They say this now. But in 12 months (or the next layoff period), they will move from hybrid to full RTO.
Still a shitty move to mandate RTO. Most people (IT folks) have spoke with do this routine:
0) daily routine to prepare for day 1) 1 hr commute to shitty office 2) login to computer, do calls with cross regional (and international) teams over Zoom/Teams/Webex or whatever conferencing system 3) teleconferencing with boss or manager 4) teleconferencing with company stakeholders 5) work on features and push code to remote systems (VCS, CI/CD…) 6) eat shitty food at nearby places, or use the low quality vending machines or cafeteria 7) logoff 8) 1 hr commute back home
There are _some_ roles which may require in-person. But those were mostly sales folks. Some IT folks that deal with physical assets did require RTO (ie, data center / network engineers).
I think the worst part is 9) at night, do more work that requires focus time while no one is bothering you, since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.
Yep. Many of my days are 4-6 hours of meetings in the morning, 2 more hours of paperwork/email/coordination activities, go get dinner, then work another 2-3 hours.
Thank goodness I can work from home. I know in some ways that makes my flexibility more damaging to my work/life balance, but the tradeoff is worth it to me.
That’s how it was for me circa 2004-2005. The only way I could get anything real work done was from home, after hours. During the day all we did was sit in meetings and report status to each other and to the higher ups. Worse, then the higher ups decided that we don’t need a sustained engineering team for the past two releases (boxed software) and the team would context switch between building new stuff and patching what’s already out there, 2 releases back. I said fuck it and left.
> shitty office
I'm not sure this applies to Google. Their offices and food are pretty nice. And their gyms are top-notch. If you stick with the salad bar, I'd venture to guess the freshness and nutrition variety will be better than most IT guys can get at home.
Of course, this does not mean RTO won't suck.
I think if you're required to RTO, you should insist on not having Zoom/Teams/Webex on while in the office.
"Come to my cube if you need me".
Way before the pandemic, I almost never had those tools running on my work laptop - unless it was for a (rare at the time) cross-geo meeting. A coworker once sent me a screenshot of how I appeared in the IM tool - Last seen 120 days ago.
Sadly, that went away once we hired our first remote person.
If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.
In the Bay Area, 1-hour commutes are generally for older and apartment people. Younger family people are in the 2+ range.
When I lived in the Bay Area, my commute was ~2.5 hours each way. I would have killed for a 1 hour commute.
I find it absurd how Americans can't give up on their suburbs and car centric development dystopia and then spend so much time in their cars.
Because door-to-door transport is faster than public transportation. Average American commute time is 26 minutes, what is it where you live?
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans....
They didn't necessary talk about time in commute. Maybe they thought spending time inside cars was useless. Sure your commute is shorter but most Americans also have to drive everywhere in their cars. To be honest, it's shit.
Edit: also, the chart is too simple to know how they conducted and came up with the data.
>I find it absurd how Americans can't give up on their suburbs and car centric development dystopia and then spend so much time in their cars
I agree that kind of commute is insane, but maybe we don't all want to raise our families in shoe boxes (often surrounded by filth and crime) in the city centre (as if everyone in France lives in downtown Paris).
You may find that thrilling, but I don't. None of it.
There is zero relation between filth and crime, and living in the city centre. At least inherently. There may be a correlation where you live.
"In 2005, Harvard University and Suffolk University researchers worked with local police to identify 34 "crime hot spots" in Lowell, Massachusetts. In half of the spots, authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, enforced building codes, discouraged loiterers, made more misdemeanor arrests, and expanded mental health services and aid for the homeless. In the other half of the identified locations, there was no change to routine police service.
The areas that received additional attention experienced a 20% reduction in calls to the police. The study concluded that cleaning up the physical environment was more effective than misdemeanor arrests."
People would go for condos if there were cheap large ones nearby. Alas, the supply restrictionists blocked all vertical development decades ago in order to inflate prices 10x and capture tech wages. That left SFHs and townhomes in far away places.
+1 for family sized (3 bedroom condos) if they existed close to work we could have families and jobs - imagine!
Now that's crazy talk.
You have to sign over most of your future earnings to the guy who's selling you the property, in exchange for (hopefully) getting the next guy to fork over most of theirs. The game is so hardcore that the pyramid scheme is as strong as ever.
I live within an European city - not downtown, but relatively close. My commute by car over ~10km is 18-20 mins, same distance by public transport takes 40-50 mins, depending on train reliability and workers not striking.
So change my mind?
I don't intent to change your mind because it's often that people are stuck to their opinions.
Just want to say that sitting in public transports I can do other things such as doing some work or reading a book. While sitting in a car feels terrible to me. 30 minutes of driving a car is a lot worse than sitting in public transport. Also, if I have to commute by walk/bike, I also feel much better.
Yes, we Americans love our cars, oil, wars, wwf, and guns.
Well at least we still donate to preserve endangered species. 1 out of 5 ain't bad!
But only because we're confused and think we're still paying for pro wrestling. :D
What steps do you suggest an average person take?
That’s insane. 13 hours of work + commute. After 7 hours of sleep you only have 4 hours left in your day for literally everything else.
The push for the 8 hour work day over a century ago was often accompanied with slogans to the effect of "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours for what we will."
5 hours round trip commuting a day is giving up over half of your prerogative time to simply shuffling from one place to another.
The Bay Area is lucrative monetarily and all, but there's just no world where that's worth it for me.
