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I reclaim 1.5 hours a day from work from home, so a mandated back to work would actually represent a 6 point pay cut on the day assuming I thought that through properly.
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.
Ed Zitron wrote about it a lot in his newsletter a while back and I think had some really excellent insights about it. Especially these three factors:
- 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.
> transparently a middle management “I’m still relevant!”
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.
I say this on here every time this topic comes up and get downvoted to hell because no one likes to hear it, but I don’t care because people need to hear it and I m gonna preach it. Everyone who complains about RTO always focuses on how it affects them. If you want to argue from a position of strength with your company on why WFH is better, stop focusing on it’s benefits to you and more on its benefits to your company.
Your arguments about “me” will always fall on deaf ears at your company. They don’t care about “me”, they care about “us”.
"Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated"
No severance payouts. No bumps to your unemployment insurance payments. Everything is working to plan.
This seems to be the real reason that AT&T is pushing RTO, including telling people that have worked remote for their entire careers and never seen an office in 20+ years that they must relocate to a designated location either by the end of 2023 or 2024 depending on their wave. If they reject immediately they will get severance, but if they accept and don't relocate later they will be terminated without severance.
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.
Yep! This is it. Managers associate willingness to RTO with loyalty, so the idea is very much to induce voluntary, mostly non-regrettable attrition.
They're playing with fire.
Anecdotally my org is on a hiring tear lately and we're completely remote, and the quality of candidates has steeply risen as of late. I mean really good candidates I'd rarely see before are pouring into my inbox. I've never talked to so many folks currently at Google, Meta, Amazon, but also big banks and other F500s.
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.
> 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.
Does he actually spend any time working?
Every time this topic comes up on HN, I see many anecdotes on why WFO is bad.
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.
> 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
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
>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.
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
How long is your commute?
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.
I understand why businesses want us to return to office, and cannot disagree that I would likely react the same way. However returning to the office has numerous additional costs that are very much avoidable. I have to go to the office once a week. That’s a week do gas, time, money, pollution, and using resources and space that is duplicative.
Here’s the thing with commercial leases. They go on for years at a time and cost a very large amount.
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.
Commercial real estate value is a bubble that's gonna pop soon.
There's just way more office space than anyone needs.
Is there a way to short CRE other than investing in non-commercial RE? I'd think you can probably directly short CRE-focused REITs but I'd be worried about them rebalancing or diversifying even as CRE starts to pop.
Our office building management is giving half a month free for new referrals; meanwhile they are refusing to rent us more floor space.
Copy and paste of a previous article discussed here a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36500448
EDIT: And copied and pasted here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36956799
I kind of prefer going in to the office. I like talking to people around the water cooler and whatnot. BUT, remote work has definitely allowed me more opportunity than I would have otherwise based on where I live.
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.
My take on remote work as a manager for a company with significant name recognition:
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.
> It's also clear that some people feel real benefits from being in the office.
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.
> It's also clear that some people feel real benefits from being in the office.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The survey equates the displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one to that of experiencing a 2-3% pay cut.
I think they forgot a 0.
Yes, this doesn't add up. The typical 2x20 mins daily commute is effectively an 8% unpaid increase in working hours, not counting transportation costs.
They probably averaged a bunch of people that equated it to 30% with a bunch of people that liked being in the office.
It is unclear who wants RTO, at least within tech and other leaders whom I know within tech.
Those who are entering the workforce, remote working is fun for greybeards and terrible for fresh grads, interns and apprentices.
The people who have investments in commercial real estate want it. All those ginormous office buildings... would be obsolete.
...Is this article plagiarized from this article posted June 26: https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/the-damaging... ? It was even submitted to HN and had a few hundred comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36500448
Seems more nuanced than this discussion is making it out. We have had attrition and recruiting challenges with RTO, but also noticeable improvements in morale and productivity - especially when it comes to onboarding new folks.
I will not relocate and I will not commute to some subpar, noisy office where no one around is on my team.
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.
Business practices evolved but the office space did not. Our open floor plan was still somewhat reasonable pre-2020 with a few quiet software developers around. Now it has been turned into a shared video conference space and thanks to the company growing there are no longer dedicated desks.
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.
The manager class is going to go kicking and screaming into the new world where they can no longer call their otherwise totally capable, productive employees into the office for morning snack like schoolchildren. The faster they accept it, the better off their organizations will be.
Sure, but what is it doing to productivity for those who remain?
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 author of this article is a PhD who is advertising their services at the end -- it is partially a self-promotion piece. However it has quantitative survey data, and speaks to the regulatory and also practical concerns that real corporate management faces in managing a mid-size work force. Unlike other recent articles, there is little reference to the real-estate value of office property. Instead this article talks about protected minority employees, the role of job security in the minds of both management and job-seekers, and common carrot-and-stick negotiation parts from both sides.
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"
Bad use of statistics.
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.
There's an editorial in the Washington Post today from Michael Bloomberg pushing for RTO in the federal government, and generally, everywhere else. I wonder who is more influential?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/01/michael-b...
Are we pretending that this is a news or analysis, and not a sales pitch for "the office whisperer"? Article is a joke.
> “staggering 76% of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules”
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.
Hybrid work is an unstable point. An office where half people are missing / zooming is useless. remote vs fully present are the only two stable attractors
Of course it's too early to tell with lots of confounding variables, but labor productivity has been taking a steep dive[0]. So perhaps in the aggregate, WFH is resulting in less work being done.
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.