[prima-facie]

Suddenly all these layoffs from the tech industry now make sense. Companies view the WFH movement and the rights which the workers have gained over the past three years as a threat to their very existence. The layoffs combined with a mandatory return to office will discourage any sort of dissent.

[slowmotiony]

Do they though? I see the WFH movement as a threat to the existence of my job. If the entire IT department works from home, what's stopping the company from moving it to India, Bangladesh or Pakistan? If you live in North America or Europe then I feel like you should fight against WFH, since a lot of smart people in the world would gladly do your job for half the salary.

[epups]

If that was true, why don't Meta and all the others simply hire people from those countries, like they offshored production? In some cases they even set up physical offices there to try to do exactly as you say. Yet they keep coming back to more expensive workers.

[hot_gril]

Because WFH didn't work for them.

My opinion as someone who's never been a megacorp exec: WFH should work, but they long ago set themselves up around some kind of over-collaboration with too many cooks in the kitchen, then with WFH they just introduced a big latency factor to it without fundamentally changing how they work (which would've been too risky).

[Gigachad]

I get this. Work requires every single PR to receive 2 reviews. It's not so bad in office because you just pull up a chair and have a discussion. But having to do it remote is infuriating and painfully slow. It takes hours at best, days on average to get a review, and then you make the changes and have to wait hours/days again for the next round. It's especially bad when a reviewer just isn't sure what something does so they leave a question and don't approve. Now you have to go through the whole process just to have them read and approve.

And this is just one scenario. There are so many things that seem to just grind to a halt when you can't just go talk to someone. You have to instead try to book a meeting which is so much friction that you avoid doing it if at all possible.

[hot_gril]

Code reviews are the basic thing that started taking longer, yeah. Also the system architectures tend to have multiple people owning one thing, vs a more distributed setup where one person has total authoritah over a service or two and just makes sure they talk well to the others.

[BaseballPhysics]

Have you ever tried to manage outsourced work?

Trust me: the problems with outsourcing have almost no overlap with the challenges of remote, on-shore work.

Think: timezones, talent quality, language barriers, cultural differences, just to name a few.

[surgical_fire]

> India, Bangladesh or Pakistan

Many of the best you can find from cheaper countries already moved to US or EU, or are willing to move.

Also, while I'm all for remote work, time zones different are a mess to manage.

[next_xibalba]

To what "rights", specifically, are you referring? How were they "gained over the past 3 years"? There is a weird strain of thinking in this thread that tries to frame this as some kind of Marxian labor-capital power struggle. But that framing doesn't really fit the facts.

[prima-facie]

Maybe rights is the wrong word. 'Leverage' is what I meant.

[hot_gril]

Might makes right ;)