391–400 of 969 posts
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When I was a teenager I played World of Warcraft for 5 years. During that time we did "raids" where 40 people have to pay attention and communicate, sometimes for longer than 8 hours, with people from around the globe. If teenagers can do it, adults can do it. Period. And if they can't, skill issue I guess.
This assumes productive work in a highly collaborative environment. Meetings aren't usually any of those things. The rest can be done remotely.
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Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome, I would hope that it didn't crash all the time.
> Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome That's news to me; I use Teams on Firefox every work day and I see no issues (other than it being one of the very few sites which need third-party cookies to work, but recently Firefox has made it easier to add an exception for a single site like Teams).
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If you quit (because of, say, RTO) then you quit. It's a fairly standard deal between you and your employer. If you get laid-off, employer has to give you a severance package for any number of reasons (local labor laws, agreement with the union, corporate PR). This is not a standard deal and is, simply put, more expensive than if the employee just quit of their own accord. In both cases, employer gets the benefit of…
Yes… but they are asking why now? Why did Microsoft start with traditional layoffs and then transition into RTO layoffs years later?
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A West Coast software engineering career is barely worth the land underneath a house from which you could reasonably commute to it. We're getting there.
I'm glad I live in the midwest. Every story I hear about working in the bay area makes me wonder why anyone would.
Additionally, Silicon Valley in particular benefits from having multiple companies in overlapping specialties. Suppose I’m a GPU expert working for NVIDIA, and suddenly I hit a setback and it’s time for a new job. Well, Apple is just a few miles away, and Apple makes GPUs and NPUs, and so I’d have a shot at working for Apple.
Contrast that with people living in areas with little diversity among tech companies. For example, Intel recently laid off a ton of engineers working near Portland, Oregon. There are few alternative technical employers in the region, especially in the specialties Intel focused on in Portland. Those laid-off engineers are facing the prospects of pivoting to a different tech specialty with more employment opportunities, competing for remote jobs at a time when so many companies are requiring their employees to return to the office, or relocating from Portland, which is massively disruptive and can potentially be very expensive. Some may be forced to retire early.
Silicon Valley may be insanely expensive and ultra-competitive, but it also has critical mass, which is vital for highly-specialized engineers and researchers.
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If people aren't getting their work done, then they should be having discussions with their manager that eventually lead to pip or firing if not resolved. If they are getting their work done... Who cares if I do a "non work thing" at a "work time"?
If your work could be easily quantified and measured like that, it would be contracted out to the lowest bidder.
At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best. The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared). I remain baffled by executives' obse…
It's because although many people do work well in RTO, the vast majority don't. And the various TikTok videos showing "Day in the life of a remote worker" didn't help the cause either. I worked at a fully remote company during the pandemic and trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career.
I love working in the office, mainly for the social aspect and free food, but I need to find remote work for personal reasons. And I'm about 2 years too late because almost no one in Big Tech is allowing remote work anymore.
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Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job? I’ve signed 10 over the years and they basically all spell out - how much you are going to get paid, when your start date is and you are an at will employee. I was also hired by BigTech in 2020 and assigned to a “virtual office” and my position was designated as “field by design” meaning that it was suppose to be permanently remote. There was nowhere in my contr…
>Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job? I live in California and many things have changed over the years in terms of labor laws. So yes, I don't know if what I signed is relevant today (e.g. non-competes). >There was nowhere in my contract that I would never be expected to return to office and in fact AWS did tell all of their “field by design” roles that they would have to come into the office by th…
Unless you signed your contract in California before 1872, when you signed your contract, non competes were already illegal in California.
I challenge you to find any citation in any contract written by any BigTech company where legal would ever let them put in a contract that they guarantee that you will never have to work in an office.
> Sure, that happens all the time in minor cases. You'd be surprised how sloppy offices can be with compliance. There are still cases of discrimination that courts fine to this day.
Any company would have their team of lawyers bury your little family lawyer so as not to set a precedent. Do you think that lawyer is going to work pro bono? They are going to charge you for every hour and then not win the case. These people have eight months to find another job.
> Again, that's not for me to determine, though. That's for a firm to analyze, accept or reject. I don't know why you're questioning me about a sector I'm not involved in. Ask your "family friend" lawyer to dig up cases for you. They are much better at that than me
Because anyone who knows how the industry works knows that the entire idea of suing a company because they enforced RTO is foolhardy. What are the chances that these multi trillion dollar companies are making these kind of policies without passing them by their team of lawyers?
At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best. The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared). I remain baffled by executives' obse…
Well every company just happens to be undertaking RTO at the same time so it seems to be above the exec level. I’ve seen hypotheses on here that city councils are putting on pressure to boost their local economies and another that boards of directors are pushing this as the last chance to layoff->outsource before H-1Bs are banned. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t appear to stem from innovative or independent exec…
Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%? I've worked remotely for 5 years now, and there is NO way I would return to an office based job. I even have moved to a small town where there are practically 0 tech jobs; and at this point there's N…
This question isn't very revealing because it almost entirely depends on this one variable: > maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family. The second variable it depends on is their current sal…
Maybe this is the way companies rid themselves of older workers who push back on things. The FIRE movement is huge in tech, and I imagine a not insignificant number of people have RTO as the last straw where they pull the ripcord. Personally, for me? There's no going back. The only way you could get me into the office on a regular basis is if you let me work on rovers at JPL or something.
For myself, I'd love nothing more if I could code part time in retirement, for the rest of my life, but I won't RTO to do it. If I have to leave development behind? So be it.