I quit my FAANG job yesterday to join a fully remote company. I took a >50% pay cut but I think it is a 100% life saver. I remember spending 3-4 hours/day commuting and I am just not willing to do that any more. I've cut back on expenses and simplified my life, built up some savings so I can make do with less. My retirement savings will slow down dramatically, but if I don't hate my work life then those savings will be less of an all-consuming goal.
Thank you senior leadership for your wisdom, "If you don't like it, find another place to work". The first good advice I've heard from them in 5 years.
I did the same and for around 50% cut. Working from home allows me to spend more time with my kids (I get to have lunch with them and hear them play in the background), no toxic rush hour commute, and I get the comfort of my own space. I know there's a down side of not being able to collaborate as well with my team. But I put my wellbeing over that.
And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life. But the peace of mind and serenity I have retained by WFH is invaluable.
> And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life.
Yep. Speaking for myself, beyond a certain income threshold there has been no substantial quality of life improvement. My last promotion made it even easier to save for an even earlier retirement, and that's about it.
Early retirement is nice, and earlier retirement is even nicer, but given a choice between retiring when my kid is 20 and being home with him every day throughout his whole childhood, there's no contest. I'll happily delay retirement if that's the trade-off that's needed in order to be there while he's growing up.
This is a critical point. There seems to be an obsession with “making money so you can retire early” and then what? Your children are grown and left home, you’ve often sacrificed them as well as your own physical and mental health, you don’t have the energy you had in your youth, for what? So you can play golf with other retirees? Or maybe you saved up enough that you can invest in a new startup. Okay fine but that’s not retirement, in fact it may be more work.
It's odd to me that people think the value in excess wealth is just living on a beach somewhere.
The value in excess wealth is what you can do with it. You can find a person in need and hand them a thousand dollars for fun. You can fund some program your town needs. You can build a "third space" for your community. There's so much you can do with wealth that isn't just hoarding it!
Personally, my goal is to have enough money to buy a giant mansion on the edge of some town and be the weird rich lady you can go to with your problems. If I get richer than that, great! It'll be a bigger mansion and a bigger town. But if you gave me a billion dollars tomorrow, I'd just use it to be a bigger weird rich lady you can go to with your problems.
As with every other person who has wealth, you'd quickly find that the people who go to you with their problems are the ones whose problems would be magically solved if you only gave them a small investment of $10k, maybe $100k if they're bold and daring, but don't worry, they'll pay you back with interest after their business takes off.
Outside of people who crave the fame and/or flaunt their wealth to promote themselves (e.g. Michael Bloomberg), wealthy people do not advertise that they are wealthy, because doing so invites a lot of unwanted attention.
> The value in excess wealth is what you can do with it. You can find a person in need and hand them a thousand dollars for fun. You can fund some program your town needs. You can build a "third space" for your community. There's so much you can do with wealth that isn't just hoarding it!
Thank you for your kindness. However, you can't become and definitely won't stay a billionaire if you give away your money.
Who wants to stay a billionaire? You can't take it with you, and that's an unfathomable amount of money for a single person to have. At a flat 5 percent interest per year, that's $50 million a year, or just under a million per week, or $137k/day. per day! You could fund a third space for quite a while on that and still never run out of money after your ordinary life expenses were paid. Ballooning life costs can still add up as jets and yachts get expensive, but that's still an insane amount of money.
On 50 million a year, you could give out 49,000 homeless people to give $1,000 to every year, and still have a million dollars to spend, without touching your principle. Could you even find 134 homeless people every day to give $1,000 to?
The goal is to Die with Zero, as written by Bill Perkins, and while you may not want to literally do that, it's still a good book to read to get you thinking about how to spend your money.
> However, you can't become and definitely won't stay a billionaire if you give away your money.
It's very possible that I won't, no. But I also don't think I'm naive.
I run a company. I founded it without funding from venture capitalists, so that no one will ever be able to tell me to sell anyone out. One of the first things I wrote down was that I would never lie, mislead, or otherwise tell anything less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And right now, my company is functioning and profitable, while doing - at least as far as I can tell - no harm to anyone.
Yeah, being a horrible human being means you're free to do everything to your game-theoretic advantage. But you can choose not to do that. You can win without choosing to do that. You just have to know, crystal clear, from day one, that you'd rather make one million dollars ethically than two million dollars unethically.
Similarly, will people sometimes abuse your kindness? Yeah, sure. But you can give your kindness knowing that that's part of the cost of doing business - especially if you're successful enough that you can afford the loss.
You ever read Les Miserables? There's a scene where Jean Valjean, who has been taken in briefly by a kindly bishop, steals some of his valuables out of desperation. He's caught by the police, who arrest him and bring him back:
“Ah! here you are!” [the Bishop] exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad
to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too,
which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get
two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and
spoons?”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop
with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said
is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is
running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this
silver—”
“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had
been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had
passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him
back here? It is a mistake.”
“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”
“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.
“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost
inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.
“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the
gendarmes.
“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your
candlesticks. Take them.”
He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and
brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering
a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the
Bishop.
Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
mechanically, and with a bewildered air.
“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my
friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always
enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with
anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”
Then, turning to the gendarmes:—
“You may retire, gentlemen.”
The gendarmes retired.
Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.
The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—
“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money
in becoming an honest man.”
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,
remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he
uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good.
It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts
and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
retiring early is not a goal only if you define your life through work. there are MILLION other things to do besides “playing golf with other retirees” (though that’s definitely more fun that working in a cubicle.
if your work defines you - great, keep on trucking. but having financial means to not have to work at early age (while you are still youngish and healthy) is probably one of the biggest goals any human on Earth can achieve
I heard a financial planner say once that many of his clients don't know how to retire. My Dad worked until he was ninety making money he will never spend. If you enjoy your job and have control over your time and projects, you may also want to keep working.
Retirement sounds very appealing when you aren't spending enough time with your friends and family, or when you aren't getting enough relaxation. But there will come a time when your kids won't really want to spend that much time with you. And a hobby you spend all your time on could become an unpaid job.
There will be times in your life when you have to be all in on your job. But when its not those times, try to have a balanced life now.
I "retired." Still go to some events that are particularly interesting, usually in areas that I enjoy spending some extra time--though I did my best when I had a wage. Doing some of what I used to do anyway but on my own terms. I realize doing that is somewhat privileged but it works for me.
I’m 52. I’ve run a micro tech consultancy with my wife for 15 years. We live by the sea in Cornwall and we’ve chosen every step along the way to deliberately not grow our company by taking on staff, instead using freelancers. We’re comfortable but very far from rich, financially. Instead, we’re rich - honestly, I’d say billionaires! - as a family unit. My eldest has left home now to go to uni and the younger one will go next year. My wife and I have been around for them every step of the way, and it’s been the most beautiful and fulfilling journey - my life’s work!
I’ll easily still be working until retirement, probably beyond. I’ll be old and tired and probably pretty useless at tech. But I wouldn’t change a single thing about the last 20 years. It’s been amazing.
Everyone’s gotta do what they want to do - but not seizing life and putting your family at the middle of it - that, in my humble opinion, is batshit. We ain’t here long, and the only legacy is our kids and (maybe one day!) our kids kids. Make it count, which in my book doesn’t = “make loads of cash and as a consequence don’t ever see your loved ones”…
Those charts that show remaining time you’ll be around someone at a given age are sobering.
Even if you live 30 years after your kids are out of the house, odds are only something like 5-10% of your total time with them will be in that 30 years.
Similar figures for your own parents and grandparents. Those hours with them are few, especially at ages when they can still do much.
Don't orget the body wears out as it ages. Already at 50 I find things I cannot do. I don't know how aging will hit you but you really should plan for the day when work isn't possible.
Right, but I'm talking about the difference between retiring at 60 and retiring at 50 or even younger.
You don't need a FAANG salary to retire at (what use to be) the normal age or somewhat early, but you do need one to retire very early. I'm saying that I won't choose to chase a very early retirement if doing so compromises the time I can spend with my kids while they're young.
I live about six miles or so from the office. I'm so much more productive (and end up working far longer) at home than in the cattle car hotel configuration. I dislike the idea that they might try to pitch things as 'pay less' if I'm more productive. If I'm in the office, I've lost the day. WFH should not be a reason to make less - it should be considered a benefit like a gym membership. If folks use it, the company comes out ahead in the end.
Pure WFH will naturally tend to translate to making less if you're currently living in a high CoL area, because there are lots of us living in low CoL areas for whom 75% of a Bay Area salary would be a huge raise.
If a remote-first company can give someone in a nearby time zone with the same language and cultural background and the same skillset a tempting offer while saving themselves 25% of their salary band, they're going to do it. It's not because they think you're less productive, it's because they're now looking in a wider job market with more competition from people who need less money to live.
The converse is also true: if you're living in a low CoL area, WFH can actually bring you a huge pay increase, because salaries balance out somewhere in the middle.
(I'll add that I strongly believe that where you live should not impact your income if you're in a remote company, for the reasons you list: if you're in the same country as everyone else, your location of residency has no impact on your value to the company.)
I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet ).
Covid was a big moment for me in a lot of ways, because I was very pro-corporate for a long time. Having seen some of the bs up close and personal, it made me realize how broken our current system really is ( I still remember 'we are in this together' lip service and 'driving is your zen time' ). Having a kid ( and seeing it grow up ) can be such a radicalizing moment.
Honestly, if you're not a radical in the year 2024, you haven't been paying attention.
I travel around a lot (a thing I can do because I work remotely). From SF to Seattle to Tampa to Salt Lake to the small-town corners of the Carolinas, everyone is struggling. You can feel it in the air, find people identifying with it in every conversation, see the slow decay of every place you know. The dead mall in your hometown, your phone forcing a prompt to take your data to train some AI, the favelas that are now the norm in every major city (regardless of local policy), the fact that you now get a prompt for what is effectively a payday loan when you try to order a pizza.
I think people underestimate how poisonous that is to a culture and to a body politic. When you don't believe in reform, you either shrug and let things burn, or you start setting the fires yourself. Neither bodes well.
It does ring true and I am not sure I can refute it ( management wants easily replaceable cogs for the machine ). But my overall thought is that humans are a lot of things, but among those things they are also horrible biological machines if seen only through that prism. Our whole value to the system is that we can adjust to the unknown.
Still, maybe more importantly, we are not all even the same cogs, but management tries to lazily put us in the same category. I am not sure we can even really call it management. That is actually a mismanagement of human resources..
I think I mentioned this pet theory before here, but it is no longer 1950, but the management has not evolved since that period in US. Maybe it is time to force that evolution.
> I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet ).
One big reason is they are very worried about their stock grants due to the stock value nosedive that will occur once they finally have to write off all those office space leases as actual losses and report the loss on their SEC forms.
If they can force RTO then all the money being spent for office space leases remains in the "business expense" category and the stock price does not tank as a result.
This narrative has been repeated ad nauseam, but I'm not fully buying it. What is the average S&P 500 exposure to real estate for their stock price? In a handful of cases sure, but en masse it seems much more likely driven by more direct management beliefs about productivity and/or calculation to drive a "silent layoff" through voluntary attrition.
> I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet)
Why do you think healthcare is tied to employment in the US?
Why do you think minimum wage in the US has not gone up in decades?
Why do you think 2 weeks leave is normal in the US?
Why don’t more Americans travel overseas?
At this point you have to be willfully ignorant not to make the connection.
Beyond a certain point, you have as much money as you wish to spend. Some people don't seem to have a top limit, but for many, those lucky enough to earn more will just put it away.
The difference in your lifestyle isn't now, but in a few decades. It's hard to know when you have enough for the rest of your life. There are formulas, though I don't really know how meaningful they are.
Meantime you're clearly leading a better life now, and may well not mind having a few additional years of it (compared to a bit less time with a lot more aggravation).
So, congratulations. It sounds like you made a well-founded choice.
I probably saved more than I had to do and probably shouldn't be as (relatively) frugal as I am. COVID definitely pushed out a significantly earlier (semi-)retirement.
data to support this claim? you are (incorrectly) assuming that since employees are not commuting to work
they are just home and cars are just collecting dust in a garage… but of course you go to the store and mall and park and … in the middle of the day and you see a whole other story :)
How did you and poster above manage this? A 50% paycut would mean having to move to a much more remote area for most people without a lot of NW already.
Homes being $1-3m in most of the places that FAANG resides just makes it implausible to take a cut from $400k+/yr to maybe $200k/yr. You can't afford a mortgage at $200k/yr for a $1m home with 20% down.
Is everyone here who is taking these paycuts just have a partner who makes bank or are you already rich thanks to having bought/inherited property long ago?
This advice just seems implausible to most anyone who cares about being in a good school district, in a relatively populous area, and hasn't inherited millions through buying real estate, inheritance, or stock appreciation.
My pay cut was only around 15%, but I also wasn't working for a large company, and was apparently underpaid by around 20%. This will come of a spoiled and privileged, but I honestly have no idea how we'd make our day to day life work if I didn't work from home, with incredibly flexible hours. Getting children ready for school and pick them up at a reasonable hour, without stress just isn't possible. You have to drop off your children in some kind of care before their even fully awake, and you need to pick them up almost before you get out of the office.
Obviously people make it work, but I have no idea what kind of hours other people work, because doing a pick up at 16:30 would mean that my child would be the last one in the day care. In any case I don't see the point in tolerating the stress of traffic, school/day care, or just regular difficulties getting your daily tasks to fit in with a 8-16 job at an office. I have a family member that works at a hospital, she can't get her car service for four weeks because there's no available time to drop of the car and pick it up afterwards, which also fits with the mechanic. I can normally get appointments for mechanics, doctors, dentists, contractors, everything, with a few days notice because I can be incredibly flexible with my time.
This is pretty close to the average value engineers place on a remote job.
In our data set, the on-paper gap is about 18% (~37k on ~200k) if you just compare remote to non-remote, but given that the remote candidates often live in lower-COL areas, some of that probably comes from COL and not purely value placed on remote work.
The real driver is that ~half of engineers only want remote work, and the vast majority of the remainder aren't in whatever city you're hiring in.
I get that businesses are about profit and not much more, but I do find it interesting that it doesn't really register that people, given that option, choose to live in very diverse locations.
Some companies don't have the choice. If you need people to come in and operate machines, do manufacturing, care for others and similar, then you often need your employees to commute. If you don't need that, why wouldn't you hire the best qualified person, even if that person prefers to live in the Mojave desert?
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be a fraudulent person who doesn't exist.
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be interviewing for jobs they intend to quietly outsource, possibly to people worse than themselves and definitely in ways that create security risks.
- Because you think the random overheard conversations and water-cooler factor of in-office work has enough benefits to compensate for nominally lower qualifications.
- Because you think you're not perfect at detecting low-quality work and think remote employees might take the opportunity to slack off in ways they wouldn't in an office.
- Because you think it creates additional security risks by removing the implicit air-gapping of having to physically be in an office to handle sensitive information.
- Because you and your current employees actually like being in-office and having that cultural cohesion, and you don't think you can get it remotely.
...or any number of other reasons.
Like, I get that people like remote work. I do too. But the moralizing of RTO is...just incorrect, I think? There are practical arguments against it (I literally wrote a few thousand words to that effect not long ago - see my most recent HN submission), but that's an entirely different class of objection than the idea that it's just about middle managers wanting to breathe down your neck.
Just to be clear, I'm in an area of the world where there never was much work from home. During COVID, sure, everyone was home, but most have been back at the office for a long time. The question of trust also isn't as much of an issue, given that I'm in a country where trust is pretty much implicit. So I don't really buy into many of the especially American takes on return to office. It's not about a "return" for me, that is long gone. People returned to the office years ago.
For me it's missed opportunities for business, it's about a better work life balance, reducing stress, improving health, about reducing traffic and the associated pollution and it's about decentralization. As you rightly point out, there will be situations where you absolutely need people to go to an office, or where it will make a difference. These jobs could benefit from less traffic, better service at the edges of working hours, because the work from home people can use the time slots in middle of the day. For those jobs where it makes no difference if you are in an office or would be an improvement not to be, I don't get why more companies aren't just going for it.
Only two ways that I know of that can make it work: 1) one parent needs to stay at home, or 2) hire a nanny. Both of those come with considerable costs.
While I apparently where underpaid, my boss and I had a pretty good relationship, but he didn't think a 50+% pay raise, so my wife could stay at home, was realistic, but I did ask.
My wife's boss recommended getting an au pair, she pointed out that he's aware of how much she makes, and that it was a stupid suggestion that he know that we wouldn't be able to afford that.
Historically, you had grandparents or other extended family (which was the case when I was growing up with two working parents). But that's far less common in the US today.
When I was doing this, I went in a bit later and dropped the kids off and my spouse went in a bit earlier and picked them up. They were neither the first ones in nor the last ones out. My commute was worst case 20 minutes, that also helped. It worked fine (except when spouse was traveling), but WFH Is much easier.
Not to mention that you’re putting your corporate boss’ well being above that of your children who have to cope with those circumstances. I’m willing to deal with the commute. I’m not willing to let my kids take the hit.
> This will come of a spoiled and privileged, but I honestly have no idea how we'd make our day to day life work if I didn't work from home, with incredibly flexible hours.
I don't think it's spoiled, I think you're spot on. Yeah, it's hard. And yes, you (and me and probably many others reading here) are privileged.
> Obviously people make it work
And yeah, they usually make it work, and it sucks. Or if they can't make it work then maybe a spouse or partner has to quit their job to handle that stuff and take care of the kids and then they have to get by with even less income.
3-4 hours a day commuting? I confess I used to bike to the office and that could take about 3 hours/day, but I could cut it down to a 2 hour/day by switching to an ebike. I also like biking. On my "work from home" days I would aim for an hour and a half ride every morning.
I can't imagine being in a longer commute that I didn't like.
Sf Bay Area can easily exceed 2 hours each way if you aren’t willing to pay insane money on housing. It honestly made me wonder how low income people exist there at all. I did more than 2 hours each way for many years there but only by riding the train with a hot spot.
Some of the comments in here are all in on "I'm going to take half the money to work remote and not have a commute" but were apparently not on board with "I'm going to spend more of that double-salary to live close" which is a contradiction I find interesting.
(Obviously not everyone could choose to live closer without driving up the prices even more in the short-term, but the value of money-vs-commute compared to money-vs-remote doesn't seem directly comparable to many people.)
That sounds insane to me. Again, I had a long commute by bike. Could have easily shed most of it by getting a car. Would have to shift off rush hour, but that isn't too hard to do?
Would love to see more data on this. Quick googling shows average commutes well below an hour. I'm assuming average is just not a good stat for this?
Low income people exist by either living with family or commuting insane distances from lower cost areas. I've met quite a few people who would commute from Tracy or Stockton to SF/Mountain View to work as janitors or food service workers at tech offices. It's brutal, especially when they're expected to show up in time to serve breakfast or open the doors.
When I graduated college, the drive from Santa Cruz to 85 and Shoreline was about 35min at 730am. These days that is 90-120 minutes at that same time (think google/microsoft campuses). Many can’t afford to live close to those areas any more.
I did a radical change recently too, save for the fact my job (full remote) wasn't very well paid to begin with. The additional 700€/month I got for working in comparison to the unemployment benefit is absolutely not worth working 150h a month, since I still can pay for whatever small or medium things I want, and it don't make a real change to what I can't (buy a house).
On the other hand, I have now time and energy to focus on all the cool things: writing research papers and my thesis, learning accounting to set up my company, make contributions to the open-source and open-data projects I care about, taking time for friends and family. In a word: living.
I'm grateful for my FAANG job because, despite my lack of intelligence, I'm able to make enough money to provide a comfortable life for my family and save up for early retirement.
Don’t paper over everyone with the new Day 2 Amazon. There are still great things happening at Meta for example where the founder is still driving culture. They’re some of the biggest players in open source AI and you better believe Meta AI has very smart people
I wouldn’t say it’s friendly, but that’s not really the point. The commenter was saying smart people didn’t work there which is really hard to say when talking about the AI groups. I would say you can get a lot done if you’re not in a few particularly slow moving heavily layered orgs. They’re also pushing hard to flatten as they should
I’d switch jobs then as well, or rather, I would never take such a job in the first place. Luckily my commute is only 20 minutes by bike. I don’t earn anywhere near FAANG level either, though.
That only matters if you spend the majority of your income. For many high paying tech workers the amount you save matters more and doesn’t change enough comparatively if your rent doubles for example.
Sure and that’s still not the majority of your income over a 10+ yr period if you’re getting paid good bay area wages as a senior+ engineer.
Not to mention that buying a house isn’t a requirement of living in a location (and isn’t the right financial choice for many places when comparing to rent).
A decent house in the Bay Area is >$2M. Why would I pay that when I can make the same money and buy a much better house for $500k, work from home, not have a commute (which is hideous in the BA) and not have some little micro manager breathing down my neck all day? It's a massive quality of life improvement all around.
We’re talking about trade offs here right? Not saying you get everything.
But no I wouldn’t live in rural Arizona over the Bay Area or most cities unless there was a very strong extra reason to live there (like a manhattan project) and definitely not for a pay cut even if cost of living was near 0.
Although I think most people in a major urban metro (broadly--not necessarily living in a city) probably don't really want to move to the mountains someplace. I'm well out of the city--where my job mostly never was anyway--but I like being able to drive in in 90 minutes or so and the other advantages that a major metro offers.
This comment, to me, is heartwarming. The free market works! You valued something more than $$$ and so made adjustments to your employment (aka selling your labor).
I think that in-office work is good for certain situations, which is why onsites still make sense. And for folks newer in their career, onsite time is really important, based on my experience.
But if remote is more attracitve, over time companies that offer it will win in the talent marketplace.
Except it doesn’t because so many companies are slowly bringing people back to office and finding a fully remote job is becoming more of a privilege. One anecdote does not validate your views.
But that’s exactly how it works. If you are willing to make the trade off for what you value more then go for it. Many do not want to make the pay or job tradeoff and come into office, and many others (myself included for many cases) think coming in to office is generally good.
Remote is not more attractive to everyone and everyone doesn’t have the same economics on the trade offs.
That’s exactly why it doesn’t work. Leaving our rights to the market to decide does not work. It never has.
Why? Because for the vast majority of people, employers have almost all of the negotiating power. What this means is the market is slowly shaped by what employers want, not employees. Because we need a job more than they need our labor.
