I’ve been part of a lot of these conversations and it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. The trick is how to please everyone. It is easy to say, let those who want to come back come and those who don’t stay home. However those that want to go back say it is because they want to be surrounded by their coworkers. Having gone back to the office voluntarily for a day recently I can confirm that going back while the majority of the team is remote is not the same.
Things seem to be hardest for younger single employees who don’t always have great work from home environments and are also sometimes lonely. Also, some of my coworkers with kids are having a hard time being productive with pressures from kids or spouses that don’t respect the working from home boundaries. Then there are people who can’t manage the work life balance and relied on a commute to tell their brain the work day is over.
Finally, there will always be under-performers who are desperately searching for a scape goat when they fail to deliver. I’ve seen this so many times after an org change, architectural change or anything that will give someone an excuse for failing to preform. These people may or may not like their new freedom but they do like their paycheck and will use any excuse for their poor performance.
Many of these problems seem solvable without forcing employees who want to work remote to come in. I personally love working remote and would never go back to mandatory days in the office if I didn’t have to. I think the trick is for executives to wrangle all of these new challenges at once. It is so much easier to just say “make things go back to where they were” so their jobs can be less complicated. People haven’t been trained how to make this new world work. In a public company it is one more unknown to juggle when they have a responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits.
So let’s start proposing solutions and promoting them. How do we make our execs feel more comfortable to let those who want to work home do so? How do we make it so easy that no exec has to worry about losing their job because they agreed to something that didn’t use to be normal?
I'd happily go back to working in the office. If I had an actual office, not a 4-foot wide folding table that's part of a line of eight of them in 12 rows in a room the size of a basketball court.
I haven't had an "office" to go to work in since 2000. I've shared spaces with anywhere from three to all of my co-workers. "Recent research shows that such offices result in 73 per cent less face-to-face interaction, and a 67 per cent increase in email interaction" https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/325959
"Private offices with doors that close" - that's the standard at Fog Creek Software, the company behind Stack Overflow, Trello, and other great products. Microsoft also provides offices (or at least used to). These companies might be on to something.
An opposing perspective: note that the cost for private offices is very high vs. cubes. Assuming Class A space in a premium location is around $85/sq.ft. per month [1]:
6' x 6' cube: 36 sq.ft. * $85 = $3,060/mo
8' x 10' office: 80 sq.ft. * $85 = $6,800/mo
10' x 12' office: 120 sq.ft. * $85 = $10,200/mo
What would most people choose: upgrade from cube to desk, or add $3,500/mo to their paycheck?
Thanks for the link, but I'm not sure about the conclusion. Why do you think the company would reimburse you for $3500/mo for freeing up office space or using less of it?
A company basically pays you for your cost of living. That's why pay is high in the Bay Area or NY, and why you take a massive pay cut when you move out. If you choose to work remotely or sign up for shitty work conditions, they are not going to reimburse any of the costs you just saved them.
> A company basically pays you for your cost of living. That's why pay is high in the Bay Area or NY, and why you take a massive pay cut when you move out.
That's the essence of another issue companies are forcing with remote work. It puts the lie to any claim that compensation is based on business value. Do I not provide the same value to the business if I live in Omaha, Nebraska rather than San Jose, California?
But, the company has offices in Menlo Park, you're more valuable because you're closer to them, you say? But the company also has offices in Omaha, and a dozens other places around the world.
This isn't theoretical: companies have already said that pay scales for remote work will be tied to location, regardless of the contribution a person makes to the company.
Employers are going to have to reckon with the fact that if I can chose to live more comfortably, I can also choose to expect to compensated for my contributions rather than my postal code. Am I worth a six-figure salary or not?
any company that told me the value of my work is tied to the location at which i accomplish it would immediately hit a wall with me being willing to work there.
it simply is bonkers they've tried to pull that line out.
Agreed! Employees have to realize this is a very unique opportunity where the Companies have lost much of the strong arm wrenching used by what Human Resources has become. (basically, a way for companies to remind employees they are number and replaceable at any second.)
Companies are terrified that employees will flex some of these desires and flexibilities as not benefits, but open to as many jobs as possible. It removes their ability to keep employees focused on groveling in appreciation to be allowed to be in their presence.
If they let this go, employees may begin looking around and realizing why are the top 1% being paid ridiculous salaries with millions of shares given annually while whinning to unions, employees and anyone who can hear they have to continually cut benefits, pensions (what are those?) to barely keep profitable. (Question how can foreign companies continue to pay good benefits, have employee long term retention, etc. and not have it cause such damage to company profits?)
Employees have been trained and brainwashed for so long that only a scant few find the behvior described above as bonkers. Rather most have grown numb and believe it is normal for companies to tell them they deserve only what the company decides to toss their way.
It is bonkers they are pulling that line out, unfortunately it works very time.
Companies pay you minimum you're willing to accept. People don't have a habit of accepting jobs they know will cause their personal budgets to run red.
As an aside, its also a a reason why immigration from poor countries is so dangerous - people in the 2nd/3rd world have much simpler lifestyles and are thus willing to accept much lower salaries.
Note, I am from Ukraine, and I am speaking from personal experience moving to the USA. My American friends eat out all the time, buy very expensive home appliances, and tip extremely generously.
I live a frugal life since this is the standard of living I am accustomed to from my homeland. I was also willing to accept the lowest salary legally possible just to get into the country, which is already a huge upgrade to my income.
I also can't then change jobs easily, since the visa is tied to my employer.
If Tech workers want to maintain this state of demand, they should really oppose immigration from poor countries, such as requiring that the H1B visa has a maximum cap of 10% from any one country, which will have the effect of limiting the number of Indians who enter. Setting an additional maximum cap of 49% males from any one country would also be good to encourage gender diversity, instead of flooding in male migrants and then forcing companies to do it.
I see your point and agree with thing you’re saying in general. However, this impacts US workers due to the following:
- Visa workers paid less for a job with a higher rate of lay is illegal. The paperwork and justification to offer jobs to visa workers clearly makes the company liable for Fraud, Illegal Hiring, etc, etc. problem is to stop it things just happen:
- they must be turned in
- the US Govt must stop turning a blind eye
- companies at fault and convicted must face real consequences (fining a company $5 to $10M for this when savings over multiple positions over time has saved them 10x, 100x or more than the fine is useless
- CEO, CFO, etc jailed no less than 10 years per instance (10 year min time served)
- company fined out of business on 2nd or 3rd instance
NEXT…
- Americans can leave on lower lifestyle cost but refuse (tech high pay jobs, obviously not everyone)
- Americans need to be educated in jobs as well. Many times positions go infilled as no available US worker or the $150k per year doesn’t allow to live and eat in places like the Bay Area and Americans while forced to share housing here couldn’t imagine to share a room with 4 or 5 or 6 others.
Yes visa worker process needs to be massively reworked and politicians need to stop screwing Americans for lobbyists pouring money, etc at them to bend to the business needs. But a lot is also caused by Americans keeping up appearances and government allowing the cost of housing and living to be so out of control.
I am actually in a very similar position to yours and agree with most of your points. I also assume you are in tech. I don't know what the immigration situation as a whole is, but I'm not sure tech is a good example of immigrants driving salaries down. Also, isn't it technically illegal for a company to pay the immigrant less? Rather than imposing limits on immigration, which I think is what the average conservative mindset would push for, I'd argue that companies should be punished for exploiting their workers -- regardless of where they come from.
For what it's worth, I had the luck of working in an actual office, with walls and doors that close (it honestly sounds quite absurd to describe it this way; how low have we sunk?) and I prefer it very much that way for the same reasons described in your link.
And agree on the last statement, I had over-simplified that, though I did add the word "basically".
Wait, you get cubes? That would be an upgrade compared to the open offices I am talking about. I mean open-plan offices, where each worker gets a flat surface, a rolling filing cabinet, and a power outlet.
I'd almost go back to one job where I had a cube, because the cubes there were maybe 8' (2-1/2m) square, high-walled, enough desk space to spread out, and even a personal coat closet/locker with a door. Make it another foot or two high, put on a cover and a door that closes and I wouldn't care that it was made out of cheap fiberboard covered in ugly carpet.
