> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Amazon used to pride itself on behaving like a (very big) startup, trying to be scrappy and focused - but now it has very definitely joined the league of ordinary corporations.
A corollary is that they existing big-tech companies will never embrace remote work. You need to start new companies which are remote-first and then replace big tech with them.
I don't think that's a useful generalization. It's pretty clear that company culture changes over time (in tandem with changing management and workforce).
The point of the Planck quote is that many people (especially the "important" people) have large egos and therefore (among other reasons) are unwilling or unable to change their minds and learn new things. This then significantly hinders progress.
The equivalent to your claim in science would be something like "particle physics cannot change, you need to let it die and start a new scientific discipline" (I guess you'll find some people who think that but I don't).
Now we'll get to see which is more powerful: the invisible hand of the free markets, or the human tendency of power to accrete with autocrats, who seem to struggle immensely with the idea of letting people have the freedom to control their work environment and hours.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
It's an outdated arrangement. All you need are respected VPs that know their area and foster collaboration toward ideal technical/operationl goals in line with the business objectives. If your approach is invoking fear and exhibiting aggression to drive outcomes you have already lost half of the productivity battle. Jaime Daimon is the new Jack Welch. Too busy looking good and laying down the law to focus on innovation.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks.
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
In my experience, there is not much technical growth as you go upward because there's not that much need for technical depth. What most companies need is armies of low and intermediate programmers churning out various kinds of CRUD apps. There's a bit of scope to be a "senior" grunt, and there may even be some very small number of "architects" above that but generally what's needed is people to manage the grunts and senior grunts.
Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
IMO the bigger difference is there is no direct path from NCO to officer. If you are enlisted and you want to be an officer, there is no standard path for that, no promotion from NCO to office. And officers never serve as enlisted solders. Fighting and leading are two different jobs, done by different groups of people
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
The Navy has Seaman-to-Admiral-21, a modernized version of the NESEP (or MESEP for Marines) program. If selected, you go to college while on active duty, more or less like NROTC midshipmen, with full pay and allowances and up to $10K per year in tuition, books, fees.
Not really. Command Sergeant Majors technically dont lead anyone. They are just advisors. Plenty of other senior NCO positions in the army are just staff advisors as well.
Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.
Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner).
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.
This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah.
In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs.
Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
Yes that’s how analogies work, they’re not exact equivalents.
The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.
When I did a check in about 2018, almost all (like, all but 2-3) of the Distinguished engineers at Google were actually Sr Directors with vanity titles (DE was considered better then Sr Dir). Most 50+ person orgs with multiple managers working under them.
Isn't this just the nature of the business? I'm sure there aren't many plumbers or factory workers who have a level similar to a senior director in plumbing companies either: as an IC, there is a cap to how much contribution you can bring to a company, limited by the type of job you do. Of course, the same is true for managers as well, and the vast majority of directors are vastly overpaid, but that's a different discussion. My point is that all or almost all industries have this distinction, and the people in charge of companies are almost all doing a different job than someone just starting in their fields. Even in law firms, the senior partners are very rarely, if ever, doing the type of litigation they would when they started out. Probably no different than a CTO doing actual technology work.
I deliberately stayed in a first line management position, for most of my career.
I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level.
Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades.
I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level.
That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.
You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons:
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
Strange that you’d say that. What I’ve seen is that promoting homegrown ICs to line management is a favored strategy of nontechnical MBAs in upper management. Any large organization is bureaucratic. Given the intensely bureaucratic record of communist governments, your invocation of Marxist rhetoric here is frankly laughable.
What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
> he used the word "class", let me find Marxism in my dialogue tree.
If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant.
Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.
"bourgeoisie" refers to the capitalist class. Made more rigorous, we can say the set of people who do not need employment to pay their bills, they can live off of investment income. They often still perform labor, but as a part of their own businesses.
The bureaucratic class depend heavily on employment income. They are very lucky to have their jobs, and could be easily replaced or eliminated. They are desperate to maintain the structure of the bureaucracy in which they thrive. They create a cost born by both the "working class" and the "capitalist class". They consume the resources of the capitalist class, and mis-allocate the labor of the working class. If the investors and employees could coordinate without them, more value would be created for the capitalist and more wages could be kept by the worker.
I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.
My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
Companies that require RTO, if they actually want their employees to return to office, should prioritize in their messaging the objective benefits/cost to working in the office. No vague-speak, no shaming people claiming that workers "don't work" at home, but rather objective analysis on what exact benefits they seek to accrue by mandating that work that could be done anywhere in the world must be done in separate rooms of a large corporate office space.
Since most companies that are enforcing RTO aren't doing this, it only makes sense that it is a covert mass layoff. They just want people to quit because they were planning on culling the herd anyway, and would prefer it be a self-selection of those who aren't willing to put up with bullshit.
Executive brain worms are real. They see each other do things, and they want to be like each other, so they feel safety in numbers, untethered to the data.
My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.
It's an open secret that we have no idea how to actually measure tech company productivity. That's why there isn't and will not be clear evidence for or against RTO.
Best you can do is pick a narrow enough sliver that it is measurable. Then claim it is the "important" view and wow, what a shock, the data supports your position!
I agree on an individual level, but at a company level it’s fairly easy to measure things like product feature shipping velocity, change in business metrics like growth etc. When you’re talking about company wide changes like RTO it would theoretically show up in these core metrics.
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
We simply are not going back, period. They are fighting the trend. Ask your analysis team and marketing about what happens to people that fight the trend.
It's not just about RTO. The trend is bigger than that. It's just overall reality. If you need to go remote to fill a position then so be it. But some people have certain thoughts lodged squarely in their atrophied boomer brain about how everything has to be, no exceptions because feelings.
The companies that don't have fog stuck in their head are going out and hiring remote and they have great cultures and are oozing productivity. That's the trend.
> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
Is this actually happening? I have seen this idea thrown out a lot online but it always feels like a conspiracy theory to me (akin to "fine art is a tax write-off")
Yes, Amazon needs people to fill their expensive offices in Seattle, or otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
>> otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
So what? I mean companies write down things all the time. "We've revalued our $billion office and adjusted our balance sheet to match. Cause was a global pandemic which we considered as a risk factor in 2019, but it was negligible."
Stock will drop a % or two for a week, then recover and move on (especially as the Amazon machine continues to print cash.)
Microsoft wrote off the Nokia purchase with a shrug and the world just moved on.
Explaining a change of work environment to investors seems like a pretty minor bump, not a major factor in decision making.
I agree in that I don't think explaining a write off is a problem, per se. But I do see Amazon taking a long term view of their real estate investment and saying "OK we have it in our power to make this payoff" which dynamic is not in play with most writedowns.
I bet there are some incentives in there but it's not the whole picture. It's probably the combination of many things but mostly management that don't know how to manage people remotely, or they started to realise that most middle manager positions are obsolete/unnecessary.
This is the case for the city of Boston. The city derives the vast majority of its budget from commercial property taxes, it's why residential property taxes are so low in the city.
Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.
I think part of the equation is that less people are going into the office so values of buildings are going down, less people in downtown the less money that goes to all the restaurants/shops/stores during the week.
I can't speak for other cities since I don't live in them but Boston has never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of office workers.
People being downtown are people more likely to spend money downtown then someone who lives in the suburbs and doesn't come to downtown. Therefore more sales taxes collected, more businesses in downtown, etc...
It's not just downtown that matters, it is the total population living in the city. People working from home will live away from Boston or other major cities. If they need to work in a downtown office the same people will be forced to live in Boston or close by.
Because that’s what feeds local businesses especially shops and service oriented jobs. I’m not saying I care that happens because remote workers can do that closer to their home so it’s a net zero game, but not in the eyes of business owners downtown or the mayors of said downtowns.
For Boston in particular, governmental borders are close to downtown. The city is composed of several unconsolidated abutting Towns and Cities. The City of Boston[1] mostly extends from downtown to the south-west. So MIT/Harvard are Town of Cambridge, not City of Boston. Downtown-vs-suburb revenue tensions extend into the city.
For analogy, imagine the historical City of New York (Manhattan and Bronx) never consolidated with the City of Brooklyn and the city and towns of Queens County, to form a City of Greater New York. WFH Queens would be as bad for Manhattan as WFH New Jersey. Not only loss of going-to-work-associated revenue, but little home-associated. As it is, the mayor vocally pushed for back-to-office (real-estate interests are powerful in NYC, transit budget income, CRE better-vacant-than-cheaper dysfunction, etc).
Because then transit, services, restaurants, stores, dry-cleaners, gyms fail, and the taxbase collapses (every city has a different mix of commercial vs residential property tax vs sales-tax).
DowntownRecovery.com project mapped this (using cellphone user data, at least)
“You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it.”
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
"RTO is definitely the play: the CEO says all his friends are doing it; activist-investors want RTO for their own porfolios, PR says breaking the lease on our newish HQ is embarrassing while Legal says it makes more work for them; Accounting says we'll pay more in tax unless we can prove X jobs created locally; our middle-managers need it in order to tell if work is happening, and HR notes that we can slim our workforce by prompting a lot of 'voluntary' departures! Seven key stakeholder groups."
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
While all of that is true, I wonder how much of it is re-affirmation of a social hierarchy.
From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.
The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me.
They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.
As an amazonian, this has come up during the five day RTO discussion. As a manager, I can't imagine a more obvious way to destroy the service that I help run and then really risk losing customer trust.
I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.
not really. there used to be a system where the SF government of course provided tax benefits for Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block) to open offices to enliven Market Street. Jack Dorsey fell into this trap and actually did establish his office there, until the SF government decided to cash their Golden goose and take these tax breaks away.
and so right after, Square has gone fully remote as well as X has mostly left the Bay area
“Send us a count of employees whose home addresses is in state S (or city C). We reserve the right to audit that count.”
If a politician wants jobs in their state in exchange for state tax breaks (or same for a city or county), they can easily condition it on creating/showing X jobs for people who will there. Remote work can break that.
Local tax benefits is the exception, not the norm. Just because 1% of the companies get that for 1% of the location, it doesn't prove 90% of the companies have WFH policy.
And there are countries/states where the respective corportate tax is 0. Shouldn't shifting your virtual company to that be better than say opening office in California, even if assuming you get local tax benefits.