It’s naive to think the market is a level playing field and if employees want something they just vote with their labor and the market will adapt. That’s just not true. Most people don’t have the ability to change jobs on a whim to play the market with their livelihoods.
It works fine for tech and most white collar jobs. You can indeed vote with your feet unless you make very poor financial decisions (or have too high of needs) for most of these careers.
There were companies both hybrid and remote before covid (I worked for a few). Covid was a shock that shifted remote work (as well as a lot of other things).
I would not call remote work a privilege. Rather I would say remote work is a benefit. It falls into the same bucket as all the other benefits that employees can weigh in addition to salaries when they weigh job options.
I expect a reversion in terms of remote/hybrid, but not all the way back to where it was before hand. Looked for some stats, didn't find much. From the US BLS[0]:
> However, remote work participation was still higher than its 2019 level in all industries except agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, which returned to its 2019 level.
The data only goes to 2022, but the publication is from 2024. If there are fresher stats, would love to see them, as I think things have changed in 2023 and 2024.
I don’t think this is true. This is a lagging indicator and takes time to show the meaningful data. You’ll not get your productivity gains as your top talent leaves and everyone else who is salty will coast doing the bare minimum while looking for a new job. https://youtu.be/4ec_yZCWOCY?si=RQs2bo3w_ATv9X6e
I think companies that won’t adapt and embrace remote/hybrid will slowly decay.
I think hybrid is MUCH closer to in-person than remote. It requires you to be close to a base office.
I think hybrid-with-scheduled-days is almost always a clear win over 5-days in-office, but that full-remote is a huge productivity drain. The cost of alignment, decision making, and collaboration for any sort of creative work goes way up. So unless you know exactly what sorta widgets you need to make and it won't change much more than once a year or so, you're going to have trouble keeping up.
I went through 3 different remote-only startup jobs before finally finding another in-person one, and didn't stay long at any of them because the productivity was just too low. Too much time spent doing things that would be easier in-person or waiting-or-making-up-for async-induced issues.
Hey, congrats. I did a similar thing... in December 2019. Poor timing, but a good decision nonetheless.
Even years later, I am still not making as much money as I was making back then. I could not care less about that. I'm making plenty of money, and am more than twice as happy—this is harder to measure than salary, but it sure feels true.
I'm happy that you found something that works for you. But wouldn't it have been cheaper to move to a place closer to the office of your previous employer?
Rather than the snarky response, I’ll answer: closer is likely to be impossibly more expensive for the requirements OP needs (e.g. living area, number of bedrooms or similar).
To add in, they may have other obligations in life that prevent it as well. Taking care of elders, kids schools, spouses jobs, medical care needs. Frequently money is just not the answer
Maybe. But sign a new lease (or mortgage!), pay moving expenses, relocate away from friends/family/social network/what have you and then the job disappears after 18 months, leaving you to relocate again....
So not parent, but no. I lived as close as we could afford, roughly 20km away. Outside rush hour you can to the trip in 15 minutes, during rush hour it's 35 minutes, assuming no accidents (and this is a highly accident prone area where traffic would block up completely every other week).
Taking a 15% cut, which allowed us to move further away severely reducing our cost of living, bring us closer to family which can help out if needed. It has reduce stress, ensures that our child doesn't need to be in the care of after school programs longer than she needs. The reduced cost of living, reduction in stress and the flexibility that we're able to offer my wife's employer was made a huge, positive, difference in our lives, well worth the 15%.
It’s not just that it’s more expensive COL but if you’re buying then you’re taking a 30 y mortgage that may not be so easy to divest when the next round of cuts come and you find yourself let go anyway.
Not really in VHCOL areas.
You can get by on less, if you are planning your life around your job, for sure.
But for example if your office is Midtown Manhattan, the equivalent lifestyle to own a home for your family in walkable Manhattan vs long subway commute Brooklyn vs longer commuter rail suburbs vs extreme commute exurbs is staggering.
You can buy an entire exurban home for the incremental cost to upgrade from Manhattan 2bed/1.5bath to 3bed/2.5 bath.
My parents & in-laws each have 3bed/2.5 bath homes outside of Manhattan commute range, but within tolerably unpleasant driving commute to Stamford/Greenwich. That is - they are in commuter range of where commuters live / satellite office are located.
The combined values of those 2 homes might buy a single family sized apartment in Stamford, an ok 1 bedroom apartment in yuppie Brooklyn, or a kind of dumpy studio in Manhattan.
A lot of these answers seem to boil down to "I would simply have more money".
> But wouldn't it have been cheaper to move to a place closer to the office of your previous employer
it might not be the sort of place they want to live. it also negates a lot of the higher salary argument if a lot more of it is going into paying rent or mortgage.
I spend 40 minutes a day commuting. Would I take a 50% pay cut for that? You know the answer.
Depending on how one is, working from home not only isolates you, but if you have kids, dealing with them on a daily basis while trying to work is not what you think it will be after months and years of doing so.
Yes, your life will change and be totally different.
You sound pretty negative about it. I know plenty of people who work from home and deal with their kids and enjoy doing so. And some who just seem to dislike their kids regardless of the work situation.
So when folks say they work at home to spend more time with family I take that at face value. I've certainly enjoyed being with mine - not every moment for sure. But I didn't have kids as an obligation, it was a choice and any relationship also requires work, being home with them helps that.
I’ll get downvoted for this but so many people taking 15-50% paycuts without a moments thought, or trading 50% of pay for 3-4 hours back out of a 11-12hr workday (including commute) sort of implies that there are a lot of overpaid people right now.
A better hypothesis would be that there are diminishing returns for the hours in a day a person has. Getting back 4 hours when you are currently working 12 hours has a ton more impact than getting back 4 hours when you only work eight.
The defining metric of progress in a society is that all of us have to work less for maintaining same or higher quality of life. Leaving aside the supply demand aspects, who is going to pocket the savings if people aren't overpaid and why should they be the appropriate recipients of that savings.
Not overpaid. Even if you are paid below the market, but you are highly skilled in a job where you deliver a lot of value for the employer and you make a lot more than the average worker, you can take a pay cut. For example, average pay in US is around $50k/year. If you are very good in tech or an MD and you make $250k, are you overpaid? Probably not. If you take a $50k cut, with the remaining $200k you are still fine in many places. There is no reason to reach the conclusion you are overpaid.
The fact that you have to take a pay cut, rather than find another employer at the current level, is evidence that the original salary was well above-market
When I was looking for a job I was offered peanuts for a position requiring very specific knowledge. When I pointed this out, they said "well, if you want to earn a lot of money, go to company X".
I did. Now I'm exploring the limits of slacking off while getting a nice paycheck. I could aim higher, but I doubt my new place would allow me to slack off as much as this place does. After all, I have only one life, so I'd rather spend it doing things other than working, and I know that modern work is unlikely to bring deeper life satisfaction.
At least you have a much better chance to (live to) eventually retire. I am glad to see this kind of change is not just possible, but really happening.
I'd never work for a "FAANG" style corporation, but otherwise made a similar choice when my first kid was born, back in early 2019.
I'll surely lose out on some currency in the long run but I'm not so sure whatever value it's going to have in the coming fifties outweighs the time with my family I've gained. On a global scale a lot of things are going to shit and I'd rather my kids think of me as someone who didn't bail on them under such circumstances.
I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point. The post is a well-written spleen vent, and I mostly agree, but I didn’t see anything new in it.
But because everyone has an opinion, I’ll share mine: I like being in the office, sometimes. I hate going to and from the office.
I don't mind the commute if I live close enough that I can just walk 30-40 minutes to the office, because then it serves as a good exercise (okay, fine. Grass-touching) that I don't have to do separately in the day.
But I realize that this is NOT a luxury most people have. Most people's commute looks like being stuck in the subway, or driving in traffic, for up to several hours every single day, and I just can't think of anything that would justify that type of commute.
The single-occupant driving commute is the most common way to get to work in the US, by far. [1] That’s just miserable: it’s stressful, lonely, expensive, prone to risks like car problems. I feel like we can do better, even incrementally. Why isn’t slugging [2] more common, for instance?
No one slugs where I am now because we all have kids that also have to be shuttled around by parents. I grew up using school buses most of the time. These days, at least where I live, those don't exist. We've had to rearrange our personal and professional lives left, right, up and down to deal with the fact that we have 1 kid in preschool and 2 in elementary school and dealing with school hours and after-school care programs, etc.
My mom slugged for decades of her working life. I really wish it were an option.
After a high intensity job with a short, city commute, I moved away and had a new job with an ~hour, drive commute. For a few years, that drive was amazing for being able to mentally prepare and decompress from work. It made it so easy to leave work at work and there was a long separation between them. I really needed that at that time.
I use to love slugging (aka “casual carpool”) here in the Bay Area in the Before Times. There was a conveniently nearby bus stop where drivers would routinely offer rides into SF so they could use the carpool lane and get to work more quickly. It was a fun way to meet neighbors.
It's tough to imagine slugging culture becoming prominent enough that it could be a reliable and timely mode of transport, and HOV lanes aren't always available to provide an incentive to drivers.
I have a feeling almost all of the pro-WFH types are exactly that: 1) American 2) single-occupant driver commute 3) live in big car-centric city. 4) have ridiculously long commute time.
Slugging isn't common because the capitalist system would rather everyone buy a car. Selling cars is big business.
So the big car companies are forcing me to buy their product? It does not feel that way. Seems more like it is people in their capacity as voters and consumers which are driving things this way.
I'd argue it has less to do with the "capitalist systems" and more to do with how obnoxious "slugging" sounds. Commuting in your own car guarantees (a) you have a ride and (b) you have flexibility. You can change you plans, stop by the store, run errands, anything your heart desires (plus, not deal with strangers everyday. Ugh.)
This isn't a pro-car thing. I've haven't driven a car to work in 8 years (I pay out the ass to live downtown so that I'm close enough to walk / bike). It just seems like "Well, that sounds like a pain in the ass" is a simpler possible explanation to why slugging isn't popular in the US compared to Big Business not wanting it to be.
Long commute is indeed a pain. My way of coping it is listening to audio books and podcast, and in the meantime cut as much screen time on my phone. Listening to good books improves commute immensely.
Here is mine: I like the commute, it marks the beginning and end of my workday and I get fresh air. I loathe being in the office, it is mentally taxing and I have to put in more for the same output.
My commute is a 15 minute bike ride. 9/10 days it’s nice weather, I get some air and possibly some sunlight. Office isn’t too bad, and it’s nice to meet other adults. I don’t think I would enjoy it as much if I had a desk in a big, shared office space and a 45 minute bus ride.
Ironically those days that are so bad that I think that I almost shouldn’t try to bike, those are the days that the busses don’t run because the busses and more sensitive to the weather than my e-bike with studded tires.
Busses in Oslo don’t work if it’s raining a lot or if it’s snowing a lot. It’s really sad since it’s snows and rains quite a lot every year. Our locally public transport is more interested in trailing self-driving cars than testing out new tires :(
Commutes can indeed be good, but you can get the same benefit with your own rituals. Currently, I shovel the snow in the morning and drink a hot chocolate to start the workday, and I take a ten-minute walk to end it. Same effect as a commute, but something I can control.
If you have the discipline for them. Some of us find maintaining rituals deliberately very taxing, and find having them imposed on us useful. (I'm with the previous poster, in that I actually kind of liked commuting. I like remote work because I don't like cities.)
> I like the commute, it marks the beginning and end of my workday and I get fresh air.
I get up at 06:15. Work for an hour, then go for a fast and invigorating walk through the forest where I often encounter deer, and this week a fox, and then I'm back at my home-desk to start the day with some video meetings.
When my kids get back from school I take a break and we have a snack together. Then I work another hour, and then in the summer I roll out my bike, and in the winter we've gone out with the snow-racer (although the kids don't wanna do that so much anymore).
Before covid I used to sit in a miserable office. Everyone had headphones on. My window overlooked a motorway on-ramp that was always backed-up as far as the eye could see.
The serenity I had while sitting in a train is the only thing I seek from my office days. I actually listened to audio books and learned, or just watched outside and thought about nothing.
Catching cold every 2 to 6 weeks on winter wasn't amazing though.
I have a fake commute that I just started. I meditate or listen to an inspiring short talk. It has done wonders with my patience with the kids right after work.
I have an easy commute (35 - 45 minutes, but not bad traffic and pretty roads), and a comfy car. The commute is my peaceful time, when I don't have to answer to anyone.
I guess I don't really consider that an easy commute though I've done something along those lines off and on over the years. It's not bad like when I commuted about 90 minutes a few days a week. "Easy" for me is a 15-30 minute walk with maybe some mass transit mixed in there if the weather is bad.
And, yes, if I had an office to go into, I would do so some days if that were my option.
I just need flexibility and variety. Some days I work better from home. Some days it feels claustrophobic and I cannot focus. Sometimes the office helps me focus. Sometimes it facilitates communications that never would have happened remotely. Other times I’m bogged down by unwanted social interactions. Sometimes I really need to be on site with customers or at a conference building and maintaining social ties.
I’ve worked in hybrid environments for over a decade and could never go back to a full RTO position. I’m currently mostly remote and that is also driving me a little crazy.
Some people do great in the office. Some do great remote. I’m not in either bin.
I did two hours of work this (Saturday) morning, and I was pretty ill four days in a recent week but able to work for two of them. That's a lot of productivity my employer would not have had from me if I had to go to the office to work.
> I like being in the office, sometimes. I hate going to and from the office.
I like being in the office when it means the office isn't packed to the brim. Prior to RTO mandates at my employer, our team voluntarily went in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And it was very nice. Not everyone (including myself) came in every day but there was always others present. Then RTO mandates came down, then we got moved out of our office space into another, next to a very loud group of non-engineers, then we got moved again, again next to a very loud group of non-engineers, and we are being moved, yet again, but this time back to our own, secluded space. It's all frankly ridiculous bullshit. I'm 60% remote today but I'm still generally annoyed about being in the office when I am there because of all of the stupid bullshit that comes along with it.
This girl has pretty severe Crohn's, severe enough to make commuting in pretty much not an option: in addition to the severe fatigue, she's immunocompromised and more prone to whatever bugs her coworkers bring in to work. That's something new and unique about this post I took away from it. It's not just a rant because me no like office/commute. There are health and profound QoL issues in play.
Not the person who wrote this post, but I also have Crohn's (that isn't quite in remission). If WFH was off the table, there's no way I'd be able to work at all. With WFH, I'm bringing in more than half of total our household income. Very very grateful that this is available to me.
I think being in the office together with a plan is a good tool to use, but you need to use it well.
Just yell at people to be in the office for 2 days per week for no reason? Meh. Why?
Organize a week to have all local and international employees together for a week once or twice a year, schedule big organizational meetings and important discussions in that week, sponsor dinner and lunch together, have a team event or three? Just accept that concrete and hard productivity will crash for that week, and consider it a social event? That's actually nice and valuable.
> Organize a week to have all local and international employees together for a week once or twice a year, schedule big organizational meetings and important discussions in that week, sponsor dinner and lunch together, have a team event or three? ... That's actually nice and valuable.
When I read posts like this - however well-intentioned - I just see a person without kids or other responsibilities, who thinks it would be 'fun' to fly out to some town and hang with their colleagues 24/7 for those seven days, and forgetting that for a lot of people this would be difficult or impossible. At home there can be children that need to be looked after, or an elderly parent who needs a visit, or a partner who works nights or a disability that would make this type of 'cool' get-together impossible or extremely stressful.
You are straw-manning by quoting half of my post though.
On the team, "people without children" are the minority. We do have member s on the team with disabled elders, elders requiring care, disabled children. Lifestock even. We do have people with all manner of volunteer responsibilities too.
We have discussed this extensively internally. To all of these people, it is massively easier to clear up 1 full week with 3-4 months of lead time, than to free up 2-3 days per week permanently. That's why whe chose this mode.
The compromise is ofcourse that you're working the majority of the time remote and can reasonably accommodate one of these trips if the date is known in advance. I had a similar experience at a workplace I've had with known "onsites" that facilitated several of the business units at the same time, holding meetings and small get togethers to allow some face to face time. Afterward, optional events were suggested to spend time with teams if you had the flexibility, like meeting for a bigger group dinner or doing a meeting specifically with your team.
I don't think it's nearly as 'tech startup burnout' culture as you're envisioning here, people travel for work functions regularly in other sectors of work. Nearly all my aforementioned coworkers on my team had children and lives that they were able to allow their temporary separation from. I dont think it's anyone else's responsibility to fix but your own if making accommodations and planning to meet other people makes you stressed.
I'm in the same vein. I enjoy being in the office a couple days a week - I feel like there's different types of focus needed for different tasks and sometimes the focus I need is the kind I get from being in a very structured environment with co-workers. Other times it's the kind I get from being in my own space in full control of my own surroundings.
But either way I hate commuting. Especially if I have to drive.
Well, I wouldn't. Teleportation wouldn't even be necessary in my case as it takes 5 minutes for me to get to my office. I just don't see any point in being in office on days when I am focusing on writing code to push features out.
Heavily agree on the “going to and from the office”
I was just thinking about this recently as $company executives are sociopathically dangling RTO in our faces. The worst part is the commute by car.
I’m totally for WFH, but give me an office I can walk/bike to in a safe calm environment - not a bike lane next to 60 mph traffic - and I may just want to go into the office.
Furthermore, the company culture needs to be such that you can leave the office as necessary like we do in WFH. Do errands, take a break, etc. Cal Newport makes the point on his podcast that our work culture for creative jobs (anything that uses the brain primarily, I don’t know the right word) has not really changed from factory line physical in nature jobs.
I work in the healthcare industry. Because of this, a lot of people on my extended team still had to go to work, and see patients and their families face-to-face.
The worst part of 2020 for me was repeatedly removing coworkers from the intranet as they died.
Why would I point you to a blog post with an example when I already provided one in the post, and when the unspoken premise of the term RTO is a reference to the worldwide phenomena of people not going to the office to avoid spreading a disease.
You may not mean to, but you are coming across as intentionally obtuse. Apologies for my tone of that isn’t the case.
It's a bunch of people in a crowded, shared space. For respiratory/airborne illnesses, the default assumption should be that office work will in fact spread disease.
You asked for examples about office work spreading disease, in the context of you saying that you hadn't seen the claim before. I took that as an unwillingness to believe the idea until you saw evidence. If that wasn't your point, I obviously didn't understand what you were trying to say, so could you clarify?
[Edit: I see that it could be read to be asking for examples of the claim that office work spreads disease in a piece arguing against RTO. Given that at this time, none of the direct replies read it that way, I'm going to say that it was at a minimum ambiguously worded...]
In context, the person was replying to someone who stated “I have read it all when it comes to RTO”. They stated they hadn’t seen a _blog post_ making _this point_ that RTO would cause more sickness. They were never addressing the claim that it does or does not. They were talking about the novelty of this argument for them.
Just as a tip: the links between comments and replies on HN is pretty thin so it can be hard to follow the connection between a comment and what it's reply to.
I get fewer (not none!) of this kind of misunderstood reply after adopting a habit of quoting the specific part of a post which I'm replying to, especially when that post makes more than one point.
So in this case (and this is mainly for the benefit of anyone still confused about what happened in this thread):
> > I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point.
> Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?
It spreads disease and increases sick days and terrible for green house gas reductions and increases inflation (increases demands for gas). The thing that gets me is the same people preaching the world is going to end because of these gases demand we continue these practices. The environmental groups are silence. Who is lying to whomp? Is it all some self delusion.
I resisted RTO as much as anyone but eventually I took a job that required me to be in office 3 days a week because, well, didn’t have much of a choice.
I have to say being in the office has been better than I expected. I recently got together with a group of former coworkers, who I worked with for many years at a startup, and have kept in touch all these years later. We noted that this kind of friendship definitely would not have happened if we were working remote.
My only thing is, I would rather have the flexibility to choose where I work, even if only at the team level. It gets cold where I live in winter, I would love to be able to go stay someplace warm during those months, and come to the office when I want to be there.
I feel like for me, this debate isn’t really about working in the office vs working from home, it’s about control. Companies have realized that they gave over too much soft power to employees during the pandemic, so they are now working together to claw it back. They could care less where we work, as long as they are the ones in control.
I just turned down a job that I would've been amazing at, because they're in person 3 days a week.
They lost literally tens of millions in grant opportunities that I have written and the experience I bring, because they wouldn't go remote 3 days instead of just 2.
I understand wanting some time in person, absolutely. I hate it, but it does make certain processes much easier. But to not negotiate at all, even when the candidate is perfect for the job and happy with everything else? Ridiculous.
I've noticed companies that recruit on LinkedIn marking roles as remote, then at the very bottom of the long job description it mentions that it is in fact not remote. I could see someone making it through the initial calls without it coming up. I'd go so far as to say some companies may use it as a backhanded tactic.
I suppose the bet from executives is: recession/influx of former government employees will allow for relatively easy replacement of candidates. I am not sure which consideration is more cynical and/or misguided.
Yes, I am great work friends with some of my former colleagues from foreign offices that I rarely saw in person. Similarly have good friends on my current fully remote team. I also have good friends from the fully in office era.
Turns out it's more on you as a person to figure out friendship than arbitrary spatial collocation.
Depending on your home, it is often easy to create strong social ties with your neighbours or within your neighbourhood. Especially if you have kids.
Then the anecdote would be different. Definitely post-hoc since there's also plenty of workplaces you never end up with friends from. I am reasonably outgoing and have kept only a handful of friends from various past jobs. Mostly one group is still mostly friends (but we co-founded together so perhaps an unusual group).
I have the opposite problem as you: I've done tech all my life but live in a place where there are few tech opportunities, and it's a bit late in my life to switch to being a longshoreman. So I kind of have to find remote opportunities, even as it becomes more difficult to do so.
There’s what I view as a common misperception embedded in the article. RTO isn’t about empty real estate, or not mostly. Leases can be broken, everything is subject to negotiation. Sure, there’s a cost, but it could be paid.
It’s not about real estate, it’s about power. For a brief period, during the great resignation, executives felt the sting of at will employment, a weapon that was never meant to be used against them. RTO is about showing us all who is really in charge.
