I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly speaking that the path of building and managing a remote team successfully is different than in person in that (1) it should be more transactional, less relationship based, and you should be more comfortable and active in routinely cutting the bottom performers. Remote work does genuinely change the labor relation to be a step or two closer to the contractor model (extremely transactional and performance based, not culture/family etc). Remote work gives power to capital/management and it seems like most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT and learned to run teams in a zero interest rate env are not comfortable exercising this power on behalf of the companies they represent. (2) Managers should be hiring in low cost areas, you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things. There are great engineers in Latam. You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12. (3) a lot of senior leaders don’t want to learn a new playbook (remote management). They have a playbook that worked, they used it for 10-15 years, and they want to turn the clock back to that time. Even if 30% of senior leaders at a company feel this way, that’s usually enough to “roll back” to how things were. The remote enthusiasts who haven’t taken on the new management style whole hog don’t have any wins to show, so the revanchist old managers are winning the hearts and minds of CEOs. The companies who mastered remote and learned how to do it right aren’t doing RTO BUT remote done right definitely is not paying a globally average Bay Area engineer locally competitive salaries for globally average work.
Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
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Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#22It's a combination of the following:
1. Hr and management Karen's/Joe's looking for control
2. People who hate their families and want a socially acceptable way to get away from them.
3. Corner office types who spent their careers trying to get one just to have COVID and cloud services make them realize it was all a mirage anyway.
At least this is what I've seen. I don't have a problem with hybrid schedules but the last in office place I went to did a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday hybrid week. FFS, it was awful. Id have all of this go juice for Monday, lose it for work from home Tuesday and be miserable for Wednesday and Thursday. Just do Monday through Wednesday in office or Tuesday through Thursday. Just keep all the in office days together.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#23I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is totally in the dark.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#24Not an employer. But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home, and most employers aren't very good at rewarding people for their results, not their hours.
> I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home
From my experience and observations I've gathered from my teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to wait until Monday.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer. Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?
It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a time. Especially those with children.
Couldn’t the employer just hire people close together if they feel like that is an issue and still not have an office space?
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a reason why an employee would go to the office. But not really something employer would care about - they don't care about employees social lifes in other contexts.
> "People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully "
Tens of billions of dollars in market cap of remote first orgs disagrees. You can work with colleagues without any superfluous social connection, it’s just a job, not a tribe or family. One should be both polite and effective; this does not make you friends.
The inability to support remote work signals the employer cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is managing from emotion instead of data.
(have worked remote for 10+ years)
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#27Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of problems it’s useful to have people in the same room until we have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people, not leaving their home caused significant issues in their performance. People aren’t solitary creatures, so for some - the office fills that role. For others, home offi…
Ha the good old tale of people gathering around the whiteboard to solve hard problem.
IME, it's usually 30/60 minutes during which the Architect listens to himself, draws some nice boxes and arrows, overlooks all the edge cases and nuances and then everyone goes back to their open space desk. And the next day you realize that the solution doesn't work and you start a Jira comment thread.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#28People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.
Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote.
I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#29People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.
OP pointed out that meetings and projects have happened remotely anyways for a long time - an experience I share. The peers you describe aren’t in the same place as yourself even if you’re both in some office.
I had an in-office contract in 2019. No one in the open office plan wanted to be interrupted while sitting at their desk. Everyone had headphones on. I literally used Slack to talk to the people sitting to the left & right of my desk XD
Re: Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
#30Am employer, but only after covid- during covid i wanted to get back to the office as soon as i was vaccinated. The reason for that is that i missed my coworkers. I missed the spontaneous connections, the conversations, the hang outs. People are social beings, and being fully remote means a lesser emotional connection. I don’t like that.