I was at my limit of nonsense unrelated to the job... then unclear RTO policies started appearing.
I put my foot out of the door and raised my concerns.
Management then, in a panic, told me it's being used as a wedge. Platitudes like "Enforcement isn't likely" or "not worth thinking about".
They were right... but not the way they intended. I chose new employment that doesn't play these games.
The market has decided I'm worth an extra $70k/year (with 200k in RSUs) and can work remotely. I now make more money, am officially remote, and have less stress.
By picking up a new job I've actually shed about seven. It's incredible how much burden one can carry.
This isn't even some fancy dev role, just SRE/keeping lights on.
I hope the good people I left behind (or those reading this) recognize the game.
It's the cheapest way to lay people off, get them to leave. The nefarious thing is it costs you, too.
Their attempts to retain were repulsing. I was assured that because of "who I am", I didn't need to worry. That validated the choice for me.
And best of all, the hidden costs don’t show on the balance sheet for many many quarters, hopefully after the CxO has left and it’s someone else’s problem. It really is a victimless crime!
This is a company everyone knows but expects nothing from. It's institution at this point, barely makes anything.
Not making a riddle, there aren't codes here. No, this also isn't a code. I'd outright say the company name if I wanted to communicate it
I know people like to read into things... So have that last paragraph of madness. Spare the effort
Empty things like this serve as a function to identify workers who will allow themselves to be exploited. I was blind but now I see.
That's what I'm really getting at with "validation". They determined I was fine for this game. What about the next?
The other thing is that people who have something extraordinary also ask for something extraordinary in return, and that's not surprising either, it's just power dynamics. Similar to how powerful celebrities can have ridiculous backstage requests - what are they going to do, cancel a show?
Indeed. As my years go by, I value reliability more than talent, possibilities, records. For example when playing games, I always leave a good buffer so that the card delivers the 60 fps in the most complex scenes too. I value that more than beautiful, but sometimes choppy performance.
My own experience has been that with junior talent, they don't gel with the team and don't have anything in common with the rest of the employees outside of the project they're working on.
If I were building a remote company I would hire people out of chats. I would rather hire someone off of IRC than off of LinkedIn, because I know the people on IRC can communicate (and argue!) via text. This may mean Discord now. That's my strongest opinion.
Following that is managerial. I have had places that did not have 1:1s with your direct manager, just bi-weekly or daily 15 minute standups with everyone. That is a good way to sabotage your company. Employees have nowhere to air problems besides in front of the whole group, so problems don't get mentioned until they are breaking (e.g. I have been working on other stuff for 2 months waiting for this guy to deliver something, but I need it now).
Being good enough to know what needs to be done, and being able to hire good talent and then trust them to get that stuff done. I have seen non-technical founders being run around by a D-tier CTO. You need good people to get good people as well. That place had a very difficult time landing talent.
Finally, pay well. I think the standard early startup pay range (180k + 1%) will not get you the technical talent you need. Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenges many companies face, but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.
This was my view, too, but I've been trying the 'fewer, better' route for a while now and seniors seem to be only marginally ahead of the curve, if at all. Now I wonder whether hiring twice as many juniors and aggressively promoting the ones who prove themselves wouldn't be more effective. (This isn't a good idea for other, pragmatic reasons, but I do wonder if it would work.)
I second this. Worked for a large retail operation and people used to sometimes move between departments. These had very different communication styles: one group had communal rolling chats about all sorts of stuff all the time. Others only chatted if they had planned to do so, or created a specific private chat for a topic. Far easier to work in the department in which you could just fling out a question or comment any time and people would get back to you almost instantly and hash things out.
Where are these 360k jobs posted? I never see anything close to that.
I fail to grasp this part. How is this negative? I often have nothing in common with the rest of the guys in my team but it doesn't affect my work in any way.
First I worked at a small company that was oriented towards remote work. At the beginning I would show up in the office, but the company had a policy "instead of talking to me, can you write a message on public Slack channel, or even better, make a github issue I'll get back to later?", which made me furious because I'm a naturally talkative person. So I spent two years working remotely. Not gonna lie, that was amazing, I had work on one screen and porn on the other at all times.
Then I moved to a much bigger company that's remote-friendly. I make a point coming to the office every day, although never for full 8 hours, more like 3, and I'm slowly making some friends. There's people I can talk to beyond "howareyou howareyou", which is a huge thing, because we're social animals and as an immigrant, I just don't have the out-of-office social network most people do.
What I have noticed is that I'm always on much better terms with people I actually talk to, and in the office it's much easier to have these random chats about everything and nothing. These chats are incredibly important because they allow us to see coworkers as human beings rather than API calls.
A friend of mine lives with her boyfriend who's working fully remotely, the company doesn't even have an office in his area. She complained to me about the guy just not doing well in general. His entire social life is her, and that's not a healthy dynamic.
Right because context switches are very expensive, and you are just one person. If everyone did what you did, the other end would be busy talking and not doing.
Instead, file your bug/report and give some indication of criticality. I understand why you don't like this approach but think of it from the other side's perspective.