I run a remote company, so I don't have skin in trying to convince anyone that RTO is a good idea. And there might be some truth to this in a wider, more systemic sense, in that employers and employees are always in some degree of zero-sum negotiation. But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
Sure. Lots of talk by executives about reining in the “sense of entitlement” in the post Covid era. Worked in middle management, heard it endlessly. I’m glad to hear it’s not universal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Yea, the company that I left due to RTO a while ago laid it out very clearly as about a sense of "fairness" towards the jobs that had to be done in person. That they couldn't allow the developers to keep working from home because it wouldn't be "fair" to the other teams that they didn't get the "perk" of WFH.
It was decidedly an org that felt like it resented the things it needed to do in order to compete for dev talent, and made very clear over time that it felt like it was overpaying us and other more "blue collar" roles in the company were more honorable and valuable.
> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers [...]
This still seems a lot like RTO being used as a weapon. The only difference is they aren't being cruel for the sake of it (which is undoubtedly rare), but they have cruel intentions nevertheless.
> usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work
So, it is about wanting to assert control. Because they think "abusing" remote work is when workers have more control of their circumstances and don't have to break their backs or brains for their salary.
The kind of abuse I (and they) are thinking of are things like "working four different jobs and half-assing all of them" or "outsourcing your job to some guy in the Philippines".
You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well.
If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
> But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for
Some work might be harder to quantify, but... for a lot of work, there's deadlines. If you need to get a UI screen working to some spec by Feb 1, and Feb 1 comes and goes and it's not done, isn't that some indication that work is getting done or not?
Do they really care if someone 'does the job' or 'delivers the results'? Sometimes there's not much difference, sometimes there's a huge difference.
If someone can do a day's work in an hour and disappear for the rest of the day: good on them, assuming it's not rushed I'd prefer that to somebody useless but glued to a desk 9-5.
Feels like a fringe belief here, and only really feasible in flat, lean orgs with semi-technical stakeholders and no BSers. [So probably <0.001% of tech industry currently]
If that were actually the choice on offer, in such simple and clear terms, that would be one thing.
But it isn't. There's a reason that every company wants that top 0.001%. Employees who give a damn and can be trusted to get things done effectively without supervision or managerial pressure are rare. Even at the best organizations, they're often a minority. At weaker organizations, and (typically) at older and larger ones, they're somewhere between "very rare" and "totally nonexistent".
If you're the latest highly-funded startup, maybe you can pay enough and create a good enough work environment to attract that person. But what if you're a random 30-year-old contracting firm in Overland Park, Kansas, paying $85k a year for software engineers? Do you think you'll attract that vanishingly rare talent? Can you rely on the idea that all of your engineers are so motivated and so skilled?
If you want to argue for that level of managerial hands-off-ness, you can do that. It's a legitimate managerial philosophy, and it might even be the right one! But I think it's hard to deny that many people don't think that's the right managerial philosophy, and that's all that they need to believe to favor RTO without any particular malice.
My point isn't to argue for RTO. Again, I run a remote company, and if you ask me, I'll tell you your company should probably be remote, too (depending on exactly what you do). My point is to argue that people who are arguing for it need not be doing so out of any particular malice.
Okay, and does your UI screen have some quiet bug that won't come up for a year? Does it introduce some unnecessary tech debt? Did the engineer implementing it notice some accessibility or consistency issue that wasn't caught by the product team? Does it account for some weird edge case? Is it performant? Does it handle IE6? Did it incorporate some package with a security vulnerability?
And why Feb 1? Who decides what the reasonable timeline is? How sure are you that they aren't playing political games? How do you measure their performance? Did the engineer abandon some on-call thing to get it done? Did they pull a more senior person off of their job to help? Did the manager who gets blamed for all this choose who to hire?
Management isn't binary in this way, and when managers try to make it binary, a lot of people (rightly) complain. And I'd bet that many of the people who complain about that are exactly the same people who are here arguing for remote work (not least because I am in both groups).
Quantifying work to such an extent that you can detect any slacking or poor-quality work is one of the fastest ways to make it horrible for employees. Unscrupulous employees abuse Goodhart's Law to hell and back, scrupulous ones get punished for doing important work that didn't make it onto the quantified metrics, and work becomes more about covering your ass than it is about getting stuff done.
> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company,
Well sure. Just because they think it's a more effective way to run their company doesn't mean that their understanding of "more effective" isn't equivalent to exercising more control.
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
People are perfectly capable of thinking about things in terms that are inconsistent with their underlying motivations. Dog whistling in politics works and is necessary because explicit racism turns off a substantial part of the population that nevertheless remains open to more indirect forms of racist policy and language. Thus, dropping n bombs morphed into "welfare queens." While such voters may be uncomfortable with outright bigotry, dog whistling rhetoric still appeals to them because on some level they are not entirely comfortable with true racial equality and integration. i.e., they harbor racial animus that motivates racist beliefs.
Similarly, managers and executives may not feel comfortable speaking explicitly in terms of exercising power or control over their employees while still acting out of a subconscious need to exercise that very power or control. Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations. Others adopt similarly indirect language and comparable positions without being consciously aware of the emotional needs motivating their choices. Still others legitimately believe in their pro-RTO position without necessarily experiencing any ulterior motive.
> because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work
Lack of trust in their workers is a failure of leadership. Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more, they impose an extremely unwelcome cost on those employees. I don't see how that is any better than thinking about the problem in terms of raw power dynamics.
> or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative
Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees. It's an example of attribute substitution. They don't know how to measure actual merit or hard work, so they measure visible, loosely correlated behaviors. Again, this is a failure of leadership, and a failure to establish systems of accountability that can function in a remote environment.
It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader. Especially because an organization that cannot hold employees accountable in a remote environment will be unlikely to do so in the office either. So far, the overwhelming majority of the published data around remote work and the rigorous analyses based on those data strongly suggest RTO policies damage rather than improve productivity. Likely precisely because organizations with poor organizational mechanisms around accountability continue to perform poorly in office, whereas those with strong accountability perform even better remotely.
When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy, it makes sense to consider what their ulterior motives might be. Many ambitious leaders possess a deep psychological need to exercise power over others. That's what makes them ambitious. In the absence of any reasonable justification for RTO, it is thus not unreasonable to attribute their position to that need for control rather than accepting the insufficient and unconvincing excuses they explicitly offer for their position.
> Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations.
That's possible, yes. But I'm in as good as position as anyone to know, and as far as I can tell, that does not appear to be true of any of the people I'm interacting with. (I do agree with your preceding point, but that's a bit off-topic.)
> Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more
Accountability trades off against other things, though. If it's by some objective standard, you run into Goodhart's Law almost immediately. If it's by subjective standards, you run into politics and personal biases (the exact biases you're concerned about, by the way!). It's this effect to "improve accountability" that leads to metrics on your git commits or programs that watch whether you're moving your mouse or stack-ranking or whatever else.
You could say "well they should improve their accountability to something not stupid" - sure, but organizational and managerial talent is limited. You don't run a business in an abstract ideal vacuum, you run it in a real world of human beings who are sometimes selfish, biased, petty, inattentive, stupid, egotistical, or any number of other things.
Given the practical fact that accountability has costs and is often done badly, avoiding the need for two much of it is not as unreasonable as it sounds.
> Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees.
I agree with that, yes. Hustle culture is not a good thing. But buying into something dumb is different from malice or some deliberate effort to suppress workers.
> It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader.
Even if there isn't a moral difference (and I think there is probably one, for reasons already described), there is a practical difference in the nature of the problem and the solutions to it.
> When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy
But I do think they justify it - or at least, that a reasonable person could think that they do. I think you're sort of assuming management of spherical cows on a frictionless plane here, without any of the extremely messy business than comes with any organization involving a large number of human beings.
Yep, noticed the same. I and others have pressured executives to give exact argumentation with data and motivation.
All 7 of those people (in 3 different contracts) have failed to do so. At one point they said a variation of "because I say so" and that was that.
A lot of more liberal-leaning people don't understand the power-play games that many of the people on top love to play. One could argue some of them long stopped being there for the money and only do it for the power-play, even.
For smaller companies yes leases can be broken but for others spending billions building college like campuses where they sublease space to businesses to sell to employees part of their worth is connected to real estate value. Others getting tax breaks by having people in an office in a downtown core.
For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate.
For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.
When you work in an open office everyone ends up just talking on Slack most of the time anyway. Except those people who have no sense of boundaries, and will gladly invade your personal space and interrupt your train of thought at any time for any reason, leading to a constant state of anxious hypervigelence preventing you from ever fully concentrating on something.
My employer invested tens of millions in telepresence, telecommuting and remote working options. When the pandemic hit they got Zoom scaled up and working for tens of thousands of employees. Which it did, beautifully.
Now that the pandemic is over, we're back to mandatory 3 days per week, minimum, with more for higher level roles. Yet except for a recently acquired employee my entire team is remote. So, WFH and meet on Zoom or sit in an office and meet on Zoom.
Unfortunately the sales people are the policy makers and they can't seem to wrap their heads around doing anything that isn't face to face. Yet we started on this investment in remote work to control travel costs.
"Open office" - I've never been healthier (and fitter) than since I went remote. Not sharing an open office with coughing sneezing co-workers who would come in, no matter what, and commuting on trains, has been remarkable. I'd previously have 2-3 heavy colds a year. I think I've now had 1 in 5 years.
Meanwhile there are those who expect you to process every Slack ping, making them in some ways worse those who interrupt in person — since they don’t feel the distress of the person they’re interrupting through the screen.
A workplace’s culture of consideration is expressed through communication channels, but is not determined by the choice of channel.
IM's and the like are the bane of my existence. If I'm busy I can close a door or put a sign up. I can close email. Nobody expects me to immediately respond to email anyways.
But instant messages? Everyone expects instant responses. Even when their message is something like, "hey,I see you have your door closed. Are you busy?"
> people who have no sense of boundaries, and will gladly invade your personal space and interrupt your train of thought at any time for any reason
You gotta game the system and learn some basic acting skills. Twitch your face. Pause just a little too long before responding. Get up in the middle of a sentence to stare out the window and just stop talking, forcing the other party to ask you to continue. Laugh obnoxiously loud at your own jokes. Stall, delay, confuse, whatever you do: make the experience not worth repeating for the offender.
Get bipolar: be the very best person you can be on Slack. But be a complete hebephrenic bug eyed lunatic when someone interrupts you IRL.
However I’m a team lead. And no matter what I try I can’t train my juniors as quickly remotely.
My seniors and I can show them how to work, and solve problems so much faster on-site. We catch bad habits sooner and in-still the teams approach to working via example. Which so far I’ve found hardest to replicate remotely.
Yes you can pass skills on remotely. But many people aren’t willing to spent extended periods on a call. And it is time people need more than anything else at the start of their career.
Many juniors - understandably - don’t know what skills they are lacking. And those that do don’t know which to focus on first. Only 10/20% have the right personality type to self-source these skills independently. They need our help. Just as we needed the previous generations help. And to provide that we need to really get to know them.
Difficulty training juniors is easily the weakest argument I’ve heard related to RTO.
I’ve trained dozens of people remotely and helped them level up. Sure it’s not the most *effective*, but given the immense benefits of WFH, I have no problem sacrificing the ease of my job so that my juniors can have a better life.
>If you cannot train your juniors up remotely, that’s a management failing. Why punish them for that?
That's an unnecessarily aggressive and uncharitable read of the situation. While it may be possible to train up juniors remotely, many people (myself included) have given it a serious try and have found it far too risky to be worth the effort. An intellectually honest manager will say "it's not for me, I can't do it," and their higher-ups have to make a value judgment about whether it's worth it to force them into a shape that they're not, or accept that the tried-and-true method of socializing juniors in-person is still valid.
If you're honestly curious as to why it's so hard, my experience is that it's a socialization task: you have to make the junior folks feel like they're part of the team and have standing to ask questions. That's really hard to do when everyone is just words on a screen, or occasionally floating heads on a video chat. Embodied communication has something that gets lost online.
Remote work is about collaboration. That requires an effort from both sides to make it work. For sure, management has a huge responsibility. But putting every failure on management is overly simplistic.
It’s a management limit. I’m not sure it’s a failing. I’m a pretty good manager and I’ve worked with some great ones. All of us are better with access to frequent informal communication, shared meals, and walking.
This isn’t about punishment: it’s about how we organize ourselves if we want to create together. I write LARPs collaboratively, and I play tabletop RPGs, too—and those are more fun and more productive and creative in person.
Clearly you have zero idea about remote working and remote management. I've been working 15 years remote and 5 years manage/mentoring. The junior is as much as, if not more, responsible for the growth as the manager/mentor is responsible. You can drag a horse to river but can't make it drink and all that.
Workers have all the right they need.
Don't like RTO? Leave, find a job which allows WFH or go start your own company.
Many people overlook a key benefit of remote work: the ability to live in cities where good companies don't have offices. E.g, living in Montpellier while working for a company based in Paris (700 km away), living in Düsseldorf while working for a company headquartered in Munich (600 km away), or living in Seville while working for a company in Barcelona (900 km away).
I'm not talking about global hiring (something many people don't like because salaries tend to go down), but companies allowing remote work within the same country. This, imo, is the greatest advantage of remote work
The thing I keep coming back to here is how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.
I understand that most of us worked our asses off to get to a skilled position and that in many ways it makes far more sense to be able to work from home. I myself am being dragged back into the office 5 full days a week and it's a 45 minute one way commute on a good day, so I'm salty about that. But hearing people who live 10 minutes from the office in $450,000 houses complaining loudly in the lobby about being forced back into the office right near the minimum wage security desk is a little uncomfortable.
Never think that pure hard work leads to success, placement, privilege, or anything else. The farmhand in a field works harder than 99.9% of high paid tech employees. Hard work is important, sure, but it’s all about relative value contribution in the market, nothing else.
It’s easy to find another farmhand, it’s hard to find another ML engineer
I agree, and I've argued vocally against RTO from my privileged position because I have that value that makes me hard to replace.
I just want to make sure that we're not forgetting the people who weren't able to become high-level ML engineers for various social and economic reasons and are locked into 10 hour hard days in person.
A lot of people bullied the ever hell out of the current ML engineers today. A lot of those bullies are only just now experiencing the economic effects of their actions from 10-30 years ago.
Kids knew which kids they’d have to clean to the house of 20 years in the future and they intuitively want to knock those elite kids down a peg while they still can.
Never forget the extreme resentment that those around nerds have for a nerds mind. When this country stops treating nerds like shit and celebrating anti-intellectualism, I’ll start being worried about the plight of the lowly security guard.
I think the nuance here is while we should continue to push for WFH, we should also be aware of the feelings of people around us when we speak from our privileged position. This doesn't just apply to WFH, we should keep other people's feelings in mind when arguing from any position of privilege. Software developers are extraordinarily privileged and it's important to keep this in perspective or else we will contribute to a sense of disdain toward all software developers.
Some will argue this is a talking point for anti-WFH people, but it's still a valid point to make independent of your WFH stance and as a general tip for being a decent, empathetic human being.
Your average blue collar workers benefits from the 300,000 corporate Amazonians working from home and staying off the road. He cannot avoid his commute, you can.
And frankly, stop LARP-ing as a “sympathetic to blue collar work” person. God knows you’re probably an executive using them for messaging.
When has anyone on HN ever given a fuck about blue collar workers until RTO, when these mysterious “sympathies” emerged? Of course we should support the working class, but you should’ve started a lot fucking sooner.
Eh, the difference is that for some roles being in-person is obviously necessary for the role while in others it isn't. Most people I know working in lower-level roles in-person recognize this because they've experienced more than their share of blatant management power games themselves.
There's definitely a generational divide though. Older folks seem more likely to view being at the office as just a natural part of how work "works", while younger people are more likely to understand when it's necessary and when it isn't.
It's a different story for lower-status jobs that could be done from home but aren't allowed. But when it's such a clear signal that you aren't trusted by management/society/etc, you really do have something to resent!
I'm not saying accept it. I am a vocal critic of the RTO policy at my work and have been for years.
But keeping context and perspective is important. Even in your example, it would do the security guard some good to take a moment and be grateful that he does have that minimum wage job and a place to stay.
It's not meant to encourage you to settle and get screwed over. It's meant to remind you of what you have and often those things should drive you to fight harder for other people and yourself.
While I see your point I don’t think it’s a very useful one. It’s more productive to aspire for the betterment of your own/group’s position/circumstances than to compare how other groups have it worse. The latter just brings complacency, stagnation and maybe even regression because there is always someone who has it worse and so on and so forth.
> how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.
Absolute bollocks. This is the Elon Musk screed and it's baseless. Do you think fast food workers gripe and moan when extremely well paid pilots or nurses go on strike?
Every worker wants every other worker to succeed over management.
I personally see WFH as a way to improve working conditions in general. Just because some jobs really need to be done in person does not automatically mean all of them should be. Similarly, not all should be RTO. As such, it is valid to point out ( and even complain ) that trying to apply 'one size fits all' RTO solution is silly at best.
And just a point of perspective, it was only recently 40h a week ( 1940 ) and child labor (1938) was not considered some sort of communist plot intended to overthrow capitalism.
I have no sympathy. America has made it so easy to convert hard work into a better job. Nowhere else on earth has it even close to this easy to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Security guards are usually security guards because they want to be (most require a concealed carry license). I do not care if they think they are underpaid. They can always snap and go murder half the building. Id rather we didn’t even have a security guard, since the tweaker whod try to come into our building to do drugs is almost certainly not going to literally shoot the place up because overpaid tech workers were talking about not like RTO…
My biggest takeaway from this was the ableist messaging:
“You cannot dangle what people need to effectively work in front of them like a carrot and subtly threaten to take it away. It’s ableist. You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features at the office, so don’t do it with that either.”
> You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features
This is only because there's usually legal protection for that kinds of accessibility features. If employers could legally, it would be way more common to threaten to take them away.
I have no doubt there are some that do so illegally.
I would agree with their sentiment. I don't know how common it would be, but it would certainly happen at least in some occasions.
When I was young, I worked in a call center in which the bathroom was taken away as a punishment for bad rates on multiple occasions, until someone called the Dept. of Labor over it.
Some infamous billionaire wanted to build mega-dorms for universities without windows. Yeah, these billionaire fucks will cut corners wherever they can.
Those that are most pro back-to-office are the ones that are either very extroverted, and have human-to-human roles. Or the people that simply can't disconnect between work and home. I know some people that say they simply can't focus on work, unless they're at the workplace, or some other non-home office.
But by far, it's the extroverted managers that seem to hammer on about return to office.
They're afraid that people will see that they're not needed in the organization. It's easy to fake that when everyone is forced into the same location and the people who like to talk do just that.
My favorite environment is a 5-10 person office, no more than 5 miles from everyone’s home.
I know how to make that work in a startup, but its premise doesn’t scale beyond a pizza box.
Has anyone figured out a better way that works at 100 people?
One idea I’m curious about is pods. Could you build a small team who all live close enough together? Could they coordinate remotely with the mothership?
The default seems to be to just embrace remote.
Or issue a RTO as a ‘polite’ way to decimate the team and reduce burn.
At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet.
Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situations would be handled by a phone call or email.
Meeting in the coffee room to chat becomes rare because schedules and tastes (eg. office coffee versus off-site coffee, bagged lunches versus going out) differ. Also there's too many people and too much churn to really get to know anybody.
Arranging meeting times becomes difficult outside smaller 5-10 person units so asynchronous communication becomes predominant.
What I've seen work is not trying to co-locate a full team at all. Doing so only leads to silos and hiring difficulties. Instead have small offices which people from a small geographic area use. Those people will be on different teams and in different departments -- which is good for inter-team communication and synergy. This is exactly what offices normally miss because teams are co-located resulting in a relatively high 'distance' to build a rapport between teams.
I actually would not mind a slightly bigger org - like even up to 100 or so...but everything else you noted i'm 100% in agreement with. I'll call this the "village way"...because what you noted - to me at least - seems like how villages, small towns, whatever you want to call them had to exist a hundred years ago or so...like, not just before digital, but i mean, even when base telecom was not a common thing....so i would imagine most folks in a town/village worked for one of a few extremely local workplaces. I'm not saying having only very few employers in an area is good, since that would be giving a central group way too miuch power. But, yeah, i kinda yearn for a sort of village approach. And, yes, it could also mean that the "local pod" is everyone in the local area working together in one place, but remotely coordinating with a mothership as you put it. That all sounds pretty decent!
But, this approach is not something that powers-that-be would even begin to support...even though, i betcha, this approach would have tons of people actually invested in the success of the org because of the good that it represents in allowing people to earn a living without making commutes and such that much more difficult. I know that if my employers supoorted this sort of model, i would not only work karder, but actually give more of a damn, and really care to have the org succeed. Basically, i would contribute far more to the org. But, nah, the bosses just want to squeeze the lemons, and not care how they get their juice produced. ;-)
At my previous job I worked in a room with ~6 people, now it's a small open plan office and I hate it. I just can't focus with all the talking, noise, meetings etc. it's awful, especially with the contrast of our 2 work-from-home days per week.
Funnily enough our team lead works in a 2 person office... hmm.
So what happens when someone wants to change teams for whatever reason? Or they're presented with a new opportunity? On the other side of the city--or in a different city. Do they have to move?
Totally agree on the RTO forced memes. I recently participated remotely in a mostly-in-person team summit that went great. At the end of the session, Big Boss gave a rousing pep talk about how much this proved the value of in-person collaboration and my heart sank. Was that the whole point of this session, and not the technical solutions we spun? I was literally right there on the projector meeting room, and had obviously weighed in as much as anyone else. I’d been feeling hopeful because $EMPLOYER has been encouraging about the prospects of sustained remote work there, but they also own a lot of business property and I know they are going to follow suit with the others.
My boss has been trying to bully me to RTO for several months now. Unfortunately for him, he promised me verbally that this job was remote forever during the interview, and where I live verbal contracts are just as valid as contracts on paper.
Because of their bully tactics I've essentially been paid for doing absolutely nothing at home for 2 months now. They can't fire me for cause, because they did contract with me under the stipulation of WFH, and they can't lay me off without cause because they know perfectly well that I can and will sue them if they do because the reason is obvious even if not explicitly stated.
I guess the point of this post is that companies will cut off their nose to spite their face.
