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The workers have spoken: They're staying home

computerworld.com

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Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#121

Post by mikestew »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #101
mikestew wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The poverty line for a family of 4 in San Francisco was $149k in 2023. I live in a MCOL city with all the modern amenities and on $150k can be a comfortably upper-middle class sole income earner, buy the average house, and send 2 kids to private school if needed. A 2-3x pay differential is a fairly accurate COL difference for a family moving to NY or SF, maybe even on the low end if comparing to a rural area.

I’m not debating the accuracy of GP’s statement, but rather the level of success one might have with that negotiation tactic. I’m waiting to hear the success stories of negotiating that 250% CoL raise.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#122

Post by bunderbunder »

mistrial9 wrote: post #71
ghaff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much relates to commute. I'd probably meander in for a halfway decent office arrangement if it were less than a 30 minute walk and there were actually people I worked with there. But that hasn't been the case so I don't.

traditional urban planning in the USA includes extensive field research that shows .. just what you are saying.. there is a demographic curve about time to commute and who is willing to do it, and how often.. behavior on a large scale across industries, show curves like that

I suspect that traditional urban planning in the USA also assumed that relatively few people would be trying to pack into city centers to work. Because modern office parks hadn't been invented yet, and modern curtain wall skyscrapers hadn't been invented yet, and consolidating many industries into a relatively small number of massive tech companies hadn't happened yet, and the two-income family (which doubles the potential number of commuters per dwelling unit) hadn't become such a thing yet, etc.

There's a part of me that wonders if part of what's going on here is a cadre of genxers who are so wealthy as to necessarily be out-of-touch don't realize that typical millennials' and zoomers' socioeconomic reality is not, and cannot reasonably be forced to be, similar to that of boomers and the greatest generation.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#123

Post by tegiddrone »

Suppafly wrote: post #43
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #20

My problem is that I quite like working with other people. It’s really hard to build relationships with other human beings when not in the same physical location- sharing jokes, lunches, walks and just shouting across the room about the weird code change . It’s vital. Most large companies think that as they are hiring “the best from around the world” that leaving them around the world is fine. Look leaving people on…

>My problem is that I quite like working with other people. Which is fine as long as you understand that the rest of us don't. Most of the push for back to the office is being pushed by extroverted people that miss being about to chat with people and not because of any results driven data.

At least in my experience, while I am good at text/email communication: my co workers were not. I feel like being a full remote company crippled us in terms of engineering quality. We have more of a license to be left alone and that sucks when we actually do need to coordinate with our coworkers. Easier to just not coordinate and tune out the notifications.

All said, maybe it is a larger issue and working from the office is just addressing symptoms that are more apparent when going remote. Are we really missing out on those water cooler talks or is there a missing information/management role. I think of how I've had the conversations with other teams around the occasional virtual water cooler "oh, you're building a microservice to do that... so are we.... why are we building the same microservice?"

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#124

Post by Aurornis »

buildbot wrote: post #5

Companies get so much more out of people working from home - Microsoft has realized this and still broadly supports remote work.

> Companies get so much more out of people working from home

We actually saw a very bimodal split: One group of employees had virtually no measurable change (neither improvement or decline) in any metric, subjective or otherwise.

The other group's productivity plummeted by nearly all metrics (again, from subjective performance reviews to any objective measures we looked at).

The angry internet comment section solution is to fire everyone in group #2 (people who can't work from home), but that group was large enough that no amount of firing or intensive coaching was going to turn the ship around.

The problem isn't as simple as you read about on internet comment sections. In my experience, it's good to have some remote employees but the WFH dynamic collapses when you try to let everyone do it. It's not appropriate for everyone. Normalize having some remote employees while requiring others to be in the office if they can't handle WFH. It's hard.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#125

Post by LordKeren »

mgkimsal wrote: post #109
LordKeren wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even outside the salary negotiations, it’s astounding to me how many companies are calling for RTO just to have people go to the office and sit on zoom meetings — because the company has several offices. I’m actually ok with RTO, but I’m not going to do it when there are no actual upsides because it’s only some days and the team is spread across the globe.

