Dell does this but continues to outsource to India and China where communication is an epic problem that has never been solved. This is nothing short of a stealth layoff. If they were so interested in communicating they would hire all US and stop the outsourcing.
This quite literally cuts both ways, and workers know it.
If you can outsource work abroad, then you cannot justify mandating everyone be in the office. If you’re mandating everyone be in the office, then you can’t be outsourcing work abroad.
Workers aren’t stupid, and ignoring them is what leads to Unions.
I think the underlying problem here is that despite what the stock market would have you believe, sales are down, moral is down, and many industries are experiencing light to moderate headwinds.
RTO is an (desperate) attempt to resuscitate businesses experiencing economic woes.
From the inside, RTO feels more like a way to reclaim leverage from highly paid technical employees who have become too uppity. Summoning us back to the office is about putting us in our place - but in the social hierarchy, not physically.
I genuinely wonder if that is actually the case. Our team ( fairly technical team within a non-technical type company ) repeatedly ( edit: and successfully) pushed back against any kind of RTO ( I personally sent rather non-corporate email asking why the RTO calls if they can't even get enough desks for rotation ). I am sure bosses hate being questioned, but I don't see anyone begging to do my job. In other words, something has got to give.
I don't know what is going to happen exactly. I feel the push from bigger corps will give smaller one a "permission" to do it as well, but I know I am already doing what I can to make sure I am ready. Last time the company tried to call me back in specifically, I was lucky enough to secure current position and was able to tell them no.
That said, even today, I know I would not be able to get my job back there and I didn't burn bridges in any conventional way ( unless you consider saying no to RTO burning a bridge ).
Nah, RTO is in no way trying to fix business sales. It's entirely a way to layoff workers or to control them. Trying to put an economic reason behind this power play is Febreezing a turd.
management wants to execute their fancy plan to make more money, and see control, supervision, faster iteration, tighter feedback loops, blablabla ... as one part of it, hence the amazing "all hands on deck" idea that today is "everyone in the office".
Yes, I have heard that as well, because having people on the office is going to magically ramp up sales, as that is the missing factor why they aren't taking off. /s
You're misunderstanding what was said. It's about costs/income. RTO (probably) doesn't increase income - but people will (most likely) quit, reducing costs. Thus the ratio gets better.
Most likely, because no one on this thread has been in company meetings from Fortune 500s where this is reason being told for RTO, while they keep doing good old outsourcing as always.
"Collaboration in the office strengthens opportunities for sales" is the message.
It’s not even just a matter of being all in the US, they would need to have everyone in a single office. The second teams need to work together between offices, the in-person pop-in chat is dead. Of course this doesn’t mean it turns into a days long email chain, in be a quick call.
People randomly stopping at my desk was a huge productivity killer when I was in the office. Working from home, that killer turns to meetings and group chats. Both arrangements have their issues when it comes to interruptions. At least at home I can control if those apps are open and allowing notifications, if I really do need to be heads down to meet a deadline.
When outsourcing across timezones, that’s when those quick chats, regardless of the medium, start to take days, because each reply takes a day.
Absolutely. They should just stop pretending. They know they are lying as they say it's all about collaborating closer and communication. The workers know they are lying. They workers know the leaders know they are lying. But it's still not allowed to be acknowledged publicly.
If it really was all about collaboration and communication this would be uniformly enforced as much as possible globally and the budget to travel and in-person meetups for teams would have been greatly increased. If neither one of those is happening, it's just too obvious.
"The workers know they are lying. They workers know the leaders know they are lying. But it's still not allowed to be acknowledged publicly."
Man it reads SO much like Soviet days when the bureaucrats would say one thing, but the people would know it's bullshit, as did the leaders and everyone had to pretend it's "real".
For my first full time job, I was a junior sysadmin. My toolset had to include LOAF floppies, one FREEDOS floppy, and a bent paper clip.
I had an office. My office. With a door.
Since then, every advance in my career raised my skill level, raised my pay, and shrank my office. First came the open office plan. Then came hot desks. Now I'm all-remote, and I mostly float around libraries and cafes when I'm not zooming.
The people making these RTO demands should remember they are demanding people meet in person in what is little more than a set of hot desks dedicated to one company. It's really demoralizing to have to come to work to such an environment where you can't even put a backpack's worth of things on a desk and leave them there at 5 PM.
If the managers making these demands vacate their own dedicated offices and go hotdesk for a while, they'd realize why there's so much pushback on RTO.
All office discussion today is seen through the post-COVID WFH lens. It's easy to forget that there was a time before, largely filled with complaints about office conditions falling on deaf ears. The cat is out of the bag - we know remote can work and we know how different hotdesking in a room full of zoom calls feels.
The comment about an "email chain could have been a 30-second chit chat" is such a straw-man argument. On top of that, forcing everyone to commute up to an hour each way is a blatant disregard for people's personal time. How productive would the workforce be if the commute counted as work hours?
Hate that. Yes, some issue can be resolver faster by talking in person, but that can be accomplished by a phone call, too. Just like a face to face conversation can end in an hour of gossip. How's that for more efficient?
Back when a lot of my work conversations were with sales reps and system engineers over the phone, certain reps in particular would take 10 minutes to get to a point where they could have been handled in a minute with an internal email. Though, yes, sometimes the real-time conversation was useful.
Sales is hard. For some it comes naturally, others have had to work at it. A good sales person is valuable, and a good relationship with a sales person is very valuable, especially to those of us of the engineering breed.
Give them the time, build the relationships, could be worth the effort.
On a busy day, I resented it sometimes. And there were a few who, when I got a call from them, I silently sighed. But, as a product manager, keeping field people happy was part of my job and I mostly did.
And of course, the email chain gives everyone time to think on the problem and construct a sensible reply, without interrupting anyone.
As opposed to some manager walking up to your desk while you're neck deep in concentration, only to ask you a retarded question that should have been an email.
And, not mentioned explicitly anywhere in the discussion, email is a proof of sorts come a dispute time. Chat in the hallway won't be captured in a deposition or at least not as much more than 'he said, she said'.
This incentivizes people to live far from the office. I know people who live 2 hours from the office. If the commute counted, every day would be a half day. People choose where they live relative to where they work, so if someone has a 2 hour commute, that is a choice they made… assuming the housing choice and work choice were made in an environment where working in the office was the expectation.
I work from home currently, and thought about getting a less expensive place in a small town. However, I ended up deciding to get a place closer to the city. This way if I do need to get a new job, I have more options without a painful commute, and I’m not only reliant on remote positions. We all make these choices.
