When I worked at office I had to get out of my comfort zone and socialize a bit with colleagues, chit chat, going for launch together, and in the retrospect it was nice to get small daily doze of social interactions.
I sometimes miss going to the office, hybrid thing (2-3 days in the office) would be probably ideal.
Have you heard of the phrase "never mix business with pleasure"? It isn't about sexual harassment policies. It's general life advice, meant to save you from becoming a recluse who loses all of his friends if he loses his job or whose work suffers because he's paying attention to something other than the bottom line.
For your own mental health, I'd work on making some friends outside of the office. No matter HOW cool they are at the office.
Again, that just happens sometimes. For comparison, I wouldn't bat an eyelash about anyone from my old job, with the exception of the hr and qa lead. Everyone else - I hope I never see them again in my life.
Wow, quite a strong statement. Personally I'm not much friends with ppl from work, my feelings are neutral. If I see some ex-colleague from work, I'll say hello and maybe some small talk. But that practically never happens, because I've been moving a lot.
Personally I would never work as an employee to begin with, unless I were in serious financial distress. I would rather be a poor entrepreneur/freelancer than wealthy salaried employee. And office isn't really the factor, but other things, like freedom. But people have different preferences.
To add a data point that will sound snarkier than it is:
I used to say very similar things. It is a really wonderful sound bite, and you can get together with all the other starving founders to say things like this to each other.
Looking back on it, I think this philosophy is actually a really important part of the startup-industrial complex. If you can just make it "not cool" to go get a job, and starting a startup is all about "freedom and adventure," then it becomes really easy for VCs to normalize things like "founders paying themselves subsistence salaries." That means the pipeline of new startups will increase in quantity and decrease in unit-cost -- which is exactly what the VCs want.
What they won't tell you about, if you want to chase the founder dream, is the opportunity cost. It turns out that maxing out your 401(k) is pretty great, as is having an infinite supply of sparkling water and spending your days building software with a whole bunch of other brilliant people.
I'm still not going to RTO, though. That part is just dumb, and I think every serious company that truly values engineering productivity will agree.
When applying for jobs, you should negotiate for the things that you value. It doesn't make sense to require all employers to offer WFH when it is only your personal employer in the end who matters. There was WFH jobs before COVID, like there are onsite jobs now, and there will be always jobs for both purposes.
In office jobs should pay at least 30% more than WFH jobs to even be competitive.
People are really upset at Amazon because the office doesn't provide anything more than what they can get at home (and in a lot of cases provides less). At least at the others you can get some extra stuff you can't get at home.
That's the point. The pandemic give employers worldwide an enormous advantage in these negotiations. Personally I would never work for any company that requires RTO.
All these statements are missing the point, which is that commute time is unpaid 99% of the time, and is a complete waste from the employee's standpoint.
So whenever I negotiate with the employer, I have to take that into account, regardless of it being specified in the contract. It's an unstated consideration - an externality.
Past 2024, we should be considering commute time (or at least a portion of it) as a cost to the employee. This should be a firm stance, or worker rights will continue to be eroded.
If productivity is +/-10 or 20% (which would be huge) between office and wfh but the additional comp is 50% to get someone to work 100% in office then the calculus is still simple.
[1] https://www.lifehealth.com/top-25-us-companies-ranked-by-pro...
Also one time we had remote employee, that was committing fraud towards the customers.
What in this scenario makes it easier to know if this person is working when they are in the office?
Given that employment law is even more employer friendly for small companies, I would expect that a small company should not have much problem to argue about terminating an employee not working at all?
For Germany for example, it's quite common for office jobs to have 6 months during which point you can "fire" employees with 2 week notice.
If I'm behind on my work for a week my manager will know because I have nothing to show as results.
I have difficulty believing employers are that forward thinking.
I work for a professional service firm (disclaimer: none of the big 4 or resellers etc. )and every time this subject comes up with candidates I say:
1. It depends on the customer, but you follow their rules. 2. In practice it's always possible to WFH a few days a week, but never assume this. 3. The more senior you become, the more human interaction and interpersonal skills are key. I am not convinced any Teams/Zoom/Webex (pick your poison) screen can replace this. 4. We try to get our employees a job less than a 1 hour commute from home. Again, this is Holland: a tiny piece of mostly reclaimed land
Summary: it depends on role, customer and assignment.
We never have someone leave because they're unhappy with the WFH policy, we do have some candidates that didn't sign with us due to this policy, but that's perfectly fine. It's a free marketplace and IT staff is in high demand, so if you're qualified, there's a ways work.
If there were no legitimate business reason they wouldn't do it since it costs them a great deal to do so. And if businesses are acting irrationally? There are plenty of companies who are not returning to office, so we'll certainly see them out compete and displace the office-based businesses.
That seems to be the most plausible answer. Businesses are led by people and acting irrationally even when not financially beneficial isn't out of the realm of reality.
Businesses in the same industry already suffer from a herd mentality, doing the opposite thing that others are doing is risky, most leaders will choose less risk. It becomes dominoes, one leader from a benchmark company makes a hard to quantify wrong decision, another will follow, the side-effects will take a few years to crop up and by then almost the whole industry will have followed suit.
We have over a century of evidence that requiring employees work > 40h/week for long periods of time is a net loss in productivity compared to working fewer hours. That's why we have a standard 40 hours per workweek and a concept of overtime in the first place.
However, there's always going to be a large cohort of management that thinks their employees are different so they can squeeze out more hours, so we get BS like trying to convince employees they're part of a family they need to sacrifice for and (unfortunately successful) lobbying for legal overtime exemptions across certain jobs.