I keep seeing this being brought up, I haven't researched it too much, but it's a bit hard for me to believe that this could truly be the case, that there's such huge influence from commercial real estate owners on CEOs of much larger companies? What causes them to have such power over large companies?
I'm not from the US, so I don't have direct sight into all of that. Luckily, I think there's many start ups and other companies who are valuing and all in on the remote work. I haven't felt the risk at my company to have a strong urge of getting people return to the office.
>Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
As in "we need to RTO to prop up commercial real estate" specifically, or something more general like "we need to RTO to increase collaboration" or whatever?
The pressure is not from smaller RE companies, is from the biggest banks who control the comercial debt and see the writing on the wall. The banking industry can exert indirect pressure on lots of tech investors. Similarly for politicians in large cities and states who can control the tax side of the equation.
I really don't think this is the case... I believe more than anything it's about the kind of personalities that make up people who are in charge of these decisions... Think about the types of people who are c-suite executives. They are likely people who prefer to be in an office setting.. at least most of the time. I don't think they like it very much coming into an office and seeing it mostly empty... Partly because it diminishes their perceived value as a leader and everything they've worked for but also because they truly believe people work better in person because that's what they've always done and continue to want to do.
I think that's actually plausible, because yeah, if I was to put myself in their shoes. If someone is looking for status, and people looking up to them, etc, it would make sense that they would get much less that sort of attention if everyone is working remotely. Getting that through the Zoom is not exactly what it would be in real life.
While we’re debating whether it’s a conspiracy from the elites or not, that eludes debates on the real important questions for a team lead/founder like me:
Does the office provide a better environment for building things together? How much do people cheat in WFH situations? Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH? What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other? By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It seems all that union-talk “Boss is evil. Boss wants office. Office evil. Bad managers.” is kidnapping a real debate that is extremely important.
Unless I’m proven otherwise:
- People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
- 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Unless we stop debating whether real estate companies form a coup against the workers, I’ll never hear better arguments.
> Does the office provide a better environment for building things together?
Not for me personally, because at home I can create the perfect environment. Tons of monitors, high noise satisfying mechanical keyboard, that I'm sure would bother others in the office, music that puts me in the flow, very large desk, really comfy clothes, the exact lighting, temperature, water and coffee and everything that is perfect for me.
> Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH?
I think that's a culture thing, but if not it should be talked about and Slack should be used for that, people should have good culture around when they respond or how responses are expected.
> What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other?
I think it should be optional however frequently everyone wants to come. Also not wanting to come to office doesn't mean to me that I don't like someone. I just don't want to have the obligation of socialising. I want to focus on what I want to focus at the time.
> By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It's something I don't particularly care for. I enjoy building things, but I don't particularly care for team building or similar things. The thing is then this means that if I come to office or team building events, it's something that I have to actively spend energy on to pretend that I care and that this is fun. I get much less work done if there's pressure of socialisation, especially unrelated to the actual work since it's mentally draining and takes focus away from actual work.
> - People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
In a healthy environment we shouldn't actually measure hours spent on working, but the value/output produced. I don't track how many hours I work. For all you know, maybe all I do is work when I'm sleeping so add another 8h there to my hours measured since my subconscious is deep at work. All I'm making sure is that my deliveries are hitting what is expected and more in terms of quality and quantity. It's another great aspect for me. If I have a low inspiration day, I will maybe do a hour of work just to make sure there's no fires, I'm not blocking anyone else and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. However if I have high inspiration day I will do a continuous 13h spurt without eating or going anywhere. No need to try myself fit neatly in a 8h schedule that just doesn't align with how my energy naturally operates. I don't need to justify how I operate and spend my hours to some arbitrary standards. All they see is that I deliver and if they are not control freaks, that should be enough for them. I've been in an environment where people don't doubt my deliveries, but maybe that's because I'm lucky to be in such an environment.
> - 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Firstly - I don't belong to anyone to be clear. I'm not a slave. I belong to myself. Even if I went to the office I wouldn't "belong" to anyone. I wouldn't work for a company that would own me in the first place. In fact anyone can quit at any time. I'm here to build things, not to belong to anyone. The company has a product to build and the product provides value at scale, I'm here for building it to the best of my abilities.
> I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months
I think that's a hiring problem (skill issue tbh). I'm being a bit snarky since you seemed to imply that people should belong to companies or at least you worded it that way. I've done a lot of hiring as well, and we are all remote and we managed to h...
I'm going to need some data to prove this. I keep seeing this claim, but have not seen anything more than conjecture. There are just too many factors for this, and you would have to believe that a company is willing to throw away money for this to happen.
They already threw away the money by purchasing real estate and falling for the sunk cost fallacy.
Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.
Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.
That’s not evidence. It’s as baseless as the other side’s arguments. You’ve just heard it on HN enough times and are parroting it. I assure you that there’s not a person on this website that hasn’t read essentially your exact comment 100 times. OP is saying that one nerd’s reckoning doesn’t constitute evidence.
Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low).
The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.
Don’t forget the biggest interruption of all … the commute, sometimes 1-2 hours or more per day, just to get to the office and take advantage of the “benefits”.
I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.
"Interruption" is only one side of the coin, there's usually a reason why somebody is interrupting you and not being able to interrupt you (=not get an important information) will often cost a lot for their productivity.
I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.
I think having deep work to do is the biggest sign that a team has found a good use for me. It's how tech companies build competitive products. Commodity work should be automated; Moore's Law already paid for doing that.
It does feel like a debate that is mostly qualitative, and from two different sides (employee and employer).
My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.
Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
There are tons of articles out there about mayors/council members/ etc pressuring execs to get butts in office seats for the past few years. I don’t know if that counts as data to you or not, but they are relatively easy to find in a google search.
2/3 of corporate real estate are empty and the commercial real estate market is due for a major crash. a lot of assets on companies balance sheets are for the offices that they own. or leave empty while leased
>In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
This argument has never made sense. Commercial real estate exists to optimize the real cost (labor). There is no temptation to put it above the needs of labor.
The canonical example would be it's hard to have a serendipitous conversation with your male colleagues in the mens restroom if you're female.
That's the obvious one. Then we get to styles of conversation and engagement. I've had to defend promotions for female engineers from criticism based entirely on their communication. "She is not assertive enough." Ok, is she highly effective at her job? Yes. Ok, then what the fuck are we talking about?
And always what we're talking about is men communicate a certain way, and women don't, and the men don't want to have to change.
To answer the disabled question, there was a flight of stairs at the office, and the meeting would end and people would just head up the stairs. Except the dude in the wheelchair. I'm autistic and I have light sensitivity, and after a meeting in a nice bright window office, I am exhausted and don't want to engage in social rituals.
My point is that the examples that tech leaders give as the reason to go back to the office are simply male social rituals, held up as "how we have good ideas and develop new hires". They're not. They are all managers performing post-hoc rationalization theater And if those were the goals, they'd figure out an effective way to meet them that's better than "chatting to john while taking a leak".
And the most galling thing is that every single one of my most impactful career moments didn't involve having a serendipitous conversation. It involved researching things I was interested in.
I’m sorry but rude people exist everywhere and it’s not a tech thing. I’ve been in big tech for over a decade and I don’t have conversations in the bathroom. If you think WFH reduces these bro-relationships, you are being naive and they just become less accessible.
No one is having serious conversations in the restroom. That would be profoundly bizarre and weird.
And most people aren't saying that serendipitous conversations spur great big innovations or "aha!" moments, but rather that it just makes the process easier. Or that they prefer it. If yours are different then fine, but don't be so dismissive of other people's experiences and preferences.
“Company culture”… that’s the word they use for sure. Often it’s ego, sunk cost fallacies and other things that have to do with the culture in the C suite for sure. Pay people well and treat them with respect and you’ll end up with good and loyal employees, as always.
It’s unfortunate that it has gotten so black and white. I’m a big fan of WFH. But I also think it’s beneficial to see people in the office and interact on a regular basis. Why can’t we have both?
having both is equivalent to having WFH (but without the cost savings to the business regarding office rentals).
People who want an office are likely doing so in the expectation that there'd be people there. What actually happens is that the office is semi-empty on most days, and you'd get a few ghosts here and there (unless there's mandated office days).
So in the end, hybrid (without mandated days) is basically the same as WFH.
There are companies that have pulled off We Work style office renting successfully for decades.
Just without the crazy, megalomaniac founder CEO, without trying to spin it as being the savior of humanity, without a buttload of unrelated and extremely questionable side projects, without trying to sell it as a tech company and inflating the valuation to absurd levels.
I’m actually rooting for hybrid with mandated office days (eg Tue-Thu) but without being super strict about it. If people can’t make it on a day or even two that’s fine.
Working in the office could be pretty nice with reasonable commute times and actual office space for employees. Like earning a top 10ish percent salary but the parking lot is full and people use bike locks on their office chairs so they don’t get stolen because they aren’t enough chairs.
Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.
“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.
And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.
Yes, all this. I have a 5 minute commute, an office with a door, and plenty of parking. Going back to the office is no big deal (and has some major advantages.)
But of course context will vary from one person to the next. Which is why sweeping generalizations is mostly fruitless. There are endless factors in play here on both sides of the table.
If we could all be like executives and only come into the office when we feel like it unless it’s a rarely important occasion and have actual offices, it would be a much different game.
Work from home makes me LOYAL to a company, and makes me work my arse off! If you want to keep good employees, give them agency.
I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done.
I think the option to go into the office (on your own accord) is important. The main pro of the office is I can talk to team-mates and do learning sessions with them (the juniors).
But I do these as well from home every day too.
Unfortunately my work place is putting in place a 4 day in the office mandate, like we are children. All it does is make me want to look for jobs that respect employee agency.
I’m fortunate to be a software engineer, I have about 4yoe and mainly work on frontend code.
But it’s been a very long road from being a university dropout, to getting an Electrical Engineering degree, and then transitioning to Software mostly in my spare time
I think though, that for hybrid or work from home to win in the shared mindset - productivity has to be accounted for.
It feels like employers that switch to RTO office mandates do so on a “hunch” that WFH is less productive. At least that’s what my company is doing. They have not shared any stats that hybrid work has affected outcomes. Yes the company was down in outcomes for 2 quarters, but that’s mostly related to consumers not spending + inflation + economic instability.
Because the board need a more tangible boogeyman to point to, they blame the “lazy work from home ethic”.
