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The damaging results of mandated return to office

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Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#121

Post by aaomidi »

brookst wrote: post #71
aaomidi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A study like that would be nearly impossible to measure. What we do know is anecdotal evidence of very influential and high performers at various FAANG type companies that have ended up leaving due to forced RTO.

Everyone has anecdotes that support their opinion. Anecdotally, I work at a large company that fully supports 0% to 100% remote work, and I work with a wide mix. Some people, and some roles, just do better in the office. Others don’t. I’d be very suspicious of forming beliefs based on anecdotes, especially if they coincidentally align to your expectations.

Your company is doing the best possible option then, so of course you’re going to see that as positive.

Forcing in office work for everyone means all the people who work better remotely now…simply don’t.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#122

Post by mrtksn »

jabbany wrote: post #104
mrtksn wrote: post #90

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. 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…

Right, the time zone differences are a hard one. In some places people work in the hours of the client when doing remote work but it's still hard and taxing.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#123

Post by dclowd9901 »

malfist wrote: post #56
m348e912 wrote: post #55

I think a good solution is industries should standardize on pay differential between working at the office full time, vs hybrid, vs full time work from home. Here is just an example: Looking at the same exact job. Office workers would make 20% more than the WFH employees and Hybrid workers would make 10% more than WFH employees. Now employees have incentives to pursue jobs on both ends of the spectrum. Maybe the empl…

Why is the cost of my labor different if I'm in the office or not. I produce the same work, I should be compensated the same

They apparently value people being in the office. Let them put their money where their mouth is. This is a textbook capitalist approach to the problem.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#124

Post by seydor »

Uehreka wrote: post #37
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 (…

…what? Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” an…

> At this point remote work is nothing new

I disagree. As long as i still see traffic in cities, it means remote work is still a tiny minority

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#125

Post by matheweis »

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…

Somewhat, but I suspect that it’s not as bad as it may seem.

The pandemic made it clear that there are naturally forming windows of better collaboration around longitudinal time zones. Outside of +/- 2 time zones becomes fairly difficult on a regular basis. West coast to East coast is difficult.

For Americans, there may be some interesting competition coming out Mexico and perhaps a few of the more advanced countries of South America like Brazil and Argentina.

For Europeans I would expect the same from Africa, from countries like South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, etc.

But once you are outside of +/- 2 time zones you either need one side to shift schedules or have zone local orgs.

At that point it’s less about remote work and more about outsourcing. We already know what outsourcing looks like, and it’s very different from remote work.

Bottom line, I do expect to see increased competition for remote jobs, but for the good roles that matter the competition is not truly global.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#126

Post by throwawaylinux »

Kiro wrote: post #111
Uehreka wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…what? Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” an…

You've been lucky and haven't experienced a regular company that is not remote ready. I'm sure most tech companies are in a much better position then the ones where the only communication software is Skype. It's a serious uphill to convert such a company to a remote one.

Most IT and engineering (and probably other "IP based") companies are "remote ready" for the right person. It's not some vast change or investment they have to make, really. You use the laptop they give you and connect from a different place, and continue to go about your job more or less the same way as does everybody who works with you, since most places are perfectly used to remote meetings and have been for decades. If they want you they'll make the accommodation. That goes for prominent companies that have been implementing strict back to office policies.

There's no "not ready", it entirely a choice by management.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#127

Post by benjaminwootton »

NKosmatos wrote: post #103

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 “downgra…

Needing to eat and have a roof over your head is a fairly strong reason.

The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#128

Post by Kiro »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #126
Kiro wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been lucky and haven't experienced a regular company that is not remote ready. I'm sure most tech companies are in a much better position then the ones where the only communication software is Skype. It's a serious uphill to convert such a company to a remote one.

Most IT and engineering (and probably other "IP based") companies are "remote ready" for the right person. It's not some vast change or investment they have to make, really. You use the laptop they give you and connect from a different place, and continue to go about your job more or less the same way as does everybody who works with you, since most places are perfectly used to remote meetings and have been for decad…

I'm not talking about IT or engineering. Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here? They clearly want it to be a remote company.

Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software. It's even worse there. Their remote culture is highly dysfunctional and she goes into the office 5 days a week even though she doesn't need to.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#129

Post by mh- »

Solvency wrote: post #94
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 (…

Virtually the entire VFX industry has shifted to remote. Let that sync in. The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now. They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.

I'm curious (and not really familiar with modern VFX workflows).

Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#130

Post by Stranger43 »

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…

Read Wealth of Nations for an explanation of why this might not be the disaster for the wealthy countries as most mercantlists think it will.

Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.

Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.

With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.

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