Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

In theory you can resolve this (I'm at a remote company now and think gathertown is a great tool for this), but the lift is high and I suspect the majority of remote companies are operating at a net negative vs. colocation because of this.

Even with these tools, some natural amount of human communication/interaction is lost. It mostly hurts spontaneous collaboration and junior engineers - the threshold for these (comms/collab) is higher than in the office even in ideal remote conditions. Normal human team bonding/relationship building stuff is also lost (and useful for building a high performance culture).

This is also assuming you're at least within mostly the same or close timezones, add that into the mix and it gets even worse.

Other people replying don't understand what I mean by the market solving this. If remote is truly advantageous then startups that are remote first should out compete those that aren't. Empirically this appears to not be true and at least in SF and AI (the sector with the largest return likely in the next decade) people are going back to being colocated because of its advantages (primarily around communication and cycle times).

Mostly I see motivated reasoning primarily as the argument in favor of remote being better. I get it, I work remotely - there are nice quality of life advantages, but I still think it's competitively worse for companies in almost all cases.

This comes up a lot around here in discussions about uncomfortable employer decisions.

The H-1B visa is certainly restrictive, but it is by no means the indentured-servitude visa that people make it out to be.

I’ve hired a fantastic employee who was at the time in the US on an H-1B visa. The process was straightforward. I was at a small startup at the time, so we didn’t have a big hiring team to lean on or anything. There was some friction — we needed to do more paperwork, and that pushed things out by maybe a week or two. And we had to pay lawyers and some filing fees — perhaps $10-15k. Which isn’t nothing, but also is fine if you get a great employee out of the deal.

My understanding of the H-1B visa is that it requires that the visa holder maintains a job matching there description that the visa was issued for, and in the case of a job loss, the visa holder has a (painfully short) 6 weeks to find new employment. So, stressful for sure, but workable, especially with a little planning, as this article suggested in any case.

The L-1, in contrast is (mostly) non-transferable, and the limited transfer options require the original employer to initiate.

I bring this up not to dismiss the stress imposed by the 6-week H-1B unemployment scramble, but rather to remind everyone here (employers and employees alike) that H-1B status doesn’t impose all that much of a hurdle. If you are in the US on one, don’t hold back from applying for new jobs! If you’re hiring, don’t be afraid if you see that a candidate is in the US on a H-1B!

Apropos username.

And I suspect this is exactly what the managers want: Decrease headcount and decrease average salaries to make the company look good next quarter. That's what they get rewarded for. They don't get penalized for decreasing the collective talent or productivity of the company in the long term; they get rewarded for decreasing costs in the short term. So that's what they're going to do in the guise of an RTO policy.