But I’m yet to see ANY evidence that hybrid work decreases productivity or outcomes. In fact, I strongly believe, and could probably produce evidence, that Hybrid work ensures better workplace outcomes on average in a vacuum.
Employee agency -> less stress, more loyalty -> better outcomes
Think it was the FT that reported, there's no data indicating RTO improves productivity. It is being done either on a hunch or as a form of stealth layoff.
I will stay on the ground where WFH is benefit for the company. That is what I believe and I want everyone to believe and I do not care what any kind of research will say. Just if employees will force it in that way it will be.
I'm not sure about that. Companies are still made of people and people aren't always rational or even good at their jobs. Managers might prefer butts in seats because it's easier for them. Or maybe they fall for the sunk cost fallacy and want people in the office because the office space is expensive.
It's not difficult to win at all, if I'm more productive at home, I'm more productive at home, and a smart employer would enable me to choose that. If I'm not, I'd like to have an external space, perhaps the office, to go to and be productive. A stupid employer would ignore their employees and just decide that the office is a universal good.
Now, if you're saying that it's a difficult argument to win with an existing employer who's mandated RTO (rather than a difficult argument to win in general), I'd agree, but I'd say that's true for nearly any argument at any sufficiently traditional, large, or bureaucratic company, about anything. The same place where it'd be difficult to argue for WFM is the same place where it'd be difficult to argue for better pay, dimmer lights, a change in ambient room temperature, less meetings, different duties, less overtime, the use of a mac vs windows pc, a different chair, or any other kind of benefit package, because these decisions get made and then applied without consulting anyone lower in the org chart until those people leave the company and come back asking for them as terms. That's the nature of those hierarchical structures, it's what allows mass layoffs it's what takes agency away from people, nearly by definition.
During my time as an executive, the CEO of the company pushed for a return to the office despite widespread success with remote work during COVID. He personally disliked WFH, even though productivity data from every team showed improvements, and employee surveys were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing remote work. A small minority preferred the office, which was understandable, but the overall results were clear: WFH was beneficial.
Despite this, the CEO disregarded the data and announced that employees wanted to return, citing a need for in-person collaboration and productivity improvements—claims that directly contradicted the evidence that had been gathered. His decision was based on personal bias and gut instinct rather than the facts.
This led to significant fallout. As executives like myself left, key engineers followed, resulting in a mass exodus of talent and customers. Within two years, the company was a shell of its former self and was ultimately sold off for a fraction of its value to some shit kicker PE firm.
Also funny, was that the CEO had always hated WFH, even prior to Covid, even though he himself was always happy to exercise it personally. Even whilst doing WFH himself though, his opinion of anyone else WFH had always been that any of them claiming to actually work was "full of shit" and "taking the piss" and in fact doing absolutely nothing. This of course did not apply to him because he was an executive and executives are different.
Yes, as a well-paid, introverted, technical contributor who is internally motivated by their craft, with the luxury to afford good working space and at a moment in one's life where home haunts feel secure and supportive, you can't beat it. Like any tradesman in history keeping up their own shop, it's really quite empowering. I've been doing it for pretty much all of a very long career.
But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.
There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc
It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.
It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.
> I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
Absolutely wild that you seem to have been downvoted for essentially just saying that you like working with people who thrive because you give them agency and that nobody's happy about being treated like children.
Doing the opposite—micromanaging people—is how you create distrust and poison your productivity.
When I got my first corporate dev job, everyone thought it was weird that I kept desperately looking for my own quiet space to perform the work I needed to do, instead of just sitting in the cube where my shitty assigned computer was. I'd go out into the lobby, or the cafeteria, or an empty room, and be able to get in the right headspace for hours long focus. I ended up burning out at that job, because I'd constantly be interrupted and underwater trying to get things done. People should have the options available to find an optimal path toward meeting their expectations.
> But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there
Amazon, Salesforce, etc should all fit well within those constraints. And nobody is suggesting that we ban offices - just stop pretending that all of us fit into those exception buckets.
I will offer a counter-example despite being very much pro-wfh.
In my little corner of the universe, the company, its execs and some rank and file, who appear to genuinely either want to be in office or appear to bosses ( or both ) are not super keen some of the vocal anti-rto people showing others that they too could stay home, leave early.. you know, all those things management did not that long ago.
And the thing is, for me anyway, paradoxically I am waiting for the other shoe to drop by and, as a result, genuinely doing as little as possible ( 'cept for the ridiculous projects, can't do much about those ).
Companies had it. They had their gay little compromise in the form of hybrid, which I hated anyway. And now I am just saying meh. Funny thing is, I am clearly not the only one.
It really isn't. For me, hybrid is genuinely the worst of both worlds. My internal sleep rhythm is screwed each week, just because someone had a bright idea that today will be everyone in office day ( and unsurprisingly almost never is.
I get what the companies are doing. Hell, blind monkey can see what they are doing. Scale back full WFH and claim compromise and flexibility by, but also slowly putting in more required days in office and token flexible day at home ( and in Amazon's case -- full RTO ).
If you are objecting to the particular use of the world gay, then I might be just betraying my age, where gay used to mean lame.
"gay" in that sense is a pejorative against homosexual people. You could almost make it work with the original definition though.
From Wikipedia -
> Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.
Where you getting that free coffee from? I work from home but still have to pay for mine, although did recently get a good deal in sprouts in that yellow sticker section. Real good deal! But not free ;)
Not OP, but less than a dollar for a great espresso that I don't have to wait in line or walk further than 100 feet for is practically free, especially considering the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to walk to the cafe at the office.
I WFH 100% of the time. This allows my spouse and I to work. Without this one of us would have to leave the workforce to take the children to school. But because I WFH I can do the school runs and I realize I have it so good, it makes me unwilling to consider any other potential job offers.
And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the ability to WFH makes me LOYAL.
just curious how this works, do the kids just need a lift home and you can continue to work? Just wondering how you fit a full day in even with WFH (asking because both spouse and I are 3+ days in office and pickup/drop off kinda happen before/after the work days so WFH isn't make a big difference for us, personally)
They might not have a choice (although this is somewhat relative); switching costs to changing jobs and a move elsewhere due to changes in family circumstances or rising rents might lead to a situation where one has to “accept” the 3 hour commute, at least until the right opportunity presents itself.
I despair a little at this. If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts. Client-facing stuff gets centralised to a smaller team of specialists, and the ship gets much tighter.
How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are still on the last days of this post-covid efficiency wave, coupled with the buffer of capital from the money that was created in the last few years.
I'm usually not a doomer, but it's hard to see a way around the next downturn not creating irreversible culture change through AI offshoring and mass layoffs.
There are latent questions in your response. The fear is justified but equally, viewed from a distance, what is the "worth" of your price point, if the same job can be done and lift somebody out of poverty in the developing world?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
Completely agree. And it is funny how we put so much emphasis on developing our skills and abilities, when really our actual value is always determined by the market.
I'm personally at peace with that, and would have a pretty hard time arguing against the logic of off-shoring my job. However, it's also rational to want to hold onto a favourable environmental niche for as long as possible!
How has western society completely forgotten the point of a country? It is not the to create the most efficient economical configuration for routing wealth from the masses to the capital holders. Your value is not determined by the market, and those who tell you it is are only looking to exploit you.
There are people out there who haven’t succumbed to the nihilistic poison of modern liberalism, though the people in power have run a very successful propaganda campaign to convince you they’re evil (and I’m absolutely not talking about staple green cards to diplomas trump).
In the modern sense, this is very much a “I don’t want to do labor” issue. If all of the WFH jobs get sent overseas, the only thing left to do here is stuff that cannot be done on a computer from home, like construction, fabrication, forestry, food service, etc to name a few. A lot of us coder/designer/techy types are somewhat privileged in the idea that we can get paid a reasonable to high wage for doing something that is physically non-demanding and essentially only commands its price tag because of schooling and brainpower.
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
I mean, if you can do your job in-office, then surely somebody in the global can do it in their office? Or what if somebody could do your job in a branch office rather than in HQ?
Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
> our entire development team has been replaced. They can barely speak English.
The race to the bottom is real. xD. (ps: I've spent around a year in Vietnam and barely any software developer I met can speak any intelligible English. So I believe the OP).
I work for a company that has satellites in both India and Vietnam (among others).
Working with Vietnam is much better, if someone knows English then they have a decent enough education; and their local institutions make it possible to verify credentials.
They have less social issues besides.
Indian outsourcing is almost a bit outdated... Effective machine translation and globally widespread english education, they really don't have much to offer.
Their culture essentially makes it impossible to get predictable value out of a hire.
I live and run a (non-tech) business in Vietnam. I've never tried to run a business in India but I've spent quite a while there, and have worked on occasion with Indin freelancers.
I can tell you that it's nothing to do with price point. There are cultural difficulties and language barriers, sure. But Vietnamese are generally highly conscientious, well educated, incredibly hard working people. And besides this, their culture (no strong religion, high value on women in then workplace, non confrontational, accepting of LGBT and different cultures) fits very well with Western values. It's not perfect - taking criticism on board is not a strong point of Vietnamese culture, for example.
I fully understand it's not fair to dismiss huge country like India, and there are certainly many amazing Indian workers out there, and I've had to let go a fair number of Vietnamese slackers while building our team (as I would in any country). But statistically speaking, you'll probably have a far better time outsourcing to Vietnam over India.
Hope for new job roles. A race to automate all the things needs a lot of human effort!
As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!
> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match
Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.
Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.
On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.
Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.
I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.
Offshoring & distribution of remote work may be bad for you but very very good for humanity.
There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.
Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.
They tried remote body shops, which was a disaster (we had "tested deliverables" that didn't compile). This time there seems to be more emphasis on opening your own remote office and hiring the strong candidates there.
Yeah, the argument made no sense. If "outsourcing" will work this time (and it might), it's because the global south have developed quite a lot in education and infrastructure (pretty much all of the global south has good internet now, sometimes better than the US).
> If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts.
This argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.
> How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
This is the best case scenario. As a country, you want your megacorps/SME to execute this somehow while keeping control. The alternative is that new megacorps/SMEs get spawned in the global south and there you have no job and no cash flow.
It seems much less likely to me that this wouldn't have the effect of raising the global south up to the level of the global north, rather than drag down the global north to the global south, which would be a huge win for human flourishing. So I can't say I oppose it.
