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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

#201

Post by banannaise »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #34

I would be interested to hear from Indian, Philipino or other off- near- shore locations. Is this “give me WFH or give me death” actually just USA/European entitlement and Chennai Devs will gleefully work in air-conditioned offices (hopefully not open plan cubicle hell but nicely designed “WeWork-like” places) and discover the turbo-charge of a co-located mission locked team? Are we Western Devs about to learn a very…

Offshored work solves a very different problem. Typically they're being given lower-difficulty work where the quality of the developers and their specific qualifications are less important, so it's easy to co-locate a team of sufficient quality.

One of the advantages of US/European remote teams is that they can pull the most skilled personnel available from many different regions and have them all working together. When you force a team to be co-located, you weaken your talent pool.

Or, in other words: A high-performing team requires a group of: - motivated engineers - with the right skillsets - who can communicate effectively - and work together effectively and losing any of these three things will trash your team's throughput. It is hard to get all three, but especially hard when you hard-limit your team to a single city.

Outsourcing trades "with the right skillsets" (and to an extent "who can communicate effectively") for "cheaper" and "in the same location". This works just fine as long as you don't need serious skillsets, but is nowhere close to an effective replacement.

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

#202

Post by wing-_-nuts »

qwerpy wrote: post #97
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.

Agree but Microsoft has more going for it than just remote work support. My wife switched from Microsoft to a much younger, hip tech company and her quality of life plummeted. The higher work intensity, forced RTO, and the overall lack of parents at the company and especially at the leadership levels made for an unsympathetic place for her to work while dealing with the day to day life of a parent to young children.…

>the tech industry is showing its true colors.

I'm not sure a WLB issue with one company is reflective of the tech industry as a whole. If anything, it seems the tech industry is much more accommodating to the needs of flexibility than other similarly paying industries like medicine, law, finance, etc. That, in and of it self raises an issue with modern work culture. There's currently a bit of a panic happening amongst those who study demographics. People are having less kids, and the pressures of modern living are part of the problem. I think the only way you're going to turn that trend around is by being way more flexible with and accommodating with workers. Either WLB gets better, or demographic collapse gets worse. Modern society has some choices to make.

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

#203

Post by loco5niner »

JohnFen wrote: post #162
danudey wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quite my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. We're moving to an open plan office design, to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity. Also, please don't talk to people at their desks, it's very distracting. Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation.

> to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity. I wish you the best, but if history is any guide then the result will be less collaboration and a decrease in productivity.

You may have missed the /s

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

#204

Post by bitmasher9 »

Aurornis wrote: post #124
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 solutio…

I am in group #1, and left my previous company over their return to office policy. It felt very unfair that a company would insist I spend my time and resources to work in a less comfortable environment because some people cannot focus without being in an office and having managers look over their shoulder.

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

#205

Post by alexeiz »

Justsignedup wrote: post #102
throwaway387232 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked in to this topic to make these exact same points, but you did a better job of it than I would have. My employer mandated a minimum number of days in-office per week and then implemented the flex desk system with all of the drawbacks that you outlined. In my company's case it's a little worse: There are, in fact, often no available open desks in my workgroup. Furthermore there's no enforcement or discipline…

Mixed bag for me. My office is pretty decent but we have a bigger office than we currently need. My last job, at the office it was so loud (no dedicated conference rooms) that I was better off being at home, but unfortunately they also had zero respect for calendars, so getting in touch with people was... pretty much horrible no matter what way. In-office was less bad. I had offices with desks so small and shitty I j…

> boss that saw my desk and started complaining to HR that it was too big

Wow, your boss is a real dickhead.

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

#206

Post by com2kid »

bunderbunder wrote: post #160
crooked-v wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the lack of housing is entirely self-inflicted by locals in most US cities. There's no shadowy conspiracy; people have just spent decades opposing even the most basic new construction.

It's not quite so simple. Another thing that's happened is that all the good jobs in many industries have hyper-concentrated into a small number of locations. There's plenty of space to live available in many "main street" towns, but not necessarily anywhere nearby to work if you do choose to live there. My own city (Chicago) does have new construction, but it can't possibly keep up with demand from people moving int…

> and you can't replace half a city block's worth of two- and three-flat dwellings

It is funny because here in the Puget Sound, if we had two and three flat dwellings that would be a major improvement over the bullshit we have now. Like seriously, 3 story flats would be a dream for density and alleviate much of the area's high house prices.

Unfortunately due to a confluence of factors there are only two types of "density" being built around here:

1. Giant apartment blocks owned by multi-national investment firms where the rent goes up by LOL each year that exist just to drain money out of the community.

2. Awful 4 story townhouses that are inappropriate for anyone who has small children, or knees that aren't perfect.

Also because of reasons, the townhomes don't have usable yards (they have to be set in the lot such a way that neither the front or back are usable), and they can only be built in a few designated "upzoned" areas.

Zoning changes are slowly supposed to come that upzone[1] more and more of the city, but if building actual usable housing isn't even possible, just pure zoning changes aren't enough.

[1] Where upzoned means not just SFH, but still most of the city will be zoned SFH only.

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

#207

Post by Leynos »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #163
Leynos wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. For me, the office is door to door 35 minutes, 20 of those walking, the other 15 on light railway. Any longer than that and I would really struggle. As it is, this arrangement works well for me. I tend to WFH one day out of ten, or if I have a reason to be at home such as a delivery or a tradesperson visiting.

Somewhere I found an essay that references some claims that humans dislike traveling for more than something around an hour a day. And it doesn't depend on mode of transport.

Ten years ago, my commute was an hour by bus each way. I didn't mind it so much then, but I definitely wouldn't go to an employer who required that of me now. The light railway system is so much nicer than the bus, and I enjoy the walking part.

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

#208

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #195
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing costs are not included in measures of inflation. While they have gone up (almost certainly faster than inflation), they are not part of the inflation numbers that we hear in the news.

> Housing costs are not included in measures of inflation Yes, they are [1][2]. [1] https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/methodologies/RIPfac... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-consumer-pri...

My apologies, home ownership costs are not included in inflation measures. But I was wrong and you're correct: rents are.

Which actually makes my point even more clearly: yes, there are a lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent, but these are not supported by the statistics for inflation and median income. Doesn't mean that they are wrong, but makes it more likely that there are other reasons for the proliferation of these stories.

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

#209

Post by ghaff »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #78
ghaff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it depends on the utilization. Even before COVID I maybe used my desk once every two weeks or so and eventually just gave it up.

Sure, if someone doesn’t care or is infrequently there, then don’t bother. If someone is in the office a few days a week, give ‘em a desk.

Hoteling is probably a pain for a regular. Yeah, something like 3 days per week is is probably about the threshold.

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

#210

Post by JumpCrisscross »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #208
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Housing costs are not included in measures of inflation Yes, they are [1][2]. [1] https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/methodologies/RIPfac... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-consumer-pri...

My apologies, home ownership costs are not included in inflation measures. But I was wrong and you're correct: rents are. Which actually makes my point even more clearly: yes, there are a lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent, but these are not supported by the statistics for inflation and median income. Doesn't mean that they are wrong, but makes it more likely that there are other reasons for the p…

> home ownership costs are not included in inflation measures

They are, as one of the inputs to imputed rent for owner-occupied housing.

> lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent

A lot is explained by regional variation. For example, real mean wages in San Francisco are back where they were in 2017 [1].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MWACL06075

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