JPMorgan Workers Ponder Union in Wake of Return-to-Office Mandate (opens in new tab)

I find slacking off in the office so much easier than slacking off at home, mainly because people (like CEOs of companies with RTO mandates) automatically assume people in the office == people being productive. You could leave your seat and go to a meeting room, and people won't know if you are having a genuine meeting or if you are just talking to yourself. Or you could bring your laptop to a meeting room and people won't know if you focusing or if you are slacking off. You could even stay in your seat, and people won't easily notice that the GitHub page you have open on your monitor is actually for your side project. You could open a long and useless company email on your monitor and daydream for a few minutes. In contrast, when people know you are at home, they default to thinking you are slacking off. You need to actively work to prove you are working.

> If every single office job went remote, what's the point of a city like New York.

The point is to enjoy the city (whether museums or bars) after work hours.

In a few cases (certainly not all), it's to keep the c-suite's reputation sustainable.

If you're a CEO that signed a lease or construction contract on any piece of property since, idk, 2015, you have, in some way, burned a lot of money on a piece of ground that could have, in many cases, been replaced with a far cheaper internet connection and suite of remote work applications.

You have two options at this point:

1) explain this bonfire of cash to the board and possibly to shareholders, which is a pretty good way to see yourself shown the door

or

2) justify your expense by telling the rank-and-file to get back in the office and make use of the capital you are now locked into having.

Social currency is also a thing, which is much more difficult to gain in a remote setting - if not impossible. I don't go to work to socialize either, but I'm not naive enough to think that without an extremely established career and reputation at an org that I'll be promoted or employed strictly on merit. there is always some degree of social-ness involved in those kinds of decisions. I'm not saying that's how things should be, it's just how they are.

The entire point is to get you to quit because firing people is hard, and they don't care if their best talent leaves.

Pizza and Bagels. If the rest of the country got their shit together and figured out how to make acceptable pizza and bagels then I could leave this city.

I solved an incredibly difficult technical problem while grabbing lunch during PAX with fellow co-workers.

Spending time face-to-face with team members as a lead help me keep track of who needed some extra time off, who was at risk of burn out, and who was being harassed out of band by PMs.

One of the most powerful things my team did was have cookies out in front of her desks everyday. Other devs would stop by the chit chat and it let us keep a pulse on how the entire war was doing. My team was able to get a lot more done and hope everyone succeed because we had not just technical connections but personal connections throughout the building.

Those personal connections also let me transfer top performers onto my team, people who would otherwise have left the org due to dissatisfaction with their current team.

Knowing individual developers one-on-one also helps me know what problems they're going to have with their code and blind spots in their technical knowledge.

Finally, there's a fact that trust is earned through time spent together. As a junior member of a team, I was able to propose some radical alternative solutions to problems because of how much time I'd spent talking to the tech leads above me.

That said, the working conditions in most offices are so bad, I see what people want to stay home myself included.

Even Microsoft, who years ago commissioned studies showing the massive productivity gains from individual offices, has gone against their own best practices and resorted to loud open office nightmare environments.

I think part of this is because corporations no longer expect individual engineers to come up with radical solutions to hard problems and are okay with mediocre solutions to everyday problems instead.

In my opinion, this results in massive numbers of employees being hired to create complex solutions. When one quarter of the employees could have got the job done if they were treated well.

Another aspect of everything going wrong is that American cities are so poorly designed with constrained housing that commute times have gotten way out of hand. Even in the early to mid 2000s when I started my career it was possible for people to live 15 minutes from work or buy a house 20 minutes away. I used to have a round-trip commute time of under 10 minutes so of course I didn't mind coming into the office.

Yikes, if the only reason you’re in NYC is a job and you don’t go out I highly recommend you find a new job/city.

The end effect is employees schlepping to the office to sit down and hop on a zoom call.

The main important factor IMO is mentorship of junior talent. (I'm speaking for technical orgs)

Viewing the organization as a living organism where an employee is a "cell", then there are material benefits in the "cellular replication" of talent and rejuvenation of the next generation.

