More and more companies are cutting down on it increasing the needed presence. At the same time they just don't have the real estate capacity to do it decently which means (at least in my personal experience) that you land in a noisy subpar open space (worst invention ever) for n days a week where you can hardly do any work.
Not to mention wasting time/energy in commuting.
It really beats me why a company would waste resources like that and I cannot explain it. The best I have is that this is some kind of power play but I'm not convinced. Am I missing something?
The answer is hybrid (my opinion) and even though it may be true that employers have commercial real estate and all, but if productivity was really up, why would they care ? The truth is that there are many people who either are not a good fit for 100% remote (juniors) or use 100% remote to do things that they wouldn't be able to otherwise (overemployed, slacking off further) etc.
So, if I have 15 years of experience can I work from home? Hum. All the juniors in the office, all the seniors at home. That's it? Or just because some engineers do not know how to work remotely, then I too should be dragged to the office?
Nonsense.
I don't know how open you are to an actual answer, but here goes: The short answer is yes, but here are nuances.
Things I've seen work
1. Fully remote companies with a high density of experienced talent and very few (sometimes none) juniors. Everyone is expected to be professional, responsible, know when they need help or get stuck, deliver production ready stuff in the first or second iteration. Juniors get at least 2 1:1s per week from their manager and a senior IC colleague. 2-4x a year, company has a conference/convention where everyone gathers in a single location.
2. Hybrid approach, with some fully remote hires, exclusively at senior level, with a focus on the high end. All juniors in office, with a mix of junior-senior employees. People can and do work remotely 2-3x a week. Regular events when everyone comes into the office.
Things that absolutely do not work
1. Fully remote team with a lot of junior people. They get isolated, don't get the mentorship they need, end up working inefficiently for too long getting stuck on basic things because they don't know when to ask questions, and they don't have enough dedicated mentorship to be supported.
2. Hybrid team with fully remote junior members. This is the worst case scenario. Those team members are doubly isolated, both by their physical distance and by the issues detailed in (1)
Why three years? What about 4 years? How about 2.5 years?
I'm sorry to call you out but it's incredibly frustrating than on a news aggregate site that purports to hold itself to a higher standard than alternatives like reddit, that users are still completely confident about putting forth assertions such as these with zero actual concrete quantifiable data other than anecdotal evidence.
What’s the factual basis for your visceral reaction?
There will always be entry-level candidates willing to do whatever it takes to get a tech job and ambitious career makers gunning for those vacant leadership roles. But the costs of losing decades of institutional knowledge will catch up with these companies. They are harming themselves for an RTO whim and many won't make it in the long-term with his type of leadership.
WFH for engineers is a no-brainer however you look at it. Whether it's about quality of life, work and life balance, convenience, savings on office space and utilities, or being able to attract top talent. Why would I, as an engineer, apply for a job that will ask me to relocate, make my spouse quit their job to move with me, pull my kids out of school and make them find new friends elsewhere, abandon all my responsibilities to my community and put my house up for rent for a company when there are plenty more that don't ask me to do it? And most will still have a small office to come into if I so insist.
I don't think cunning malice or power plays can explain the decisions of leaders forcing RTO on their employees. There does not seem to be anything calculated about this to me. I reckon they just don't understand what happened to their business during the pandemic and they want to get back to the good old ways instead of finding the actual root causes of their problems. When the damage of RTO becomes clear, some will revert their decisions, and others will double down. Either they will go back to WFH or make space for others on the market. Doing work that can be done from home from the office is an unnatural state of things, it was only normal in very recent history, and hopefully briefly.
I've listened closely to all of the pro-RTO people, and have yet to hear a single reason proposed that makes any sense at all. The only thing I'm left with that makes any sense is that this is about power and money.
There are many other reasons, not just power like people here say just because they are highly biased.
I’ve been remote for over 15yrs starting as a junior and becoming a senior with added management responsibilities. I’ve been mentored and have mentored remotely.
Remote can and does work, but the company needs to be set up or adjust for it properly. Remote and asynchronous communication needs to be the primary way to communicate for it to work IMO.
Here is a pre-pandemic post on Wordpress, which started as a remote first company: https://hbr.org/2013/03/how-wordpress-thrives-with-a-1
You mentioned troublesome employees, these also exist in the office but they also impact other employees. I’ve had many complaints over the years of disruptive staff in the office making it difficult for others to focus and get work done. I’ve only known one remote employee who clearly wasn’t spending his time working.
I need hours of uninterrupted time to get work done. This just doesn’t happen at the office.
I know it’s not for everyone, I’ve had staff leave because they need the social aspect of working in an office, but in general, in my line of work, people prefer to be remote.
Untrue. I've listened, and continue to listen, with an open mind. However, I haven't found the arguments being put forth to be very persuasive. Being unconvinced is not the same as "not wanting to hear".
If an employee's productivity has become unacceptable, then you address it with that employee to correct the situation. If it can't be corrected, you fire them.
This is no different working from home than working in an office.
The biggest is the power balance between capital and labor. Capital wants cheap and pliant hands to do the work. That’s behind a lot of the fed interest rate raises and recession drumbeat in the media.
But another one, and a very important one is the power of one person over another. The best and most intimate and controlling kind of power is the power over another person’s body. Where they go, how long they stay there, how they behave. For a leader to really feel that power, they need eyes and sometimes hands on the people who work for them.
Companies haven’t realized the detriment that RTO is having on their recruitment because most of the big names are doing layoffs rather than hiring.
It’s pretty evident that companies that are posting remote roles get orders of magnitude more applicants.