I’ve worked in tech in the Bay for over a decade and met a handful of people with that insane of a commute. It’s not normal.
>13 hours of work...
... what?
13 hours of (work + commute) -- that's 5 hours of commute + 8 hours of work.
The parentheses help a lot. I also thought the original commenter was implying 13 hours of work + the 5 hour commute and couldn’t figure out where they got the 13 from haha
That is a ... choice.
Everyone I know with a long commute can afford a shorter commute, they just trade the commute for a larger single-family dwelling.
yeah, “can afford” doesn’t mean I should, props to them
You're forgetting that a lot of people still have to WFH, they just do it now before or after going to the office - so it's even worse than you're stating.
I know some folks that work from the west coast with customers on the east coast, and they regularly are taking meetings at 6am from home, then commuting in, and getting home late.
If we return to the office, we should not also be expected to work long hours when we're at home. It's the worst of both words.
I was told at a previous job I couldn't work from home but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened. My response was I couldn't work from home and just left my laptop at work.
>It's the worst of both words.
And it's quickly becoming the status quo.
They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?
RTO for sales folks doesn't make sense to me either. Typically you want your sales folks on the road not in your office. I think sales is a good candidate for fully remote.
You 100% want your sales folks at customers not in your office.
Most roles can be hybrid/remote. Regardless of Tech, Finance, Marketing, whatever, if the job involves sitting in front of a computer or being on the phone all day it's a good candidate. If you were doing the job remotely from March 2020 through the end of 2021 and being effective, it's a good candidate.
Sales also has long established and standard ways to measure performance
Amazon is not mandating RTO for sales folks.
Good, they didn't when I was in sales at AWS (well before Covid).
> There are _some_ roles which may require in-person
IME when working in a Product role, it worked better from the office. Doesn't have to be every day, but being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings.
Tech positions don't even need daily video calls IMO. My team experimented with a few days of written status updates and it was fine. But they chose to have a 10-mins stand-up mainly for socialization.
> being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings
i do not understand what people are talking about when they say things like this
personA: hey @personB you got 20 mins to talk about XYZ?
personB: yeah gimme 10 mins
personA: k, i’ll grab a coffee
personA: /zoom start
the rest of what your comment says is fair enough. i just see this mentioned a lot in anti-WFH leaning comments. often about how hard it is to mentor a junior.
(i can’t remember the exact slack command but you hopefully get the idea).
Google had flex time for all the time I worked there, for a dozen years, well before the pandemic. I don't see any particular reason it wouldn't work for them now?
Google has always had the flexible working hours and didn't mind the occasional "plumber coming today" day, but before COVID it was very allergic to permanent WFH arrangements.
I don't know if that will happen. A lot of the cloud heavy offices moved to shared desks for engineers, so there's only a desk for 2 days/week, so they don't have enough space available for everyone to return full time.
It's still possible, but I don't think would be as easy as an annoucement.
At least Google's offices have nice perks: free gym, healthy and nutritious meals, healthy and tasty snacks. Personally those perks are enough to negate the terrible commute.
I was told Amazon's offices has none of these.
Inside sales maybe. But sales reps who physically meet with customers spend very little time in company offices in general.
I mean, my experience says you’re right, but the red hot labor summer combined with Dell and Amazon _and_ Apple workers vocally opposing such mandates and leaving outright give me hope that maybe, _maybe_ leadership will accept this is a losing battle and embrace the new norms.
Barring that, the younger working demographics have made it abundantly clear there’s a zero tolerance for the traditional corporate bullshit. When mandates first came down, they responded with “coffee badging” and the like; I don’t doubt there will be another adaptation, like arriving late and leaving early, baking the commute time silently into the work day.
The writing is on the wall, and the modern worker knows how badly they’re being screwed over. I’d argue it’s a wiser decision to let the workers do their jobs from wherever, consolidate offices into continental HQs, and decentralize the workforce to disincentivize collective action. Workers get the flexibility they need to survive in the current cost of living/housing crisis, and companies don’t risk bleeding talent or earning the wrath of a Union election.
Everybody wins except commercial landlords, but they’re not exactly the good guys here anyway.
Tech organizations are all overstaffed from the pandemic. Engineering is usually boom/bust. Likely outcome is recession and purge. The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.
It depends on your perspective and context. I refuse to subscribe to the defeatist attitudes of "this is how it has been and therefore always shall be" that's in your post, because otherwise what's the point of participating at all if change is impossible?
The engineering boom-bust cycle is a recent phenomenon (past fifty years) relatively speaking, and it doesn't mean it's a permanent fixture of civilization unless we choose to accept it as such. I reject permanence and advocate change, and so should you.
Besides, "Gen Alpha" won't be in cube farms even with a RTO, because Glorious Leaders (TM) in tech threw out cubicles, personal identity, and privacy in favor of hotel seating and clean desk policies. A return to cubicles would be a marked improvement over the present status quo, if we could just figure out the right marketing buzzwords to trick the C-Suite into believing it's the Next Big Thing (TM).
I’m not defeatist. We’re at a high where massively capitalized companies have been in a hiring binge for skilled technical employees for a long time. It’s been good to me - my family is more prosperous by any measure than my parents are grandparents, who were arguably smarter and bolder people.
All of these companies have been incredibly successful… but can they sustain their historically unprecedented growth? Maybe. But when that train slows down, Intel is the example of what happens.
