[Two9A]

This is one aspect of the RTO discussion that's sometimes missed: there are plenty of people in the tech sphere (myself included) who've been comfortably remote for much longer than those who were pushed into remote work by lockdowns and pandemic response. We're not about to give up a whole lifestyle we've built over (in some cases) decades, on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the present time.

Props to the author for highlighting this.

[andrewmutz]

Prior to COVID, everyone understood that remote work was supported by some companies and not others. It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others.

As a result, everyone peacefully self-selected into their preferred employment relationships. Companies got the type of workforce they wanted and workers chose the type of environment they wanted. It was great.

Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. We should just return to the status quo before COVID: choose the type of company you want to work for that supports the lifestyle you want to have. If your employer wants to transition back to in-office work and you don't want to do it, switch to one of the thousands of companies that will hire you.

You have no obligation to stay at a company that is forcing you back in the office, and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.

[cogman10]

> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.

Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"

I resent being lied to. Had they been more careful and put this out more as a "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed. That's not how they rolled and they didn't even have the guts to simply admit "Hey, we just made a mistake here, remote work isn't working for us"

[cableshaft]

> "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"

Pretty much exactly this happened at my company. They started touting these new offices they got for a steal, but in the all-hands said "our company has never required anyone to come in to the office and we never will". Three months later, they start encouraging everyone to come in once a week. Three months later, they changed it to 'we expect you to be in 4 days a week', and in the all-hands one of the founders went "We never said we wouldn't have you come back into the office. I love seeing people in person, that would be silly of me to say!"

Technically it's not a requirement, just an "expectation", so I still haven't gone in more than necessary. But I'm not expecting a great performance review next year because of it, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll stick around either (it does look like most other places are being even worse about it right now, though). I was so angry to hear that.

Not the only time they gaslit either. They also had a round of layoffs about six months ago while trying not to call them layoffs ("we let a bunch of people go today, it's not a layoff though, they just weren't performant enough to work here"), that really rubbed me the wrong way too.

[lazide]

If it’s not in writing, it ‘never happened’ - and even then, make sure you have a copy they can’t get at and know your odds of a successful prosecution under the law (and your ability and willingness to see it through).

Because sometimes that will be required.

[lotsofpulp]

Prosecution for what? Business leaders (and employees) are allowed to change their course of action anytime.

I would keep it anyway for your records, due to it helping your claim for unemployment benefits by establishing constructive dismissal as opposed to termination for cause. But it might not work even then.

[lazide]

For shitty companies, wage theft is a not uncommon scenario when things like this start to happen (as in the overall economic/industry shifts, not just RTO).

When changing direction results in actionable torts against employees, then employees are also entitled to be made whole (to some extent).

And I meant prosecution in the sense of ‘driving to an actual successful resolution including getting paid what you’re owed’ - which can be for breach of contract, illegal dismissal, constructive dismissal, etc.

There are a million ways for a company to fire someone without ‘firing’ them, which they’ll often use if they don’t want to pay out unemployment/owed vacation or the like. Many companies will target expensive employees first (age/seniority, expensive physical health issues, mental health problems, or they just think they ‘aren’t a team player’, or are harder to manager. etc.).

[snotrockets]

Oh, they put it in writing. Then they wrote something else.

[lazide]

Sounds like it’s time for a folder.

[_puk]

Generally[0] your contract references a living policy document covering the softer areas.

I see changes to these documents as similar to the change in T's & C's for any service I use; your continued use of the service denotes acceptance of the new terms. You're welcome to leave at any time.

Not sure what you can litigate against.

0: anecdotal from the past 15 years

[lazide]

If they actually put in writing ‘Remote is forever’, then later try to fire you for refusing to return to the office - what judge in the world is going to rule in their favor?

If course, they rarely actually say that. But some folks have definitely been dumb enough to do so.

The issue with contract law is that most folks never put things in writing, so it’s a pain to litigate many claims, which makes it uneconomic to recover damages.

But if it’s in writing? Sounds like an easy to show breach of contract to me!

[enobrev]

A hiring contract isn't Terms of Service or a EULA. Your job isn't a service to you, it's an employer. You make a deal with a company in which you offer your time and expertise for pay and amenities. That contract with the company binds them as much as it binds you.

Anything non-monetary that they take away from you should be offered in compensation and/or renegotiation. You should not be allowing changes to your employment contract without approval, especially ones where they are removing amenities.

[fieldcny]

Correction, the company was not performant enough to keep them working there…

[cableshaft]

Considering several of them were in between client projects through no fault of their own (a few of the people laid off I worked with personally and were only transitioned off my project because the client was trying to save some money and didn't really need graphic design work at that point), yeah I'd agree.

The company has already had to revise down their earnings estimates a couple times this year, and hasn't bothered to replace about 20-30 other employees that have quit in the months since then (despite several of them being star employees).

That's why it felt like gaslighting to me, claiming these people weren't good employees and that's why "it wasn't a layoff" (even if that were true, it's still a layoff).

[cj]

> "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed

Ironically, during peak covid lockdowns, "this is only temporary" may have actually been seen as reckless and irresponsible. "There's a pandemic! We need to be remote for the foreseeable future, not just temporarily!1!1" (etc...)

During peak covid, a lot of people made decisions that they reneged or reversed later. I'll get downvoted if I empathize with the executives making these decisions, but all I'll say is that no one had a crystal ball in 2020/2021. I give a lot of people the benefit of the doubt that they believed what they were saying at the time they said it (even if they have since reversed their opinion).

I don't think anyone was expecting the tech bubble to burst until it did. I don't think anyone was expecting the degree of inflation which led to interest rates which led to big tech downsizing, etc. A lot of people made a lot of mistakes. One of the top mistakes a lot of companies made was hiring people outside of their HQ cities and they're trying to correct that now.

Edit: To be clear I'm a proponent of remote work. Our company has been remote since before covid. Pro tip for anyone in the job market: look for companies that were remote pre-Covid and be skeptical about WFH promises if the company was forced to go remote after 2020.

[uhhhhhhh]

I remember a vocal group predicting the economic bubbles would burst while pointing to them growing for a while. The only real disagreement was on when not if.

While no one has a crystal ball it was known pre pandemic that bubbles were there and unsustainable and not far from being at bursting levels.

I know many in my circle were talking about when the dominoes would fall and which ones would topple which others in 2020-2022 as the pandemic raged on. The inevitable outcome of the social supports on top of the economic bubbles happening and then both likely ending at similar times was predictable in anyone thinking in longer terms than the next quarter and next fiscal year.

Meanwhile CEOs took advantage of conditions to go on insane M&A deals, hiring sprees and personal project schemes with little framework for any of that succeeding long term, and burning tons of cash with stock buybacks to keep up with the expected growth targets.

Once the 'Bubble' everyone saw about to burst met the realities of the pandemic and costs rippled through supply chains no one should have been surprised. Unfortunately the tech segment is way too much follow the leader/money right now and once the few big names start moving it happens regardless of it being good or bad.

[superwalker]

It’s always when not if though. If you predict a bubble invariably you will eventually be right — in fact the more wrong you are (calling it too early) the more prescient you will appear!

[ndriscoll]

I didn't know when the Fed/government might stop lying about it, but inflation was immediately obvious to me, and should've been to anyone with assets and who tracked those assets' value. My net worth in Mint grew 38% from Feb 2020 - Feb 2021 (so from the high before the big dip in March 2020) during a time when everyone was talking about supply chain disruptions, delays, lockdowns, etc. My manager and I would regularly talk about how crazy it was that such a huge wealth transfer to the rich was happening in front of everyone.

I bought a house as soon as I could once the interest rate drops happened. Prices were going up by more than my net income each month. Given that I make several times median, I still don't know how there haven't been riots over it.

[cj]

I think this is where the "inflation is transitory" catchphrase was born.

"Yes, we see all of these price changes, but don't worry it will go back to normal after the pandemic" ... which people went along with for a while, until it was clear that prices weren't dropping back to normal.

[superwalker]

Inflation being transitory doesn’t imply prices will ever go down though. That was just people not understanding how inflation works.

[macksd]

That's because they are actually struggling to admit deeper problems with the company culture and processes that they don't know how to solve, and so they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things.

[garciasn]

You give them entirely too much credit. They were told by others (primarily Wall Street) that they are to do this. It provides them with three things:

1. Real estate holding investment increases.

2. Control.

3. Silent layoffs.

There's no reason for RTO. None. They're doing it to save money and regain control of their workforce.

[VBprogrammer]

I think one thing which wasn't obvious to me early on is that halving the number of office days doesn't half the requirements for desk space. In my experience people have a strong preference for going in on similar days, particularly Tuesday and Thursday. So if you ask all of your employees to come in 2 days a week you end up needing desks for almost every employee.

The result in my experience is you have either fullish remote or you need just as many desks so very little saving from a company point of view.

[ajmurmann]

Also, what's the point of going into the office if nobody else is there? My department had a hybrid model for a bit with a fabulous, newly built-out office. I liked seeing people in person a couple times a week. However, if I go in and nobody from my team is there or we need to still call in to meetings as if we were at home, what's the point?

[303uru]

>1. Real estate holding investment increases.

Yup, our commercial real was essentially fully vacant. So they rolled out these silly blended schedules (literally just electronically sign in to the office by physically being there once a week, no time req). Now they can say, hey our office space is 90% utilized on a weekly basis! I think commercial real estate investors are going to see right through this charade, but maybe I'm overestimating them.

[TheKarateKid]

Let's not forget 4. Politicians

You have several from major cities (NYC, SF, etc.) saying on the record that they are going to speak to CEO's and push for RTO so that downtowns, local businesses, and neighborhoods can go back to "normal."

[15457345234]

Yeah, and what I find funny is people acting like that's a stupid thing for them to be saying.

Not everybody works or can work in an office. Not everybody can work in tech. Cities are symbiotic, they offer employment to both knowledge workers and non-knowledge workers.

Sorry but you can't just write off the needs of that 50% of the population that aren't techcels. Yes, you will come back to cities, yes, you will re-create thriving downtowns, yes, you will do your bit.

Service sector workers will not tolerate being turned into gigbots and stuffed into ghost kitchens so the PMC elite can pretend they don't exist.