I can't say I "love" the idea of having an office, let alone spending more than five days a week in one.
Explain how that makes me love 5+ days in the office. Btw, it's so cool how you put that +. Not just 5 weekdays, but also weekends.
This is true of a lot of companies, particularly those with offices distributed across America and the world(e.g. you work in Houston, but your boss is in NYC). Financial institutions typically fit this bill.
Something I wonder about, if anyone has already calculated the value of the informal "water cooler chat" which is missing at working from home scenarios.
I mean, that's company time during which one isn't working, but the inevitable coworker bonding that happens can be extremely valuable, as stronger connections with colleagues can make one more engaged, collaborative, and productive in the long run.
That said, HR policies (both ones we like, and ones we hate) tend to be "one size fits all" policies. They don't adjust for individuals. There's reasons for that; usually, legal reasons.
Individual jobs require individual approaches. If I'm a bench tech, running a rack of $40,000 analyzers that I share with other techs, I probably need to be in the office. If I'm running tests on an Internet connectivity layer, maybe not so much.
Also, different people work better, in different contexts. Some folks can't muster the personal discipline to work out of their living room (or their home environment is not friendly to their work). That doesn't mean that they need to RTO, but they should find some solution. I know someone that actually rents a desk in a local accelerator, and goes there, five days a week, for a remote job.
I have a good friend that just accepted a position at Amazon. They are paying him a lot more than his previous employer. He's really good at what he does. Their offer was not charity. He came on board as a remote employee. He lives out East on Long Island, and the Amazon office is in Midtown Manhattan. That's at least a two-hour commute, each way. He has a new kid, and is currently weighing his options. That paycheck is making the choice difficult, but he's coming face-to-face with the things he will need to give up, for that paycheck.
I have a lot of that. Actually, in each company I worked for, I made sure we have a channel for informal communication, it is a work life changer.
Most people, even so called introverts, sometimes like to communicate, and they need to have a way to do so, and this must be done in a way that doesn't disturb others etc. This can be a slack channel, a weekly "coffee online" with your teammates, or even pre-daily informal discussion on any topic. Otherwise, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy which Bezos apparently doesn't care about.
One thing that office is irreplaceable in (again, depending on company and atmosphere) is getting some stuff done from people not directly on projects but with crucial responsibilities/access.
If I am physically there, I just go to their desk, and either sit behind them till they have time or we agree to do it within 1 or 2 hours. Now I am few months fully at home due to breaking both legs while paragliding, and some of those folks take 2 weeks of chasing, meetings etc. to get their 5-minute max shit done. While 50-folks project is blocked by them. Maddening.
It's a flaw, not a feature.
And trust me, guy managing sFTP server (latest case in long line of cases) doesn't do any sophisticated deep stuff that requires 15 mins to get into the zone.
More often than not its the case of folks in various roles promising to do certain work by the end of the day or given date on the meeting, then happily ignoring all chats/emails/calls asking for it for another week or two past the deadline. Of course the excuse is in 100% of the cases how busy they are, when you know they happily spend 15 mins on coffee/smoke breaks multiple times a day. Absolutely 0 sympathies there, and this is one of general senior skills to get work done on time from such people too.
I was in the office the other week, and someone from the operations side of the project I work on started chatting me up about a recent company initiative to come up with projects to improve things, and asked my opinion about his suggestion. It was great info I didn't otherwise have and I got excited about solving his specific complaint in a productive way in the new system.
Except.... This was a companywide initiative. Why didn't the company have people present to all engineers instead of just submitting a powerpoint deck to leadership if they wanted collaboration on such an initiative? What if I was sick that day, would he have never talked to me about it and I never would have learned about this sticking point?
I'm available through email and Teams. Why didn't he message me? I message random coworkers all the time about feedback and ideas and brainstorming and questions, why didn't he?
Some people have no willingness or ability to communicate usefully digitally it seems, and they want to make my life worse to counteract that fact, but that's stupid! Just have a teams channel for water cooler talk! We used to have an extremely productive teams channel meant for devs to just bring up brainstorming and ask for feedback and wonder aloud and it resulted in all the supposed benefits that water cooler talk has, and it didn't waste my lunch hour!
Just talk to me! You don't need the excuse of physical presence! If the serendipity is utterly necessary (it really really really shouldn't be FFS), build a quick teams bot that just puts a few people in a chat room together occasionally!
It also removes petty sleights, sexual harassment, and political maneuvering.
The problem is when you are wfh and there are still people in the office who get more visibility from management simply by being in eye sight.
All of these things can and do happen virtually.
Would you like to know more?
When my company went remote I was suddenly cut off from a handful of friends who I haven't spoken with in four years now. I'm bored and socially disengaged, lacking friendship and largely isolated to my wife and children.
Nobody ever talks about things like this, only what's the most 'productive', which I think is a glaring mark on how people operate and think. There is now an entire class of people who are being excluded from social camaraderie because the majority is happy working in pajamas.
All of that being said, now that my kids are in school I've realized that WFH is far more convenient. But can we please stop pretending that the lifestyle is the dream it's made out to be? If companies aren't offering opportunity for social engagement it can be a real problem.
What I find more disturbing is that in my company's case the result of the pandemic seemed to be random and based on nothing but financial logic. My department supported a hybrid situation almost entirely but the powers that be didn't care, they did the easiest thing. Before the pandemic we couldn't get one day a week remote because it was a 'security risk'.
Can we just do the hybrid thing and call it a day? Or give people optionality on whether they want to go into the office or not?
I do have to sacrifice the super valuable experience of joining zoom calls from a loud non-private cubicle to appease a middle managers ego and artificially inflate the local real estate market though.