I think those are rates per year - not per month. So maybe make that contribution to your paycheck per year - not per month. (Kinda surprised no one here knows that and hasn’t mentioned it yet)
Kinda changes your whole point. $10k/yr for a $400k/yr engineer is really not much at all. $10k/month is but $10k/yr is definitely not. Rounding error, basically.
And - personally - I might even take the $10k/yr pre-tax deduction for a nice private office. Certainly much cheaper than trying to do it at my own place.
I fondly remember days in my last office. It was ground-level in a small building, with a window that faced a small tree-lined space behind the building. I could sit at my desk and think while watching the birds and squirrels, and on a wintry day the snow would hang on the leaves.
Microsoft used to provide offices but has been slowly doing away with them in favor of open office spaces. From what I understand, any new buildings they construct are designed around open offices.
While I totally agree with what you just said. "Recent research" part is dangerous and somehow works in favor employers overall. It is for very simple reason that employers can sponsor vastly more research that can save business a penny while making employees' life miserable along the way.
Knowledge is power. Research has certainly been turned to socially questionable ends. See, for example, the iffy research churned out by the tobacco companies to counter the overwhelming evidence that smoking causes cancer, heart disease, and a host of other issues.
While I truly do appreciate the cooperative tone, as someone who never intends to set foot in an office again except by choice (outside of onboarding), I think this is a rare event that has reduced the power asymmetry and should be taken advantage of.
How do we make execs more comfortable? Simple, we make it so they have no choice to be uncomfortable with. Allow full remote or lose a significant portion of your workforce in the middle of a hiring crunch with already existing insane hiring demand. This may not play at Apple, for example, but it’s what I’ve already seen play out at my company (including for me specifically) and I see no reason it wouldn’t work at any non-FANG. It’s not a bluff or bluster, I’d leave if my company doubled down on forcing people back on a hybrid schedule and truthfully I may leave anyway over frustration with their initial attempts to do so despite exempting me and others.
My team and office is in a very precarious position with two of our best engineers having left over the initial attempts to force hybrid. I truly think if it was forced again my the fallout may be fatal for my team.
I left a C level position over going back into the office even 2 days a week. There were plenty of options to go to an all remote company - I had three offers before choosing where I would go. There are just a ton of permanently remote jobs out there at the moment.
> While I truly do appreciate the cooperative tone, as someone who never intends to set foot in an office again except by choice (outside of onboarding), I think this is a rare event that has reduced the power asymmetry and should be taken advantage of.
Why do you assume that this won't result in you being replaced?
Sure, employers are paying a premium for remote work for the moment. That's a great demand right now and you absolutely should take advantage of that. Supply will adjust to compensate--developers willing to take less are flocking into the system. Companies are adjusting to be able to deal with workers not in their local jurisdictions.
Once that shakes out (and it will happen quicker than you think)--why shouldn't I lay off your expensive salary? If you can be completely remote, what value do you bring over someone else completely remote who is a bit cheaper? This is the classic race to the bottom problem.
Apparently programmers learned nothing from outsourcing. Management doesn't really care about how good you are. Most programmers aren't geniuses working on world shattering problems. They're doing the same thing that a thousand other programmers have done before.
The only people likely to survive this well are, in fact, the people who have a genuine need to be in the office.
Well said, I do want to point out that some of those who want to go back "to be surrounded by their coworkers" might be missing the fact that those who don't want to back might be because they don't want to be surrounded by their coworkers; they want to be surrounded by people they choose to have relationships with, not ones foisted upon them.
I’m a generally introverted person who prefers to work from home and performs better either at home or with a private office.
That said, I have worked for many different companies, and rarely felt like working relationships were ‘foisted’ upon me.
I generally enjoyed interacting with colleagues because we were working towards a common goal - i.e. we had something meaningful which we cared about in common.
The one company where this wasn’t true had a cultural separation between product and infrastructure engineering, with a lack of mutual respect that flowed from the top of the organization.
My point is that if people don’t feel common purpose with their coworker that enables them to find satisfaction in their working relationships, that points to a company culture problem.
How many companies would you estimate have cultures with such problems? If they're quite numerous, then it seems to me that remote work removes a high risk of landing into an unsatisfying role while paying the price for having to still go to the office -- this lack of satisfaction is much easier to deal with at home where one doesn't have to pretend to be engaged so long as work gets done.
I agree with you in that at the company with the culture issue, working from home was ultimately the only way I could be productive and not hate my job. I did it for a while before ultimately leaving.
However it is definitely not a solution to an actual culture problem. Ideally, working from home should be a choice because it suits the individual’s needs, not a way to separate from dysfunction.
I think culture problems are quite common. Plenty of people report them, on the other hand I haven’t run into them all that often, and there are many people here who report reasonable cultures.
Yes. I am a young single guy who is not really a fan of the office. A lot of that is simply that have already filled all my available relationship time.
Adding new people requires removing other people or reducing my productivity to make more time available.
“Filled your relationship time”? What are you expecting these coworker relationships to be? Dates? They’re coworkers. I’ve rarely interacted with coworkers outside of work.
Also, I don’t think you’re going to have much of a problem socializing if you’re going around humblebragging about how you’ve optimized your work and personal time for peak employee performance.
I am defining “relationship” more broadly to encompass all my human (and dog in my case) relationships.
I am not humblebragging about optimization. I have 24 hours in a day. They are generally all spoken for, meaning that for something to go in, something else must go out.
I don't understand how (and I think I've seen people implying it a lot besides you) office socialization takes away from socialization with other people elsewhere.
Don't you, like, have to work during those hours regardless of your environment? Even working for the government, they kind of expect that.
You said you were young, so let this old person give you some advice. If you think interacting with coworkers is opposed to being a productive employee, you’re gravely mistaken. Also if you think you need to optimally schedule every day to maximize work, you need to rethink your life.
> If you think interacting with coworkers is opposed to being a productive employee
Being productive is as much a waste of my time as interacting with coworkers.
I basically have every day mostly free because I'm just productive Enough and work remote. I am leaving an insane amount of (for-employer) productivity on the table and instead giving myself that productivity.
Didn't they choose their jobs, and with that, their co-workers?
I'd like to see them argue "I don't want to come to the office because I don't like to be surrounded by people like you" as well. Is that a common argument?
I think people who are unhappy with their working conditions should just look for another job. It's fine to try to convince bosses that changes would be beneficial, but I don't have much sympathy for all the whining.
I see what you mean, but I think there is a bit of a hidden fallacy here. Work is work for many people and not a fun place to socialize, despite this common and widespread idea that for some reason we should be doing the latter. Also, most people do not even get to choose their co-workers anyway. So it's not that one absolutely dreads being around their co-workers, but rather, it just boils down to one question: where you want to be glued to a chair? In a shitty cube in an open space office where you are bombarded by distractions after a 45min commute of smoking exhaust gas and air pollution from traffic, or at home, where none of the just mentioned conditions exist?
I kind of concur with the original comment too. Single guys in their 20s might want to go back to socialize, perhaps driven by this idea of socializing at work. Guys in their 30s, low on kool-aid reserves, no kids but maybe partner, might prefer to stay at home. Once the kids show up, now you have an external force that might push you back into the office. Guy in his 50s with grown-up kids? He's having a hell of a blast retiring in a remote cabin while cashing in on the big bucks. Unless he is a VP or a micro-manager; then he might be miserable for his inability to crush people's lives remotely.
I have nothing against work just being work, but I think there are different types of companies for a reason. If you want work to just be work, you can choose a company that treats work just as work and doesn't expect you to become one big family.
Like if you give the example of young people and old people - fair enough, then maybe young people are better of looking for jobs where they work together with other young people, and people in their 50ies are better off in jobs with other old people.
Ultimately companies are not created for the benefit of employees, but to create stuff. They try to be good to employees to be able to attract and keep talented staff.
> Didn't they choose their jobs, and with that, their co-workers?
What do you mean? Did they tell you about guy with questionable hygiene and that other guy with chronic allergy that makes him cough all day long during your interview?