Oh goodness, if we’re talking about sustainable growth then boy do I have some hockeystick charts to reject that notion. For decades, growth has largely been an illusion created through clever accounting and inflation metrics - it’s why the industry keeps desperately trying to jump on “brand new” stuff like crypto, blockchain, and generative models: a new industry means actual growth as opposed to illusory growth, which would create a new wealth class above and beyond any of the existing billionaires of today. For all of Sam Altman’s own blowharding, he’s not wrong that whatever the next brand-new revolutionary industry turns out to be - AI, space mining, molecular fabrication, whatever - will require literal trillions of dollars to explode into a 100x ROI.
That said, if we abandon this idea of “infinite growth forever” and accept that market saturation and incremental improvements provide opportunities to rebalance structures and remediate institutional flaws, then there’s a lot more hope to be had. You can’t build new things forever, and eventually need to take time to pay off outstanding debts, improve existing systems, modernize legacy infrastructure, and basically make everything simpler and sustainable for whatever the Next Big Thing turns out to be.
…unfortunately for me, making that pitch to leadership usually just gets me laughed out of the room because maintenance and efficiency isn’t “sexy”, nor does it boost their share valuations. Ah well, won’t stop me from trying.
>The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.
Gen alpha? You're talking about a generation that the oldest cohort is ~10-11 years of age.
Will there even be enough of them given their potential parents can't afford a house? Will they go into tech after seeing this "learn to code" cohort getting screwed in the marketplace?
There’s a ton of fraud in this space. You need at least hybrid to keep that at bay.
At a previous place, we chose hybrid RTO over intrusive surveillance. My opinion shifted from being a full remote advocate after I caught a half dozen folks with various schemes and scams.
The straw that broke the camels back was a guy who lied about where he was living. He was going through a divorce and the ex-wife ratted him out to the state tax authority to get the reward. The company was fined by both states. The ex made like $50k.
Define “fraud”? If you get your work done in two hours and can’t progress until a teammate does their end, is it better or worse if you are scrolling HN in an office or at home?
I run my own company, I do not give a single fuck how, where, or when people get their job done. I only care they deliver.
Likewise, people who need to be watched over are not the employees I want in the first place. I’m not running a daycare for children. Adults can make their own decisions, if you need me over your shoulder to deliver you aren’t useful to me to start with.
> Define “fraud”?
the BigCorp owns your life, the rights to tell you where to be 75% of your waking hours and what to do.
get the eight hour job done in two hours and slack off for the rest? that's theft and fraud. get it done in two hours and admit to it? that's more work for you for the same pay, to fill the rest of your time.
then you go online and some overly enthusiastic yc sponsored clown will dunk on you for not giving your life away to a corporation
> Define “fraud”?
He lived in another state but paid taxes where he supposed to be living. The company was held liable.
> I run my own company
Then you should understand what for you can be held liable and what your responsibilities are. It may be very expensive not to know. In extreme cases you may be held criminally liable.
> I do not give a single fuck
It’s just a recommendation: I’d suggest you do because your tax authorities certainly do.
A lot of business don't want to bother performance managing that closely. Plenty just worked off of trust.
* You hire someone, and then figure out someone else is doing the work (usually because they are making stupid mistakes, and the person you hired can't be that dumb)
* Your staff work odd hours that make coordinating hard (side gigs / hussle's etc).
* I think the rumored record of multiple full time jobs someone was working was 5+.
* We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.
We deal with sensitive information. Having data go overseas etc is a no go for our business at least.
Note: If you have to deal with government agencies that have gone remote you KNOW that the throughput is sometimes < 50% what it was before. You can almost immediately tell as someone dealing with them. No one answers their phones, all voicemail, all super long delays (week+).
> * I think the rumored record of multiple full time jobs someone was working was 5+.
> * We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.
I'm not sure how this is justified as a problem.
CEO of multiple companies: A-OK
SVP serving on multiple companies' boards of directors: A-OK
Salaried office worker working for multiple companies remotely: Fraud
Hourly worker working three jobs to make ends meet: A-OK
CEOs and SVPs have contracts that deal with these issues. Salaried workers commit to full time hour commitment.
My employer allows outside employment for some roles if appropriate. It requires disclosure and may not be possible depending on what you do. Double dipping is not acceptable.
I’m a VP level person who serves on a couple of boards and help with a family business. It’s all disclosed and approved with mutually agreeable boundaries.
Another example is an attorney - it’s ok for some private practice, but not ok if that practice will reasonably involve an entity that the company is likely to interact with.
That’s just, like, your opinion, mahn. I don’t recall anyone else saying that those things were OK, or that they were comparable, which they aren’t? Your MO seems to be to just make your comment so high-effort to reply to that nobody will bother.
Capital patches out any attempt of non-capital to exit the system quickly.
I wouldn't call it fraud, but it is probably violating the terms of the employment contract. I know it is for my company (I bet people still do it anyway)
What's the recourse for violating your employment contract beyond termination? Ineligibility for unemployment because you were fired "for cause"? Seems like it's worth the risk since you can be fired for no reason at all.
If you want to work like a hourly contractor, be one. Work your hours.
If you want to be a $250k engineer and fuck around on Netflix waiting for something for 75% of the workday, you’re demonstrating a lack of maturity and professionalism. Or you work for a really dysfunctional place.
If you’re running your own shop, you’re empowered to run it to your needs. That’s awesome. Mine are different.
And if you find out that your developers were actually in North Korea and you've violated sanctions, would you care then?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-n...
