I don’t even have an egregious commute compared to others.
Never mind that all of a sudden I no longer need before and after daycare. I have a home gym and can acceptably exercise at lunch. I don’t have peer pressures to go out for lunch all the time to eat. Etc.
The amount of money changes just from working from home is huge.
Never mind that I get more done, and have way fewer interruptions. This whole “get back to the office” is transparently a middle management “I’m still relevant!” Move.
- Executives work in a way that genuinely does probably reward or even require in person interaction. A lot of their job is "intangible" human connection-building stuff with other executives, shareholders, investors, manufacturers, etc. And because of the way executives are selected, a lot of these people haven't worked a "normal" job in decades or sometimes ever. They mistakenly think everyone else's work is, or should be, more like theirs is.
- Ego shit: from executive down to middle management a significant amount of the "reward" of the job is prestige, in the form of authority and control over other workers. Seeing "their" workers all lined up in the office is a visceral experience of this prestige and they don't want to give it up.
- Some significant fraction of middle management is genuinely not necessary or beneficial, but is essentially skimmed off the productivity of the lower workers and presented upwards as managerial competence. And especially, this isn't evenly distributed: maybe all managers do it a little, inadvertently or through bureaucratic structure, but some managers are almost exclusively this. Their actual career is at stake because it makes clear who is doing the work, and prevents them from intercepting it to take credit.
And then finally my own view on it is exposed in the disgusting euphemism "labor discipline." White collar pay went up during the pandemic. WFH is incredibly better for the quality of life of many workers, with few or no downsides. We are realizing we don't have to live and work the way we have been, things can be better for us at no one's expense. We are getting uppity and need to be reminded who is really in control of our lives.
This is definitely a real phenomenon. "Subordination", the product of having subordinates, is a sort of hidden compensation to some people.
> And then finally my own view on it is exposed in the disgusting euphemism "labor discipline." White collar pay went up during the pandemic. WFH is incredibly better for the quality of life of many workers, with few or no downsides. We are realizing we don't have to live and work the way we have been, things can be better for us at no one's expense. We are getting uppity and need to be reminded who is really in control of our lives.
Amen. There's a certain type of boss who thinks that employee happiness is a sign they're not being whipped enough, and that whipping them will increase productivity; these people also treat it as an axiom, and are immune to evidence about productivity.
And in my experience there is a minority of people, also developers, who really enjoy working at the office, or don't do well at home.
Good managers would be busy figuring out what their people actually need to thrive and know that it is not the same for everybody.
In this case, I really hope forward thinking companies will destroy the competition and scoop up all the displeased talent that is forced to return to the office. Insofar as we have a free market, the problem will then sort itself out anyway, even though the road to get there might be ugly.
I think for many executives it's so "intangible" as to be worthless bordering on detrimental ;)
Ah the old "middle manager man in the middle" attack.
Which makes one wonder who the people who kept posting on here how much they missed the office and wished we'd go back to the office during the pandemic actually were.
Enthusiastic extroverts who needed face to face interaction to stay happy. The pandemic limited their social options and they longed for the amount of in person interactions they had when working from the office.
Easily distractable people unable to set up a distraction free environment at home who got stressed because their productivity suffered. I thought I was going to be one of these people because I had a pre-school aged child who was also stuck at home but it didn't end up being that much of a problem for me thanks to my wife being very proactive and able to juggle her school schedule to when I was available to parent. Some of my co-workers privately admitted that they couldn't focus on work when their hobbies and house-chores were so close at hand.
Those who had issues in their home environment that caused them grief and they relied on the office as an escape rather than fixing their problem. These were the people who got divorced or broke leases at the beginning of the pandemic as they were unable to live 24/7 with the people they had been able to deal with as long as they had 40+ hours of break from them every week previously.
The other side of the coin is that solo work - e.g. slinging code - is a lot easier to get done at home with fewer distractions.
All that said, if my choice is between the extremes of mandatory RTA and full-time WFH, I pick full-time WFH ten times out of ten.
Of my current direct reports, I have 2 folks who couldn't wait to get back to the office full time, a number of folks (including me) who go to the office maybe 1-2 days of the week, and the rest never come to an office. My office folks go in because they like a firm separation between work and home and like seeing their friends in person. Same with us casual office types; I go in because there's conversations that move faster to better outcomes when had face to face. Exactly how are we wrong? Why do you care?
And while I know you won't believe this, but the middle managers job hasn't changed: all the bullshit they had to deal with so you don't is still there.
I actually enjoy interacting with my coworkers, but the time I would enjoy spending with them outside of work, I instead have to spend on the road.
I guess this might be true, but I do not have any numbers to validate this.
Your arguments about “me” will always fall on deaf ears at your company. They don’t care about “me”, they care about “us”.