There should be a law that says for absolutely every job whatsoever, you are on the clock as soon as you leave your home, and 100% of all commuting expenses must be reimbursed by the employer. If employers expect you to travel to a particular place to work, they should pay for all of it including your time. The only reason this doesn't make perfect sense is because the insanity of commuting on your own dime has been normalized.
If such a law were in place almost no company would ask any employee to commute anywhere unless it were absolutely necessary. Return to office is really easy for them to ask for when they aren't the ones who have to pay for it.
This would just mean that people living farther away would have a harder time finding jobs, or negotiating salary/promotions, because they are more expensive for their employer. Yes you could have laws making it illegal to discriminate based on commute distance, but you know that employers would find other pretexts.
I can see commuting being regarded as a total time waste requiring employer compensation in the US, where most people commuting are driving. But in countries where commuting is done via public transportation, the time spent commuting can be productively used for personal improvement in the form of reading.
Only in some cases. Often public transport at commuting hours is too crowded to practically do so, or is a bus rather than a train so that many people would get travel sick if they tried to read.
I arrived at this conclusion too after 3 years of smart working, it's unreasonable to have today an obliged/implicit sacrifice of time and money that's commuting to the work place.
Don't most people take into account requirements to commute when negotiating salary before taking a job? It should already be baked into pay.
I get some people were hired without any understanding of that during/after the pandemic and sometimes offices move, but that seems like when to renegotiate.
Rather than sharing our own anecdotes about how we feel about RTO - maybe we can try something different and discuss the specific points raised in the article?
Particularly this point: in office collaboration is digital
I feel the other points have been hashed out to death on other similar HN discussions:
- in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
- at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
> in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
Many people's adult friends come from work. Sometimes their spouse does too. I've noticed a phenomenon where more junior team members in particular would go into the office, even though the senior folks rarely did, and I think part of this is just to meet people because they may not have built up a friend group in their city yet.
> at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
That's the case for me, although it depends a lot on your physical home situation and the social dynamic at home. I think for some folks the office is an escape.
Out of curiosity, assuming some companies which embraced hotdesking in the last few years have also since implemented some form of return to office mandate, has it come along with dedicated desks for each person?
I don't mind a few days a week in an office, I absolutely hate having no clue where I'm going to be sitting those days.
One of my wife’s female bosses was completely lacking in empathy when my wife had our baby. She wanted my wife to come in every single day after her maternity leave even though her company was hybrid. According to her, taking care of a baby and toddler is no big deal. It was so disheartening especially coming from a woman.
And then she revealed that she had a nanny flown in from her country and the nanny handled everything kid related.
Don’t be this kind of a boss.
> The point is micromanagement and needing to justify the large office spaces they invested into.
Justifying office space is not a useful business strategy. I think it’s best to treat people you disagree with as reasonable and consider what their motivations could be. In this case I think it’s clear there is one big one—-productivity. It’s clear that some people (not everyone!) use remote work as a way to do minimal work (see r/overemployed). Moreover there are some benefits to in person collab in terms of being able to discuss things quickly and rely on people to be there.
And I say this as a remote worker who loves it and never wants to RTO. But I don’t assume the other side is acting in bad faith, I think there’s pros/cons to both. Mostly remote work is great, but not always. Sometimes my teammates randomly don’t respond to me on an urgent issue and I have no recourse. Sometimes they aren’t making progress on work I am counting on and I can’t tell if they are even working.
Being able to jump into a zoom call with everyone immediately outweighs trying to book a room or walking over to someone's desk. I can easily waste more time and look like I am working in the office where at home it's hard to coverup nothing has been done.
There has been some bad faith over hiring and then forcing rto to avoid termination payouts. We see Musk plans to do the same even moving government offices to states like Wyoming.
Most companies are not bad faith actors just copying others.
Funny, I find the expectation of having to immediately join ad-hoc zoom calls, interrupting me while I'm busy working, to be a pretty huge negative.
I miss being able to look over and check to see if someone was busy before interrupting them. I also miss being able to read body language during meetings and not having to stare at the camera the entire time or having people talk over each other repeatedly due to network delays.
It's not that nuanced guys. zirp ended they did layoffs, and they got bad PR for it. Now they have to do layoffs again but they don't want the bad PR. The people at the top couldn't possibly, with all the time in the world, make an actually informed rational decision about who to cut so an RTO where completely random people quit is just as good as "picking".
I wouldn’t sweat it. The market has a way of working these things out.
Want top tier talent but can’t afford it in your area? There’s likely a cheat code available to you now.
It’s inevitable that zoning laws will change. When the bag holders for corporate real estate have an exit strategy, I wonder if we won’t magically find the question of RTO features a lot less in the ambiance of life. I don’t know enough to say whether it might be true that the kinds of people to have large investments in media conglomerates are the kinds of people who’d consider large investments in corporate real estate as a sound and obvious diversification strategy (and vice versa).
"At my place, we don’t innovate, we don’t develop new products for a mass market; we do lots of data entry, emails, and writing reports in SharePoint or with comments and track changes in Word."
"...we are not designers or knowledge workers solving issues, we handle data!"
The second sentence is what got me.
I know it's implied as the author's perspective, but speak for yourself.
I am a developer, designer, knowledge worker, and my products are used to solve business issues. There would be no point moving data around and making dashboards, products, automation, except for solving business problems or pushing the bottom line up through innovation.
The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.
I agree with the general thrust of the article, that in person routine working isn't needed. I work fully remote and collaborate better in many respects that way.
There is also value in having face to face meetings and conversations, body language, microexpressions, aspects of tone are all significantly more palpable in person.
BUT, that doesn't mean we should be in the office all the time, just for occasional face to face meetings. My employer is in another state, I visit for a bit every quarter or two.
It also doesn't change the fact that the return to office is motivated by micromanagement and stop losses on real estate.
“ The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.”
But people conflate the needs of the business with the “needs” of the executives or investors. I have little faith that any exec that I have met that is capable of putting their own ego aside and honestly describe how RTO helps the business. Maybe it does help the business, but I haven’t seen anyone make that case.
I take issue with these statements as if they apply to most workers:
>You’re asking me as an immunocompromised and chronically ill person in pain and dealing with fatigue to show up and do the same stuff I do at home so others can play family at work?
>Home office is the only way for many people to have a decent work output because family, household, caretaking, further education, illness and free time activities are better taken care of this way and people can work focused in silence without noise and interruption.
How is one taking care of those things mentioned and still "focusing in silence without noise and interruption"?
Time slicing? Being able to effectively 'work from home' may often mean 'work as productively at 7pm as at 2pm'. Working from an office often (not always) implies synchronous work with others, which often is tied to the 9a-5p 'office day'. Companies that embrace 'work from home' usually can accommodate more asynchronous work from folks as well.
My job is still remote but pay is now based on zip code for both new hires and for self-driven relocation. If I move and the zip code is not near one of the few office locations in major cities, my pay and/or the pay band for my job title is adjusted.
I was hired during COVID with the expectation of a fully remote first policy, for good. Now it's this micromanagement where I need C-level approval to change my address. And there are one-off exceptions all over the place both for hiring and for relocation.
It tells me that leadership and the board don't give a shit about me. I am a cog in their machine. Expendable.
I am quietly looking for a new job and not stretching myself as much at my current job. Not coasting, but also not answering those slack pings as quickly, or referring people to the help desk process instead of solving their problem then and there. Putting me and my needs first more often.
Truly remote first companies should be at an advantage both for hiring and for cost efficiency.
They absolutely are at an advantage in hiring - our data set has remote companies with 5-10x the candidate pool of non-remote ones, even ignoring differences in salary asks.
The question is: are they at an advantage in effectiveness? I think they probably are, but it seems like a reasonably open question, one that we should see an answer to in the coming years. If in five or ten years remote companies aren't crushing non-remote ones, that's going to be pretty strong evidence that there is good reason for in-office work.
Is anyone aware of a study between political affiliation and RTO views? I feel like it's become just yet another political/social echo chamber warfare topic and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a huge correlation between political ideology and RTO opinion.
Liberals dominate the jobs where RTO is even an option. Conservatives are trying to eliminate it from the US government for a reason.
It’s entirely political. Conservatives hate the idea that “lazy” limp wristed soy boy ML engineers can make more money than their good old boys making tractors at catapiller.
maybe this is an unpopular opinion but this culture of aggressively and publicly airing all grievances of current employer seems counterproductive for the job search when this person leaves due to said grievances. or maybe it's just a pre-match for future companies that "appreciate" this type of transparency. :shrug:
I'd bet that most people agree with you, which is why the people who actually do it get a lot of attention--from the other folks who want to, but can't. This particular topic notwithstanding, employers have so much leverage that it's risky to stick your neck out but I'm thankful there are people who do it.
Remote working is the future. The forced commuting days are so silly. My open plan office is like a call center with everyone on different meetings. Sometimes 2 or 3 people sitting together are on Teams/Zoom calls because 1 or 2 others aren't in the office.
I've worked remotely my entire career since the 90s with only a few short exceptions. It's a dealbreaker for me and always has been. I do not like to have people around when I'm working, I don't do office politics, I'm not willing to keep my mouth shut when Ted from Accounting starts talking right wing bullshit, and I'm more productive sitting on the patio of a cafe than I am in some shitty cubicle. On the few occasions I ever was required to come into an office and desperate enough for a paycheck that I did it, I always figured out the company was shady somehow. I'm closer to the end of my career, such as it is, than the beginning, but I'll be damned if I'll ever work in an office again. If you rented some luxurious ass space somewhere and spent your seed money on expensive furniture that's your problem. I need a laptop and a chair and a table and coffee and nicotine and for everyone to shut the fuck up and quit bothering me so I can do my job.
I think a lot does boil down to generational differences in real estate entry prices.
Sometimes I think millennials fell into a trap following GenX back to urban living, but missed out on the sweet spot late 90s/early 00s where cities were attractive but also cheap.
I worked with guys 10 years older than me who bought apartments at 1/5 the prices my generation saw, but had starting salaries more than 1/2 of what ours were.
For example in NYC, population peaked in 1950s around 8M, went down to 7M by the 80s. Losing 12% of your population can make housing pretty affordable. Population started increasing in the 90s, re-crossing 8M around 2000... and ~9M today.
If one wants to be really pedantic, a lot of that growth was in outer boroughs that were relatively sparse in the early/mid 1900s.
Manhattan is still below its peak population of ~2.3M in the early 1900s. Fortunately we don't have overcrowded tenement housing anymore. Manhattan population was about 2M in 1950 and bottomed around 1.4M in 1980s.. so a 30% draw, and is now at about 1.7M.
where does that number come from? and i cant imagine it applies equally across industries if it is true. 50% of software related job cant be 5 years to retirement?
I'm currently negotiating a deal to get relocation assistance in exchange for being in the office sometimes, on a job that was intended to be fully remote. In my case, I need to leave my current state of residence for health reasons soon, and this company's campus is attractive enough that I'm excited anyways.
And if people are just interchangeable widgets, that's a clever strategy.
People aren't, though. The most valuable people are the ones who have the most options, precisely because they are valuable. If you play that game, you're going to differentially lose your most valuable people. That's not a smart move.
I think there is a fallacy “if I am more productive at home than therefore all must be more productive at home”. Consider though that the most sophisticated companies in the world when it comes to analyzing human behavior are asking for employees to return to work, do you really think they would do this if this meant a productivity decrease. I’m suggesting the harsh reality is that while you may be more productive at home the majority of your colleagues are not and they unfortunately have ruined it for everybody. I don’t think this has anything to do with sunk office space costs, it’s about bottom line productivity.
Work is not only about what the company wants but also about what the employee needs. I don't see much difference between the ability to work from home and the ability to avoid working on weekends; the later is an acquired rights in many places, the former can come over time.
I would never work in an office again or for a company where the leadership pretends like there's some value to working in-person. My time and space are way too valuable to give them to some company. They can get my work on my own terms.
office work does not have to suck. main thing is to have small offices, 3-4 people per room. no open spaces. flexible working hours(if there is no trust between the employer and the employee, don't take the job in the first place). very few mandatory meetings. commuting should be no longer than 30 minutes by any means. good lavatory/facilities(you'd be surprised how important this is). small kitchen(home meal prep, or making simple lunch from scratch if needed), good dining and shopping options close by. air conditioning. no direct sunlight or strong neon lights. good furniture so you don't feel like you have travelled back in time into the 90s. good chairs and large computer monitors. and that is about it. it is not that hard to offer good working conditions.
This is not a good article. It has pretty much no argument against RTO and is entirely one-sided, not even mentioning any of the real advantages of working in an office.
Hopefully by this point everyone understands that office working has significant upsides for some jobs/people, and only downsides for others. Can we please stop saying "it's good" or "it's bad". It's like arguing whether marmite tastes nice.
For me, as a lowly code monkey I could never work anywhere where going to the office was mandatory again. The advantages aren't worth the commute. I would imagine if I was in upper management I might be more tempted though. Zoom just can't match real life.
I think OP is not arguing if working in the office is good or bad. The point, as far as I can understand, is about the way the return to office is presented to the workers. With sugary lies and fake cheer. It's like they're addressing toddlers in preschool.
> We are not pioneers or a Silicon Valley tech firm!
Working in a silicon valley tech company your still not innovating, I spend lot of my time making bullshit suck less.
And if I was innovating, and for the few times I did actually get to do something cool, I want a quiet room with no distractions so I can focus and research and hack on things. I think one of my most productive and innovative times at work I did a work-cation for a couple week, to a different timezone by 3 hours, no people interutpions and no slack interruptions.
I’m so disgusted by the entitlement of “founders” and business folks who have never coded, forcing the technical people who make their lives possible to suffer for a pointless commute.
It’s to the point that I realized the tech industry may not be for me. I don’t want to be a shill for Bezos or Musk or some other tasteless billionaire. I may opt to leave entirely.
I’ve started religiously studying for the LSAT. Maybe if I work hard, I can push to make America better so these insipid fucks cannot play with our lives.
This article and many in the comments represent the extreme sense of entitlement that tech workers have earned.
This attitude that you're a rockstar dev who doesn't need to collaborate closely with other people, that your coworkers are a tedious distraction, that your boss just doesn't understand, is completely childish. You are just trying to paint this picture of yourself as a lone genius. In the back of your mind, you think you could run the company all on your own, but you're wrong.
Generously, maybe 1-5% of people on HN actually embody this 2010s docudrama archetype, but it's not possible that all of you are that guy.
Why don't you just quit and put up your shingle as a contractor? You can set your own hours. You will have no pesky coworkers breathing around you. You can sleep until 2PM as long as your work gets done. You can be your own man. That is, unless, you don't think you could get a contract on the merits of your work...
My bosses already don’t believe I need to collaborate closely with my coworkers in person, or they wouldn’t have shifted three quarters of my team’s headcount offshore.
The sole content of the RTO “collaboration” controversy as applied to these big global companies is whether it’s better to join Zoom calls from your desk in an open office, or from home. The answer to that is obvious to anyone who’s tried it.
Tech offices only work to the extent that everyone in them is wearing noise canceling headphones all the time - a technological simulation of not being there.
Oh no, if only it were possible to collaborate without being forced into an office! Hopefully we can invent some sort of technology for communicating asynchronously to make this possible.
It's perfectly possible to collaborate remotely, but the casual contempt many of you display towards your coworkers shows that you do not play nice with others - remote or in person.
lol, “entitlement”? Do you believe companies pay over $200k out of charity? They pay what they have to pay, and that $200k is artificially lowered by illegal backroom deals by the FAANG cartel.
You sound like a bitter contractor. And even if you aren’t, support your fellow proles.
I'm not a contractor. I'm saying, if I were you, I wouldn't be pissing and moaning about the terms under which I'm being given $200k a year to drink smoothies and pretend to do engineering work.
That's very entitled of you, to consider that someone else's salary is not worth what they work. You should display a little more respect for other people's efforts instead of considering that they are getting some sort of welfare payment.
Some people enjoy going to the office to get out of the house though. I agree some of the messaging about needing to RTO is illogical but going to an office for work can be beneficial to fighting loneliness. That shouldn’t be a reason to RTO however. I think if you don’t enjoy the office it’s time to find a remote job and that anti-return to office rhetoric doesn’t necessarily apply to every company.
You should still have a seperation of spaces with your home and your work. If not, you focus less when working and relax less when chilling. It's doubly counterproductive.
You can have a separation of spaces within your home. I have a home office. The only time I go in there when I'm not working is if I left something there (and it's really nice that "swinging by the office to grab my earbuds" doesn't involve a commute).
As a result, I just don't think of that room as part of my home. I'm never tempted to go in there and use that room for something else. For the most part, it's as if that room only exists during the workday.
I quit my FAANG job yesterday to join a fully remote company. I took a >50% pay cut but I think it is a 100% life saver. I remember spending 3-4 hours/day commuting and I am just not willing to do that any more. I've cut back on expenses and simplified my life, built up some savings so I can make do with less. My retirement savings will slow down dramatically, but if I don't hate my work life then those savings will be less of an all-consuming goal.
Thank you senior leadership for your wisdom, "If you don't like it, find another place to work". The first good advice I've heard from them in 5 years.
I did the same and for around 50% cut. Working from home allows me to spend more time with my kids (I get to have lunch with them and hear them play in the background), no toxic rush hour commute, and I get the comfort of my own space. I know there's a down side of not being able to collaborate as well with my team. But I put my wellbeing over that.
And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life. But the peace of mind and serenity I have retained by WFH is invaluable.
> And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life.
Yep. Speaking for myself, beyond a certain income threshold there has been no substantial quality of life improvement. My last promotion made it even easier to save for an even earlier retirement, and that's about it.
Early retirement is nice, and earlier retirement is even nicer, but given a choice between retiring when my kid is 20 and being home with him every day throughout his whole childhood, there's no contest. I'll happily delay retirement if that's the trade-off that's needed in order to be there while he's growing up.
This is a critical point. There seems to be an obsession with “making money so you can retire early” and then what? Your children are grown and left home, you’ve often sacrificed them as well as your own physical and mental health, you don’t have the energy you had in your youth, for what? So you can play golf with other retirees? Or maybe you saved up enough that you can invest in a new startup. Okay fine but that’s not retirement, in fact it may be more work.
It's odd to me that people think the value in excess wealth is just living on a beach somewhere.
The value in excess wealth is what you can do with it. You can find a person in need and hand them a thousand dollars for fun. You can fund some program your town needs. You can build a "third space" for your community. There's so much you can do with wealth that isn't just hoarding it!
Personally, my goal is to have enough money to buy a giant mansion on the edge of some town and be the weird rich lady you can go to with your problems. If I get richer than that, great! It'll be a bigger mansion and a bigger town. But if you gave me a billion dollars tomorrow, I'd just use it to be a bigger weird rich lady you can go to with your problems.
As with every other person who has wealth, you'd quickly find that the people who go to you with their problems are the ones whose problems would be magically solved if you only gave them a small investment of $10k, maybe $100k if they're bold and daring, but don't worry, they'll pay you back with interest after their business takes off.
Outside of people who crave the fame and/or flaunt their wealth to promote themselves (e.g. Michael Bloomberg), wealthy people do not advertise that they are wealthy, because doing so invites a lot of unwanted attention.
> The value in excess wealth is what you can do with it. You can find a person in need and hand them a thousand dollars for fun. You can fund some program your town needs. You can build a "third space" for your community. There's so much you can do with wealth that isn't just hoarding it!
Thank you for your kindness. However, you can't become and definitely won't stay a billionaire if you give away your money.
In practical terms, you don't want strangers in your home. There are some bad people in this world. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...
Who wants to stay a billionaire? You can't take it with you, and that's an unfathomable amount of money for a single person to have. At a flat 5 percent interest per year, that's $50 million a year, or just under a million per week, or $137k/day. per day! You could fund a third space for quite a while on that and still never run out of money after your ordinary life expenses were paid. Ballooning life costs can still add up as jets and yachts get expensive, but that's still an insane amount of money.
On 50 million a year, you could give out 49,000 homeless people to give $1,000 to every year, and still have a million dollars to spend, without touching your principle. Could you even find 134 homeless people every day to give $1,000 to?
The goal is to Die with Zero, as written by Bill Perkins, and while you may not want to literally do that, it's still a good book to read to get you thinking about how to spend your money.
> However, you can't become and definitely won't stay a billionaire if you give away your money.
It's very possible that I won't, no. But I also don't think I'm naive.
I run a company. I founded it without funding from venture capitalists, so that no one will ever be able to tell me to sell anyone out. One of the first things I wrote down was that I would never lie, mislead, or otherwise tell anything less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And right now, my company is functioning and profitable, while doing - at least as far as I can tell - no harm to anyone.
Yeah, being a horrible human being means you're free to do everything to your game-theoretic advantage. But you can choose not to do that. You can win without choosing to do that. You just have to know, crystal clear, from day one, that you'd rather make one million dollars ethically than two million dollars unethically.
Similarly, will people sometimes abuse your kindness? Yeah, sure. But you can give your kindness knowing that that's part of the cost of doing business - especially if you're successful enough that you can afford the loss.
You ever read Les Miserables? There's a scene where Jean Valjean, who has been taken in briefly by a kindly bishop, steals some of his valuables out of desperation. He's caught by the police, who arrest him and bring him back:
retiring early is not a goal only if you define your life through work. there are MILLION other things to do besides “playing golf with other retirees” (though that’s definitely more fun that working in a cubicle.
if your work defines you - great, keep on trucking. but having financial means to not have to work at early age (while you are still youngish and healthy) is probably one of the biggest goals any human on Earth can achieve
>but given a choice between retiring when my kid is 20 and being home with him every day throughout his whole childhood, there's no contest
This. So much this. I don’t want to start catching up on life after I’m 70 or 60 something and hate every minute before I retire.
Once I got my mortage, there is no more reasons to care about exact numbers that much.
I heard a financial planner say once that many of his clients don't know how to retire. My Dad worked until he was ninety making money he will never spend. If you enjoy your job and have control over your time and projects, you may also want to keep working.
Retirement sounds very appealing when you aren't spending enough time with your friends and family, or when you aren't getting enough relaxation. But there will come a time when your kids won't really want to spend that much time with you. And a hobby you spend all your time on could become an unpaid job.
There will be times in your life when you have to be all in on your job. But when its not those times, try to have a balanced life now.