[red-iron-pine]

This is a big one. Entire tax bases are effectively drying up because people aren't driving in or are moving away.

Not just income or payroll taxes, but also regular traffic simulating the local bars, cafes, gas stations & oil changers, dry cleaning, late night pizza, you name it. If these folks can't make their nut then they can't pay rent, and end up moving away or going out of business. Then the problem snowballs.

And then there are the other sources of cash, i.e. speeding tickets, parking fines, and jaywalking citations.

Arguably this is the 'invisible hand of the market' doing its thing, but it's hard to run a municipality if your year-by-year tax base could change dramatically.

[superq]

I don't really have a horse in this race, but it's actually funny the way you worded that:

[three reasons for RTO] "There's no reason for RTO. None." [perhaps another]

[garciasn]

Yeah, I meant to say 'valid' reason, but it got dropped. It's been a day; my bad.

[esoterica]

(1) is a dumb conspiracy theory, the tech companies that pay rents care about their own profits, not the profits of their REIT counterparties. The idea that evil capitalists sacrifice their own profits in order to boost other companies’ profits in the name of class solidarity is one of the sillier things people on the left believe. According to your theory of how capitalism works companies work Amazon and Walmart should be volunteering to pay their suppliers as much possible in order to boost their suppliers profit margins. Obviously that is not how the world works.

[cultureswitch]

Maybe not this specifically, but the history of the last 200 years is littered with examples of capital owners cooperating together to elevate and secure their status as a class despite supposedly divergent individual interests. Perhaps the most obvious is how rich people who commit crimes are systematically saved by other rich people who happen to have the right connections.

[The_Colonel]

> no reason

Sounds like motivated reasoning.

There are valid reasons for RTO like better communication or even better control over employees. It's a question of trade-offs.

[api]

Another very common reason is a technique to achieve a passive-aggressive round of layoffs. Announce RTO, lose some employees, and you don't have to pay any severance or take the morale hit of letting people go.

I've even heard of companies reversing the RTO mandate after the desired number of employees have left. Or just not actually enforcing it and soft-pedaling the whole thing.

[drewcoo]

> they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things

It doesn't need to fix things. It just needs to appear they're "doing something."

[biomcgary]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_bias

[tremon]

changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said

I've come to view this as a personality type, the eager salesman (or less charitably, the habitual bullshitter). They will say whatever serves their needs at the moment, and never carries any long-term weight. When they say "we never said that", they actually mean it -- because what they remember were their unspoken motivations, not the words they spoke to achieve it. You can probably find them in the hierarchy of most organizations, as they're good with words and readily commit to changing strategies. They must be, because they need to have a new strategy ready for when the old one inevitably fails. Admitting to mistakes is not part of their personality, the most you will get (if anything) is that their idea was sound but the problem was in the execution or in unforeseen (by them) circumstances.

Learn to recognize the type. If their goals align with yours, they can be useful idiots, but always have a counter-strategy for when the winds inevitably turn.

[EFreethought]

> remote work isn't working for us

It is working out.

I looked at a few financial statements for a few companies pushing RTO (Amazon and a couple of Wall Street firms). Granted, it wasn't comprehensive or scientific, but: They all made more money in 2022 than in 2019 (the last year before COVID).

So I really do not see what the problem is.

[giantrobot]

> So I really do not see what the problem is.

WFH gave those damn individual contributors some agency and prevented dead weight middle management from Lumberghing. Pretty soon they start thinking they're people and having some work/life balance.

Private equity that owns companies also owns stakes in commercial real estate. If companies start breaking leases or renting less office space those private equity firms will lose money. The worst thing in the world is your economic betters losing money. How else will that money trickle down in warm little showers of gold?

A better acronym for RTO would be KYP: Know Your Place.

[uhhhhhhh]

See recent push for operating margins needing to be at arbitrarily high levels etc and companies facing activists investors groups this year.

It's not about making money. They need to make more of it, by pushing margin growth.

It's an absolute value extraction play from investment groups that hurts every company it touches.

[theonlybutlet]

And what better way than soft-layoffs.

[snotrockets]

Managers can't look out of the office and feel powerful by watching the people they control.

[ajmurmann]

Here are a few things that aren't working out from a management perspective:

Social bonding is much harder, but important for reliable collaboration, especially when there are disagreements. I also believe that conversations are more likely to derail when they aren't in person. I've also been part of so many lunch conversations in the office that resulted in someone being able to help out someone on a different team with an issue they had solved themselves previously, learn about activities on another team that were relevant to them etc. There are ways to achieve similar things in a remote setup, but it's hard, especially to deploy across large companies with thousands of people. For the record, I've worked fully in person, hybrid and remote and think hybrid is by far the hardest to make work.

[eropple]

IMO: skill issue.

Communicating effectively on camera is a learnable skill, it's not one most people in tech have. But making sure people are trained to do a good job is a management challenge and it's incumbent upon management to make sure people are doing it. If, after two years, your team still has trouble having real conversations over a teleconferencing solution? That's a management failure.

"Lunchroom conversations" are arguably the hardest thing to foment in a remote environment for sure, but between things like cross-teams with breakouts and the like, you can do it. And some people are going to do it naturally; I know what most of my director's peers' teams are up to and I have contacts in all of them, while also touching base with them on a regular basis. If your teams don't have people who do this naturally, assign it. If you don't, that too is a management failure.

"It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

[LorenPechtel]

And managers ability to play dirty politics is greatly reduced. Remote is a big problem for managers who aren't actually competent and it's a problem for those who like to take credit for other's work.

[3seashells]

This is what I do not get. Just give them some un-skilled people as placeholders, so there social anxiety doesn't fire. Sit the janitors into the open office or the team building guys.

[ryandrake]

I think it would be a great business opportunity to offer paid actors who would go into a business, walk around, maybe give a few of them clipboards, have them have water cooler conversations, maybe write some technical looking stuff on whiteboards, and generally move around looking busy.

This would simulate the thrill and "buzz" of managing a busy office for these executives to cosplay without having to drag unwilling employees back.

[derefr]

Why are you comparing 2022 to 2019? Shouldn't you just look at YoY growth over 2021 — i.e. compare a year of full WFH to a year of RTO?

[reaperman]

> the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.

Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be much more appropriate than firing “for cause”!

[lazide]

This was always a risk at every company due to re-orgs, buyouts, or the whim of executives.

Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah.

Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare.

It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.

[bccdee]

Companies have a right to fuck their employees over in all sorts of ways. "It's not literally illegal for them to do this to you" is the absolute weakest defence that can be made for any behaviour.

[lazide]

FYI, I wasn’t defending. I was noting market dynamics and likely counter-forces.

How you decide to position yourself (and plan), and how they decide to position themselves (and plan) is of course up to each participant.

[intended]

This argument is also flawed.

“Market Dynamics” is discussed as if it is a physics problem.

Markets are social creations - they are a human way to effectively allocate resources.

They are also constantly being manipulated and shaped to better achieve certain outcomes over others.

When these outcomes are bent to serve the benefits of the few, or to serve the benefits of a principle that isn’t human wellness, its is a pointless market.

The rules against oligopolies, monopolies, fraud and manipulation are to ensure the social purpose of the market is achieved.

By extension - a market that by nature forces RTO, when WFH is superior to the majority of humans, is a market that needs to be fixed.

A negligible % of firms include commute time as a part of your salary. WFH means that you can save nearly an hour every day, doing any number of things that add economic value to humanity.

[chiefalchemist]

Give it time. The (RTO) companies are on the wrong side of history. Ideally these mandates are something the (employment) market will never forget. It will be interesting to see in the near future how many of the RTO execs at these companies will be whining about their struggles finding talent and/or having to pay a premium to attain and return the level of talent they need.

Of course few, if any of these execs will admit they got it wrong. That the root of the problem was their heavy-handed mandates and how they compromised the brand in the (employment) market.

[lazide]

Eh, people forget. Heard about Blackwater lately? Or was it Xe? Or Academi?

And they always complain about stuff like that, even when they aren’t playing games!

[chiefalchemist]

Yes and no. What needs to be factored in is, does the best / top talent forget? Or are they ones with more focus and memory? Does their marketability allow them to be more selective?

I think you see where this is going :)

[bshacklett]

Companies can do a lot of things that are morally reprehensible without fear of legal consequences. It doesn’t make it OK, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they have “a right” to behave that way.

[lazide]

I think you have a very different definition of a 'right' than the court system?

Folks on both sides are allowed to make decisions others disagree with (within bounds), and suffer or enjoy the consequences appropriately.

[anticensor]

Courts are a last resort venue though. They have to work with that standard.

[froggit]

Companies are gonna fuck over their employees either way but I totally agree that's not the kind of thing they have a right to. The world isn't dystopian enough yet.

[cdchn]

Who is doing this precisely? I've heard a lot of people bemoan that they moved during the pandemic and now are being required to return to the office but I haven't heard of any instances where previously remote employees-- remote from BEFORE the pandemic-- are being required to move to central office locations.

[reaperman]

Amazon[0], for one. But they're not the only ones -- it does happen occasionally, mostly when a company makes a blanket policy "no more remote work, everyone back to the office!" (which makes less sense for those employees who were never at any point in an office to begin with). The author of the linked article for this HN post wrote:

> I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida. Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim).

In the Re: Amazon article linked at the bottom of my post, the employee says:

> Now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. I moved to this area 13 years ago. I own a house here. My partner has a career here. I've built a home here.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over...

[cdchn]

So if we want to presume that the original linked article's author works for Amazon, we got 1: Amazon.

Who else?

[seattle_spring]

Google, Lyft, Facebook

[lwkl]

The person that wrote the blogpost was hired as remote worker and was required to move to an office after the pandemic.

[cdchn]

And they don't say who it is, so this falls short of the "precisely" qualifier.

[joshchaney]

This is exactly what happened to me. I worked from home for Wells Fargo for years prior to the pandemic. This year suddenly my status got changed and I was required to go into the office. First come first serve cubicles and none of my co-workers were even in the same state, let alone office. Years prior to the pandemic when I was in the office I had my own cubicle and could at least expect my chair would be the same and nobody had messed with the monitors on my desk. It's like working from an Internet cafe every day now.