Same as saying that you need to argue why a pay raise is good for your company. I mean, it mostly doesn't. All it does is that it makes the employees happier.
No severance payouts. No bumps to your unemployment insurance payments. Everything is working to plan.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/at-t-tells-60000-m...
Although the story says that "managers" (e.g. non union individual contributors) get to choose from the 9 locations, that's not the reality, your work stream is assigned a designated location, there may be an alternate location you can petition to go to instead but it must be approved first.
They're playing with fire.
Many candidates are coy about their reasons for leaving, especially given all the layoffs, but, still anecdotally, the trend I've seen is for folks to be sending out a lot of feelers during RTO and many folks have even told me straight up that's why they're looking. They want flexible hours and work locations.
I talked to a director last week who spends 1/3 the year in ski country, 1/3 the year in the Midwest and 1/3 the year on the coast. He's not going back, and practically anyone would be lucky to have him.
It's going to be a bloodbath.
Does he actually spend any time working?
This seems the exact thought process of management wanting people to RTO.
They forget there's time, and life, after working hours. And the less you need to commute, the more free time you have to actually live and enjoy life.
I used to work with an incredible engineer who went skiing from 6-9am every day and then again at 6pm, weather permitting. Slopes were 5 minutes from his front door.
If you tried to fit this sort of thing in while working in an office, then no you probably wouldn't spend much time working, and that's the whole point.
Director level non-standard hours might be a non-starter, but nothing about the lifestyle demanded it, it was really just about maximizing the time spent skiing or whatever. One could always knock of at 5 and get a few hours in.
My anecdote: I work from the office everyday (unforced). 20-30 minutes commute. I come in at 6am/7am and leave at 2pm/3pm. I do a 30 minutes calisthenics session and then head home and usually leave my laptop in the office (as a forcing function to disconnect).
The result: I have built strong bonds with colleagues outside my team. A few of them have become close friends.
I'm also generally as productive and sometimes even more than my colleagues that WFH.
I feel the ideal environment is *contextual* and it’s probably a hybrid work environment where people who want to work remote can but have to touch base in-person a few times every month. I wish both sides on the debate can see this.
Edit: The point of my comment is neither option is bad or good. Certain people benefit from each option and it’s unfair to paint either one as bad.
E.g: As an immigrant, the office has been useful in seeding my social circle and learning useful things about Berlin that I probably wouldn’t have know. Just the other day a colleague outside my team informed me how I can get an extra 10 days off .
Someone in a different situation probably have different priorities.
This necessitates living near the office/only hiring people that live near the office. I will not let my employer dictate where I live and I will not live in some of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world
Some of my colleagues live outside Berlin and I think they are only required to come to the office a few times a month and they haven’t complained so far.
HN will tell you that you should make friends outside of work and that they shouldn't be forced to come to the office just to socialize with you. /s
I'm in the middle on this: I have a very good office at the moment, and am content to be there and chat with my coworkers, but that doesn't make the commuting any less of a deadweight loss.
It also makes it far easier to organize e.g. work on the house or dental appointments.
So some companies are locked into their office leases and stupidly think not having people there is a waste of that money when it’s a sunk cost and has already been wasted.
But for companies without an office, it’s a massive saving.
So in the long run, cubicle-minded managers will go out of business, and get outcompeted by their younger and more modern replacements.
RTO is a nightmare for these people.
Plenty of “younger” workers often equate “work life” with “life” and love the ping-pong and beer culture of “tech” offices. I despise it. A lot of younger workers coming out of college see the office as a place to get their lattes and socialize.
So while I agree with the “cubicle-minded” aspect, the “younger” aspect isn’t quit accurate or fair. Many of us that have a life outside of work hate that cubicle-minded attitude regardless of our age. It’s often the older and more experienced people that have less tolerance for office culture, especially those of us that were doing remote long before it was a widespread “thing.” Unless I have to work with physical stuff, there is zero need to be in an office.
There's just way more office space than anyone needs.
Does that help if you believe CRE is on the outs? CRE typically carries a much higher property tax burden, which means that if CRE starts to meaningly go by the wayside: That burden will shift to other property classes, making them much less attractive and/or cuts to services will be made, making the municipality much less attractive overall.
EDIT: And copied and pasted here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36956799
I can see how the choice thing would sway people. Maybe if going into the office, you still had the flexibility to go run errands or whatever.
I think it's clear some people prefer working remotely (and the online hacker news crowd leans heavily that way). It's also clear that some people feel real benefits from being in the office.
I think it's inevitable that the culture of a company mirrors the values of it's leaders.
Companies with leaders that value in person communication, place a high premium on random collaboration will prefer their teams to be in office, and hire people based on this. This could involve companies with large amounts of more junior people that need training or experience (and whose leaders feel that training is easier done in person).
