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Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

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Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#501

Post by knappe »

rqtwteye wrote: post #295
Roark66 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office. Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got tha…

" I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office." People should stop saying this. Otherwise it will soon be the standard to take a serious paycut for WFH. .

I've been remote for 11 years.

Remote work was always an excuse to pay less, much to my chagrin. The fact is that as remote work became more popular, with the increase in positions, pay has actually increased. I'm not surprised that more people are seeing pushback on in the office vs remote compensation as this has been the standard play for years.

I find it doubly frustrating since remote employees are less of a cost sink due to less office space and all the costs that come with it. Remote employees are the most efficient type of employees from that perspective and so it always felt like such a flimsy excuse.

My suggestion is push back on any perceived pay gap between in office and remote work. The work done is at parity (if not more so due to efficiencies of remote work) and so there is no valid excuse to pay less.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#502

Post by CoastalCoder »

lampshades wrote: post #352
CoastalCoder wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean this as cras, but even better is "lunch" with the wife. I.e., when the two of you are finally home alone and awake, because school is in session. I suspect for some marriages, WFH has been a real blessing.

And for other marriages, WFH has been a disaster. I know so many people who have ended up divorced after they were both WFH everyday.

Yeah, it's sad. I didn't mean to imply that WFH was a net positive for every couple.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#503

Post by [deleted] »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #432
pydry wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally I think a a lot of the IT work that requires extreme focus has become commodified. That is, it's either done by some open source library or a SaaS or something. I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones. Most bugs seem to happen because of…

We can tell this isn't Reddit because you don't have a top reply to your post stating, "this is what happens when we let the neurotypical into the tech industry."

[deleted]

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#504

Post by ted_dunning »

adolph wrote: post #269
Veliladon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no excess labor left in the system. We just went through a pandemic where, in the US, 2.4 million people just vanished from the labor force. If there is a recession it'll be a fully employed recession where the fed has to keep rates high because workers are fully employed and driving up wages while capital is crying uncle for lost profits and cheap money again.

> in the US, 2.4 million people just vanished from the labor force Not certain what you mean by vanished and where the 2.4M number came from. CDC says 1,136,473 died in the pandemic [0], although a significant portion were not likely members of the labor force. As it stands the number labor force members caught up to pre-pandemic numbers in August of 2022. [1] Feb 2020 164M Apr 2020 156M Aug 2022 164M Jul 2023 167M 0…

A million died. A large number were disabled (probably more than were disabled).

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#505

Post by peatmoss »

Analemma_ wrote: post #483
peatmoss wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it beggars belief that companies spend so much on humans only to put them in an environment where it’s impossible to concentrate. I reckon at some point someone will figure out that the physical environment can be modified to make knowledge workers more productive, and start walloping their competition. I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone…

Microsoft used to do this. Famously, they had private offices for a long time while all the competition was open-office plans. They've scaled this way back in recent years though (to much complaining, albeit totally ignored, from employees). Whether this means the brainworms got to them too or they actually have the numbers to prove that private offices aren't worth the expense, I don't know.

In my first job after college, I worked at a federal agency where people had cubicles carved out of traditional large offices. It was actually kind of nice, because you worked with people in your office, but had some separation from them as well.

The peons all had desktop computers, while middle management had clunky laptops with docking stations. You knew who the executives were by their small laptops that were clearly designed for traveling by the jet setting class.

I’ve come to think that the ultimate power move for the movers and shakers at a company, would be to have a traditional office with a desktop computer that they cannot take with them. I remember being excited the first time I was issued a corporate laptop. I felt like I had finally arrived, and finally was one of the powerful and privileged. Now, I look back on those days of desktop computing, where I could not take my computer home, and where there was no expectation that I would randomly work from home as the very height of luxury.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#506

Post by technofiend »

wombat-man wrote: post #467
AvAn12 wrote: post #9

Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.

Yeah, whenever I need to concentrate it's earplugs + noise canceling headphones. For some reason there's a group of marketing people in the same big room as us. They are very chatty, especially in the mornings.

Since I don't have a colleague to rubber duck with, I talk to myself. Needless to say that can't happen in an open office floor plan because I don't want to be a distraction any more than I want to be distracted.

Elsewhere boiled frog and class have both been mooted with regards to office. That's definitely my experience from working the last few decades. I started my career having an office for almost every job. But that slowly fell away as corporations discovered cubes save money and is now completely gone where I work now unless you are very senior indeed. We're talking there are only a handful of offices per floor vs nothing but offices on every floor.

Class comes in to play because at least where I work the people setting policy for the average worker to sit at a cube not only have their own offices, they have their own building! One that you don't get access to by default. Yet, as cost-saving-measures we've enabled people to collaborate across regions and timezones to the point that coming in to work in a cube farm is actually counterproductive. Very few people are customer facing and need to get face time with clients to do deals. The rest of us can happily WFH. Perhaps as Wall Street slowly weans itself from CRE, that will in fact be the next benefit that's pulled back: sorry, you need to be really senior to come into the office / square footage is for closers. I can hardly wait.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#508

Post by topaz0 »

FredPret wrote: post #417
flandish wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Class is in no way related to salary.

I didn't mention salary. I mentioned other indicators; being an analyst for GS (probably went to an Ivy League school) who hangs out in the same restaurant as the CEO in the Hamptons

Class is also not these social/economic/cultural signifiers. As yogthos said in a different comment, differences in class are about having substantially different economic incentives. (I wouldn't go as far as GP and say they are unrelated. Of course they are strongly correlated. But they are different things in fundamental ways).

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#509

Post by jwells89 »

quectophoton wrote: post #333
jwells89 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, schedule flexibility. If I hit a point where my brain is a smoldering pile of ash I can get up and go do chores or get some sun by checking the mail or something, instead of sitting at my desk staring at my screen praying to the gods of productivity that my brain will start functioning again.

This also means that choosing to stay a bit late[1] because you're working on a hard problem becomes an easier choice, because you know you can stop any time and be on your bed in under 15 seconds, no bus no car no bike no commute. [1]: If your employer doesn't like if you take a longer lunch break or something to get this time back, then it's time to start looking for a different one.

This is true, but depending on the individual it can also mean that one might need to be good at drawing a line and stopping at it.

I do sometimes work late when chewing on a more difficult problem, but if I don't stop early enough to leave a decent gap between end of work and bedtime, it can sometimes be difficult to get my head turned off and get to sleep.

I miss my teens and early twenties when I could flop into bed and fall asleep no matter what I had been doing prior.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#510

Post by pipeline_peak »

kzrdude wrote: post #81
pipeline_peak wrote: post #4

Nah, I'm not going back to your stupid building to talk about sports in the break room while microwaving Tupperwared leftover chicken breast lol. Gas + commute time + increased likelihood to eat out (leftover chicken breast) = more money out of my pocket. And I could stretch even further with the endless banter, getting yelled at for not understanding things the first time (I'm not an auditory listener), disrespected…

Eating out is a net positive for me. I get better, more varied food and feel better if a professional does the cooking. It's not worth saving money on what I eat - it's so important for health.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to make healthy, tasty food.

Personally, if I made enough, I'd eat out all the time too.

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