Just as importantly: If you think this is likely to happen, why not invest in those countries now? If I'm right, they're likely to generate outsized returns as they catch up. If I'm wrong, the money you have invested in the global north will actually decrease as time goes on, while the money you have in the south stays steady, leaving you in a much better position than you probably would be otherwise.
I am not sure. Remote working allows you to instantly pair with someone. No shuffling keyboards. There are a lot of software tools that help. Things like Loom let you async stuff.
What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.
Zoom's latency is a killer. It is still harder to have the kind of natural back and forth conversation I'm used to having in meatspace pairing. Maybe I should try Discord.
maybe I'm just super used to it at this point but I don't really notice any friction in 1-1's. larger groups there's some (4+), but tbh it's not that much worse than the friction of that size in person
Havent noticed that even on international calls. But it might depend on the type of convo. Latency for talk seemed a problem last in the 2010s skype era. Latency in what is shown on a screenshare.... yeah! A problem.
That's fair but there's something to be said of physically being around someone constantly and learning off of each other. It's how I learned vim, it's how I learned about neovim, it's how I learned about the majority of command line tools I use everyday.
That being said, I do WFH and cherish the job for allowing me so but I wouldn't have a problem going into an office if it was a 30 minute walk from where I live. I feel like most people hate their commutes than working in an office.
If we could all be a 10 minute walk from the office, would more people work in them? I'd think yes, absolutely yes.
I've found that Tuple and (if people are okay with it) screen recording makes me more productive from getting knowledge transfers at home. Whenever the CTO would go on a tangent, that tangent was recorded. I'd rewatch those recordings and learn a lot more than if I'd had just been sitting next to him IRL.
My experience aligns with this as well. I work hybrid, and if a coworker needs help, I would go to the office rather than staying home & online.
There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.
I am literally at least 10x when I work from home.
I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking.
Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop.
I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives.
I love the work, I enjoy working with my colleagues and I can set my own boundaries by setting office hours and scheduling meetings. There is very rarely anything that derails my day anymore. Everything is much better documented because everything must live in confluence or Jira or it doesn’t exist. The company saves tons of money on real estate.
If you can change your processes and workflow to take advantage of tools that suit remote work, it’s superior in basically every way.
Yeah, at present I can't even imagine going back to the office. It feels almost crazy to me to go back to work in the office. Such a waste of time and efficiency.
Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".
Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.
You are the anomaly, not the norm. WFH takes discipline, work ethic and honestly the ability to manage a work life balance. Doing this is hard, like you said.
I don't have too much of a problem with it but there are some obstacles depending on your home life.
My wife is hybrid, and on the days she's working from home I have to be firm about boundaries or I'll get significantly less done than on the days where it's just me. If you have kids, or live with your parents, I imagine it presents similar challenges. My sister moved back in with my father in 2020 due to the pandemic, and he was bizarrely disruptive to her work despite _also_ being remote. I'm not saying offices don't have this problem too (many such stories of loud and obnoxious coworkers), but it can be harder to have these conversations with loved ones.
Lots of people live in distracting, annoying places. If I open my window, I will hear some idiot gun it off the line in their straight-piped car from the stoplight near my apartment, several times an hour. There is a constant din of tire noise from the nearby freeway. The firemen at the station down the block do their thing every now and then. If I close my window, it regularly reaches 78F+ in my apartment. I have been battling property management to fix my A/C for months now, and every HVAC technician they send does nothing to fix the problem. My old neighbors used to play shitty music during the day.
Especially in HCOL places with mega-offices where these RTO mandates often stem from, sometimes it really is just easier to work in an air-conditioned office where you can get free coffee, snacks, and maybe some quiet if you're lucky or can slink away to an unused meeting room.
I 100% agree with you though that, at least for me, the discipline of getting up early in the morning, being well groomed and presentable, and battling traffic both ways is greater for me than taking steps to make myself comfortable and productive at home.
I have discipline problems but when I am on site, my days are more filled with bullshit, e.g. random conversation over projects that lead nowhere, background conversations on unrelated topics, explaining stuff that aren't worth it, coffee breaks etc.
So while I believe it helps in term of team cohesion and for this purpose, on site is better, in term of productiveness it's a net negative.
Office is an external discipline forced on you while WFH is an internal discipline no one watching over your shoulders, that's the difference.
For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.
That alone is distracting enough for me. I hate the "look busy" vs. actually being busy game people play in offices.
I have severe ADHD and I don't even know what discipline feels like. That's precisely why I can't work in offices. In fact, other people are more productive when I am not in an office with them as well.
I'm cursed with the fact that a lot of my hyperactivity manifests as talking. It's actually problematic enough that I have been reprimanded for talking excessively at points in my past. I am quite charismatic too, so people end up getting locked in these hour+ long conversations with me lol.
At home, there is no one talk to but my significant other who often works during the same time. So, WFH skyrocketed my productivity. I go in the office two days a week, and I basically lose two days of work a week now.
The trick is getting those two days of being in the office and talking and interacting to sum up to be things you can put on your perf packet. those two days aren't "lost". they can be a different kind of work, which culminates into leading teams and mentoring people. work comes in many forms.
I WFH, even work on weekends. I notice that after working weekends I feel tired on Mondays, so I decided to spend Mondays on less technical stuff, e.g. customer meetings, interviews, lead generation etc
It is not easy to say that I'm not a very "internally disciplined" person. I once spent half a year procrastinating instead of working on a personal project. But when you're working for someone (regardless of place), they are paying you for it, and you would like to continue receiving the money, how is this not externally enforced discipline?
I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
> I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
YMMV. When I was freelancing, I charged by the hour. Working for 2-3 hours per day was just enough to keep me and the family afloat with some extra money to spare. I haven't saved a penny in 5+ years and haven't had any money for a downpayment on the apartment we were supposed to buy.
Unfortunately, switching to per-project payments would be terrible for me. The deadline would be too far into the future for me to feel the danger of failing the project.
The 16 pings a minute. The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day. The "hey, can I call?"'s during what I thought would be my free half hour in the afternoon. This is definitely not what it was like in the office.
Unfortunately, I recognize this doesn't change unless an org goes 100% back onsite.
You can't easily tell a coworker to go away when they start talking to you at your desk. You can mute your notifications and schedule calls. Sounds like you have bad organisation skills.
Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.
I agree that this would work, and be ideal. I think it only scales to a certain size organization though. At my company, I'd guess we have over a thousand developers across hundreds of teams, and more supporting staff. There's no possibility of getting everyone in at once.
During COVID, like everyone else, our company went to WFH. Conversely, when we had a round of redundancies some of the people that were perceived to be important or productive in the office, turned out to be nothing of the sort, and were surprisingly let go.
They talked. A lot. They worked... very little.
The discipline in the office is to do the work, not go to the 'water cooler' and chat to anyone that was there or organise frivolous meetings.
I'm substantially more productive at home. Not for any single reason, but as a result of small things coming together, for example.
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i:
- unload the dishwasher
- walk to the shops to buy items for dinner
- sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
Driving? Well, you have to be in at 8am so that thunderstorm, blizzard, morning twilight, yup, you have to drive through it. And the same the other way.
Catching a train? Is it on time? Will you get a seat or be standing for 30+ minutes. Will your connection arrive? If it's cancelled, what's the alternate route home if the line is closed.
Of course, your millionaire company owner has an apartment a short walk from the centre-of-the-city office.
I'm not disciplined at all when it comes to my work and I'm still massively more productive at home. What are you talking about?
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break
up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
Every system in place for measuring output and bringing transparency to work done by office workers/software developers finally make sense in the context of working from home.
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
Hard disagree. Working from home is a skill that does takes time to develop, but it's no more out of reach than developing the skill of being productive in an office. It was a terrible decision for companies to yank away that opportunity from employees.
WFH requires discipline, but allows you more freedom to mould your environment to your needs.
It's taken me a decade to find the perfect balance, which is total complete silence, but I would be absolutely powerless in turning an open-space office job into the monk's retreat I need.
It seems too take more discipline to attend a workplace than to do the same work from home. I don't understand your position.
To me, what you're saying is like how banks won't give people mortgages when the monthly payments are half what their current rental is because of person's "inability to pay".
I think that he is the norm, actually. Slacking off in the work is easy too, there are many empty discussions that feels like a work, discussions that are not work at all but you still count it as working time. If no one sees your monitor you can watch the same youtube. But, since you are at office you clock at as working.
In my experience, most people who struggle with WFH lack specific material things like space, a quiet home, a schedule anchored by the presence of loved ones who live nearby and a functioning community which they're a part of, good mental and physical health, coworkers who will help them without a fuss, and a million other things.
I think people who take the structure of their lives for granted say things like "problem is most people aren't disciplined:)", but this definition of discipline is directly related to how nice one's house and home life are. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality of "disincline" and "work ethic" lets you feel smug about the fact that you're doing better working from your nice home office as an L5 than your new intern who's working from the kitchen table in his family home next to three other people.
It also takes discipline to work at the office. and as you said, most people aren't disciplined. They just stay at the office, doing absolutely nothing productive and wait for the clock to tell them they can go home.
I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.
I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.
A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning. It was not good for many.
A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.
Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.
I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.
> A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning.
Well, and now we have diagnoses and corresponding treatment, intentional & personalized interventions rather than accidental and incomplete ones.
Work from home is a productivity killer for me. While maybe I can get spurts of output, it's just harder to communicate and collaborate through digital means. (I'm on the spectrum and that has a lot to do with it.)
But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol
It's basic common sense. Cut almost 3 hours of commute+preparation and not only you have saved yourself half a working day but also the fatigue and exhaustion.
Any tips or reading you would recommend about organizing the workspace to improve focus?
I recently switched from a self-imposed 5 days in the office (obscenely short commute, homeschooled kids) to a mostly WFH arrangement (the commute to the new office is two hours each way) and despite having an office with a door lock at home, my productivity could be better.
I think the top comment reflects this - I have adhd too and I can’t be productive at home. I suffer a commute every day because my job performance tanked when I worked from home 8 mo strait. I’m much more productive at the office - I just wish my wife would agree to move closer to the office.
The benefits of which you speak, are pretty much I've to say, too. My present situation offers me above-average flexibility, but not to the level as yours. Care to share whom you work for, or where to find such roles?