[cdchn]

For the past 10 years or so I've been doing "hybrid WFH" where I negotiate 3 days max in-office (when I'm working somewhere with an office close to where I live) and I always get it agreed upon in my employment contract. My guess (and bias) would be that companies that would pull this switcheroo on employees would be larger orgs with faceless HR machinery and most wherewithal to dominate their employees (ie Amazon)

[kcatskcolbdi]

It is quite literally the subject of the article you are commenting on.

[cdchn]

And they don't say who it is. Thats why I was asking precisely who is doing this. I want to know what kind of orgs would make a decision like this.

[dehrmann]

> Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

The standard advice is stay in the house at least five years. These people accepted permanent remote roles at companies that have been remote-friendly for only two years. The track record's not there; you can't reasonably assume that policy would continue indefinitely. It might, but it's clearly a risk.

[plagiarist]

Why would anyone find it acceptable for a company to hire a remote employee but later change the contract? That's a massive pay cut. It's weird how companies expect loyalty but cannot even keep their word from what they claimed during hiring.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

No one is forcing you to sell your home. You could rent your home and move temporarily until you find a suitable remote replacement.

Or, you could just quit outright.

[jedberg]

Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't because remote jobs were few and far between. COVID finally gave them what they always wanted, but now it's being taken away, and remote jobs are getting harder to find again.

That's why there is resentment. There was resentment before too, but it was more below the radar because it was always shot down with "we work better in person" and there really wasn't much an argument to be had.

But now those people have hard data that they clearly work just as well at home or even better. So now they have data to back up their desires.

[ToucanLoucan]

It goes much deeper than that though. It isn't just "they wanted it and couldn't have it, then they got it and now they want to keep it:" A lot of people, myself included, did not understand even if we wanted work from home, how life changing it would be. How it's better for us as people, better for us as workers, better for our pocketbooks, better for our planet, better for our lives, just... better. It's ALL better.

Literally the only people losing in this arrangement are the same parasites who win at literally every other juncture in our society and just, I'm sick to DEATH of it. I will DIE on this hill. I hope the commercial real estate market fucking craters. I hope every company doing this RTO shit dies on the vine. I hope it sucks for every single person in the parasite class who loses more than 2 dollars on everything. I hope it crashes the price of real estate in big cities and makes them affordable again. I hope it makes my home worth less because homes shouldn't be a fucking investment vehicle in the first place.

To borrow the bugs bunny meme, I wish every landlord a very happy get a real job.

[layer8]

I have a nice office at work, where I have less distractions than at home. I find that face-to-face meetings allow for better discussions and whiteboarding than video conferencing. I can commute by bike on a lovely route, thus getting regular exercise and fresh air. I can better compartmentalize work from leisure. I don’t have to spend my whole day within the same walls. I get to see other people and have random encounters with interesting technical and non-technical discussions at work.

So it depends on circumstances and preferences. Both modes should be possible.

[ck425]

There are a lot of us normal workers who dislike WFH and we're not parasites. It's perfectly valid to prefer WFH but it's also valid to prefer the office.

[ToucanLoucan]

Nobody is talking about workers who prefer work from home.

[colmmacc]

I'm ready to believe that remote work can be more productive overall, and definitely more cost effective, but I always have a really hard time with the "I'm just as productive, if not more productive remotely" data and argument. It's really easy to believe that folks with an existing network of colleagues and relationship, as well as a decent amount of company of industry know how can be more productive remotely. Fewer distractions, more flexibility, etc. It all makes sense.

But that doesn't solve for the folks behind us on the ladder; how effective are we being at mentoring and growing those people, how easily are they learning the small nuances that we picked up in hallway conversations, serendipitous meetings, and so on. For the company, this is a real concern, but it's harder to measure. To better advocate for remote work, I think we really need to pour more time and energy into this and call out techniques that can be more effective here. For example: having leaders write a weekly newsletter, or getting into the "Why's" much more intentionally when people are remote.

[ajmurmann]

As a leader I did weekly department emails, weekly "office hours", fun video interviews with new hires to introduce them to the team and more. It worked pretty well, especially since the majority of the team had been working together for years. The piece I wasn't able to implement was getting the entire team in the same physical place every 3-6 months. However, I think even with all that, if I was a new hire, especially a junior, I'd still have a easier time learning the ropes in person. However, is that worth the massive constraint on hiring and impact on everyone else? I don't know. It's not a clear tradeoff.

[viraptor]

> how easily are they learning the small nuances that we picked up in hallway conversations, serendipitous meetings, and so on.

You adapt. The hallway conversations are not some natural world order either. Do you want juniors to pick up skills? When you're starting work on something interesting, post "I'm doing X in (conference link), feel free to join." in a channel. Invite people for a lunch call.

[KoolKat23]

Nobody is stopping you from having those interactions remotely. Encourage a culture whereby those people call you about these things, one where calls are not formal. Set up scenarios where they literally just sit on remote video call with you sharing your screen for half the day. Calls don't need to be formal, leave the camera on and leave the desk for a break.

[taway1874]

Analogy - this is like continuing to teach new drivers how to drive a stick-shift ( manual transmission) car when their city has adopted only automatic transmission or single gear EV cars for the future.

Humans are great at adapting to their surroundings. Mentoring/growing juniors will continue but in a different way that works better for modern work arrangements.

[sverhagen]

>Before COVID there were a ton of people who wanted to work remotely but couldn't

And then there's all the people that didn't know they wanted to work remotely, until they were forced to experience it.

[taway1874]

Yep! This is the crux of the problem. WFH has been battle tested and proven to be just as effective if not more than working at an office. But when execs try to throw all logic out the window and strong arm the employee for their gain they're shocked on the push-back (which never was before). COVID changed EVERYTHING. People saw firsthand how short life can be and reset their priorities.

[KoolKat23]

Times change and so should companies. It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction.

Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works, but are unjustifiably being told otherwise by people that don't actually know what works.

When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes? An example of pride in their work: Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.

[xpe]

> It's also not unreasonable for people to expect more from their job than a simple transaction.

This. Finding the balance is challenging.

- It is often unhealthy to expect too much from work.

- most software/hardware tech employers ask employees to be more than contractors and to care more than just a paycheck

- at the same time we see corporate decisions that are largely shortsighted, and sometimes even self-defeating.

I don’t have a history of belonging to a union, nor promoting worker-owned cooperatives, but I am a student (so to speak) of public policy and history. To use political economy terminology, we often see misaligned incentives: people with a little technical experience, calling the shots on everything from where we work (office, remote, etc) to how we work (remember cubicles? They were better than open office for anyone like me.)

Software and hardware engineers have been a key differentiating factor for tremendous technological advancement and meteoric corporate growth. Why don’t we have more influence on how we work at the least?

One key aspect seems damning: could it be because for most of us, as we get successful, we don’t pay it forward? And where are the ‘politically active’ retired engineers? Many of us cash out and become investors ourselves. I suppose we get working on other interesting technical problems and treat the lack of workplace control as immutable? To some extent, I’ve seen the problem and it is us.

Or maybe the business world is structured so that being “just a worker” relegates you to a second class status. Maybe there’s no point in hoping even a group of 1,000 of the relatively wealthy of us (to throw out a number: let’s say we define that as having net worth over $2M in the USA) could’ve made a difference? But I know this isn’t true; I largely notice a gaping hole where collective organizing could be.

Of course, there’s plenty blame to go ‘round. Anyone who seeks venture-capital has to make a Faustian bargain, trading a blood infusion for improbable expectations of growth.

The tech industry has grown so rapidly, adding people at a breakneck pace, that maybe we don’t think of this as being important. New SW/HW hires at least get paid well, we tell ourselves, even if they don’t really get to shape or work places as much as we should.

Our negotiating power is not as strong as it once was, and it isn’t getting any better, in my view. Will we act? Soon? Ever?

[eropple]

You ask good questions. Historically, no, software craftspeople and technologists do not pay it forward. In my experience, my parents' generation of engineers were more of the "someday, I'll be that boot" variety. I see a little less of that in mine, but still plenty of it; that's how startups mostly operate today. But I have a little more hope for the next generation to mount more resistance to it.

There will always be toads, but there might be some people in there, too.

[marcosdumay]

> It is often unhealthy to expect too much from work.

There is a famous prayer where one asks to be strong enough to change the things one can, humble enough to not requiring the changes you can't, and wise enough to know the difference. I don't remember it literally, but should be easy to find.

Anyway, work from home just got promoted from something you can change into something you can. As it happened, the healthy thing changed from not expecting it into demanding it (if you want).

[theonlybutlet]

That's a great point, misaligned incentives. And I'd add to that misaligned goals.

The engineer who wants to deliver their project in return for their salary, in contrast to the sociable c-suite exec, who wants to cosplay the work environment of yesteryear.

This applies to the wider corporate world and not even just the tech industry but I understand it's relevance as this is HN.

[daveevad]

> Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.

The compensation is correlated with confusion.

[denton-scratch]

> When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes?

My phones are 1) a VOIPphone, and 2) a mobile device. The former relies on the internet; the latter can't send a FAX. PSTN is 90's technology, fewer and fewer people have a PSTN line.

[theonlybutlet]

So you kept up with the times. Good for you haha. I'm guessing there was some efficiency, simplicity in not going out and getting a PTSN line. Much like remote work, same results whilst cutting out inefficient offices and convoluted commutes.

[denton-scratch]

> some efficiency, simplicity in not going out and getting a PTSN line.

Yup - it was much cheaper, my previous phone connection was from a cable company, and I already had internet. And as it turns out, VOIP seems to be more reliable than PSTN. And my (boutique) ISP specializes in VOIP.

I wouldn't have even bothered with VOIP, and just relied on mobile telephony; but I don't trust mobile providers, and I wanted a landline-style local phone-number.

[hattmall]

>They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works

If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office. There is a difference between making it through an event like COVID vs making forward business progress. Certainly there's a place for remote work but the higher you go in management the more you see the holes remote work creates. Realistically, employees should push hard for return to office and then no work out of the office. The reality is that as the job market tightens the expectation is going to be in office AND work from home. Vacation days will morph into work from home days. An expectation to answer emails after hours is already turning into an expectation to be online and available for zoom calls much later than normal working hours.