So the logic is that even though they may get their required work done, the risk that they may one day flee to North Korea and cause you to violate sanctions requires that you have to constantly bring in all of your employees to a central location and soft surveil them to mitigate this?
Why not just require a single background check or interview them on-site?
I was responding to someone that says they only care that they deliver. And that was the statement I took issue with, there are numerous factors that employer should care about beyond performance. As another example, the liability raised from creating a toxic workplace. I said nothing about bringing people in. You raise two things that would be good controls for identity fraud.
Don’t worry. Most people here that “run their own business” are in VC-funded startup la la land anyway. It says very very very little about knowing how to actually productively steer a group of people.
Why do we do this all the time? Somebody makes a slightly hyperbolic statement, and everybody replies to them with the most outlandish and extreme examples of things that would be problems if they literally meant the exact thing they said.
"People can wear anything they want out in public, I don't care"
"Yeah, well if they wore a suit made of plutonium, or one covered with guns that fired randomly in every direction, I bet you'd care then".
I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that he probably does the due diligence to verify that his employees are legally able to work wherever the company is, and aren't using company resources to launch cyberattacks on the NSA, aren't international terrorists trying to destroy the moon, etc, etc.
You could have them turn up to an office for a few days when they start work if you wanted
They’re literally doing the work. They’re not accused of placing backdoors, they’re not accused of anything aside from the US government running an antiquated sanctions regime, and just doing the work. The US government isnt charging companies with OFAC violations, so there is no reason to care. North Koreans learned how to be a fake Staff Software Engineer and do non-fake things for real RSUs.
Companies shouldnt burden the rest of their employees for social verification, for something that isnt a problem for the company.
That sounds akin to saying a security breach doesn't matter until there are consequences. Not many companies would be comfortable being in the position that they have not verified the identities of employees who have access to payment processing data.
They did verify the identity to the standard required. The employee lied.
Although analogies compare dissimilar things with a common attribute, your analogy relies on saying all employees are security breaches. These are employees competent to work in medium sized all the way to big tech companies as software engineers.
Every company with sensitive data need to consider insider threat risk. Many compliance standards require background checks specifically because employees can lie. My point is simple, it's not as simple as "employee complete tasks? Y/N" but that every employee is a potential liability that businesses need to do risk management according to their role. Remote work makes that more complicated, and requires different controls.
Surely nobody is referring to scrolling HN during work hours as “fraud”
No, I think the current buzzword for that is "time theft".
And it should be that way. The responsibility for tax cheats should rest entirely on the person not paying. But that's not how it works. Our government has passed authoritarian laws that put the responsibility on the employer too even if they have no knowledge of the crime.
Hiring?
"Work in the office" or "remote surveillance" are not the only two possible options here.
I work (remotely) for a company that treats their employees like adults. I have a work-provided laptop, but it doesn't contain any surveillance-ware and my boss doesn't care where I am or what I'm doing as long as I'm getting my stuff done and showing up for zoom meetings. When they hired me, they ran a background check to ensure that I was who I said I was, among other due diligence.
There are more companies like this. They may not be in the majority, but they exist.
who are these people who barely do any work from home? My office is an amusement park with free food and amazing views and yet I still work from home to minimize distractions and wasted time. My output is measurably higher when I work from home.
What I've found quite surprising in seeing these WFH vs RTO debates play out over the past couple of years is that even the WFH stans argue in terms defined by the employers.
The most obvious example of this is citing evidence that WFH makes people more productive, but there are various other arguments that try to position WFH as beneficial for both employers and employees.
I have opinions on many of the points made by both sides, but honestly it strikes me as the wrong argument to be having. The reason I want to be able to WFH is because I prefer it. I don't care if it's better for my employer or not, the same as I don't care whether working on Saturday and Sunday is better or not - I simply won't do it.
I know I'm in a privileged position to be able to say "I won't work in an office" and others have obligations that undermine their ability to show RTO employers the finger.
I guess I'm just surprised that people demanding WFH, simply because they want it, seem to be in the minority, judging by HN comments (fraught, I know). Perhaps this is a culture clash? I'm British, and this might be a US-centric thing.
I know multiple people who worked at Amazon (I say worked because they've recently quit) who would log two of their three weekly badges by going in the office at 11:59pm, and again at 12:01 am. Their team, managers, and collaborators never actually expected them at their desks. It was all to appease this mandate.
It's not surprising that Amazon has moved to 5 days a week despite so many people gaming the system and not actually caring about being in person. There's likely some algorithm driving this entire movement that doesn't take into account any of the real nuance that team dynamics requires, let alone taking into account that there are tangible benefits to remote work.
I honestly don't think there is any algorithm. For all the bluster and commitment to being "data driven", none of the companies I've seen mandate RTO have provided any sort of data-driven reason why it needs to happen. Amazon's policy might as well be "Jassy feels it in his gut that RTO is better for the company so we are doing it".
All the communication of RTO invokes the most fanciful and vague references to "magical hallway conversations" and "increased collaboration" without a single data point to back up any of the claims.
It has been almost humorous to watch such stalwarts of "data driven decision making" turn up a giant goose egg with respect to actual evidence on such a huge, impactful, and far reaching decision.
Amazons RTO is a hidden layoff round. They are overstaffed because they hired like crazy during the pandemic, now they need to slimmdown and will simply wait for people to quit because of the RTO and fire those that dont comply. And they dont have to pay anything because those that leave do so out of free will, and the fired people were simply breaking their contract
Open office plans have data that shows it costs less than individual offices but it is sold as "fostering communication" and "team culture." The cost per office is easier to count than the lost productivity of a distracted programmer.