While the downsides of this are obvious, I wonder if in the long run this would push our cities towards better designs, by encouraging the mixing of residential and office buildings, and by encouraging improvements to implementing public transit that can quickly and efficiently move a dense population between their homes and their jobs. It probably wouldn't work, but I can dream.
That sounds great, and I care enough about this that I moved somewhere with well-designed transit, but I still think it's a problematic policy. Some people might want to live in a bigger place further out, and if they're willing to make the long commute (and pay for its negative externalities, which most aren't) then I don't see why they can't.
I actually prefer to bike to work, but I doubt any employer would be willing to give me my hourly rate for that...
Awhile back a bunch of superbowl workers who were mandated to drive off-site to go through security screening before being bused on-site sued to have those 3 hours counted as billable. They lost in court.
> The comment about an "email chain could have been a 30-second chit chat" is such a straw-man argument.
I imagine them hardly holding back laughter when they say it. It's such a bogus straw-man they have to know it makes them look stupid. If in-person communication was such a great boon for the company how much had they invested in the last 3 years in travel budgets for teams, to meet in person? Nothing? Even lowered it? Well, there you go, that explains exactly that's a completely bogus claim.
It frustrates me that Good Communication is not seen as a skill, but rather some formless office sprite that had to be coaxed out and captured.
TFA talks about email chains that last forever, I'd add my pet peeve of zoom calls that are attended without question because they're recurring calendar invites.
Clear communication, towards a well expressed goal, with an understanding of the context your audience holds, and ultimately reasonably tracked outcomes should be the goal. But instead of teaching people how to do this we flail our arms around and complain.
Personally I think the real goal is corporate climbing and these companies only incidentally accomplish their vague goals.
I've been in tech since 1990. My first job at IBM, my entire product team of ~100 people was on one floor of one building. We knocked out projects at an insane rate.
Today, trying to lead teams over zoom, across multiple time zones, means it takes weeks to solve problems that took a few hours over a whiteboard.
If I was a CEO I would mandate RTO, but I would also make sure to colocate my teams, otherwise there's very little point to RTO when you're just calling into a Teams meeting.
Of course, the downside no one is talking about: camaraderie is real. If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it, but a very large part of team success is how they work together, and in-person collab is priceless.
I’m 50 and started working in 1996. I started working remotely in consulting in mid 2020. I’ve led multiple medium to large consulting projects over the past 4.5 years where the entire team and the customer are in different locations.
There are all sorts of remote white boarding tools and even something as simple as two people working on a shared LucidChart.
I too hit the 50. For the last 8 years I been 100% remote and seen the office ONE time only and that was just to hug a buddy happy retirement. Later on I found out his wages were cut and he found a new job. I quickly joined him with a competitor.
The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry. They like flexing their will against others. That’s why having leverage and a huge f*ck you fund is necessary. Especially when it’s going to take a year to un frack this IT job economy. A quick fix would be removal of all IT h1b. The that would get Americans back to work. We all know they use it to keep wages down.
> The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry.
It depends. I have no issue with companies that RTO'd after lockdowns ended. Some teams and orgs work better in person, others can work fine remotely.
But promising new hires that they can work remotely only to renege on that promise a few years later when the job market tightens is a despicable bait-and-switch.
Exactly this. If you worked in the office, then went remote after Covid and the company made no promises about being permanently remote, I have no issues with that.
In my case, Amazon Retail reached out to me in mid 2020 about an SDE position. They made it clear I would have to relocate eventually. There was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life and move to Seattle for Amazon already knowing there reputation.
They then suggested I apply for a role in Professional Services that was “field be design” and that would be permanently remote. That department was exempted from the first round of RTO requirements while I was still there.
As of this year, even those positions are required to be in an office even though it’s more than likely no one on a project will be in the same office and the clients will definitely be remote. It means you are either at a customer site or on a call with a client from the office. I got Amazoned in late 2023. The RTO mandate from them just came into affect this year.
The equivalent positions at GCP are also hybrid. They reached out to me. But when they said that, I said no thanks
Nothing really special that we use now. They are all SaaS tools we login to via SSO. GSuite, Notion, and LucidChart are all great for collaboration. Of course Slack and Zoom.
Yeah, if you are using Teams, I assume you are working for a “Big Enterprise” company. I work for a company that was born working remotely. We use GSuite which has great support for annotations.
There are ZERO online collab tools that even come close to the speed of a whiteboard.
Fumbling with a mouse to write a word or draw a straight line is 10x slower than pen. Sorry, I think you're either used to working slow, or strait up bs'ing.
> Just because you haven’t learned how to adapt doesn’t mean the rest of the world hasn’t adapted.
The truth is a little more complicated.
We've definitely found some tasks where CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) performs better than colocated work, particularly for well-structured tasks that involve any sort of automation, documentation, or governance.
But collaboration tools still aren't a satisfactory replacement for many kinds in-person work. Studies routinely find colocated teams have higher creativity, efficiency, team cohesion, and job satisfaction. Whether that's worth the higher costs (office space and salaries) depends on the domain, but there are certainly companies that would be better off being in-person.
You think more people would be satisfied with coming into loud noisy open offices everyday with constant interruptions than being at home? There have also been plenty of studies about how long it takes people to get back on task after an interruption and studies about the deleterious affects of long commutes. Not to mention increase risk of car accidents (unfortunately every link I found was from a law office).
And let’s not forget about disease spreading (even before COVID), increase cost of childcare, and how RTO affects mostly women more than men because they are more often than not the primary caretakers of children and aging parents.
It’s not just about children who are too young to be in school. It’s about children too young to stay at home when they are sick. Speaking of which, there is the entire knock on effect of parents sending kids to school sick because they have to go into the office and can’t get last minute childcare.
But most day to day work doesn’t require “creativity”. At most it requires bouts of collaboration and maybe creativity and then everyone goes in their corner and does their own work and can collaborate remotely - pull requests, online screen sharing, shared documents you can edit, “virtual war rooms”, etc.
The first time I worked at a company where the rest of my team was in another city, I had no problem driving 200 miles each way once a quarter (and get reimbursed at the IRS mileage rate) once a quarter. Later as I got into consulting, we could all hop on a plane and meet at a central office somewhere or with a client.
Your last paragraph seems to reinforce my point that "collaboration tools still aren't a satisfactory replacement for many kinds in-person work" given that you and your coworkers spent significant time and money to have occasional in-person meetings.