It can definitely be true that RTO is worse for an individual engineer but better for the health of the organization long-term. Both can be true.

In my experience, remote only companies tend to prefer a higher ratio of senior employees for this reason. It's plug-an-play.

What is abhorrent is employers changing these terms as if they're trivial. We probably need legal protections treating swapping workplace requirements as requiring someone to relocate or accept lower pay.

> If every single office job went remote, what's the point of a city like New York

You really don't see the value of New York beyond its office buildings?

> it's a big club and you ain't in it. The powers that be one as many people in office chairs as possible, so they're real estate holdings appreciate in value

This is a Bay Area conspiracy theory that doesn't make a lot of sense, particularly when the cost and need for layoffs explains the effect more parsimoniously.

Oldhead here. This was a common thought pattern before lockdowns, but only among the ~5% of people who personally negotiated for a work-from-home/telecommuting arrangement. And it was not normal. It was vaguely looked down upon by superiors, unless you had been with the company for a long time and had proven your value. And among peers it was a little "weird."

"Return to office" post-lockdown is not the same thing as "Work from home" pre-lockdown. The RTO thought pattern is similar, but the social feeling around it has flipped - is normal and not weird. (Yet still vaguely looked down on by some management)

People don't want to chit chat, just clock in clock out. Layoffs threat is ever present. Remote & odd-time zone meetings are still here. Can't turn off my computer after 5pm. In office benefits are limited. Mentoring, learning-seminars and after-work activities are soft discouraged.

Why even come in ? _____________

> what's the point of a city like New York

I agree that RTO mandates have to do with keeping downtown office space prices high. But, if you could work from anywhere, why wouldn't you want to be in the coolest city in the world? You don't need to be in Manhattan. But you can get some pretty great apartments while still being a 30 minutes subway ride from downtown.

I visited NYC regularly through Covid, and it seemed quite lively.

Remember, us programmers are a famously introverted & indoor bunch. Most people want to be in places with rich social lives apart from their smaller intimate communities.

My experience is just so different. I love the vibe and the camaraderie of my office. It makes it fun to work there.

Just sitting at home working, never interacting with people in person sounds really dull and boring and cold to me. I had to do that in 2020 and I hated it.

Productivity is nice, but IMO it's not all about productivity. As a worker I value my enjoyment of the job, and just being a robotic super productive worker is not as enjoyable as actually feeling like you are part of a team or community and having fun with your fellow coworkers.

We spend so much of our lives on the clock, I would hate to have it all just be serious productive work 100% of the time.

You average Joe/manager in the office judges you based on this.

( I too don't like it)

You're not the only employee of the company. They aren't trying to maximize _your_ output, they're trying to maximize the company's output. You being present for a junior dev to ask quick questions to (the type that don't get asked if they have to message you) will increase their productivity much more than your productivity loss. It isn't all about you.

> If I had to think, I imagine the entire point of RTO mandates is to keep cities sustainable.

This is, essentially, a conspiracy theory. RTO is happening because management thinks it will increase productivity. Right or wrong, it's crazy to assume the are all working together to keep cities alive.

Bingo

On the same point, gosh you sound like a fun person! I know, I'm sure it's not part of your job to be personable. Though, I do wonder how an approach like that will work for most people.

Yeah, but that's the heart of the problem here. The suburbs that many flocked to when WFH became acceptable are largely subsidized by city income. Cities are largely funded by employers paying hefty taxes to operate within them. Non-negligible portions of municipal budgets are also funded by small businesses that cannot exist without people working centrally somewhere.

Until municipal governments figure out a different operating model, I don't think any major city can survive big companies pulling out en masse unless your desired end state looks like Detroit circa 2000.

> I go to work in exchange for currency, which is required to acquire goods and services. All this other crap, all these holiday parties, all of this let's dance in diversity videos, no that's not what I'm here for .

What of the people whose jobs aren't WFH compatible? "They get what they get?"

Most of my great friends I met at work

Professionalism is learned largely or even exclusively by socialization.

More like to keep cities unsustainable. If a few major real estate companies went bankrupt, forcing the rest to lower the rents, a lot of wealth would be destroyed. At the same time, cities like New York would become even more desirable due to being more affordable.