Huh. Every “I’ll just come over” or “can we hop on a quick call?” for something I’m 90% sure can be sorted out within 20 messages makes me want to go take a walk instead. Writing’s great because I can refer back to it. If it’s in a channel with the rest of the team, it keeps them up to speed on what’s happening. Unless we really need to screen share or something (it happens!) turning a few messages into a call or an at-desk conversation drives me nuts.
Apple is very RTO heavy because they’re an old school hardware company. Hardware work is easy to demand in office work because: (1) apple secrecy and prevention of leaks and (2) access to lab equipment. #2 likely holds true for spaceX as well.
Adding Microsoft to the mix is weird as nobody I know there actually RTOs.
I think people need to actually specifically measure which roles (senior? engineering?) in tech we are discussing RTO about here. I agree that for most software engineering it backfired. But if you’re an apple hardware engineer, there aren’t many places in town that’ll pay you as much so you’ll accept whatever horrible RTO hand you’re dealt. Companies apply these rules to everyone which is very, very stupid IMO.
I think the most interesting part about this being on the inside is the rationale behind RTO. It’s always the same citing culture, collaboration, or other fuzzy things. It is never quantitative. Are you telling me that the people making these decisions are doing so without data? I think that’s unlikely, it’s just that the data isn’t in their favor and execs are smart enough than to let remote versus not remote become yet another bargaining chip for an employee, let alone senior ones.
TLDR, I think senior vs not senior in tech is likely too much of a generalization. But the people with the actual data aren’t speaking up probably because discussing the results don’t benefit them.
> These shifts appear to be driven by employees leaving to larger firms that are direct competitors.
[1] https://harris.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/wright-retur...
edit: don't get me wrong, I don't want RTO. I'm just saying that I'm personally not seeing people quit over it.
Either you're seeing mid-level or lower RTO or there's another reason.
I am at my current job due to my previous one demanding RTO. As soon as they started taking attendance in the office, I walked out. I know a number of others who did the same, at a number of companies.
Then the layoffs started and this paused as people were scared. Now that hiring is picking up again and many feel that the worst is behind us, multiple people from former workplaces that are in full-on RTO mode have already reached out asking how things are at my current workplace and whether we are hiring for remote roles (we are).
I love the sentiment this article is expressing, and anecdotally the thesis holds in my experience: senior engineers have lots of opportunity, so they can (and will) leave if they disagree with office policies.
That said, the article is not good journalism. Its own cited data doesn’t actually represent the conclusion it draws.
SpaceX took an extremely draconian return-to-office policy and they suffered for it, but they also suffered for Musk being insane, so I’m not sure the causation is 100% there.
Apple actually took the next most draconian policy (required 3 days in the office per week from every employee), and in fact Apple’s enforcement of the policy has been extremely draconian. An acquaintance of mine got in trouble for hopping on a plane to visit their dying parent and not filling out the HR form to use their allowed “two weeks per year” of remote working. One of my former departments at Apple has management checking badge in and out times to enforce the policy. That’s insane!
Microsoft’s policy has been the most liberal of the three (which isn’t shown in the data). I left Apple in 2021 in the face of being forced back to the office for a fully-remote role at Microsoft on a team that transitioned from fully in the office in 2018 to fully dispersed in 2021. Articles like this (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/microsoft-rto....) don’t properly capture Microsoft’s official return to work policy. Microsoft effectively left decisions about returning to the office up to managers and teams, and the corporate leadership incentivized managers to be more liberal by allowing teams to grow more if they hired more remote workers. At one point my team was told that 50% of all new hires were required to be fully remote.
The drama day of Microsoft’s policy taking effect which was cited in some articles was really a nothingburger. All you had to do was check the HR website to make sure it properly reflected if you were remote, in-office, or hybrid.
I keep in touch with a few of my co-workers who still work there, and they tell me there are a non-zero number of people still giving their badges to their RTO'ed buddies to "badge them in" on the right days. I'm sure that's strictly against multiple policies and they'll probably get caught at some point, but... people find a way.
If you didn't leave when ordered back to the office, you're not top tech talent.
Their heyday was 2016-2019
I’ve known people to do full time online masters degrees during office hours. I’ve played a heck of a lot of video games in office. Certainly read a lot of books at the office.
Offices are not some magical “go find work” hypnotic environments.
If anything, in an office there's always an excuse not to work. And if you accidentally enter the zone and get something done, soon you are interrupted by inanities.
There is no evidence that remote workers are all just sitting around doing nothing.
And if they were then the problem is clearly with their managers who are unable to provide clear goals and monitor their status.
One may care about the company until the company shows it doesn't care about you.
If an employee is loyal to a company that isn't loyal back then I question that employee's intelligence.
Nobody has pensions anymore, and as long as your 401k is in an index you don’t care if the building collapses after you walk out the door.
It’s been interesting to watch this dynamic in defense. There’s a lot of weird niche shit that’s absolutely critical and takes a really long time (and the right environment!) to become an expert in, but the turnover rate now is crazy. There’s an “old guard” (that has a pension) that kinda keep things running, but a LOT of them are retiring about now.
