If it has to be hybrid only, then how about going into office for one week a month and the employees can pick whichever days they want to go in person to office and do WFH the rest of the month. I feel like this will make employees collaborate more and choose to come in person on specific days all together.
Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
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Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#272If it really has to be hybrid only, would it be better if the in person office was set to one week a month? That way the remaining 3 weeks employees can do WFH, and also decide which one week/5days they would like to go in person.
I feel like this approach would make it more collaborative for employees as they can decide which days they want to go in person, probably pick a day when some/few office colleagues want to go into the office. Any important meetings can also be set for those days. People wouldn’t have to move to their actual cities in this fashion, also companies would still be seeing people in the office. Just a thought.
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#273IMO these people are shooting themselves in the foot long term. If companies learn to WFH full time these people will eventually be replaced with cheaper labour from oversees.
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found that it's much harder to form social bonds, especially cross-team, when working remotely and never seeing people in person. Socializing via Zoom is not the same. The lack of lunch and hallway conversation hurts a lot without even getting into the outside of work socializing. That in turn leads to minor issues exploding because no one has a sense of empathy built for anyone else.
I’ve worked at the same company for nearly 20 years. I’ve had precisely 0 lunch and hallway conversations in all of those years. Lunch time is when I go work out. If I’m not working out, I’m sitting at my my desk working. Socializing is for non-work hours. However, I’ve learned a lot more about coworkers (some of whom I’ve worked with for more than 10 years) during the pandemic from talking at the beginning of zoom c…
You sound like a fun person to work with!
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#275Can’t imagine not having at least partial WFH after this pandemic. If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. A good portion of my team is similarly minded, but management is insistent on disallowing WFH. I can’t wait to see their faces when the company bleeds massive swaths of engineering talent. It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that…
> ... the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth ... Crazy idea - install a whiteboard at home and point a 4k camera at it. The broke college student version of this involves a pen, paper, and the camera on your cellphone; it works quite well.
Oh fun, now I can watch someone think a solution on zoom. Jesus, it was painful enough doing it in person.
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it felt a bit like servitude A feudalistic remnant in the nature of corporate hierarchy is that people higher up in the hierarchy feel that this gives them inherent superiority over people lower in the hierarchy. In reality, there's no reason that someone in a corporate hierarchy needs to have their status (including compensation, etc.) determined by their place in the hierarchy. A hierarchy should just be an effic…
It's possible that the rank-and-file will only follow leaders who have been granted outsize status. That way, executive compensation would need to be high even if value over replacement executive is low.
Social hierarchies have their downsides, but if history is a guide, they are necessary. Any behavior that appears in all recorded cultures is likely to be a core survival advantage, and therefore very fundamental to us as humans operationally and unlikely to change.
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#277IMO these people are shooting themselves in the foot long term. If companies learn to WFH full time these people will eventually be replaced with cheaper labour from oversees.
Totally true. They're already being replaced domestically by cheaper labor coming here from overseas. Imagine if there wasn't all that paperwork involved and their hiring pool gets larger at the same time.
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
What people miss in these discussions about going full remote is that the market for software developers is very good right now but this won't last forever. Many companies are surely going to embrace full-remote once they have built up the right processes and infra. When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working…
I think you are very much correct - for all the people lambasting working in an office, I hope they realize it will mean they will be competing against a much larger swath of humanity. Also, I'm glad you highlighted "Mexico or Brazil". Unlike decades past where lots of outsourcing was done to India, I think many people now realize the inherent inefficiencies when teams are 12 time zones apart. The Americas don't have…
>I think many people now realize the inherent inefficiencies when teams are 12 time zones apart
Having people 12 hours offset from the US is useful if you would otherwise have to recruit US employees to work a night shift.
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched my tech company to full WFH. I also implemented detailed surveillance on all employees, which I don’t disclose. It shows me keyboard/mouse activity levels and window update rates. It’s very interesting information, I have much better insight how and when people work, which are very different from each other. I also have other productivity measures and now I can really understand when someone is not working…
Seriously? I would never, ever consider doing that to my employees. It’s plainly obvious if someone is doing their work or not without tracking their mouse movements. What’s the name of your company so I can tell everyone I know to avoid it like the plague? My company is gingrapp.com. We’re hiring and would never subject anyone to this.
Doesn't Microsoft Teams do this stuff automatically by default?
Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
#280Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online. The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienc…
"I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first"
It will be interesting to see if discouraging WFH can actually be an advantage when it comes to recruitment and retention, but when all of the main players in tech are embracing WFH, its hard to see how smaller players can sell "no WFH" as a benefit.