Had a friend get forced in to RTO, then was 'let go' less than 6 months later because of 'decline in performance'. He wasn't getting as much done as when he was WFH. All felt very orchestrated to get rid of someone over 50, but.. hey. Yeah, driving 60 miles round trip in rush hour 4 days per week... yeah, you might lose some productivity from a knowledge worker that way. If they were productive before, why rock the b…

That’s discouraging. I hope he’s able to find a new position that he enjoys

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#126

Post by elric »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #42
bunderbunder wrote: post #10

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in. This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a product…

It is incredibly short sighted not to provide a dedicated desk.

If I don't have a dedicated desk where I can leave stuff, I won't be coming to the office. Simple as that. Wasting time commuting is bad enough, but if I'm not even worth 2 square metres, why would I want to work for those people?

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#127

Post by JohnFen »

bunderbunder wrote: post #10

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in. This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a product…

Well said. During the span of my career, the office went from being a perfectly fine place to get work done; then degraded to a cube farm environment which was worse, but you you could work around it and get stuff done anyway; then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quit my job and vow to never work in such an environment again.

Commute is certainly an important aspect, too, but when I worked in the place that adopted an open office layout, I lived a literal 10 minute walk away. Having such a trivial (and pleasant) commute in no way made up for having to work in those conditions.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#128

Post by whyenot »

bunderbunder wrote: post #10

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in. This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a product…

One of the very nice things about working in academia is that I now have a private office. It has been a huge productivity and quality of (work)life boost. I don't understand why tech companies continue with open plan offices when they know their workers dislike them and have known this for years (decades?).

Having a low stress reverse commute on 280, one of the bay area's most scenic highways, probably also helps.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#129

Post by jmathai »

giobox wrote: post #86
odo1242 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually did try (Facebook has shuttles everywhere, and tried to rebuild the decommissioned passenger railway near US-84), but economic concerns like layoffs, etc. ended up taking priority. The main issue is it takes like 10-20 years of concerted effort in the US to approve/build a bridge, and nobody except the government is willing to wait that long. This is mostly a political problem.

Ignoring the shuttles which I don't think conclusively illustrate your point; Google has for years threatened to develop land into homes in San Jose so workers can choose to live closer, with the idea of doing exactly what OP suggests, but like so many Google projects, never seems to pan out: > https://www.fastcompany.com/90978855/googles-plan-to-build-1...

When we bought our home in the Bay Area in 2017, the San Jose offices Google planned on building were on all of the brochures. I was convinced that if the city is giving the incentives and Google is buying up so much property that it must be just a matter of time. I learned it’s not that simple.

Re: The workers have spoken: They're staying home

#130

Post by ThinkBeat »

Quite a lot of companies are thinning the herd for the past months and it is set to continue for I have no idea how long. I might stop tomorrow but I highly doubt it.

The more places get rid of workers the more the pendulum swings giving more power to the companies over their employees and who they hire.

A lot of tech worker primadonnas who have not seen the ugly politics of downsizing, right sizing, and outsourcing are going to have a tough time, as companies won't be bending over to hire folks anymore. The possibility of being unemployed not by choice, for a few weeks, until a phone call is made and a new job awaits, but as a reality for months.

The attitude that "I QUIT if I have to the office", might encounter "Good, we need to reduce headcount anyway".

The tech worker primadonnas vastly overestimats their own value to the company.

When X had mass layoffs, the general consensus for some techies was that X would die in a months' time, with all the essential people who had lost their jobs. I dont have any inside information in X and they may well have had disasters but they do appear to still exist and still function. (Or so it seems to me, but I dont even have an account)

I dont like this. I dont want it to happen. but I have been around for a couple of cycles of seeing the pendulum swing one way then the other.

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