I "retired." Still go to some events that are particularly interesting, usually in areas that I enjoy spending some extra time--though I did my best when I had a wage. Doing some of what I used to do anyway but on my own terms. I realize doing that is somewhat privileged but it works for me.
I know somebody who worked, planned, and saved to spend their retirement traveling the world. It was their life ambition.
A few years after retirement they got early onset Alzheimer’s.
I’m 52. I’ve run a micro tech consultancy with my wife for 15 years. We live by the sea in Cornwall and we’ve chosen every step along the way to deliberately not grow our company by taking on staff, instead using freelancers. We’re comfortable but very far from rich, financially. Instead, we’re rich - honestly, I’d say billionaires! - as a family unit. My eldest has left home now to go to uni and the younger one will go next year. My wife and I have been around for them every step of the way, and it’s been the most beautiful and fulfilling journey - my life’s work!
I’ll easily still be working until retirement, probably beyond. I’ll be old and tired and probably pretty useless at tech. But I wouldn’t change a single thing about the last 20 years. It’s been amazing.
Everyone’s gotta do what they want to do - but not seizing life and putting your family at the middle of it - that, in my humble opinion, is batshit. We ain’t here long, and the only legacy is our kids and (maybe one day!) our kids kids. Make it count, which in my book doesn’t = “make loads of cash and as a consequence don’t ever see your loved ones”…
Those charts that show remaining time you’ll be around someone at a given age are sobering.
Even if you live 30 years after your kids are out of the house, odds are only something like 5-10% of your total time with them will be in that 30 years.
Similar figures for your own parents and grandparents. Those hours with them are few, especially at ages when they can still do much.
Don't orget the body wears out as it ages. Already at 50 I find things I cannot do. I don't know how aging will hit you but you really should plan for the day when work isn't possible.
Right, but I'm talking about the difference between retiring at 60 and retiring at 50 or even younger.
You don't need a FAANG salary to retire at (what use to be) the normal age or somewhat early, but you do need one to retire very early. I'm saying that I won't choose to chase a very early retirement if doing so compromises the time I can spend with my kids while they're young.
I live about six miles or so from the office. I'm so much more productive (and end up working far longer) at home than in the cattle car hotel configuration. I dislike the idea that they might try to pitch things as 'pay less' if I'm more productive. If I'm in the office, I've lost the day. WFH should not be a reason to make less - it should be considered a benefit like a gym membership. If folks use it, the company comes out ahead in the end.
Pure WFH will naturally tend to translate to making less if you're currently living in a high CoL area, because there are lots of us living in low CoL areas for whom 75% of a Bay Area salary would be a huge raise.
If a remote-first company can give someone in a nearby time zone with the same language and cultural background and the same skillset a tempting offer while saving themselves 25% of their salary band, they're going to do it. It's not because they think you're less productive, it's because they're now looking in a wider job market with more competition from people who need less money to live.
The converse is also true: if you're living in a low CoL area, WFH can actually bring you a huge pay increase, because salaries balance out somewhere in the middle.
(I'll add that I strongly believe that where you live should not impact your income if you're in a remote company, for the reasons you list: if you're in the same country as everyone else, your location of residency has no impact on your value to the company.)
I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet ).
Covid was a big moment for me in a lot of ways, because I was very pro-corporate for a long time. Having seen some of the bs up close and personal, it made me realize how broken our current system really is ( I still remember 'we are in this together' lip service and 'driving is your zen time' ). Having a kid ( and seeing it grow up ) can be such a radicalizing moment.
Honestly, if you're not a radical in the year 2024, you haven't been paying attention.
I travel around a lot (a thing I can do because I work remotely). From SF to Seattle to Tampa to Salt Lake to the small-town corners of the Carolinas, everyone is struggling. You can feel it in the air, find people identifying with it in every conversation, see the slow decay of every place you know. The dead mall in your hometown, your phone forcing a prompt to take your data to train some AI, the favelas that are now the norm in every major city (regardless of local policy), the fact that you now get a prompt for what is effectively a payday loan when you try to order a pizza.
I think people underestimate how poisonous that is to a culture and to a body politic. When you don't believe in reform, you either shrug and let things burn, or you start setting the fires yourself. Neither bodes well.
Management wants replaceable units which are cheap to source, maintain and replace and utilize to the maximum. That’s all it was ever about
It does ring true and I am not sure I can refute it ( management wants easily replaceable cogs for the machine ). But my overall thought is that humans are a lot of things, but among those things they are also horrible biological machines if seen only through that prism. Our whole value to the system is that we can adjust to the unknown.
Still, maybe more importantly, we are not all even the same cogs, but management tries to lazily put us in the same category. I am not sure we can even really call it management. That is actually a mismanagement of human resources..
I think I mentioned this pet theory before here, but it is no longer 1950, but the management has not evolved since that period in US. Maybe it is time to force that evolution.
> I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet ).
One big reason is they are very worried about their stock grants due to the stock value nosedive that will occur once they finally have to write off all those office space leases as actual losses and report the loss on their SEC forms.
If they can force RTO then all the money being spent for office space leases remains in the "business expense" category and the stock price does not tank as a result.
This narrative has been repeated ad nauseam, but I'm not fully buying it. What is the average S&P 500 exposure to real estate for their stock price? In a handful of cases sure, but en masse it seems much more likely driven by more direct management beliefs about productivity and/or calculation to drive a "silent layoff" through voluntary attrition.
> I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet)
Why do you think healthcare is tied to employment in the US?
Why do you think minimum wage in the US has not gone up in decades?
Why do you think 2 weeks leave is normal in the US?
Why don’t more Americans travel overseas?
At this point you have to be willfully ignorant not to make the connection.
> Why do you think healthcare is tied to employment in the US?
Because if you would take THIS money from the people directly, they will be very unhappy.
> Why do you think minimum wage in the US has not gone up in decades?
Minimum wage is eaten up by an ever-increasing amount of regulations
> Why do you think 2 weeks leave is normal in the US?
Otherwise, the minimum wage would have to be lowered
> Why don’t more Americans travel overseas?
It seems like because they already live in the best country
There is no reason to make too snarky. The reality is the propaganda machine in US is really well oiled.
Beyond a certain point, you have as much money as you wish to spend. Some people don't seem to have a top limit, but for many, those lucky enough to earn more will just put it away.
The difference in your lifestyle isn't now, but in a few decades. It's hard to know when you have enough for the rest of your life. There are formulas, though I don't really know how meaningful they are.
Meantime you're clearly leading a better life now, and may well not mind having a few additional years of it (compared to a bit less time with a lot more aggravation).
So, congratulations. It sounds like you made a well-founded choice.
I probably saved more than I had to do and probably shouldn't be as (relatively) frugal as I am. COVID definitely pushed out a significantly earlier (semi-)retirement.
I don't understand why isn't WFH made mandatory since it helps with climate change.
data to support this claim? you are (incorrectly) assuming that since employees are not commuting to work they are just home and cars are just collecting dust in a garage… but of course you go to the store and mall and park and … in the middle of the day and you see a whole other story :)
One off excursions are totally different than a 5 day back and forth. I don't have data but one can guess.
Because mandate giving authority doesn’t care about climate change. That’s pretty obvious explanation
Hey now, the morons somehow managed to remain organized enough to choose these authorities. And now we’ll all burn together.
Don’t let your fellow citizen off the hook.
> I did the same and for around 50% cut.
How did you and poster above manage this? A 50% paycut would mean having to move to a much more remote area for most people without a lot of NW already.
Homes being $1-3m in most of the places that FAANG resides just makes it implausible to take a cut from $400k+/yr to maybe $200k/yr. You can't afford a mortgage at $200k/yr for a $1m home with 20% down.
Is everyone here who is taking these paycuts just have a partner who makes bank or are you already rich thanks to having bought/inherited property long ago?
This advice just seems implausible to most anyone who cares about being in a good school district, in a relatively populous area, and hasn't inherited millions through buying real estate, inheritance, or stock appreciation.
My pay cut was only around 15%, but I also wasn't working for a large company, and was apparently underpaid by around 20%. This will come of a spoiled and privileged, but I honestly have no idea how we'd make our day to day life work if I didn't work from home, with incredibly flexible hours. Getting children ready for school and pick them up at a reasonable hour, without stress just isn't possible. You have to drop off your children in some kind of care before their even fully awake, and you need to pick them up almost before you get out of the office.
Obviously people make it work, but I have no idea what kind of hours other people work, because doing a pick up at 16:30 would mean that my child would be the last one in the day care. In any case I don't see the point in tolerating the stress of traffic, school/day care, or just regular difficulties getting your daily tasks to fit in with a 8-16 job at an office. I have a family member that works at a hospital, she can't get her car service for four weeks because there's no available time to drop of the car and pick it up afterwards, which also fits with the mechanic. I can normally get appointments for mechanics, doctors, dentists, contractors, everything, with a few days notice because I can be incredibly flexible with my time.
This is pretty close to the average value engineers place on a remote job.
In our data set, the on-paper gap is about 18% (~37k on ~200k) if you just compare remote to non-remote, but given that the remote candidates often live in lower-COL areas, some of that probably comes from COL and not purely value placed on remote work.
The real driver is that ~half of engineers only want remote work, and the vast majority of the remainder aren't in whatever city you're hiring in.
I get that businesses are about profit and not much more, but I do find it interesting that it doesn't really register that people, given that option, choose to live in very diverse locations.
Some companies don't have the choice. If you need people to come in and operate machines, do manufacturing, care for others and similar, then you often need your employees to commute. If you don't need that, why wouldn't you hire the best qualified person, even if that person prefers to live in the Mojave desert?
Well, I do, that's why my company is remote.
But if I were to play devil's advocate?
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be a fraudulent person who doesn't exist.
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be interviewing for jobs they intend to quietly outsource, possibly to people worse than themselves and definitely in ways that create security risks.
- Because you think the random overheard conversations and water-cooler factor of in-office work has enough benefits to compensate for nominally lower qualifications.
- Because you think you're not perfect at detecting low-quality work and think remote employees might take the opportunity to slack off in ways they wouldn't in an office.
- Because you think it creates additional security risks by removing the implicit air-gapping of having to physically be in an office to handle sensitive information.
- Because you and your current employees actually like being in-office and having that cultural cohesion, and you don't think you can get it remotely.
...or any number of other reasons.
Like, I get that people like remote work. I do too. But the moralizing of RTO is...just incorrect, I think? There are practical arguments against it (I literally wrote a few thousand words to that effect not long ago - see my most recent HN submission), but that's an entirely different class of objection than the idea that it's just about middle managers wanting to breathe down your neck.
Just to be clear, I'm in an area of the world where there never was much work from home. During COVID, sure, everyone was home, but most have been back at the office for a long time. The question of trust also isn't as much of an issue, given that I'm in a country where trust is pretty much implicit. So I don't really buy into many of the especially American takes on return to office. It's not about a "return" for me, that is long gone. People returned to the office years ago.
For me it's missed opportunities for business, it's about a better work life balance, reducing stress, improving health, about reducing traffic and the associated pollution and it's about decentralization. As you rightly point out, there will be situations where you absolutely need people to go to an office, or where it will make a difference. These jobs could benefit from less traffic, better service at the edges of working hours, because the work from home people can use the time slots in middle of the day. For those jobs where it makes no difference if you are in an office or would be an improvement not to be, I don't get why more companies aren't just going for it.
So, you need control. Your proposing that employees cannot be managed efficiently if they’re not inside your panopticon?
Only two ways that I know of that can make it work: 1) one parent needs to stay at home, or 2) hire a nanny. Both of those come with considerable costs.
While I apparently where underpaid, my boss and I had a pretty good relationship, but he didn't think a 50+% pay raise, so my wife could stay at home, was realistic, but I did ask.
My wife's boss recommended getting an au pair, she pointed out that he's aware of how much she makes, and that it was a stupid suggestion that he know that we wouldn't be able to afford that.
Also other families that are in the same boat and trade pickup days, etc.
This is also how you build community, so has many benefits beyond cost.
Good point!
Historically, you had grandparents or other extended family (which was the case when I was growing up with two working parents). But that's far less common in the US today.
When I was doing this, I went in a bit later and dropped the kids off and my spouse went in a bit earlier and picked them up. They were neither the first ones in nor the last ones out. My commute was worst case 20 minutes, that also helped. It worked fine (except when spouse was traveling), but WFH Is much easier.
Relatives, or illegal daycares. Or relatives who run illegal daycares.
I think that’s how folks make it work.
There's a huge class divide in affordability. Unlicensed childcare, home remodeling, etc., is wildly cheaper.
Not to mention that you’re putting your corporate boss’ well being above that of your children who have to cope with those circumstances. I’m willing to deal with the commute. I’m not willing to let my kids take the hit.
> This will come of a spoiled and privileged, but I honestly have no idea how we'd make our day to day life work if I didn't work from home, with incredibly flexible hours.
I don't think it's spoiled, I think you're spot on. Yeah, it's hard. And yes, you (and me and probably many others reading here) are privileged.
> Obviously people make it work
And yeah, they usually make it work, and it sucks. Or if they can't make it work then maybe a spouse or partner has to quit their job to handle that stuff and take care of the kids and then they have to get by with even less income.
3-4 hours a day commuting? I confess I used to bike to the office and that could take about 3 hours/day, but I could cut it down to a 2 hour/day by switching to an ebike. I also like biking. On my "work from home" days I would aim for an hour and a half ride every morning.
I can't imagine being in a longer commute that I didn't like.
Sf Bay Area can easily exceed 2 hours each way if you aren’t willing to pay insane money on housing. It honestly made me wonder how low income people exist there at all. I did more than 2 hours each way for many years there but only by riding the train with a hot spot.
Some of the comments in here are all in on "I'm going to take half the money to work remote and not have a commute" but were apparently not on board with "I'm going to spend more of that double-salary to live close" which is a contradiction I find interesting.
(Obviously not everyone could choose to live closer without driving up the prices even more in the short-term, but the value of money-vs-commute compared to money-vs-remote doesn't seem directly comparable to many people.)
That sounds insane to me. Again, I had a long commute by bike. Could have easily shed most of it by getting a car. Would have to shift off rush hour, but that isn't too hard to do?
Would love to see more data on this. Quick googling shows average commutes well below an hour. I'm assuming average is just not a good stat for this?
Low income people exist by either living with family or commuting insane distances from lower cost areas. I've met quite a few people who would commute from Tracy or Stockton to SF/Mountain View to work as janitors or food service workers at tech offices. It's brutal, especially when they're expected to show up in time to serve breakfast or open the doors.
When I graduated college, the drive from Santa Cruz to 85 and Shoreline was about 35min at 730am. These days that is 90-120 minutes at that same time (think google/microsoft campuses). Many can’t afford to live close to those areas any more.
I did a radical change recently too, save for the fact my job (full remote) wasn't very well paid to begin with. The additional 700€/month I got for working in comparison to the unemployment benefit is absolutely not worth working 150h a month, since I still can pay for whatever small or medium things I want, and it don't make a real change to what I can't (buy a house).
On the other hand, I have now time and energy to focus on all the cool things: writing research papers and my thesis, learning accounting to set up my company, make contributions to the open-source and open-data projects I care about, taking time for friends and family. In a word: living.
FAANG is just Big Blue 2.0 nowadays. Not a place for smart people, a place for Jassholes.
I'm grateful for my FAANG job because, despite my lack of intelligence, I'm able to make enough money to provide a comfortable life for my family and save up for early retirement.
Then goose step to the beat of the RTO drum and hush.
Weirdly aggressive.
Does jasshole mean something else than what I see on urban dictionary?
I assume it has to do with Andrew Jassy, CEO of Amazon
Presumably a reference to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Andy Jessy?
Don’t paper over everyone with the new Day 2 Amazon. There are still great things happening at Meta for example where the founder is still driving culture. They’re some of the biggest players in open source AI and you better believe Meta AI has very smart people
Meta culture is not exactly friendly. I can’t speak to meta ai. But much of the company has 8 layers deep of VP and directors.
I wouldn’t say it’s friendly, but that’s not really the point. The commenter was saying smart people didn’t work there which is really hard to say when talking about the AI groups. I would say you can get a lot done if you’re not in a few particularly slow moving heavily layered orgs. They’re also pushing hard to flatten as they should
I’ve done essentially the same thing for years, working for small remote companies at rates below what my resume would justify.
There are labor force bargains to be had for companies that offer workers flexibility.
Did you take a pay cut? If you include your commute hours in your hourly pay rate, maybe you didn't have such a pay cut after all.
That’s what I’m thinking. 8 hr grind + 4 hr commute for regular salary. Vs whatever 5-8 hr work plus no commute at normal salary * 0.5.
It’s a trade off in this case that I think is worth it.
> 3-4 hours/day commuting
I’d switch jobs then as well, or rather, I would never take such a job in the first place. Luckily my commute is only 20 minutes by bike. I don’t earn anywhere near FAANG level either, though.
Depending upon where you wind up living to work remote you could well see an almost 50% cut in life expenses and taxes.
That only matters if you spend the majority of your income. For many high paying tech workers the amount you save matters more and doesn’t change enough comparatively if your rent doubles for example.
If you want to buy a house, it's going to be a lot more than double to live in the Bay Area vs say rural Arizona.
Absolutely this. A down payment in the valley is enough to buy outright in most of the USA.
Sure and that’s still not the majority of your income over a 10+ yr period if you’re getting paid good bay area wages as a senior+ engineer.
Not to mention that buying a house isn’t a requirement of living in a location (and isn’t the right financial choice for many places when comparing to rent).
A decent house in the Bay Area is >$2M. Why would I pay that when I can make the same money and buy a much better house for $500k, work from home, not have a commute (which is hideous in the BA) and not have some little micro manager breathing down my neck all day? It's a massive quality of life improvement all around.
Sure. But if you didn’t have to pay it (ie living there wasn’t a requirement)?
We’re talking about trade offs here right? Not saying you get everything.
But no I wouldn’t live in rural Arizona over the Bay Area or most cities unless there was a very strong extra reason to live there (like a manhattan project) and definitely not for a pay cut even if cost of living was near 0.
What about urban arizona? Or someplace like onaha which is a city with plenty of city things todo but still low cost
Although I think most people in a major urban metro (broadly--not necessarily living in a city) probably don't really want to move to the mountains someplace. I'm well out of the city--where my job mostly never was anyway--but I like being able to drive in in 90 minutes or so and the other advantages that a major metro offers.
Depends greatly on whether you have kids and their ages.
This comment, to me, is heartwarming. The free market works! You valued something more than $$$ and so made adjustments to your employment (aka selling your labor).
I think that in-office work is good for certain situations, which is why onsites still make sense. And for folks newer in their career, onsite time is really important, based on my experience.
But if remote is more attracitve, over time companies that offer it will win in the talent marketplace.
Except it doesn’t because so many companies are slowly bringing people back to office and finding a fully remote job is becoming more of a privilege. One anecdote does not validate your views.
But that’s exactly how it works. If you are willing to make the trade off for what you value more then go for it. Many do not want to make the pay or job tradeoff and come into office, and many others (myself included for many cases) think coming in to office is generally good.
Remote is not more attractive to everyone and everyone doesn’t have the same economics on the trade offs.
That’s exactly why it doesn’t work. Leaving our rights to the market to decide does not work. It never has.
Why? Because for the vast majority of people, employers have almost all of the negotiating power. What this means is the market is slowly shaped by what employers want, not employees. Because we need a job more than they need our labor.
It’s naive to think the market is a level playing field and if employees want something they just vote with their labor and the market will adapt. That’s just not true. Most people don’t have the ability to change jobs on a whim to play the market with their livelihoods.
It works fine for tech and most white collar jobs. You can indeed vote with your feet unless you make very poor financial decisions (or have too high of needs) for most of these careers.
I don’t understand - do you think it’s the government’s role to step in and mandate remote work?
There were companies both hybrid and remote before covid (I worked for a few). Covid was a shock that shifted remote work (as well as a lot of other things).
I would not call remote work a privilege. Rather I would say remote work is a benefit. It falls into the same bucket as all the other benefits that employees can weigh in addition to salaries when they weigh job options.
I expect a reversion in terms of remote/hybrid, but not all the way back to where it was before hand. Looked for some stats, didn't find much. From the US BLS[0]:
> However, remote work participation was still higher than its 2019 level in all industries except agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, which returned to its 2019 level.
The data only goes to 2022, but the publication is from 2024. If there are fresher stats, would love to see them, as I think things have changed in 2023 and 2024.
0: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productiv...
I don’t think this is true. This is a lagging indicator and takes time to show the meaningful data. You’ll not get your productivity gains as your top talent leaves and everyone else who is salty will coast doing the bare minimum while looking for a new job. https://youtu.be/4ec_yZCWOCY?si=RQs2bo3w_ATv9X6e
I think companies that won’t adapt and embrace remote/hybrid will slowly decay.
I think hybrid is MUCH closer to in-person than remote. It requires you to be close to a base office.
I think hybrid-with-scheduled-days is almost always a clear win over 5-days in-office, but that full-remote is a huge productivity drain. The cost of alignment, decision making, and collaboration for any sort of creative work goes way up. So unless you know exactly what sorta widgets you need to make and it won't change much more than once a year or so, you're going to have trouble keeping up.
I went through 3 different remote-only startup jobs before finally finding another in-person one, and didn't stay long at any of them because the productivity was just too low. Too much time spent doing things that would be easier in-person or waiting-or-making-up-for async-induced issues.
Those companies will also feel the wrath of the free market. I'd never work for them and I'm quite a high end resource!
Is it really a pay cut if half your day is spent commuting (unpaid)? Just a thought.
Hey, congrats. I did a similar thing... in December 2019. Poor timing, but a good decision nonetheless.
Even years later, I am still not making as much money as I was making back then. I could not care less about that. I'm making plenty of money, and am more than twice as happy—this is harder to measure than salary, but it sure feels true.
I'm happy that you found something that works for you. But wouldn't it have been cheaper to move to a place closer to the office of your previous employer?
Rather than the snarky response, I’ll answer: closer is likely to be impossibly more expensive for the requirements OP needs (e.g. living area, number of bedrooms or similar).
