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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

#31

Post by spookthesunset »

sto_hristo wrote: post #13
doitLP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a mixed bag of good and bad. In fact this pandemic will probably save a lot more lives during the next pandemic in terms of preparations etc. It’s also been great for remote work. No need for additional hand-wringing.

There is no silver lining and the next pandemic will play out raw, just like this one. Antivaxers will blame it on Bill Gate's son and 6G. That is because of human stupidity - it's immutable and ever present. So my hope is that science will come up with better vaccines quickly and natural selection will trim off the Enlightened to a more tolerable level.

Hopefully “the next pandemic” will not be like this one at all. Because how “the experts” handled this one was shamefully wrong. At virtually every decision point these “experts” did the exact wrong thing. From years of school closures to two years of forced masks to intentionally frightening the daylights out of people. They did everything wrong.

History will not look fondly at what was done. I hope to god we never repeat this massive mistake.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#33

Post by Agamus »

izacus wrote: post #19

There's a lot of "considering" and "thinking" in this article, but how many people are ACTUALLY quitting over that? What's the increase in turnover because of WFH policies? A few % total? EDIT: Oh, just saw this in the article: >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. Carry on then.

I have worked from home for the past two years, and my company has started the return-to-work policy last week. I applied for, and was given, full remote status. If they had not done this, I would have definitely found another job that was willing.

Click-bait indeed, but while I'm a small sample size, the idea checks-out to me.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#34

Post by kareemsabri »

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?

Things other than peer-reviewed scientific studies also often contain data.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#35

Post by EnKopVand »

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…

The open office is a bad idea for a lot of people, but that’s not why it’s cost efficient. It’s cost efficient because it keeps rent, heating/cooling down, lets you have desks for only 60-80% of your workforce and it plays really well with the middle managers handbook of “watching people be busy”. Or in other words it basically checks all the boxes that you care about when you move into the E&Y level of executive power. The entire system is flawed or course. Even the 37-40 hour work week is sort of a left over from when we worked assembly lines. That doesn’t really matter when it’s what gets taught at every management education and is what gets adviced at any management consulting agency, and, because it works. It doesn’t work for every employee (or even manager), but it works for every company.

That’s the “cog in the machine” part of the story, the other side is what you can do as that cog. If you posses a skill set that is in demand, you can actually get away with a lot of things in this world. Why people don’t do this is beyond me, especially for IT staff. Of course it’s not easy to find the remote job you want, but in my anecdotal experience I have met so many people who were so much smarter than me who got much fewer benefits. I’ve even heard people defend their low pay, using their bosses talking points. Like, what?

I’m not an asshole, I’m not hard to work with but I do have ADHD which is crippling for me when it comes to working on things I dislike for long periods. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always asked to get things my way, but it’s not beyond me how lucky I am to be in a profession where we always have a couple or job openings available.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#37

Post by dixie_land »

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 like most of my coworkers and are friends of some offline. But I see work transactional by definition.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#38

Post by spookthesunset »

rossdavidh wrote: post #16

I have worked remotely more often than not in the last 10 years. I think it absolutely works in some cases, and hybrid (e.g. 3 days remote per week) works for more cases. But... The first time there is a bad labor market, most of the current remote jobs are going to disappear. Not all, but most, and in nearly all professions the remote jobs will mostly be contractors who have no long-term employment with the company…

Remote workers should be mostly contract in the first place. If you look at how most are operating odds are good they’d pass almost every test from the IRS. All they’d need is to take a couple gigs at once.

And why shouldn’t they take multiple gigs at once? It’s not like people working remote are at their current employer for the culture or politics or anything. In fact most do remote to avoid that crap.

Might as well formalize the relationship and just go 1099. Then you can deduct your very real home office expenses and whatnot. Then you can own your own equipment and office expenses. Then you can work “arms length” from your clients.

All I know is if I went full remote again, I would definitely restructure myself as an independent contractor. Turns out though that I actually like being in the office and working side by side with my team to build cool shit. But that is a bit because my role isn’t a developer. Developers are easy to do remote if they don’t care much about the actual product they are building. As long as you feed them fairly well speced work they are good to go.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#39

Post by gorgoiler »

Some types of tech work well with remote, largely unalignable staff. Some don’t.

I’m finding that where I can build small modules, by myself, that allow lots of flexibility to make final integration possible, I’m getting a lot of work done.

When I need to collaborate with a bunch of people and get small pieces of code landing in different places before I can start to see results, then I’m finding the remote angry nerd keyboard warriors harder to work with.

It’s much harder asking for trust and collaborating on a design when they don’t really care about anyones work except their own. Going into 100% selfish mode matches up with everyone’s culture, but it doesn’t feel great, and means I don’t really get much in the way of quality code review any more.

I’m trying, struggling, and failing to articulate what the good and bad patterns are here. Can anyone help me?

How do you structure a tech team, culturally, to promote progress in spite of everyone now having the social skills, flameyness, and diplomatic finesse of a faceless forum user?

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#40

Post by capableweb »

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'm of the view that it works best for some, while for others some other solution works best. There is no right or wrong, just personal preference.

But even so, it seems to be a bit much to preach for something when you've never experienced another alternative, except from 6 months after college. It's hard to remain unbiased when you don't know anything else by experience.

Personally, I've spent lots of my career in an office, and also lots of career working remotely, about the same amount of companies in each category. I'm more of a fan of the in-person dynamic you can create while being in the same location, compared to the almost-human dynamic you can create if everyone and everything is remotely. But I tend to work in much smaller teams (although one office-job and one remote-job were in pretty large enterprises), so maybe that's why I prefer one vs the other.

Even though I prefer at-location work, I totally understand how others can prefer a different scenario. Depends on so many variables, so I guess my conclusion is just "it depends". Don't prescribe anything to others without knowing what they want, and don't let yourself be controlled by others opinions, just do what you feel is best for you.

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