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Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

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Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#61
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hybrid model is such a joke. For most, working in the office might as well be the 21st century business suit: an antiquated formality designed to demonstrate your obedience to authority. The hybrid model is a suit on a t-shirt. And forcing employees to be in the office X days a week means productivity on those WFH days will be nonexistent, especially if they butt against a weekend. But of course while the WFH lif…

I'm struggling with the idea of hybrid WFH. It still means that I need to live near the office. Instead of a cheaper, quieter place far away from cities. Besides making middle-management happy, I'm not sure what is the benefit of having one required day per week at the office.

A lot of meetings are much easier to have in person.

Socializing, as other people pointed out, is also much easier in person.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iron grip Jeez, give it a rest. Companies don't give a crap about your life. None have ever showed the slightest interest in anything I do when not at work.

If this was really the case, WFH would be a no-brainer and would not meet so much resistance from management. Most companies clearly care more about the fact that they can account for the time you’re in office, as opposed to how productive you actually are.

I switched my tech company to full WFH. I also implemented detailed surveillance on all employees, which I don’t disclose. It shows me keyboard/mouse activity levels and window update rates. It’s very interesting information, I have much better insight how and when people work, which are very different from each other. I also have other productivity measures and now I can really understand when someone is not working vs stuck or having difficulties. I expect for slackers this coming world will be harder to hide in.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#63
post #24

I cant wait until I can go back to the office 100%. WFH, while convenient, is something I never wanted. I didnt want it 20 years ago when I started to work, and I dont want it full time today either, even with the covid experience. Human interaction is not tradable, and online conferencing sucks even more then a real meeting.

I would go back to office if my commute was like 20 minutes by bike and I would share a small office with one to three other people on my team. But my commute is 1 hour one way, some people don’t get seats on the train, U-Bahn in Berlin is like a can of sardines during rush hour and the bigger part of my team is in another country and the customer is at the other side of Germany. And the office is one big open office…

My commute is a 5 minute walk. And thats no accident. I very deliberately chose my flat to be quite near to work. Has saved me about 5000 hours of commute time so far.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#64
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will be happy to replace you with a H1B worker (who himself will be happy to migrate from India to the USA). The current situation is temporary since COVID immigration restrictions remain in place.

I’ll have a new job. They can do what they want. Hiring fresh H1B employees to replace seasoned engineers rarely ends well. It’s part of the reason we get paid as much as we do. If I end up leaving because the company refuses to offer WFH, it won’t be getting a 2-week notice or any form of knowledge transfer from me.

I hear the thing these days is to see how long your former employer will pay you before realizing you aren't doing any work for them anymore. It sounds like a joke but I’ve seen it happen on multiple occasions. Coworker just stops showing up and 5 months later their Slack is deactivated.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#65
post #3

Can’t imagine not having at least partial WFH after this pandemic. If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. A good portion of my team is similarly minded, but management is insistent on disallowing WFH. I can’t wait to see their faces when the company bleeds massive swaths of engineering talent. It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that…

Personally I look forward to hybrid but where I decide when to go in to the office as needed to get work done. Probably that would mean 2-3 days a week for me, given the kind of engineering work I do. I'm actually tired of staying home all day every day because of work. I actually kind of enjoy "going somewhere" for the day, seeing the sun rise, smelling the fresh bread and coffee as I pass the bakery, seeing restaurants setting up for the day, and the world waking up together with me as I step outside. Somehow that sensual experience gives me a sort of motivation to get stuff done.

In my current commute situation it meas going from peninsula to SF for the day, which also means I get to have lunches in the city that I wouldn't otherwise get at home, and can meet people after work who live in the city. My work is also a couple blocks from the Caltrain station, and so the commute isn't really an issue, I just walk into this big metal box and keep working and I appear in SF an hour later, it's actually kind of relaxing, and I just like trains in general, and looking out the window watching the entire Bay Area fly by me without me having to drive. In the evening on the return ride I see the fog rolling over the mountains as I look out the train window, and that's relaxing too, and as I pass by about 10 other bay area towns, I can choose any single one of them to get off the train and have dinner, or bike around the town just for the hell of it, to get some exercise.

I don't want to commute for face time though. Rather, I'd do it for things like a big space with proper air conditioning, sunlight, and conference rooms without annoying gas leaf blowers that linger in front of my front door exactly when I'm having meetings. I also work on industrial-sized robots, and even if the company were to buy extra hardware, it's pretty impossible/unsafe to be running that kind of stuff at home. It's enormously more efficient to sit in front of the actual thing than to try to cope with a video feed.

I'm a bit of an ambivert, slighly more introverted, but not an extreme introvert. I do enjoy company, and I do miss the lunch conversations about wild and awesome things that I didn't get during the pandemic. I've also found time and time again at past organizations that those in-person socializing circumstances enormously helped build mutual trust with coworkers (specifically peers, not managers or subordinates) for when things actually went wrong. We're social animals and it's still hard to get around that biological fact.

Moving to the middle of nowhere to get cheaper rent and a bigger work space isn't really what I want to do either, because I do like having access to public transportation and food from around the world, including the grocery stores of the ethnic foods I'm used to eating. I'm kind of happy living in a cosmopolitan/global part of the world. I hate the high rents, admittedly, but I realize I can't have it all.

But yeah, no, I wouldn't commute or do hybrid to please management. It's just me. I still want to make the decision about when to go in myself based on circumstances.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#66
post #52
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you. Just don't be surprised if you're the only one at the office when you get there, though. You might need to find human interaction outside work.

Where I live, people are apparently not a chicken as where you live... Most of my coworkers are happy to go back to the office. I guess we have about 10% which would like to have full WHF. OTOH, I also dont care what the majority wants. What counts to me is what I want.

Yeah, something tells me the fact that your coworkers are more excited to be back in person doesn't have anything to do with how brave you all are.

Maybe consider that are other reasons besides fear for why people prefer to work in an environment that is productive for them?

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#67
post #29

I have to admit, after I fought for remote work with a bunch of hiring managers before the pandemic, I feel quite a bit Schadenfreude right now. Also, I think, in the long run remote work will level the playing field between introverts and extroverts quite a bit.

It will not because remote only will continue to be rare. There’s a bit of a Harrison Bergeron thinking there.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#68
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling with the idea of hybrid WFH. It still means that I need to live near the office. Instead of a cheaper, quieter place far away from cities. Besides making middle-management happy, I'm not sure what is the benefit of having one required day per week at the office.

I've found that it's much harder to form social bonds, especially cross-team, when working remotely and never seeing people in person. Socializing via Zoom is not the same. The lack of lunch and hallway conversation hurts a lot without even getting into the outside of work socializing. That in turn leads to minor issues exploding because no one has a sense of empathy built for anyone else.

I'm guessing the company size (~15) has a lot to do with it, but the 100% remote startup I am at has had a lot of success with onsites 2-3x / year.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#69
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you. Just don't be surprised if you're the only one at the office when you get there, though. You might need to find human interaction outside work.

Being the only one talking to the VPs and CEO in the office during lunch is probably going to be a great career boost. So don't be surprised when the people who go into the office get the nice promotions and you don't. Interestingly my whole team is very much in favor of being in the office a few days a week.

I think a lot of people on the 100% remote side of the debate are heavily underestimating the value of relationship building and team cohesion (for most people). You can't replace the frequent face to face social interactions, lunches, and drinks after work with a Zoom call. We are social animals and the more channels there are in an interaction (words, voice, body language, etc...) the richer that interaction is, and the more we get out of it. A likely counter to this will be "well I don't care about those things", ok, that's fine, but that is not true for everybody.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#70

I don't think people quitting directly correlates to WFH. A bunch of people I know who wanted to quit during the pandemic are quitting now instead. No one wanted to risk being unemployed during the pandemic.

This. I know a ton of people who were planning to move going into 2020 who put it off because interviewing is still a massive clusterfuck right now. I’ve been warning the execs I deal with that they should expect a massive uptick in the exit of competent people in the coming months as things normalize.
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