[KoolKat23]

As part of the social contract, reasonable employees would agree with it if there were a solid case for it but this doesn't seem to be so. They're being offered ambiguous one liners such as the "making forward business progress" devoid of substance and which contrasts to actual measurable such as turnover, profits and other tangible measures that indicate otherwise (showing that remote work works).

I truly hope the line between leave and work doesn't blur.

[IntelMiner]

>If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office

You're missing the inherent power dynamics of owners versus employees

The C suites at the top down to middle (mangle) management want RTO because their goals align with real estate value and tax incentives

Mangelement want it because acting as vague wardens for a bunch of people tied to desks for no reason means their jobs have meaning

[aidenn0]

If I was hired as a programmer and my employer decides they would rather I pickup dog shit all day, I'm damn-well going to complain about it.

Both TFA (and the comment you are replying to) are about people specifically hired for remote work prior to the pandemic; the status quo before COVID was those people working remotely.

[Spooky23]

It’s not that simple - it’s a stupid control thing.

When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive.

I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees.

Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Require that people live or be available at regional hubs monthly or quarterly. My aunt had an arrangement like this for a airline in the late 90s - they setup a router and PC in her basement and would have meeting or two a month at the office.

For me, top down dictates that remove business unit autonomy and don’t understand reality are always a net negative. WFH flexibility reduced sick and family sick absences by 60%. People who’d take an hour off to go to the doctor now take a half day.

Now, I have two employees reporting on this stuff instead of doing something productive. So I’m losing thousands of man-hours to absences and spending 3000-4000 more to figure out how many asses are in chairs in dozens of facilties across the world. Managing professionals like fast food employees is dumb. The only winners are the CRE and banking people.

[cool_dude85]

>Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space.

Doesn't everyone, you know, hate this kind of stuff? I know I do.

[ajmurmann]

I had a lot of people excited about having a space where we could deliberately meet for collaboration. Even more so about bringing everyone into a shared space for a week. However, the collaboration spaces never worked out in practice because you were always missing someone and now had to call in to a Zoom meeting regardless. This lead to the thing quickly dying because there so little was real value from coming in. That might be a company culture thing one could correct though.

[pxc]

It's also potentially a team size issue. If you have small teams of 2-3 people, you can more easily have enough meet for useful collaboration.

[monknomo]

I don't know, the hotel+collab spaces is pretty good (from my perspective) when you come into the office once or twice a month and have a group of people you want to meet with and an agenda you want to accomplish.

For more mundane day-to-day work I don't care for it, but I think it can be a handy supplement to mostly remote work.

[Spooky23]

People hate reporting to work every day where you need to fight for a chair. If you're WFH, you can gather adhoc, do your thing with the team and get out.

[snotrockets]

Fast food employees are professionals as well (have you ever worked a fast food job? It's hard, and requires practice to excel at)

[redwall_hp]

That's not what professional means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession

Even skilled laborers, like plumbers and electricians, are not in a profession. They're members of a trade.

[hotnfresh]

“Professional” has a meaning in the context of employment that’s not just “good at a thing that is not easy”.

[codelikeawolf]

As a remote worker before the pandemic, I think the worst thing we could do is return to the status quo. I remember trying to find a new remote job before I moved across the country to Portland (pre-pandemic). I interviewed for a job in downtown Chicago, which would have required a 35-minute train ride to and from the city each day. I wasn't moving for a few months and I offered to work in the office before switching to remote. I even said "if you don't think I'm contributing enough value by the time I leave, and you aren't comfortable with me working remotely, let me know and I can stay with the company long enough to help you find my replacement". They still turned me down.

The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc. I remember going to the dentist and telling the dental assistant that I work from home, and her response was "don't people think you're slacking off?" and my response was "no, because I'm an adult". There was an almost insurmountable stigma around remote work. As terrible as the pandemic was, it exposed an irrefutable truth about remote work: people can still do their jobs perfectly fine at home.

I spent most of my career working in offices, until I went fully remote about 2 years before the pandemic. There are aspects of the office that I miss. I'm not vehemently against going back into an office, but it would come with some pretty big caveats: the office has to be relatively close, there are no fixed days or amount of days I'd be required to come in, and I'd have the flexibility to come and go as I pleased. I doubt many companies would agree to that arrangement, mainly because of the real estate costs, which is why I stick to remote work.

I don't want to go back to a world where I have to convince a company that a remote worker can still provide as much value as one in the office. I don't want to be forced to stay late at an office to finish something that I could knock out twice as fast at home. I can only hope that we don't spend the next few years going backwards to arrive at a status quo that was misguided and not grounded in reality.

Edit: Grammar

[denton-scratch]

> The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that work from home aren't as productive", etc.

In my last position (exclusively work-from-office), I had two co-workers (out of nine) that were seriously counterproductive: the rest of us had to work around them. I don't know why the bosses hired them, and I don't know why they kept them on - perhaps they thought they were somehow rescuing them.

At any rate, these guys weren't just less productive; they were seriously counterproductive. And this was a strictly office job; we were more-or-less forbidden to work after 5:30PM.

The bosses had some kind of "company culture" fantasy, that they could weld us together into a bean-bags-and-table-football crew of clones, who would both work and play together. Interestingly, neither of these bosses had ever done an office job in someone else's office...

[downrightmike]

I've always hated going into an office, I hate the drive, I hate the shitty coffee, I hate having to check which of the toilet seats ISN'T already caked in shit from the QA guys, I hate having to watch my smoking cowokers take the first 10 to 20 minutes off the start of every hour to smoke and the management allowing it because they also smoke. Then they bitch when I leave on time and they still have hours of work to make up. Now people can fuck up their own shit and I can just do work. Covid made it possible for companies to pull their heads out of their asses and offer WFH for more positions.

[DSMan195276]

> there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.

You don't understand why people don't want to have to go job hunting to keep a WFH position?

It's one thing to say "this is fine, get over it", it's another to say "I don't understand why people are resentful", I think that second part is pretty obvious.

[jzb]

I can give several reasons there's resentment: One - if you were hired with the understanding work would be remote, then it's definitely a reason to be resentful.

Two, people love to handwave away the difficulties in "just find another job." This isn't trivial like switching toothpaste brands, somebody who's been with Acme Corp for 3 years has invested time with that employer, learned their ins and outs, and has banked some social capital there. Saying "oh, just find another job" is saying "just toss all that out and start over."

Three, if you do change jobs you have no clue whether the next company might get swept up in the RTO craze at a later date. When Acme Corp's pro-RTO CEO or another c-level person trot over to your new workplace, guess what? Now it's no longer remote-friendly.

We're not living in the same world we were pre-COVID and many of us see no reason to go backwards.

[cmeacham98]

Firstly, you make switching employers sound like as easy as changing your outfit. Not every job has thousands of companies hiring remotely ready to go.

Secondly, companies that pulled this bait and switch deserve to be called out and loose reputation among workers for it. My current employer had recruiters and even the CEO bragging about our remote work policy, just to pull it out from under everyone.

[hypeit]

> It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others.

The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. Not everyone, but a huge number that had never been exposed to it before.

Now if a business wants to stay competitive they need to tap into that labor market. The vocal resistance to RTO is expected, we'll never go back to having such a large percentage of the work force working in an office. It's just that a lot of managers haven't figured that out yet and/or are personally incentivized to keep up the charade.

[giantrobot]

> The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it.

It's not even necessarily falling in love with working at home but just working not in shitty office environments. For most people "the office" is some miserable building in an office park in the middle of a food/service desert. Employees that need to commute to that office don't get paid for the hours of their life wasted in traffic or any financial expenses related to their commute. People with kids have to pay even more money for some child care if they can't be home when their kids get off from school.

Working from home/wherever allows someone to save on those money and time costs. They can be home when their kids get off school. They can make a sandwich at 11:23AM because they're hungry. They can stop pouring dollars into a daily commute. Hell they can even live where they want instead of somewhere in commuting distance of a shitty office park.

Many of the WFH challenges are the same as working in an office, like inconsiderate entities disturbing you or placating middle managers by attending meetings. At least you can bear those challenges in comfortable clothes in a comfortable seat. You can then take a break and shit in a bathroom you don't share with dozens of other inconsiderate coworkers. WFH isn't perfect and people don't need to love it to at least prefer it over the dystopian hell of offices.

[standardUser]

"We should just return to the status quo before COVID..."

Says the ownership class.

When we are given a rare and unique opportunity to shift our labor culture in the favor of those who provide labor, we would be beyond stupid not to seize that opportunity for everything it's worth.

[RussianCow]

Many companies did a bait and switch, though. They made grand promises of remote and/or hybrid work being a first class citizen moving forward, then did a hard 180 and asked everyone to start coming into the office every day. Understandably, some people are upset about this, especially those hired remotely.

[codingdave]

I think the resentment comes from the assumption of: "We should just return to the status quo before..."

If you look back at the history of work experiences, there were several old "status quos" that we no longer accept. We don't accept, manual labor for 60 or 80 hours a week. We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension. But society evolves. Assuming that something as disruptive as COVID should just be put aside without evolving how we operate in our world is exactly where the resentment comes from.

[cool_dude85]

>We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension

I think that if private companies offered pension plans, reasonable raises and promotion paths, many people would accept it. I think the company hopping stuff is largely a response to the death of annual raises and internal promotions.

[toomuchtodo]

> and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.

Unless laws change to require them to [1], workers organize to require it be provided [2], or you've had the working arrangement codified in your offer letter or other contractual documentation so that requiring you to come into an office is constructive dismissal [3]. This whole "employers can do whatever they want" era can't come to an end quick enough.

[1] https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislatio...

[2] https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotel...

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urg...

[derefr]

Companies which were okay with having some remote employees before COVID, are now — for no rational reason whatsoever other than following a seeming business-management zeitgeist — not okay with having any remote employees.

Isn't "companies going crazy and forcing good employees into situations where they'll quit, when they could just as well... not do that", something to push back against?

[lokar]

A lot of big companies had full remote by exception. They built up a modest amount of these (generally senior, often specialist) over the years. Forcing these people to an office is not return to pre-Covid.

[Arainach]

>We should just return to the status quo before COVID

The status quo was horribly broken, and it took a worldwide pandemic for many people to realize that things could be different and didn't have to be so awful.