RTO has similar data. If we require a highly distributed workforce to be in a specific physical location x amount of time, y percentage will resign and we don't have to pay severance or announce layoffs. That's easy to calculate vs. the lost productivity of individuals or the impact of losing top performers and lowering the bar.
Only champion data driven decisions when they confirm your desired outcome. Nothing new under the sun.
Data-driven management is primarily to find goldbrickers and troublemakers through statistical mumbo-jumbo performed over shoddy proxy metrics. It's not supposed to promote or encourage sensible decisions.
I go to the office almost everyday by choice. Free food, snacks, and coffee, gym, and medical clinics on campus. And it's just nice to get dressed and leave the house.
But it's really nice to have the flexibility to WFH when I need to, especially just mornings to skip traffic.
Same! Tech job, my co-founder and I are only a 5 minute drive or bike ride from the office. It’s nice to get dressed and have that separation from home.
I feel like the commute is what people are actually feeling the worst, because it’s unpaid time that they just straight up lose. Being close to the office resolves it for us.
Unfortunately a new job, even 5-8 miles away, may turn a then-5 minute commute into a 45m-1hr commute in many metropolitan areas.
I think more management needs to realize that forcing in-person isn't inherently beneficial. There can be value in meeting up if it's appropriately planned, though.
My current management has been very accommodating with remote/hybrid. If there's a meeting where face-time is beneficial, people voluntarily come in -- but there's no pressure to do so. Generally, we find it easier to pop into the office for a day every few months to whiteboard things instead of dealing with Miro/Zoom. We have a mix of remote folks who live next to the office, some folks within a couple hour drive, and some who need to fly in.
A former job of mine used to fly people to the same location 4x a year for a week to hash out a quarterly plan and grab drinks. The whole agenda was laid out and not a minute felt wasted. While not everyone went 4x a year, everyone was given the opportunity to do so, and this helped alleviate friction.
Another job of mine had remote folks fly in every 3-4 months for a couple of days at a time. Some teams did it more frequently (1x/mo for a couple days) when critical projects were in the pipeline, but they'd return to normal afterwards.
With good public transport and metros such low distanced would never take that long.
But Americans just can't give up the freedom of being stressed in their cars.
I'm a big supporter of public transit but this absolutism isn't grounded in reality.
A 5-10mi change in destination in almost every system that I'm aware of can add a tremendous amount of time to a commute.
I don't have the discipline to stop working when I work from home. Being able to go into the office every day is a nice perk for me to help structure my day. If it was a longer drive, I'd probably feel differently.
I feel the exact opposite- I didn't have the discipline to keep working when I work from home- my productivity plummeted during COVID and skyrocketed when RTO was mandated again. At home I'm too easily distracted by errands, hobby projects in the garage, picking up a book to read "just a chapter" on a coffee break and realizing 2-3 hours have passed, and the like. In office I feel obligated to actually be productive from the combined shame of being seen as a slacker and less physical opportunities to goof off.
> In office I feel obligated to actually be productive from the combined shame of being seen as a slacker and less physical opportunities to goof off.
If anything, an office makes for more unproductivity than working remotely. No random people showing up at your desk with "can you help out real quick (LOL) here and there", no "hey we gotta wait for colleague XYZ before we head for lunch break", no coffee room talk...
No no and no.
Stop thinking all people are the same.
Some people are just unproductive at home, some are more. That's life.
I know plenty of people that are absolutely unproductive at home, they just get distracted easily as the previous user.
And there's many people that just can't work without carrot and stick provided by people/bosses around them judging their daily routine.
Seriously stop thinking that every person works as you.
We are all different and reality is that WFH is tough for many people from many points of view, it's not for everyone.
That's true. I suppose if you are a person who has an iron will and good discipline the potential for productivity is much higher at home where you can lock in and just grind for a few hours with no interruptions. I am not that person and suspect many others aren't either, so there's that conflict between potential and real world outcomes where some people are just more productive in office even with all the distractions you mentioned than in an environment where you can actually focus in a flow state but have no surrounding social pressure to do so. I suspect management figures the same which is probably part of why RTO is being pushed so hard.
In my eyes the individual differences here could mean that it would be better to leave the decisions about WFH or office work to the teams. The team manager should know who can perform well from where and they can react if an arrangement does not work out as expected.
Wait you need discipline to... stop working?!
I can relate.
I work (or at least spend the time at the PC even if I don't) around two hours more per day from home, while the office made me quit much sooner.
Separate your work location from the house life. Best thing i did was putting a desk in the guestroom and turn it into a home office. If im there im working, if im in any other part of the house im not
> I feel like the commute is what people are actually feeling the worst, because it’s unpaid time that they just straight up lose.
There's also the associated side costs: getting ready to leave work (more for women, many feel socially obliged to put on makeup), extra clothes washing (personally, I don't like to wear clothes I had to travel in public transport with), having to schedule around errands like tradespeople coming in for repairs or picking up parcels from the post office, and for those with children all the shit associated with that, like picking up said children from daycare (whose opening times often conflict with expected work availability) or transporting them to school and after-school stuff like sports training... and finally, even though people like to deny even the most obvious (like in Munich, the current explosion of covid in wastewater tracking), there is still a pandemic raging on plus all the other "regular" bugs like influenza, RSV, measles and whatever else shit children catch at school, distribute to their parents, who then distribute it around work.