All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons
> All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons
Equally;
In office work, all I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at the office. Some people’s office and psyche isn’t good for in office work for various reasons
I worked for a firm at one point that prior to acquistion, was filled top to bottom with people that enjoyed a quiet working environment that allowed them to think and do deep work. We were an engineering heavy firm doing complex work for large multinationals. I'll admit it was shocking to me when I first joined, you could have heard a pin drop in this place, it took me quite some time to adjust to it, but in time I did.
After the original founders decided they wanted to move on and so sold up, we merged with another org that was the opposite. The office became a place of multiple indepedent bluetooth speakers blaring music all day, teams of people walking around from desk to desk and holding incredibly loud non work related conversations at random next to people trying to do deep work, everyone was crammed closer together to assist in "collaboration" etc.
One by one, all of the original staff departed as the office had for them become a living hell that destroyed their ability to do deep meaningful or productive work. They didnt dislike their co-workers, they were not against some occasional social interactions, but ultimately, they were engaged with what they did and just wanted a good environment to do it in, an environment that was removed from them by force and thus too was their capability to be as productive as they once were.
Some people do better work from office as you note due to the environment they have at home and their psyche, but the exact opposite is also true for a not insignificant amount of people.
The problem is that business is going to pretend only one of these groups exists.
This paper is the first one I've read that outlines a pretty good case as to why WFH is beneficial to both workers and society. I encourage everyone to share it with others.
WFH productivity is a matter of management. Pre-covid my company tried it and found that productivity declined. Also, the managers found it hard to trust that some of the workers were working and not doing other things.
Working at the office has its drawbacks too. As a developer, the worst one for me was working in an open area. It's extremely hard to concentrate without having to function like a hermit and alienating fellow workers.
I think some of that is still the case, but if managers define realistic expectations, I don't see why WFH can't continue to work. It's more work for management at the start but in time, as management and workers get accustomed, it will work out.
I would wager that there's a dead sea effect happening at these 'my way or the highway' RTO companies.
Top tier, upber-productive, marketable talents don't have to tolerate bullying, even in a weak employment market. So the companies pushing RTO the hardest see their hardest to replace talent evaporate quickly, and their most desperate (but thoroughly demoralized) staff cling on for dear life. Not as a rule, but definitely a tendency.
Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
> Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
While it sounds good on paper, hiring decent remote folks for a company is actually much harder, especially if you're a startup. It's way easier taking a bet on someone local where you don't have to second guess how productive they are. For similar interview performance, most companies would prefer folks who can come to office instead of full remote. Obviously, there are companies who have made it work (eg. Gitlab) for a long time, but I'd say they are the exception rather than the norm.
I do think there will be significant remote competition in the middle 50% ($101k-$167k) range [0], and at a given price point in this range the best candidates will be able to demand remote. But top talents can only get paid close to their market value at a few dozen companies structurally capable of affording them. These companies are competitive in the sense that they throw around a lot of money, but they tend to make HR decisions as a herd. Partly because they benchmark against each other, partly because they all copy Google and Facebook, partly because they illegally collude [1]. That's why everyone's waiting to see whether Amazon's move to 5 days starts a stampede.
For now there are notable holdouts, like Netflix and Airbnb, that pay in the levels.fyi scale but are still remote friendly. The other FAANGs are already at hybrid. If Netflix, the remaining FAANG-adjacent holdouts, and the HFTs go RTO then that is pretty much it for your chances of earning $300k+. It may still be worthwhile to leave comp on the table in exchange for the lifestyle and cost-of-living benefits, of course.
In my field of IT consulting I find the opposite to be true. Developing a shared understanding of client challenges, getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email.
If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
> getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email.
If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
When I was doing that work, even in office, all of those things took place over IM, email or remote meetings anyway.
My customers were not in the same building as I was. The vast majority of senior management were not in the same building as I was.
Sure sometimes I might go out to the client in person, and sometimes they may have come in to see me. But the vast, vast, VAST majority of it already took place remotely. And how could it not in a global business?
Number one benefit to companies to allow WFH: they can pay me a senior level pay for staff level seniority, and I still come out ahead living in the Midwest versus moving to SF or NYC.
also, we are very hypocritical about it. When it is about india etc, we (us and western europe) think it's normal to pay less, but when it's about different regions within our own countries, we think it's unfair.
In an ideal world, we would pay everyone based on role and output, but this is not how the world economy works at the moment.
Dont ask me to explain, because I also dont know all the details, but it is reality
I'm in a company that doesn't do this—everyone gets paid the same amount, which is way above average for most of the country—and some of the Californians are actively lobbying for location-based pay.
I don't think they realize that they're actually lobbying for most of the company to get a pay cut so they can get a greater percentage of the total salary budget, but that's what it would amount to if they got their way.
The company is fully remote and only a tiny fraction of us live in CA. Most are distributed throughout the lower-density regions of the country and are very happy with our pay rates.
This is a good way to negotiate the value of your personal wfh arrangement.
But from the company R&D perspective, saving is kind of a loser argument. Cash is cheap. In pg terms we are trying to make the album that sells a million copies, not optimize the margins on nightly gigs.
Articles like this are talking past the RTO mandates. Ignore what the mandates say in the emails. They are trying to lay people off without suffering the PR downsides. They do not care how productive you were or are going to be. They need to fix the balance sheet for the next quarter, THEN they can worry about productivity.
I’d love to see a study on the carbon and energy impact of WFH vs commuting to an office. I would assume that for knowledge workers, WFH would be more efficient.
Tell that one to Amazon. It's really not all about productively.
There's more incentives for large businesses, whether that's tax breaks, existing office space obligations or just the feeling of lording over the workers.
I don't think that will change too much. A remote company has to be fundamentally remote on all levels otherwise it'd fall apart. That kinda buy in is difficult and usually companies who start remote work best like that. As everyone has already self selected for remote work.
I currently work somewhere where I can't WFH. And as a counterpoint to pretty much everyone here I prefer it. My last role I was able to WFH.
Reasons I prefer going into the office:
- when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
- not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work.
- easier interaction with colleagues.
I liked it at the start, and liked the flexibility, but after a while hated that my home was also my workplace. I also found it was too easy to do unpaid overtime from home. After a while my productivity fell.
Caveat is I live within cycle distance to work. I hate commuting too, and wouldn't do more than 30 minutes.
I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH. When I finish working, my laptop gets put in a bag and not taken out until I start working again and colleague interaction while remote is going to vary based on how your invested your company is in remote work. As far as your home being your workplace, you could always rent a cheap office to work from. The co-working space around me offers private offices for a few hundred a month.
Hang on, why would I rent office space, to WFH? I don't mean to be blunt but I this seems ridiculous.
> I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH.
I'm not saying WFH didn't work for me so is doesn't work for everyone. For me though as soon as the novelty wore off I found it a bad experience. Certainly for me none of it applied.
If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
> Hang on, why would I rent office space, to WFH? I don't mean to be blunt but I this seems ridiculous.
>If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
You answered your own question. The article is using work from home as a catchall term for remote work but not everyone who works from home wants to literally work from home. Some companies will even reimburse you if you want to get a membership at a co-working space.
You'll have to forgive my ignorance for assuming we were talking WFH instead of remote working. I got confused when it stated work from home instead of remote working.
Either way "some companies" ain't mine, and I'm not being out of pocket for work.
If it's silly and pedantic to assume we're talking about the thing plainly stated in both the title and body of the article, then yes I am.
Now if you're actual stance is that when someone says WFH you include all remote work then we are clearly talking about two different things. In which case it should be plainly stated. As it stands it just seems to me you were moving the goalposts.
For clarity WFH when I say it means a type of remote work where you work from you home. You can set up as many straw mans as you want but this it what I've been discussing from the start.
Ultimately WFH is a matter of opinion. I don't like it, you do; and that's fine.
> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."
It's a mental separation kind of thing. When I've had jobs where I work at an office, I am able to mentally leave work at work. When I've worked from home, I struggle to do that and end up thinking about work when showering or doing dishes.
before covid, you had this 9 to 5 separation where people were required to come in so they basically did, and after they left they would just sometimes even leave the laptops at work
during covid you took afternoon naps. so then this liberty also traded for you to work other odd hours with a get-it-done-when-you-can mentality outside the 9 to 5
post covid now? the employers want to have their cake and eat it too; where they require you to come to the office, then go home and work on for some further hours. I even had a senior position where I had a 1 a.m. and a 2 a.m. call. suffice to say I left really soon after
Hence why I'm now a consultant and get paid by the day/week.
I have no control over my brain switch, so I somehow need to be paid for the brilliant ideas I get in the shower. Also, I don't want to be required to sit 8 hours if I already do 4 hours overtime because my brain is working 24/7.
This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.
I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.
Tell me where this dream job is and I will apply. For over 20 years I commuted to the office. Some days I stayed late in the office and pulled 12 hour workdays. Most of my time was stolen by coworkers and managers who constantly interrupted or insisted I attend a meeting about some issue I knew nothing about. When I left the office after only putting in 8 hours, I would end up working 2+ hours at home to catch up for the work I couldn’t do on the office. Now with WFH, when people try to interrupt me on Slack, I tell them to send me a meeting invite.
as with all things your experience depends on context. if you are part of a business team that needs to request things off other people and build off needing something from others, then you love working from the office cuz the others are available for you
if in turn, you are someone who completes projects for other people to pay you back on, then you realize that you'd rather be able to heads down work and also take 100% credit for it
Haha dream job it is not, but a definite benefit is you never take it home. And I am never not paid overtime if I work beyond my hours. I could definitely get a better paid job but this one is good enough with a decent work/life balance.
- when work is done, I turn off the computer, and it's done. At the office if work is done I can't leave immediately without raising eyebrows or I don't have a train/bus to get home.
- not using my resources (money for train,/bus.. my time) to get to work.
- easier interaction with colleagues. It's much easier to hear my colleagues from home than in the openspace. Besides most of my colleagues are on other offices. Also everytime I'm in the office I need to book a meeting room just to ensure they are able to hear me and vice-versa.
I do think face to face interacting is extremely important on certain occasions. Specifically onboarding new people and then periodically (once a week or every two weeks) to maintain the relationship.
My experience from WFO is worse: task may be done earlier, but feels wrong to leave earlier, and colleagues may not take it badly.
