It all comes down to hiring the right people. The problem with remote is many companies hire the wrong people so they end up not doing the right thing. Then all of the people who are good get punished.
Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
Now everyone expects it, and lazy/weak managers will just make everyone come into the office vs having hard conversations with crap employees to tell them they cant work from home.
> Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
I'm coordinating with developers in Europe, South America and East Asia. The customers are all over, but mainly North American. I'm in Europe. I've seen some of the customers once or twice in person, I see many of my European colleagues at the yearly get-together. But all the contact and all the work is over email, phone and video conferences and the usual mix of other remote collaboration tools, ticket system, git, stuff like that. When I enter our local office, only one of the 50 people working there has anything to do with that I do. My manager is 800km away. Well, there's payroll over here, but the only time I'll need to "visit" them in person is when a paycheck is late ;).
Even before COVID, the world shifted towards remote, even when you HAD to come to the local office because of reasons. COVID just showed everyone what a charade it already has been for the last decade to force people into an office just to get on phone/email/git and work remotely from the office. COVID cut out the stupid useless "going to the office" step.
In the 2000s, it wasn't like that, teams were concentrated at some offices, offshoring wasn't that much of a thing yet. And for lots of things, travelling e.g. to meet a customer was accepted and normal, far more often than it is now. A new contract was a 2-week stay at the customers'. Back then, remote work actually was a privilege. But the world had changed long before COVID, slowly, then very quickly.
Not to mention the trend that had long been going on, to make the office ever more impersonal, with increasingly more open floor plans, hot desking, having to move your stuff in and out of lockers at the start and end of the workday, etc.
WFH should be the ultimate dream of these companies, they can finally get rid of those pesky meatbags and their 'emotions' altogether.
Can I ask where in Europe? I'm also looking for something remote friendly as most companies in my area have pull everyone back in the office and I hate it.
I kinda feel like the comparison between an on-prem vs cloud. For the longest time, big, old companies clung onto their data center spaces. No new start-up would ever dream of that though. They would be cloud first from inception. It's probably going to be the same for new companies vs old ones.
The push to cloud happens even when it makes no sense for customers at all. I'm in the mergers and acquisitions consulting space for IT and there are a lot of very mature, stable non-it companies that can save millions going colo vs cloud when we spin them off but the push is ALWAYS to cloud, regardless of the costs.
It's now a selling point when buying a company that the infrastructure is cloud based, even if it's IaaS that has been stable and unchanging for 15+ years - and they require the staff to maintain the servers regardless of where it's hosted.
Problem is that the board and investors are usually also heavily invested in commercial real estate, to the point where artificially propping it up is worth more to them than the company.
Well, culture is just so many rocks you can hold onto while swimming in the market. My regards to the inner city bubble who based a buisness on that millstone being kept afloat.
I solved the same problem by imitating my morning and evening routine. That is, I wake up, get on my bike, and ride - but not to the city, but in the opposite direction, into the forest. I relax biking and come back home. Then my daily starts and I'm full of energy. After I'm done with all my tasks, I repeat the same procedure, just explore some different paths. When I come back home, I no longer think of my tasks.
People get really defensive about remote work I guess? It wasn't just walking, there was also social isolation and being excluded that made it unbearable. And no real boundary between work and home. If you're doing an hour driving every day I can see why you'd prefer remote though.
Yeah, I'd like to come to your defense here. While I do prefer working from home, I totally get what you're saying about the routine of walking to work.
I used to bike commute about 7 miles each way up and down some intense hills; it was part of my routine, and I had to do it. Now that I'm working from home, sure, I could go out and ride 15 miles every day, but it becomes a matter of discipline.
Same with socializing. I tend to prefer solitude, so socializing, like exercising, now requires discipline – I have to make myself do it – whereas before it was baked in, and unavoidable.
People recommending a dog aren't wrong. I do have a dog now, and walk at least 5 miles a day. My dog is an idiot so I can't really do the dog-park thing, but if you have a non-idiotic dog, there's some socialization to be gained there, too. BUT: it's a big commitment, and will have an impact on big life decisions later on like what apartment you can rent, whether you live in a city or a suburb, how easy it is to take a vacation or travel abroad, etc., so it's not like it's a no-brainer or an easy solution.