Had society actually learned anything from the two years of Covid dominance, in-presence work would be the exception not the norm, and people who have to perform in-presence work be compensated for their commute.
Used to feel the same way, but that was when I always used to always choose apartments near my office. Now that I don't want to live near my office, I prefer to work from home.
On-site childcare would guarantee I go into the office.
Google has been shedding office space in the bay. They probably don’t currently have enough desks, and they don’t feel like spending on the office space.
They’ve also been aggressively moving teams overseas. My guess is they won’t RTO, or at least not until their headcount matches desk count in core regions.
Didn't they just build a couple massive new buildings in MTV?
If they do RTO I wouldn't expect them to announce it during the busy Q4 holiday shopping season, that's an inopportune time for people to leave the company.
RTO is effectively a cut to your hourly wage since you need to commute. I think people would be less sore about it if Amazon and others extended an olive branch of “commute time pay” or something.
(And no, free food and snacks don’t count. Amazon doesn’t have that anyways.)
I'm the MD of a small company. My attitude towards WFH prior and post pandemic could not be more stark. I am probably a bit more chilled out in general but that is another matter.
MSP is a reasonable description of my firm. We have a helpdesk etc and provided calls/jobs/projects are fixed/process within SLAs etc then all is fine. I am now a lot more chilled about where people work from. In return, I know I get a lot back.
However, collaboration in person is useful and no amount of email or webrtc is going to replace that. We loosely require two days per week in the office.
Not to mention coming to Google office has many perks, Amazon office is much much more barebones.
Google proving that they remain a less Xitty company than Amazon. Yes, the bar is low, and yes, we'll see if it lasts.
No they have to alternate with the RTO policies, if they did this at the same time, it would trigger a recession.
for the moment.
my guess is that in the next 12/18 month all of major tech & big corps will follow the amazon's way.
These folks literally just saw what Amazon did and did the opposite.
I'm not sure it's right to say they did anything here. All the article reports is that an unspecified Google VP made an offhand remark that no changes are expected to their 3-2 hybrid schedule - which used to be Amazon's schedule until Andy Jassy made an unexpected change.
They just want Amazon talent. Then they'll turn up the heat.
You mean the ones that don't want to go to the office? What's the point of taking in talent, getting them up to speed at Google and then having them leave after 12–18 months?
You're not going to get a VP job talking like that.
The general opinion here on HN seems to be that the most talented that can easily land a new job are the first to leave - might be a good time to skim the cream of the crop, even if for 12-18 months. Who knows, many might even stay when every other major company moves to RTO.
Maybe but I think this sort of exposed weak leadership at the top of Amazon (Andy Jassy) and/or their hidden goals of a silent layoff or protecting value of their real estates (at everyone else’s cost).
Companies should be forced to pay some sort of commute tax every time they force someone to come into an office. Driving an hour to the office and back home, in your car has an impact on everyone and everything around them, it's time they pay up.
At least in the Bay Area, the commute is the tax that follows a severe lack of housing supply, which cities fight tooth and nail against, while encouraging more office space. Low density and driver-centric planning also makes public transport less feasible.
There's going to be a significant exodus of Amazon employees once the mandate kicks in fully. A percentage aren't able to come into the office every day, due to unrealistic commute logistics. Google making this headline sets them up to catch a lot of talent at once, to the point that I suspect this may be part of the policy's intent.
We snatched a great talent from Amazon.
And we didn't even need to throw crazy money, just full remote and 16 weeks of vacations per year.
It's amazing what amazing talent you can get paying with time rather than money they don't need.
it remains to be seen if it will be a net positive for amazon, but people quitting is expected and the primary reason they implemented RTO. it's right there in the public announcement.
Google will most certainly wind down office time on short-term leased offices or those expiring soon. There are likely many around the country/world they have. These could also be smaller offices or areas where they think they could possibly take a wash with a sublease in the current commercial real-estate environment.
I wish this commitment had some kind of actual teeth, maybe something like adding "if we ever require RTO for you to keep your job, and you don't want to, we'll give you 2 years' severance with full benefits" to every remote employee's employment contract.
RTO is going to be brutal for us in 3rd tier cities like PDX
The tech scene here SUCKS, but I much prefer the lifestyle to a large city ( plus, I can buy a house here. )
Not sure what will happen if the days of remote work ends. How will I get a gig?
There was a time in the mid 2010s were they were obsessed with "servant leaders" and "leading from the front"... those days are long-fucking-gone. Guarantee the executive class will not be forced into office.
> Guarantee the executive class will not be forced into office.
Absolutely, they will find some kind of excuse to justify their jet-setting around and spending time in their various homes across the world, while insisting that the worker bees cannot possibly do their work outside of an office.
Plenty of places are still hiring remote. Do not lose hope
Of course it won't. It doesn't have enough desks to allow everyone to be present simultaneously.
I would be fine in going to the office if they could make it so that I don't get sick. I got sick all the time even before COVID.
I’m pretty sure my friend has been required to return to office for 3 days a week since after the pandemic.
That’s hybrid, not full RTO
I applaud Microsoft and Google for not going with a full RTO. But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office. True remote work enables an economy that is spread out, resilient, and lets people live the way they want. We have this capability so why not do it?
> We have this capability so why not do it?
sortof yes, sortof no.
Aside from all the conversation about work culture, state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work. States hate losing tax revenue. Notoriously, it is easier to register to do business in a state than to unregister. This is even harder internationally.