To add in, they may have other obligations in life that prevent it as well. Taking care of elders, kids schools, spouses jobs, medical care needs. Frequently money is just not the answer
Maybe. But sign a new lease (or mortgage!), pay moving expenses, relocate away from friends/family/social network/what have you and then the job disappears after 18 months, leaving you to relocate again....
So not parent, but no. I lived as close as we could afford, roughly 20km away. Outside rush hour you can to the trip in 15 minutes, during rush hour it's 35 minutes, assuming no accidents (and this is a highly accident prone area where traffic would block up completely every other week).
Taking a 15% cut, which allowed us to move further away severely reducing our cost of living, bring us closer to family which can help out if needed. It has reduce stress, ensures that our child doesn't need to be in the care of after school programs longer than she needs. The reduced cost of living, reduction in stress and the flexibility that we're able to offer my wife's employer was made a huge, positive, difference in our lives, well worth the 15%.
It’s not just that it’s more expensive COL but if you’re buying then you’re taking a 30 y mortgage that may not be so easy to divest when the next round of cuts come and you find yourself let go anyway.
Not really in VHCOL areas. You can get by on less, if you are planning your life around your job, for sure.
But for example if your office is Midtown Manhattan, the equivalent lifestyle to own a home for your family in walkable Manhattan vs long subway commute Brooklyn vs longer commuter rail suburbs vs extreme commute exurbs is staggering.
You can buy an entire exurban home for the incremental cost to upgrade from Manhattan 2bed/1.5bath to 3bed/2.5 bath.
My parents & in-laws each have 3bed/2.5 bath homes outside of Manhattan commute range, but within tolerably unpleasant driving commute to Stamford/Greenwich. That is - they are in commuter range of where commuters live / satellite office are located.
The combined values of those 2 homes might buy a single family sized apartment in Stamford, an ok 1 bedroom apartment in yuppie Brooklyn, or a kind of dumpy studio in Manhattan.
A lot of these answers seem to boil down to "I would simply have more money".
> But wouldn't it have been cheaper to move to a place closer to the office of your previous employer
it might not be the sort of place they want to live. it also negates a lot of the higher salary argument if a lot more of it is going into paying rent or mortgage.
I spend 40 minutes a day commuting. Would I take a 50% pay cut for that? You know the answer.
Depending on how one is, working from home not only isolates you, but if you have kids, dealing with them on a daily basis while trying to work is not what you think it will be after months and years of doing so.
Yes, your life will change and be totally different.
You sound pretty negative about it. I know plenty of people who work from home and deal with their kids and enjoy doing so. And some who just seem to dislike their kids regardless of the work situation.
So when folks say they work at home to spend more time with family I take that at face value. I've certainly enjoyed being with mine - not every moment for sure. But I didn't have kids as an obligation, it was a choice and any relationship also requires work, being home with them helps that.
I’ll get downvoted for this but so many people taking 15-50% paycuts without a moments thought, or trading 50% of pay for 3-4 hours back out of a 11-12hr workday (including commute) sort of implies that there are a lot of overpaid people right now.
A better hypothesis would be that there are diminishing returns for the hours in a day a person has. Getting back 4 hours when you are currently working 12 hours has a ton more impact than getting back 4 hours when you only work eight.
The defining metric of progress in a society is that all of us have to work less for maintaining same or higher quality of life. Leaving aside the supply demand aspects, who is going to pocket the savings if people aren't overpaid and why should they be the appropriate recipients of that savings.
Overpaid? Doubt it.
Just people who make more than they need to survive and can afford to cut back on income for a happier life.
Not overpaid. Even if you are paid below the market, but you are highly skilled in a job where you deliver a lot of value for the employer and you make a lot more than the average worker, you can take a pay cut. For example, average pay in US is around $50k/year. If you are very good in tech or an MD and you make $250k, are you overpaid? Probably not. If you take a $50k cut, with the remaining $200k you are still fine in many places. There is no reason to reach the conclusion you are overpaid.
The fact that you have to take a pay cut, rather than find another employer at the current level, is evidence that the original salary was well above-market
Yup makes it easier than firing you. We don’t want less productive people.
Sounds like a correct action .. good on you, enjoy the extra time in your life, it's the real value.
Money can't buy time.
What do you think about private jets, passes to skip theme park queues, world class life saving medical treatment etc?
When I was looking for a job I was offered peanuts for a position requiring very specific knowledge. When I pointed this out, they said "well, if you want to earn a lot of money, go to company X".
I did. Now I'm exploring the limits of slacking off while getting a nice paycheck. I could aim higher, but I doubt my new place would allow me to slack off as much as this place does. After all, I have only one life, so I'd rather spend it doing things other than working, and I know that modern work is unlikely to bring deeper life satisfaction.
Admitting to slacking off and leeching your paycheque... this is why the bosses want back to office.
Which part of the post made you think they weren’t in the office every day?
Any data for that, or just your gut vibes, jabroni?
At least you have a much better chance to (live to) eventually retire. I am glad to see this kind of change is not just possible, but really happening.
I'd never work for a "FAANG" style corporation, but otherwise made a similar choice when my first kid was born, back in early 2019.
I'll surely lose out on some currency in the long run but I'm not so sure whatever value it's going to have in the coming fifties outweighs the time with my family I've gained. On a global scale a lot of things are going to shit and I'd rather my kids think of me as someone who didn't bail on them under such circumstances.
I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point. The post is a well-written spleen vent, and I mostly agree, but I didn’t see anything new in it.
But because everyone has an opinion, I’ll share mine: I like being in the office, sometimes. I hate going to and from the office.
I don't mind the commute if I live close enough that I can just walk 30-40 minutes to the office, because then it serves as a good exercise (okay, fine. Grass-touching) that I don't have to do separately in the day.
But I realize that this is NOT a luxury most people have. Most people's commute looks like being stuck in the subway, or driving in traffic, for up to several hours every single day, and I just can't think of anything that would justify that type of commute.
The single-occupant driving commute is the most common way to get to work in the US, by far. [1] That’s just miserable: it’s stressful, lonely, expensive, prone to risks like car problems. I feel like we can do better, even incrementally. Why isn’t slugging [2] more common, for instance?
[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slugging
No one slugs where I am now because we all have kids that also have to be shuttled around by parents. I grew up using school buses most of the time. These days, at least where I live, those don't exist. We've had to rearrange our personal and professional lives left, right, up and down to deal with the fact that we have 1 kid in preschool and 2 in elementary school and dealing with school hours and after-school care programs, etc.
My mom slugged for decades of her working life. I really wish it were an option.
After a high intensity job with a short, city commute, I moved away and had a new job with an ~hour, drive commute. For a few years, that drive was amazing for being able to mentally prepare and decompress from work. It made it so easy to leave work at work and there was a long separation between them. I really needed that at that time.
I use to love slugging (aka “casual carpool”) here in the Bay Area in the Before Times. There was a conveniently nearby bus stop where drivers would routinely offer rides into SF so they could use the carpool lane and get to work more quickly. It was a fun way to meet neighbors.
> lonely
not to everyone. I love being alone and hate to deal with people or drama on public transit.
Ha, this is so true. I loathe having to commute into the office, but the only thing worse would be doing that on a bus.
It's tough to imagine slugging culture becoming prominent enough that it could be a reliable and timely mode of transport, and HOV lanes aren't always available to provide an incentive to drivers.
I have a feeling almost all of the pro-WFH types are exactly that: 1) American 2) single-occupant driver commute 3) live in big car-centric city. 4) have ridiculously long commute time.
Slugging isn't common because the capitalist system would rather everyone buy a car. Selling cars is big business.
So the big car companies are forcing me to buy their product? It does not feel that way. Seems more like it is people in their capacity as voters and consumers which are driving things this way.
And the huge corporations lobbying to outlaw import of reasonable cars..
I'd argue it has less to do with the "capitalist systems" and more to do with how obnoxious "slugging" sounds. Commuting in your own car guarantees (a) you have a ride and (b) you have flexibility. You can change you plans, stop by the store, run errands, anything your heart desires (plus, not deal with strangers everyday. Ugh.)
This isn't a pro-car thing. I've haven't driven a car to work in 8 years (I pay out the ass to live downtown so that I'm close enough to walk / bike). It just seems like "Well, that sounds like a pain in the ass" is a simpler possible explanation to why slugging isn't popular in the US compared to Big Business not wanting it to be.
Long commute is indeed a pain. My way of coping it is listening to audio books and podcast, and in the meantime cut as much screen time on my phone. Listening to good books improves commute immensely.
Here is mine: I like the commute, it marks the beginning and end of my workday and I get fresh air. I loathe being in the office, it is mentally taxing and I have to put in more for the same output.
My commute is a 15 minute bike ride. 9/10 days it’s nice weather, I get some air and possibly some sunlight. Office isn’t too bad, and it’s nice to meet other adults. I don’t think I would enjoy it as much if I had a desk in a big, shared office space and a 45 minute bus ride.
Ironically those days that are so bad that I think that I almost shouldn’t try to bike, those are the days that the busses don’t run because the busses and more sensitive to the weather than my e-bike with studded tires.
Busses in Oslo don’t work if it’s raining a lot or if it’s snowing a lot. It’s really sad since it’s snows and rains quite a lot every year. Our locally public transport is more interested in trailing self-driving cars than testing out new tires :(
9/10 days it’s nice weather in Oslo?
Hey, snow and rain are nice too!
Commutes can indeed be good, but you can get the same benefit with your own rituals. Currently, I shovel the snow in the morning and drink a hot chocolate to start the workday, and I take a ten-minute walk to end it. Same effect as a commute, but something I can control.
If you have the discipline for them. Some of us find maintaining rituals deliberately very taxing, and find having them imposed on us useful. (I'm with the previous poster, in that I actually kind of liked commuting. I like remote work because I don't like cities.)
> I like the commute, it marks the beginning and end of my workday and I get fresh air.
I get up at 06:15. Work for an hour, then go for a fast and invigorating walk through the forest where I often encounter deer, and this week a fox, and then I'm back at my home-desk to start the day with some video meetings.
When my kids get back from school I take a break and we have a snack together. Then I work another hour, and then in the summer I roll out my bike, and in the winter we've gone out with the snow-racer (although the kids don't wanna do that so much anymore).
Before covid I used to sit in a miserable office. Everyone had headphones on. My window overlooked a motorway on-ramp that was always backed-up as far as the eye could see.
The serenity I had while sitting in a train is the only thing I seek from my office days. I actually listened to audio books and learned, or just watched outside and thought about nothing.
Catching cold every 2 to 6 weeks on winter wasn't amazing though.
I have a fake commute that I just started. I meditate or listen to an inspiring short talk. It has done wonders with my patience with the kids right after work.
I have an easy commute (35 - 45 minutes, but not bad traffic and pretty roads), and a comfy car. The commute is my peaceful time, when I don't have to answer to anyone.
I guess I don't really consider that an easy commute though I've done something along those lines off and on over the years. It's not bad like when I commuted about 90 minutes a few days a week. "Easy" for me is a 15-30 minute walk with maybe some mass transit mixed in there if the weather is bad.
And, yes, if I had an office to go into, I would do so some days if that were my option.
I'd rather go to the gym than be in a car for the same effect.
Fair point. Nice separation between personal life and work.
I just need flexibility and variety. Some days I work better from home. Some days it feels claustrophobic and I cannot focus. Sometimes the office helps me focus. Sometimes it facilitates communications that never would have happened remotely. Other times I’m bogged down by unwanted social interactions. Sometimes I really need to be on site with customers or at a conference building and maintaining social ties.
I’ve worked in hybrid environments for over a decade and could never go back to a full RTO position. I’m currently mostly remote and that is also driving me a little crazy.
Some people do great in the office. Some do great remote. I’m not in either bin.
I did two hours of work this (Saturday) morning, and I was pretty ill four days in a recent week but able to work for two of them. That's a lot of productivity my employer would not have had from me if I had to go to the office to work.
I don’t mind going in either, but I like having it as an option and not mandatory or only 2-3 designated days that excludes Fridays.
> I like being in the office, sometimes. I hate going to and from the office.
I like being in the office when it means the office isn't packed to the brim. Prior to RTO mandates at my employer, our team voluntarily went in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And it was very nice. Not everyone (including myself) came in every day but there was always others present. Then RTO mandates came down, then we got moved out of our office space into another, next to a very loud group of non-engineers, then we got moved again, again next to a very loud group of non-engineers, and we are being moved, yet again, but this time back to our own, secluded space. It's all frankly ridiculous bullshit. I'm 60% remote today but I'm still generally annoyed about being in the office when I am there because of all of the stupid bullshit that comes along with it.
We need those tubes from Futurama.
I like being in the office when everyone else is wfh. When everyone is in the office I can't focus, am stressed, little gets done.
This girl has pretty severe Crohn's, severe enough to make commuting in pretty much not an option: in addition to the severe fatigue, she's immunocompromised and more prone to whatever bugs her coworkers bring in to work. That's something new and unique about this post I took away from it. It's not just a rant because me no like office/commute. There are health and profound QoL issues in play.
Not the person who wrote this post, but I also have Crohn's (that isn't quite in remission). If WFH was off the table, there's no way I'd be able to work at all. With WFH, I'm bringing in more than half of total our household income. Very very grateful that this is available to me.
Ok, what if you are paid to create a office in your house?
> I like being in the office
I love being in an office with the handful of people I work with. I hate being in an office with hundreds of people I don't work with.
Yeah this is my position. There are aspects of being in the office that I like. I loathe having to drive 45 minutes to get there, however.
I think being in the office together with a plan is a good tool to use, but you need to use it well.
Just yell at people to be in the office for 2 days per week for no reason? Meh. Why?
Organize a week to have all local and international employees together for a week once or twice a year, schedule big organizational meetings and important discussions in that week, sponsor dinner and lunch together, have a team event or three? Just accept that concrete and hard productivity will crash for that week, and consider it a social event? That's actually nice and valuable.
> Organize a week to have all local and international employees together for a week once or twice a year, schedule big organizational meetings and important discussions in that week, sponsor dinner and lunch together, have a team event or three? ... That's actually nice and valuable.
When I read posts like this - however well-intentioned - I just see a person without kids or other responsibilities, who thinks it would be 'fun' to fly out to some town and hang with their colleagues 24/7 for those seven days, and forgetting that for a lot of people this would be difficult or impossible. At home there can be children that need to be looked after, or an elderly parent who needs a visit, or a partner who works nights or a disability that would make this type of 'cool' get-together impossible or extremely stressful.
You are straw-manning by quoting half of my post though.
On the team, "people without children" are the minority. We do have member s on the team with disabled elders, elders requiring care, disabled children. Lifestock even. We do have people with all manner of volunteer responsibilities too.
We have discussed this extensively internally. To all of these people, it is massively easier to clear up 1 full week with 3-4 months of lead time, than to free up 2-3 days per week permanently. That's why whe chose this mode.
The compromise is ofcourse that you're working the majority of the time remote and can reasonably accommodate one of these trips if the date is known in advance. I had a similar experience at a workplace I've had with known "onsites" that facilitated several of the business units at the same time, holding meetings and small get togethers to allow some face to face time. Afterward, optional events were suggested to spend time with teams if you had the flexibility, like meeting for a bigger group dinner or doing a meeting specifically with your team.
I don't think it's nearly as 'tech startup burnout' culture as you're envisioning here, people travel for work functions regularly in other sectors of work. Nearly all my aforementioned coworkers on my team had children and lives that they were able to allow their temporary separation from. I dont think it's anyone else's responsibility to fix but your own if making accommodations and planning to meet other people makes you stressed.
As somebody who generally dislikes the office, i respect your opinion and your preference.
The issues arise when we’re all forced into the office, whether we like it or not.
I wouldn’t mind going from time to time, but i absolutely abhor being forced to.
I'm in the same vein. I enjoy being in the office a couple days a week - I feel like there's different types of focus needed for different tasks and sometimes the focus I need is the kind I get from being in a very structured environment with co-workers. Other times it's the kind I get from being in my own space in full control of my own surroundings.
But either way I hate commuting. Especially if I have to drive.
Did I understood correctly, if teleportation would be real you would go to the office every day? I would, if I would meet my team there.
Well, I wouldn't. Teleportation wouldn't even be necessary in my case as it takes 5 minutes for me to get to my office. I just don't see any point in being in office on days when I am focusing on writing code to push features out.
Heavily agree on the “going to and from the office”
I was just thinking about this recently as $company executives are sociopathically dangling RTO in our faces. The worst part is the commute by car.
I’m totally for WFH, but give me an office I can walk/bike to in a safe calm environment - not a bike lane next to 60 mph traffic - and I may just want to go into the office.
Furthermore, the company culture needs to be such that you can leave the office as necessary like we do in WFH. Do errands, take a break, etc. Cal Newport makes the point on his podcast that our work culture for creative jobs (anything that uses the brain primarily, I don’t know the right word) has not really changed from factory line physical in nature jobs.
"Knowledge work"? Is that the label?
Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?
We’re you in the workforce in 2020?
The entire point of RTO is a reference to returning to the office from when we all decided to not go to work to slow the spread of disease.
If you want a direct example, our first on-site after COVID led to half of my team getting COVID despite testing and masking precautions.
I work in the healthcare industry. Because of this, a lot of people on my extended team still had to go to work, and see patients and their families face-to-face.
The worst part of 2020 for me was repeatedly removing coworkers from the intranet as they died.
If I weren't, would I see examples of such blog posts in your reply?
Why would I point you to a blog post with an example when I already provided one in the post, and when the unspoken premise of the term RTO is a reference to the worldwide phenomena of people not going to the office to avoid spreading a disease.
You may not mean to, but you are coming across as intentionally obtuse. Apologies for my tone of that isn’t the case.
It's a bunch of people in a crowded, shared space. For respiratory/airborne illnesses, the default assumption should be that office work will in fact spread disease.
You probably meant to respond to someone else, I have made no such claim.
You asked for examples about office work spreading disease, in the context of you saying that you hadn't seen the claim before. I took that as an unwillingness to believe the idea until you saw evidence. If that wasn't your point, I obviously didn't understand what you were trying to say, so could you clarify?
[Edit: I see that it could be read to be asking for examples of the claim that office work spreads disease in a piece arguing against RTO. Given that at this time, none of the direct replies read it that way, I'm going to say that it was at a minimum ambiguously worded...]
Your edit is still wrong!
In context, the person was replying to someone who stated “I have read it all when it comes to RTO”. They stated they hadn’t seen a _blog post_ making _this point_ that RTO would cause more sickness. They were never addressing the claim that it does or does not. They were talking about the novelty of this argument for them.
You might want to slow down a bit and re-read what the person actually said in their comment.
Just as a tip: the links between comments and replies on HN is pretty thin so it can be hard to follow the connection between a comment and what it's reply to.
I get fewer (not none!) of this kind of misunderstood reply after adopting a habit of quoting the specific part of a post which I'm replying to, especially when that post makes more than one point.
So in this case (and this is mainly for the benefit of anyone still confused about what happened in this thread):
> > I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point.
> Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?
It spreads disease and increases sick days and terrible for green house gas reductions and increases inflation (increases demands for gas). The thing that gets me is the same people preaching the world is going to end because of these gases demand we continue these practices. The environmental groups are silence. Who is lying to whomp? Is it all some self delusion.
I resisted RTO as much as anyone but eventually I took a job that required me to be in office 3 days a week because, well, didn’t have much of a choice.
I have to say being in the office has been better than I expected. I recently got together with a group of former coworkers, who I worked with for many years at a startup, and have kept in touch all these years later. We noted that this kind of friendship definitely would not have happened if we were working remote.
My only thing is, I would rather have the flexibility to choose where I work, even if only at the team level. It gets cold where I live in winter, I would love to be able to go stay someplace warm during those months, and come to the office when I want to be there.
I feel like for me, this debate isn’t really about working in the office vs working from home, it’s about control. Companies have realized that they gave over too much soft power to employees during the pandemic, so they are now working together to claw it back. They could care less where we work, as long as they are the ones in control.
I just turned down a job that I would've been amazing at, because they're in person 3 days a week.
They lost literally tens of millions in grant opportunities that I have written and the experience I bring, because they wouldn't go remote 3 days instead of just 2.
I understand wanting some time in person, absolutely. I hate it, but it does make certain processes much easier. But to not negotiate at all, even when the candidate is perfect for the job and happy with everything else? Ridiculous.
How did you get to the point of turning it down before finding out about the in person days?
I asked about remote and was told the company was up to 4 days a week remote.
Apparently I should've asked specifically about the role? Even though we were already talking about that role?
I've noticed companies that recruit on LinkedIn marking roles as remote, then at the very bottom of the long job description it mentions that it is in fact not remote. I could see someone making it through the initial calls without it coming up. I'd go so far as to say some companies may use it as a backhanded tactic.
Asking whether the job requires in person presence is usually among the first questions to ask in an interview (e.g., the screening part)
I’m sure the person that took that job is grateful.
It's still open. So instead of filling it with a massively qualified candidate, they chose pain.
Maybe they decided that your qualifications did not outweigh how much of a pain in the ass you seem to be.
I suppose the bet from executives is: recession/influx of former government employees will allow for relatively easy replacement of candidates. I am not sure which consideration is more cynical and/or misguided.
I would tend to agree RTO is primarily about middle managers and control
Though, I think the following could suffer from post-hoc rationalization fallacy:
> We noted that this kind of friendship definitely would not have happened if we were working remote.
Yes, I am great work friends with some of my former colleagues from foreign offices that I rarely saw in person. Similarly have good friends on my current fully remote team. I also have good friends from the fully in office era.
Turns out it's more on you as a person to figure out friendship than arbitrary spatial collocation.
Is it? The social ties that get built are stronger with in person interactions for me too. It’s not totally a wild hypothesis.
Depending on your home, it is often easy to create strong social ties with your neighbours or within your neighbourhood. Especially if you have kids.
Then the anecdote would be different. Definitely post-hoc since there's also plenty of workplaces you never end up with friends from. I am reasonably outgoing and have kept only a handful of friends from various past jobs. Mostly one group is still mostly friends (but we co-founded together so perhaps an unusual group).
Are you a boomer? Most of Gen Y/Z has totally digital friend groups through Discord.
I have the opposite problem as you: I've done tech all my life but live in a place where there are few tech opportunities, and it's a bit late in my life to switch to being a longshoreman. So I kind of have to find remote opportunities, even as it becomes more difficult to do so.
