to early careers outright refusing to give me help as some sort of "proving grounds" to show I can setup my own admin portal (I wasn't even in IT, I asked one and they were told by management not to help me), and that caused some extreme correction in later roles who encouraged me to simply ask. I see it a lot more often than a junior asking what what some language keyword is. So my advice will be biased toward encouraging juniors to "asked stupid questions". It just feels like bad faith (again based on my experiences) to assume juniors are stupid, lazy, and don't respect others' time.
>P.S. if the situations you describe above are what you consider 'bleak', you're probably not gonna have much fun in tech as it sounds pretty average to me.
Been in for a while, I'm just numb to it.
But just because I suffered doesn't mean I want everyone else coming in to go through the same things. The top comment here is talking about society becoming more and more isolated and this attitude of chastising newcomers for their lack of experience will just discourage them further from using their co-workers as a relationship to give and take from, instead of some cold evaluator to gain approval of.
At the end of the day a lot of work relationships isn't different from social relationships; co-workers remember how you made them feel, and not as much how many PRs you merge in. So even if you have some machine like efficiency you will simply be seen as an avatar on a chat screen if you don't make attempts to reach out. And being afraid of "stupid questions" will make you afraid of asking about anything else.
Wow - sorry you had such a shitty introduction (see below)
>> But just because I suffered doesn't mean I want everyone else coming in to go through the same things
FWiW, I've never actually seen seniors want that either. Generally, when I've seen people 'setup to fail' - its been a management decision (didn't like your tie, had to reduce head count etc.). I bet the IT guys in your first gig WANTED to help, but as you said, they were told not to..
Seniors WANT juniors to succeed - if only for selfish reasons: if a junior 'fails' - the seniors will probably have to clean up the mess, but if a junior 'succeeds' it allows the work to be spread out across another person. Also, the juniors might have some ideas about smoothing out rough spots, improving on-boarding, etc. Bonus points if they can help clear the 'landmines' (I've actually seen juniors do that - fresh set of eyes and all that..) So naturally, you want juniors to succeed.
As you mentioned above, I think it probably just comes down to what is 'basic effort' and what does it mean to respect people's time. As you said "co-workers remember how you made them feel" - Juniors that make you feel like they don't respect your time definitely get remembered too.
P.S. - I _hate_ being the 'smartest guy in the room'...I love working places where there's lots of people to learn from and I definitely ask a lot of 'stupid questions'...But I do try to do initial research before asking.
Anyway, Glad that first gig didn't sour you on the whole career :-)
There are many coworkers I met during Covid and have only known then remotely for years. I feel pretty close to them and know their kids, hobbies, etc.
In some cases I’ve gotten to meet them in person and it feels like I sat next to them for years.
In some ways it’s easier because I can have these virtual connections to more people, but in IRL I would only sit next to 1-3 people.
What I do miss is going to lunch every day. That was really nice. But at my current org, there’s no lunch culture so it was rare to eat lunch with people before remote work.
interesting, it's the opposite for me. I was in a small satellite office but I felt I got to know half of the 30 people in my area fairly quickly.
once the office shut down I never saw nor talked to most of those people. Just my immediate team of 3-5 people (2 of which came after the pandemic). The main upside was that I did talk more to people in the main office than I did before, but there was no chance of any get together when we're 500 miles apart.
I agree with missing lunch. That was definitely the best time to talk to people you'd never have a chance to otherwise.
* As the project is quite large, every time a new person appears (no matter if junior or senior), for each sprint they get someone to show them around, answer their questions etc. That guardian angel changes each sprint - and it lasts several months.
* We have open channels for ad-hoc meetings and the culture encouraging joining them even if the topic discussed is not directly related to your current task. In other words, you can just listen to what other people are trying to solve when doing your task and are free to interrupt them if you feel interested in so on.
* Every 3 months we try to get together as much as possible for 2-3 days (it never happened 100% as we live on different continents, the rest joins from their local offices or homes) - and it feels great!
* My teammates are really cool and our bosses too, so we have the necessary space to communicate without worrying it will impact our performance.
And if someone really wants, they can always come to a local office - but most of the time they are empty as everybody loves WFH and NO WE ARE NEVER COMING BACK.
All well and fine if you can, but you shouldn't be forced to. And it shouldn't be the only way to make friends. People with that mindset typically have other social groups.
> I think it's a good time to focus on ameliorating the negatives
Agreed, and this is something we should've been doing starting decades ago (see: Bowling Alone). We already link health insurance to peoples jobs, it shouldn't be a persons entire social life.
I'm all ears on current ways to make friends as an adult, or at least ideas on where to go. Like the GP said, 3rd places are down and instead of talking about ways to build more 3rd places we're potentially seeing the collapse of 2nd places. And I don't think people are exactly comfortable going or inviting people into their 1st place as of now.
