Work from home makes me LOYAL to a company, and makes me work my arse off! If you want to keep good employees, give them agency.
I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done.
I think the option to go into the office (on your own accord) is important. The main pro of the office is I can talk to team-mates and do learning sessions with them (the juniors).
But I do these as well from home every day too.
Unfortunately my work place is putting in place a 4 day in the office mandate, like we are children. All it does is make me want to look for jobs that respect employee agency.
Yes, as a well-paid, introverted, technical contributor who is internally motivated by their craft, with the luxury to afford good working space and at a moment in one's life where home haunts feel secure and supportive, you can't beat it. Like any tradesman in history keeping up their own shop, it's really quite empowering. I've been doing it for pretty much all of a very long career.
But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.
There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc
It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.
It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.
> But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there
Amazon, Salesforce, etc should all fit well within those constraints. And nobody is suggesting that we ban offices - just stop pretending that all of us fit into those exception buckets.
That’s fair, it’s definitely not as clear cut as some make it.
Anecdotally my team juggles all this well - we are relatively shielded from the rest of the business as our own unit.
Within our team or 15, we have introverts, extroverts - and some work from home alot (me etc) and others come into the office.
But no one in the team, not even the leaders think the RTO is the right call.
I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
> I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
Absolutely wild that you seem to have been downvoted for essentially just saying that you like working with people who thrive because you give them agency and that nobody's happy about being treated like children.
Doing the opposite—micromanaging people—is how you create distrust and poison your productivity.
When I got my first corporate dev job, everyone thought it was weird that I kept desperately looking for my own quiet space to perform the work I needed to do, instead of just sitting in the cube where my shitty assigned computer was. I'd go out into the lobby, or the cafeteria, or an empty room, and be able to get in the right headspace for hours long focus. I ended up burning out at that job, because I'd constantly be interrupted and underwater trying to get things done. People should have the options available to find an optimal path toward meeting their expectations.
So fuck all of the people who work from home and RTO is good?
All of what you said does not support any blanket return to office policies.
I WFH 100% of the time. This allows my spouse and I to work. Without this one of us would have to leave the workforce to take the children to school. But because I WFH I can do the school runs and I realize I have it so good, it makes me unwilling to consider any other potential job offers.
And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the ability to WFH makes me LOYAL.
just curious how this works, do the kids just need a lift home and you can continue to work? Just wondering how you fit a full day in even with WFH (asking because both spouse and I are 3+ days in office and pickup/drop off kinda happen before/after the work days so WFH isn't make a big difference for us, personally)
I think framing the WFH argument in terms of productivity is a bad idea. It’s difficult to win that argument and it might not even be true.
Instead, call it a benefit, like paid vacation or health insurance.
Nobody argues that employers contributing to an employees 401(k) plan is good for productivity. They do it to attract and retain talent.
Benefit for the employee can be cut off any time.
Benefit for the company will go on forever.
I will stay on the ground where WFH is benefit for the company. That is what I believe and I want everyone to believe and I do not care what any kind of research will say. Just if employees will force it in that way it will be.
Consistency and stability is a benefit to the company, but execs still periodically fuck that up for no reason with random reorgs.
Though I agree that framing WFH as a productivity gain makes RTO in the name of productivity harder to sell.
Benefits can be enshrined in law, you should see what European countries have legislated at the benefit of workers some time.
But they won't and it will be limited if anything makes it into law.
The point is that it isn’t a benefit if it’s productive for the company to.
It’s like calling “allowed to use a computer” a benefit.
It's not difficult to win at all, if I'm more productive at home, I'm more productive at home, and a smart employer would enable me to choose that. If I'm not, I'd like to have an external space, perhaps the office, to go to and be productive. A stupid employer would ignore their employees and just decide that the office is a universal good.
Now, if you're saying that it's a difficult argument to win with an existing employer who's mandated RTO (rather than a difficult argument to win in general), I'd agree, but I'd say that's true for nearly any argument at any sufficiently traditional, large, or bureaucratic company, about anything. The same place where it'd be difficult to argue for WFM is the same place where it'd be difficult to argue for better pay, dimmer lights, a change in ambient room temperature, less meetings, different duties, less overtime, the use of a mac vs windows pc, a different chair, or any other kind of benefit package, because these decisions get made and then applied without consulting anyone lower in the org chart until those people leave the company and come back asking for them as terms. That's the nature of those hierarchical structures, it's what allows mass layoffs it's what takes agency away from people, nearly by definition.
