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The damaging results of mandated return to office

entrepreneur.com

191–200 of 348 posts

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Nah, admin of course means rapist, didn't you know?

WFH-advocates turning to "arguments" like your post is one reason why I oppose this new trend of entitlement. You people really think you are on top of the world and everyone has to dance to your tunes, right? I hope the market will fix this. Go and find a WFH company that lets you slack-off from home all day long. And then, shut up!

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#192

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.

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

Producing food and shelter are quite well suited to being done at home. Once upon a time that was the norm.

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

There is no limit on WFH positions. It is technically possible for everyone to find one. However, you will often be entering uncharted territory to explore them. Commuting to a restaurant to flip burgers, or whatever, is much more well understood and thus carries far less risk. Indeed, the worker will prefer low risk opportunities in the vast majority of cases.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#193

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.

Decision makers are politicians, their job is to take the most politically efficient decision according to data. Deciding if it was the best decision to take or not is the job of historians.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#194
post #189

I recently changed jobs and had the choice between a senior IC role at a FAANG and an engineering director position at an open-source company that is fully remote. While working in fully remote culture would be intellectually interesting, I opted for the FAANG and enjoying going back to the (incredibly cushy) office, after 3 years of WFH that I found isolating and depressing, even though I am an introvert and possibl…

Just moved to London some months ago... nobody told me that the housing situation was so bad to the point to even push us introverts back into the offices XD (couple days a week personally).

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#195

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…

> and you like the taste

Orthogonal to the productivity argument, have there been any studies trying to find the motivation for people preferring/hating WFH?

My guess is you tend to prefer it if you have a social circle that's not your co workers and hate it if you don't.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#196

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…

To each their own. I find that WFH makes me incredibly unproductive, I'm glad I'm able to return to to the office. I think there are a lot of factors that affect this (e.g. I have a family with small children at home, and my commute is <15 minutes by bike).

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#197

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…

Not so sure. My sample size is tiny but when interviewing people today it's not uncommon for candidates to request/hope for at least some office time during the week.

I think people are beginning to miss the social aspect of being physically close to their colleagues.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#198

There have been a lot of, at least to me, somewhat unsubstantiated criticisms that fully remote work is difficult for new graduates. I can only provide n=1 sample data, but back when I was working for a company that was fully remote, we brought on many junior engineers who lived across the United States and didn't have any problems onboarding them by keeping a continual slack team huddle running during office hours.…

The thing is the way it used to be done was you'd mill around the office and then when there was a free moment, you'd ask the senior guys some questions. It wasn't really structured.

What you're describing has some merit, but it also means you are being watched all day, just like if you were in the office. Not being watched is probably a major benefit of WFH.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#199
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having the tech to allow a few employees to work remotely is one thing. Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely . You have to transform a lot of things like: * On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate…

> Having an organisational and operational structure to allow everyone to work remotely is another thing entirely.

It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).

> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.

Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#200
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm not talking about IT or engineering.

What are you talking about then?

> 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?

I don't know what you're talking about. What result? What company? Can you give some more detail or did I miss a post?

I have many concrete examples right in front of me, which is the number of companies and government agencies that went to remote extremely rapidly during covid shutdowns.

> 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.

Like I said, that's just a simple choice. Most probably by some self-important bureaucrat who wants to sabotage the remote work scheme. All they would have to do is use normal software like many other places permit, and that would be most of the battle.

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