I agree that some of radical pro-WFH people might seem entitled, but I think in reality they just too fed up with open-spaces and commute and see pandemic as their last chance to normalize WFH across the industry. Also, I honestly don't see why it is such a big deal to let every team decide how they want to work.
Or they can continue to argue for work from home. Lots of people are not "people" extrovert types and prefer working solo with only a bit of contact with other people. It doesn't matter who the other people are.
Agree __100%__. Now that it is proven what we've already known for a very long time (as a programmer I have no business sitting in an office), let's just not waste our time anymore.
There's wisdom in this comment. But note that the dynamics of the conversation are a function of company culture. "Make execs comfortable" is a reflection of culture.
Another path is to simply hold leaders accountable for output rather than working style. After all, is it acceptable for a team to under-deliver if they worked hard & worked in the office? Usually not. Working in the office is not sufficient to produce the right output.
If you hold leaders accountable for output, you can then let them decide how their team will work. It's way easier to solve this problem in a discussion among 5 team members than in a written policy for 500 or 5000.
One last tip: collaborating is much easier when a team is 100% remote or 100% in the office, but split is much harder. When everyone is remote all communication must be available remotely (and typically written). When everyone is in the office, it's easy to swivel the chairs around for a quick impromptu chat. But impromptu chats leave out the people who aren't there - that's why half local and half remote is harder.
Yes, you are right in holding leaders accountable. But I feel in my experience leadership has mafia like power over employees. IN this situation what's theirs is theirs but what's mine is always up for negotiation.
> One last tip: collaborating is much easier when a team is 100% remote or 100% in the office, but split is much harder.
While this maybe true for best outcomes. IMO even flexible work policy is better for people like me who are stuck in hellish commutes 5 days a week. 2-3 days in office is similar outcome and avoiding 3 hr /day commute times for couple of days a week.
> it's easy to swivel the chairs around for a quick impromptu chat.
This used to be true for me also 5-7 years back. However lately all important tech decisions comes from "enterprise architects" and what's left is sufficient for a webex call.
Also in my case team is distributed and of course travel is not approved for lowly engineers to have face to face collaboration. But nonetheless commute is mandatory. So the rule seems collaborate with remote co-workers but only from office.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but a few observations:
1) Starting remote seems tougher than going remote. It’s a bit rough on families but maybe an extended in person onboarding trip is a good compromise.
2) Face to face connections have to be renewed every once in a while. Co-location trips are going to become a cost of being remote, I think.
3) Some people come across badly over video. Not sure if there’s some kind a training and/or technological answer but it’s a problem and if it can’t be solved those people are not going to thrive remote even if everything else lines up.
4) All other things being equal the relationship is always going to be more transactional for remote workers. It’s just human nature to feel closer to people you regularly bump into and eat meals with.
That’s not necessarily a horrible thing in an industry that blurs the line between work and life, but it does mean you need to be on the top of your game in terms of being productive and making sure people know it.
I started a job remotely. A lot of the problems with remote onboarding to me were because of broken things that conversations could quickly fix, making fixing it properly too onerous.
For example, when I was setting up my local environment I needed a token. What token? Not specified. So I had to ask someone else and wait for a reply. It turns out I could have gotten the token myself.
In a prior job, I needed at least 10 instructions from senior developers on setting up my local environment as the readme was very out of date. It caused a lot of problems for the next guy coming on board.
That’s the kind of thing that can and should be fixed by every person that gets onboarded updating the onboarding docs.
The thing I find more problematic with remote onboarding followed by remote work is that there’s no relationship building. There needs to be some play in the joints for a team to work. Getting to know teammates as real people, and not just an image on a screen and some IM messages, makes it more likely you will give them the benefit of the doubt.
> Many of these problems seem solvable without forcing employees who want to work remote to come in.
Agreed. Most of the issues that you highlighted that cause employees to prefer being in-office (loneliness, children and other distractions at home, work/life balance) are not attributable to being remote per se. Exacerbated by it, sure. But we should probably be addressing those problems head-on in a more intentional way.
For instance, I've seen a lot of younger devs opining about wanting to go back to the office to reinvigorate their sense of social participation. But I'm not sure that's something we should be encouraging. (It actually runs counter to the work/life balance problem you mentioned.) Compared to cultivating friendships outside of the office, socializing at work is empty calories.
> (It actually runs counter to the work/life balance problem you mentioned
I’m not an old fart but I’m on my way. I find is brilliant to talk about house repairs and kids and vacation tips with my colleagues. It really brings some chill to an otherwise chaotic day in an absolutely volatile industry.
I meet with my team once a day for 15-20 mins, and once a week for a full hour. I meet with each of the team leads once a week for a half hour. I meet with my boss once a week for an hour.
This is important for a few reasons:
1. Keeping coordinated with work. We get that out of the way first.
2. Replacing the work-type water cooler conversation. There’s a lot of problems, random thoughts and questions, etc that may never rise to the level of scheduling an actual meeting but are valuable to resolve. The meeting is already there and the time is already spent, so the barrier and cost to bringing these up are nil. This has led to a lot of improvements and moving things forward in a way they wouldn’t have been otherwise.
3. Personal connection. Once we’ve got the work sorted out, just hang out and chat for a few minutes about all the things you’ve mentioned.
I spend like 5-6 hours a week on meetings like this, just beginning/end of day so it’s not a interruption to anyone and everyone I’ve asked finds these meetings valuable.
We’ve had to onboard a lot of people since we went remote and I’ve developed good working and personal relationships with many of them. And I still get the chance to ramble about home repairs and kids.
I work currently in distributed team and if you want water cooler chat you can join status meeting some half an hour before and have that. There is always someone online already.
> wanting to go back to the office to reinvigorate their sense of social participation. But I'm not sure that's something we should be encouraging. (It actually runs counter to the work/life balance problem you mentioned.)
I have seen this multiple times already - overtime and long hours that are largely composed of socialization in disguise or very ineffective work. Mostly serving as a way to fill in void or have someone to talk to.
> How do we make our execs feel more comfortable to let those who want to work home do so? How do we make it so easy that no exec has to worry about losing their job because they agreed to something that didn’t use to be normal?
Looks like you work for a relatively good company. Others have, for example, threatened with dropping health insurance unless the workers come back -- yes, in the middle of a pandemic. I am not sure those execs care about how you make them feel. Therefore, my answer to your question, is to organize and fight back. It's a class struggle, not a happy conversation.
Agreed, this is the struggle. Look at whats being asked here, its frankly absurd:
How do we make our execs feel more comfortable ...
How do we make it so easy that no exec has to worry ...
Some of the corporations I've worked, the execs seemed to absolutely revel in their ability to make their employees uncomfortable and worried. I give not one whit to their comfort and worries so long as they act like sociopaths or worse. This class of people hasn't had to worry in a generation. Hasn't been uncomfortable in decades.
So the pandemic reveals the charade, and we're just supposed to all agree that is isn't a charade and go back to acting like good human resources? We have been so overworked, for so long, that we get a long moment to rest -- the pandemic -- and realize the culture, the society, its just awful. What have these stewards of the economy given us, and guided us toward? Empty lives, endless work, a seemingly dying ecosystem, endless consumption, pointless entertainment.
This isn't class struggle, its class war. A war the lower class is clearly already losing.
I am with you 200%. Just giving the original poster the benefit of doubt.
I think the post makes the mistake of assuming that we are one equal footing with corporate execs and that this is, somehow, a conversation. But let's just give them room to expand on their thoughts.
> Things seem to be hardest for younger single employees who don’t always have great work from home environments and are also sometimes lonely. Also, some of my coworkers with kids are having a hard time being productive with pressures from kids or spouses that don’t respect the working from home boundaries.
I agree this is a reality and has to be considered.
But we need to acknowledge that this is people's personal problems coming into the workplace. If there is going to be a compromise, at some point I'm going to at least want it acknowledged that Bob's personal problems are the reason I can no longer interact with my new born baby a few time throughout the day, and will thus spend significantly less time with them during this brief phase of their life. I also want it acknowledged that Bob's personal problems are the reason my risk of early death in a car accident are greatly increased. Otherwise, I'm going to feel that any "compromise" is forced.
