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).
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.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.
Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.
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.
The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me. They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.
Okay but surely given all the pro-wfh people, you'd think at least someone would leak memos of banks pressuring lenders to institute RTO policies?
It's just a general attitude that has filtered around C suites or whatever. Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
Just run of the mill cohort thinking. No big conspiracy.
As in "we need to RTO to prop up commercial real estate" specifically, or something more general like "we need to RTO to increase collaboration" or whatever?
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
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/boston-reside...
I think part of the equation is that less people are going into the office so values of buildings are going down, less people in downtown the less money that goes to all the restaurants/shops/stores during the week.
I can't speak for other cities since I don't live in them but Boston has never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of office workers.
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.
It’s just how well does a company culture support distributed work (many locations) or not.
On the other hand, executives are clearly banking on a good old-fashioned recession to rein in the unruly and ungrateful employees.
That's the obvious one. Then we get to styles of conversation and engagement. I've had to defend promotions for female engineers from criticism based entirely on their communication. "She is not assertive enough." Ok, is she highly effective at her job? Yes. Ok, then what the fuck are we talking about?
And always what we're talking about is men communicate a certain way, and women don't, and the men don't want to have to change.
To answer the disabled question, there was a flight of stairs at the office, and the meeting would end and people would just head up the stairs. Except the dude in the wheelchair. I'm autistic and I have light sensitivity, and after a meeting in a nice bright window office, I am exhausted and don't want to engage in social rituals.
My point is that the examples that tech leaders give as the reason to go back to the office are simply male social rituals, held up as "how we have good ideas and develop new hires". They're not. They are all managers performing post-hoc rationalization theater And if those were the goals, they'd figure out an effective way to meet them that's better than "chatting to john while taking a leak".
And the most galling thing is that every single one of my most impactful career moments didn't involve having a serendipitous conversation. It involved researching things I was interested in.
I am for nerds and against tech-bros.
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.
I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.
I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.
Problem is most people aren’t disciplined:)
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i: - unload the dishwasher - walk to the shops to buy items for dinner - sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
That is bizarre to me. I find the office takes far more discipline. Do people really get that distracted at home? What is so distracting?
For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.
My wife is hybrid, and on the days she's working from home I have to be firm about boundaries or I'll get significantly less done than on the days where it's just me. If you have kids, or live with your parents, I imagine it presents similar challenges. My sister moved back in with my father in 2020 due to the pandemic, and he was bizarrely disruptive to her work despite _also_ being remote. I'm not saying offices don't have this problem too (many such stories of loud and obnoxious coworkers), but it can be harder to have these conversations with loved ones.
Lots of people live in distracting, annoying places. If I open my window, I will hear some idiot gun it off the line in their straight-piped car from the stoplight near my apartment, several times an hour. There is a constant din of tire noise from the nearby freeway. The firemen at the station down the block do their thing every now and then. If I close my window, it regularly reaches 78F+ in my apartment. I have been battling property management to fix my A/C for months now, and every HVAC technician they send does nothing to fix the problem. My old neighbors used to play shitty music during the day.
Especially in HCOL places with mega-offices where these RTO mandates often stem from, sometimes it really is just easier to work in an air-conditioned office where you can get free coffee, snacks, and maybe some quiet if you're lucky or can slink away to an unused meeting room.
I 100% agree with you though that, at least for me, the discipline of getting up early in the morning, being well groomed and presentable, and battling traffic both ways is greater for me than taking steps to make myself comfortable and productive at home.
So while I believe it helps in term of team cohesion and for this purpose, on site is better, in term of productiveness it's a net negative.
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".
Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.
Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.
(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)
That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.
First, there is very little data and just a couple conjectures thrown around. There isn't much substantive evidence of what it claims.
Second, even if people aren't commuting, it just assumes people work the same hours, but many people are probably working longer hours so you can't tell the impact on WFH on productivity.
Third, it doesn't look at outputs at all, especially the output of the company. While some (or even all) individuals might produce more, the group as a whole will have less communication and each employee might have less context of what else is going on in the company, so much of their contribution might not align as well with company objectives. Management of all the individuals would be more difficult and the company would be less of a team. This would support the idea that the increased productivity is only available to well managed groups. I think this sounds much more likely.
Fourth, much of the increase explained is from widening the labor pool. It explicitly mentions those with disabilities, stay at home mothers, and larger geographical inclusion. This isn't increasing productivity, just increasing the labor input.
This is more an opinion piece with some hand waving than actual proof
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, this is pot.
Reasons I prefer going into the office:
- when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
- not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work.
- easier interaction with colleagues.
I liked it at the start, and liked the flexibility, but after a while hated that my home was also my workplace. I also found it was too easy to do unpaid overtime from home. After a while my productivity fell.
Caveat is I live within cycle distance to work. I hate commuting too, and wouldn't do more than 30 minutes.
This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.