Only if you live in a country with decent public transportation. The rest of the world still have to deal with traffic jam and polluted air while commuting (cars are difficult to get in many countries).
Not if you count rural areas. In Japan for example, commuting every day in many areas still requires a car or long train rides. And the sardine-packed trains at rush hours in the cities are literally soul-sucking.
Only Japan would remotely apply unless you're cheating the system by checking only hotspot cities and trying to claim they are the entirety of their country. Suffice to say, most people don't live near Amsterdam, let alone able to afford it.
>> Think of how much time is stolen from you in a daily commute
> Not that much.
OK, let's assume it's not 90 minutes but only 20 minutes a day. That compounds, and it's a lot of time I could spend on what really matters to me, not work. Why should I do it, if I have a choice? Time is the most precious thing we have. I will never come back to the office, period.
It’s 20 minutes where I catch up on the news get a bit of walking in from the home to the train station and generally wake up to arrive at the office ready to go.
ha 20 minutes. Some days I waited for the bus longer than that. I waited because in Sydney the bus is on-time about 15% of the time. If you miss it, you wait an extra hour.
Not sure where you live, that's got a 20 min commute, but most people either live in a concrete prison to reduce the commute, or spend 2 hours a day on a bus/train.
I do know this.. if you worked from home, you could get all that you've outlined, and likely spend a pile less on rent/mortgage. Others who work with you would also get to see their kids before bed.
Sydney sucks. I’m in Melbourne and the train leaves every 5 minutes, takes me about 20 minutes to get to the cbd about 7km away. Rent is pretty affordable too.
Stolen? You were paid for and took the job you knew was a certain distance and commute away from your home.
I believe employees have to start to get used to being paid less when working remote. People who work in an office or factory have to be rewarded for this commute. Some jobs cannot be made remote.
I assume a lot of people working remote also like the fact that they can do the laundry, clean the house, do some errands etc during the working day. This flexibility should also allow the salary for remote workers to be lower than for people working in an office.
I wasn't necessarily comparing a programmer working remote with a programmer working in the office.
I mainly tried to say that if we want to have people working in factories, working as nurses or doing office work that requires working as a team in person or meeting clients or what ever it might be then we have to start to pay them more compared to people who work from home.
>People who work in an office or factory have to be rewarded for this commute.
Last I checked, no one paid me" for my commute time or comp'd the wear on my vehicle. If those hours* spent in traffic should have been counted on the clock, then golly gee, I have invoices yo get written!
Seriously, I get it. There should be something for it, but there never will be. Wage theft. Management will do anything possible to get unpaid time out of you.
Well, most people took the job as a being-in-the-office job (before the work from home took off). Which means you took the job + commute for that salary. If you then suddenly don't have to go to the office it's not such a stretch to think you could/should be paid less.
As it's probably easier to hire someone to work remote than hire someone who has to go to the office, the salaries will probably over time be less for work from home jobs anyway (for the same type of job).
It's funny how people feel so entitled to their salaries and that management is there to rip people off. I get it for warehouse people, but for tech workers, come on.
>Well, most people took the job as a being-in-the-office job (before the work from home took off). Which means you took the job + commute for that salary. If you then suddenly don't have to go to the office it's not such a stretch to think you could/should be paid less.
That does not follow. I quote you a salary sufficient to warrant me to work for you. You don't get to come back and demand that you should be able to pay me less when I no longer commute when I'm still working for you. Unless the physical presence in the office is absolutely essential (which it isn't for knowledge workers in the way it is for a stocker or laborer), and the tech exists where working remote is a reasonable accommodation (which it does), then you wanting me in the office to get the job done is now something on the table for me (the employee) to charge you, the employer extra for. In no way are you, (the employer) entitled to an extra discount because I'm not driving in. Nevermind that I don't offer one of those. Though I may to have to ruminate on it.
>It's funny how people feel so entitled to their salaries and that management is there to rip people off.
It's funny how companies feel entitled to their profits and that employees are there to rip them off.
A) People are free to set the price of their time.
B) Management is explicitly there to get the absolute most out of workers with the least input. Even if that means playing dirty, (hopefully not, but I've seen a lot of it). You can say their purpose is leadership, but I've been privy to what high level management types think leadership is, and unfortunately, it ain't leadership. I know leadership. Come from a family with a lot of military background. Civillian business management theory abandoned most facets of leadership in order to cut corners, and maximize value generation. Just look at the C-Suite-to-everyone else pay disparity to see the fruits of that.