[jfghi]

Pre-Covid COL would be great too.

[addicted]

> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.

I mean, this is a ridiculous argument supporting remote work because it works so much stronger the other way.

You literally had companies change centuries worth of corporate work for overnight to switch everyone to remote work.

If anything the people who want full time return to office have a much stronger argument that companies have suddenly changed everything on them, as opposed to the people who are complaining that now that things are normal companies are reverting the changes they made for a once in a lifetime pandemic.

[cableshaft]

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Vladimir Lenin

Sometimes it takes a black swan event to reveal how broken something is and how things could be better another way.

It used to be the norm in the US for children to be allowed to work in coal mines and factories too (apparently in 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were children under the age of 16[1]), but after some photos were taken of them exposing just how bad the situation had gotten, it helped shift public support to pass legislation barring child labor. Nowadays I doubt hardly anyone would be in support of that now.[2]

[1]: https://www.history.com/news/child-labor-lewis-hine-photos

[2]: https://energyhistory.yale.edu/child-labor-pennsylvania-coal...

[aaroninsf]

Counterpoint: why would we EVER return to a born-crappy status quo?

No secret that the answer is: to privilege the anxious social needs of those uncomfortable working remotely. And those whose career is on the hook for over-investment in trophy real estate.

[make3]

before, people weren't sure if it could be done, and if the productivity would be similar.

It's now been shown that it's possible and that productivity is very similar. So that's why companies forcing the return to work are resented, and why they don't even pretend to have numbers to back their decision. https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...

[taylodl]

> Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why.

Because these companies hired a lot of remote employees in the interim. Also, many of the employees of these companies decided to buy houses in areas where they could afford to buy a house instead of continuing to rent - and now after several years these companies want to renege?

How can you not understand the resentment? This is the biggest FUCK YOU in the history of corporate America.

[Consultant32452]

I think it’s important to remember people had been subjected to literally decades of propaganda that remote work didn’t work.

When everyone was forced to do it, many learned that it is not only possible but results in better overall life satisfaction.

I’m sure some people learned they really hate remote work, but my guess is there were more converts the other direction.

Also, the commercial real estate market is getting fuct. And a lot of big corporations hold commercial real estate in their portfolio.

[ghaff]

If you went back 20/25 years, it's probably fair to say that remote work wouldn't have worked in general. Had COVID happened in 1995, I expect that there would have been a lot more shrugging and getting on with business/school/etc. because there really wouldn't have been other realistic options.

[obmelvin]

I don't think it's realistic to say things should just return to the status quo. The world was changed by the pandemic and even if that didn't happen, time continues to advance which always brings change as well.

Yes, some companies will go back to hybrid or complete in person, but it is also clear that remote work can be done in a much wider context than it was before the pandemic.

[k__]

"as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why."

They saw the light. Simple as that.

They also noticed, if more employees in the market demand remote, chances are higher that employers will allow it.

[somsak2]

I don't think the free-market-solves-all-ails response really works here. The issue is that the CEOs of these companies act together, essentially as a cartel. Sometimes formally [1], other times informally [2]. Labor (at least in the US) does not have anywhere close to such a level of organization, and so top-down mandates like this can impact a whole sector, without a clear place for you to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[2] "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin

[RIMR]

>We should just return to the status quo before COVID

Why? People at my org had been begging for WFH before the pandemic, and the pandemic helped us win that battle.

Why should we cede ground back to our bosses when we are happier and more productive now?

[goodpoint]

No, management has been lying to employees with the "working in an office is more effective" for decades. Now the king is naked and yet companies are trying to manipulate people to return to offices.

[RC_ITR]

These kind of arguments have sort of eaten their tail in recent years as work culture has shifted.

We (as has happened with a lot of things) basically have two camps of people and a culture that makes us believe we are only allowed to make "one-or-the-other" choices (I blame the rise of consulting, KPIs, and 'benchmarks'.)

So two camps are arguing about their preferences but with the stakes that "my preference has to be the moral and logical choice," which will always just lead to nowhere.

[FearlessNebula]

The market is really difficult right now, most people don’t have the option to just find a remote work company. A significant amount of people who were laid off can’t find any company right now

[hagbarth]

Alright, but the post is about and pre-pandemic remote role getting swept up in rto - in what world does that make sense?

[bit_logic]

What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. At this point, it shouldn't be called RTO, it should be called STO (Switch To Office), because WFH is the default existing state. And the companies that want to STO, they admit there's NO DATA to support this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...

https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...

The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.

[The_Colonel]

> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH.

I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote.

Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.

[bit_logic]

Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed.

Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH.

Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?

[The_Colonel]

> Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH.

I think there's a bit of a selection bias. I believe many people can work effectively remotely and these likely applied to remote companies. But many people are less effective remote and these wouldn't succeed in remote companies. In the end I certainly think there's a space for remote only companies, but I'm not sure if it's a model useful for the whole IT sector.

> All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?

In the end it doesn't matter. It's the managers calling the shots and carrying the responsibility. If their guts tell them office work is the right direction, it's their bet.

[Hermitian909]

Talking to lots of middle and upper management, the primary complaints I hear are hard to measure - poorer communication, less alignment, less innovation, etc. None of this reduces the number of tasks being done, but reduces the utility of those tasks. Measuring directly is hard, but ultimately you'd expect it result in lower growth - which many companies are seeing (but it's hard to disentangle this from the macro situation).

I think the hard reality is that companies need to make a thesis on the level of flexibility in remote/in-office work and commit, then 5 years from now we'll get an idea of what works well.

[bit_logic]

These are also hard to measure:

* Employee happiness

* Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office

* Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge

* Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure)

* Able to hire from outside local metro area

None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And yet now vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations is enough to shift everything back to in-office?

[Hermitian909]

Pre-pandemic, why would you risk testing out an unknown style of work and management that almost no one had experience with?

Now there's a significant portion of the labor market that expects WFH, companies need to produce a policy on WFH/RTO instead of treating it as a non-decision.

Data gives no clear insight into which is better, which makes this a judgment call, and everyone with >5 yoe has enough experience in both modes that they feel qualified to make that judgment. Many think requiring some in-office time is superior. You can try and dismiss those opinions as "vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations" but that's not going to actually convince anyone with the power to effect these decisions - even if you're right! You need answers to concerns like "virtual communication is too low bandwidth to build alignment on strategic shifts that are necessary for the company to grow to profitability" (quote to me from a director at a company with >1,000 employees).

My argument is basically: if you could have addressed those concerns, it would've happened during the pandemic. Manifestly, those concerns were not addressed in a satisfactory way. Therefore the only real resolution now is to wait 5-10 years to see if RTO/WFH is a meaningful differentiator for companies.

[taway1874]

Love your argument! Nailed it on the hypocrisy.

[intended]

Wouldnt it be more likely that current Middle management isn’t familiar enough with a chat environments to maintain team cohesion.

I worked as a volunteer in an online team before the COVID years. I was FAR better at ensuring a team was cohesive online, than I was in person. You can make out whats going on based on how people talk, you can have one on ones, and diagnose issues.

[gruez]

>Where's the data?

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/t...

"Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."

[bit_logic]

This line from the article "...in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes.." shows that this study is about a call center. A few points on this:

* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees

* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.

The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.

[gruez]

>* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.

1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work.

2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study:

"Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office."

>* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees

>The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.

1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest.

2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.

[somsak2]

Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm interested in how you're able to measure "overall team productivity." I've found that to be a near-impossibility at any organization that I've worked at.

[JambalayaJim]

For many people it’s really just a gut feeling. That’s the issue with this debate; there isn’t really any data on either side of the aisle. Regardless, team productivity is both more important, and easier to measure than individual productivity; and most proponents of remote work are only focused on the latter.

[boston_clone]

Isn't bad communication a management issue, not a team performance issue?

Some articles have pointed out that the major driver (from executives) to return to office is simply underperforming real estate investments. In short, the attrition, decreases in performance and morale, and environmental impacts are simply not worth the massive losses that would be incurred from the innumerable empty office parks.

[danaris]

And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?

And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.

[The_Colonel]

> And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?

Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it.

> And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them?

My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations.

Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.

[danaris]

> > And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them?

> My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it.

Then my intuition is that you were one of the people popping over walls.

(You weren't? Well, your intuition is worth about as much as mine.)

(You were? Well, then you've got a vested interest in believing that that was better.)

[nikau]

> Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.

That's great until you are forced to come in on "anchor days" and there are no free meeting rooms left.

[x86x87]

This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.

[DiggyJohnson]

I enjoyed the flexibility of WFH but I still prefer working with local teams in the office. There are pros and cons to both, but it's silly to assume everyone has the same preference as you just because your preference is strongly held.

This is my response to both your comment and TFA. There is less consensus on this topic than the very-vocal WFH crowd would have you believe. I know plenty of other talented engineers that feel similarly to me. They aren't dogmatic about it, but they prefer working with their teammates in the office.

[flashback2199]

From what I observed during the pandemic, I sincerely believe that the only reason remote work is worse than working in person is how little effort teams tend to put into making remote work equivalent to in person work. The biggest thing I saw throughout the entire pandemic on multiple teams was zero effort to create a culture of meet on camera for quick ad hoc, hey I have a quick question on this, ah cool thanks bye, it's always have a big fat meeting with lots of people or we're all just poking each other on chat with long reply latencies, which works very poorly. The only solution that was tried at my company was taking attendance, which is crazy, anyone who's gone to school, which is everybody, knows that taking attendance does zero to create collaboration, it just marks down whether you were there. Ass in seat? Check, we're done, mission accomplished. To me if you're taking attendance you've already lost because attendance is table stakes.

[npsimons]

I strongly feel a large number of people complaining about "lack of collaboration" have a dark pattern of not documenting things.

Sure, you don't need to write everything down - but how many times could someone have simply RTFM if people were more in the habit of documenting institutional knowledge among other things? Even just defaulting to email discussions would help keep track of things much better.

And yeah, when I'm working with other people, I make a point to hang out in a BigBlueButton or other similar instance, with a note with my phone number there, as well as putting in my email signature line my phone and a note that I'm available for videconference.

[The_Colonel]

One of the problems associated with remote work is that synchronous communication is not guaranteed. People tend to work varying hours and even during their "work hours", they will make breaks to do various activities like household chores etc. So it tends to be more difficult to catch a co-worker for a quit chat. Then there's a feedback loop where you basically stop trying since it has such a low chance anyway.