There’s what I view as a common misperception embedded in the article. RTO isn’t about empty real estate, or not mostly. Leases can be broken, everything is subject to negotiation. Sure, there’s a cost, but it could be paid.
It’s not about real estate, it’s about power. For a brief period, during the great resignation, executives felt the sting of at will employment, a weapon that was never meant to be used against them. RTO is about showing us all who is really in charge.
I run a remote company, so I don't have skin in trying to convince anyone that RTO is a good idea. And there might be some truth to this in a wider, more systemic sense, in that employers and employees are always in some degree of zero-sum negotiation. But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
Sure. Lots of talk by executives about reining in the “sense of entitlement” in the post Covid era. Worked in middle management, heard it endlessly. I’m glad to hear it’s not universal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Yea, the company that I left due to RTO a while ago laid it out very clearly as about a sense of "fairness" towards the jobs that had to be done in person. That they couldn't allow the developers to keep working from home because it wouldn't be "fair" to the other teams that they didn't get the "perk" of WFH.
It was decidedly an org that felt like it resented the things it needed to do in order to compete for dev talent, and made very clear over time that it felt like it was overpaying us and other more "blue collar" roles in the company were more honorable and valuable.
> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers [...]
This still seems a lot like RTO being used as a weapon. The only difference is they aren't being cruel for the sake of it (which is undoubtedly rare), but they have cruel intentions nevertheless.
> usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work
So, it is about wanting to assert control. Because they think "abusing" remote work is when workers have more control of their circumstances and don't have to break their backs or brains for their salary.
The kind of abuse I (and they) are thinking of are things like "working four different jobs and half-assing all of them" or "outsourcing your job to some guy in the Philippines".
You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well.
If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
> But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for
Some work might be harder to quantify, but... for a lot of work, there's deadlines. If you need to get a UI screen working to some spec by Feb 1, and Feb 1 comes and goes and it's not done, isn't that some indication that work is getting done or not?
Do they really care if someone 'does the job' or 'delivers the results'? Sometimes there's not much difference, sometimes there's a huge difference.
If someone can do a day's work in an hour and disappear for the rest of the day: good on them, assuming it's not rushed I'd prefer that to somebody useless but glued to a desk 9-5.
Feels like a fringe belief here, and only really feasible in flat, lean orgs with semi-technical stakeholders and no BSers. [So probably <0.001% of tech industry currently]
If that were actually the choice on offer, in such simple and clear terms, that would be one thing.
But it isn't. There's a reason that every company wants that top 0.001%. Employees who give a damn and can be trusted to get things done effectively without supervision or managerial pressure are rare. Even at the best organizations, they're often a minority. At weaker organizations, and (typically) at older and larger ones, they're somewhere between "very rare" and "totally nonexistent".
If you're the latest highly-funded startup, maybe you can pay enough and create a good enough work environment to attract that person. But what if you're a random 30-year-old contracting firm in Overland Park, Kansas, paying $85k a year for software engineers? Do you think you'll attract that vanishingly rare talent? Can you rely on the idea that all of your engineers are so motivated and so skilled?
If you want to argue for that level of managerial hands-off-ness, you can do that. It's a legitimate managerial philosophy, and it might even be the right one! But I think it's hard to deny that many people don't think that's the right managerial philosophy, and that's all that they need to believe to favor RTO without any particular malice.
My point isn't to argue for RTO. Again, I run a remote company, and if you ask me, I'll tell you your company should probably be remote, too (depending on exactly what you do). My point is to argue that people who are arguing for it need not be doing so out of any particular malice.
Okay, and does your UI screen have some quiet bug that won't come up for a year? Does it introduce some unnecessary tech debt? Did the engineer implementing it notice some accessibility or consistency issue that wasn't caught by the product team? Does it account for some weird edge case? Is it performant? Does it handle IE6? Did it incorporate some package with a security vulnerability?
And why Feb 1? Who decides what the reasonable timeline is? How sure are you that they aren't playing political games? How do you measure their performance? Did the engineer abandon some on-call thing to get it done? Did they pull a more senior person off of their job to help? Did the manager who gets blamed for all this choose who to hire?
Management isn't binary in this way, and when managers try to make it binary, a lot of people (rightly) complain. And I'd bet that many of the people who complain about that are exactly the same people who are here arguing for remote work (not least because I am in both groups).
Quantifying work to such an extent that you can detect any slacking or poor-quality work is one of the fastest ways to make it horrible for employees. Unscrupulous employees abuse Goodhart's Law to hell and back, scrupulous ones get punished for doing important work that didn't make it onto the quantified metrics, and work becomes more about covering your ass than it is about getting stuff done.
> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company,
Well sure. Just because they think it's a more effective way to run their company doesn't mean that their understanding of "more effective" isn't equivalent to exercising more control.
> But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
People are perfectly capable of thinking about things in terms that are inconsistent with their underlying motivations. Dog whistling in politics works and is necessary because explicit racism turns off a substantial part of the population that nevertheless remains open to more indirect forms of racist policy and language. Thus, dropping n bombs morphed into "welfare queens." While such voters may be uncomfortable with outright bigotry, dog whistling rhetoric still appeals to them because on some level they are not entirely comfortable with true racial equality and integration. i.e., they harbor racial animus that motivates racist beliefs.
Similarly, managers and executives may not feel comfortable speaking explicitly in terms of exercising power or control over their employees while still acting out of a subconscious need to exercise that very power or control. Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations. Others adopt similarly indirect language and comparable positions without being consciously aware of the emotional needs motivating their choices. Still others legitimately believe in their pro-RTO position without necessarily experiencing any ulterior motive.
> because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work
Lack of trust in their workers is a failure of leadership. Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more, they impose an extremely unwelcome cost on those employees. I don't see how that is any better than thinking about the problem in terms of raw power dynamics.
> or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative
Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees. It's an example of attribute substitution. They don't know how to measure actual merit or hard work, so they measure visible, loosely correlated behaviors. Again, this is a failure of leadership, and a failure to establish systems of accountability that can function in a remote environment.
It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader. Especially because an organization that cannot hold employees accountable in a remote environment will be unlikely to do so in the office either. So far, the overwhelming majority of the published data around remote work and the rigorous analyses based on those data strongly suggest RTO policies damage rather than improve productivity. Likely precisely because organizations with poor organizational mechanisms around accountability continue to perform poorly in office, whereas those with strong accountability perform even better remotely.
When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy, it makes sense to consider what their ulterior motives might be. Many ambitious leaders possess a deep psychological need to exercise power over others. That's what makes them ambitious. In the absence of any reasonable justification for RTO, it is thus not unreasonable to attribute their position to that need for control rather than accepting the insufficient and unconvincing excuses they explicitly offer for their position.
> Almost certainly organizational leaders do not form a homogenous block here. Some of the leaders proposing these RTO policies are intentionally disguising their true motivations by using indirect language because they know their true beliefs are socially unacceptable and they do not want to incur the social cost of honestly representing their motivations.
That's possible, yes. But I'm in as good as position as anyone to know, and as far as I can tell, that does not appear to be true of any of the people I'm interacting with. (I do agree with your preceding point, but that's a bit off-topic.)
> Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more
Accountability trades off against other things, though. If it's by some objective standard, you run into Goodhart's Law almost immediately. If it's by subjective standards, you run into politics and personal biases (the exact biases you're concerned about, by the way!). It's this effect to "improve accountability" that leads to metrics on your git commits or programs that watch whether you're moving your mouse or stack-ranking or whatever else.
You could say "well they should improve their accountability to something not stupid" - sure, but organizational and managerial talent is limited. You don't run a business in an abstract ideal vacuum, you run it in a real world of human beings who are sometimes selfish, biased, petty, inattentive, stupid, egotistical, or any number of other things.
Given the practical fact that accountability has costs and is often done badly, avoiding the need for two much of it is not as unreasonable as it sounds.
> Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees.
I agree with that, yes. Hustle culture is not a good thing. But buying into something dumb is different from malice or some deliberate effort to suppress workers.
> It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader.
Even if there isn't a moral difference (and I think there is probably one, for reasons already described), there is a practical difference in the nature of the problem and the solutions to it.
> When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy
But I do think they justify it - or at least, that a reasonable person could think that they do. I think you're sort of assuming management of spherical cows on a frictionless plane here, without any of the extremely messy business than comes with any organization involving a large number of human beings.
Yep, noticed the same. I and others have pressured executives to give exact argumentation with data and motivation.
All 7 of those people (in 3 different contracts) have failed to do so. At one point they said a variation of "because I say so" and that was that.
A lot of more liberal-leaning people don't understand the power-play games that many of the people on top love to play. One could argue some of them long stopped being there for the money and only do it for the power-play, even.
For smaller companies yes leases can be broken but for others spending billions building college like campuses where they sublease space to businesses to sell to employees part of their worth is connected to real estate value. Others getting tax breaks by having people in an office in a downtown core.
For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate.
For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.
It’s also a way to cut your labor costs without having to fire people which seems to be the latest trend.
Yeah, well, see, if you're an exec and you didn't like feeling "the sting of at will employment", forcing RTO is a great way to feel it again.
When you work in an open office everyone ends up just talking on Slack most of the time anyway. Except those people who have no sense of boundaries, and will gladly invade your personal space and interrupt your train of thought at any time for any reason, leading to a constant state of anxious hypervigelence preventing you from ever fully concentrating on something.
My employer invested tens of millions in telepresence, telecommuting and remote working options. When the pandemic hit they got Zoom scaled up and working for tens of thousands of employees. Which it did, beautifully.
Now that the pandemic is over, we're back to mandatory 3 days per week, minimum, with more for higher level roles. Yet except for a recently acquired employee my entire team is remote. So, WFH and meet on Zoom or sit in an office and meet on Zoom.
Unfortunately the sales people are the policy makers and they can't seem to wrap their heads around doing anything that isn't face to face. Yet we started on this investment in remote work to control travel costs.
"Open office" - I've never been healthier (and fitter) than since I went remote. Not sharing an open office with coughing sneezing co-workers who would come in, no matter what, and commuting on trains, has been remarkable. I'd previously have 2-3 heavy colds a year. I think I've now had 1 in 5 years.
Meanwhile there are those who expect you to process every Slack ping, making them in some ways worse those who interrupt in person — since they don’t feel the distress of the person they’re interrupting through the screen.
A workplace’s culture of consideration is expressed through communication channels, but is not determined by the choice of channel.
IM's and the like are the bane of my existence. If I'm busy I can close a door or put a sign up. I can close email. Nobody expects me to immediately respond to email anyways.
But instant messages? Everyone expects instant responses. Even when their message is something like, "hey,I see you have your door closed. Are you busy?"
FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Slack pings are worse than in person interruptions. The async comms still interrupt the recipient but also force the sender to wait for a response.
Pre-covid you could tell when someone was busy based on body language and avoid interrupting them.
I feel this. The, let's hash this out asynchronous synchronously over 30 minutes rather than talk for 3
> people who have no sense of boundaries, and will gladly invade your personal space and interrupt your train of thought at any time for any reason
You gotta game the system and learn some basic acting skills. Twitch your face. Pause just a little too long before responding. Get up in the middle of a sentence to stare out the window and just stop talking, forcing the other party to ask you to continue. Laugh obnoxiously loud at your own jokes. Stall, delay, confuse, whatever you do: make the experience not worth repeating for the offender.
Get bipolar: be the very best person you can be on Slack. But be a complete hebephrenic bug eyed lunatic when someone interrupts you IRL.
You know you can turn Slack off right?
I’m a huge proponent of async messaging (email) over sync… but if you are in the office, turn that nonsense off if you need to get work done.
That's entirely my point? You can turn Slack off. You can't turn off the coworker who constantly comes to your desk to interrupt your thoughts.
You know your employer can see if you've turned Slack off, right?
I would prefer to WFH 100%.
However I’m a team lead. And no matter what I try I can’t train my juniors as quickly remotely.
My seniors and I can show them how to work, and solve problems so much faster on-site. We catch bad habits sooner and in-still the teams approach to working via example. Which so far I’ve found hardest to replicate remotely.
Yes you can pass skills on remotely. But many people aren’t willing to spent extended periods on a call. And it is time people need more than anything else at the start of their career.
Many juniors - understandably - don’t know what skills they are lacking. And those that do don’t know which to focus on first. Only 10/20% have the right personality type to self-source these skills independently. They need our help. Just as we needed the previous generations help. And to provide that we need to really get to know them.
When’s the last time a junior engineer was hired at a US tech office? Onboarding hasn’t been a thing for us in the Bay Area since ZIRP.
Difficulty training juniors is easily the weakest argument I’ve heard related to RTO.
I’ve trained dozens of people remotely and helped them level up. Sure it’s not the most *effective*, but given the immense benefits of WFH, I have no problem sacrificing the ease of my job so that my juniors can have a better life.
If you cannot train your juniors up remotely, that’s a management failing. Why punish them for that?
In a world with any worker’s rights, you wouldn’t be able to.
>If you cannot train your juniors up remotely, that’s a management failing. Why punish them for that?
That's an unnecessarily aggressive and uncharitable read of the situation. While it may be possible to train up juniors remotely, many people (myself included) have given it a serious try and have found it far too risky to be worth the effort. An intellectually honest manager will say "it's not for me, I can't do it," and their higher-ups have to make a value judgment about whether it's worth it to force them into a shape that they're not, or accept that the tried-and-true method of socializing juniors in-person is still valid.
If you're honestly curious as to why it's so hard, my experience is that it's a socialization task: you have to make the junior folks feel like they're part of the team and have standing to ask questions. That's really hard to do when everyone is just words on a screen, or occasionally floating heads on a video chat. Embodied communication has something that gets lost online.
Remote work is about collaboration. That requires an effort from both sides to make it work. For sure, management has a huge responsibility. But putting every failure on management is overly simplistic.
Putting the failure of management to manage remote workers? I think that’s appropriate.
You’re now making a point which is different from the comment I replied to.
It’s a management limit. I’m not sure it’s a failing. I’m a pretty good manager and I’ve worked with some great ones. All of us are better with access to frequent informal communication, shared meals, and walking.
This isn’t about punishment: it’s about how we organize ourselves if we want to create together. I write LARPs collaboratively, and I play tabletop RPGs, too—and those are more fun and more productive and creative in person.
You have zero data to support that. It’s just your gut. Forgive me for not believing in your gut.
Clearly you have zero idea about remote working and remote management. I've been working 15 years remote and 5 years manage/mentoring. The junior is as much as, if not more, responsible for the growth as the manager/mentor is responsible. You can drag a horse to river but can't make it drink and all that.
Workers have all the right they need.
Don't like RTO? Leave, find a job which allows WFH or go start your own company.
Many people overlook a key benefit of remote work: the ability to live in cities where good companies don't have offices. E.g, living in Montpellier while working for a company based in Paris (700 km away), living in Düsseldorf while working for a company headquartered in Munich (600 km away), or living in Seville while working for a company in Barcelona (900 km away).
I'm not talking about global hiring (something many people don't like because salaries tend to go down), but companies allowing remote work within the same country. This, imo, is the greatest advantage of remote work
I go to the office a couple of times per week. Those are largely unproductive days, and being in the office is a massive waste of time.
If the company is willing to sacrifice productivity to pretend any collaboration is happening because butts in seats look nice, oh well.
Yet the deadlines don't move to accommodate this.
The thing I keep coming back to here is how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.
I understand that most of us worked our asses off to get to a skilled position and that in many ways it makes far more sense to be able to work from home. I myself am being dragged back into the office 5 full days a week and it's a 45 minute one way commute on a good day, so I'm salty about that. But hearing people who live 10 minutes from the office in $450,000 houses complaining loudly in the lobby about being forced back into the office right near the minimum wage security desk is a little uncomfortable.
Never think that pure hard work leads to success, placement, privilege, or anything else. The farmhand in a field works harder than 99.9% of high paid tech employees. Hard work is important, sure, but it’s all about relative value contribution in the market, nothing else.
It’s easy to find another farmhand, it’s hard to find another ML engineer
I agree, and I've argued vocally against RTO from my privileged position because I have that value that makes me hard to replace.
I just want to make sure that we're not forgetting the people who weren't able to become high-level ML engineers for various social and economic reasons and are locked into 10 hour hard days in person.
A lot of people bullied the ever hell out of the current ML engineers today. A lot of those bullies are only just now experiencing the economic effects of their actions from 10-30 years ago.
Kids knew which kids they’d have to clean to the house of 20 years in the future and they intuitively want to knock those elite kids down a peg while they still can.
Never forget the extreme resentment that those around nerds have for a nerds mind. When this country stops treating nerds like shit and celebrating anti-intellectualism, I’ll start being worried about the plight of the lowly security guard.
I think the nuance here is while we should continue to push for WFH, we should also be aware of the feelings of people around us when we speak from our privileged position. This doesn't just apply to WFH, we should keep other people's feelings in mind when arguing from any position of privilege. Software developers are extraordinarily privileged and it's important to keep this in perspective or else we will contribute to a sense of disdain toward all software developers.
Some will argue this is a talking point for anti-WFH people, but it's still a valid point to make independent of your WFH stance and as a general tip for being a decent, empathetic human being.
Your average blue collar workers benefits from the 300,000 corporate Amazonians working from home and staying off the road. He cannot avoid his commute, you can.
And frankly, stop LARP-ing as a “sympathetic to blue collar work” person. God knows you’re probably an executive using them for messaging.
When has anyone on HN ever given a fuck about blue collar workers until RTO, when these mysterious “sympathies” emerged? Of course we should support the working class, but you should’ve started a lot fucking sooner.
We should all work to end exploitation and that starts with ourselves.
Eh, the difference is that for some roles being in-person is obviously necessary for the role while in others it isn't. Most people I know working in lower-level roles in-person recognize this because they've experienced more than their share of blatant management power games themselves.
There's definitely a generational divide though. Older folks seem more likely to view being at the office as just a natural part of how work "works", while younger people are more likely to understand when it's necessary and when it isn't.
It's a different story for lower-status jobs that could be done from home but aren't allowed. But when it's such a clear signal that you aren't trusted by management/society/etc, you really do have something to resent!
Yeah, and if the homeless people outside the office heard the security guard complaining about their low pay imagine how they would feel.
The “somebody has it worse” argument always ends up pushing people to accept getting screwed over.
I'm not saying accept it. I am a vocal critic of the RTO policy at my work and have been for years.
But keeping context and perspective is important. Even in your example, it would do the security guard some good to take a moment and be grateful that he does have that minimum wage job and a place to stay.
It's not meant to encourage you to settle and get screwed over. It's meant to remind you of what you have and often those things should drive you to fight harder for other people and yourself.
While I see your point I don’t think it’s a very useful one. It’s more productive to aspire for the betterment of your own/group’s position/circumstances than to compare how other groups have it worse. The latter just brings complacency, stagnation and maybe even regression because there is always someone who has it worse and so on and so forth.
Agreed. Also, note many of these “founders” are mysteriously suddenly sympathetic to blue collar average joes when they never were before.
Thank you. Truly.
Do you consider $450k a lot for a house? That would hardly get you a shack in the Boston area.
I'm in the Atlanta area, so that's mid to high for a smallish house, yeah. Or at least it was. Prices have short through the stratosphere recently.
There are tiny little condos being built next to my office in northeast ATL that are going for a STARTING rate of over a million.
> how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.
Absolute bollocks. This is the Elon Musk screed and it's baseless. Do you think fast food workers gripe and moan when extremely well paid pilots or nurses go on strike?
Every worker wants every other worker to succeed over management.
Exactly!!! So many Muskovites won’t shut the fuck up about the blue collar workers they never mentioned until now.
I personally see WFH as a way to improve working conditions in general. Just because some jobs really need to be done in person does not automatically mean all of them should be. Similarly, not all should be RTO. As such, it is valid to point out ( and even complain ) that trying to apply 'one size fits all' RTO solution is silly at best.
And just a point of perspective, it was only recently 40h a week ( 1940 ) and child labor (1938) was not considered some sort of communist plot intended to overthrow capitalism.
I have no sympathy. America has made it so easy to convert hard work into a better job. Nowhere else on earth has it even close to this easy to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Security guards are usually security guards because they want to be (most require a concealed carry license). I do not care if they think they are underpaid. They can always snap and go murder half the building. Id rather we didn’t even have a security guard, since the tweaker whod try to come into our building to do drugs is almost certainly not going to literally shoot the place up because overpaid tech workers were talking about not like RTO…
My biggest takeaway from this was the ableist messaging:
“You cannot dangle what people need to effectively work in front of them like a carrot and subtly threaten to take it away. It’s ableist. You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features at the office, so don’t do it with that either.”
> You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features
This is only because there's usually legal protection for that kinds of accessibility features. If employers could legally, it would be way more common to threaten to take them away.
I have no doubt there are some that do so illegally.
It being legal doesn't stop it from being ableist.
You have “no doubt” that employers threaten to take away elevators?
I would agree with their sentiment. I don't know how common it would be, but it would certainly happen at least in some occasions.
When I was young, I worked in a call center in which the bathroom was taken away as a punishment for bad rates on multiple occasions, until someone called the Dept. of Labor over it.
IDK, sitting in a call center can’t be good for you. So imagine complaining at the beneficial favor they did for you.
Some infamous billionaire wanted to build mega-dorms for universities without windows. Yeah, these billionaire fucks will cut corners wherever they can.
"would"
My observation has been:
Those that are most pro back-to-office are the ones that are either very extroverted, and have human-to-human roles. Or the people that simply can't disconnect between work and home. I know some people that say they simply can't focus on work, unless they're at the workplace, or some other non-home office.
But by far, it's the extroverted managers that seem to hammer on about return to office.
They're afraid that people will see that they're not needed in the organization. It's easy to fake that when everyone is forced into the same location and the people who like to talk do just that.
My favorite environment is a 5-10 person office, no more than 5 miles from everyone’s home.
I know how to make that work in a startup, but its premise doesn’t scale beyond a pizza box.
Has anyone figured out a better way that works at 100 people?
One idea I’m curious about is pods. Could you build a small team who all live close enough together? Could they coordinate remotely with the mothership?
The default seems to be to just embrace remote.
Or issue a RTO as a ‘polite’ way to decimate the team and reduce burn.
At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet.
Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situations would be handled by a phone call or email.
Meeting in the coffee room to chat becomes rare because schedules and tastes (eg. office coffee versus off-site coffee, bagged lunches versus going out) differ. Also there's too many people and too much churn to really get to know anybody.
Arranging meeting times becomes difficult outside smaller 5-10 person units so asynchronous communication becomes predominant.
What I've seen work is not trying to co-locate a full team at all. Doing so only leads to silos and hiring difficulties. Instead have small offices which people from a small geographic area use. Those people will be on different teams and in different departments -- which is good for inter-team communication and synergy. This is exactly what offices normally miss because teams are co-located resulting in a relatively high 'distance' to build a rapport between teams.
I actually would not mind a slightly bigger org - like even up to 100 or so...but everything else you noted i'm 100% in agreement with. I'll call this the "village way"...because what you noted - to me at least - seems like how villages, small towns, whatever you want to call them had to exist a hundred years ago or so...like, not just before digital, but i mean, even when base telecom was not a common thing....so i would imagine most folks in a town/village worked for one of a few extremely local workplaces. I'm not saying having only very few employers in an area is good, since that would be giving a central group way too miuch power. But, yeah, i kinda yearn for a sort of village approach. And, yes, it could also mean that the "local pod" is everyone in the local area working together in one place, but remotely coordinating with a mothership as you put it. That all sounds pretty decent!
But, this approach is not something that powers-that-be would even begin to support...even though, i betcha, this approach would have tons of people actually invested in the success of the org because of the good that it represents in allowing people to earn a living without making commutes and such that much more difficult. I know that if my employers supoorted this sort of model, i would not only work karder, but actually give more of a damn, and really care to have the org succeed. Basically, i would contribute far more to the org. But, nah, the bosses just want to squeeze the lemons, and not care how they get their juice produced. ;-)
At my previous job I worked in a room with ~6 people, now it's a small open plan office and I hate it. I just can't focus with all the talking, noise, meetings etc. it's awful, especially with the contrast of our 2 work-from-home days per week.
Funnily enough our team lead works in a 2 person office... hmm.
So what happens when someone wants to change teams for whatever reason? Or they're presented with a new opportunity? On the other side of the city--or in a different city. Do they have to move?
There are clear flaws. I haven’t figured it out.
Being able to form and disband teams dynamically is an advantage.
That does seem to favor a big enough pool of people in the same place.
Or relying on remote for projects spanning pods.
Totally agree on the RTO forced memes. I recently participated remotely in a mostly-in-person team summit that went great. At the end of the session, Big Boss gave a rousing pep talk about how much this proved the value of in-person collaboration and my heart sank. Was that the whole point of this session, and not the technical solutions we spun? I was literally right there on the projector meeting room, and had obviously weighed in as much as anyone else. I’d been feeling hopeful because $EMPLOYER has been encouraging about the prospects of sustained remote work there, but they also own a lot of business property and I know they are going to follow suit with the others.
My boss has been trying to bully me to RTO for several months now. Unfortunately for him, he promised me verbally that this job was remote forever during the interview, and where I live verbal contracts are just as valid as contracts on paper.
Because of their bully tactics I've essentially been paid for doing absolutely nothing at home for 2 months now. They can't fire me for cause, because they did contract with me under the stipulation of WFH, and they can't lay me off without cause because they know perfectly well that I can and will sue them if they do because the reason is obvious even if not explicitly stated.
I guess the point of this post is that companies will cut off their nose to spite their face.
I'm sure this'll help provide them with a positive view on remote positions.
There should be a law that says for absolutely every job whatsoever, you are on the clock as soon as you leave your home, and 100% of all commuting expenses must be reimbursed by the employer. If employers expect you to travel to a particular place to work, they should pay for all of it including your time. The only reason this doesn't make perfect sense is because the insanity of commuting on your own dime has been normalized.
If such a law were in place almost no company would ask any employee to commute anywhere unless it were absolutely necessary. Return to office is really easy for them to ask for when they aren't the ones who have to pay for it.
If people want to live far from the office, that is not the employer's fault.
This would just mean that people living farther away would have a harder time finding jobs, or negotiating salary/promotions, because they are more expensive for their employer. Yes you could have laws making it illegal to discriminate based on commute distance, but you know that employers would find other pretexts.
I can see commuting being regarded as a total time waste requiring employer compensation in the US, where most people commuting are driving. But in countries where commuting is done via public transportation, the time spent commuting can be productively used for personal improvement in the form of reading.
Only in some cases. Often public transport at commuting hours is too crowded to practically do so, or is a bus rather than a train so that many people would get travel sick if they tried to read.
I arrived at this conclusion too after 3 years of smart working, it's unreasonable to have today an obliged/implicit sacrifice of time and money that's commuting to the work place.
Don't most people take into account requirements to commute when negotiating salary before taking a job? It should already be baked into pay.
I get some people were hired without any understanding of that during/after the pandemic and sometimes offices move, but that seems like when to renegotiate.
If employers pay for commute time they can also use home location as a hiring criterion.
Rather than sharing our own anecdotes about how we feel about RTO - maybe we can try something different and discuss the specific points raised in the article?
Particularly this point: in office collaboration is digital
I feel the other points have been hashed out to death on other similar HN discussions:
- in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
- at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
Sure, I'll bite:
> in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
Many people's adult friends come from work. Sometimes their spouse does too. I've noticed a phenomenon where more junior team members in particular would go into the office, even though the senior folks rarely did, and I think part of this is just to meet people because they may not have built up a friend group in their city yet.
> at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
That's the case for me, although it depends a lot on your physical home situation and the social dynamic at home. I think for some folks the office is an escape.
Out of curiosity, assuming some companies which embraced hotdesking in the last few years have also since implemented some form of return to office mandate, has it come along with dedicated desks for each person? I don't mind a few days a week in an office, I absolutely hate having no clue where I'm going to be sitting those days.
One of my wife’s female bosses was completely lacking in empathy when my wife had our baby. She wanted my wife to come in every single day after her maternity leave even though her company was hybrid. According to her, taking care of a baby and toddler is no big deal. It was so disheartening especially coming from a woman.
And then she revealed that she had a nanny flown in from her country and the nanny handled everything kid related. Don’t be this kind of a boss.
> The point is micromanagement and needing to justify the large office spaces they invested into.
Justifying office space is not a useful business strategy. I think it’s best to treat people you disagree with as reasonable and consider what their motivations could be. In this case I think it’s clear there is one big one—-productivity. It’s clear that some people (not everyone!) use remote work as a way to do minimal work (see r/overemployed). Moreover there are some benefits to in person collab in terms of being able to discuss things quickly and rely on people to be there.
And I say this as a remote worker who loves it and never wants to RTO. But I don’t assume the other side is acting in bad faith, I think there’s pros/cons to both. Mostly remote work is great, but not always. Sometimes my teammates randomly don’t respond to me on an urgent issue and I have no recourse. Sometimes they aren’t making progress on work I am counting on and I can’t tell if they are even working.
Being able to jump into a zoom call with everyone immediately outweighs trying to book a room or walking over to someone's desk. I can easily waste more time and look like I am working in the office where at home it's hard to coverup nothing has been done.
There has been some bad faith over hiring and then forcing rto to avoid termination payouts. We see Musk plans to do the same even moving government offices to states like Wyoming.
Most companies are not bad faith actors just copying others.
Funny, I find the expectation of having to immediately join ad-hoc zoom calls, interrupting me while I'm busy working, to be a pretty huge negative.
I miss being able to look over and check to see if someone was busy before interrupting them. I also miss being able to read body language during meetings and not having to stare at the camera the entire time or having people talk over each other repeatedly due to network delays.
It's not that nuanced guys. zirp ended they did layoffs, and they got bad PR for it. Now they have to do layoffs again but they don't want the bad PR. The people at the top couldn't possibly, with all the time in the world, make an actually informed rational decision about who to cut so an RTO where completely random people quit is just as good as "picking".
I wouldn’t sweat it. The market has a way of working these things out.
Want top tier talent but can’t afford it in your area? There’s likely a cheat code available to you now.
It’s inevitable that zoning laws will change. When the bag holders for corporate real estate have an exit strategy, I wonder if we won’t magically find the question of RTO features a lot less in the ambiance of life. I don’t know enough to say whether it might be true that the kinds of people to have large investments in media conglomerates are the kinds of people who’d consider large investments in corporate real estate as a sound and obvious diversification strategy (and vice versa).
"At my place, we don’t innovate, we don’t develop new products for a mass market; we do lots of data entry, emails, and writing reports in SharePoint or with comments and track changes in Word."
"...we are not designers or knowledge workers solving issues, we handle data!"
The second sentence is what got me.
I know it's implied as the author's perspective, but speak for yourself.
I am a developer, designer, knowledge worker, and my products are used to solve business issues. There would be no point moving data around and making dashboards, products, automation, except for solving business problems or pushing the bottom line up through innovation.
The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.
I agree with the general thrust of the article, that in person routine working isn't needed. I work fully remote and collaborate better in many respects that way.
There is also value in having face to face meetings and conversations, body language, microexpressions, aspects of tone are all significantly more palpable in person.
BUT, that doesn't mean we should be in the office all the time, just for occasional face to face meetings. My employer is in another state, I visit for a bit every quarter or two.
It also doesn't change the fact that the return to office is motivated by micromanagement and stop losses on real estate.
“ The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.”
But people conflate the needs of the business with the “needs” of the executives or investors. I have little faith that any exec that I have met that is capable of putting their own ego aside and honestly describe how RTO helps the business. Maybe it does help the business, but I haven’t seen anyone make that case.
I take issue with these statements as if they apply to most workers:
>You’re asking me as an immunocompromised and chronically ill person in pain and dealing with fatigue to show up and do the same stuff I do at home so others can play family at work?
>Home office is the only way for many people to have a decent work output because family, household, caretaking, further education, illness and free time activities are better taken care of this way and people can work focused in silence without noise and interruption.
How is one taking care of those things mentioned and still "focusing in silence without noise and interruption"?
Time slicing? Being able to effectively 'work from home' may often mean 'work as productively at 7pm as at 2pm'. Working from an office often (not always) implies synchronous work with others, which often is tied to the 9a-5p 'office day'. Companies that embrace 'work from home' usually can accommodate more asynchronous work from folks as well.
My job is still remote but pay is now based on zip code for both new hires and for self-driven relocation. If I move and the zip code is not near one of the few office locations in major cities, my pay and/or the pay band for my job title is adjusted.
I was hired during COVID with the expectation of a fully remote first policy, for good. Now it's this micromanagement where I need C-level approval to change my address. And there are one-off exceptions all over the place both for hiring and for relocation.
It tells me that leadership and the board don't give a shit about me. I am a cog in their machine. Expendable.
I am quietly looking for a new job and not stretching myself as much at my current job. Not coasting, but also not answering those slack pings as quickly, or referring people to the help desk process instead of solving their problem then and there. Putting me and my needs first more often.
Truly remote first companies should be at an advantage both for hiring and for cost efficiency.
They absolutely are at an advantage in hiring - our data set has remote companies with 5-10x the candidate pool of non-remote ones, even ignoring differences in salary asks.
The question is: are they at an advantage in effectiveness? I think they probably are, but it seems like a reasonably open question, one that we should see an answer to in the coming years. If in five or ten years remote companies aren't crushing non-remote ones, that's going to be pretty strong evidence that there is good reason for in-office work.
Is anyone aware of a study between political affiliation and RTO views? I feel like it's become just yet another political/social echo chamber warfare topic and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a huge correlation between political ideology and RTO opinion.
Liberals dominate the jobs where RTO is even an option. Conservatives are trying to eliminate it from the US government for a reason.
It’s entirely political. Conservatives hate the idea that “lazy” limp wristed soy boy ML engineers can make more money than their good old boys making tractors at catapiller.
Yup. And in typical conservative fashion, they’d rather denigrate and ruin the lives of the talented liberals than pull up their own bootstraps.
maybe this is an unpopular opinion but this culture of aggressively and publicly airing all grievances of current employer seems counterproductive for the job search when this person leaves due to said grievances. or maybe it's just a pre-match for future companies that "appreciate" this type of transparency. :shrug:
I'd bet that most people agree with you, which is why the people who actually do it get a lot of attention--from the other folks who want to, but can't. This particular topic notwithstanding, employers have so much leverage that it's risky to stick your neck out but I'm thankful there are people who do it.
I’d rather hire a brave asshole than a compliant, meek little ship.
That’s what life is all about, right? The job search, the grind, the hustle…
It’s an anonymous blog…?
Remote working is the future. The forced commuting days are so silly. My open plan office is like a call center with everyone on different meetings. Sometimes 2 or 3 people sitting together are on Teams/Zoom calls because 1 or 2 others aren't in the office.
I've worked remotely my entire career since the 90s with only a few short exceptions. It's a dealbreaker for me and always has been. I do not like to have people around when I'm working, I don't do office politics, I'm not willing to keep my mouth shut when Ted from Accounting starts talking right wing bullshit, and I'm more productive sitting on the patio of a cafe than I am in some shitty cubicle. On the few occasions I ever was required to come into an office and desperate enough for a paycheck that I did it, I always figured out the company was shady somehow. I'm closer to the end of my career, such as it is, than the beginning, but I'll be damned if I'll ever work in an office again. If you rented some luxurious ass space somewhere and spent your seed money on expensive furniture that's your problem. I need a laptop and a chair and a table and coffee and nicotine and for everyone to shut the fuck up and quit bothering me so I can do my job.
I think a lot does boil down to generational differences in real estate entry prices.
Sometimes I think millennials fell into a trap following GenX back to urban living, but missed out on the sweet spot late 90s/early 00s where cities were attractive but also cheap.
I worked with guys 10 years older than me who bought apartments at 1/5 the prices my generation saw, but had starting salaries more than 1/2 of what ours were.
> Sometimes I think millennials fell into a trap following GenX back to urban living
You should be more specific, because the cities were always inhabited. Which millennials are you talking about?
For example in NYC, population peaked in 1950s around 8M, went down to 7M by the 80s. Losing 12% of your population can make housing pretty affordable. Population started increasing in the 90s, re-crossing 8M around 2000... and ~9M today.
If one wants to be really pedantic, a lot of that growth was in outer boroughs that were relatively sparse in the early/mid 1900s.
Manhattan is still below its peak population of ~2.3M in the early 1900s. Fortunately we don't have overcrowded tenement housing anymore. Manhattan population was about 2M in 1950 and bottomed around 1.4M in 1980s.. so a 30% draw, and is now at about 1.7M.
That last point about a large retirement effect looming is a pretty salient movement to bring up.
I wonder if most of the RTO-enforcing people will be swept up in that 50%.
where does that number come from? and i cant imagine it applies equally across industries if it is true. 50% of software related job cant be 5 years to retirement?
It’s BS through and through.
Covid led in the most early retirement ever seen. We’re are not expecting a spike in retirement by any measure that I have seen.
Yeah that’s fair, I didn’t do any research on behalf of the author, and they didn’t cite any sources.
I do think that there a lot of baby boomers hanging out in the workforce still, Covid just pushed the RIP (retired in place) people over the edge.
Reflecting on my place of employment though, I can only come up with a handful of people planning to retire in the next year.
We also fired a lot of them recently, so there’s that.
I'm currently negotiating a deal to get relocation assistance in exchange for being in the office sometimes, on a job that was intended to be fully remote. In my case, I need to leave my current state of residence for health reasons soon, and this company's campus is attractive enough that I'm excited anyways.
They sold you on the college campus? I guess it is working.
To the people here talking about switching to fully remote positions (while taking a pay cut) - how and where did you find your new positions?
FAANG are not-so-subtly forcing people to quit because they over-hired in the last years. Slow clap.
And if people are just interchangeable widgets, that's a clever strategy.
People aren't, though. The most valuable people are the ones who have the most options, precisely because they are valuable. If you play that game, you're going to differentially lose your most valuable people. That's not a smart move.
I think there is a fallacy “if I am more productive at home than therefore all must be more productive at home”. Consider though that the most sophisticated companies in the world when it comes to analyzing human behavior are asking for employees to return to work, do you really think they would do this if this meant a productivity decrease. I’m suggesting the harsh reality is that while you may be more productive at home the majority of your colleagues are not and they unfortunately have ruined it for everybody. I don’t think this has anything to do with sunk office space costs, it’s about bottom line productivity.
Work is not only about what the company wants but also about what the employee needs. I don't see much difference between the ability to work from home and the ability to avoid working on weekends; the later is an acquired rights in many places, the former can come over time.
This is a free correction for over hiring force someone to pull the kids out of school and move across the country or lose severance.
Are you saying: our colleagues have performed poorly while WFH, and because of their poor performance, management is forcing RTO on everyone?
No one is going back to the office full time.
I would never work in an office again or for a company where the leadership pretends like there's some value to working in-person. My time and space are way too valuable to give them to some company. They can get my work on my own terms.
office work does not have to suck. main thing is to have small offices, 3-4 people per room. no open spaces. flexible working hours(if there is no trust between the employer and the employee, don't take the job in the first place). very few mandatory meetings. commuting should be no longer than 30 minutes by any means. good lavatory/facilities(you'd be surprised how important this is). small kitchen(home meal prep, or making simple lunch from scratch if needed), good dining and shopping options close by. air conditioning. no direct sunlight or strong neon lights. good furniture so you don't feel like you have travelled back in time into the 90s. good chairs and large computer monitors. and that is about it. it is not that hard to offer good working conditions.
Sounds great if it wasn't for the powers that be still being infatuated with their open plan hellscape.
my points is that employees need to be picky. let the free market sort itself out.
This is not a good article. It has pretty much no argument against RTO and is entirely one-sided, not even mentioning any of the real advantages of working in an office.
Hopefully by this point everyone understands that office working has significant upsides for some jobs/people, and only downsides for others. Can we please stop saying "it's good" or "it's bad". It's like arguing whether marmite tastes nice.
For me, as a lowly code monkey I could never work anywhere where going to the office was mandatory again. The advantages aren't worth the commute. I would imagine if I was in upper management I might be more tempted though. Zoom just can't match real life.
I think OP is not arguing if working in the office is good or bad. The point, as far as I can understand, is about the way the return to office is presented to the workers. With sugary lies and fake cheer. It's like they're addressing toddlers in preschool.
> We are not pioneers or a Silicon Valley tech firm!
Working in a silicon valley tech company your still not innovating, I spend lot of my time making bullshit suck less.
And if I was innovating, and for the few times I did actually get to do something cool, I want a quiet room with no distractions so I can focus and research and hack on things. I think one of my most productive and innovative times at work I did a work-cation for a couple week, to a different timezone by 3 hours, no people interutpions and no slack interruptions.
I’m so disgusted by the entitlement of “founders” and business folks who have never coded, forcing the technical people who make their lives possible to suffer for a pointless commute.
It’s to the point that I realized the tech industry may not be for me. I don’t want to be a shill for Bezos or Musk or some other tasteless billionaire. I may opt to leave entirely.
I’ve started religiously studying for the LSAT. Maybe if I work hard, I can push to make America better so these insipid fucks cannot play with our lives.
You are going to love law firms, then.
This article and many in the comments represent the extreme sense of entitlement that tech workers have earned.
This attitude that you're a rockstar dev who doesn't need to collaborate closely with other people, that your coworkers are a tedious distraction, that your boss just doesn't understand, is completely childish. You are just trying to paint this picture of yourself as a lone genius. In the back of your mind, you think you could run the company all on your own, but you're wrong.
Generously, maybe 1-5% of people on HN actually embody this 2010s docudrama archetype, but it's not possible that all of you are that guy.
Why don't you just quit and put up your shingle as a contractor? You can set your own hours. You will have no pesky coworkers breathing around you. You can sleep until 2PM as long as your work gets done. You can be your own man. That is, unless, you don't think you could get a contract on the merits of your work...
My bosses already don’t believe I need to collaborate closely with my coworkers in person, or they wouldn’t have shifted three quarters of my team’s headcount offshore.
The sole content of the RTO “collaboration” controversy as applied to these big global companies is whether it’s better to join Zoom calls from your desk in an open office, or from home. The answer to that is obvious to anyone who’s tried it.
Tech offices only work to the extent that everyone in them is wearing noise canceling headphones all the time - a technological simulation of not being there.
Oh no, if only it were possible to collaborate without being forced into an office! Hopefully we can invent some sort of technology for communicating asynchronously to make this possible.
It's perfectly possible to collaborate remotely, but the casual contempt many of you display towards your coworkers shows that you do not play nice with others - remote or in person.
Ehh, you don't need to be pals with your coworkers to have a healthy professional relationship with them.
It tends to work pretty well remotely too. You don't need to be in person to collaborate when needed.
lol, “entitlement”? Do you believe companies pay over $200k out of charity? They pay what they have to pay, and that $200k is artificially lowered by illegal backroom deals by the FAANG cartel.
You sound like a bitter contractor. And even if you aren’t, support your fellow proles.
I'm not a contractor. I'm saying, if I were you, I wouldn't be pissing and moaning about the terms under which I'm being given $200k a year to drink smoothies and pretend to do engineering work.
That's very entitled of you, to consider that someone else's salary is not worth what they work. You should display a little more respect for other people's efforts instead of considering that they are getting some sort of welfare payment.
Do we “pretend” to generate shareholder value?
Some people enjoy going to the office to get out of the house though. I agree some of the messaging about needing to RTO is illogical but going to an office for work can be beneficial to fighting loneliness. That shouldn’t be a reason to RTO however. I think if you don’t enjoy the office it’s time to find a remote job and that anti-return to office rhetoric doesn’t necessarily apply to every company.
Anyone younger than a boomer knows how to make friends, they don’t need office hostages for that.
working from home != working remotely
You should still have a seperation of spaces with your home and your work. If not, you focus less when working and relax less when chilling. It's doubly counterproductive.
You can have a separation of spaces within your home. I have a home office. The only time I go in there when I'm not working is if I left something there (and it's really nice that "swinging by the office to grab my earbuds" doesn't involve a commute).
As a result, I just don't think of that room as part of my home. I'm never tempted to go in there and use that room for something else. For the most part, it's as if that room only exists during the workday.
Skill issue. Newton did just fine in his home office.
In this economy?
Most can’t afford this in Europe.
Any data, bro? Or should we just take your word