Don't you find it selfish that someone is forced to start commuting to office again, only because somebody wanted to be surrounded by coworkers?
I've been fully remote since 2010, and I would be completely frustrated if I was told "You need to sit at the office now, because John is feeling different in half-empty office"
Let’s not forget all of the pollution that rush hour traffic entails. Even if you drive an EV, there’s still the prospect of pollution from tires.
Everyone likes to talk about supporting efforts for climate change until they are presented with an actionable choice that negatively affects their personal habits.
What does “team” mean when the technology allows you to build perfectly good software by exchanging short, on-topic, asynchronous messages with a rotating cast of anonymous strangers?
I don’t think it’s necessary to be physically present to build software, but if you do go remote, go all the way. Trying to build a sense of camaraderie over Zoom is a tragic farce.
My team is distributed around the US. A number of people joined after the pandemic started, which forced the firm to go from fully in-house to fully-remote overnight.
Our experience is that a team that works together to solve problems builds camaraderie. The tools and tech are all there and very easy and affordable.
A few weeks ago we met up for lunch after being away from each other for over a year. Nothing about our meeting gave us the impression that we'd grown apart from working remotely.
Of course, the size of your investment and your returns may vary.
You don't need to work from home we can find/create spaces near your with like minded people in your community.
Productivity is not the main reason big tech want people back to cubicles. They need to justify the spaceship shaped offices they built and also they need keep our consumption high. As describe in this post that's also trending on HN [0], the best way to do this is to remove spare time on our lives (ex: long commutes). https://www.raptitude.com/2010/07/your-lifestyle-has-already...
I've very much liked what my company/team/office is doing so far:
1. No hard rules on when to be in the office, simply that you must be close enough to make it into the office when you need to.
2. All meetings are remote first unless everyone is in the office (protects disadvantaging people who don't choose to come in)
3. A slack channel for people to coordinate when they will be in the office. This is big as it means that people can group together when they want to socialize easily, so it's 20 people in on one day vs 4 diff people in a day in a week. I've seen team coordinate this as well, often with social activities after.
4. Cross-team social events that encourage people to go into the office without having any professional consequences when you don't come in. In person hackathons, a many game long Catan tournament, etc.
I think there's much more to sort out, but generally this seems to have few complaints. Everyone gives up a little here, but it is very flexible. Some examples:
- The people who want to be in for social reasons can be
- Those who work better in an office / separation from home can come in whenever they want
- Have a new hire? Everyone can try to come in for the first week to help onboard and get to know people, then go back to mainly remote.
- The people who want full remote get most of what they want and don't get professionally disadvantaged by not being in the literal room. The only downside is having to be near an office, but they can easily do a few weeks working from completely remote location X still.
I think many full remote people who want to get out of major cities will have qualms with the last one, but I think those people are looking for fully remote companies without any hybrid model. I'm all for that existing and becoming more popular, but I think we have to realize that the hybrid model simply can't fully accommodate these people, and the answer is to split our models. One open question then is can you split that model at a team/org level, or does it have to be at the company level?
The return on investment in physical presence is conversations that aren’t mediated by Zoom. If you’re going to have a rule of using Zoom anyway, there’s no point.
I think you're significantly underestimating the value of many other aspects:
- Things that happen outside of meetings, which are what the remote-video rule is for, not everything categorically. e.g. debugging together when in, white-boarding, the quick desk visit, etc. As I said, teams can (and do) coordinate to come in on the same day
- Socially, the return being happier workers, better teamwork to fall back on when you're remote, etc.
- The people who do not have a good home office setup for many various reasons that affect both young and old.
There are countless benefits, there's no magical "this is the reason to be in the office" that you can reduce to. The "video conferencing by default" rule is the tradeoff for not disadvantaging people who want to retain their less frequent office time schedule of the pandemic.
I really appreciated how this captures the varied perspectives on remote vs. in-office work in a nuanced way.
I also think you hit the nail on the head in explaining the incentives and default behavior we’ve seen from executives. Before the pandemic, I heard the same explanation for open office plans, despite intense dislike from many: “well, around 50% don’t like this, but we can’t please everyone.”
The only solution I can think of is not mandating a single solution. Allowing individuals/teams to choose what works best for them is more complicated and risky, but also offers the greatest potential. I’m not sure there’s a way to make execs feel more comfortable with this approach though. It is risky, and it requires a lot of trust.
I’m hopeful as more companies take the leap to flexible remote policies, the results will speak for themselves. If the fears among the more conservative/risk-averse execs aren’t realized, opinions may soften. At the same time, I’m expecting there will be enough anecdotes to serve as “evidence” for any staunchly-held perspective.
I've been going back to the office 3 days a week and am loving it. I find it much easier to get into deep work, put in longer days, and maximizing my productivity.
The two wfh days become almost half days due to banked up hours while in the office.
I find it astonishing that people think sitting in their own homes all week is reasonable behavior for an adult, let alone a behavior that others should accommodate.
That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be your home. You could be at the park or outdoor restaurant. If you’re lucky enough, it could be your backyard. The freedom to choose where you work is nice.
I don’t see why those that want to work remotely need to suppress their needs for those that do not. It’s one thing to have the freedom to choose the option you’re comfortable with, but to force it on those unwilling to so doesn’t seem right.
You’re right that it won’t be the same. We’re past the point where everyone being in the office was the unquestioned norm because we never really tried mass remote work on a large scale. But we have now, and it worked just fine.
Companies and employees need to figure out solutions that don’t involve forcing people to do something they don’t like just to “get back to where we were”.
Give management a new role: ‘make the office worth going to’
e.g. no meetings in dusty conference rooms that could be done remote, instead, actual interactive events that are occasional but useful for relationship building and collaboration.
The future of going in 5 days a week is gone, the pandemic and the internet killed that. When you do get the team to go in, make it worth it.
What I think you've hit on brilliantly here, that a lot of companies seem to be having trouble implementing, is there is no one size fits all policy.
This is an incredibly difficult thing for management to implement and write policy for. Now, if you look at my previous posts, I'm known to have made fun of a bloated middle management structure cough once or twice, but in this very specific case, it might actually be able to be used to the benefit of the employees. Using that middle management to reach out, communicate and facilitate the needs and wants while the infrastructure is in place can make a truly hybrid structure work for everyone and review based on work performed, not time in office (like it should be, anyway - though generally is).
Exactly - different strokes for different folks. Therefore, there is no one size fits all approach. The same was true before the pandemic - 100% in office was not ideal for everyone.
Mature in-office companies - generally larger companies with established business models and median employee tenures of 5+ years - have it the most difficult. Some may have rapidly adjusted during the pandemic. But other in-office companies will not adapt so quickly - people were hired into a certain culture, got used to it, build core processes, systems, workstyles etc. Even if in-office wasn't ideal for them, and it wouldn't have been for all of them, it is ingrained. For those companies, if they choose to go hybrid or remote now because they feel it makes more sense long term, they still may have a multi-year adjustment, and that may include losing some people and gaining others. So, if you are one of those companies, this may represent a massive refactoring type decision and the complex systems between people and processes can be difficult to refactor.
Would love to hear from folks at these types of companies (we have always been remote-first so can't really put ourselves in their shoes) who are successfully pulling off that refactoring.
This looks like balanced and well articulated position. Would be nice if executives of big companies stop being hypocrites and provided such explanations to their employees instead of "bUt mUh cOllAbOrAtIvE cUltUrE!!1" and "performance gotten approximately 3 billion times worse since WFH started".
Oh, I see. And I want to be surrounded by family and friends. Coworkers are....well, coworkers.
> going back while the majority of the team is remote is not the same
Going back while I don't want to go back is not only not the same, it is __completely different__
> kids or spouses that don’t respect the working from home boundaries
Now, this is the problem of the worker. Just because person X can't reason with their family shouldn't mean that __I__ have to go into an office.
> relied on a commute to tell their brain the work day is over
This makes absolutely no sense. If they want a commute they can go to a coworking space. Commute itself is the reason why I __will never__ go to an office again. I'm not gonna waste a minute on something I'm not getting paid for.