Companies with leaders that feel like collaboration is less important, are more willing to set metrics and not be as directly as involved, and hire experienced employees with less oversight, lean towards remote work.
This means you'll see a decline in hybrid teams. Teams want to be made up of people who share values, and this is something that will polarize teams. Companies that prioritize growing talent will prefer to be in person, companies that prefer to hire for specific roles with clear expectations will be OK being remote.
This polarization will be painful and shouldn't happen quickly. I see many companies putting their finger on the scale when hiring, preferring in office roles (and selecting people that want or can't get remote roles). Over time, natural attrition will mean less and less remote workers, and that eventual makes it easier to push others out.
I don't think this is a good or bad thing, but it does mean that if you want to be fully remote, you need to remain very competitive in terms of skills. You're competing against a wider talent pool. I do expect 3 days a week (Tues/Wed/Thurs) to become standard for many companies, and that broadens the "recruiting" radius for in office companies. 1 hour commute 5 days a week is the same time commitment as 1.5 hours commute 3 days a week.
I'm so tired of this equivocation. These aren't two neatly swapable things like some sort of cute little "preference" that each company can decide for itself without receiving any judgement.
The costs behind in-office work are GARGANTUAN, both in terms of the literal cost of renting + heating + cooling a huge office space that is vacant every weekend and every night, and the environmental impact of this flagrant waste, combined with the costs of requiring everyone to commute (and typically do so without compensation), the brain drain of only allowing "local" applicants, etc, etc...
This isn't some cute little preference where you can be like oh well Johnny prefers in-office. Johnny better come up with some really huge world-changing justifications or better yet we can stop renting such spaces and save money and the environment across the board.
If I could instantly teleport in the office and if the office had quiet private spaces, yes sure, but the terrible housing market, long commutes and shit offices, are bigger downer that prevent me from prioritizing going to the office even though I like working and socializing with my coworkers.
I feel like collaboration is very important which is why I only run teams WFH and never in the office. There's no collaboration happening when people are crammed together in a building, just posturing.
Collaboration for remote employees is amazing though. You can even look at large open source projects where people who have never even spoken to each other successfully develop software together.
Screen sharing on a call is a 10000x better experience than "just come over to my desk and look over my shoulder"
Screen sharing is better for pair programming, mentoring, demoing, everything. It's awesome.
The only real downside to calls is that whiteboarding is a challenge, but tbh Whiteboards are anti-productive, they are where communication goes to die imo.
I think they forgot a 0.
So completely do away with tech hubs. People can continue to grow organically, they are free to stay or move as makes sense to them individually.
As a society, we should be striving to continue decoupling work from our identity.
- Companies just aren't interested in training people if they can hire someone trained somewhere else.
- Project-based time accounting doesn't account for time spent mentoring and transferring knowledge.
- Some older workers withhold knowledge and aren't punished for it. Some older workers share knowledge and aren't rewarded for it.
All this existed prior to COVID and expansion of work from home.
I doubt this. Would probably be cheaper, but I doubt the rental market is so inelastic that the new price will break anything.
https://www.profgalloway.com/work-from-office/
One of his arguments is that for younger employees, in that it provides an opportunity to create social connections. For example, it appears that ~20% of people meet their spouses at work.
I worked from home before the pandemic, hated it, and vowed to never do it again. Then the pandemic happened.
The pandemic was a huge rearrangement to so many things though. It forced through a lot of the accommodations that previously I had to beg and fight for. Got everyone used to having to write more, have video option for all meetings, train judgement about what can be async etc.
It also normalized the lunch errand, the early dinner then back at work, the "I might just be away from the computer when you message me" dynamic that makes remote work genuinely fulfilling. I no longer feel like I'm committing a moral transgression against my coworkers by stopping to help a family member with a chore or whatever.
I once said I would never willingly do remote. Now I say I'll never willingly work from an office regularly. I might turn out to be as wrong about this as I was about that, we'll see.
Understand that your current preference is a result of being in an advantageous living accommodation next to the office building your company is leasing.
We're trying to prevent reverting to that being the mandatory norm for all workers though.
We have folk who prefer to work from the office, and that's fine. But it makes team meetings more challenging than they are when everyone's at home.
When we were only spread across two offices, we'd occasionally have a team day in one or other of the offices. But the third office is much further away.
I am sure you will need it with all the attrition. ;-)
RTO morale isn't really a thing. Morale is high when the team members enjoy the product, the respect of our customer and fellow teammates, and the ability to deliver to the product to the customer. We also have excellent work-life balance in leadership. This kind of morale can be garnered by both remote and in-person teams alike. I genuinely think it's an issue of nuance, personal preference, and specifics of geography.
If everything can't be done remotely, then there's a collaborative tech problem.
