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RTO: WTAF

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Re: RTO: WTAF

#81

Post by bonoboTP »

varispeed wrote: post #57
bonoboTP wrote: post #26

It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location. You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent. If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person soci…

The argument doesn’t hold water. Companies aren’t pushing RTO because they want to pay higher salaries to office-bound staff in expensive metros. If raw “input–output” and cheap labour were the only metric, they’d go fully remote, tap global markets, and slash payroll overnight. RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity…

> If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.

Well, it's not just capability. I know people who had offers at Big Tech, but had to move. There was no option to work from Bucharest or Eastern Europe. You either move to the US or to some other country like UK or Germany. Even if the job is remote. For legal and accounting reasons apparently. I know someone who officially rented a tiny space in rural Germany then secretly worked remotely from Poland, because they needed the official address for paperwork. So there are many artificial hurdles as of now. But the more normalized remote work becomes, the more people will realize these rules don't make sense.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#82

Post by oytis »

xienze wrote: post #67
mft_ wrote: post #13

I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list: * Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need. * Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might refl…

I think the bigger driver is that cities and states are pressuring companies to RTO because of the massive negative impact to local businesses and governments who no longer have thousands of people coming into a particular area on a daily basis.

How are cities and states pressuring companies?

Re: RTO: WTAF

#83

Post by sublimefire »

Yizahi wrote: post #41

RTO is way to force people work for two more hours per day for the same pay (1 hour typical commute one way). Hence it is done to suppress wages and make people leave voluntarily. It's not that hard to deduce.

But it is not, people work more when remote. It is harder to disconnect from work. This kind of bothers me because it seems RTO will reduce the hours spent working (on average) which should affect the output, but somehow companies expect the inverse.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#84

Post by ricardobeat »

threemux wrote: post #10

> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.

It depends on the age of the child - having a 7-year old return from school at 2pm and hangout at home with an adult present is fine and saves you the cost of afterschool care.

A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#85

Post by Lio »

lnsru wrote: post #53
gabesullice wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by e…

I was also studying many MBA books about decision making in corporate environments. Many cool things about data driven decision making. Costs and alternative costs, etc., many cool things, some even with scientific background. RTO is also analyzed in similar manner. The truth is that RTO is great way to ditch people with longer commute and/or kids easily and for free. And unions (as they’re in Germany) are happy. But…

I wonder if it’s possible for to sensibly short stock based on RTO announcements?

Generally people don’t push for redundancies is companies growing organically.

If this is a signal I wonder what the lead time is before it starts to bite?

Re: RTO: WTAF

#86

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

SR2Z wrote: post #66
bonoboTP wrote: post #26

It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location. You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent. If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person soci…

I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are. I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year. I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US. There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunat…

> I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are.

This is sortof absurd on the face of it. For context, I'm a European who's been working for US based companies for well over a decade now, and rarely do I have communications issues (and they're generally with non-native English speakers, mostly Europeans living in the US).

> I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year.

It's important to note that not all Europeans are unfireable. In fact, none of them are, it's just that you need to 1) give a verbal warning, 2) give a written warning and 3) fire them if things don't improve. Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.

> I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.

This is the actual reason. There's so much capital available in the US that it sucks in a lot of ambitious people.

> There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.

In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#87

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dboreham wrote: post #54
bonoboTP wrote: post #26

It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location. You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent. If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person soci…

If the entire organization is offshore then fine, but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration. South America is ok but there aren't many software developers there.

> but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration

This is definitely part of it, but if you have east coast or central teams, this is totally doable. In fact, often the European employees get more done as they get a whole morning before the US based pings/meetings start.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#88

Post by lbreakjai »

threemux wrote: post #10

> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.

My wife and I work remotely. Everyone in my team has children, so everyone's very flexible. We tend to work less during the afternoon, and pick it up later in the day. I start earlier when I'm not the one doing the morning drop-off.

My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.

Re: RTO: WTAF

#89

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

majorbugger wrote: post #16
mft_ wrote: post #13

I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list: * Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need. * Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might refl…

Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.

> Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.

Yeah, me too. It's much harder for me to focus at the office, which is annoying as mentally it's great for me to get out of the house and see people who aren't my family (who are great, I just do better when i see and interact with more people).

Re: RTO: WTAF

#90

Post by gabesullice »

tallanvor wrote: post #58
gabesullice wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by e…

The problem is that proper studies on this topic will take years to really understand the positives and negatives of having the majority of your employees working remotely. --Researchers need to be able to track people through their careers to understand whether or not WFH is a net benefit to them and/or their companies. So you're really going to have to deal with only hearing what people think. RTO is trending for m…

To be clear, I'm not wishing for evidence of whether RTO is good or bad.

I want evidence that proves "it's about cheap layoffs" or "it's about real estate" or "it's because they want to monitor people" or ""

Once we have evidence"it's about layoffs" then we can debate whether it's ultimately helpful or harmful to cull headcount that way.

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