> How do we make our execs feel more comfortable
Why would I want that? There are many more employees than execs. Why wouldn't we want to focus on making the employees comfortable so that they can perform well?
> no exec has to worry about losing their job because they agreed to something that didn’t use to be normal
Another option is to allow either 2-days home, 3-in office... or 3-days home and 2-days in... but maybe make it so that only wednesday is the only day where everyone has to be in office....
However - how many people have moved away from a commutable distance during the 1 year WFH period?
With employers being much fewer, the no-poach stuff, etc. this is a bad solution. Employers have always been more organized and holding more market power than employees.
Some tech jobs are only available in a handful of companies that were a part of the cartel. Some of us took the bet that a big investment in education in one of these specialties would pay off. The cartel effectively suppressed the pay off. Now these companies are complaining that the supply of specialists has dried up.
With recent limits on H1B, those companies aren’t wrong to say that the supply has dried up. That said, it means we have more leverage when it comes to remote work. If it means changing companies, so be it.
US companies are now being hoisted by their own petard.
There are not that many exploitable smart people left, even internationally. In my applied research niche they already hired internationally and the ability was rare, being high functioning autistic was basically a prerequisite. Supply dried up because these people have better options now; start ups, finance, crypto, independent scientists, more promising companies in their home countries.
It’s much easier for me to change companies than for companies to change. I’ve been remote for 7 years and will retire long before going back to an office.
Are you sure? The most I've seen on job boards are about 200 to 400 remote companies. Even assuming a magnitude more no more than a couple thousand. Your assumption on literal numbers are off and need significant correction.
There are estimated 10,7 million companies in the US. US has roughly 1/ world's GDP, so we can estimate that there are at least 40 million companies in the world (a figure around 100M+ looks more realistic estimate to me, but let's stick to 40M).
Simple DDG search [1] says that somewhere around 45-80% of companies are pro-remote. Which definitely puts the number of such companies into TENS of millions.
> it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office.
Do you mean the majority? Because that is not true. The percentage of employees that want to go back and that doesn't want to go back are both significant and comparable. The question, as you say, is how to make everyone happy, but the meta-question is, does everyone really need to be happy?
A hybrid solution makes the "officer"s partially happy but non-"officer"s completely unhappy. A flexible solution makes officers happy and at advantage, but non-officers at a career disadvantage for being deprived of, among other good things, also all the schmoozing, self-marketing etc that takes place.
Also the breakdown of the "employees" is important. Not just execs but also mid-managers seem to be particularly unhappy with current setup because having the self-organizing IC to IC interactions reduced, managers' organization and coordination skills have been put under serious test. I am not saying only bad managers want RTO, but their shortcomings do get foregrounded more.
> Finally, there will always be under-performers who are desperately searching for a scape goat when they fail to deliver.
I think this is another problem of the managers' performance. Now it is up to their capabilities to steer up or weed out those chronic scape-goaters.
Also I think it is very important to operationalize the term "under-performer". There is a reason for having performance tiers and their proportionate rewards; anyone who is not operating at full-performance can be considered an under-performer, but that is OK and the employee's choice unless they are in the lowest tier.
That's what most ICs have been wising up to; it is easier to not cave into the peer pressure of an office environment to feel you always have to perform at top. You can totally pick a tier and have a proportionate work performance in comparison to your life performance, i.e. your other life goals. For the first time in a while a great majority of employees got a feel of what is to be not living for work.
I mean, this is not even just tech, eg. restaurant workers have been quitting disproportionately, due to many things, but also for realizing they just don't need to put up with the unnecessary pressure and rude clients.
> The trick is for executives to wrangle all of these new challenges at once... People haven’t been trained how to make this new world work... How do we make our execs feel more comfortable to let those who want to work home do so?
That is literally their job to handle and steer the ship under ambiguous conditions.
I absolutely don't think it is anyone's but their burden to find a working solution. If they find it too stressful, they can quit, or take comfort in their exec salaries.
Since when does significant mean majority? It means significant; ie nontrivial; a number you can't ignore.
I think the comment is asking the HN community for potential suggestions/solutions that allow for the remote-loving crowd and the office-loving crowd to coexist (presumably in a single company), since their needs are a little at odds with one another.
Majority by definition implies significance, and I wanted to clarify they weren’t meaning majority. I think I am missing the point you’re trying to make.
Majority implies significance, but significance doesn't imply majority. It felt like you were projecting something onto the comment that wasn't actually there. But I understand where you're coming from.
If you work at one of these companies and are frustrated by the decision to return to the office, I encourage you to seriously consider leaving to pursue a remote-first career. Not only to send a message, but also because there are many great remote opportunities out there right now.
Ironically I had this battle with Google pre-COVID back in 2019. I was worn down by my commute and itching for a change of environment, but I liked my team and my project. I figured I’d push for full remote since the sell seemed obvious: either I stop working for you and you get zero value from me, or you let me work remotely and you continue to get value from me (more value, I argued). I put forth a list of concessions to address their concerns (I’ll commit to stable online hours, I’ll create a virtual desk in the form of an always-on voice or video call, I’ll forfeit remote if my performance rating is anything below “exceeds expectations”). After weeks of back and forth meetings, the final response was: we can’t give you full remote because then everyone will want it. How about 3 days in 2 days out?
I left a month later, did some traveling, then started working as a remote freelancer. Despite no free food, no benefits, no in-office massages, I have zero regrets. It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for my overall well-being. And most recently I took a full-time position at a fully remote company (as in no offices at all) with better comp and benefits than what I had at Google.
The more we actually leave to pursue remote, the more these opportunities will arise.
DM me if your company is hiring! I’m happy where I’m at (I left my previous workplace for the same reasons as you mentioned, and now work fully-remotely), but I’m always open to new opportunities. My current company is not fully-remote; my team is, but others are hybrid.
> And most recently I took a full-time position at a fully remote company (as in no offices at all) with better comp and benefits than what I had at Google.
Really? What company pays more than Google and is full remote like that? I’m not saying that they don’t exist but the $400k bar is hard for most remote companies to swallow.
How are you getting paid more than Google if they're a private company? Are they paying $400k liquid? Monopoly money stocks cannot be factored in as real liquid comp unless you can actually liquidate it. If this is a known company to IPO in a year or something then maybe you can make an argument but... I don't think they're comparable, IMO.
Yes, liquid comp (salary+bonus) exceeds my total Google comp (salary+bonus+equity). I should qualify this by saying I left Google as an L4 SWE and I'm starting at this company as an engineering manager, so that factors in. But FWIW I got an offer for a tech lead position at another all-remote company, and it matched my Google total comp with just salary+bonus as well.
"There is no apparent justification for resisting remote work besides a sort of management control-freak insecurity, proponents argue."
This seems naive, disingenuous, or just lazy reporting. In my experience, neither "management" nor "workers" are monolithic blocks. Some are in favor of more WFH, some not.
Most people I work with want to return to the office or are indifferent. Reasons cited include, too many distractions at home (kids/family), work/life structure (more below), team social interaction, improved face to face collaboration & mentoring (new hires), office perks, and so on.
Not everyone has the discipline, independence, and communication skills necessary to be successful at WFH. In my experience, WFH is especially challenging for many early career individuals.
We should be realistic about human nature and organizational dynamics. There are significant down sides to teams if some people are in person and some are remote. The remote people will inevitably miss out on many in person / adhoc conversations. Having less information than peers can hurt job performance. This leads to people feeling like second class employees in the long run. We saw the same thing with remote employees pre COVID.
I say all this as someone who is generally in favor of WFH.
Remote teams need to work & communicate differently from in person teams to be successful. For example, we spend a lot more time on written communication (docs, emails, chat, etc) compared to in-person adhoc desk/whiteboard conversations.
I think the more reasonable organizational approach is to have fully remote teams and fully in person teams. This enables everyone to get roughly what they want/need. Team processes and expectations can be tailored to the team's situation.
The big question then becomes, how do companies refactor large orgs into remote and in person teams? My guess is that it's going to involve a lot of team changes and disruption to the org. This is likely why sr. managers are trying to make the transition in a slow, controlled way.