NYC is still the #1 city in the world. There are plenty of things you can't find anywhere else. Cities like that – cities that offer something unique – would benefit from being more affordable. Mid-tier cities that exist primarily for economic reasons would probably suffer from a real estate crash.

This is truly a past way of being. A real past, we cannot go back.

We have a way of solving this for many workers and any company not in tune with this beautiful thing is unacceptable to my heart (and hopefully many others).

If it has no meaningful impact on productivity, and workers don't like it (including a lot of managers), why push it?

That's why I believe that companies have some evidence (or belief) that work from home employees are not as productive, enough so to wage this political battle and pay loads in office expenses.

The opposite has happened. Workers are craving jobs harder than since the financial crisis.

Those are two hours every single week-day that I could use to either do more work for the company or, more realistically, do self-improvement tasks or hobbies.

Of course management doesn’t like to hear this. They’d rather you stare at a wall when there is nothing in front of you I guess.

I’ve not had to do this. I’ve been fully remote for over a decade.

If I am hired as remote and then the company changes its policy later requiring me to go in, that is a change of the employment contract. AWS was particularly insidious as people are required to go to the office where the work/team they are part of are assigned to.

My one bedroom apartment is my home. Not an office to work in.

Maybe if I had a spare room, but I like the feeling of leaving work at work and coming home not to know I need to work here tomorrow.

They hate it because it's designed to be hated. The discomfort is the point. You're meant to know your place and be reminded of it everyday.

Anyway, I am mentioning it, because the usual issues with quality of work that had to be QC'ed immediately came up. To be honest, there is nothing stopping corporate, but none of the jobs most of us do are so easily done that it can be just put in a simple step by step process ( and even then its hardly a way to guarantee accuracy ). I guess what I am really saying is: if they could, they would have already.

But they can't, because you get what you pay for.

Only way to ensure worker rights (and a greater share of your company's profits) is to fight for them and that's where unions come in.

My take is that this assumes the job - any job - that can be done remotely, can also be done by just anyone, and that there is someone in India or elsewhere with the same or higher level of critical thinking and IQ and who is willing to do it for a lot less pay.

But maybe none of this matters. Maybe the company is OK with a below average warm body in a 3rd world country that can do a version of the job for 1/3 of the pay.

Quality of work, communication challenges in time zones, language barriers, and setting a company culture are huge barriers to entry for workers remote from India.

Minimum required wages of at least the prevailing wage and limited access for W2's are major ones for bringing them here. Even doubling the W2's wouldn't cover replacing all jobs.

I like to think the quality of my work and ability to be more than just a coder (setting priorities, goals, innovating on the product, etc) prevents that.

Ultimately most tech jobs are replaceable but that’s not a good enough reason not to. Especially since there’s already pressure making this happen. I recently watched a previous employer offshore most of the dev work and it seems to be going ok to bad for them.

These companies already offshore every change they can get, you aren't going to preserve your job by going in each day and staring at your boss with giant sad eyes like Puss in Boots.

If I was at an office, I'd be spending hours on zoom anyway.

Please explain—knowledge workers are still workers and the same benefits that labor unions provide to other workers apply just as much here.

Secondly, why would I ever care about a professional organization if I can't use it to collectively bargain? It doesn't seem to work this way for doctors; why would it work this way for us?

Knowledge workers did this to themselves by moving everything to the cloud and remote work. My boss was literally told by one of our private equity overlords that if a job can be done from home, then it can be done from India. They proved good on their word by doing it to my job within two years. And that was before the current era of mass layoffs. I was here warning people to this effect and making myself rather unpopular back during the boom times.

The threat of jobs being exported just means that members of the union or association have to embrace innovation like unions do in Germany rather than focus on job retention.

Unionizing tech workers may or may not be a good idea, but finances would be comparatively down the list.

In Austria, every year the unions negotiate salary increases for almost all job groups (IT, metal work, etc.) and this is very important to keep our wages at least up with inflation. No-one would ever think this is a bad idea here.