[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.

[soco]

Then what? Okay you can prove them liars, but that won't surprise anybody and won't change anything in the course of the company. I don't even mention the likely personal repercussions from speaking truth to power: "not being a team player" and and and.

[_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.

[lazide]

Sounds like they were smart about it in the case you’re talking about, both in word and in action.

Flexibility (both in being able to say yes, and no) is important. Not being abusive is important too.

A lot of folks have lost their minds over the last few years (more than most), and it’s going to be interesting for sure how this all plays out.

[_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.

[lazide]

If the general policy is updated to ‘remote is forever’, save a copy - that’s part of your contract too!

If it gets changed in a way that causes you injury, guess what - you can be and should be compensated. If you can prove these things, then it should even be relatively easy to do so.

Contract law is not just things that say ‘contract’ on them. It is about agreements between parties.

Also, talk to a lawyer so they can look over the fine print and applicable statutes. They matter.

[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.

[garciasn]

Having ineffective management ("it’s really hard to a manager (sic) to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester") is a leadership problem that is easily fixed by hiring competent and experienced leaders who have worked with remote teams.

Incompetent leaders cannot manage people remotely and they generally do a poor job when in person, but it's masked by their ability to micromanage and type-A the problem away.

[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)

[eropple]

Also true. My current job has a lot of people whose survival mechanism to date has been "interminably long Zoom meetings where people tune out". Now that I have been on a "fewer, better meetings" kick, that is definitely springing some leaks.

I would stress the video capability, though, because that's the thing that impacts how people feel in pretty substantial ways. I have a weekly 90-minute meeting every Friday where my product teams bring questions to both ask me and to kick around with a group, and so far the feedback has been excellent--and a direct reason cited is that I'm not just letting the meeting wander but I am leading it, I'm standing up while on camera and projecting excitement and a reason to be engaged. When compared with the interminable-drone meetings the rest of the week, it really drives the point home that you have to talk to people like you want them to listen to you, and that is much harder on a camera but it is a totally learnable skill.

[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?