I came out of retirement last fall for a while to work at an AI startup. One of the really nice things about the all-remote setup was randomly assigned long virtual coffee breaks every week. Given that I had a lot of samples (N ~= 50) of co-workers opinions on remote vs. in office work, I feel comfortable making a generalization: young single people mostly wanted to go back to the office while people in relationships and kids at home (especially young children) really liked the flexibility and extra family time that remote work affords.
"randomly assigned long virtual coffee breaks every week"
Really? As in you and someone else are each assigned a meeting with each other on Zoom (or whatever) at a given time? Would your co-workers not socialize, otherwise? It sounds like it was a positive experience for you, which is great.
The number of people on the Zoom virtual coffees were nominally 5 people, but in practice, 2 to 4 people were able to attend on average.
Yes, I did enjoy this a lot. Off topic, but when I retired (again) after this gig, I re-started offering my free mentoring service (1 hour talk on the phone or Zoom, some people just want to exchange emails) again, and have enjoyed helping people.
>young single people mostly wanted to go back to the office
I realize that this is an anecdote, but as a young(ish) single person, this doesn't match up with my experience at all. Half our team is out of state, and I've never heard anybody express a desire to come in state to work at the office.
I wonder how much of it is driven by the company leadership owning very expensive real estate that would lose a lot of value once tech workers are not forced to spend money into those rental or real estate markets.
It's probably, to some degree, a mixture of both. Rarely ever do decision makers not factor their own interests into their decision making process or skew/distort the situation to their advantage in some way so it's not as clearly linked to their self-interest.
As others have said, it is likely the companies themselves owning giant, expensive, heavily-branded campuses that weren't designed with modularity and reselling in mind.
However, making decisions based on this is a pretty classic sunk-cost fallacy. The cost of continuing to use the campus won't be any higher because it's half-empty.
This is why zoning is really bad. Those company could have converted some of those space into housing. Provide it to the employee as benefit for cheap/free. I believe quite significant number of employee would happily live on campus.
One way, the company could maybe give some amount of money to help with the moving out cost or maybe allow for the employee to stay for a bit longer while they looking for new place to live.
What I mean by conversion including demolishing the office building and building apartment instead not just retrofit existing office building to be a living space.
So I don’t think this has to do with executives protecting home values. It might be about the business protecting the value of office buildings, though - if they own them, and don’t rent, anyway.
0 interest rate as well as all the stimulus money flowing through the economy. People are looking for places to put their money to not lose out to inflation and most investments reached all time highs already. So investors are looking for pretty much anything to buy - look at crypto (even shitcoins gained tons of value), real estate around the world, etc... in addition to equity markets.
This is an interesting angle I hadn’t considered but I think their net worth is likely pretty diversified. If not then weighted on stocks over real estate.
Can't they just sell real estate? I mean, remote working is not a thing for the vast majority of jobs out there, so office space is still a valuable asset. So if you are in IT and have offices that are not going to be used (because your employees want to work from home) then just sell/rent it to other companies in which their employees cannot work from home.
For smaller companies this is likely feasible. But for Apple/Google/etc, I imagine there were a lot of architectural / design decisions that went into their campuses that assumed a single monolithic tenant working in a largely open-office format.
That probably makes those spaces harder to sell/rent. It's unlikely they'll find a single large buyer with the same needs. They'd probably have redesign the campuses a bit to better support multiple tenants.
Those companies have massive amount of plain office space too. Like, Apple has half the office space in Cupertino and plenty more in Sunnyvale. They are certainly not fretting about suddenly having too much spaceship on their hands.
This just in, "Dear fulfillment center staff, you now have access to free coffee, a gym, and a great cafeteria but will still need to urinate in bottles to meet expectations. If you clock in early you can grab a free coffee! Just think of it as a beautiful environment for you to slave away in, your industry peers will be envious of all the perks you have access to but can never enjoy." --Amazon Logistics Management
To be fair, Apple and Google have tons, tons, and tons of real estate in the Bay Area, not to mention globally. They would probably sell those other non-iconic "basic office buildings" before thinking about selling their main campuses. I mean if you drive through Mountain View and Cupertino, there are entire streets where every building is a Google or Apple building. Plenty for them to sell and still keep their headquarters.
Media playing stupid "war" stories again. They only like click bait stories that sell news, not stories that tell the whole picture.
There are millions of small variations in this "war", to the point that it is not even a war, but markets being creative in their own way.
There are the startups in high paying areas that hire remotes for a fraction of the salary they'd have to pay locally.
There are the people with skills extremely rare that can demand remote only.
There are the contract workers or consultants in one area of expertise.
If, from the start you say no to FAANG and Microsoft you'll find lower salaries but a lot more in interesting opportunities.
I work remote for a startup in Europe. The salary is not Berlin/Zurich/Paris high but allows me to live like a king in the Canadian Prairies. Without effort I can save 40% of it for retirement. And also I can truly make a difference in the company. Couldn't be happier.
This makes it sound like these 3 are somewhat equivalent in terms of compensation in terms of salary, but to be clear, they're really not, as a quick look at levels.fyi indicates.
> Without effort I can save 40% of it for retirement.
I've been reading a bit about personal finances lately, and I realized that being able to save x% only tells you part of the story. More precisely, the comparison between two places in terms of saving rates are only relevant if the only two scenarios are to remain in one place or the other indefinitely. Let's say you want to retire in Berlin eventually, you might be better off saving 10% working in SV than saving 40% working in Paris. If you're flexible about where you'll retire, you should maximize the nominal amount you're saving.
Company I work for is remote-only and has been for years.
Since they already had that in place the pandemic didn't really hit them from an organisational point of view.
The reason I was so interested in the job (other than the fact the work is interesting) was because they where remote-only before pandemic - so there was no risk of "right, it's over, everyone back in the building".
I'm not sure what someone would have to offer me at this point to get me back in an office tbh.
Working how you want, with everything setup how you want is just a no-brainer.
Of course there are challenges to working remotely but on balance they are no worse (or somewhat better) than working on site.
YMMV, but I've never not had reasonably high-quality equipment in an office. When one startup went under, I bought my set of it and now it is in my home office. It is a significant contributing factor to really, really wanting to work remotely now, because there isn't a lot of "up" for me on that front.
"I believe this narrative is being funded by the commercial real spectate industry. They are absolutely fucked. Like Wile E Coyote running over a cliff, they are desperate to not look down. In December 2019, I asked some guys in wealth management, what’s a hot tip, and they were all about Commercial Real Estate, it never goes down! I laughed, but then wondered, what would make it go down? Anyway, that question is now answered.
I’ve been working with a company that have done studies on remote work, at the beginning 4% of employees wanted to work from the office 100% of the time. 6 months later it was 2%."
So who's funding this ArsTechnica WFH narrative then? Who's the evil overlord trying to benefit driving this "war" narrative when there's so many open WFH positions?
The problem is they built campuses and feel stupid about devaluing them. Combine that with a backwards mindset and, for most companies, the situation becomes clear.
You mean executives didn't need to build giant monuments to themselves they can sit in and command from upon high down for whatever idea they justified it with to attract talent and they only needed to, I don't know, compensate people adequately with reasonable work life balance to retain people, perhaps with a mixture of interesting work to attract some types of talent?
There is no way any of the FANG companies care about keeping their campuses occupied for the sole purpose of justifying their costs. If remote work resulted in happier employees and by extension more productive employees that trade-off would be a no-brainer. The real reason is they genuinely think in-person benefits outweigh remote benefits for most employees. The internal employee surveys show this to be the case. Most employees want the hybrid model. HN is a bubble.
If a company isn't allowing remote work, they're voluntarily cutting themselves off from a large portion of the available labor pool.
That's their choice, but they can never again complain about a shortage of talent. Which should affect their ability to participate in work visa programs, for example.
This cuts both ways: people from wealthy countries with high cost of living can never complain about competition from people who will be happy to take 1/4 of their salary to do the same job.
It's not like companies tried that before with outsourcing. It didn't work quite as well as hiring someone who lives in another city in the same country.
