321–330 of 472 posts
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I’m sorry management hurt you. It’s not your fault.
To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here. Like everything it's a mix. In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
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Nobody was ever prohibited from coming to the office. If you like it, do it. But forcing people to come to the office when they hate it, is counter-productive.
A lot of people are not responsible enough to work well remotely.
A lot of people who prefer remote work have a superiority complex over their peers. They’re usually hard to work with and unreliable, and think that as long as they’re performing their individual tasks they’re allowed to be awful communicators.
"We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change." So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one? What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity. During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivi…
Any productivity increases come from the fact that some employees would rather quit than come back to the office. Which makes it seem like less people do the same amount of work. Until they get overworked and output plumments. But that will land outside of the measurement window.
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Good thing for you that you’re productive anywhere. I’m not. I much prefer working from an office. I’m way more efficient and happy in an office than working from home. It’s not a matter of mentality. It’s a matter of being in an environment conducive to work. You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
Nobody was ever prohibited from coming to the office. If you like it, do it. But forcing people to come to the office when they hate it, is counter-productive.
The biggest benefit of an office is collocation. People need to be forced to come to an office or they won’t do it, and team efficiency will go down.
Even if you think you’re performing well, the entire team suffers for it. Miscommunication happens. People get blocked for longer. Juniors can’t get the mentoring they need.
If you disagree that’s fine, go work for a remote company. But clearly the tide is turning against you with more and more companies enforcing RTOs.
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I go to the office around one week out of every four, it's not that rare. Sure, there's some catching up, but not that much. Mostly it's the continuous interruptions that are never time boxed, the way they are when remote.
That’s odd, in my experience most engineers know to at least send a slack message first before talking to a fellow engineer in person, unless it’s an emergency.
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For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X. Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of tim…
With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees. Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
All your "more important" issues are predicated on the idea that you can get a job. For those who are unfairly discriminated against, they don't even get to your point. Who cares about employer healthcare when you have no employer?
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imo that’s the worst of both worlds. That’s what my company does, and none of the engineers ever come in. My manager comes in when he has meetings, and I’ll go in sometimes, but I’m usually alone. None of the benefits of collocation with all the of downsides of an office. I find that office days work a lot better. Everyone comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays or something.
Your initial post was about there being choice. Now it appears that the upside of the office is the others being there. I can understand that some people like the physical distinction between "work" and "home". My boss is like that, and he would actually go to the office during covid when no one else would be there. He lived alone in a comfortable apartment, so there wasn't even a question of loud kids / no space for…
Yes, offices have downsides, but they also have benefits. To get the benefits the majority of a team needs to be in the same office. Having tried both, I prefer working in an office with coworkers around. The growing consensus seems to be that large companies agree with me. Are you saying you know more about employee productivity than Meta and Amazon among others?
If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
And on your comment about your office being disgusting, your coworkers being terrible, and your commute being awful: that’s a skill issue friend. My office is great, always clean and stocked with snacks; my coworkers are awesome, very thoughtful people and i consider some of them to be my friends and we hang out outside of work; my commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride that gets my day started with some exercise. I might change jobs to somewhere that has more office days though.
I’m sure you can also find a company with a great office culture. I wouldn’t want to work from your company’s office either. That’s why I specifically look out for that when job hunting.
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Maybe if the office was not a hellscape? Not just the commute, the offices themselves. I didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is ta…
Well yeah, and that's actually the point: if you don't like it, you're free to leave! Headcount reduction without severance payment and getting rid of an unmotivated employee, win-win! At least for federal employees they had the decency of spelling it out clearly: https://traumaawareamerica.org/2025/04/28/deliberate-strateg... - the rest of us have to keep listening to the "it's all for your best" BS...
[1] If they get to call shit on workers with "quiet quitting" etc. they get the same back
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> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? You'll cross-pollinate across functions. Or at least increase the chances of that happening. Not saying that's worth the tradeoff. But my time in the office often finds serendipitious value in random off-team conversations, not scheduled time.
I am currently an engineer at Meta. No one in my office is cross pollinating among different teams. In fact most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience, because the collaboration (at least for engineering) is most of the time better done in a document. There are, however, a few times…
I worked at Meta nee Facebook from 2013-18, and back then there were no documents, and the only way to figure stuff out was either spelunk through the source code, or talk to people in person. So I was very surprised that they ever said they'd be doing remote, and entirely unsurprised that they are moving back towards the office.
That being said, there was no tracking of in office/remote days, it was just expected that you'd work from wherever worked best for you but (almost) everyone was based out of an office.