RTO is way to force people work for two more hours per day for the same pay (1 hour typical commute one way). Hence it is done to suppress wages and make people leave voluntarily. It's not that hard to deduce.
RTO: WTAF
41–50 of 151 posts
Re: RTO: WTAF
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a lazy and cowardly way to get people to cull themselves and save money on severance packages. It's not that deep.
Isn't it possible to just not give people severance packages?
It is likely too late for many existing contracts with packages built-in, which probably also overlap with the longest-working (and thus most expensive) engineers.
Re: RTO: WTAF
#43Sigh This debate has been going on for years now. Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers) Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.
> Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)
I disagree, this does not make any sense to me. You can work together with other people without being physically present, and you can socialize as well. We had regular after hour meetings online drinking beer.
Re: RTO: WTAF
#44I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list: * Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need. * Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might refl…
One additional reason: all the other CEOs are mandating it at their companies. Can't be the odd man out in the CEO group chat.
Also mating/dating and the less pleasant side of that exemplified by Harvey Weinstein et al.
Re: RTO: WTAF
#45It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location. You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent. If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person soci…
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Re: RTO: WTAF
#46Sigh This debate has been going on for years now. Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers) Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.
I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote. Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires diffe…
RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
Re: RTO: WTAF
#47they're just tightening the noose.
don't you feel like everything is getting worse in some ways?
the delusion is to think you're special because you work for a big evil company.
Re: RTO: WTAF
#48I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by e…
I've long suspected it's got to do with office real estate. You spent $10m or $100m on a building that's now half empty. Either you downsize or commit to enterprise scale sunk cost fallacy and enforce RTO so your real estate investment isn't "wasted". City centres also thrive on RTO, with high street shopping on a generational decline it's up to office workers and their employers to prop up the economy of the CBD one…
The city centre / real estate thing sounds like an externalisation - which companies famously dont give a shit about.
It should be a tradegy of commons at best: it may affect the CEOs 401k, but not by much (0.000001% for their individual decision to RTO for that company y). It like buying McD shares then going to McD for lunch every day with your team.
I think there are other reasons.
Re: RTO: WTAF
#49> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.
You’re right for younger children but for older children in school you can definitely handle it while working remotely. You just pick them up from school and then they can mostly do stuff on their own the afternoon. But if you have to go in office suddenly that doesn’t work anymore.
Re: RTO: WTAF
#50It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location. You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent. If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person soci…
> you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe
Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.
You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.