I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.
To quote Dilbert:
> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."
> I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH.
I'm not saying WFH didn't work for me so is doesn't work for everyone. For me though as soon as the novelty wore off I found it a bad experience. Certainly for me none of it applied.
If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
>If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
You answered your own question. The article is using work from home as a catchall term for remote work but not everyone who works from home wants to literally work from home. Some companies will even reimburse you if you want to get a membership at a co-working space.
You'll have to forgive my ignorance for assuming we were talking WFH instead of remote working. I got confused when it stated work from home instead of remote working.
Either way "some companies" ain't mine, and I'm not being out of pocket for work.
Are you paid for the time spent commuting? Are your transportation expenses fully reimbursed?
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
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.
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.
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.
And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.
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.
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.
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.
What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
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.
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)
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
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!
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).
This is already happening by large margins. Companies hiring contractors in India or Brazil to do the work that a full time employee used to do.
If WFH can be done in Arizona, it can be done just as easily in Colombia for half the price.
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...
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 argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.
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.
>How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
You don't have to wait long, it happened around 20-25 years ago.
Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
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!
Examples excluded on purpose. :)
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.
also, we are very hypocritical about it. When it is about india etc, we (us and western europe) think it's normal to pay less, but when it's about different regions within our own countries, we think it's unfair.
In an ideal world, we would pay everyone based on role and output, but this is not how the world economy works at the moment. Dont ask me to explain, because I also dont know all the details, but it is reality
I don't think they realize that they're actually lobbying for most of the company to get a pay cut so they can get a greater percentage of the total salary budget, but that's what it would amount to if they got their way.
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.
There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.
What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
All of what you said does not support any blanket return to office policies.
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.
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 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.
Though I agree that framing WFH as a productivity gain makes RTO in the name of productivity harder to sell.
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.
It’s like calling “allowed to use a computer” a benefit.
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
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.
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
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.
What an odd phrase.
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.
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'.
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?
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.
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.
For now there are notable holdouts, like Netflix and Airbnb, that pay in the levels.fyi scale but are still remote friendly. The other FAANGs are already at hybrid. If Netflix, the remaining FAANG-adjacent holdouts, and the HFTs go RTO then that is pretty much it for your chances of earning $300k+. It may still be worthwhile to leave comp on the table in exchange for the lifestyle and cost-of-living benefits, of course.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
There's more incentives for large businesses, whether that's tax breaks, existing office space obligations or just the feeling of lording over the workers.
I don't think that will change too much. A remote company has to be fundamentally remote on all levels otherwise it'd fall apart. That kinda buy in is difficult and usually companies who start remote work best like that. As everyone has already self selected for remote work.
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.
(I don’t believe it’s all covert layoffs either - it’s imho the more banal reason of c-level personal feelings and groupthink)
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.
I've had a lot of American colleagues that do not wish to return to office, the types that believe in "freedom", "individual responsibility" and "if you do not like the job go work somewhere else".
As the employers are closing in on them, they slowly start to understand that unless they collectively punch back they _will_ yield sooner or later.
They are still on their pleading / "negotiating" phase at the moment, but let us see.
The American libertarian will just move to a job that allows remote.
>As the employers are closing in on them, they slowly start to understand that unless they collectively punch back they _will_ yield sooner or later.
Believe me, companies stand to lose a lot more with an empty dev team than any dev stands to lose moving to another company. RTO companies better have some damn good reasons to work there if they require asses in seats. Companies that don't (most) will struggle and wither.
> 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.
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).
its a need to travels ... to consume fossil fuels and to benefit effectivly some sharhe holders ...
its A primary reason.
Equally;
In office work, all I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at the office. Some people’s office and psyche isn’t good for in office work for various reasons
I worked for a firm at one point that prior to acquistion, was filled top to bottom with people that enjoyed a quiet working environment that allowed them to think and do deep work. We were an engineering heavy firm doing complex work for large multinationals. I'll admit it was shocking to me when I first joined, you could have heard a pin drop in this place, it took me quite some time to adjust to it, but in time I did.
After the original founders decided they wanted to move on and so sold up, we merged with another org that was the opposite. The office became a place of multiple indepedent bluetooth speakers blaring music all day, teams of people walking around from desk to desk and holding incredibly loud non work related conversations at random next to people trying to do deep work, everyone was crammed closer together to assist in "collaboration" etc.
One by one, all of the original staff departed as the office had for them become a living hell that destroyed their ability to do deep meaningful or productive work. They didnt dislike their co-workers, they were not against some occasional social interactions, but ultimately, they were engaged with what they did and just wanted a good environment to do it in, an environment that was removed from them by force and thus too was their capability to be as productive as they once were.
Some people do better work from office as you note due to the environment they have at home and their psyche, but the exact opposite is also true for a not insignificant amount of people.
The problem is that business is going to pretend only one of these groups exists.