[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.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Or to check if that original all-hands teams call was recorded.

[_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!

[soco]

Often it might be in writing as a company newsletter or communicated in a call, but not in writing as your employment contract. Mine was always vague on how much can be spent in home office (was never a problem, then or now) and I assume it might be often the case for other companies. Thus anything the management allows or requires is possible and no judge will decide on the basis of a newsletter. So I'm afraid in the end you only can vote with your feet.

[_puk]

Granted. If you want something set in stone, add it to your contract.

If it's a general policy that "we are remote", but your contract wasn't updated to reflect that, then don't be surprised if it changes.

[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?

[VBprogrammer]

Yeah, definitely. The only real value I've had from going in is when we've got some kind of social event planned (over teams / zoom this sucks) and when we've gone in with the specific plan of talking about a how we can implement a new feature which is complex and touches multiple teams (which also sucks to do online).

[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.

[TheKarateKid]

You do realize that most of the service workers in major cities can't even afford to live in the neighborhoods that they work in right? They often have to commute from other cities or parts of the city which aren't at all close.

Perhaps this will make things go to how they should be, which means that you work locally because that's where the demand for your services is.

[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.

[lazide]

Valid is entirely up to the eye of the beholder. For them, they may be valid reasons even if you don’t like them.

It’s all about pros/cons and either sides approach.

One big one you didn’t list - it’s really hard to a manager to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester.

Some (but not most!) employees may be burning out, or violating security or labor rules, or not following company policies, or whatever, and these would be trivial to detect in person, but nearly impossible to do so remotely. And almost definitely impossible to do anything about effectively while remote.

[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.

[ajmurmann]

There is something about in-person communication that's different for bonding. It's just human nature. Getting information across can be trained, but the social aspect will always be missing. That's ok if you make up for it.

Ones thing about meeting in physical space that I miss is directionality and locality of sound. If we are sitting with 4 people at a table at lunch, we can organically switch between having a single shared conversion or two different ones.

> "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.

Agreed. Different from a power trip though. IMO it's just ineptitudes.

[snotrockets]

Just shifting from face to face to video conferencing won't cut it. You need to be efficient communicator in writing, which is harder to bullshit your through (or maybe requires different kind of bullshiting)

[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.

[ryanwaggoner]

Better yet, just do it as discounted coworking space. Win / win.

[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.

[lazide]

What argument am I making exactly?

Your statement seems to be one of 'should' due to social factors largely outside of the various actors control and/or self-interest.

Which in my experience tends to mean 'I wish was', not 'will be', let alone 'is'. Unfortunately. But pressure applied to various regulators, PR campaigns, etc. could change that! I wish whoever wants to spend the time and effort doing so the best of luck. When that happens, the factors will change.

In the end, labor markets only care about the wellbeing of participants as much as they have to - because labor will either actually not participate, or regulators will actually intervene, etc.

If someone is willing (and able) to commute 12 hrs a day to fill a job, and an employer is willing to employ that person at the rate they want, that will often happen barring better deals. Stochastically of course.

One can think of it in relation to energy states (when markets get above a certain size) if one was in the mood.

As always though, just as in said physics or chemistry problems, individual 'atoms' can and will end up in wildly different states from the median.

But that a single atom may be a movement/vibration rate equivalent to 100C doesn't mean the temperature of the solution isn't 25C (for example). Or that it won't average out over time for that atom as it collides/interacts with others.

[bshacklett]

Just a data point: When I was living in LA, it would have been nearly 2 hours a day for a good while. My boss, at the time, commuted nearly four hours a day on the worst days.

[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 :)

[lazide]

Oh I'm well aware. How many downturns have you lived through?

It's rarely so easy when times get lean, but everyone has a different experience for sure!

[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.

[lazide]

I’m not sure what you mean here.

While having a moral right to something (or not) is definitely important, when push comes to shove it’s the legal rights that come into play.

Legally recognized rights tend to underpin most definitions of ‘rights’ someone has, since if the legal system doesn’t recognize it, it’s nearly inevitable it will be stomped on at some point with no recourse.

And when that happens regularly, it’s hard to claim it’s a right anymore as practically it isn’t.

[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

[cdchn]

I haven't seen anything about them requiring pre-pandemic remote employees to relocate post-pandemic, only people who moved after the pandemic WFH movement started. I'm genuinely interested in if they're going after this.

[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?