The damaging results of mandated return to office • Hacker News Board

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#101

Post by ornornor » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 5:59 AM UTC

jupp0r wrote: post #57

Companies who mandate return to the office should pay employees for the additional commute time at their hourly rate. If this becomes too expensive then productivity gains from being in the office are apparently not worth it.

I once worked some place where my manager loved to tell this allegedly true story (happened before my tour) as a hilarious joke to onboard new devs on how to fill the timesheet:

There was this IC who was working on cross departmental stuff. Things like pipelines, UI component libraries, build tools, etc. He would frequently go on walks to think, either during the work day and return to the office or to go back home and work some more. At this amazing place, we had extensive timesheets to fill in (with 15 min granularity, was great). That guy used to count his walks as work time on specific projects (15–30 min walks.) The joke is that management came down hard in him because you can’t get paid to walk as you’re paid to be writing code. Thinking about code for the company isn’t a paid activity unless it happens in the office. What a sucker this guy was, asking to be paid for taking a walk harharhar!

My colleagues then added (after the manager left the room) that as a result the guy in question took much longer “walks” to think things through in an empty conference room every day instead. Nobody saw the stupidity in that and he left shortly after this new policy was enforced.

This was the single most toxic worst company I’ve ever worked at.

My point is that employers still think that butt not in seat = not working, and since I’m paying you I can make you suffer and I own you for that duration. My job sucks and I can’t work remote so why should I allow you, puny peasant, to have it better than me when you didn’t “work” or “deserve” it?

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#102

Post by Tade0 » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:00 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #66

alistairSH wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

I've done a lot of remote work over the decades. It starts out well, because you know your coworkers well. But, over time, those relationships fade, and people come and go at work. You lose the connection with them, and they with you. It's hardly all roses.

I've been in my current project for over two years now, never met the team in person, but we have a good connection - chiefly because we insert some chit-chat into the meetings.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#103

Post by NKosmatos » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:05 AM UTC

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back.

It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision.

People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgrade” imposed by others, unless it’s something they’ve decided on their own and on purpose.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#104

Post by jabbany » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:06 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #90

diego_moita wrote: post #19

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (…

Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown…

Time zones still matter though. I have been in same-time-zone remote teams and different-time-zone ones. The dynamic is very different.

Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones.

As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to affect why that doesn't work.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#105

Post by wincy » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:06 AM UTC

pachico wrote: post #86

Sorry but, who isn't struggling with hiring?

It’s been super easy for me to recruit people from my network. Yesterday texted an old friend and he straight up said “sign me up”. Just placed another friend who was extremely competent at our previous job but he got swept up in layoffs. Big layoffs at my old jobs that are in industries that saw huge booms because of the pandemic, whereas I’m in a nice stable industry at a very large company that has a decade+ worth of huge contracts lined up.

They made the home office return to work, but for our sizable satellite office they’re literally building a new 4-story building so the devs can come back in 2025 or so.

Business is booming if you’re in the right industry, and for tech workers it’s not that hard to switch it up.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#106

Post by flaminHotSpeedo » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:07 AM UTC

RestlessMind wrote: post #49

alistairSH wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

> with little evidence that’s a better way to work. You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

Let's flip this around: do you (or decision makers) have any evidence that remote work is worse? Without that data, and barring ulterior motives (such as attrition without severance), reversing the status quo and enforcing return to office is, by definition, not a sound data-driven decision.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#107

Post by BLKNSLVR » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:08 AM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #73

What's worse to me is the return to the "hybrid" office we keep getting threatened with. (My company has not actually done a RTO … yet. I don't know if we ever will.) Now instead of a lousy 4' desk in an open office plan … I also get a desk that isn't mine? I'm supposed to … what, lug a keyboard¹ & mouse & laptop in? It seems like literally nobody has imagined what it might be like for a SWE to actually attempt to do…

An external keyboard and mouse is a necessity for any non-emergency work. 100% of laptop keyboards and trackpads suck for anything other than emergencies, and many suck for emergencies as well.

This is inarguable fact.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#108

Post by pcthrowaway » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:09 AM UTC

darkerside wrote: post #20

belval wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your parent does not really say that though. Assuming that WFH/RTO preference is distributed equally across highest and lowest performers his statement will be true. As lowest performers will be stickier (regardless of preference) and highest performers won't be so you may lose 50% of your highest performers but a lower amount of lowest WFH-loving performers. Effectively averaging down the skill level of your company…

Is there a study that breaks down whether high performers are more or less likely to want a return to office?

I don't even think there's a study that indicates developer productivity can be reliably measured.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#109

Post by flaminHotSpeedo » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:10 AM UTC

slategruen wrote: post #78

Aerroon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco). Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications. When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting Fre…

Similar thing is happening here in Philippines. The government basically gave tax breaks to companies who will utilize their office spaces in city centers. To no one's surprise, most of the local companies are now forcing return-to-office. The government justification is: people spend more when they regularly go the the office thus, stimulating the economy.

There's a lot of unconfirmed scuttlebutt that companies in major American metro areas have similar motivations...

I can say with the utmost confidence that spending more time and money downtown is the last thing that my 3 hour round trip commute motivates me to do

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#110

Post by ornornor » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:16 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #99

ornornor wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf becau…

I agree, it wasn't a mainstream success so far but there are teams who cracked it. There are some companies who are proudly WFH-only and global. The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results. I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, th…

In my opinion, it’s more about the local culture.

People in different countries/continents work differently, have different expectations around how much initiative non-managers should take, etc.

I’m not saying one is worse than the other. What I’m saying is that trying to mix these levels and hoping to exploit cheap labor to offshore doesn’t work well in my experience and what’s saved on paper is paid tenfold in customer attrition, employee turnover, high severity outages, that kind of thing.

For example, having had experience with Indian sweatshops, the people working there were paid a pitance compared to us, had to use their own equipment, no paid sick days, forced to commute several hours to work and back… imagine how interested they were in the work, being treated like subhumans by their employer. And whenever we’d talk about technical problems, they’d always say yes even if it turned out they had no clue what needed to be done or how to do it. I believe it was a factor of the tyrannical management there, but also a cultural thing. Same with asking for feedback, we had a culture (country, not corporate) where it’s common to ask for and receive honest feedback. The offshored staff could never wrap their heads around it. Or being asked to do something unclear/stupid: onshore would bring it up/challenge it/ask for clarifications, offshore would just go ahead and do… something, anything. Then we’d have to spend time redoing it and rethinking it losing weeks of work. But it was cheap, look how much were saving!!

I hope this doesn’t come as racist. I do t mean that the Indian offshores were worse people than onshore employees! What I mean is that there was a huge values gap between the two, very different ways of working, different expectations, different power dynamics and that they absolutely didn’t mesh together well at all.

We were appalled at the conditions offshore had to work under. One of the workers had cancer and couldn’t really afford the treatment because apparently health insurance isn’t really a thing in India and had to come work sick because they couldn’t afford the treatment otherwise… it was a disgrace and we tried to pressure management to face the human cost of their penny pinching.

It’s not impossible to have offshore and onshore working together and save money but I’ve never seen it done well so I’m very doubtful it can work.

And I think that’s our moat: we work differently, have different values, and different levels of initiative that local comapnies benefit from more than the marginal amount saved on exploiting offshore labor (in the context of sweatshops)