Perhaps I should be more nuanced since few tech roles these days are entirely remote or entirely in-person -- many remote workers occasionally meet up in person and many in-person office workers occasionally work from home.
The rest of your post makes the case that there are downsides to working in an office. I agree, there are! (Though as a parent with young children who recently worked from home for a week to keep an eye on sick kids I'm amused by the implication that an office is noisier or has more interruptions than being at home.)
To be clear: Remote collaboration is perfectly satisfactory (or better!) for many tasks. And even those tasks where it is suboptimal it may still be a net positive because of the higher costs associated with in-person work, including but not limited to the ones you list.
However, it is worth honestly acknowledging that there are also benefits to working in person. It's up to each company to balance those costs and benefits, but my guess is that eventually some companies will be better off working (mostly) remotely, and others will continue to work (mostly) in-person.
Don’t get me wrong, I work in consulting now and have no problem flying out to a customer’s site occasionally.
But I think the reason virtual collaboration only doesn’t work is because you need to meet people, socialize outside of work with the business lunches and dinners etc. Just because you are a lot more forgiving of people and it’s a lot easier to assume positive intent once you have met them and broke bed with them.
Yeah you can do the virtual “war room”. But it’s easier for people to say “no” to other meetings and block their calendars for an entire day when they are all in an office on-site in the same conference rooms.
I guess my entire thesis is that constant “collaboration” in a large group of any form is overrated. You collaborate and brain storm over strategy and then it’s usually you working by yourself or with another person over tactics which can be done with screen shares, putting ugly boxes in diagramming tools to discuss architecture and then polishing it, shared docs etc.
As far as working environments, the beauty of remote work is that you can buy some place bigger/cheaper/further out that’s optimized for your family situation.
My first home that I had built had a “bonus room” upstairs - the only thing on the second level - that was separated from the rest of the house. But I admittedly I never had to deal with small kids. My (step)sons were 9 and 14 when we moved in together.
> But I think the reason virtual collaboration only doesn’t work is because you need to meet people, socialize outside of work with the business lunches and dinners etc.
And I'm saying there's more to it than that. A couple decades ago I worked on a collaborative mapping/whiteboarding/sketching for Cisco Telepresence rooms for military users. We managed to get pretty close to the bandwidth of in-person meetings: eye contact was slightly off and turn-taking still required more verbal structuring, but overall we were hitting our targets. After that I worked on digital collaboration tools for finance professionals and we found use cases where virtual collaboration was superior, cases where it was clearly deficient, and most fell into a fuzzy middle ground of "it depends". I haven't worked in CSCW for several years now, but still follow the research, and my understanding is that there are still tasks where remote work suffers, and not just for socialization.
Every company is different, many only need high-bandwidth collaboration in large groups once a quarter, while someone in a research/design/startup might spend a couple hours a day in small collaborative meetings. Every company is different.
And again, I acknowledge the many advantages of remote work for both employees and companies. Related to your point about remote workers being able to buy bigger houses in a lower cost of living area, my company has now been forced to pay at least 10-20% higher salaries for in-person hires compared to a similar caliber of remote hires, not to mention the costs of office space. Therefore, if you're not getting at least ~30% higher productivity out of being in person then it's probably a net loss, and there are many companies that are being irrational or deceitful about their RTO mandates. But I've also found remote work proponents overly dismissive of the downsides which makes it significantly harder for them to convince their companies and managers even in cases where remote work truly is a net benefit.
And this has been my pushback against RTO, ironically enough. Team camaraderie is important, yes, but so is independence and comfort. I found that a single week or two a year, with my global team sharing a conference room, three square meals a day, and even non-work activities like volunteering or offroading, built a stronger working relationship than simply cohabiting a space together five days a week or working entirely remotely.
We knocked out big room planning and upwards of eighteen months of work scheduling in that brief week. We executed successfully on everything we planned for that entire year.
Teams absolutely need to meet in-person at regular intervals to remain effective, but they don’t need to be full-RTO. By making such meetups focused and organized, they become important events we want to sink our time and energy into. We relish the next opportunity to meet one another and build better stuff as a result.
And occasional face to face team meetings are part of that work at many companies. If you don't want to participate you're probably better off finding a company that doesn't have such an expectation.
Yeah. Latterly, some of the economic headwinds in tech led to a lack of in-person meetings even after the worst of COVID was over. I pretty much just gave up even knowing who most of the people on my extended team were because I just wasn't invested in it.
It's very easy to have rose colored glasses when remembering the 90s.
I'm not trying to discount your entire point, but rather, argue that what was true in that economic climate might not be the same today.
Do I believe people were enthusiastic, collaborative, and highly productive when it seemed nothing could go wrong and the economy was booming? Absolutely. It's a lot harder to pull everyone together and knock out projects at an "insane" rate when the backdrop is the post-2007, post-covid climate. Stock market aside, there's something off about the purchasing power of the dollar and most young people feel it deeply. It's demotivating to say the least.
I think that's why you're seeing such a strong resistance to RTO. If massive wealth growth isn't an option like it was in the 90s, then give me comfort.
<< It's very easy to have rose colored glasses when remembering the 90s.
Nostalgia is a possibility, but I was watching an old reality TV show and let me tell you. Even that fake, scripted stuff was simply of different quality. It was hopeful, even inspired at times. Yes, maybe it was partly reflection of the times it was created ( easy access to money, jobs, cheap food and so on ), but I do not think we can just blame tinted glasses for remembering 90s fondly.
Depends where you were and what you were doing. The company I was at in the late 80s and almost all of the 90s was mostly not doing great off and on. Had some fun projects but I was definitely done when I left at the end of the decade. On the other hand, I was able to buy a house mid-decade and had some great extended vacations. 9-5 in the office pretty much every day except for some business trips wasn't great but I didn't have that bad a commute.
Nothing wrong with the dollar, things are cheap, food is cheap, even after the last couple of years inflation. What's broken is housing. People in the 90s had fewer toys but much more affordable housing.
I agree. I had my first house built in a new subdivision - 2800 square feet 4/2 - for $170K in south metro Atlanta in 2002. I was only making $60K at the time.
I even had my second house built in 2016 in north metro Atlanta in the “good school system” - 3100 square feet 5 bed /3.5 bath for $335K and only put around $12K down. I sold it last year for $670K after moving to a condo in Florida that cost $340K. I could never move to the state tax free Florida with not many local tech jobs if it weren’t for remote work
Except I also work with my local divisions, and the teams that work on the same floor near the same cubes are vastly more productive.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I'm here to burst the echo chamber bubble that "RTO is evil greed". There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you.