The other insanity is shared desks. Why even bother having an office if you're going to take away things from your employees? It and pointless penny pinch sends the message that you're no longer a cool place to work and nudging people to quit by stacking up the misery factor as high as possible to alleviate your guilt of doing more layoffs to keep profits high and salaries low.
As if business practices changing the requirements was not bad enough, half of the floor has been taken over by the provisioning, shipping & tech support team, but that's more of an issue with the building management refusing to rent us more space in this specific case.
What is the manager class? The people who sacrificed their $/hr in favor of power?
If I want to be a manager, I can hire people with my fat income and manage them on my spare time or when I take a few years off work. Then I can come back as a manager with all my new experience.
What is the opportunity cost of maintaining the extra office space vs using that money for other things such as travel so people can actually meet the people they work with?
The Internet combined with recent lockdown public policy has definitely changed the constant back-and-forth of corporate hiring and job roles. One thing not mentioned at all is the change in productivity of IT overall.. For example, in farm work is was easy to measure the effects of gasoline-powered machines to replace hand labor. The effects of modern computer systems against clerks and secretaries, not so straightforward. There is no question that the returns for certain individuals has rocketed compared to "ordinary workers" .. Will job negotiations ever be the same? insider tip - the answer is "no"
That's an author bio. Completely ordinary for articles and has been since the print days.
> At that point, they called me to help as a hybrid work expert who The New York Times has called “the office whisperer.” We worked on adapting their return-to-office plan, . . .
> In another case, a large financial services company began noticing employee turnover despite offering competitive salaries . . . . After consulting with me, they adjusted their policies to be more competitive in offering flexibility.
He's just trying to sell books and consulting. Nothing wrong with that -- but hardly objective analysis.
42% of companies seeing more attrition than expected doesn't really mean "worse than we thought". But the author is in the business of selling pro-WFH consulting, so the facts don't really matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/01/michael-b...
People always say this, but I’d bet that the vast majority of those 76% would begrudgingly go in if it was demanded. Talk is cheap, as they say.
Always be interviewing, always be ready to move on. If an employer wants loyalty, I recommend a dog. To be clear, this is not intended to be adversarial. On the contrary, it is simply recognizing the tenuous employment relationship for what it is.
Then you're left with the worst people, people who are unhappy but stuck, and people who just can't be bothered to do anything about it.
Sounds like a great recipe for productivity! I love working with my fellow cage-mates.
In other words if your company is paying way too much money as compared to the market, people would think they want to leave, but won’t. But if you’re a company that is at market or slightly above market, and you’re enforcing mandatory RTO, you are in trouble, you just don’t know it yet.
When they were hired during the pandemic, it was agreed there would be an eventual return to the office at an unknown time in the future. They'd been planning a move to my (high-salary, high-cost-of-living) area before the pandemic, so that was just fine with them.
Now it's several years later. If I order a full return to the office they'll have a choice: Either move house, or move jobs.
Selling a house and buying a new one costs $$$$$ and is a huge hassle.
Seems to me pretty believable that they'd look at other jobs if a full return to office was ordered.
Sample size of one, but I've thought about this a lot, and I decided I would hand in my notice if my company unilaterally demanded I physically present myself in a building for several days per week. I've never worked on-site in this job, and been consistently ranked highly in terms of productivity and responsibility.
It's astounding not worth the risk for my firm except for certain teams.
We've had 2 of 3 engineering role candidates we recently made offers to decline citing our 3 days a week in office policy...
I say this as someone who's been full-time WFH for over a decade; I'm not taking a position one way or another.
So the "steep dive" that you talk about is a single year -1.7% decrease vs a decade of constant increase, going as high as 4.6% in a single year?
I feel that chart is almost deceitful. Every year that this is above 0 is a percentage win no matter the delta. So if that chart showed
* 2030 -> 20%
* 2031 -> 1%
It'd feel like a steep dive, but 2031 would still be an _increase_ in productivity over 2030.
It's common to draw economic indicators this way.
Basically, if one year had +3 and the next -3, you would be back at the original value.
The largest ever 4.6 at the peak of WFH in 2020 and the fall to a normal 2.2 in 2021 both represent fast growth in productivity. The only "bad" point there is the -1.7 at the peak of RTO in 2022. So the GP's analysis is indeed bullshit.
(But anyway, there are some much more compelling explanations for 2022 than RTO, do not take it as evidence against mandating office work, it's not strong enough for that.)
It goes down because you now have to pay him more for the same amount of work. But it also goes up because marginal utility of his work has increased.
Productivity shot up early COVID when people were scared and WFH started?
That's a pretty big leap.
Manufacturing and Durable Manufacturing had the biggest decreases and WFH isn't a thing in those sectors. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm
