RTO also kills business. I had a thriving business out where all the workers were working from home, in the ground floor of a massive apartment community where many of the tech workers live. I had so much foot traffic business I didn't have to advertise. Amazon and Microsoft RTO'ed and my business dried up overnight and I can't get it back even with advertising and the foot traffic is paltry compared to what it was.
‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
111–120 of 140 posts
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
My office is 7 minutes on my bicycle. I work from home where I have a better screen setup, privacy, instead of having to shuffle into a cubicle to make calls. I cycle to the office to have a beer with some colleagues every few weeks on an agreed date and we meet there when we have to do some deep planning. Day to day my house is so much better
You can't get a good screen setup at your office?
office is limited to two 1080 monitors at home I have 2x1080 + 4k. so much better. they won't change for one person :|
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#113I think full time work in the office is 100% dead and buried. It's never coming back for people who have enough skills to leverage that kind of arrangement. I think the first place we need to start is there. Most of us are NEVER going back to 5 days a week in the office. However, most of the folks complaining about return to work I've noticed are senior people who have enough skills to perform their job and don't req…
> I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely.
I've done this a bunch over zoom.
> I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming.
Ask them in standups? Have an "open door" policy towards them pinging you to hop on a zoom? You also probably don't need to be hovering over them making certain that they're never struggling, that's a form of micro management. Gotta let the kids fight with problems for awhile before jumping in and fixing it for them[*].
[*] and really don't fix it for them, teach them how to fix it. poor phrasing.
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bigger the organization the more bureaucratic it becomes. High quality performance coaching and just maintaining internal communication is hard to scale. Big organizations tend to fallback to easy to measure butts in seats and lines of code.
Big organisations will have already learned the hard way about the value of institutional knowledge and how difficult it is to pass that on remotely.
Based on my experiences at companies ranging from 75-5000 employees, I would dispute that. I don't think any type of company is particularly good at passing on institutional knowledge.
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#115It feels like RTO is quickly evaporating the leverage these big companies temporarily created with their mass layoffs. I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO. Well, it looks like the majority of the industry is calling their bluff and refusing to go back to the office regardless of the threat of unemployment. The tech job market seems to be rejuvenating so I think if people couldn…
> I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO.
If we hit a major recession and unemployment spikes, corporations will be looking to downsize everywhere, including jettisoning more office space.
And the Fed jacking up interest rates and trying to cap inflation and wage inflation is just what the Fed does, they're not caring about RTO. Volker didn't jack rates up in 1980 to force workers back into the office.
There may be mangers/executives cheerleading all this, along with the cuts to headcount in tech, because they personally think that it'll result in RTO. But if the economy actually blows up then CFOs and boards will be telling them to cut costs everywhere and offices are a huge sink of money.
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#116Just genuinely don't see the point in this debate anymore, like some companies will want you to show up, some will be fine with you working from home. If your company is asking you to show up, time to just get another job if that's important to you. Thankfully it's an easy solve because the people who like showing up are tired of video calls anyway.
Approximately 100% of my meetings are video calls, even in office. It was that way before the pandemic too. That's what happens when your organization has multiple locations.
Not necessarily so. I worked at a large organization with offices across the US, as well as in London, Germany, and Canada. Approximately 100% of my meetings were in-person, many with a remote participant or two.
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really should be the other way; they ought to tax office space punitively in order to coerce people not to commute at all. Commuting is a major source of emissions, personal health ailments, and encourages human-hostile urban design.
It's also a major source of income from taxes on things like fuel.
Nope. Fuel taxes only constitute about 1.5% of revenue for state and local governments that collect them.
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#118Offices per se aren’t necessarily terrible. Commutes are terrible. Open floor plans are terrible. Companies don’t seem interested in fixing these things, though.
Yep. Ask any remote worker if they’d go back to the office and most would say no. Ask them if the office was within walking distance and most probably wouldn’t mind.
I have certainly found this to be true. When I took a job with a remote-first startup last year, I lived on the opposite side of North America from its headquarters. My family has since moved (for almost entirely unrelated reasons!) and we now live within walking distance. I come into the office almost every day, even though it is mostly empty, because the walk is pleasant and the quiet office is a good place to get work done. If I had to drive here, or take the bus, I would almost certainly stay home instead.
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Workers have leverage and are using it. You don’t have to understand it for workers to work towards having more agency over their working arrangements. The NLRB is likely about to reinstate the Joy Silk doctrine, which will make it even easier to organize. Workers who want flexible work arrangements as a right should lean into that. Public support for unions exceeds 70%, the highest amount in almost 60 years. So stra…
>> “you just have to do what your employer dictates or go elsewhere.” Isn't that pretty much exactly the case? No one in software is going to go to the trouble of unionizing.
I used to think we didn't need unions and then it came out that dozens of the big tech companies were colluding with each other to limit wages and job mobility.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
The suits ripped off the engineers to the tune of US$8,000,000,000 (est.)
Re: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the plan was to create a poor labor market so they could demand RTO. This is an extremely paranoid/conspiratorial way of thinking.
No it isn't, in fact I'd say not believing it plausible is the epitome of naivety, if not outright burying your head in the sand. I'll use the ongoing writer's strike as an example: The studios outright said[1] they wanted them poor and in apartments so they'd have to take a deal. [1] https://www.theroot.com/studios-reveal-cruel-plan-to-push-wg...
I'll grant that studios may have the ability to do what the article says they want to do -- after all the WGA has only 11k members.
But let's just take accountants -- there are 1.4 million according to the BLS. Realistically there's just no amount of coordination that will stop a significant portion of those who want to from WFH. And that's just one type of WFH-friendly white collar job.