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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

#171

Post by dlsa »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #118
dlsa wrote: post #41

If the office is so great, pay me extra for the commute.

Many companies try to! The problem is that paying extra for the commute deterministically implies that people who do end up working remote are penalized, which they understandably aren't happy about. As the article describes, when companies like Spotify try to come up with an employee friendly policy they inevitably conclude that remote employees should be paid the same as in office ones.

I think just wiping the fees/charges off commuting would be a good start. PT / Fuel costs are still a thing as they continue to increase. Not everyone is using EV. Yet.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#172

Post by elric »

db48x wrote: post #98
michaelchisari wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also burnt out on WFH. At this point, I'd appreciate an workplace to go in to. But I'd also appreciate that workplace giving me my own office with a door that closes. I've had that only once in my career and it was bliss.

If you work from home, can’t you acquire an office with a door that closes? Perhaps by building an extension on your house, or a workshop in the yard, or renting an office over a restaurant a mile from home (you know the ones that are usually rented by local lawyers, insurance agents, etc)?

Who's going to pay for this? My employer? I doubt it. Me? Hell no.

On a less grumpy note: I'd love to have an actual home office, worthy of the name, but real estate is very expensive, I can barely afford a home, but I definitely can't afford a big enough home for a home office.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#173

Post by elric »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #127
elric wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Even desk sizes seem to be getting smaller and smaller. Heh, I didn't realize this, but during covid my company mandated every other desk to stay empty, and suddenly it felt like I had as much space again as I used to have 20 years ago.

My employer replaced all of our 180cm wide desks with 140cm wide desks during lockdown. Needless to say, I'm not too thrilled to be back in the office. That's barely enough space for a laptop and a monitor. Second monitor? Notepad? Forgetaboutit.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#174

Post by ekianjo »

tshaddox wrote: post #99
ekianjo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To use a crude example, if you’re in a rock band composing songs together, you would never consider that interrupting the bass player to suggest a slightly different riff would be “an interruption that cost them 20 minutes of focus Bad analogies are not very persuasive

If you think software development can be a collaborative creative process, it’s really not a terrible analogy.

This analogy sucks because a rock band cannot make songs without actually playing together over and over again. You can however build software in modules or independent parts as long as you have clear specs about what each part should do and proper testing. Thats why you can outsource some software dev but you cannot outsource a rock band.

Terrible analogy.

If you want to pick something that makes more sense to compare, it would be something that is engineering related.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#175

Post by kcplate »

gorgoiler wrote: post #165
kcplate wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get small pieces of code landing in different places before I can start to see results I long for the days when developers worked on big pieces of code and had ownership much more holistically in what they were developing

This sounds like an interesting perspective. Could you elaborate a bit more on what it is different today, and what you are comparing the present situation to?

This is just my opinion, but I think we have compartmentalized development too much. Atomized it a level where the individual parts only care about themselves and are now too simple that the parts lose sight of the whole.

I hate the “well my piece works” attitude that I have seen grow over the last 5-10 years. Likely due to bastardized scrum/agile with tiny little bite sized dev stories and tasks that in my mind have turned developers into cogs in a assembly line. 30+ years ago, almost all devs were brilliant, creators, engineers and problem solvers. In my estimation 25% are brilliant today with the remaining seemingly unable to write a single line of code unless the requirements are spelled out in hyper levels of detail, with design standards, engineering guides, and all manners of cheat sheets to contain them in a box where their screwups are contained.

rant over

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#176

Post by dijit »

elric wrote: post #172
db48x wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work from home, can’t you acquire an office with a door that closes? Perhaps by building an extension on your house, or a workshop in the yard, or renting an office over a restaurant a mile from home (you know the ones that are usually rented by local lawyers, insurance agents, etc)?

Who's going to pay for this? My employer? I doubt it. Me? Hell no. On a less grumpy note: I'd love to have an actual home office, worthy of the name, but real estate is very expensive, I can barely afford a home, but I definitely can't afford a big enough home for a home office.

That's a shame, home space is much cheaper than office space. (based on Malmo, Sweden office real-estate prices).

Co-working desks are as much as 50% of rent in a normal area of the city.