Once the economy picks up, the RTO companies are going to have to reassess as their applicant pools will be smaller than WFH companies.
It's the sunk cost fallacy in action. They spent too much on physical space and the whole organization that comes with that and can't let it go and cut their losses, so they are doubling down with RTO. I can't see this ending well in the long-term for them.
Instead of having the possibility of playing videogames at home, while being online on Slack.
It's kinda common sense - humans have a limited amount of willpower they can expend daily, and it generally takes a lot of willpower to not slack off - especially if your job is boring as hell. Dev work isn't very boring, because it's kind of like art - but you better believe a lot of 'remote' work is mind-numbingly boring.
If you don't have these things... the argument for working in person is low. You should either work somewhere else, or work remotely and save $$$ and time.
If working remotely is important to you, I would look for these types of companies, and not the ones that only adopted remote work because of external circumstances, whether that be cultural trends or lockdown restrictions.
I work from home 100% but I sort of miss office and socializing there. It is easier to discuss a problem over cigarette break/lunch/happy hour than an ad hoc Zoom meeting. I have been working from home since 2017 but I had an office nearby. On days when I felt lonely, I could go to office. I would join company's social events, etc. I made some lifelong friends working from offices.
Yes most of these reasons are personal/social. Not for an increased business value. It is hard for me to see business value when working from an office other than social cohesion and politics.
If companies and employees care about the planet, they may provide better options to socialize over long distance like schedule a lunch hour everyday. Or subsidize working from local co-working places. Encourage and provide support for employees to join local social groups such as sports leagues, neighborhood groups, etc.
We used to have lunch breaks with my other friends who work from home but lately it seems most of them have to work from office few days a week or they just want to work through lunch and get done with work early. I think companies should be encouraging employees to take lunch breaks for healthier workforce.
(A) From what I can see, the more tech heavy a given role, the more remote is OK. For non-technical roles, I see fewer remote options. Especially during Covid times, when I spoke with CTOs, they all mentioned how well fully remote works for their teams. Which is quite different to the results in other functions.
(B) Is pretty much a decision from the founding team and the early members of the business + how well the collaboration works. I see fundamentally different approaches here and all can lead to great results.
I currently also often see a somewhat hybrid model, i.e., companies trying to have the staff in the office e.g., on a Tuesday and Thursday...
You can consider that not everyone has the same preferences as you. Many people are more productive and happier working from an office and meeting their colleauges in person.
Forcing people into limited open space with unassigned seats sounds like terrible execution of return to office but in general RTO doesn't have to be some kind of conspiracy.
You mean, that to each their own right? I agree, but RTO is the opposite. RTO forces everyone to work from the office.
If you prefer to work from the office, go ahead be my guest. I prefer to work from home. It's a win-win, right? No. Just because you like to work from the office, I too must go to the office so that you are happy. I don't force you to work from the office or your home or wherever you want.
No. I don’t know if the pro-remote people really don’t get this or just pretend?
It’s not about where I am and where you are. It’s about us being in the same physical place that people (such as myself) who prefer office work are looking for.
If I’m in the office and the other 25 people aren’t then it doesn’t benefit me the way I want it to. So for the company, it’s either RTO and the 25 people make a decision about what they want to do or stay remote and I make a decision about what I want to do. Neither is right or wrong, it’s just a decision that might have a good outcome or not.
In a way it is “to each their own” in that you get to decide whether the good stuff about your job outweighs the bad.
So while I want you to have whatever working arrangement works for you, either arangement only work if most of your colleagues have the same preference as you.
I can only speak to my industry as a software engineer, but I have yet to meet someone in my field under 40 who wants to go into an office.
If your butt is in an office chair then obviously you're "working" and not slacking.
[sarcasm]
Pretty much what it boils down to. A lot of executives hated that employees got so much power during the pandemic (even though it's still miniscule compared to the power the executives have themselves) and they couldn't wait to take it back away from them. Now that there's a bit of a downturn (at least in tech jobs), they're taking advantage of it to force things back to the way it used to be.
Nevermind it's completely unnecessary and damaging to the planet, they're just going to pretend that watercooler talk is the biggest and most important thing in a company ever, so they simply cannot abide by you skipping your commute.
CEO's like Benioff from Salesforce are out there touting record profits and productivity on stock earnings calls all throughout the pandemic and then go on and lay everyone off and call the remaining employees back to the office under the guise of "no one is working"
It's quite odd - you can't both have record profits & productivity and then also have "no one working"
The guy built the largest office building west of the Mississippi which now sits largely unoccupied alongside other unoccupied office buildings. His opinion is biased.
I mean the list of things like this is a mile long and nobody cares about doing a damn thing until helping the planet happens to align with something they really like.
To throw a hopefully not that controversial of an example out there, how about the obligation of gift giving and wrapping paper (and lets throw company swag in there, while we're at it). Tons of people give dumb or destined to be unused crap just to meet a societal expectation of giving gifts. I got a whole box of crap from my company as a welcome gift. I use maybe one item from it, the rest are just sitting in the house and will be trashed at some point. And I had to throw away yet another garbage bag of wrapping paper this past Christmas because it's expected to wrap gifts.
But that's the norm, and there hasn't been an established new normal yet. So it's not nearly as infuriating (to me at least) as this intentional clawing back of remote work to stroke the egos of executives.
Why must a company hyper-maximize the effectiveness of every employee at the expense of their work-life balance and happiness (assuming they would rather be remote, of course)?
And if the employee isn't happy, they're probably a lot less effective in-person than you might think, but you assume they are just because they're physically present.
