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Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

bbc.com

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Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#21

Post by jcpst »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #7
ryanSrich wrote: post #3

Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no…

Can you explain your day to day? And how do you keep up with company politics, changing requirements etc?

As someone who has been fully remote the past two years, and in a team that is gradually exploring/adopting more async work practices over the past year, I would be curious to hear more too.

Our team stopped having a standup meeting- we just have a daily automated post in our chat, and we comment in the thread whenever it makes sense. If we’re working on the same thing for days with no blockers, it’s not a big deal to not provide an update.

We’ve reduced our synchronous communication by quite a bit. Some weeks I don’t have a single call I join. If you document everything well enough, you don’t really need to. I find myself on calls when I need to extract information from an architect that is just too busy to write everything down, or I’m mentoring a teammate. Or I’m in my monthly 1-on-1 with my manager.

Working outside of regular business hours is not off the table, but it is new. It helps that some of us are in the US and some in Poland. Normally, just blocking off time on the calendar and marking your status (out of office) is sufficient.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#22

Post by xeromal »

chrisseaton wrote: post #14
xeromal wrote: post #5

>Although there isn’t any hard data to show increased quits due to ending flexible work specifically, anecdotes of worker exits are starting to trickle in. Quote straight from the article.

It's a news article, not a peer-reviewed scientific study - why don't people understand the difference?

I don't really understand the point of a news article where not even a poll is used.

Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" does nothing but reinforce existing biases that everyone here will have.

Hard data will at least convince some people who have biases but trust scientific processes to change their opinions.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#23

Post by ryanSrich »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #7
ryanSrich wrote: post #3

Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no…

Can you explain your day to day? And how do you keep up with company politics, changing requirements etc?

I’m a startup co-founder, so day to day can be a lot of different things. But it’s something like this:

1. log on to Slack in the morning and see if there’s anything that needs attention. We use slack as a central hub. All of our tools funnel activity into slack. My team is small (3 full time, 2 part time contractors). Most of my team works over night and into the morning (very different time zones). Typically when I wake up, there’s a few PRs for me to review, or questions to answer on a ticket in linear. We also have a check in bot that runs once per week. No real need to do daily checkins.

2. After I catch up and respond to any questions (which most likely will be read by people that night or the next day) I see if I have any sales meetings. Since we’re a startup it’s still founders in sales mode. I might have a demo or 2 each day. This is probably my only non-async activity.

3. Outside of sales work, I also write code, review design work, and field customer support questions. So the rest of my day is a buffet of random stuff.

As far as politics go. There really isn’t any. The team is pretty small. We might have a disagreement on how a feature should be implemented or something like that, but I’m the deciding factor and everyone is a professional so it’s not a problem.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#24

Post by chrisseaton »

xeromal wrote: post #22
chrisseaton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a news article, not a peer-reviewed scientific study - why don't people understand the difference?

I don't really understand the point of a news article where not even a poll is used. Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" does nothing but reinforce existing biases that everyone here will have. Hard data will at least convince some people who have biases but trust scientific processes to change their opinions.

> Just saying "they've heard anecdotes"

That's what a journalist does. They go out and listen to people and they tell you what they're hearing and provide context to it.

You want a scientist - that's a different thing.

Both are useful in practice.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#25

Post by renewiltord »

I'm glad the market is segmenting into people who want to work remote and people who don't. I am among the latter but lots of people I respect are in the former group.

I don't think I'll work on a remote team for a long time but it's important that what's good for a lot of people is doable by them.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#26

Post by spookthesunset »

axg11 wrote: post #12
ryanSrich wrote: post #3

Of course this is happening. I’m coming up on year 10 of working remotely, and year 2 of completely async. The only forced-commute job I ever had was for 6 months right out of college. I’ve been preaching remote work for almost the entire time I’ve been doing it. I thought it would catch on much sooner, but it’s here now. I think async is the next thing that will happen. If you’re building software there’s really no…

I like the concept of async work but I’m also scared of how transactional that would make work. Most companies that preach async now have a very strong, “friendly” culture. If async catches on more widely I’m worried it would be the final push to make software development purely transactional and performance/pay would be directly tied to metrics. I enjoy the human component of work. I don’t like _all_ of my coworkers…

I am beginning to think that many remote developers will eventually become 1099 contractors who can pick up random gigs.

Because let’s be honest, the reason most of these folks are doing this is because they don’t give a crap about the specific company or anything like that. They just want to build cool shit that other people spec out. As long as the pay is competitive one day they might be building a healthcare mobile app, another day an online car dealership portal.

Honestly, I think that is where it’s headed. I know if I went back to being a dev who did 95% of my shit remote, I would much rather be a 1099 “arms length” contractor then I’d be W2 “real employee”. If you are going for the flexibility that remote brings, you might as well make it fully flexible and just be a contract developer… after all you already decided you didn’t give a shit about company politics or culture… you just want to write code! So just become a contractor!

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#27

Post by edmcnulty101 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #14
xeromal wrote: post #5

>Although there isn’t any hard data to show increased quits due to ending flexible work specifically, anecdotes of worker exits are starting to trickle in. Quote straight from the article.

It's a news article, not a peer-reviewed scientific study - why don't people understand the difference?

Good point. The modern mainstream news is worthless sensationalist click bait nowadays.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#28

Post by xeromal »

chrisseaton wrote: post #24
xeromal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the point of a news article where not even a poll is used. Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" does nothing but reinforce existing biases that everyone here will have. Hard data will at least convince some people who have biases but trust scientific processes to change their opinions.

> Just saying "they've heard anecdotes" That's what a journalist does. They go out and listen to people and they tell you what they're hearing and provide context to it. You want a scientist - that's a different thing. Both are useful in practice.

I'll agree with you that it can definitely be useful. I just don't see the usefulness in this particular instance. Work From Home is a heated topic that is sharply divided between types of personalities so articles like this will just cause circular arguments IMHO.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#29

Post by [deleted] »

elric wrote: post #11
dijit wrote: post #2

I’ll be honest: I feel somewhat vindicated due my own personal struggles with the open office[0] and people arguing for the status quo on hacker news[1]. I am extremely sad at the extreme loss of life and horrible conditions caused by the pandemic. So I feel exceedingly guilty for feeling glad that an upside of it is that we can finally do away with this horrible practice of crushing everyone together so the managers…

I'm growing more and more frustrated with open offices, and with $management's unwillingness any concerns. Quitting isn't really an option: I haven't seen a single Belgian company that has an acceptable office layout for software engineers. Even desk sizes seem to be getting smaller and smaller. Remote options are few and far between (and I don't want to WFH anymore).

[deleted]

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#30

Post by chrisseaton »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #27
chrisseaton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a news article, not a peer-reviewed scientific study - why don't people understand the difference?

Good point. The modern mainstream news is worthless sensationalist click bait nowadays.

News can't work if you want to wait for a peer-reviewed study for everything.

It's legitimate for journalists to report what they're hearing less formally than that.

And that's how it's always been - it's not a new thing.

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