Some people just want to sit in a cube in code forever and ever. Awesome, that's great. But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.
For the last 4.5 years, my job has been half supporting sales as the tech person working with them and the client and half leading a team once the sale closes. The teams and the customer are located all across the US. So I am definitely not one of the people who just wants to “code forever”. I’ll hop on a plane for a business trip in a heartbeat and have no problem with schmoozing, business dinners, etc
I also have had experience delivering successful and unsuccessful projects. If I did a retrospective of each, none had anything to do with whether the team was collocated. While I’ve only done consulting remotely, I have been a team lead at a product company in office prior to 2020.
I started working remotely and in consulting at the height of Covid in June 2020. It’s just that too many people haven’t learned how to evolve and work in a remote first culture.
Before the gate keeping starts, I’m 50 and have been in the industry almost 30 years and I started in consulting when a job in the cloud consulting department at AWS (full time direct hire) fell into my lap and now I’m a “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company.
There is merit to WFO, but there is also merit to WFH. The problem is it is not being honestly discussed in terms of its merits. And we know this, because when WFH crowd actually notes verifiable metrics, management trots out unverifiable, unquantifiable serendipitous conversations at the watercooler.
<< There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you.
It is not my job to make my manager's job easier. It is management's job to make our job easier; not harder. The priorities are backwards, because management also happens to hold a lot of power over rank and file. Quite frankly, the management is simply too lazy to manage WFH well.
<< But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.
I only have anecdotes, but I am not sure you are right. Can you elaborate on the examples in your head?
I think lack of in-person collab is the biggest drawback to remote work, but only because a lot of people still haven't adapted to or accepted the tools available.
> If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it
In my experience, the younger people tend to adapt faster and more readily use the tools. It's easier to form a good working relationship with them as a result.
Cannot agree more. Human interaction in person is far superior to virtual. Younger developers have never experienced this so they don’t appreciate the lack of it. However, I notice their delayed and glacial pace of growth. All of this is due to lack of discrete interaction which is where the real learning, team development and software development processes can thrive.
Never a full-time developer but I had a ton of in-person interacting in the early years of my career--even though I've had significant remote (admittedly mixed in with a good bit of traveling for a long time). Maybe it's a lack of imagination but I can't imagine how working more or less full-time out of my apartment for my early career years would have worked.
Yes, you can see the development plateaus earlier in recent decades. Teams that I've managed that are collocated are more nimble and ramp faster because in-person feedback loops all day long. I'm doing a bad job communicating this, and it is disappointing to see so much "well, i'm special and can learn on my own" which is something I've encountered so many times over the years (hint, it is a very small %age). The self-sabotaging isolation is astonishing. But as I said before, forcing people to commute far distances in cities with gawd-awful public transport is both on the OEM and on the car-centric USA. But I digress... All I know is: teams that are in the same building are 2-3x more effective than teams that are fragmented across the globe.
It seems entirely reasonable some teams will work well remotely, others in person. It maybe be context dependent, and it may be that some people prefer different structures for different projects in different places over time.
There is no perfect pasta sauce, only perfect pasta sauces.
Collaboration in person is a force multiplier. The problem is corporations and CEOs are the ones getting all the benefit from that. The average employee is no better off in RTO, so why would you expect them to want that?
For the record, I prefer being in office so I'm not arguing from my perspective. I'm merely trying to take the position of someone who advocates for remote work. It's not hard to understand why they might.
I don't doubt that most engineers are hugely unproductive, but I'd wager it has less to do with where they physically are and more to do with the fact that most companies have carefully, almost clinically undercut their employees' faith and independence. Do you know how long it's been since I even saw a single job listing that was searching for an exceptionally strong candidate?
This is a far bigger problem than wfh ever was. Everyone has their own thing to do and there is no incentive to work as a team. I saw it in several companies.
I remember better times, working in teams that actually worked like teams, together on solving the same problems, all day. I don't think it had anything to do with being in the same room. The trend towards "everyone has their own jira ticket to work on and the only thing anyone cares about is how fast they can complete that one thing, so working together with others is just a waste of time" started years before the pandemic. It will not be solved by going back to the office.
You guys were super efficient because you had whiteboards? You don't think people develop relationships with people they work with closely remotely? Time for bed grandpa.
Funny. Whiteboarding, for me has always been the fastest way to discuss complex ideas. I've never been able to replicate this speed with remote people (and I've tried several tools).
We used an open source collaborative text tool earlier, the name of which eludes me, but during COVID, I think we generally realized that shared Google Workspace docs actually worked pretty well for a lot of things we used to use big whiteboards for. For certain things, aspects of being able to have a hallway conversation easily were absent. But really we adapted pretty well IMO.
I have tried every tool that gets recommended to me as a substitute for in person whiteboarding, and nothing comes close to the tactility of IRL ones. I've always found the online versions become a one person show rather than actually collaborative and handing pens back and forth.
Question. When you say you've tried them, do you mean with an actual graphics tablet + pen? I have not seen any company that actually provides such work-related tooling.
Companies thinking this is unnecessary because you can just use the mouse and it's "good enough", is like companies thinking keyboards are unnecessary for writing software because you can just use the mouse + an on-screen keyboard and it's "good enough".
Whenever I have to use a physical whiteboard for brainstorming, I loathe not having access to the flexibility of Krita (when just showing my screen) or Excalidraw. Ctrl+Z; moving stuff around; rotating; re-scaling; being able to hide the full layer and work on a new one (or move to a different part of the infinite canvas), instead of permanently deleting the whiteboard (and, in some cases, awkwardly taking a photo of it before deleting it and then awkwardly sharing that in Slack)...
I do like physical whiteboards though; having one on my fridge has been a nice low-friction way for my family to share reminders without the hassle of having shared calendar software ("waiting for package on Friday" or "cat vet on October" kind of thing, stuff that gets mentioned during conversations but it's still nice to remember in the short-term future).
And I'm a sucker for physical notebooks too, don't get me wrong (I love MUJI loose-leaf notebooks).
But using physical whiteboard for work brainstorming? To me they feel like not having access to the proper tools.
Just me and I'll probably take it down when I do a forced kitchen remodel, but I have a physical whiteboard in the kitchen as well. Less useful now that I do less travel. Probably some sort of project notebook works at least as well for one person.
My company provided an iPad + pencil, and my group has another one in the office. It’s better than nothing, but it’s nowhere near as effective as doing the Raj and Sheldon “stare at the board” act.
It’s true that on a physical board you can copy/paste/undo as easily as with an iPad, but unless the purpose is to create a tidy set of handwritten notes, you don’t actually need that functionality.