I'm very curious about this, why doesn't it work? I can understand it may be hard for smaller companies to add an entirely new location since it would change team dynamics. But for large corps already having teams across regions, why wouldn't the concentration shift heavily towards lower cost regions?
The only solution for this is organized labor activism. At an individual level, everybody wants to be outsourced to but not outsourced from and nobody can prevent this at an individual level.
Given how things are going at my company, I am not sure that hybrid can work all that well. It really just seems like remote work, but half the time you must work from an open office and hear everyone else's meetings, as many teams are spread all over the country anyway as nobody hired with location in mind during COVID.
Seems like the solution may just be a great realignment of employees. Companies can pick a side and people can move accordingly.
This industry doesn't care about tenure or retaining codebase experience anyway.
This conversation is not about remote work but wage reduction.
Before the pandemic, companies had employed remote workers and paid them based on business value, but now they want to pay us based on the location we live.
They are creating a narrative that they pay us based on the cost of living, but it's just an excuse to reduce our salary.
They are forcing us to go back to offices because corporate executives are elitists control freaks that think remote work is a privilege workers should not have.
They are putting pressure on this question because they know the majority of developers would prefer to stay remote and they will put pressure on us until we accept the wage reduction.
But I tell you we should not accept this. The media always says there is a shortage of qualified workers in the tech industry so we, as employees in the tech industry, are qualified workers and since there is a shortage of us, we have the power to impose our conditions.
I want remote work with full salary and I think you too.
What do corporations fear? Unions.
They fear unions so badly that they are willing to pay lots of money to union bursting firms.
So I say you we should unionize, we should combine our power to fight this devilish attempt to reduce our salaries.
My company is staying fully remote with 'hub-offices' for those who want to get together. I plan to stay working from home even though the office is an 8 minute commute. I like my co-workers but I just want to work on my craft and build things. Commuting and hanging out at the coffee machine wastes time that I could be doing things.
My company is also experimenting with a 36 hour work week based on the Icelandic Study. As per the study, in order to maintain productivity, organizations need to clean up their processes. Specifically targeted meetings, more documentation and less interruptions. I am sure my coworkers will also be more productive just to keep the shorter work week - I know I will.
8 hours in an office != productivity. Quiet time and the ability to do deep work = productivity. I wish more managers and execs understood this.
For my own productivity, the company that I am looking at for inspiration is Hashicorp. https://works.hashicorp.com/ looks to be one of the best documents on how to do remote work. If anything, it is all well thought out.
I don't think this will be limited just to tech companies. Personally, after looking over our reopening plans, I don't think I'm going to be going in unless forced to. Why should I drive into the office, wear an uncomfortable mask for 8 hours, and have to deal with the ridiculous cleaning requirements when I can just commute from my bedroom to my kitchen to my home office (OK, my living room) and not deal with masks or a commute?
Personally, I don’t consider an employer if remote is not an option.
It gives you a view into how their management thinks about work and that’s important for not just getting things done but long term development.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
I think it really depends. I for one prefer going back to the office, with a small twist that I wish it was just me who is in the office. Being alone in the whole floor gives me focus and productivity, plus the office has an almost unlimited supply of soft drink and bubbled water :D
I'm actually wondering if there is a way to rent a sealed medium size office space (think something around 10-15 m2) with high-speed internet, table, chair and a refrigrator with a moderate fee. I absolutely hate open spaces. For God's sake if it's open why not I go to a Starbuck? It's just a few bucks a day!
I personally believe that executives get an ego boost from physically seeing people in an office working. Given the productive year tech has been being full remote, and the active threat by a large chunk of the work force to quit if the execs try and make us return, one can only conclude that the execs are motivated by something else other than business need.
When it comes to work from home vs. go back to the office, the question for leadership is, "Is it working now?"
For some, you have to work at a specific location. This is what it is.
If work from home works, you have an opportunity to hire some great people that less flexible employers are going to shed. You also can start reducing the costs - offices are very expensive compared to a reasonable work from home allowance.
If it's not working, then it's time to go back to the office and hope you can out compete your competitors. Your competition will be hiring away anyone not happy with the office environment, who wants to move or hates their commute. Your competitors will have lower costs because as they eliminate a huge chunk of office costs, you'll be making rent and utility payments. This is a Pareto level advantage.
I'd love to work in an office most days a week. I enjoy the people, I think it helps with work/life boundaries and distractions. Especially if it was flexible.
But it would have to be an actual office. Like with a door. And room for a photo of my wife or two. Maybe a silly LED project.
If my choice is having to be somewhere at a certain time with absolutely no privacy, sometimes not even the ability to set stuff up and leave it, or WFH, it's WFH every time.
Maybe now that those of us that don't want to be in an office at all will be at home, those of that want to go in can take over the empty space and get actual personal space again instead of cafeteria tables with a row of monitors on them....
I say: where is the data? I have not seen data suggesting that fully remote teams are more or less productive than in-office teams. How are big company executives making this enormous decision in a rational manner?
I think one of the underreported dynamics of this push to return to the office is that the biggest companies in Silicon Valley just BILLIONS on buildings. Buildings that are now empty, and soon to be filled by people that don’t want to be there.
Apple Park $5 billion[0]
Google over $7 billion nationwide ($1 billion in Mountain View alone)[1][2]
Facebook $300 million on MPK 21, a billion on real estate in general.[3]
And these are just some of the marquee players. If workers don’t return to the office, these executives just wasted $13 billion collectively. Well, we can’t have that! Force the plebes back into their boxes.
we’re living Cook’s, Pichai’s and Zuck’s a sunk cost fallacy.
Lots of middle managers entire existence depend on carefully built fictions of usefulness and politics that are hard to manufacture outside of a office.
Working remotely turned out to be the perk I never knew I wanted. I get back 3-4 hours a day that I would spend commuting, I have much better options for food at home, I get to see a lot more of my wife then I used to. And it makes sense - all of the infrastructure I work with is in the cloud, I haven’t had to roll out a crash cart in a data center in a decade. Almost everyone I work with is overseas, I don’t need to be in the office to have a zoom meeting with them. I’m very tempted to relocate someplace like Virginia which is absolutely beautiful but I would have not considered before because there isn’t much for me to do there professionally (I had to look up what “rockwool” was). The only thing that worries me is that if I relocate myself and the work-from-home movement fizzles out or someone decides I need a salary reduction because I live in a less expensive area then I’m stuck.
You can move there without telling anyone. For example I live in the same house on paper where I was living 16 years ago. No one cares and no one will go and check if you live there. I'm pretty sure you can make this work.
People don't understand how companies work, and the real hidden agendas that drive all decisions about employees.
In addition to remote work, some here have commented about private offices vs cubicles or open desks without even cubicle walls. Obviously, it is much cheaper to give someone a desk in an open space, with zero extra costs. The cost savings then can to to giving the CEO an ultra expensive office. I've read some can get up over a million dollars, with gold faucets in their private bathrooms, rare Italian marble credenza tops and all furniture made of rare mahogany wood, and the like. For example, a Pininfarina Aresline Xten office chair costs $1,500,000. John Thain, Merrill Lynch’s CEO, spent approximately $1.22 million to upgrade his office. Goldman Sachs' retiring Lloyd Blankfein spent top dollar to build its soon-to-be retiring chief executive a new office as he transitions to an advisor for the firm - exact numbers are not known but it is over $500,000. Many other peoples' offices had to be moved for the ex-CEO, in order for Blankenfein to get a coveted view of the Hudson River.
This is essentially the same exact reason why CEOs want people to work in the offices. For both, it is personal vanity.
When the CEO brings people into the office - personal friends, family, clients - the CEO wants to show off how great he is. Vanity. "Look at me, look at how important I am with my own expensive office that costs $528,000."
In the same way, the only reason the CEO wants people at the offices is for his vanity. It is more impressive for the CEO to bring his friends to an office where there are thousands of workers, all reporting to the great big important man. Oh, he is so important. How impressive is the CEO if there's only a barebone skeleton crew of 8 people?