>not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work
Gas is more expensive than electricity, so I'll take the tradeoff. Even better if you can reduce the number of cars in the family - purchase, annual fees and insurance, etc.
> easier interaction with colleagues
A pro and a con: good for collaboration, but also easier to be distracted when trying to focus.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] thread> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
The point of the Planck quote is that many people (especially the "important" people) have large egos and therefore (among other reasons) are unwilling or unable to change their minds and learn new things. This then significantly hinders progress.
The equivalent to your claim in science would be something like "particle physics cannot change, you need to let it die and start a new scientific discipline" (I guess you'll find some people who think that but I don't).
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.
Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
We could have many parallel units and yet each unit can keep making technical progress.
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Co...
Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.
I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level.
Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades.
I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level.
That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant.
Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.
The bureaucratic class depend heavily on employment income. They are very lucky to have their jobs, and could be easily replaced or eliminated. They are desperate to maintain the structure of the bureaucracy in which they thrive. They create a cost born by both the "working class" and the "capitalist class". They consume the resources of the capitalist class, and mis-allocate the labor of the working class. If the investors and employees could coordinate without them, more value would be created for the capitalist and more wages could be kept by the worker.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
Since most companies that are enforcing RTO aren't doing this, it only makes sense that it is a covert mass layoff. They just want people to quit because they were planning on culling the herd anyway, and would prefer it be a self-selection of those who aren't willing to put up with bullshit.
(I don’t believe it’s all covert layoffs either - it’s imho the more banal reason of c-level personal feelings and groupthink)
My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.
Best you can do is pick a narrow enough sliver that it is measurable. Then claim it is the "important" view and wow, what a shock, the data supports your position!
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
On the other hand, executives are clearly banking on a good old-fashioned recession to rein in the unruly and ungrateful employees.
The companies that don't have fog stuck in their head are going out and hiring remote and they have great cultures and are oozing productivity. That's the trend.
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
So what? I mean companies write down things all the time. "We've revalued our $billion office and adjusted our balance sheet to match. Cause was a global pandemic which we considered as a risk factor in 2019, but it was negligible."
Stock will drop a % or two for a week, then recover and move on (especially as the Amazon machine continues to print cash.)
Microsoft wrote off the Nokia purchase with a shrug and the world just moved on.
Explaining a change of work environment to investors seems like a pretty minor bump, not a major factor in decision making.
I bet there are some incentives in there but it's not the whole picture. It's probably the combination of many things but mostly management that don't know how to manage people remotely, or they started to realise that most middle manager positions are obsolete/unnecessary.
Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.
Doubt Boston is alone in these propositions
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/boston-reside...
I think part of the equation is that less people are going into the office so values of buildings are going down, less people in downtown the less money that goes to all the restaurants/shops/stores during the week.
I can't speak for other cities since I don't live in them but Boston has never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of office workers.
For analogy, imagine the historical City of New York (Manhattan and Bronx) never consolidated with the City of Brooklyn and the city and towns of Queens County, to form a City of Greater New York. WFH Queens would be as bad for Manhattan as WFH New Jersey. Not only loss of going-to-work-associated revenue, but little home-associated. As it is, the mayor vocally pushed for back-to-office (real-estate interests are powerful in NYC, transit budget income, CRE better-vacant-than-cheaper dysfunction, etc).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhoods_in_Boston
DowntownRecovery.com project mapped this (using cellphone user data, at least)
https://downtownrecovery.com/
Prior discussion on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=downtownrecovery
Prior discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=downtownrecovery
George Carlin: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE3sYUJASLY
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.
The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me. They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.
I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.
It's a layoff, but a really poor one losing exactly the people you don't want to lose.
and so right after, Square has gone fully remote as well as X has mostly left the Bay area
If a politician wants jobs in their state in exchange for state tax breaks (or same for a city or county), they can easily condition it on creating/showing X jobs for people who will there. Remote work can break that.
And there are countries/states where the respective corportate tax is 0. Shouldn't shifting your virtual company to that be better than say opening office in California, even if assuming you get local tax benefits.
It's just a general attitude that has filtered around C suites or whatever. Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
Just run of the mill cohort thinking. No big conspiracy.
As in "we need to RTO to prop up commercial real estate" specifically, or something more general like "we need to RTO to increase collaboration" or whatever?
It's all feels and vibes.
Okay but surely given all the pro-wfh people, you'd think at least someone would leak memos of banks pressuring lenders to institute RTO policies?
Does the office provide a better environment for building things together? How much do people cheat in WFH situations? Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH? What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other? By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It seems all that union-talk “Boss is evil. Boss wants office. Office evil. Bad managers.” is kidnapping a real debate that is extremely important.
Unless I’m proven otherwise:
- People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
- 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Unless we stop debating whether real estate companies form a coup against the workers, I’ll never hear better arguments.
Not for me personally, because at home I can create the perfect environment. Tons of monitors, high noise satisfying mechanical keyboard, that I'm sure would bother others in the office, music that puts me in the flow, very large desk, really comfy clothes, the exact lighting, temperature, water and coffee and everything that is perfect for me.
> Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH?
I think that's a culture thing, but if not it should be talked about and Slack should be used for that, people should have good culture around when they respond or how responses are expected.
> What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other?
I think it should be optional however frequently everyone wants to come. Also not wanting to come to office doesn't mean to me that I don't like someone. I just don't want to have the obligation of socialising. I want to focus on what I want to focus at the time.
> By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It's something I don't particularly care for. I enjoy building things, but I don't particularly care for team building or similar things. The thing is then this means that if I come to office or team building events, it's something that I have to actively spend energy on to pretend that I care and that this is fun. I get much less work done if there's pressure of socialisation, especially unrelated to the actual work since it's mentally draining and takes focus away from actual work.
> - People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
In a healthy environment we shouldn't actually measure hours spent on working, but the value/output produced. I don't track how many hours I work. For all you know, maybe all I do is work when I'm sleeping so add another 8h there to my hours measured since my subconscious is deep at work. All I'm making sure is that my deliveries are hitting what is expected and more in terms of quality and quantity. It's another great aspect for me. If I have a low inspiration day, I will maybe do a hour of work just to make sure there's no fires, I'm not blocking anyone else and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. However if I have high inspiration day I will do a continuous 13h spurt without eating or going anywhere. No need to try myself fit neatly in a 8h schedule that just doesn't align with how my energy naturally operates. I don't need to justify how I operate and spend my hours to some arbitrary standards. All they see is that I deliver and if they are not control freaks, that should be enough for them. I've been in an environment where people don't doubt my deliveries, but maybe that's because I'm lucky to be in such an environment.
> - 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Firstly - I don't belong to anyone to be clear. I'm not a slave. I belong to myself. Even if I went to the office I wouldn't "belong" to anyone. I wouldn't work for a company that would own me in the first place. In fact anyone can quit at any time. I'm here to build things, not to belong to anyone. The company has a product to build and the product provides value at scale, I'm here for building it to the best of my abilities.
> I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months
I think that's a hiring problem (skill issue tbh). I'm being a bit snarky since you seemed to imply that people should belong to companies or at least you worded it that way. I've done a lot of hiring as well, and we are all remote and we managed to h...
Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.
Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.
The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.
I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.
My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.
Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
Those tax breaks are explicitly contingent on butts being physically in seats to add to the economy and tax revenue of that municipality.
Too few butts in seats triggers penalties or revoking of the tax breaks altogether.
/Dr Mephisto enters the chat/
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
That's the obvious one. Then we get to styles of conversation and engagement. I've had to defend promotions for female engineers from criticism based entirely on their communication. "She is not assertive enough." Ok, is she highly effective at her job? Yes. Ok, then what the fuck are we talking about?
And always what we're talking about is men communicate a certain way, and women don't, and the men don't want to have to change.
To answer the disabled question, there was a flight of stairs at the office, and the meeting would end and people would just head up the stairs. Except the dude in the wheelchair. I'm autistic and I have light sensitivity, and after a meeting in a nice bright window office, I am exhausted and don't want to engage in social rituals.
My point is that the examples that tech leaders give as the reason to go back to the office are simply male social rituals, held up as "how we have good ideas and develop new hires". They're not. They are all managers performing post-hoc rationalization theater And if those were the goals, they'd figure out an effective way to meet them that's better than "chatting to john while taking a leak".
And the most galling thing is that every single one of my most impactful career moments didn't involve having a serendipitous conversation. It involved researching things I was interested in.
I am for nerds and against tech-bros.
And most people aren't saying that serendipitous conversations spur great big innovations or "aha!" moments, but rather that it just makes the process easier. Or that they prefer it. If yours are different then fine, but don't be so dismissive of other people's experiences and preferences.
It’s just how well does a company culture support distributed work (many locations) or not.
having both is equivalent to having WFH (but without the cost savings to the business regarding office rentals).
People who want an office are likely doing so in the expectation that there'd be people there. What actually happens is that the office is semi-empty on most days, and you'd get a few ghosts here and there (unless there's mandated office days).
So in the end, hybrid (without mandated days) is basically the same as WFH.
It allows the company to be flexible with meeting space budget without being on the hook for permanent space.
My company ran out of space pre-Covid, so we would book random meeting spaces (within walking distance) around the city.
Just without the crazy, megalomaniac founder CEO, without trying to spin it as being the savior of humanity, without a buttload of unrelated and extremely questionable side projects, without trying to sell it as a tech company and inflating the valuation to absurd levels.
I’m actually rooting for hybrid with mandated office days (eg Tue-Thu) but without being super strict about it. If people can’t make it on a day or even two that’s fine.
Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.
“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.
And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.
But of course context will vary from one person to the next. Which is why sweeping generalizations is mostly fruitless. There are endless factors in play here on both sides of the table.
I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done.
I think the option to go into the office (on your own accord) is important. The main pro of the office is I can talk to team-mates and do learning sessions with them (the juniors).
But I do these as well from home every day too.
Unfortunately my work place is putting in place a 4 day in the office mandate, like we are children. All it does is make me want to look for jobs that respect employee agency.
But it’s been a very long road from being a university dropout, to getting an Electrical Engineering degree, and then transitioning to Software mostly in my spare time
Instead, call it a benefit, like paid vacation or health insurance.
Nobody argues that employers contributing to an employees 401(k) plan is good for productivity. They do it to attract and retain talent.