I agree with your assessment - “okay boomer” - and I’m 50 and started my career programming on mainframes. I went full remote in 2020 and have no trouble leading projects remotely. Occasionally I’ll do a business trip during the initial kickoff or handover.
Half of my job is sales adjacent and the other half is leading implementations. If I can adjust to working remotely anyone can
I think it's pretty damning that all of the bigcos are so entrenched in their inertia that they can just bleed talent like this and it just. doesn't. matter.
I think it speaks to the lack of competition in the space that the enormous companies have realized they can shed a lot of jobs and coast and they're still unassailable.
I don't get why they'd do shadow layoffs this way. The ones who can get jobs elsewhere will, so you bleed talent.
I understand why they're doing it at the federal level; they believe they have a mandate to eliminate federal employees entirely. But a corporation is supposed to focus on the bottom line.
“The social media platform formerly known as Twitter is worth almost 80% less than two years ago when Elon Musk bought it, according to estimates from investment giant Fidelity.”
You seem to have mistakenly put quotation marks around something that the linked article doesn't contain. Please allow me to fill in the correct quotation:
"Fidelity discloses what it believes is the value of its shares of X"
Mostly b cause the goalposts got moved and they don't care anymore about a bunch of things. But yes, it bled users to other platforms but seem still stable-ish.
And as someone who has accounts on both Bluesky and Mastodon, I see very little activity there--as well as much less on Twitter/X. Musk basically succeeded in killing much of the micro-blogging (or whatever you call it) ecosystem. A lot of people have just largely walked away from the whole thing. And maybe that's OK on net although something ended up lost.
I think many people have been super tired of the entire format and all the terrible interaction that it breeds, but didn't have a good enough reason to quit (because after all, there still was and is a community there, plus the dopamine fix of course) until now.
A lot of people were probably staying on and regularly using Twitter out of momentum. And when Musk came along, their interactions probably decreased drastically because so many people dropped out, or they just themselves decided this was a good forcing function to largely leave. None of the alternatives were especially good. So the whole format is a shadow of its former self--at least in the tech space (and I avoid the politics).
It's a ton less interesting for me. A fraction of the people I follow post any longer and there's even less interaction. Maybe something I check into once or twice a week these days.
My experience working in offices has always been that almost everybody was wearing headphones and there wasn't much talking, except when everybody went to a conference room to meet (and half of them were fiddling on their laptops/phones).
Having not seen big advantages of collocating everybody (usually against their will and with the heavy burden of commuting), I can only attribute shadow reasons for RTO policies everywhere.
I asked around, got these as reasons from various people (management or otherwise) for forcing workers to come to office
1. Effective tool to force people to quit, instead of laying them off
2. Smart, fast workers have figured out ways to do extra work (freelance, part time job etc) which enrages employers. We can debate the ethics of this all day, but remember that prices of everything is going up every year, but raises/promotions are hard to come by
3. Pettiness, micromanagement - just relishing the fact that people suffer from long commutes, have to find baby sitters etc. A manager at my job was collecting names of people who don't come to office minimum 3 days a week. This was his biggest "achievement" last month, he contributes nothing to actual work. Showing people who is "the boss"
4. Keeping commercial real estate prices from crashing
Number 3 is what scares me the most, as throughout the years I overheard enough conversations that HR/management had, which weren't meant for my ears, that I find it an entirely believable reason why they might be doing it.
There probably is a world where you get paid per line of code or story point, but you might not like it. When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your entire professional capacity. In a creative field like ours, part of that price encodes a bet that you might be one of those rare workers whose contribution exceeds their cost many times over. If everyone is able to titrate their contribution to the exact level of management’s expectations, like by context-switching to childcare or another job when their assigned workload is done, then the budget for the role is going to be exactly what that bare minimum is worth.
What could break us out of this jam is either radically more individualized compensation structures, or other costly signals of commitment and engagement that are as meaningful to the firm as transporting your physical body to be somewhere for 8 hours a day.
I think there’s an interesting world of co-presence technology beyond the Zoom call that could be relevant here, but explorations in this area are also a stone’s throw from rather dystopian employee surveillance regimes, so it’s hard to say.
Individualized compensation and treating everyone like expendable faceless factory workers instead of teams of professional hired to work together on solving problems seems to me to be the real problem today, not a solution. We're supposed to work on really difficult problems, but we're not given the freedom and resources to think and collaborate in meaningful ways to solve problems. Instead it's a constant push for individuals to sit alone and display how productive they each are, alone, at completing jira tickets.
Managers care more about being able to measure individual performance than about actual results. If they cared about results they would allow teams to work as teams. Agile had a lot of good ideas, but I never saw any of it lead to anything good in reality.
If your responsibility is to the team's mission, and the end of this mission is not at hand, then there's really no limiting principle other than the number of butts-in-seats hours your work culture considers reasonable.
> When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your entire professional capacity.
Nah. I’ve got free time with a full time job. I’ll do what I damn well please with it. “Salary = ownership over worker” is the most authoritarian working class vs ownership class things I’ve heard
Let’s make laws that help the vast majority of people: workers.
The additional joke is that some companies reduced office desks because of hybrid/remote and now ask to people to come back. Ready for the "best" of both worlds ?
I had an idea recently that some of the agile rituals we engage in are actually spiritual rituals. Like, they are these weird kind of shared prayers.
The thought came as a result of a YouTube video of monks I happened to watch. The day of some monasteries is strictly regimented, often starting at 4am. There are designated times to pray individually, pray as a group, sing as a group, eat and work. Every monk is required to attend and failing to regularly attend the communal prayers, meals or songs can be grounds for the monk to be asked to leave the monastery.
It made me think about how rituals are valuable as a recurring communal activity, even more so than their content. That is, just the monks all congregating in the chapel together may be more important than the prayers they say. I mean, it must suck to show up at 5am to chant some hymns but then you look around and see all of your brothers dutifully there and it may have some kind of psychological affect.
I'm a proponent of remote work but I often wonder if I am being selfish. Monasteries are notoriously ridiculously productive and I wonder how much those rituals play into their success.
The old meaning of the word "deprecate" meant to "pray against," or "to pray for deliverance from". As a software developer, I have always found this fact amusing. Software becomes deprecated not when it is actually limited or removed, but when the developers and maintainers begin to pray that God will deliver them from it.
Thanks, that's interesting. I never thought to look it up before.
Though most people I've worked with for some reason insist on pronouncing and sometimes spelling it as 'depreciated', which I guess makes a little sense if they're thinking of it as 'valueless.'