For example an apartment of 82sqm (269sqf) in Malmo might be 9000 SEK ($900~) per month, a co-working desk might be 4,200 SEK ($420~)[0]. But an apartment for 13,200 SEK ($1.3k) would likely be 100-120sqm (328-392sqf) in size.

Meaning a dedicated room in your home of 18-38sqm (59-124sqf) can be the same price as a single desk in a co-working space.

Paying 1.5x the rent for an apartment would give a lot more space than just a desk.

[0]: https://www.gamehabitat.se/devhub/

*EDIT*: just realised a fixed desk is actually more than 4,200SEK

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#177

Post by db48x »

elric wrote: post #172
db48x wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work from home, can’t you acquire an office with a door that closes? Perhaps by building an extension on your house, or a workshop in the yard, or renting an office over a restaurant a mile from home (you know the ones that are usually rented by local lawyers, insurance agents, etc)?

Who's going to pay for this? My employer? I doubt it. Me? Hell no. On a less grumpy note: I'd love to have an actual home office, worthy of the name, but real estate is very expensive, I can barely afford a home, but I definitely can't afford a big enough home for a home office.

They don’t generally pay people extra to commute either, but certainly do whichever is cheaper for you. The one time I had a long commute I was paying upwards of $200 a month for the train. Gas, maintenance, repairs, depreciation and so on for a car would have been even more. Add in the drudgery of the daily commute and the cost to me was not small.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#178

Post by tshaddox »

ekianjo wrote: post #174
tshaddox wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think software development can be a collaborative creative process, it’s really not a terrible analogy.

This analogy sucks because a rock band cannot make songs without actually playing together over and over again. You can however build software in modules or independent parts as long as you have clear specs about what each part should do and proper testing. Thats why you can outsource some software dev but you cannot outsource a rock band. Terrible analogy. If you want to pick something that makes more sense to compa…

> You can however build software in modules or independent parts as long as you have clear specs about what each part should do and proper testing.

Where do these clear specs come from? That’s the creative process I’m talking about.

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#179

Post by db48x »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #129
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…

How do you handle brainstorming sessions or design sessions where things are hard to solve, so there is no direct answer? I love the idea of async, but there are just some sessions that are incredibly valuable and develop on others thoughts, evolving in a final solution. At the company I work at, we compromise with a specific 4 hours overlap so that meetings can be scheduled only during those times

It seems that there is decent evidence that a group meeting that tries to come up with new ideas does worse than if the same people did so individually, and only then had a meeting to present their best ideas. And by “does worse” I mean that they come up with fewer good ideas, even when they are quite confident that they have completely explored a problem.

Personally I doubt that having face–to–face meetings is ever truly necessary. Once everyone in the group has thought of several ideas, they can write a page or two description of it and why they think it is a good idea. Then the decision makers (which obviously might be the same group) can read those papers and decide between them. Mozilla used to work something like this specifically to allow contributions by volunteers outside the company (no idea if they still do though). The Rust programming language is developed in a similar way: anyone can write an RFC to propose making a change to the language (or the associated tooling, the standard library, etc).

Re: Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

#180

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

db48x wrote: post #179
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle brainstorming sessions or design sessions where things are hard to solve, so there is no direct answer? I love the idea of async, but there are just some sessions that are incredibly valuable and develop on others thoughts, evolving in a final solution. At the company I work at, we compromise with a specific 4 hours overlap so that meetings can be scheduled only during those times

It seems that there is decent evidence that a group meeting that tries to come up with new ideas does worse than if the same people did so individually, and only then had a meeting to present their best ideas. And by “does worse” I mean that they come up with fewer good ideas, even when they are quite confident that they have completely explored a problem. Personally I doubt that having face–to–face meetings is ever…

I'm not convinced by this. It works but for a subset of problems, not all of them. And it overlooks the fact that people might build on top of each other, I don't think that was taken in consideration. What about exploratory meetings, where people are trying to understand a problem in the first place, those happen to be synchronous because answers evolve in other questions.

Keep in mind that I never mentioned face-to-face, I just asked for synchronous time.

That being said, I'm open to explore the idea, I think I already do this for a certain subset of problems using Slack threads

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