It feels like employers that switch to RTO office mandates do so on a “hunch” that WFH is less productive. At least that’s what my company is doing. They have not shared any stats that hybrid work has affected outcomes. Yes the company was down in outcomes for 2 quarters, but that’s mostly related to consumers not spending + inflation + economic instability.
Because the board need a more tangible boogeyman to point to, they blame the “lazy work from home ethic”.
But I’m yet to see ANY evidence that hybrid work decreases productivity or outcomes. In fact, I strongly believe, and could probably produce evidence, that Hybrid work ensures better workplace outcomes on average in a vacuum.
Employee agency -> less stress, more loyalty -> better outcomes
Benefit for the company will go on forever.
I will stay on the ground where WFH is benefit for the company. That is what I believe and I want everyone to believe and I do not care what any kind of research will say. Just if employees will force it in that way it will be.
Though I agree that framing WFH as a productivity gain makes RTO in the name of productivity harder to sell.
I'm not sure about that. Companies are still made of people and people aren't always rational or even good at their jobs. Managers might prefer butts in seats because it's easier for them. Or maybe they fall for the sunk cost fallacy and want people in the office because the office space is expensive.
Now, if you're saying that it's a difficult argument to win with an existing employer who's mandated RTO (rather than a difficult argument to win in general), I'd agree, but I'd say that's true for nearly any argument at any sufficiently traditional, large, or bureaucratic company, about anything. The same place where it'd be difficult to argue for WFM is the same place where it'd be difficult to argue for better pay, dimmer lights, a change in ambient room temperature, less meetings, different duties, less overtime, the use of a mac vs windows pc, a different chair, or any other kind of benefit package, because these decisions get made and then applied without consulting anyone lower in the org chart until those people leave the company and come back asking for them as terms. That's the nature of those hierarchical structures, it's what allows mass layoffs it's what takes agency away from people, nearly by definition.
And even if it is, it rarely matters.
During my time as an executive, the CEO of the company pushed for a return to the office despite widespread success with remote work during COVID. He personally disliked WFH, even though productivity data from every team showed improvements, and employee surveys were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing remote work. A small minority preferred the office, which was understandable, but the overall results were clear: WFH was beneficial.
Despite this, the CEO disregarded the data and announced that employees wanted to return, citing a need for in-person collaboration and productivity improvements—claims that directly contradicted the evidence that had been gathered. His decision was based on personal bias and gut instinct rather than the facts.
This led to significant fallout. As executives like myself left, key engineers followed, resulting in a mass exodus of talent and customers. Within two years, the company was a shell of its former self and was ultimately sold off for a fraction of its value to some shit kicker PE firm.
Also funny, was that the CEO had always hated WFH, even prior to Covid, even though he himself was always happy to exercise it personally. Even whilst doing WFH himself though, his opinion of anyone else WFH had always been that any of them claiming to actually work was "full of shit" and "taking the piss" and in fact doing absolutely nothing. This of course did not apply to him because he was an executive and executives are different.
It’s like calling “allowed to use a computer” a benefit.
But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.
There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc
It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.
It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.
Anecdotally my team juggles all this well - we are relatively shielded from the rest of the business as our own unit.
Within our team or 15, we have introverts, extroverts - and some work from home alot (me etc) and others come into the office.
But no one in the team, not even the leaders think the RTO is the right call.
I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
Absolutely wild that you seem to have been downvoted for essentially just saying that you like working with people who thrive because you give them agency and that nobody's happy about being treated like children.
Doing the opposite—micromanaging people—is how you create distrust and poison your productivity.
When I got my first corporate dev job, everyone thought it was weird that I kept desperately looking for my own quiet space to perform the work I needed to do, instead of just sitting in the cube where my shitty assigned computer was. I'd go out into the lobby, or the cafeteria, or an empty room, and be able to get in the right headspace for hours long focus. I ended up burning out at that job, because I'd constantly be interrupted and underwater trying to get things done. People should have the options available to find an optimal path toward meeting their expectations.
Amazon, Salesforce, etc should all fit well within those constraints. And nobody is suggesting that we ban offices - just stop pretending that all of us fit into those exception buckets.
All of what you said does not support any blanket return to office policies.
In my little corner of the universe, the company, its execs and some rank and file, who appear to genuinely either want to be in office or appear to bosses ( or both ) are not super keen some of the vocal anti-rto people showing others that they too could stay home, leave early.. you know, all those things management did not that long ago.
And the thing is, for me anyway, paradoxically I am waiting for the other shoe to drop by and, as a result, genuinely doing as little as possible ( 'cept for the ridiculous projects, can't do much about those ).
Companies had it. They had their gay little compromise in the form of hybrid, which I hated anyway. And now I am just saying meh. Funny thing is, I am clearly not the only one.
What an odd phrase.
I get what the companies are doing. Hell, blind monkey can see what they are doing. Scale back full WFH and claim compromise and flexibility by, but also slowly putting in more required days in office and token flexible day at home ( and in Amazon's case -- full RTO ).
If you are objecting to the particular use of the world gay, then I might be just betraying my age, where gay used to mean lame.
From Wikipedia -
> Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.
And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the ability to WFH makes me LOYAL.
How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are still on the last days of this post-covid efficiency wave, coupled with the buffer of capital from the money that was created in the last few years.
I'm usually not a doomer, but it's hard to see a way around the next downturn not creating irreversible culture change through AI offshoring and mass layoffs.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
I'm personally at peace with that, and would have a pretty hard time arguing against the logic of off-shoring my job. However, it's also rational to want to hold onto a favourable environmental niche for as long as possible!
There are people out there who haven’t succumbed to the nihilistic poison of modern liberalism, though the people in power have run a very successful propaganda campaign to convince you they’re evil (and I’m absolutely not talking about staple green cards to diplomas trump).
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
Even Indians are losing their IT jobs to Vietnamese. [1]
The squeeze is real.
Good time to start a business I guess.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1eckee9/oh...
The race to the bottom is real. xD. (ps: I've spent around a year in Vietnam and barely any software developer I met can speak any intelligible English. So I believe the OP).
Working with Vietnam is much better, if someone knows English then they have a decent enough education; and their local institutions make it possible to verify credentials. They have less social issues besides.
Indian outsourcing is almost a bit outdated... Effective machine translation and globally widespread english education, they really don't have much to offer.
Their culture essentially makes it impossible to get predictable value out of a hire.
I can tell you that it's nothing to do with price point. There are cultural difficulties and language barriers, sure. But Vietnamese are generally highly conscientious, well educated, incredibly hard working people. And besides this, their culture (no strong religion, high value on women in then workplace, non confrontational, accepting of LGBT and different cultures) fits very well with Western values. It's not perfect - taking criticism on board is not a strong point of Vietnamese culture, for example.
I fully understand it's not fair to dismiss huge country like India, and there are certainly many amazing Indian workers out there, and I've had to let go a fair number of Vietnamese slackers while building our team (as I would in any country). But statistically speaking, you'll probably have a far better time outsourcing to Vietnam over India.
As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!
Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.
Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.
On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.
Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.
I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.
There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.
Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.
This is already happening by large margins. Companies hiring contractors in India or Brazil to do the work that a full time employee used to do.
If WFH can be done in Arizona, it can be done just as easily in Colombia for half the price.
Ofc, it's true, you might get to the same destination. But the journey would be so different you can hardly call it the same thing.
>How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
You don't have to wait long, it happened around 20-25 years ago.
This argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.
This is the best case scenario. As a country, you want your megacorps/SME to execute this somehow while keeping control. The alternative is that new megacorps/SMEs get spawned in the global south and there you have no job and no cash flow.
Just as importantly: If you think this is likely to happen, why not invest in those countries now? If I'm right, they're likely to generate outsized returns as they catch up. If I'm wrong, the money you have invested in the global north will actually decrease as time goes on, while the money you have in the south stays steady, leaving you in a much better position than you probably would be otherwise.
But I can't deny that when a coworker needs help, rolling my chair next to theirs in office allows for a much larger bandwidth of knowledge sharing.
On the other hand my production skyrockets at home.
What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.
That being said, I do WFH and cherish the job for allowing me so but I wouldn't have a problem going into an office if it was a 30 minute walk from where I live. I feel like most people hate their commutes than working in an office.
If we could all be a 10 minute walk from the office, would more people work in them? I'd think yes, absolutely yes.
There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.
I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking.
Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop.
I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives.
I love the work, I enjoy working with my colleagues and I can set my own boundaries by setting office hours and scheduling meetings. There is very rarely anything that derails my day anymore. Everything is much better documented because everything must live in confluence or Jira or it doesn’t exist. The company saves tons of money on real estate.
If you can change your processes and workflow to take advantage of tools that suit remote work, it’s superior in basically every way.
Pry it from my cold dead hands.
Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".
Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.
Problem is most people aren’t disciplined:)
That is bizarre to me. I find the office takes far more discipline. Do people really get that distracted at home? What is so distracting?
My wife is hybrid, and on the days she's working from home I have to be firm about boundaries or I'll get significantly less done than on the days where it's just me. If you have kids, or live with your parents, I imagine it presents similar challenges. My sister moved back in with my father in 2020 due to the pandemic, and he was bizarrely disruptive to her work despite _also_ being remote. I'm not saying offices don't have this problem too (many such stories of loud and obnoxious coworkers), but it can be harder to have these conversations with loved ones.
Lots of people live in distracting, annoying places. If I open my window, I will hear some idiot gun it off the line in their straight-piped car from the stoplight near my apartment, several times an hour. There is a constant din of tire noise from the nearby freeway. The firemen at the station down the block do their thing every now and then. If I close my window, it regularly reaches 78F+ in my apartment. I have been battling property management to fix my A/C for months now, and every HVAC technician they send does nothing to fix the problem. My old neighbors used to play shitty music during the day.
Especially in HCOL places with mega-offices where these RTO mandates often stem from, sometimes it really is just easier to work in an air-conditioned office where you can get free coffee, snacks, and maybe some quiet if you're lucky or can slink away to an unused meeting room.
I 100% agree with you though that, at least for me, the discipline of getting up early in the morning, being well groomed and presentable, and battling traffic both ways is greater for me than taking steps to make myself comfortable and productive at home.
So while I believe it helps in term of team cohesion and for this purpose, on site is better, in term of productiveness it's a net negative.
