| You may be interested in the addendum the author posted. https://soatok.blog/2023/10/02/return-to-office-is-bullshit-... """
Addendum After I posted this, it made the front page of Hacker News and was subsequently posted in quite a few places. After reading some of the comments, I realize a few subtleties in my word choice didn’t come across, so I’d like to clarify them. When I say “RTO is bullshit”, I don’t mean “office work is bullshit” or anything negative about people that prefer in-person office work. I mean “the forced relocation implementation of transitioning a whole company to never-remote (a.k.a. RTO) is bullshit”. If working in an office is better for you, rock on. I don’t have any issue with that. The bullshit is the actions taken by company’s leadership teams in absence of (or often in spite of) hard data on remote work versus in-person work. The bullshit is changing remote worker’s employment agreements without their consent and threatening “voluntary resignation” as the only alternative (even though that’s pretty obviously constructive dismissal). When I discussed ultimatums above, I’m specifically referring to actual ultimatums, not colloquial understandings of the word. If you can talk with the person and negotiate with them, it’s not a goddamn ultimatum. What I was faced with was an actual ultimatum: Comply or suffer. I chose freedom. Hope that helps.
""" I still agree completely post-addendum. I'm not sure if you've been faced with RTO/RTT, but I have, even though I had exclusively negotiated with my employer for full remote. They've done nothing but coerce compliance to their new RTT/RTO mandates and it's absolutely dehumanizing. The corporate overlords demand full and total capitulation or else you are fired. It doesn't matter I negotiated specifically to be full remote prior, have RSUs vesting part of my compensation, or that I pivoted my entire life and career to be here! In essence, 'capitulation' is the perfect word to use for this nonsensical regression of workplace flexibility because people are being coerced. So what, you had a successful in-office experience prior to covid, its irrelevant here in all honesty. This greater discussion at hand has little to do with workers indifferent to or in favor of returning to office workspaces. |