I think though, that for hybrid or work from home to win in the shared mindset - productivity has to be accounted for.
It feels like employers that switch to RTO office mandates do so on a “hunch” that WFH is less productive. At least that’s what my company is doing. They have not shared any stats that hybrid work has affected outcomes. Yes the company was down in outcomes for 2 quarters, but that’s mostly related to consumers not spending + inflation + economic instability.
Because the board need a more tangible boogeyman to point to, they blame the “lazy work from home ethic”.
But I’m yet to see ANY evidence that hybrid work decreases productivity or outcomes. In fact, I strongly believe, and could probably produce evidence, that Hybrid work ensures better workplace outcomes on average in a vacuum.
Employee agency -> less stress, more loyalty -> better outcomes
Think it was the FT that reported, there's no data indicating RTO improves productivity. It is being done either on a hunch or as a form of stealth layoff.
> and it might not even be true.
And even if it is, it rarely matters.
During my time as an executive, the CEO of the company pushed for a return to the office despite widespread success with remote work during COVID. He personally disliked WFH, even though productivity data from every team showed improvements, and employee surveys were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing remote work. A small minority preferred the office, which was understandable, but the overall results were clear: WFH was beneficial.
Despite this, the CEO disregarded the data and announced that employees wanted to return, citing a need for in-person collaboration and productivity improvements—claims that directly contradicted the evidence that had been gathered. His decision was based on personal bias and gut instinct rather than the facts.
This led to significant fallout. As executives like myself left, key engineers followed, resulting in a mass exodus of talent and customers. Within two years, the company was a shell of its former self and was ultimately sold off for a fraction of its value to some shit kicker PE firm.
Also funny, was that the CEO had always hated WFH, even prior to Covid, even though he himself was always happy to exercise it personally. Even whilst doing WFH himself though, his opinion of anyone else WFH had always been that any of them claiming to actually work was "full of shit" and "taking the piss" and in fact doing absolutely nothing. This of course did not apply to him because he was an executive and executives are different.
Where you getting that free coffee from? I work from home but still have to pay for mine, although did recently get a good deal in sprouts in that yellow sticker section. Real good deal! But not free ;)
Not OP, but less than a dollar for a great espresso that I don't have to wait in line or walk further than 100 feet for is practically free, especially considering the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to walk to the cafe at the office.
Free coffee? Dang, I have to buy mine at the grocery store :) at least I can drink my loose leaf tea at home though!
What do you do?
I’m fortunate to be a software engineer, I have about 4yoe and mainly work on frontend code.
But it’s been a very long road from being a university dropout, to getting an Electrical Engineering degree, and then transitioning to Software mostly in my spare time
I will offer a counter-example despite being very much pro-wfh.
In my little corner of the universe, the company, its execs and some rank and file, who appear to genuinely either want to be in office or appear to bosses ( or both ) are not super keen some of the vocal anti-rto people showing others that they too could stay home, leave early.. you know, all those things management did not that long ago.
And the thing is, for me anyway, paradoxically I am waiting for the other shoe to drop by and, as a result, genuinely doing as little as possible ( 'cept for the ridiculous projects, can't do much about those ).
Companies had it. They had their gay little compromise in the form of hybrid, which I hated anyway. And now I am just saying meh. Funny thing is, I am clearly not the only one.
> gay little compromise
What an odd phrase.
It really isn't. For me, hybrid is genuinely the worst of both worlds. My internal sleep rhythm is screwed each week, just because someone had a bright idea that today will be everyone in office day ( and unsurprisingly almost never is.
I get what the companies are doing. Hell, blind monkey can see what they are doing. Scale back full WFH and claim compromise and flexibility by, but also slowly putting in more required days in office and token flexible day at home ( and in Amazon's case -- full RTO ).