It's an interesting idea but doesn't really sync up with my experience.
If recurring communal activity has a positive psychological effect then why do people (myself included) seem to have such a disdain for meetings.
"Check in" meetings really are the worst. They're often a very cut-and-dry "here's what I did last week, here's what I'm doing this week" kind of thing and I get the sense that almost everyone hates them.
Maybe the difference here is that in the monasteries the "meetings" are not personal. Nobody is going to a chapel to talk about themselves, or be put on display. It's very much a low-pressure communal environment which IMO makes all the difference.
I think it is possible to confuse a positive psychological effect in the sense of bringing you joy as opposed to a positive psychological effect that results in improved communal activity. I mean to say, not all benefits to a community are coincident with benefits to the individual. In fact, that would be a pretty Christian idea, that the sacrifice you make as an individual (to your enjoyment) results in a benefit for the community.
That is what I meant about me feeling selfish. It may be the case I am prioritizing my comfort over the needs of the community. Rituals are a public display of a willingness to sacrifice, one that is shared amongst a community. The monks see themselves sacrificing for the sake of each other when they show up for the unpleasant 5am prayers.
I was reading about the Order of Cistercians the other day, and I am reminded of this passage from wikipedia:
Relaxations were gradually introduced into Cistercian life with regard to diet and simplicity of life. Also, they began accepting the traditional sources of income that monks in comparable orders used: like rents, tolls, and benefices. The agricultural operations were blessed by success. Wealth and splendour characterized the monasteries, so that by 1300, the standard of living in most abbeys was comparable, if not higher, than the standards middling nobles enjoyed.[59]
[59] Jaritz, Gerhard (1985). "The Standard of Living in German and Austrian Cistercian Monasteries of the Late Middle Ages". In Elder, E. Rozanne (ed.). Goad and Nail. Studies in medieval Cistercian history. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. p. 57. ISBN 978-0-87907-984-0. "A study [Watzl 1978] done for the Lower-Austrian abbey of Heiligenkreuz demonstrates that in the first half of the fifteenth century, no fewer than 201-207 days of the year saw extra food."
One documentary I watched claimed that they tend to accumulate significant wealth so much so that their effects can be seen on the communities that surround them.
There are probably a lot of reasons for this. Much of the profit from the work done by the monks is often captured by the institution and used to purchase land and buildings. Large monasteries might have dozens or even hundreds of able bodied men engaged in light agriculture, bee keeping, beer production, etc. and that adds up over decades and centuries.
I think when we consider productivity you might be thinking of Silicon Valley hustle culture rather than the effect a community has over centuries.
>Dell's about-face on working from home belies chief operating officer Jeff Clarke's mid-pandemic assertion that "we will never go back to the way things were before."
>"Here at Dell, we expect, on an ongoing basis, that 60 per cent of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week," said Clarke during the corporation's Q2 2020 earnings conference call.
I yearn for the day that an investor reminds him of this during an earnings call.
After seeing various consultant presentations early in COVID (and much pundit commentary), I find it somewhat remarkable just how little ended up really changing five years later. It has changed a bit some places. Some relatively remote-friendly companies that basically ignored hiring location requirements during COVID really can't go home again without drastically cutting their workforce--which they probably don't want to do if they're doing reasonably well whether they like it or not. But I'm not sure that, aside from seeing a few more masks being worn, that there's really a lot of change overall.
While interviewing candidates for a critical role in my organization, the recruiter mentioned that she is finding it hard to get good candidates who want to come to office. And yet, management stuck to "minimum 3 days from office" rule. We are also "gently reminded" often and another rule about showing your face on video.
My previous team lead was a super smart guy and pleasant to work with, in the 1.5 years that I worked with him, I saw him once on camera. It didn't matter to him or me to see each other's face. The only people it seems to matter are the suits, who go around nitpicking everything making life miserable for everyone. Sure, it is nice to have human connection and seeing people on camera helps, but if someone doesn't want to be on camera, why push them? The sarcasm ("someone is having a bad hair day"), the threats ("camera or else...") - it just reeks of pettiness and stupidity.
None of this makes any sense. My job is to write code, I am not a model for toothpaste or eyelashes or lipstick or razor or whatever. Just leave me alone so I can do the tasks that I was hired for.
I don't think COVID changed the work culture much, except exposing some corporate lies ("you gotta haul your ass to the office to be effective" etc). The more we think things are changing, the more they are staying the same.
> We are also "gently reminded" often and another rule about showing your face on video.
I'm actually buying this being 100% remote. We had more than a couple of folks who never showed their faces except for the first interview, never attended any face to face meeting (company sponsored travel and accommodation) and in one case a dude posted a daily update from his second (or third, or seventh) company on our channel by mistake and was pissed off he's getting fired.
I'll take the video if this means I can stay 100% remote otherwise they'll announce RTO and I don't even have an office to go to in my country.
I don't think you always have to be on camera and a cell call is sometimes just fine. But, given that we have the technology, especially for genuinely interactive calls, I agree that people should generally default to video on. And, to the degree that there are face to face offsites, I think you need a really good reason not to attend--and "I don't want to" is not that good reason.
Lets say 10% of people have a side job. Are we gonna put stupid rules in place and piss off the other 90%?
That dude who posted updates on the wrong channel? He deserves to get fired. That said, lets say he was doing his job well and he was posting the right updates to the right company channel, then why does anyone care if he has 1 job or 10? Sure it is ethically dubious - so is not providing raises, not keeping up promises, withholding promotions for no reason etc (one of my team mates was hired at a very low salary with the promise that they will pay market rate after 6 months, it has been more than a year now, they refuse to honor their promise. He is fantastic and still gets treated like this). Ethics works both ways.
Suppose person A is sharp and fast and finishes his work in 4 hours while person B takes 8 hours for the same set of tasks. Is A going to be paid twice as B? In knowledge work, why does anyone care if a person works 2 hours a day or 20, as long as they finish their work in the agreed upon time?
<< Are we gonna put stupid rules in place and piss off the other 90%?
If one is to believe Linkedin crowd, yes. I have long stopped trying to understand that frame of mind. I simply accept that it exists and plan around people with those perspectives.
Before COVID, I worked for an international company, with people from various countries often working in the same team together. It happened that in my team, I was the only guy from my country. So whenever I needed to talk to my teammates, I had to make a call.
And yet, it seemed very important for the managers that I come every day to the office and make those calls from there, rather than from my home. They couldn't make even the excuse about people being in the same room, because we obviously were not. But if you make the rules, you do not really need an excuse.