For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.
That alone is distracting enough for me. I hate the "look busy" vs. actually being busy game people play in offices.
I have severe ADHD and I don't even know what discipline feels like. That's precisely why I can't work in offices. In fact, other people are more productive when I am not in an office with them as well.
I'm cursed with the fact that a lot of my hyperactivity manifests as talking. It's actually problematic enough that I have been reprimanded for talking excessively at points in my past. I am quite charismatic too, so people end up getting locked in these hour+ long conversations with me lol.
At home, there is no one talk to but my significant other who often works during the same time. So, WFH skyrocketed my productivity. I go in the office two days a week, and I basically lose two days of work a week now.
I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
YMMV. When I was freelancing, I charged by the hour. Working for 2-3 hours per day was just enough to keep me and the family afloat with some extra money to spare. I haven't saved a penny in 5+ years and haven't had any money for a downpayment on the apartment we were supposed to buy.
Unfortunately, switching to per-project payments would be terrible for me. The deadline would be too far into the future for me to feel the danger of failing the project.
Unfortunately, I recognize this doesn't change unless an org goes 100% back onsite.
This happens in the office more. Someone just coming to you with whatever they need in the moment.
> The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day.
That is excessive amount of meetings. But also, that organic getting information was still a meeting, you just did not considered it one.
They talked. A lot. They worked... very little.
The discipline in the office is to do the work, not go to the 'water cooler' and chat to anyone that was there or organise frivolous meetings.
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i: - unload the dishwasher - walk to the shops to buy items for dinner - sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
This is an understated problem.
Driving? Well, you have to be in at 8am so that thunderstorm, blizzard, morning twilight, yup, you have to drive through it. And the same the other way.
Catching a train? Is it on time? Will you get a seat or be standing for 30+ minutes. Will your connection arrive? If it's cancelled, what's the alternate route home if the line is closed.
Of course, your millionaire company owner has an apartment a short walk from the centre-of-the-city office.
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
It's taken me a decade to find the perfect balance, which is total complete silence, but I would be absolutely powerless in turning an open-space office job into the monk's retreat I need.
To me, what you're saying is like how banks won't give people mortgages when the monthly payments are half what their current rental is because of person's "inability to pay".
I think people who take the structure of their lives for granted say things like "problem is most people aren't disciplined:)", but this definition of discipline is directly related to how nice one's house and home life are. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality of "disincline" and "work ethic" lets you feel smug about the fact that you're doing better working from your nice home office as an L5 than your new intern who's working from the kitchen table in his family home next to three other people.
I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.
I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.
A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.
Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.
I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.
Well, and now we have diagnoses and corresponding treatment, intentional & personalized interventions rather than accidental and incomplete ones.
It is undeniably true, though, that the pandemic forced a lot of people to do a lot of self-analysis and reflection.
It would be nice if wfh wasn't such a polarised issue.
Btw which is something I also sometimes seek out, a hard working colleague is an inspiration.
But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol
Equally;
In office work, all I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at the office. Some people’s office and psyche isn’t good for in office work for various reasons
I worked for a firm at one point that prior to acquistion, was filled top to bottom with people that enjoyed a quiet working environment that allowed them to think and do deep work. We were an engineering heavy firm doing complex work for large multinationals. I'll admit it was shocking to me when I first joined, you could have heard a pin drop in this place, it took me quite some time to adjust to it, but in time I did.
After the original founders decided they wanted to move on and so sold up, we merged with another org that was the opposite. The office became a place of multiple indepedent bluetooth speakers blaring music all day, teams of people walking around from desk to desk and holding incredibly loud non work related conversations at random next to people trying to do deep work, everyone was crammed closer together to assist in "collaboration" etc.
One by one, all of the original staff departed as the office had for them become a living hell that destroyed their ability to do deep meaningful or productive work. They didnt dislike their co-workers, they were not against some occasional social interactions, but ultimately, they were engaged with what they did and just wanted a good environment to do it in, an environment that was removed from them by force and thus too was their capability to be as productive as they once were.
Some people do better work from office as you note due to the environment they have at home and their psyche, but the exact opposite is also true for a not insignificant amount of people.
The problem is that business is going to pretend only one of these groups exists.
WFH productivity is a matter of management. Pre-covid my company tried it and found that productivity declined. Also, the managers found it hard to trust that some of the workers were working and not doing other things.
Working at the office has its drawbacks too. As a developer, the worst one for me was working in an open area. It's extremely hard to concentrate without having to function like a hermit and alienating fellow workers.
I think some of that is still the case, but if managers define realistic expectations, I don't see why WFH can't continue to work. It's more work for management at the start but in time, as management and workers get accustomed, it will work out.
It seems to be a win for employees and companies.
Top tier, upber-productive, marketable talents don't have to tolerate bullying, even in a weak employment market. So the companies pushing RTO the hardest see their hardest to replace talent evaporate quickly, and their most desperate (but thoroughly demoralized) staff cling on for dear life. Not as a rule, but definitely a tendency.
Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
While it sounds good on paper, hiring decent remote folks for a company is actually much harder, especially if you're a startup. It's way easier taking a bet on someone local where you don't have to second guess how productive they are. For similar interview performance, most companies would prefer folks who can come to office instead of full remote. Obviously, there are companies who have made it work (eg. Gitlab) for a long time, but I'd say they are the exception rather than the norm.
For now there are notable holdouts, like Netflix and Airbnb, that pay in the levels.fyi scale but are still remote friendly. The other FAANGs are already at hybrid. If Netflix, the remaining FAANG-adjacent holdouts, and the HFTs go RTO then that is pretty much it for your chances of earning $300k+. It may still be worthwhile to leave comp on the table in exchange for the lifestyle and cost-of-living benefits, of course.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
When I was doing that work, even in office, all of those things took place over IM, email or remote meetings anyway.
My customers were not in the same building as I was. The vast majority of senior management were not in the same building as I was.
Sure sometimes I might go out to the client in person, and sometimes they may have come in to see me. But the vast, vast, VAST majority of it already took place remotely. And how could it not in a global business?
also, we are very hypocritical about it. When it is about india etc, we (us and western europe) think it's normal to pay less, but when it's about different regions within our own countries, we think it's unfair.
In an ideal world, we would pay everyone based on role and output, but this is not how the world economy works at the moment. Dont ask me to explain, because I also dont know all the details, but it is reality
I don't think they realize that they're actually lobbying for most of the company to get a pay cut so they can get a greater percentage of the total salary budget, but that's what it would amount to if they got their way.
But from the company R&D perspective, saving is kind of a loser argument. Cash is cheap. In pg terms we are trying to make the album that sells a million copies, not optimize the margins on nightly gigs.
There's more incentives for large businesses, whether that's tax breaks, existing office space obligations or just the feeling of lording over the workers.
I don't think that will change too much. A remote company has to be fundamentally remote on all levels otherwise it'd fall apart. That kinda buy in is difficult and usually companies who start remote work best like that. As everyone has already self selected for remote work.
i am sorry to point this out ... but its a primary driving point!
its a need to travels ... to consume fossil fuels and to benefit effectivly some sharhe holders ...
its A primary reason.
Reasons I prefer going into the office:
- when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
- not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work.
- easier interaction with colleagues.
I liked it at the start, and liked the flexibility, but after a while hated that my home was also my workplace. I also found it was too easy to do unpaid overtime from home. After a while my productivity fell.
Caveat is I live within cycle distance to work. I hate commuting too, and wouldn't do more than 30 minutes.
> I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH.
I'm not saying WFH didn't work for me so is doesn't work for everyone. For me though as soon as the novelty wore off I found it a bad experience. Certainly for me none of it applied.
If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
>If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
You answered your own question. The article is using work from home as a catchall term for remote work but not everyone who works from home wants to literally work from home. Some companies will even reimburse you if you want to get a membership at a co-working space.
You'll have to forgive my ignorance for assuming we were talking WFH instead of remote working. I got confused when it stated work from home instead of remote working.
Either way "some companies" ain't mine, and I'm not being out of pocket for work.
Are you paid for the time spent commuting? Are your transportation expenses fully reimbursed?
Now if you're actual stance is that when someone says WFH you include all remote work then we are clearly talking about two different things. In which case it should be plainly stated. As it stands it just seems to me you were moving the goalposts.
For clarity WFH when I say it means a type of remote work where you work from you home. You can set up as many straw mans as you want but this it what I've been discussing from the start.
Ultimately WFH is a matter of opinion. I don't like it, you do; and that's fine.
But I stand corrected, apparently: WFH != WFH. Good to know.
To quote Dilbert:
> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."
during covid you took afternoon naps. so then this liberty also traded for you to work other odd hours with a get-it-done-when-you-can mentality outside the 9 to 5
post covid now? the employers want to have their cake and eat it too; where they require you to come to the office, then go home and work on for some further hours. I even had a senior position where I had a 1 a.m. and a 2 a.m. call. suffice to say I left really soon after
We didn't went through the same COVID period I'm afraid.
I have no control over my brain switch, so I somehow need to be paid for the brilliant ideas I get in the shower. Also, I don't want to be required to sit 8 hours if I already do 4 hours overtime because my brain is working 24/7.
This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.
I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.
if in turn, you are someone who completes projects for other people to pay you back on, then you realize that you'd rather be able to heads down work and also take 100% credit for it
Reasons I prefer staying at home:
- when work is done, I turn off the computer, and it's done. At the office if work is done I can't leave immediately without raising eyebrows or I don't have a train/bus to get home.
- not using my resources (money for train,/bus.. my time) to get to work.
- easier interaction with colleagues. It's much easier to hear my colleagues from home than in the openspace. Besides most of my colleagues are on other offices. Also everytime I'm in the office I need to book a meeting room just to ensure they are able to hear me and vice-versa.
I do think face to face interacting is extremely important on certain occasions. Specifically onboarding new people and then periodically (once a week or every two weeks) to maintain the relationship.
> when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
My experience from WFO is worse: task may be done earlier, but feels wrong to leave earlier, and colleagues may not take it badly.
>not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work
Gas is more expensive than electricity, so I'll take the tradeoff. Even better if you can reduce the number of cars in the family - purchase, annual fees and insurance, etc.
> easier interaction with colleagues
A pro and a con: good for collaboration, but also easier to be distracted when trying to focus.