Peoples' vanity is limitless, and they will literally tank a company rather than give up on their vanity. People think that CEOs are attached to the bottom line, to maximize shareholder value, but they are not. It's all tied to their vanity.
No, this is not the case for all CEOs, of course, but probably is for a good 84.827% of them, as shown by France Is Bacon polling company.
It seems to me that to have any hope in this "war" (a bit extreme, IMO, because I believe flexibility serves management and companies too), we need greater transparency about both the policies of what degrees of workplace flexibility are officially permitted, as well as the reality of how much people are able to take advantage of that flexibility in practice.
To that end, as a side project I was hacking on https://wlblist.com/surveys/aa74ed35-d51e-4d23-991d-6049e0ba... earlier this year (think the awesomeness of Levels.fyi but for non-compensation data). Never got much traction, but I still believe that collectively, we can influence the future of work if we collaborate in some form to freely and anonymously share information about the degrees of workplace flexibility that each employer offers.
Is it really a war when employees can simply switch to a remote job? It sounds like those CEOs may have failed big time when they decided to invest some millions in gargantuan open offices.
What really baffles me is that this remote work thing has been possible under similar terms for more than 10-15 years yet ppl kept going in the office, even the smartest of them. Why?
I work at one of those, and the word "at war" is a massive hyperbole. There's discussions and evaluation of if and how to best offer this new benefit with pleasing everyone and not hampering the actual work. There's questions of tax legalities, of budgeting for offices, and things like that that are also being considered.
Been back full time for 3 weeks by choice instead of being remote as people trickle in.
I think when people start going back we will quickly see that most aspects of the office are actually worse.
I am a hard worker but I am also social and with just a few people back I end up wasting at least 1 hour talking about non-work related things. This isn't even an open floor plan.
If you are going back to an open floor plan, forget about it. Things will be so obviously less productive.
I am enjoying going into the office but I also know this time is limited. At some point in the future going into the office is going to be a perk with remote standard. Bet your ass on that.
You don't even have to bring in the cost savings but the cost savings will be the knockout punch.
Waiting for some company to build a campus including accommodation and offices where you can live and work in whatever way suits you, and when in-person is required, people just wander over to the common area.
They built billion dollar campuses that sit almost empty and the attitude now is by God we are going to fill them even if it means all our employees have to die from Corona. It all started with open offices to create less privacy and more surveillance under the guise of collaboration. Then they hired as many H1B's as they possibly could so they can work them like slaves while paying them less because fuck Americans, they don't have the skills. I hope this war burns them down. Fuck them and their bullshit "we need you here so you can collaborate", I'm not a fucking retard and can collaborate just fine from home.
Any in office work should be 100% optional and up to the employee.
There is a *much* worse trend than trying to force office time: forcing non-stop pair programming. It is not only counter-productive, but also extremely tiring for many people. I'm pretty sure that the rationale behind it is that installing human spyware is less controversial than installing software spyware on the employees' computers to monitor remote workers.
I recommend unionizing (a federally protected activity) to enable negotiating for benefits (including remote work) collectively. This presidential administration is already gunning for Big Tech, strike while the iron is hot (for more robust worker rights).
You can be well compensated and still demand a seat at the corporate table as a stakeholder in a business.
I don’t need a union. I tell my employer “either I work remotely or I am gone to one of the ten job solicitations I get a week”. Tech workers have enormous individual leverage and there are so many job opportunities out there — the power is already in your hands. Be a part of the market change by putting your money where your mouth is and moving to more adaptive companies if your company fails to adapt.
That doesn’t fix the employer abuse or poor treatment, it just makes it someone else’s problem, ruining the next human who comes along. Lets prevent the ruining or suffering of our fellow humans.
The suffering can persist longer than it takes for the market to reach equilibrium and/or improve. Market forces alone are insufficient, as capitalism in general has demonstrated time and time again.
unions are necessary when there is a power imbalance between workers and corporations. There is currently not a power imbalance between tech workers and corporations so unions are not necessary for tech workers. For other professions where workers have a low amount of power I believe that unions "are good", but for tech I think it is unnecessary. If you are a competent tech worker you have the choice of 100's of potential places to work.
Please don't post like this - it breaks the site guideline against name-calling (which applies also to arguments) and generally goes against the desired culture of the site, which is curious conversation.
Of course you can still have your views; you just need to post about them in the key of curiosity. That includes, btw, respect for the opposite point of view, since curiosity is somewhere short of certainty.
While I emphasize with your feeling on unions, having seen first hand how they operate, your tact is not convincing anyone and is just virtue signaling.
The thing that I never see addressed with unions is what they are and what they do. The easiest way to look at unions is thus:
Unions exist for the explicit purpose of enriching their members(not necessarily all equally), at the expense of all others.
I have two issues with unions:
1. They have been given this deity status as an unassailable good thing.
2. Federal Union laws that force employers to fire the employees they hired to work during the strike, even if they can be reasonably certain that union employees that used violence against property and person during the strike are the ones they have to bring back.
Want to bargain as a group? Sure, more power to you. But either side should have the option of walking away and severing all ties. The union can do this, the employer is held hostage by federal labor law.
> even if they can be reasonably certain that union employees that used violence against property and person during the strike
These things are crimes, so I don't see how they have to hire back someone who is in prison. Or do you mean "people who I think did these things but cannot proof"?
Unions are a counter balance to private companies. They have found demand for labour, and form a group to gain a local monopoly of labour, and use that to gain influence. It is capitalism applied to labour and to me seems poetically perfect opposite force to private companies.
The corporation isn’t mandating what happens to your body any more than the government is (as long as there isn’t forced injections). They’re simply choosing not to associate with un vaccinated people. This is first amendment from both sides all the way.
It’s literally no different from not wanting to employ people that don’t have a driver’s license, or some credential, or are convicted of crimes.
Then you need to read it again. No one is making you make changes to your body. You are always free to go somewhere else.
Come on. If vaccines are ao offensive, why do you want to work for someone that only wants people that are vaccinated around them? Take some responsibility for your life choices instead crying, “Woe is me!” No one owes you a job, nor do you owe any employer your labor. Walk if you don’t like it.
Finally, if you think employers and body modification is some recent bridge too far, perhaps you should google tattoos, hair styles, facial hair, and piercings in the workplace.
> Well, if all companies apply the same rule then you are not really free to choose are you ?
You are always free to start your own company and endanger other people’s health there.
At this point you’re basically complaining that it sucks to be unpopular. Well, that’s a personal problem. Stop trying to say that people are being forced to do anything. They’re not. They just aren’t free of of the consequences of their (in)actions.
You’re not allowed to enroll in a public school or the military without specific panel of vaccines. Again, you’re always welcome to not join the military or to enroll in a private school that doesn’t require vaccines or even homeschool. Whining that that private schools are too expensive, or homeschool is too much of a time sink, isn’t the responsibility of anyone except the person that decided to opt out of the system. Take the responsibility. Antivax folks don’t have a right to endanger others.
Things seem to be hardest for younger single employees who don’t always have great work from home environments and are also sometimes lonely. Also, some of my coworkers with kids are having a hard time being productive with pressures from kids or spouses that don’t respect the working from home boundaries. Then there are people who can’t manage the work life balance and relied on a commute to tell their brain the work day is over.
Finally, there will always be under-performers who are desperately searching for a scape goat when they fail to deliver. I’ve seen this so many times after an org change, architectural change or anything that will give someone an excuse for failing to preform. These people may or may not like their new freedom but they do like their paycheck and will use any excuse for their poor performance.
Many of these problems seem solvable without forcing employees who want to work remote to come in. I personally love working remote and would never go back to mandatory days in the office if I didn’t have to. I think the trick is for executives to wrangle all of these new challenges at once. It is so much easier to just say “make things go back to where they were” so their jobs can be less complicated. People haven’t been trained how to make this new world work. In a public company it is one more unknown to juggle when they have a responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits.
So let’s start proposing solutions and promoting them. How do we make our execs feel more comfortable to let those who want to work home do so? How do we make it so easy that no exec has to worry about losing their job because they agreed to something that didn’t use to be normal?
That’s how we make this work for everyone.