I’ll just repeat what I’ve said before: it’s not about people, it’s about real estate valuation and taxes. The folks making the RTO mandates (CEOs) are, as a whole, completely uninterested in employee preferences compared to the value of their homes and buildings. They are influenced by others in the same boat.
Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
321–330 of 913 posts
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. Perhaps if everyone working from home were constantly available to screen-share/video chat it wouldn't be as bad, but my experience with WFH is people get distracted by kids/pets/etc and half the time I wait h…
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask…
Yeah I guess the difference is that at my workplace there's a lot of tribal knowledge. Even when there is a design document it often hasn't been updated or requires nuance to interpret that's only really in one or two peoples' heads. Often the question/discussions is about engineering priorities, some discovery was made during coding that would alter the design, and half the time simply bringing up the topic with them for 5 minutes brings new information to bear that produces a superior result.
I try not to waste their time and develop my questions as much as possible on my own, but I'm not going to risk several hours of wasted work going down the wrong path when a 5 minute discussion with a SME would confirm something.
And it is an RTO discussion, because in the office they're available to some degree. WFH that availability drops off a cliff, and these are questions about the inner-workings of proprietary software, if the answers were on Google there would be legal action.
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#323Its only bullshit if you want to work remote. I want to be in the office. Working remote is the most stressful thing I've ever done.
Working in office can be good. But the question is - are you getting paid 20% more for the RTO job compared to the remote? To compensate for the 20% more time wasted in useless transit (2 more hours per day)?
In your scenario, presumably you are 20% less effective for same pay. So in a way yes but comp does not need to be adjusted.
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#324good for you if you can hold out. i am close to retirement, and don't care much for "office productivity", or "team spirit", or collectivist management bs. i can do all my work remote, and will not willingly return to a commuter life.
in my youth i enjoyed the energy of a team, hanging out with colleagues, and generally never resented the office environment. physical collocation will still be valuable for many younger people. it really depends on one's working style, experience, life stage, etc
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#325If I start a company tomorrow, this is what I would want to do: 1. Hire within a general metropolitan area (2 hour commute max). 2. WFH for 28 days a month. 3. 2 days a month the entire org convenes in a ballroom or something and works together, have some progress reports, happy hours and hackathons. In this model, everyone’s remote most of the time. Yet everyone gets FaceTime with each other IrL. Seed ideas and brai…
This is very close to what I’d do, but with the addition of enough office space for anyone who wants it, and less frequent “required” gatherings rather than once a month. It’s really counterintuitive, as suggested by all the other replies so far, but I really think it’s the best setup:
1. Individuals and teams can work in whatever way is most productive for them.
2. On a day to day basis, everyone who’s in the office is there because they want to be there, not because their boss requires them to be there. Speaking from experience, this leads to way better energy at the office.
3. Yes, you’re restricting hiring to a single geographical area. But for a small startup in a tech hub that’s not an issue, there’s plenty of talent around, you just have to convince them they should work for you.
4. People will want to work for you, because they’ll appreciate not only the flexibility, but the fact that you’re treating them like adults who can manage their own working practices. I’ve told several recruiters this year something to the effect of “I’d only be looking to move for a role with more scope and autonomy, and if I can’t be trusted with a decision as simple as where to work from, this role probably doesn’t offer the level of autonomy I’d be looking for.”
At a larger scale you might have to branch out to multiple hubs, but I think having departments or at least functional teams colocated but with flexible work arrangements is a huge advantage over the alternatives.
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine, they will eventually have their lunch eaten by companies that can execute with all the talent they refuse to hire. It takes time, but the wheel turns.
These wheels often take a generation or more to fully rotate. And I have no idea whether any collective or group action can materially accelerate the timeline.
I would agree historically, but I think innovation and change is happening much faster now.
10 years ago, nobody seriously thought about taking on Google in terms of search engine. Now we are going though a phase where we are questioning if LLMs can take over that market share.
Same with Facebook in social networks, but TikTok took over pretty fast.
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#327This is one aspect of the RTO discussion that's sometimes missed: there are plenty of people in the tech sphere (myself included) who've been comfortably remote for much longer than those who were pushed into remote work by lockdowns and pandemic response. We're not about to give up a whole lifestyle we've built over (in some cases) decades, on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the pres…
I was a remote worker at Apple pre-pandemic and had no problems. After COVID I was told that moving states where I live would have to get some approval and is not guaranteed. I left Apple shortly after and have been contracting since. When I was in an office full time, I had to work my life around my work. When I have forty hours to fill out over a seven day period, I'm working my work around my life.
Why didn't you just move states and ask "forgiveness" later? Companies cannot tell you where and when to live and if they try it see who blinks first. I would certainly have ignored them and let them fire me or RIF me.
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to COVID, everyone understood that remote work was supported by some companies and not others. It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others. As a result, everyone peacefully self-selected into their preferred employment relationships. Companies got the type of workforce they wanted and workers chose the type of environment they wanted. It was great. Today, as some companies are…
> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they starte…
> "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"
Pretty much exactly this happened at my company. They started touting these new offices they got for a steal, but in the all-hands said "our company has never required anyone to come in to the office and we never will". Three months later, they start encouraging everyone to come in once a week. Three months later, they changed it to 'we expect you to be in 4 days a week', and in the all-hands one of the founders went "We never said we wouldn't have you come back into the office. I love seeing people in person, that would be silly of me to say!"
Technically it's not a requirement, just an "expectation", so I still haven't gone in more than necessary. But I'm not expecting a great performance review next year because of it, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll stick around either (it does look like most other places are being even worse about it right now, though). I was so angry to hear that.
Not the only time they gaslit either. They also had a round of layoffs about six months ago while trying not to call them layoffs ("we let a bunch of people go today, it's not a layoff though, they just weren't performant enough to work here"), that really rubbed me the wrong way too.
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#329Video conf still sucks. It's literally the same as 10 years ago. Does anyone have a workplace where it is really seamless, high resolution, and just works? Or is using any of these new technologies? Maybe VR will help... But not being in-person for collaboration/morale is miles apart. I wonder if employees would personally cover the cost of a one week meetup once per month if their other option was move city and offi…
Why do so many want to video conf specifically when audio is all you need? Hell, of these, text chat is all you need and is more practical most of the time.
Because audio-only or, worse text-only, is throwing away >90% of the bandwidth of human-to-human communication. Studies show that relatively little of in-person communication is the words themselves. I don't think emojis solve this.
Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It
#330Video conf still sucks. It's literally the same as 10 years ago. Does anyone have a workplace where it is really seamless, high resolution, and just works? Or is using any of these new technologies? Maybe VR will help... But not being in-person for collaboration/morale is miles apart. I wonder if employees would personally cover the cost of a one week meetup once per month if their other option was move city and offi…
> Does anyone have a workplace where it is really seamless, high resolution, and just works? Google. It was good even before the pandemic. We used to video call each other between buildings 100 feet apart instead of walking over.
Agreed, people keep trying to push Teams, Zoom, WebEx and others, and everyone complains about how rubbish video meetings are. Google Meet work, and it works well every single time.
Not that I enjoyed using Google Chat much, but it did have one awesome feature: Click and the you where having a video meeting/call with the people you where just chatting to. The absolute simplicity of either planning or just setting up a spontaneous meeting using Googles solution is fantastic. I really don't get why more aren't using it.