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The damaging results of mandated return to office

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281–290 of 348 posts

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#281

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgra…

> Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. Let me guess, you are in a low cost of living area (at least relative to your income) and have a big house? I live in NYC. Residential floor space is very expensive here. My wife and I on two tech salaries can afford a fairly large place by the standards of our area, but it's definitely not large enough for 2 adults to comfortably wo…

And one of the consequences of widespread remote work—as we're already seeing—is more people deciding they don't want to continue to live in a cramped, expensive city apartment.

This doesn't mean everyone will—there are certainly other benefits to living in a city besides proximity to workplace. But it is likely that, given time (and probably some common-sense changes to housing policies), this will result in less pressure for apartments, meaning that people who do remain in cities will be likely to be able to afford more space.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#282

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgra…

> Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. Let me guess, you are in a low cost of living area (at least relative to your income) and have a big house? I live in NYC. Residential floor space is very expensive here. My wife and I on two tech salaries can afford a fairly large place by the standards of our area, but it's definitely not large enough for 2 adults to comfortably wo…

on the flip side of this I live in a house in NYC (the outer boroughs and yes the outer boroughs are a part of the city) and have the corner of my bedroom into a full WFH station.

I am missing the kid component though.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#283

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgra…

Not universally true. I strongly prefer work from office. I hate commuting but prefer the office so that’s a paradox I struggle with. I’ve been thinking terrible commutes are a symptom of how we’ve built society. If everyone lived within 20 minutes by public transit or bike or walk from the office would there still be as much pushback?

I live 20 minutes' walk from my workplace.

I've been working from home almost exclusively since lockdowns started, and it's hugely beneficial to me, while adding minimal burden to the actual work. Being in my own space, with my cats nearby, my own kitchen just a few steps away, and my family doing their own work in other rooms...

And this is as compared to my own spacious office, with a decent minifridge and a back room I can sit in if I need to be more clearly "unavailable".

Thinking back to my previous job, where I worked in a cube farm, I just shudder inside. There is no way in hell I'm ever going back to that soul-destroying atmosphere, and by far the most reliable way to ensure that is to only take full-remote jobs from now on.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#284

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgra…

I work in an office for a company that's headquartered in another state, so even when in the office it's often been a "remote work" experience for me. What we have today is a natural and logical progression from all the improvements meant to make it easier for people to work together, regardless of location.

You have to remember at one time people actually left their desks to go to a conference room and meet. The first iteration of bringing in remote workers to that was often speakerphone systems maybe with multiple microphones if you were lucky. You'd literally have twenty people in a room all talking to each other. It was nearly impossible to keep up if multiple conversations broke out and often it was work to be heard. There was no view of the whiteboard and people had to remember to share any materials and be explicit as they advanced through it.

Cisco's telepresence system that tried to create an experience mirroring sitting across from each other at a table was a huge step up, but still it was a large hardware investment and the rooms were a scarce resource.

Fast forward to today and everyone has the "Tandberg" equivalent of a single person telepresence device that was limited to senior management. In fact everyone has a better experience at their desktop with universal access to web-hosted whiteboard and collaborative tools, and (assuming broadband network speeds are home) all those things work equally well at home or in the office.

So the progression of making it easier and easier for remote offices to collaborate has reached its logical conclusion. At least where I work it was pitched as a way to cut travel costs. And if I'm being cynical it's worked in that the senior staff are still free to travel while small departments now share travel budget that was previously available on a per-person basis. My personal corporate card has a credit line that's nearly what my boss' travel budget is for fourteen people.

So with no need to travel and no local staff or coworkers, it's frankly better to work from home: same zoom calls, same excalidraw, same figma, confluence, teams, etc. And no scheduling a desk for the day. No loud coworkers yelling on their headset when they get excited. I can have my preferred mouse and un-office-friendly mechanical keyboard. I can wear a lapel microphone and use my also un-office-friendly speakers instead of being forced to wear a headset or earbuds. I can have a wide screen monitor and a better camera. In short: productivity-wise my experience is the same or better, but comfort-wise it is materially better in every way. When every other coworker is already in another state, for me and a lot of people like me there's literally no downside.

And there's zero sympathy for corporations that worked so hard to make it easy to work from any other office only to discover it's just as easy to work from home.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#285

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgra…

Idk, I'm firmly in the "hybrid works best" camp. Face-to-face collaboration has no alternative, sorry. In jobs where you have to actually engineer instead of build CRUD web-app #2,000,001, it's very hard to be effective without in-person communication. Most people are not great at the async types of comms that are necessary for that to scale to remote work.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#286
post #90

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (…

Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown…

A mitigating factor is that a lot of engineers are from low cost areas, and yearn to return. India, China, exurbs from across the US.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#287
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most did so successfully. There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut. Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too? Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?

Wife works for a retail bank. Front-line employees didn't go remote - they need to be in retail bank locations serving customers. Back-office employees were 98% in-office prior to COVID. In several weeks, the company pivoted to remote work, including procurement of laptops (most non-managers had desktops). During the 2.5-3 years of COVID-induced WFH, their engagement numbers and measured productivity went up. I've he…

My company went permanent full remote. We are much less productive, velocity per engineer is about half what it was. I'll freely admit it's because the company is poorly managed, but in my experience tons of companies have leadership that isn't able to quickly pivot in the way needed for WFH to be successful. It requires a lot of effort to get remote engineers to communicate well and at least here it basically just doesn't happen anymore.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#288
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a nonsense argument. Your choice to return to the office is not somehow tied to other people being forced to be in the office.

> To each their own. They were giving another perspective, not forcing anyone to do anything.

They edited their comment after the fact to add this part, it was not there originally.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#289
post #196

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgra…

To each their own. I find that WFH makes me incredibly unproductive, I'm glad I'm able to return to to the office. I think there are a lot of factors that affect this (e.g. I have a family with small children at home, and my commute is <15 minutes by bike).

But thats not the issue.

The issue is that companies are forcing people into offices. Nobody forces anyone into WFH (as a trend).

It a mute point, that people like different work environments or that different tasks might require different environments.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#290

What's worse to me is the return to the "hybrid" office we keep getting threatened with. (My company has not actually done a RTO … yet. I don't know if we ever will.) Now instead of a lousy 4' desk in an open office plan … I also get a desk that isn't mine? I'm supposed to … what, lug a keyboard¹ & mouse & laptop in? It seems like literally nobody has imagined what it might be like for a SWE to actually attempt to do…

Get your employer to buy you an ergo keyboard. If you need a medical certificate then doctor shop until you get one. Then again if your employer doesn't even have monitors at hotdesks then maybe it's time to look for greener pastures.

> Get your employer to buy you an ergo keyboard.

… if only it were so simple! Employers are incredibly stingy¹.

But what I was trying to convey in the previous comment is that I already have an ergo keyboard. (So do many of my coworkers. It is also mine, purchased with my own money, because of the above.)

The point is not really obtaining the keyboard … it's transiting it to-and-fro the office, day-in, day-out, in these hybrid RTO plans. "Hotdesking" is inherently incapable of supporting this as the desk is no longer dedicated to a specific employee, but nobody in power making these plans appears to have thought it through.

(¹but frankly, a part of me would rather just say "give me that in cash as part of salary" and I can make a better purchase & management then than trying to deal with what amounts to being partially paid in keyboards. This extends to more than just keyboards: employees should absolutely not forget we bear costs in order to be employed for the company in the form of depreciating hardware costs)

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