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80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

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Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#451

Post by datavirtue »

troupe wrote: post #48
atleastoptimal wrote: post #15

I understand the merits of WFH and in-person work. One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee, and more so, employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person. 90% of jobs aren't people's "passions" and have…

I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. My guess is that most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive or not so managers are just reporting what makes them look good...and now we are ba…

It's not about productivity just like it's never about "the children."

It's about the desire to control thier investments. They want their investments to work out, so they try to force people back into the office.

Conflict of interest.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#452

Post by dclowd9901 »

generic92034 wrote: post #114
dragonwriter wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if your firm isn’t exposed to real estate, its probable that a lot if its shareholders are and are interested in ending the slump in commercial real estate. Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs.

> Plus, while the overall employment situation is strong, the tech downsizing wave may not be over and if you can get people to self-select out, you can maybe avoid having to officially have layoffs. Are you sure announcing layoffs hurts share prices? I mean, companies only recently were doing it while still being highly profitable.

Yeah pretty sure the opposite is true.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#453

Post by cableshaft »

kylixz wrote: post #226

I did software work for most of my career and am a huge fan of remote and hybrid arrangements. But having started a hardware robotics company… it does seem more difficult to run the team remotely. When we get together in person, everything moves faster. We have more equipment. EEs can fix things on the spot. Perception engineers can perceive their algorithm’s behavior in front of their face. We can mitigate safety co…

Not every job can reasonably be done remotely. Working with specialized and expensive hardware is an area that seems to me to have a reasonable expectation that people work in the office, at least when they need to test on actual hardware.

Also why I'm avoiding such fields personally, despite thinking they're pretty neat.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#454

Post by derefr »

ascotan wrote: post #378
wonderwonder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent. To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping…

> To be fair, cubes weren't any better.

Cubes, with hot-desking, is pretty great actually. IBM has it in their drop-in “business centers” for WFH employees.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#455

Post by toomuchtodo »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #295
toomuchtodo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get to have lunch with my partner every day and see them when I take breaks working from home. That’ll never happen at an office, and it’s more valuable than any comp to me. I would not entertain on site even at 500k/year (legit offer from a high frequency trading firm in downtown Chicago for an infosec cloud/iam engineer role). I can always make more money, and I only need so much to live well, but I have a finite…

Hey, if you're somewhere near Chicago, we should meet up sometime. Long shot, but I'm down in Lake Saint Louis. (Rather far from Chicago, but I've been looking for an excuse to visit anyway.)

I’ll reach out, I’ll be in STL in the near future. Thanks for asking! Always great to meet other HN folks.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#456

Post by hamburglar »

ghaff wrote: post #416
also23throwaway wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my company’s case, RTO is because of tax cut deals with the city/state. They need butts in seats to maximize profit after taxes, so they are passing the cost onto their employees.

That's one of the few non-productivity/collaboration/etc. rationales that may actually make some sense. States (e.g. NH and MA) have had tiffs because workers living out of state are no longer commuting into an office and are no longer paying income tax to the state they used to commute to as a result. I'm sure there are many local cases where there was some agreement about creating jobs in some town which have been…

I’ve heard this “tax impact / tax break” idea floated as a theory about what’s going on, but if municipalities are putting that type of pressure on companies, shouldn’t we see some concrete evidence of it? What is the actual mechanism by which such force is being applied? I have a little bit of a hard time believing that such large company policies are frequently being set based on deals that we have no actual evidence of. Is there actual evidence that I just haven’t seen?

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#457

Post by toomuchtodo »

theGnuMe wrote: post #387
toomuchtodo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get to have lunch with my partner every day and see them when I take breaks working from home. That’ll never happen at an office, and it’s more valuable than any comp to me. I would not entertain on site even at 500k/year (legit offer from a high frequency trading firm in downtown Chicago for an infosec cloud/iam engineer role). I can always make more money, and I only need so much to live well, but I have a finite…

I will take that 500k offer. Got a link?

Drop an email in your profile and I will put you in touch with the right folks. No guarantees, but I will make the effort.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#458

Post by hagbarth »

mfDjB wrote: post #433
closeparen wrote: post #153

I have a new conspiracy theory on RTO in Big Tech. Much has been said about commercial real estate. But I think getting highly capable people to work hard for you is a difficult problem & something tech executives put a lot of thought into. If you don't pay people enough, someone else will. But if you pay them too much, they'll become financially independent. Mid six figures is an objectively life-changing amount of…

Thanks for posting this. I always found it odd that the transition from labour to capital seemed to be so hard, even with mid-figure 6 income TC's it always seemed like you can't quite escape the rat race, you can definitely live more comfortably, or maybe as comfortably as you can as one of the rats in the race but never escape. Of course with very disciplined saving and LCOL arbitrage you stand a chance, however it…

Seems to me that it’s central to the economic system we live in. If advancing from labour class to capital class was not very very hard, there would be far fewer workers, which is untenable in our society.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#459

Post by gorbachev »

"A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted"

sigh

The problem here isn't RTO or anything else relating to where people sit when they're working. These idiots didn't even talk to their employees before making grand decisions affecting their work situation.

This is, btw, exactly what's happening in my workplace right now. I guess more accurately they are talking to employees, but just straight up ignoring what they're hearing.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#460

Post by frostiness »

josephd79 wrote: post #393
ascotan wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the definition of "productivity" is part of the problem. Managers view "productivity" as the ability to bounce ideas off each other and working collaboratively to get traction on hard problems. This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of intera…

You can't "manage" people who work remotely the same way you manage people in the office. That's the issue. Also, you shouldn't have to watch newer employees like a hawk if you've given them clear tasks / projects and expectations. No need to micromanage people.

It's not about managing. It's about the friction to reaching out for help and lost productivity from having to schedule meetings combined with inexperience making it hard to decide which problems are worth the friction of reaching out and which ones aren't. There's also the sense of isolation that being remote gives, because asking for help over a private message makes it look like you're the only one that needs help. All of this is still a problem regardless of clarity of expectations and tasks.

My preferences are likely going to change once I get more experience under my belt but I absolutely feel there are some facets of remote work that benefit senior engineers at the expense of junior engineers.

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