331–340 of 913 posts
It's not framed as a debate but an expectation, and an overdue one at that.
zu must return to ze office and zu must sit in ze pod for 8 hours or zu vill be fired!
Its 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.
The point is, requiring everyone to feel that way is bullshit. This bell can't be unrung, and the successful places are the ones who can cater to both, which is good because it's not mutually exclusive. The term "return to office," just like the term "remote" are biased towards desire. Workplace independence is what those of us who don't want to go back in are looking for, and there's room enough for everyone. You can go in, I can stay home, we can work together.
The last bit matters, though, because you going in have to be accepting of those of us who don't want to. Yeah, you're gonna sit on Zoom calls still from the comfort of your cube, but at least at my company, we were doing that on Skype before anyway, we just all forgot. Any office with more than one building, or any company with a tolerant work from home policy, had at least one person not come in at a time, so voice calls were a requirement. It was never not that way, and it won't go back to the time before that when absence meant missing things.
Make If you want to go back and make us all go with you, now we have a problem. But please, go in to the office! Enjoy it, it's a nice place to be. Just not the only place.
Remote "work" is fine (with pros and cons). The problem is lots of people don't "work" remotely. Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.
I see the opposite problem, while there are people that work remotely that don't work, when I go into the office, it has become apparent to me that most people in office don't work nearly as much as remote people. There's tons of socializing, and snacking, and getting coffee, and going out for lunch, and commuting, and then on top of that, everyone works in giant open spaces with all kinds of distractions. Furthermor…
Most seemingly useless bullshit team bonding activities will benefit the company long term. [This is especially true for slow-moving large companies, e.g. FANG, where very few lines of actual code is written by each employee and most of the "work" is in fact is to ensure business continuity, replicating institutional knowledge and context in employees' heads, and of the nature you describe.]
I agree there are different preferences, but it's not about employee's preference for the most part, but employer's — and the case I am making is it is not at all surprising or stupid that the employers are demanding RTO by default.
Earlier 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…
Times change and so should companies. It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction. Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and…
The compensation is correlated with confusion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier 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…
> the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore. Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before. Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be…
Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah.
Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare.
It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.
I think that many people struggle at home (group A) while others don't (group B). RTO helps those who struggle at home (group A). And is a major inconvenience to those who excelled at home (group B) but it doesn't significantly degrade them. Thus RTO improves group A performance while not affecting group B performance so it looks like a win overall and in a sense it is. But it is penalizing group B, making their live…
As someone who has worked remote long before COVID, there's another layer to this issue: Many of the people who think they are in Group B (work well from home) are actually in Group A (struggle at home) but they are resistant to recognizing it.
Prior to the pandemic, remote companies all understood that not everyone who wants to work form home can actually be productive at home. For some reason the pandemic WFH push made everyone forget that, and we started assuming that anyone who wants to work from home is good at working from home. Predictably, a lot of companies saw a huge increase in issues, panicked, and force every to RTO.
It's a challenging issue because the problems aren't immediately obvious. We had some very productive programmers who just couldn't WFH because they were hostile in text chat but very cordial in person. Others would spend entire works grinding away at problems in isolation that could have been solved with 1 hour of communication because they think WFH == freedom to isolate from others.
Many of these things can be trained out with good management and mentoring, but only when it's introduced gradually. The pandemic WFH push opened the floodgates to everyone, with predictable results.
I hope we go back to wide acceptance of WFH, however with the understanding that it's not for everyone. Some people can't handle it even though they like it.
I dont work from office anymore. At most, in a hybrid way. But if I can avoid steping in a office, I will.
Its 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)?