[flashback2199]

To me, the work varying hours is part of the problem; if the remote work is expected to replace in office work, then similar hours have to be worked, in which case people need to be available throughout the work day.

To head off negative reaction to this, I'm not saying that remote should always be similar hours, I mean remote work positions that otherwise would have been in office before the pandemic, if that makes sense.

I just look at this situation and to me it looks like people are like, ohh noo, remote work isn't as good as in office work, well, yeah, you haven't even tried to make it anything like "in office work but thru a camera," you've almost allowed your domestic employees and contractors to work as if everyone's in different teams in different timezones, with all of the problems that come with that...

[Tainnor]

I feel the exact opposite. People should make an effort to make as much communication async as possible. Usually, I don't need a ton of 1:1 interaction, and if you really do feel there's something to discuss synchronously, you can schedule a meeting in advance. The situation where you're so completely blocked that you can't make progress on your own or switch to a different task (or where the house is on fire and something needs to be done now) are rare in my experience.

Of course, sometimes it makes sense to do check-ins (e.g. for onboarding) or a pairing session, but that can also be scheduled.

I also tend to forget things that were just said in personal interactions or meetings. If it's written down, I can look it up.

[tedivm]

It's absolutely silly for the RTO people to force their preferences on everyone. The fact that RTO folks only consider it a win if everyone comes back, rather than trying to build out flexibile working conditions that make everyone happy, is the real problem.

People who want an office to work in are just as valid as people who want to work from home. It's the people who want to force RTO on everyone that are real assholes.

[krisleipus]

The thing is that there is no arrangement that works for everyone. Sure, those who just want a physical office space instead of their home will probably be ok collaborating remotely, but the others want to collaborate in person, and that requires everyone to be at the same place. Flexible conditions which make everyone happy is going to the office to spend large amount of time on video calls in cramped call booth - nothing too happy about that, whichever side of the debate you're on.

[DiggyJohnson]

I don't understand why this argument (which is a popular one) makes sense. It's symmetrical. RTO folks want their colleagues in the office. WFH folks don't want to not have to do this. It would be obviously absurd if I criticized WFH on the basis that its proponents are trying to force their preferences on others.

[layer8]

I think RTO folks tend to care more for everyone on the team to be in the office at least part of the time, whereas WFH folks tend to care less if their team colleagues are in the office or also WFH. So I don’t think it’s quite symmetrical. It’s better if the split is outside team boundaries, or between different companies.

[intended]

WFH works better for everyone.

It reduces commute time. - This saves environmental and energy costs

- It increases worker productivity because now they commute time is recovered

- Commute time was not accounted for in contracts, and was a cost of doing business. It is no longer the case.

A common complaint is that Coordination costs have increased. However Data is missing for this. Further, Coordination activities are achievable online. Competitive firms will adapt and thrive. Bad firms will and should die.

Other benefits: - Less money is spent on rent, Especially in high rent locations. This means that more money is available for R&D, or to give to shareholders

- Rent Money is now distributed across geographies - and will favor regions with lower costs of living. This spreads talent and wealth broadly, increasing chances for entrepreneurship and new businesses to flourish in those locations

WFH was considered infeasible, but COVID provided hard evidence not only was it feasible, it was feasible at scale.

The data has been updated, so our position has changed. Expanding the economic pie makes us all better off. WFH is probably one of the more interesting economic revolutions we will see in the developed world.

[layer8]

It’s difficult if you have teams split between WFH and RTO though. The compromise is for all team members to be in the office at least some days per week, or else to just have RTO companies vs. WFH companies. I agree that everyone should be able to choose their preferred mode of working, but you can’t just arbitrarily mix people with different modes and expect that to cause no issues.

[tedivm]

That's not a compromise, that's RTO.

Also, I've been in this industry for 17 years. Malwarebytes (VP), Vicarious (VP), Rad AI (VP), Explosion AI, Aptible, and now Comcast. Every one of those companies except Vicarious had a remote or hybrid culture, and it's worked great for all of them. You absolutely can "arbitrarily mix people with different modes" as long as you have good management.

[taway1874]

Yep. And mind you "flexible" here means fully remote. None of that 3 days at office BS.

[hypeit]

It's the "Return" part of RTO that people have a problem with. Have an office if you like, but don't expect me to go there. I work from home.

[ta1243]

Most people who claim to like an office specifically like other people being at an office

[listenallyall]

Most people who claim to like work-from-home specifically rely on other people showing up at their workplaces -- restaurants, delivery drivers, grocery workers, cleaners, healthcare, dog walkers, etc.

[ncallaway]

Sure, but RTO is about… forcing the preference for in person work on everyone.

[throwaway5959]

RTO doesn’t really work if five people are back in the office.

[Kye]

Manufacturing buggy whips doesn't work if only five people own buggies. This is a problem for the buggy whip manufacturer to solve, not the people who bought a car or took the train.

There's a third option beyond forcing everyone into boxes in the middle of nowhere (old and busted) and everyone working from home (new old hotness).

[ncallaway]

You see how that’s inherently about putting the preferences of the 5 people *above* the preferences of the rest of the office, yes?

[throwaway5959]

People are allowed to have different preferences and lifestyles than the majority. I’m not a CEO so it’s not my place to decide what a company does or doesn’t do.

[Aldo_MX]

Well, remote really works if five people are back at the office. That's a point for remote.

[layer8]

It may not work for the five people in the office, because it’s not the environment they enjoyed if the 95 other people are not there. This is particularly true if teams are split that way.

Nobody should be forced to anything, but that doesn’t mean that an arbitrary mix works.

[ScarZy]

I echo this sentiment completely. I do 2-3 days a week in my office and I am personally mentally better off for it.

That said, personally is the key word. I manage a team. I love seeing employees together and aligning on things in person where possible - but totally understand if this does not suit their schedule that day or week. It often does not work with mine.

It's the small human mistakes that are innocent and spontaneous - like inevitably spilling coffee on myself - that keep us humble.

Some fit the remote world entirely never wanting to see the inside of an office again, some thrive off rubbing shoulders with colleagues. I found it difficult to not have social engagements outside of family during the darker periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also found myself working longer hours, not having solid disconnected time or neglecting my health physically and mentally.

I believe we still have a lot to learn about how to work best remotely. Businesses should invest in making this as normal as possible - for example enforcing a work-from-desk policy for calls has helped normalise communication. I do worry slightly about those younger graduates coming into the industry now that have never had the experience of working in an office.

[iwonthecase]

> I also found myself working longer hours, not having solid disconnected time

To the frustration of my then boss, I noticed that I (and a lot of other coworkers) used RTO as a way to reduce our hours to ~40/week and not spend our nights and weekends with our work laptops open nearby.

[cultureswitch]

When one party stops goodwill arrangements to a contract, typically the other party follows suit.

[dheera]

It's much more multi-faceted than this.

I enjoy going to the office from time to time, and if you establish no rules, I'm pretty likely to go to the office about 2-3X per week and coordinate those days with others, because I'm also a social human being.

I also enjoy being able to see my partner for a week here and there. Some have a "4 week work-from-anywhere policy", but if you're in an LDR you know 4 weeks per year is really not enough.

[afavour]

> silly to assume everyone has the same preference

I don't see the OP assuming that. Not everyone enjoyed it but for those of use who did going back is not desirable.

[DiggyJohnson]

> Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.

This was the line I was directly responding to.

[afavour]

I don’t read that as “everyone enjoyed the flexibility”, I read it as “the people who enjoyed the flexibility aren’t going back”

[Spivak]

I don't know anyone that is advocating for forcing everyone to work from home but instead "office available for anyone who wants it."

There's a mile wide difference between "my preference is to be vegetarian" where people will get out the stops to provide accommodations and "my preference is everyone must keep vegetarian."

[sokoloff]

There are definitely companies (and individuals) who are making the decision that "the benefits of RTO emerge from/rely upon our entire workforce being mostly in the office".

I don't personally hold that view, but I know people (including individual contributors) who do and, depending on why you think in-office work is good, it's an entirely reasonable view for some people and some companies to take.

[Spivak]

> the environmental benefits of vegetarianism emerge from/rely upon our entire population being mostly meatless.

I understand the argument, I still don't think it's valid. Companies are made up of heterogeneous individuals with not only different preferences on how to work, but different work styles, different flexibility needs, different energy cycles. One of my current teammates has Crohn's and is a fantastic programmer but there's no way he could work 8 hrs in an office. For myself, I have really bad ADHD and working in the office means I will be completely dependent on stimulants instead of being able to work around it most days.

You can't put the cat back in the bag that made the whole world collectively realize that for most jobs being in an office building wasn't the real requirement we all thought it was.

[sokoloff]

Some believe the benefits of RTO are closer to the ability of an entire team to eat from the same crock of chili at a potluck.

There are discussions and topics that just work better in-person. If you think you have (or could arrange to have) 0% or 3% those types of conversations, you're fine to work fully remote. If you think you have 70% or 90% those types of conversations, you're logically going to want to RTO to whatever extent you're prioritizing company outcomes.

[fnordpiglet]

I think the right model for management to adapt to is “let your workers work the way they work best.” It’s a false dichotomy that it’s either everyone in the office or everyone work at home. In my entire career of over 30 years most meetings were held with some remote person in some other location as most companies of size have many locations already. I don’t see a huge difference between that model and a “work how you work best” model, other than the knowledge the other people aren’t in a corporate supplied human Habitrail but are in their natural environment.

Ultimately the argument is about control, extorting and coercing compliance under threat to some will. The alternative is a relaxing of control. In that model no one tells you to work in the office, and no one tells you to not. Instead of management exerting coercive control their job would become ensuring productivity given a lack of control.

Tax advantages are part of the story, but the other part of the story is most managers aren’t very good at managing people. They’re in their job through some career twist, either under the delusion that management gives them scale of influence or because they don’t really like computers that much and went to CS for a career. The easier policy to enforce is the coercive one because it requires no thought, and it’s uniform in its application. The harder one for management is figuring out how to adapt to a changing environment and maximize productivity by understanding their people and how they work and smoothing the landscape for them.