If you are objecting to the particular use of the world gay, then I might be just betraying my age, where gay used to mean lame.
"gay" in that sense is a pejorative against homosexual people. You could almost make it work with the original definition though.
From Wikipedia -
> Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.
It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH.
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
> real-estate value
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
Ding ding ding … this is the most overlooked aspect of the RTO/WFH dynamic.
"RTO is definitely the play: the CEO says all his friends are doing it; activist-investors want RTO for their own porfolios, PR says breaking the lease on our newish HQ is embarrassing while Legal says it makes more work for them; Accounting says we'll pay more in tax unless we can prove X jobs created locally; our middle-managers need it in order to tell if work is happening, and HR notes that we can slim our workforce by prompting a lot of 'voluntary' departures! Seven key stakeholder groups."
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
Is this actually happening? I have seen this idea thrown out a lot online but it always feels like a conspiracy theory to me (akin to "fine art is a tax write-off")
This is the case for the city of Boston. The city derives the vast majority of its budget from commercial property taxes, it's why residential property taxes are so low in the city.
Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.
Doubt Boston is alone in these propositions
feel like that to me too
I bet there are some incentives in there but it's not the whole picture. It's probably the combination of many things but mostly management that don't know how to manage people remotely, or they started to realise that most middle manager positions are obsolete/unnecessary.
I think it explains some of Amazon's choices, as they made multibillion dollar bets on office space and real estate in Seattle.
The conspiracy theory version is that it's the sole cause, rather than one of many causes.
We simply are not going back, period. They are fighting the trend. Ask your analysis team and marketing about what happens to people that fight the trend.
If I am called back, I will come in, but only for as long as it takes me to move onto something else. It really is that simple.
On the other hand, executives are clearly banking on a good old-fashioned recession to rein in the unruly and ungrateful employees.
And the come back with wonderful anecodotes about how serendipitous hallway conversations lead to good ideas, or how some junior dev was brought into a conversation so they learned something.
Sounds great. Except if you look at what is happening, it's just male social rituals that are happening. Quite males, females, disabled people are all excluded from the serendipity and they don't even see it.
Essentially the argument is: As a male manager or tech lead, it is easy for me to feel that I am distributing my wisdom to the team because, at no cost to me, I just happen to bump into people and include them in my conversation. And look! This junior male is presenting properly!
An actual training program, or any kind of systemic approach to fostering learning and advancement? Oh noes, that is too hard!
I don’t follow the male, female, disabled person argument at all.
I am literally at least 10x when I work from home.
I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking.
Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop.
I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives.
I love the work, I enjoy working with my colleagues and I can set my own boundaries by setting office hours and scheduling meetings. There is very rarely anything that derails my day anymore. Everything is much better documented because everything must live in confluence or Jira or it doesn’t exist. The company saves tons of money on real estate.
If you can change your processes and workflow to take advantage of tools that suit remote work, it’s superior in basically every way.
Pry it from my cold dead hands.
Number one benefit to companies to allow WFH: they can pay me a senior level pay for staff level seniority, and I still come out ahead living in the Midwest versus moving to SF or NYC.
> is highly dependent on how well it’s managed.
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks.
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
When I did a check in about 2018, almost all (like, all but 2-3) of the Distinguished engineers at Google were actually Sr Directors with vanity titles (DE was considered better then Sr Dir). Most 50+ person orgs with multiple managers working under them.
Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
IMO the bigger difference is there is no direct path from NCO to officer. If you are enlisted and you want to be an officer, there is no standard path for that, no promotion from NCO to office. And officers never serve as enlisted solders. Fighting and leading are two different jobs, done by different groups of people
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
Enlisted =>college (via GI Bill) => ROTC/OCS
Yeah, exactly, there is a path, but it sort of involves quitting the army
> And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management,
And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.
In my experience, there is not much technical growth as you go upward because there's not that much need for technical depth. What most companies need is armies of low and intermediate programmers churning out various kinds of CRUD apps. There's a bit of scope to be a "senior" grunt, and there may even be some very small number of "architects" above that but generally what's needed is people to manage the grunts and senior grunts.
Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner).