The firm didnt give 2 bits about your commute.
They pay you to be in on time. Not your commute. I know people who travel 6 hours a day. They get paid the same.
Why would any firm increase salaries, for services you were already providing?
You get maybe 12 waking hours a day, 8 working +2 commuting. Getting 2 hours back is a 16% raise.
You don't get it do you? The person took the job knowing that they have to commute. Be it 5 minutes or 5 hours. the took it based on a certain salary.
If they then all of a sudden don't have to commute (let's say 5 hours), then why could they then not be okay with a slightly lower salary (as they save 5 hours a day).
While true, it does highlight the fact that white collar jobs are diverse, and not all of them require one to be in the office. In fact, most of probably do not.
If your job is to meet and talk to customers, then yea, it isn't required to be in the office. In this case, you're not WFH. You're actually WFWCA (where ever customers are).
So is he either a figure head that can work remotely because he doesn’t matter, or is he doing “real work” and it turns out that working remotely does work?
Execs like to paint working remotely as something that is wasteful and so the common employee shouldn’t be allowed to do so, while simultaneously extolling the virtues of their remote work.
It’s reminiscent of the time I worked at one company and the chairman of the board showed up to give us a rousing speech that included the fact that he only showed up because he was going to a board meeting for another company whose board he was on in the same city. This was less than a month after one of our coworkers got shit canned after it was found out that he was moonlighting.
This is a bit ranty by the tl;dnr is that lots of jobs align with remote work and I am personally pissed that you try to frame it as ok because it’s a CEO and then in the next sentence you try to blunt the message by saying he’s just a “co-ceo” so it’s not that bad
Just read the article. He doesn't like to work from the office because he said he prefers to be on the road meeting customers.
Meanwhile, the brand of WFH HN folks want is to not leave the house and interact with real humans in person.
The only reason I said "co-ceo" is because I was responding to someone who, for whatever reason, thinks a multi-billion public company shouldn't have its CEO talk to customers.
That’s odd because the the brand of WFH that most people
I’ve met want is identical to what they do in the office sans the commute. That being that they hop onto a zoom meeting with people who are in other physical locations or they are working independently and the office is just a distraction.
Another commenter mentioned that people were setting up a straw man against your words but I can’t agree. You keep implying that it’s rational for c levels to be working remote and then implying that regular employees only want wfh because they are just anti social.
Your comments are heavily biased with one viewpoint and I heartily disagree with it
I’ve been working from home for years. I leave the house and interact with real humans in person all the time. Sometimes I interact with real humans in person at home!
You go looking outside offices, it turns out there’re people everywhere. Who knew?
I think that proves a point that some jobs can be done outside of the office, so why not have people work where they prefer? For this CEO it's on the road. For a lot of people it's at home. For a lot of people it's both.
Is he firefighting? Why isnt he doing strategy, management and the other things CEOs do?
Like hiring a CMO or BD head to do all the traveling he is doing?
>Well, I’m a remote worker. I’ve always been a remote worker my whole life. I don’t work well in an office,” Benioff said. “It just doesn’t work for my personality. I can’t tell you why. I do love to go in to visit customers though. I’m on the road constantly visiting customers.”
Ah, so he doesnt need to do sales. He likes doing it. It just …works… for his personality.
I know of one company who got the majority of their business because their CEO wined and dined some of his fellow CEOs and take them rides on his private aircraft. If Benioff is doing that sort of thing and enjoys it, more power to him
Even on the less cynical side, there's something to be said for hearing from customers directly instead of filtered through 5 levels of middle management
There is a lot that happens at that size - one of which you should have a trust worthy team who does exactly that; its why they get paid - leadership.
His is a Saas firm. This argument is inappropriate as a defense. You can do this a few times, the rest of the time he needs to be in office.
Failing which - like elon said - its an excuse to slack off.
So its either
1) odd sales situation
2) weasel worded sentence
3) delinquency - a la Elon “people who wfh are slacking”
It’s great if it’s 1 and he fixes it, but then he has to get back to office. In which case his “i dont have an office personality” line works against him.