Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work • Hacker News Board

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#21

Post by compumike » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

It seems to me that to have any hope in this "war" (a bit extreme, IMO, because I believe flexibility serves management and companies too), we need greater transparency about both the policies of what degrees of workplace flexibility are officially permitted, as well as the reality of how much people are able to take advantage of that flexibility in practice.

To that end, as a side project I was hacking on https://wlblist.com/surveys/aa74ed35-d51e-4d23-991d-6049e0ba... earlier this year (think the awesomeness of Levels.fyi but for non-compensation data). Never got much traction, but I still believe that collectively, we can influence the future of work if we collaborate in some form to freely and anonymously share information about the degrees of workplace flexibility that each employer offers.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#22

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

I came out of retirement last fall for a while to work at an AI startup. One of the really nice things about the all-remote setup was randomly assigned long virtual coffee breaks every week. Given that I had a lot of samples (N ~= 50) of co-workers opinions on remote vs. in office work, I feel comfortable making a generalization: young single people mostly wanted to go back to the office while people in relationships and kids at home (especially young children) really liked the flexibility and extra family time that remote work affords.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#23

Post by MattGaiser » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

Given how things are going at my company, I am not sure that hybrid can work all that well. It really just seems like remote work, but half the time you must work from an open office and hear everyone else's meetings, as many teams are spread all over the country anyway as nobody hired with location in mind during COVID.

Seems like the solution may just be a great realignment of employees. Companies can pick a side and people can move accordingly.

This industry doesn't care about tenure or retaining codebase experience anyway.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#24

Post by bigbillheck » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #9

vhold wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of it is driven by the company leadership owning very expensive real estate that would lose a lot of value once tech workers are not forced to spend money into those rental or real estate markets.

This is why zoning is really bad. Those company could have converted some of those space into housing. Provide it to the employee as benefit for cheap/free. I believe quite significant number of employee would happily live on campus.

Lots of office space is simply not suitable for conversion into living space.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#25

Post by spenczar5 » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

vhold wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of it is driven by the company leadership owning very expensive real estate that would lose a lot of value once tech workers are not forced to spend money into those rental or real estate markets.

The weird thing is that residential prices have gone way up, even in cities. It’s been a great year for the value of Seattle homes (https://www.seattlepi.com/realestate/article/seattle-2021-ho...).

So I don’t think this has to do with executives protecting home values. It might be about the business protecting the value of office buildings, though - if they own them, and don’t rent, anyway.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#26

Post by bigbillheck » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

hourislate wrote: post #3

They built billion dollar campuses that sit almost empty and the attitude now is by God we are going to fill them even if it means all our employees have to die from Corona. It all started with open offices to create less privacy and more surveillance under the guise of collaboration. Then they hired as many H1B's as they possibly could so they can work them like slaves while paying them less because fuck Americans,…

You're not wrong about the class war but please don't use the term "r.t.rd".

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#27

Post by Engineering-MD » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

notpachet wrote: post #17

sdevonoes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't they just sell real estate? I mean, remote working is not a thing for the vast majority of jobs out there, so office space is still a valuable asset. So if you are in IT and have offices that are not going to be used (because your employees want to work from home) then just sell/rent it to other companies in which their employees cannot work from home.

For smaller companies this is likely feasible. But for Apple/Google/etc, I imagine there were a lot of architectural / design decisions that went into their campuses that assumed a single monolithic tenant working in a largely open-office format. That probably makes those spaces harder to sell/rent. It's unlikely they'll find a single large buyer with the same needs. They'd probably have redesign the campuses a bit t…

Especially given all large employers will be facing exactly the same issues.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#28

Post by h4waii » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

todd3834 wrote: post #10

I’ve been part of a lot of these conversations and it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. The trick is how to please everyone. It is easy to say, let those who want to come back come and those who don’t stay home. However those that want to go back say it is because they want to be surrounded by their coworkers. Having gone back to the office vo…

Well said, I do want to point out that some of those who want to go back "to be surrounded by their coworkers" might be missing the fact that those who don't want to back might be because they don't want to be surrounded by their coworkers; they want to be surrounded by people they choose to have relationships with, not ones foisted upon them.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#29

Post by notpachet » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

todd3834 wrote: post #10

I’ve been part of a lot of these conversations and it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. The trick is how to please everyone. It is easy to say, let those who want to come back come and those who don’t stay home. However those that want to go back say it is because they want to be surrounded by their coworkers. Having gone back to the office vo…

> Many of these problems seem solvable without forcing employees who want to work remote to come in.

Agreed. Most of the issues that you highlighted that cause employees to prefer being in-office (loneliness, children and other distractions at home, work/life balance) are not attributable to being remote per se. Exacerbated by it, sure. But we should probably be addressing those problems head-on in a more intentional way.

For instance, I've seen a lot of younger devs opining about wanting to go back to the office to reinvigorate their sense of social participation. But I'm not sure that's something we should be encouraging. (It actually runs counter to the work/life balance problem you mentioned.) Compared to cultivating friendships outside of the office, socializing at work is empty calories.

Re: Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work

#30

Post by Engineering-MD » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

New_California wrote: post #14

toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

I recommend unionizing (a federally protected activity) to enable negotiating for benefits (including remote work) collectively. This presidential administration is already gunning for Big Tech, strike while the iron is hot (for more robust worker rights). You can be well compensated and still demand a seat at the corporate table as a stakeholder in a business.

Unions are cancer on private companies and should be abolished.

Unions are a counter balance to private companies. They have found demand for labour, and form a group to gain a local monopoly of labour, and use that to gain influence. It is capitalism applied to labour and to me seems poetically perfect opposite force to private companies.