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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

#821

Post by mrbgty »

commonlisp94 wrote: post #147
mrbgty wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will the company stay in business without workers? They'll have no choice...

They have plenty of choices, including: - visa workers who have no bargaining power. - younger people who are mobile - moving offices to other places There have been a few recent posts about struggling to find jobs... every time it turns out they are only applying to online listings for remote jobs, and have high standards. That's not a situation you're likely to stand out in. I just don't see how global remote work…

As if individuals don't have plenty of choices?

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

#822

Post by up2isomorphism »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #30

People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…

Most of people do not want to work if they can get paid too. And there is no need for employers if RTO makes the overall productivity worse. RTO is really a decision made by the market not from a particular employer or employee.

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

#823

Post by casperb »

flandish wrote: post #215
steveBK123 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite story on this thread is that during the hybrid period, GS CEO threw a fit when out in the Hamptons because some analyst (fairly junior role almost at the bottom) had the balls to go introduce themselves during a workday lunch at a restaurant. He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed…

This example is a stark reminder that the complaints are most often not about details but about class . The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class. It’s always class when one boils it down, imho.

I am always surprised when I realize this in conversations with entrepreneurs. They explain something to me about how they “control” their employees, then I say it out loud that it seems weird to me and then they try to explain it to me like it has nothing to do with control or with class but that it is necessary. Sure. It’s mostly bullshit, class and mistrust.

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

#824

Post by Tactician_mark »

Aeolun wrote: post #814
vladvasiliu wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually argue there's a benefit to those who need to work at the job site in having the others stay home: a commute in a crowded bus / subway where you can't breathe or spending 2 hours on a gridlocked highway is an absolute PITA for everybody concerned. So if I can jockey my keyboard while sitting in my chair at home instead of taking the subway to do it while sitting in my employer's, that's a tiny bit more sp…

> that's a tiny bit more space for the guy who actually needs to go somewhere and work in person For a little while. Until the bus company decides not enough people are riding anf the 1/15 minutes bus becomes the 1/hour bus :/

Agreed. And when even the moderately wealthy took public transit, they could apply political pressure to make it better. As riders get poorer on average, service gets worse.

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

#825

Post by Tactician_mark »

np- wrote: post #515
rayiner wrote: post #179

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. That’s not populist at all. It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind: https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa... . Before the pandem…

> Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work. With all due respect - so what? This seems like crab in a bucket mentality, just because some of us crabs managed to climb to the top of th…

np- is acknowledging a difference between their job and the jobs of others. I think it's important to acknowledge those differences, especially since those other metaphorical crabs aren't getting out of the pot any time soon. For example, I think it would be nice if workers forced to commute had additional worker protections related to cost of transit/housing.

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

#826

Post by putnambr »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #267
Workaccount2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it comes from being a software engineer in US the last 10, and especially the last 5 years, is probably the greatest working conditions of any worker ever in human history. There are a large number of people, namely on HN, that have never known anything other than $120K+ compensation, constant stream of offers for changing jobs, all while working from their home and doing about 4 hours of real work a day. I d…

Four hours of knowledge work a day is actually a lot. The average corporate worker probably does far less. Meetings, small talk, answering emails, etc. feel like work, but most of the time it isn’t. Four hours of focused knowledge work can produce exponential more value that four hours of meetings. The thing is, this has always been the case for the white collar world. Lawyers, executives, etc. The real change is tha…

Four hours of knowledge work a day is a lot?

Maybe I'm uniquely on a path to burnout, but I put in at least 6 hours of what I would call hard knowledge work per day as a SWE. Throw on 1-3 hours of collaboration and an hour of truly useless meetings and I'm at a 45+ hr week.

Factor in commute time, via bike so counts towards exercise minutes, and I'm working 50 hr weeks + 24/7 15 minute SLA on-call once every other month.

It's unfathomable to me that this isn't the average experience, and that anyone would get paid more than $120k doing any less.

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

#827

Post by srndsnd »

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. .

This was always inevitable. The demand for fully remote jobs will always be higher than for in-person. With more demand for those positions, the companies can afford to pay labor less. WFH was always going to come with a pay cut. I don't know why people are simply expecting the other shoe never to drop. I'm not saying that it should, I'm saying that it will.

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

#828

Post by deathanatos »

pseudalopex wrote: post #669
deathanatos wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I consider "the cost of the buildout", I consider that to be the cost to do the buildout, nothing more. Productivity gains/losses are outside the scope of that. I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee. (If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty cle…

What you quoted had numbers for open office spaces. It said they were not much smaller than average or the same typically. And the source was a leasing guide. Office meant company office. Not individual office.

Ha, so you're right. That's what I get for trusting AI to answer a question.

That figure absurd in the context of an open office floorplan, and I suspect they're doing some "damned lies" statistics to arrive at it, such as amortizing the common area across the occupancy. I think every open office floorplan I've been in has had 4' desks. The next desk is flush against mine, and there was someone sitting directly behind me. At best, that's 16 sq ft. Generously 20. I have no idea how you arrive at ~150 sq. ft.

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

#829

Post by deprecative »

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.

What you're describing seems to be healthy vs unhealthy relationships (marriages). If two people are forced to be around each other and don't like each other you're going to speed up the decline. It wasn't WFH that did it, it was the fate of their relationship the entire time.

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

#830

Post by fmajid »

lr4444lr wrote: post #101
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.

I go back to reading "Joel on Software" from time to time... it's not my Bible or anything, but a lot of it has aged REALLY well.

If you don't want Spolsky, you can also refer to Tom DeMarcos' excellent Peopleware.
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