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
That's inevitable given how quickly the ranks of software workers have grown in the past 20 years.
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
It's an outdated arrangement. All you need are respected VPs that know their area and foster collaboration toward ideal technical/operationl goals in line with the business objectives. If your approach is invoking fear and exhibiting aggression to drive outcomes you have already lost half of the productivity battle. Jaime Daimon is the new Jack Welch. Too busy looking good and laying down the law to focus on innovation.
You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons:
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.
I wonder, what do you see as a desirable alternative?
This is just as true in office. A bad manager is a bad manager no matter where they manage.
Now we'll get to see which is more powerful: the invisible hand of the free markets, or the human tendency of power to accrete with autocrats, who seem to struggle immensely with the idea of letting people have the freedom to control their work environment and hours.
I hope for WFH or hybrid to win the day.
It'll be determined by who can effectively train the next generations of employees.
If that's what the market wants.
Honestly, that I can't find that bet on polymarket is beyond me.
I despair a little at this. If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts. Client-facing stuff gets centralised to a smaller team of specialists, and the ship gets much tighter.
How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are still on the last days of this post-covid efficiency wave, coupled with the buffer of capital from the money that was created in the last few years.
I'm usually not a doomer, but it's hard to see a way around the next downturn not creating irreversible culture change through AI offshoring and mass layoffs.
There are latent questions in your response. The fear is justified but equally, viewed from a distance, what is the "worth" of your price point, if the same job can be done and lift somebody out of poverty in the developing world?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
Completely agree. And it is funny how we put so much emphasis on developing our skills and abilities, when really our actual value is always determined by the market.
I'm personally at peace with that, and would have a pretty hard time arguing against the logic of off-shoring my job. However, it's also rational to want to hold onto a favourable environmental niche for as long as possible!
How has western society completely forgotten the point of a country? It is not the to create the most efficient economical configuration for routing wealth from the masses to the capital holders. Your value is not determined by the market, and those who tell you it is are only looking to exploit you.
There are people out there who haven’t succumbed to the nihilistic poison of modern liberalism, though the people in power have run a very successful propaganda campaign to convince you they’re evil (and I’m absolutely not talking about staple green cards to diplomas trump).
Can you explain this comment again? It intrigued me but I haven’t the foggiest what you are hinting at.
I think you're onto something.
Even Indians are losing their IT jobs to Vietnamese. [1]
The squeeze is real.
Good time to start a business I guess.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1eckee9/oh...
Offshoring & distribution of remote work may be bad for you but very very good for humanity.
There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.
Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.
> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match
Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.
Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.
On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.
Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.
I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.
This was the perspective I was looking for to respond to my innate suspicions caused by the source of this post. Who are they signaling toward?
I mean, if you can do your job in-office, then surely somebody in the global can do it in their office? Or what if somebody could do your job in a branch office rather than in HQ?
Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
Hope for new job roles. A race to automate all the things needs a lot of human effort!
As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!
I love working from home and I plan to keep doing it.
But I can't deny that when a coworker needs help, rolling my chair next to theirs in office allows for a much larger bandwidth of knowledge sharing.
On the other hand my production skyrockets at home.
One on one knowledge sharing is the worst kind though. I can’t search through your verbal conversations.
That's fair but there's something to be said of physically being around someone constantly and learning off of each other. It's how I learned vim, it's how I learned about neovim, it's how I learned about the majority of command line tools I use everyday.
That being said, I do WFH and cherish the job for allowing me so but I wouldn't have a problem going into an office if it was a 30 minute walk from where I live. I feel like most people hate their commutes than working in an office.
If we could all be a 10 minute walk from the office, would more people work in them? I'd think yes, absolutely yes.
How is that different from just making a call? It's much faster and you can both be looking at your respective screens with the same information
I am not sure. Remote working allows you to instantly pair with someone. No shuffling keyboards. There are a lot of software tools that help. Things like Loom let you async stuff.
What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.
Zoom's latency is a killer. It is still harder to have the kind of natural back and forth conversation I'm used to having in meatspace pairing. Maybe I should try Discord.
In my field of IT consulting I find the opposite to be true. Developing a shared understanding of client challenges, getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email.