This challenge extends not just to the line managers but to the CEOs and everyone between. None of them are usually very good people managers. Often senior management are better at strategy and manipulation of the organization. They are perplexed by ambiguity, and when you’re used to being in control being perplexed is uncomfortable. And when you feel like you’re in charge you don’t have to feel uncomfortable alone, you can make it someone else’s problem. Layoffs, resignations, turmoil are all issues they are used to. But a changing work environment that fundamentally rethinks the structure of corporate engagement that’s focused on lack of control in exchange for productivity and reduced operating expenses and freeing up of capital? That’s scary stuff, and they don’t need to feel scared - it’s easier for them to make you feel scared.

Anyway - tax agreements expire, leases lapse, cultures adapt, management learns new playbooks, and things change. In 5 years the cold hard dollars will win - eventually no board will accept hand waving culture arguments when confronted with an improved EPS, freeing of cash flow, and reduced capital commitments coupled with improved morale and productivity and the “Bring your own office” moment will be here. BYOD saves a few million a year, BYOO will save dump trucks of money. It will happen.

Disclaimer, I just quit my cushy senior exec job at a mega cope over RTO and joined a forward late stage startup with a mixture of remote and in office “work the way you work best” structure.

[pbhjpbhj]

I asked about WFH prior to the pandemic and was told 'oh it won't work for you, ask again when you're in a senior position; you'll never develop without peer-friendships and a senior worker a couple of desks away'. Then we were forced to WFH.

Now, we're being told to do hybrid, but there's no peer friendships because it's hotdesking, and the senior personnel are no longer nearby (they're at home or on a different floor) ... so there's no "return", we're not going back to what we had, we don't have our own desks anymore.

Management acknowledge that office days (we're hybrid) will be low in productivity, but no changes to productivity requirements. It's all about collaboration, except you're next to random people you've never met and you can't talk because it's open plan and you'll disturb everyone.

None of the reasons given for return fit the reality (in my office), but they probably make sense for senior managers (who seem unable to see past the end of their own noses).

[light_hue_1]

And of course, you will spend all of your time in the office zooming with other people who aren't there.

Time to get a new job.

[taway1874]

It's just stupid. How do these people get to such senior positions?

[brightball]

There’s a flip side to this where you’re not observing the negatives coming to the company as a result.

It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either.

Just as an example, I see people complain (a lot) about “cameras on” policies. This is the result of a company trying to eliminate an issue that they are seeing from non-participation to potential instances of fraud. They want to do return to office, but this is a “let’s find a middle ground” step.

And yet, people will act as if it’s the end of the world. The alternative is being in the room itself. You have to pick your battles.

[mc32]

Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment.

There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.

[bacza2]

Why it always need to be only about productivity and not what is better for people? I get that company need to make money but surly productivity is not dropping 50% and company makes significantly less

[mc32]

If one company were to hire all the slackers and the other all the busy beavers, one will be more likely to succeed vs the other.

Unless being a slacker becomes a protected class companies will hire the productive people, given a choice.

[grogenaut]

How do you objectively measure productivity? Same question for "better for people".

The former can be somewhat measured by in-effective methods such as lines of code produced, revenue per emp in division, and other measures. The latter via surveys.

A company's direct objective it to turn a profit. Their indirect objective is might be to do that via retaining productive workers, or they may take a churn approach. Is it surprising they'd put more effort and weight on the former (prod) than the latter (better for people)?

What math function allows you to strike the correct balance between the 2 measures. For some employees you might make them maximally satisfied by paying them a lot to do nothing. For others they might want little to no money for socially rewarding work. It's not going to be the same for every person.

So in your mind what's the right optimization function for this equation?

[jheriko]

ask yourself that question and answer it.

just what in the hell are you thinking?

[Terr_]

> productive [...] ways of measuring

I always point out that most "productivity" numbers assume the costs of commuting hours/fuel are $0, because it measures from the perspective of employer costs, and it assumes the employer has used their bargaining-position to force all those variable-costs entirely onto the employees.

So we've got (A) a misleading "productivity boost" sometimes being used to rationalize (B) one-sided policies which are (C) probably not sustainable in the long-term anyway.

[soulofmischief]

Tying my ability to work remotely, and thus plan and live my life accordingly, to some kind of arbitrary performance mechanism installed by Initech's latest up-and-coming executive star, will result in me immediately leaving. I have the skill to back that statement, but I won't employ it just so that some patronizing manager can get a kick out of it.

[bee_rider]

A level of productivity is part of the package that the employer buys from the employee. Some people might be less productive WFH, but if the WFH perk is important enough to them that it is a deal-breaker, then… that’s what’s for sale, the company can take it or leave it.

If you already have a set of employees, and you demand they all come in, you are selecting against people who know they can sustain their lifestyle by moving to another company.

Only problem with low enough productivity enough to be bumped down to becoming totally unemployable don’t get the choice. These also are the people who are most likely to follow an in-office mandate. It seems like a bad filter to apply.

[SoftTalker]

I'm more productive in the office, but I prefer working from home.

[potta_coffee]

Productivity increased exponentially for many years in line with technological advances. We were supposed to have flying cars and personal robots by now. The least they can do is allow us to reap our meager earnings from our own hovels.

[falcolas]

> also many are not and are more productive in an office environment

I see this assertion every time the WFH/RTO topic is brought up, but there's never any data to back it up. Mind changing that?

[gburdell3]

When I work from home, I watch 8 hours of Twitch and get 0 work done. When I work from the office, I watch 0 hours of Twitch and get 8 hours of work done. I simply don't have the self-control to effectively work from home. That's all the data I need.

[mc32]

Ultimately only people's immediate managers have insight into this either from managing them or from their co-workers. People eventually will let you know who isn't pulling their weight (obviously people will forgive others if they know they have a temporary issue in their life --but not if its unwarranted).

[falcolas]

Simply saying "people will know" is a deflection that doesn't really help this point.

If you (royal you - anybody who wants to make this claim) really want to claim that many people are measurably more productive at the office, we'll need studies to counter those done which show WFH is more productive than working from the office.

[Shaanie]

Doing studies on this is difficult for many reasons. However, I bet there's a lot of people who noticed a drop in productivity from certain colleagues after the switch to WFH. I personally noticed that the productivity of colleagues with young children dropped significantly, for example.

I really don't think it's a controversial statement that some people work better from home and some people work worse from home. In fact, I'd be extremely surprised if the opposite was true (everyone works better from home, or everyone works better in the office), I'd almost say that's impossible.

[mc32]

I think you misunderstand me.

I think some people _are_ more productive WFH. But also there are lots of people who become quite unproductive WFH. Direct managers can often tell.

I don't know of a study that says one way or another, but from experience those two kinds of people exist (among other kids of people).

[JeremyNT]

> This is not only about before pandemic remote workers. Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.

I mean this is true in the scenario where demand for their skills outstrips the supply of available workers with said skills.

In a different scenario, where tech jobs are being reduced across the board (due to return to normal interest rates and VC funding slowing down), such an "aren't going back" ultimatum isn't necessarily going to be compatible with "I need a job."

And of course, if you believe Microsoft, ChatGPT is going to start eating tech jobs left and right any day now.

The economy runs in boom and bust cycles, and the winds are shifting. The tech environment from 2020-2022 was extremely weird, and the balance of power now is shifting back to management. Management knows that (at least some) workers highly value remote work, and they're not going to hand that out for free.

The only certainty here is change, and as tech workers lose leverage, "remote work" moves from a default assumption to an item that must be negotiated for (perhaps in exchange for some total compensation) - if it's available at all.

[ericfrazier]

And why should they?

[lizardking]

Unfortunately many people are being strong armed into it. People coming out of lay offs are finding less wfh opportunities than existed just a year ago, as a percentage of the available jobs.

[rgrieselhuber]

Organization is always the key. The minute people are treated as isolated cases they are exploitable.

[x86x87]

Exactly. Cat is out of the bag now

[bradly]

I was a remote worker at Apple pre-pandemic and had no problems. After COVID I was told that moving states where I live would have to get some approval and is not guaranteed. I left Apple shortly after and have been contracting since.

When I was in an office full time, I had to work my life around my work. When I have forty hours to fill out over a seven day period, I'm working my work around my life.

[sys_64738]

Why didn't you just move states and ask "forgiveness" later? Companies cannot tell you where and when to live and if they try it see who blinks first. I would certainly have ignored them and let them fire me or RIF me.

[panzagl]

There are a lot of differences between state labor laws and taxes, remote doesn't mean you can just change residences willy-nilly.

[bradly]

That's very true, even contracting I ran into different issues based on where I work from and where they are. Some companies required a business entity is certain states.

[gamblor956]

An employee in a state exposes the employer to legal, regulatory, and tax jurisdiction. Many employers are not set up to handle compliance in states other than where they are located, and even many multi-state employers may not be set up to handle compliance in a particular state.

Not all states are understanding about this either; many states are notorious for penalizing employers for failing to comply with compliance requirements they didn't know they had because an employer moved to a state without telling them.

Prior to COVID, many companies considered this grounds for for-cause termination. Even post-COVID, some companies still consider this grounds for for-cause termination.

[bradly]

That just isn't really something I wanted to do. I was in a privileged enough position where I could choose to leave so I did when it became convenient. Not everyone can do that and the new policies may put them in a bind.

[kridsdale3]

I told Apple in 2015 that I was moving from California to Washington. They said they can't support that. I said goodbye.

[toomuchtodo]

Learned appetite for that operating model. Have to have enough financial resources and grit accumulated first.

[spacemadness]

Yep. Management acted like none of us knew how to work remote and we were all learning. Actually folks, no, I’ve been working like this for a while. And now I need to listen to our leaders say we work better in person and remote folks don’t know how to collaborate. What an utter failure in leadership and communication. The author said it best: these people are assholes. I’ve been so frustrated since people started going back to offices with management trying to undo what I worked to put in place prior to covid under some guise I’ve been underachieving all these years.

[chiefalchemist]

> on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the present time.

You're being too kind. Whims aren't the problem, lack of imagination is (and in leadership positions that should be unacceptable).

The problem is, few of the RTO office execs have WFH long enough to understand it. They have no clue how to lead WFH. They have no clue how to manage WFT. And they're not interested in learning new tricks. They simply wield their power and reinstate the status quo.