It's not a solution but it is the current best alternative that is currently falling by the wayside.
However if workers have so little productivity on-site, there is something wrong with the company (or workers).
I also started my career in a cubicle farm with a lot of other software engineers which was great for my growth, but I think that could be replaced with adjustments to the process of ramping up juniors. Perhaps colleges or training programs will incorporate training to deal with the lack of seniors or assign juniors with seniors to work together in a mentorship with guidelines.
I'm not as optimistic. that class of 2020-2022 (high school and college) got socially stunted in a way that I feel will only break the physical divide further. Those kids in 20 years won't even see it as a problem that they never got a proper prom, a chance to walk the stage, a chance to properly onboard into their first step of their career and form connections that will help them grow. It'll just be a new normal, a colder normal facilitated by the false platitudes that is modern social media.
The only possibly good long term (20+ year) ramifications will be that a lot of old crusty government processes will definitely be streamlined through the net. Having platforms livestream electorial forums to a populace who treat the internet as a natural extension of their bodies will completely change the dynamics of how candidates argue and pander.
1) While I'm sure there's always going to be some imposter syndrome, I simply feel like I'm not growing the same in a post pandemic world. People in general are less connected and that osmosis from random lunch conversations or overhearing other engineer's problems may be a big part of how the pioneers of yester-decade could take command of a system or entire product and truly thrive. not only do I not get that knowledge, but I feel I get less opportunities to really show I can push to the next level. I'm not as trusted with unfamiliar areas because I'm less a face and more a name that pings for PRs. I can't branch out as much because it's even harder to converse with other teams, I find it harder to get promoted as it's hard to point to "significant impact" (which I never get a chance to) and if I go looking for jobs I get less impressive things to talk about that may help with a more senior role.
This may indeed be a young/old divide as someone who was surrounded by older folk with families who feel elated (and after consulting my own family with young kids, I start to get it). Whereas I always felt more ambivalent on the situation. It does feel great once you get to a point where you feel no need to grow, but I very much do.
2) isolation is also a huge problem as well, especially since I moved to a town where none of my college friends are. Now with remote work I have to physically force myself to get out for the sake of sanity. I live alone so I can legitimately go a week without seeing another physical face if I fell into my usual habits. to call it "loneliness" is an understatement, and it doesn't feel healthy at all.
I can code anywhere and I can text anywhere just fine. 1:1 calls work more often than not. But boy do I abhor remote workshops. They suck in every way possible, and even in some previously thought impossible!
I never once had the same experience in a remote or hybrid workshop.
Imagine instead if you and (the majority of) your colleagues came to work by cycling for 20 minutes through green pastures, parks, under willow trees along the river, and through the centre of one of the most famous historic towns in England. That’s what we do here in Cambridge.
We also do not operate a cubicle farm. Our office is spacious, filled with breakout spaces, relaxation spots, a library (aka quiet room), VC equipped rooms of all sizes, with a mini- and a maxi-kitchen and free snacks and meals.
We come and go as we please with two days a week all together and frequently other in-office days for sub teams too, agreed by consensus not fiat. I often work at home in the morning or go home after lunch for the afternoon if I need uninterrupted focus / maker time. We have a personal IT budget for our home offices so I don’t need to cycle with my laptop (which btw is an Ubuntu Dell XPS, because our IT team know what they’re doing — you can have a MacBook if you insist.) Cambridge has gigabit fibre which is handy when pushing and pulling models from the A100 machines in our remote data centre.
We still allow people to be as remote as they want and we also have a satellite office in London. It is rare though for the core eng team to not see each other in person for more than five days on the trot. It’s just so much more productive to build and plan stuff in person around a whiteboard, with pair programming, or in a war room.
In office is a waste of time and money.
But I don't browse Twitter nor Tiktok. So that may be a factor I am spared from.
I’ve asked this same question when leaders have had entire webinars about how awesome the office is and how nice it is to be back to work. I’m still not sure if their work life is just that different from mine, or they are super stupid, or they are gaslighting.
It’s made worse as they interview 20 employees and every one of them talks about how much better the office is than remote. And then me and every coworker I know feels differently.
I like the flexibility that remote work gives me, but at the same time I also enjoy going to the office because it forces me to get out of the house, and interact with people at the office.
Admittedly, if I were full remote, I'd probably rent a desk at a co-working space, so I could get that office-like feeling.
That is also for the employees advantage. Your social circles are not bound to your employment anymore and will outlive new jobs.
However, this will also commoditise jobs even more as the main thing you need to change is the Zoom like you login to work weekly meetings, which is to a detriment for the employer.
The notable change is simply the expanding set of options available to employers and workers depending on their jobs, personal needs, costs, etc. Which is great!