If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
> getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email. If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
When I was doing that work, even in office, all of those things took place over IM, email or remote meetings anyway.
My customers were not in the same building as I was. The vast majority of senior management were not in the same building as I was.
Sure sometimes I might go out to the client in person, and sometimes they may have come in to see me. But the vast, vast, VAST majority of it already took place remotely. And how could it not in a global business?
This paper is the first one I've read that outlines a pretty good case as to why WFH is beneficial to both workers and society. I encourage everyone to share it with others.
WFH productivity is a matter of management. Pre-covid my company tried it and found that productivity declined. Also, the managers found it hard to trust that some of the workers were working and not doing other things.
Working at the office has its drawbacks too. As a developer, the worst one for me was working in an open area. It's extremely hard to concentrate without having to function like a hermit and alienating fellow workers.
I think some of that is still the case, but if managers define realistic expectations, I don't see why WFH can't continue to work. It's more work for management at the start but in time, as management and workers get accustomed, it will work out.
It seems to be a win for employees and companies.
I would wager that there's a dead sea effect happening at these 'my way or the highway' RTO companies.
Top tier, upber-productive, marketable talents don't have to tolerate bullying, even in a weak employment market. So the companies pushing RTO the hardest see their hardest to replace talent evaporate quickly, and their most desperate (but thoroughly demoralized) staff cling on for dear life. Not as a rule, but definitely a tendency.
Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
> Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
While it sounds good on paper, hiring decent remote folks for a company is actually much harder, especially if you're a startup. It's way easier taking a bet on someone local where you don't have to second guess how productive they are. For similar interview performance, most companies would prefer folks who can come to office instead of full remote. Obviously, there are companies who have made it work (eg. Gitlab) for a long time, but I'd say they are the exception rather than the norm.
Companies that require RTO, if they actually want their employees to return to office, should prioritize in their messaging the objective benefits/cost to working in the office. No vague-speak, no shaming people claiming that workers "don't work" at home, but rather objective analysis on what exact benefits they seek to accrue by mandating that work that could be done anywhere in the world must be done in separate rooms of a large corporate office space.
Since most companies that are enforcing RTO aren't doing this, it only makes sense that it is a covert mass layoff. They just want people to quit because they were planning on culling the herd anyway, and would prefer it be a self-selection of those who aren't willing to put up with bullshit.
It’s an open secret that there is no data that supports RTO. If there was, at even one company, it would be screamed from the rooftops.
(I don’t believe it’s all covert layoffs either - it’s imho the more banal reason of c-level personal feelings and groupthink)
Executive brain worms are real. They see each other do things, and they want to be like each other, so they feel safety in numbers, untethered to the data.
My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.
> My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.
In my case a sane Director saw the slow motion trainwreck before it happened.
Previous employer went 2:3 hybrid after covid, driven mostly by C-levels and pushed forward by HR. HR wanted managers to monitor remote/in-office ratios like sort of like children attendance sheets.
Engineering Director told all the line managers to ignore that and apply discretion. i.e. don't give the key people in your teams a reason to look around.
no, please, I want to be in office and hear the coffee machine grinding coffee for everybody in the office /sarcasm
15 second cities now!
Take that, Jassy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
It's an open secret that it is no longer day 1 at Amazon.
It’s like day 22.
What does that mean (genuine question?)
Amazon used to pride itself on behaving like a (very big) startup, trying to be scrappy and focused - but now it has very definitely joined the league of ordinary corporations.
A corollary is that they existing big-tech companies will never embrace remote work. You need to start new companies which are remote-first and then replace big tech with them.
I don't think that's a useful generalization. It's pretty clear that company culture changes over time (in tandem with changing management and workforce).
The point of the Planck quote is that many people (especially the "important" people) have large egos and therefore (among other reasons) are unwilling or unable to change their minds and learn new things. This then significantly hinders progress.
The equivalent to your claim in science would be something like "particle physics cannot change, you need to let it die and start a new scientific discipline" (I guess you'll find some people who think that but I don't).
I've definitely heard this as "Science progresses one funeral at a time" before.
All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons
@Andy Jassy
Duh....