For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + taxation, and every state and country under the sun's paperwork + regs + taxation. That is a real burden. Not just the paperwork + administrative overhead, but being subject to differing employment + everything else laws from *everywhere* will really muck up ability to run a consistent business.
While fully remote startups can now access services to help with this, like PEO providers like Justworks/Deel, the reality is that most of the world is not setup to accept this at scale. I run a fully remote startup and still run into issues with vendor diligence departments and accounts etc. expecting us to have a physical office, and being totally bewildered when we don't. The people involved now understand remote work, but the systems --forms, insurances, tax nexus decisions, etc -- still very much aren't setup to handle it.
Notably: if you are a bigger company, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube with all these local governments, and you bet that every locality will be trying to extract tax dollars from the big firms with deeper pockets.
We see this all the time working at the intersection of the insurance / fintech space. I've had several big, legacy vendors make requests for multiple physical signatures on a piece of paper (printed and mailed or faxed, can't just annotate a PDF) from people who haven't even met eachother in person let alone ever worked at the same address.
The kicker? These papers are access authorization forms to APIs.
Your average tech company is probably reasonably well prepared to go truly distributed, but I bet many of their vendors aren't. Whole workflows in certain industries don't even conceptualize companies with employees distributed across offices, let alone companies with no office at all.
(I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk and even if I did I'm not at the office anything close to full time, and I don't provide my personal cell phone number to vendors... but thats a whole different topic. Employees exist without phone numbers! Entire offices exist without phones!)
> I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk
I'd probably just setup a cheap DID number with someone like VOIP.ms and have it go straight to voicemail.
I agree though, it's not a fight you should have fight. Office phones are going the way of the fax machine.
is this your startup? I'd love to chat about what you've found work. we're in the intersection of fintech / wealth (which overlaps with insurance).
I've gotten by just fine for the past few years but we are starting to see more questions about this that require us to change our legal address away from a residence. I think we got away without much trouble solely because of the pandemic, and now it's over we're going to see a lot more questions about this.
It's not worth the future of the whole business to fight big vendors/customers over addresses.
Basically, for those who aren't living this, the physical address is mostly a liability thing. Insurance expect to be able to (imagine worst case scenario) walk into an office and blame / seize assets / arrest people if things go south. Sometimes you can just provide a residential address of a founder / board member, but all the diligence forms etc expect a physical office building where you can find all the employees 5 days a week if you just walk in.
> For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + taxation, and every state and country under the sun's paperwork + regs + taxation. That is a real burden. Not just the paperwork + administrative overhead, but being subject to differing employment + everything else laws from everywhere will really muck up ability to run a consistent business.
This is a real burden for small businesses. The nature of Amazon's business as an online retailer with a massive distribution network means that for any significant market they do business in, they will have employees. Practically speaking, this is a solved problem for any state in which Amazon has a warehouse (which I think is probably all of them for the US?).
All major payroll companies and employment law firms have long since figured out paperwork, taxes, and labor regulations in all 50 states. Unless you're so small that you don't even have an external payroll provider or legal counsel, "differences between States" shouldn't be a valid excuse.
"Anywhere in California" would also solve the LA density problem.
> state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work
What percentage of remote-workers are in a different tax-jurisdiction? Especially post-COVID I expected that the majority of remote-work involved people already in the same US state, merely with a nontrivial commute.
> But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office
Not as close as a daily commute, though.
I live 60 miles from my office. It's just not practical to go in every day, so I go in once a week. I can also go in as needed, such as if there's a special guest, event, ect.
I wish I could go in every day, but where I live is a compromise with my wife, and we have kids.
If I were to go in everyday, I'd need to be much, much closer to the office. It wouldn't work for my family: Single incomes don't work very well near my office.
I would hate to live in a world where I don’t regularly meet with coworkers face-to-face. Remote communication just isn’t the same, you lose a lot of signal and are more compartmentalized from each other. I’m saying that as an introvert.
But I also have a short commute and a nice office.
At my last company I was officially in-office but I basically never went in because essentially everyone I worked with was in a different office or even a different country.
IMO the downside of being that spread out is the infrastructure. Cities subsidize the suburban infrastructure because of the population density benefits. If everyone spreads out then infrastructure will suffer.
Do cities actually subsidize suburban infrastructure? I am skeptical but I don’t know all of the details on how people come to that conclusion. What happens if the economy is more spread out? Also a lot of the people that own and run companies that give a city its tax base live in the suburban areas. It might even be reasonable to say that they are the ones subsidizing the city and not the other way. How do you think about these angles?
Suburbs in general are losers from a government operations perspective.
They work because they are mostly newish. Core functions like keeping roads functional rely on state and federal aid.
Many older suburbs are more in decline now. Especially in 2nd/3rd tier metro areas. It’s just less obvious than the inner city or rural areas. They need growth to thrive. Once they fill out, population ages out, schools decline, and a vicious cycle starts.
Money policy has kept that going by organizing the economy around real estate. I don’t think it’s sustainable to continually recapitalize single family homes.
Suburban infrastructure is usually much more sparse, of lower quality and a lot of it is shifted to the local business/homeowner.
As an example - city water vs Water wells & Septic tank/fields. Gravel roads without sidewalks, etc.
So it's not 100% evident that cities subsidize rural counties. Cities do provide the larger tax base for states, which probably subsidize more rural counties through incentives tied to certain rural activities, but making a blanket statement is probably not accurate.
