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Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

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Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#721

Post by fieldcny »

cableshaft wrote: post #328
cogman10 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Correction, the company was not performant enough to keep them working there…

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#722

Post by enobrev »

rwmj wrote: post #41
Two9A wrote: post #3

This 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…

Remote since 2002!

End of 2001 for me!

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#723

Post by Yizahi »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #340
Yizahi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Surely that's 25% more?

Yep, my mistake. And that is also a conservative number, because human time is not equally priced. Arguably the free time a human has is more valuable per hour the less time remains. So a person having 8 free hours daily may value a single of these hours at X, but a person having only 4 free hours daily would value a single hour lost much higher than X, because it represents a bigger proportion of the free time lost. Corpos even agree with this, valuing overtime pay progressively more per hour the more hours they demand, not perfectly of course but still something.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#724

Post by throwaway5959 »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #667
throwaway5959 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was referring more to sense of entitlement vs what people actually have to do for their job. To me, coming into the office twice a week for the salary I get just isn’t that big of an ask.

Yeah, I can see that and in most cases that's true. But I also understand the anger of people who were legitimately bait-and-switched. For some people it may be a big deal, if they have to move to work in the office for example. But even if it's not a big deal, it's shitty to have someone reneg on a deal with you. And that's especially true if you feel (right or wrongly) that it's for bullshit reasons.

Yeah for people that were hired with the position being 100% remote, especially pre-pandemic, I think it’s unreasonable to ask them to move. Just let them work remote.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#725

Post by cdchn »

joshchaney wrote: post #582
cdchn wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is doing this precisely? I've heard a lot of people bemoan that they moved during the pandemic and now are being required to return to the office but I haven't heard of any instances where previously remote employees-- remote from BEFORE the pandemic-- are being required to move to central office locations.

This is exactly what happened to me. I worked from home for Wells Fargo for years prior to the pandemic. This year suddenly my status got changed and I was required to go into the office. First come first serve cubicles and none of my co-workers were even in the same state, let alone office. Years prior to the pandemic when I was in the office I had my own cubicle and could at least expect my chair would be the same…

For the past 10 years or so I've been doing "hybrid WFH" where I negotiate 3 days max in-office (when I'm working somewhere with an office close to where I live) and I always get it agreed upon in my employment contract. My guess (and bias) would be that companies that would pull this switcheroo on employees would be larger orgs with faceless HR machinery and most wherewithal to dominate their employees (ie Amazon)

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#726

Post by lazide »

garciasn wrote: post #653
lazide wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid is entirely up to the eye of the beholder. For them, they may be valid reasons even if you don’t like them. It’s all about pros/cons and either sides approach. One big one you didn’t list - it’s really hard to a manager to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester. Some (but not most!) employees may be burning out, or violating security or labor rules, or not followi…

Having ineffective management ("it’s really hard to a manager (sic) to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester") is a leadership problem that is easily fixed by hiring competent and experienced leaders who have worked with remote teams. Incompetent leaders cannot manage people remotely and they generally do a poor job when in person, but it's masked by their ability to m…

Ho man.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#727

Post by guhidalg »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #693
ncallaway wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I think it’s fine for people to have differences and differing preferences. My point is that if 5/100 people want to work in the office and 95/100 don’t, that’s fine. If 5/100 want to work in an office with 100 people, and force the others to return against their wishes that’s * not* fine. They can have their preference, but it seems wrong to me for their preference to override the preference of others. > I’m…

Hypothetically, would you still feel this way of it turned out that everyone being in the office (remember this is a magical hypothetical) has a significant and demonstrable improvement in productivity? This is more of a level-setting question than any sort of disagreement.

Unask this question.

Every industry, every company, every team, and every project is different. What works in some places and times doesn't work in others.

You have to decide for yourself and your team/company if RTO is what is best, and don't take other's lived experience as your own.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#728

Post by CoinFlipSquire »

gonehome wrote: post #72

This is a classic HN post that will get a lot of positive attention here playing into the HN cognitive bias zeitgeist, but I think is mostly bullshit. The market will settle it in the end, but at least for startups being colocated is a competitive advantage.

I think it also presupposes that the market is good and the industry has spots available. It's just not that simple though. The advice the blog gives isn't necessarily wrong on it's face but what if you can't get another job quickly? What if the market is bad and people are trying to scramble for a job?

People who can just easily get another job and are just engineer interview ready at all points aren't exactly the majority.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#729

Post by npsimons »

mvdtnz wrote: post #580
npsimons wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The market" is a bunch of rich assholes that act in their own self interests. For instance, demanding that people commute to the RE they've invested in before their investments fall through the floor in valuation. Lot of naysayers here claiming illegitimate "bias" when people point out their increased productivity when working from home (just the lack of interruptions and forced writing down of institutional knowl…

A vanishingly small proportion of business owners or managers have any investment in commercial real estate beyond the office lease they're holding. Virtually none of them own their commercial premises.

> Virtually none of them own their commercial premises.

Of course this is probably the case; but how many people in higher positions are invested in REITs that invest in commercial RE? I bet it's a fairly large proportion. Hews to the old adage espoused by Buffet and others of "only invest in what you know."

Just because they don't have skin in the game on that particular building they are bossing people around in doesn't mean they don't have vested interest in seeing office space being rented in general.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#730

Post by bit_logic »

gruez wrote: post #669
bit_logic wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed. Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the…

>Where's the data? https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/t... "Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."

This line from the article "...in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes.." shows that this study is about a call center. A few points on this:

* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees

* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.

The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.

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