Then COVID came, and impossible things became possible overnight.
Now they are gradually becoming impossible again. Except that more people are pissed off, because they remember that it used to be possible.
Inflation, crypto, and sports betting removed almost all stigma from gambling.
Being in your 20s with a crippling gambling addiction is just normal now.
The tech industry has finish metamorphosis and is now just another financial industry. No care towards building great products or solving real problems.
Just building great pitch decks and solving for investor attraction.
OAI is the peak example. ChatGPT was the fastest growing product ever and, especially in the early forms, sucked.
Even now, it’s just kind of mid.
OAI seems more focused on regulatory capture and spending on compute rather than innovating.
That’s why deep seek caught them with their pants down.
I think you're overstating the betting angle. I saw and read about people buying buying lotto tickets long before COVID. Sports betting is certainly a bigger deal but day trading was a big thing in the dot-com era well before crypto.
And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry. There have been shifts; there's a lot more about open source for example. AI is way over-hyped probably but there's still the core of something useful there even if we don't really know how it will develop.
>> And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry
>I don’t think that’s true, mostly.
I mean there's all the work in the cloud-native space. Fusion and quantum remain speculative and probably relatively long term but you can't say there isn't a lot of innovative work going on there. Lots of little things in the Linux kernel and elsewhere in open source even beyond cloud-native. AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.
I'd argue that a big chunk of that particular space is sales innovation rather than tech innovation. But I'm admittedly pretty jaded and cynical of all the bs at this point.
I guess when I say “innovation” I’m not talking about advancements in science or incremental improvements to existing solutions, but using those advancements to solve real problems for people.
It feels like tech lost the plot. (This was most apparent during the NFT craze)
We advance technology for the sake of it, assuming that solutions will be found using this new technology.
There’s no focus on people anymore, just technology in the hopes that one will be a jackpot.
> AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.
I think we’re on the same page here and it illustrates my point.
Innovation still happens, ofc. I think AlphaFold is a major innovation, for example.
I just feel like it’s no longer the focus of the industry at large
I wish people had learned from covid and taken widespread illnesses more seriously. Before covid I was getting sick 5 to 8 times a year, thanks to coworkers. Since covid I am 100% WFH as is practically all of my company, and I've been sick exactly 1 time in 5 years. I mask indoors in public spaces during the seasonal spike in contagious viruses, and use hand sanitizer after touching anything like doorknobs or other surfaces a lot of people touch, like restaurant menus, etc. No, I am not hiding inside like some idiots seem to want to think I am.
It really disappoints me that air filtration was not taken seriously during covid, it should have been mandated by the government and paid for by the government for public places like post offices, and there should have been tax credits given to businesses to install air filtration systems. But no, we've learned nothing, and people continue to get sick far more than they would have to if we only decided to do something about it with readily available mitigations. Of course, it also helps to not elect a malicious narcissist to lead us down a path of ignorance.
I hope you realize you're doing an experiment with your health. We don't have studies on the long-term effects of this degree of isolation from everyday pathogens. It could go either way, but so much human adaptation is use it or lose it that my money's on worse long-term outcomes.
Agreed. It's common for new teachers to get sick a lot during their first year. Then their immune system adapts.
I was a bartender for over 20 year and never, i.e., very rarely, got sick. I'm pretty isolated now due to being a caregiver. Nearing the tailend of that role though and think often about how I am going to ease myself back into a regular life.
>I hope you realize you're doing an experiment with your health.
It was much more of an "experiment" before covid, getting every virus that came my way, to see how much damage it did to my body. There's a lot of evidence that even the regular flu causes irreparable damage to the body.
So, you can keep your own experiment going if you like, but I'll take the experiment that doesn't result in heart complications, loss of endurance and strength, physical decline and secondary infections. You can keep performing that "experiment" all you want.
>my money's on worse long-term outcomes.
My bet is on living longer for not having contracted the flu 40 more times in my lifetime, or long-covid, which would erase a year of my life just living through it not to mention the toll it takes on the body.
And getting the flu or a cold is not the only way to exercise the immune system, your immune system is constantly fighting pathogens. If it isn't then you'd be dead right now from something normally most people wouldn't die from because they have functioning immune systems. So, no I'm not concerned about my immune system not being able to fight off infection, it's doing that right now as we speak, and so is yours too whether you know it or not.
It's also known that when the immune system is too aggressive, people also die from the immune response. A lot of people died from covid because their immune system was fighting too hard.
Getting an avoidable disease certainly is quite a gamble.
Where did I say that I'm not socially active? I explicitly said that I'm not cowering inside afraid of the world. I just take precautions, and added precautions during spikes in seasonal viruses.
Maybe my immune system is just not that great, and covid has taught me it doesn't have to mean guaranteed illness so many times a year. I do mask when appropriate. I don't mask when the risk is low. How am I not socially active?? Forget it, you don't know me at all.
I’m sorry if I offended you — I meant social activity in the context of WFH, ie I was specifically talking about the social activity one gets at the office
I’ll admit that I was throwing some shade — but I was really just implying that “5-8 times a year” seemed like an exaggeration to me, not that you are a hermit.
I so very badly want to find a way to "chart my own course" these days. This corporate stuff is just awful. It's all so transactional and soulless and generally unpleasant.
I'm fine with transactional if I'm shopping at the grocery store. Somewhere where I spend 8+ hours a day, I kind of want to have some human connection with people.
Some days, I really miss where I worked in Italy. We weren't "family", or even "friends" really, but we were all friendly and got on well and people seemed to care about one another. And importantly there was none of that fake-ass "family" crap from management - we were all there to do a job and do it with pride, but without all the 'rah rah' BS.
There's not a single person involved in this letter - reader nor writer - who is confused about what this is actually about. Companies would rather not have an employee than have an employee who has leverage over them, even if having them and paying them is objectively better for the company's outcomes. It's all about power. And forced RTO is always about shadow-layoffs.
This is a common misunderstanding. The people who produce value in businesses (anything larger than a true startup) are not "more motivated" regarding the business than the others. They are more talented, more experienced, and/or enjoy what they are doing more. None of that is intrinsic to the business. If you try to root out "unmotivated" people, you are just going to lose your best. Alternatively, depending on how you use the word ("motivation" is a really broad term), a lack of motivation is typically a problem with the business, and not the employee, so getting rid of the employees most affected by the problem won't fix the problem.
It does seem likely that it is the least productive who remain.