In a word...weak.

The RTO v WFH debate (?) is an opportunity in the market. An opportunity where WFH is the new up and coming opportunity. RTO is all but a fax machine. Who would feel comfortable working at a company where the executives lacked imagination and are all but mandating "Bring back the fax machine"?

[ricardobayes]

Before the pandemic it was almost unimaginable to be employed fully remotely, at least in Europe. Top achievers got a day per week, working from home as a perk or as a "hiring condition". In my 10 year career before the pandemic I basically never had a coworker who had been working from home on a regular basis. That said I love remote work, and I think it's one of our biggest workplace inventions in this century.

[caseysoftware]

When I worked for Bay Area companies from Central Texas, I used my remoteness (+2 hr timezone diff) to my team's advantage very visibly and on purpose.

- The UK team wants a noon (their time) meeting? Sure, I'll do it at 6am my time vs the SF team doing it at 4am.

- That NYC customer wants us to present at 9am ET? Sure, I'll do it at 8am my time vs the SF's team at 6am.

- Need someone to cover that meeting in Atlanta/DC/Dallas/Houston/Chicago? Sure, you can take a 3+ hour(+2-3 timezone) flight to cover it or I can just hop over in a fraction of the time.

After a while, I got ALL of the East Coast and European calls simply out of convenience.

[npsimons]

My brother was 100% remote for 13 years before the pandemic. I was 100% remote way back in 2001. It took the pandemic and WFH to remind me how much better it is, from every conceivable angle.

I'm never going back, and have shut down plenty of recruiters and headhunters with one simple phrase: "100% remote."

[throwaway290]

Been remote for 15 years, recently started full time job, love going to office. No strict work hours but I come anyway, nice to chat with colleagues (and much more productive than those tedious calls or text chats). Also I was already making myself leave home at least daily for physical activity, so if I'm out why not travel to the office? There's a nice coffeeshop near there. Also the chair is comfy enough, desk is adjustable etc.

So no, to say it's "bullshit and everyone knows it" is just pushing for some agenda. I wish everyone can have their way, if you don't want to come to the office then don't, employers should make it possible, but don't make it sound as if everyone hates it, it's just wrong.

[variants]

As someone who works hands on so I have to work at the office I really wish more people fight to stay home, the commute was so much nicer with people working remote plus the office was much nicer to work in without all the noise and distractions

[grogenaut]

I agree with this but the obvious outcome is that if you're 1 person in a 200 person office floor, your company will consolidate 200 floors into one and it'll get noisy again. The same cost function still exists for office space.

I'm very with you on the commutes tho. I live in Seattle and Mondays and Fridays are like driving on Thanksgiving (a major holiday in the US when no one drives and even the roads in L.A. are clear), and Tuesday is worse than the before times. Wed/Thurs are a bit better than the before times though so I just go in on those days (that's also when we tend to have happy hours).

[throwaway290]

If you use public transport it works better (more cost efficient to run = more frequent) when more people use it, so my commute would not get better if people stayed home.

But I agree on the last part, I prefer it when certain coworkers WFH. TBH some days I strategically choose my office hours so I overlap with them less.

[jacobr1]

I've enjoyed both environments. Having an in-person, highly engaged, collaborative environment is fantastic. Having a remote first, well-considered remote team is great.

But having a mostly in-person, and some-people remote setup, where the remote folks are left out of the hallway conversations sucks. Having an "in-person" setup, where your team is distributed between building locations and remote sites, and you can't ever schedule conferences rooms and you are working in a cube-farms/open-office sucks.

The key is finding a way to be engaged with your colleagues remote or local, and figuring out how to scale that.

[grogenaut]

I was in a remote office from the main one before and about 30% of the time people would forget to dial in, and another 20% of the time the AV setup would be broken. They ironically got that all fixed during the pandemic, and it's great now. At the minimum the default is you will be on VC now and so it makes it much better for everyone, and everyone has the hardware all figured out.

We had a large onsite last week and a ton of the young engineers said to me "people told me stuff immediately in person that I've been trying to find out for months". Humans are still kinda humans.

[ryandrake]

It definitely takes discipline and a little culture change. I work for a company where teams are spread across many offices, so the company culture is: there's a video conference for every meeting. Period. End of story. When you walk into the conference room, you press one button and the VC starts. Everybody does this, and it's engrained. So, thanks to this discipline, remote workers are never left out.

Same goes for the "hallway conversations." You just got to get out of that company-habit where major decisions and information transfers happen in this ad hoc way. It takes discipline (often on leadership's part) to properly document and communicate. Again, where I work, we would never consider "Oh, I talked to Director Xyz in the hallway and he said our focus is on the Foo project rather than the Bar project now" to be any kind of official guidance. Totally unacceptable.

[strogonoff]

In-person, same-air is objectively different experience from a video or audio call—higher bandwidth, unmediated, spontaneous, visceral… not something one can “get out of” as if it was just a habit.

Perhaps some find IRL distracting, so they suffer less and have easier time compensating for the difference between in-person and remote. Meanwhile, some others are good communicators who thrive with and make the most out in-person, and for them it’s more of a challenge to WFH. I personally suspect many of those who want to WFH are naturally not that great at remote communication without realizing so.

I personally had insightful office conversations that started as tangents from semi-idle chance chats and would be impossible remotely, since in an online meeting you must be mindful of others’ time because you don’t know how busy they are (IRL you can sense if a person would rather be doing something else, but you know it can be perfectly faked remotely—so you will never have a chance convo; meetings must have agendas—culture!—and once the agenda is over, everyone gets to be free). Such random conversations can easily alter the course of whole projects.

I don’t see WFH vs. RTO as a black-and-white, high culture vs. lack of culture, good vs. evil sort of battle; more like people have different natural tendencies, life circumstances, desires, and everyone wants it to work best for them.

[grogenaut]

Yeah we didn't even have that one button integration until 2019 and it didn't work well and the mics were all broken. They started leaving usb jabra mics in the conference rooms to supplement the very expensive cisco setups. That's mainly fixed now.

Interesting on the hallway conversation thing. I have no idea how I'd handle that.

[GenerocUsername]

Sounds Nice. If my office was within 15 minutes of home I would be there frequently. Dropping in and out for chit chat and activities.

But it isn't.

The only housing within 35 minutes of my downtown office is small, expensive, high-rise apartments and condos. And there literally are not enough of those to serve the abundance of offices in that area, so it is literally impossible to provide even that meager standard to everyone.

[switchbak]

Similar here, been doing part time remote since '06, full time since '11. There's ups and downs to both sides.

I get "more done" remotely, in that I can usually have more time for deep focus. But then it's harder to get high-bandwidth knowledge transfer sessions, and overhear when someone has some particularly bad ideas (or roads you've already been down, etc).

I think I still prefer the remote side, and it's probably a better deal for the biz, but I would like to spend a few days here and there with like minded people on shared problems.

[nurettin]

You probably like people and are comfortable with whatever you excelled at. And you probably don't have an inner voice comically second-guessing everything you are about to say, causing you to act timid and awkward around others.

Qualities missing from most people at the office.

[throwaway290]

It depends on my mood. Some days I say hi and then only keyboard noise. I probably look like a robot then. Other days may talk more. And second guessing is a thing, but feeling good after social interaction is also a thing...

But it's a small open office. Probably in a big open office it can be worse if many coworkers are distracting. I can see how I would hate that and it would hamper work.

[and0]

That's totally valid, also. I do sometimes miss the office, particularly from when I worked in a healthy office culture, but would want it to be optional.

[harvey9]

You've made a reasonable proposal. But the writer of the blog wasn't offered anything so reasonable and that's why they're mad.

[throwaway290]

Exactly right, the real title should be "my employer sucks and working conditions are not reasonable".

But no, the writer titled "return to office is bullshit and everyone knows it", which phrased like that is patently false.

Return to office can be a problem if some other conditions are true, like your office sucks, you are made to clock in clock out at inflexible hours, commute is inconvenient, etc. Why not talk about that.

[dheera]

Another aspect of the RTO discussion that's missed: People in long-distance relationships.

I don't mind going to the office a fair share of the time but I don't want rules that require N days per week because that prevents me from visiting my partner. I generally work from my partner's place about 1-2 out of every 8 weeks. Going to the office as little or as much on other weeks isn't a huge issue (though admittedly I do work more efficiently from home, and have way better snacks and drinks at home than the office) but I want those 1-2 weeks to be respected.

[jzb]

Most of my career has been remote, excepting a stint with a hosting company (being on location was logical, no complaints there), and a brief dalliance with being in-office while I was with a company that was fine with me being remote.

Tried the cube life, didn't like it, company happily re-allocated my veal fattening pen to another drone during the heady pre-COVID days when such real estate was scarce.

There are too many social, economic, and ecological reasons to put a stake in the heart of requiring people to be in a specific location unless there's an honest to goodness requirement.

[hintymad]

Teams big companies are already distributed across time zones, effectively forcing their employees working remotely. It's quite common for an org to have office in NYC, in Bay Area, in a tech hub in Europe, and in an Indian city. Meetings are conducted over video conference, and communication is mostly asynchronous in writing. I don't see how that is different from WFH. Of course, local office for employees to bond and having face-to-face discussion is really nice, but there are different ways to handle that.

[downrightmike]

It is missed on purpose because leadership wants it to be missed and they get visibly upset if you ask them. Such thin skins for people cracking a whip.

[rwmj]

Remote since 2002!

[TigeriusKirk]

2011 here. Fully remote teams for more of that.

It does take time and active effort to become fully productive in a remote environment. It's not something you're just born knowing how to do, it's a set of skills just like working in an office is a set of skills. You have to learn them.

[enobrev]

End of 2001 for me!

[jcims]

Yep. Remote work since 2002.

[red-iron-pine]

Aye, been remote since 2015. Small but niche market for remote folks, mostly who you know and specialized gigs, but could make it work reasonably well.

now the market is packed with applicants and the backlash is making it harder.

[bromuro]

I work remotely since 2006. To me, working remotely is the best - if no the only - way to keep myself mentally and physically healthy.

[somsak2]

Not clear to me why the requirements should differ if you have been doing 5 years vs. 3.