Towns and counties produce revenue from property tax and sales tax.
The infrastructure relies on state support, which is usually from Federal funds and personal income tax. That aid is a transfer payment from cities to localities. Bigger states, bigger transfer. Also, the federal funds are sourced from bigger states to the smaller states.
Thats one of the amazing things about the US. The wealth of the coasts ensured that the smaller states weren’t left behind.
It is simple enough to break it down by area. If a city has N people per city block, but a suburb has 1/N people per city block you lose out on all economies of scale. Each individual dwelling requires water, electrical, gas, roads, etc. More efficient to amortize that across more people per unit of infrastructure. A road is always going up cost $/foot. Best if that road is being used by 100k people per day instead of 10.
Yes but that’s a cost of infrastructure angle, not an argument for who is subsidizing whom. I’m saying the fact that the economy is unnecessarily focused into cities makes suburbs look worse in tax revenue but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Strong Towns does a lot of discussion in this area. But here's a video that breaks it down well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
It's not like cities give their money to every suburban mom. It's like this:
Suburbs cannot function without freeways, but the presence of freeways harm the property values of city neighborhoods not suburban ones.
SFH simply produces less tax revenue than an entire apartment building by land, so any statewide social services (education, freeway maintenance...) is paid proportionately more by cities than by SFH.
There are reports[0] of cities reporting that their SFH actually loses them money due to the fact they simply don't pay their fair share of taxes vs all the infrastructure they use.
It's not like the government is going "oh boy, SFH mom, here's 500$ plucked straight from some inner city mom's payroll taxes". But in the broader system of supporting many people's living styles through greater societal infrastructure, less-dense housing like suburbs do not put out as much as they take.
[0]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e... [Town of Nolensville, TN]
This feels more like a planning/governance problem than an innate property.
I've lived in SFH on the edge of a major city and on the edge of farmland and there's a wide gulf in the level of infrastructure that they had access to, and also a significant difference in the amount of tax that was owed. It's hard for me to believe that those two very different scenarios are functionally equivalent.
Moreover, vast swathes of the city I used to live next to, despite having significantly higher tax rates, were ultimately paying a lot less in tax due to severely depressed income levels and property values. There might have been a higher mean revenue per acre in the city as a whole, but there also was a much higher variance.
The should raise the taxes to account for land size to make it fair
From Google's perspective a lot of outsourced work is remote work. As its done away from Google offices. And they are doubling down on that.
Because they don't simply want you to perform tasks. They want to assimilate your mind and make it fully committed to a corporate cult. They can best accomplish this by having you spending most of your wake time in their corp kingdom.
Having been there: it's not that. It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck.
I knew some folks at Google who worked 100% remote and only came into the office for critical meetings about once a month. They had proven they could operate that way with a more-or-less stellar track record.
> It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck.
While the conclusion — that most people do their best work when in the office — may be correct, why do you think that the cause of that is the boss breathing down people's necks rather than, say, more efficient collaboration among team members?
My personal observations of my team over the past couple of years are that people are much more engaged, issues get resolved much quicker, and information radiates much better when team members are co-located. This is something that many were in agreement on before covid.
It may be more efficient collaboration among team members. The end-result is the same: more output for the same cost if people are congregating.
> This is something that many were in agreement on before covid
This is an excellent observation worth highlighting: Google's belief stems not just from pre-COVID / post-COVID observation but from the relative output of teams that were same-office colocated vs. inter-office located, necessitating videoconferencing, chat, and email to get work done. Now that you highlight that, I think my reasoning is in error and it's probably more about collaboration being easier in-person. But inconveniently for those who don't want to work in person, the end-result is the same.
Hybrid is RTO. If I can’t live where I want to live and work from anywhere, it’s a non starter for me.
In my little neck of the woods - cloud consulting/professional services - Google is worse than Amazon where I just left last year.
AWS ProServe never had a RTO mandate and from former coworkers I’ve talked to, still doesn’t.
Google’s Cloud Consulting division does force a hybrid office schedule which is really dumb considering the work is both customer facing and requires a lot of travel
> AWS ProServe never had a RTO mandate
Before Covid, no team had an RTO mandate, so ProServe wasn’t really special here. In ProServe you were still expected to be in an office regularly, but it was just understood that you wouldn’t be in an Amazon office all the time because you’re likely at a client’s office instead.
Post-covid, it’s mostly the same, although now even many clients aren’t requiring consultants to come in. But when they do, you’re expected to be there.
Well. Being tied to any one cloud is not a great position to be in. Not patronizing.
You’re always locked in to your infrastructure. The entire idea of “cloud agnosticism” is BS.
I’ve seen companies take over a year and thousands of man hours to move from VMs on premise to a cloud platform.
Cloud agnosticism is hardly ever a business differentiator
It's also not an advantage, I've seen endless complexity in abstractions on abstraction, fragility and giving up really nice cloud features for this.
It'd take years to migrate STILL even with all that effort. And they can't ship features they are so busy worrying about AWS going away.
Exception, companies like datadog where they're actually operating in several clouds for good business reasons (it's where their customers are).
they are watching and will make the switch if it pays off for amazon. dont trust any of the big corps.
_yet_
I'm going to give benefit of the doubt that the headline was probably revised after submission. :(
RTO Mandates are just attempted power moves by greedy CEOs.
We have people living on space stations and promising nuclear fusion, but we still have to be in the office to be productive? Gimmie a break.