The approach ensures that the people who most badly need a paycheque or who just are into it for a paycheque are those that are most likely to stay. Not likely the most experienced and best workers.
The most passionate people can go anywhere and do anything and are more likely to leave.
Teams and Zoom is the worst of both worlds. Delivers most of the disadvantages of not being face-to-face, and most of the disadvantages of RTO.
These platforms made remote work during the pandemic possible for orgs that didn't know how to work remotely already. But they are not ideal, far from it.
My guess is that, at companies where there really is a from-the-top mandate, the manager probably has very little flexibility. That said, even pre-COVID, I'm aware of companies that really didn't want even very senior (and well-known) folks to work remotely and eventually parted ways whereas they seemed to be OK with others who didn't work out of an office.
It’s not a low level management decision. I am all for remote work. But I won’t work for a company remotely if it isn’t a “remote first” culture where everyone is remote. It puts you at a real disadvantage.
I have worked for the second largest employer in the US until late 2023. RTO five days a week was a top down mandate and managers had no say so.
I was there during the first mandate. But I had a “field by design” role that was exempted. Those roles lost that exemption this year according to some of my old coworkers.
Autonomous to a certain degree. When a mandate comes down from above you have the autonomy to figure out how to comply; which depending on the mandate may leave little wiggle room.
So, if a CEO mandates everybody get off the Oracle JVM then you have some discretion on moving to OpenJDK or say re-writing things in C#.
Also, managers often have a lot of discretion is reporting problems. If somebody you supervise doesn't ever show up in the office but is still getting their work done then you have little reason to inform HR. However, if HR is monitoring badge data on their own then your discretion is irrelevant.
Yes, twice. I did it and it did work, but I was on a shitlist because of it. Excluded from higher level meetings/information, given menial/impossible tasks, etc. They hired someone else in my area pretty quickly to replace me. If you do this, you're going to have to start looking for a job immediately. Telling management to fuck off is a job ender even if it doesn't happen immediately. The second time I did it, I already had another job lined up for leverage. I worked for two more weeks until my paperwork was done at the new gig and then bailed.
I did, but I was already looking for work as I saw the levels of inflexibility not experienced before so I lucked out and was able to say no with near zero repercussions. I am saying near zero, because I am kinda looking again and long story short, the VP I said no to is still there and clearly seething over me leaving, because of the RTO mandate. Long story short, I was told in no uncertain way that I can't come back there..
It's also funny that companies crack down on business travel. C-Suite folks decide, are in-person meetings critical or not? Zoom only works from the local office?
Yep. When I was working at AWS ProServe (consulting department), until mid 2022, I could just tell my manager I need to fly out to a customer site and AWS would pay for it. The same if I wanted to meet some of ny team in person we could just all fly out to an office.
That all changed later where we had to get approval from our skip skip manager for travel on the company dime.
They cancled my trip to India for budget reasons just before they mandated wfo. nobody on my team works from the same office as me (other than my boss)
i'd complain more except I bike to the office and thus I'm getting exercise that I'd otherwise put off.
Oh this is the old story of shadow layoff. Of course the more talented go away while the less talented one stay. They know this but don't care because the cost cut is immediate but the damage is long term.
> all hybrid and remote team members who live near a Dell office will work in the office five days a week
Seems it's employees within an hour of the office, unclear on those not.
Years ago the company I worked at implemented the same policy. Funnily enough I had been planning to move but being lazy about it, and you can bet that policy lit a fire under me. Was further than an hour away within 2 months.
It strikes me as a strange that not one comment in this thread supports RTO, so I will weigh in with my unpopular opinion - I really wish all our employees would work from the office 3+ days per week.
I like the energy we get when we work in the same space. I like being able to look people in the eye when discussing challenging or emotional topics. I like being able to brainstorm together at will, and use the whiteboards. I like seeing our office space we pay for being used by more than just 2 people. I enjoy our staff lunches and getting to know each other socially. Most people have a <10m commute in our small town, so travel time isn't a big deal.
Half our company is remote, and the other half work from home most days. But I'd prefer we all be local and in the office ideally. There, I said it.
I think the future of remote work is reserved for small businesses. Publicly traded companies have no choice in the matter because of the legal risks.
I have to work from home. A day at home is like a week at the office for me in terms of productivity. The office is a distraction.
Conversely, I have an employee who repeatedly demonstrates that zero office days translates directly into zero commits.
Small companies can afford to give managers the freedom to apply different policies to different people as suits their work habits and abilities. But at publicly traded companies, the risk of a discrimination case is far too great to go with anything other than a blanket policy that screws everyone equally.
There is no RTO push. There are also no layoffs. What's happening is salary renegotiations. If people leave, they need to renegotiate their salaries and then the employer has the advantage.
Does Dell just have one campus? Are teams typically homogeneous near one campus?
I'm thinking about my own employer, where I have been WFH since I got hired. My team is spread across 5+ states. I'd be the only person from my team in the office nearest to me were there an RTO mandate. I think there would only be one or maybe two other people there who I've even worked with on anything, in my several years of employment.
Quick note that when I worked on a campus (not Dell, big silicon valley outfit) 30 years ago, I seldom met most of my co-workers face to face, except once in a while in a meeting or randomly in the cafeteria. This was because the campus was large and the probability that someone you interacted with was on the same floor let alone the same building was low.
This is a great A/B test. Since clearly it isn't necessary to all be in the same building to produce software or hardware (and hasn't been necessary since around 1994), and the companies that allow remote work get to hire from a much larger talent pool, we aught to eventually see the remote organizations thrive and the RTO ones die.
I am 100% for this. During Covid some of my coworkers started second jobs. Some of them slept all day. Even now the ones who are hybrid I see get on steam and play games right in the middle of work hours.
It's a slap in the face to people who actually work hard.
If work can only be done at the office then be sure to take Email, Teams, and Slack off your phone and leave your laptop at work so you don't break any rules.
This is dishonest, unnecessary, and likely a shadow layoff. But it’s also bad for the economy. If we can have people spread out, live how they want to in a mix of different environments, we can remove pressure on housing, traffic, services.
"...Remote work made it too easy to hire people from different time zones. Now that you’re back in the office, we can focus on hiring people from the same zip code as the CEO..."
Are you referring to the 30 second quip or the generic non-response?
> Asked whether Dell has any financial data that suggests working from the office leads to better productivity or results, a spokesperson said, "We continually evolve our business so we're set up to deliver the best innovation, value and service to our customers and partners. That includes more in-person connections to drive market leadership."
This is utter bullsh*t and everyone knows it.