[rakoo]

I think too many people are misunderstanding what we're talking about and creates confusion.

It's not about RTO. It's cool if you find it better for you and your team, if your team also likes it better; as others, on some occasions I want to just work and don't want to be bothered by others every 5 min.

It's about mandatory RTO. It's about forcing employees to do something, without asking them, without including them in the discussion, without explaining why the decision is taken ("it's better" is wrong; it's better for some, worse for others. It needs more explanation)

We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees.

If it was about work then let the people who actually do it manage themselves: they're grownups engineers, surely they can work it out. But it's never about work, and employees are right to protest the decision and to demand transparency.

[cauch]

> We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees.

Do you have any objective elements proving this?

I have witnessed a dev colleague who worked from home. They were unable to document and communicate, and it screwed everyone else. They were really happy to work from home, though, thinking they were doing great, doing all the tickets and all the new tickets that appeared because of how badly designed for purpose their solutions on the previous ticket were. The mess and difficult job they were creating around them was not their problem. When asked to come back in the office, they used exactly those arguments.

I'm sure bad management and bad direction exist, but HN is naturally biased towards devs and against management, and of course, everyone thinks they can manage themselves and that if it does not work, it's the others' fault. I wonder how much grain of salt I should add to these affirmations and if there are more objective analyses of the situation (for example some that acknowledge the two possibilities).

[hermanradtke]

> I have witnessed a dev colleague who worked from home. They were unable to document and communicate, and it screwed everyone else.

How did working in an office improve the documentation abilities of this employee?

> doing all the tickets and all the new tickets that appeared because of how badly designed for purpose their solutions on the previous ticket were.

How did working in an office improve the design decisions of this employee?

[cauch]

There was a clear difference in output when the dev was WFH or RTO, so even if we cannot pinpoint the exact reason, the facts are just there.

But in fact, there are a bunch of elements that can explain why.

For example, when remote, pressing them to answer was impossible: you ask a precise question on Slack, 15 minutes later, they answer something vague or irrelevant, you refine and refocus the question, 30 minutes later, they repeat what they've said, you ask to have a call, they complain that there is too many calls. And if you try to profit from an existing meeting to go to the bottom of that, you just ruin the meeting. In the office, you confront them, show them on the screen exactly why their answer is not helping, and they cannot really go away without answering.

There is also other cases were a question is asked to them in the office, and other people chip in, with things like "wait? what? you told me that it worked the other way around ...". Again, this is not possible remote unless you systematically add everyone to all the chat (and people stops looking at them anyway because it's too much noise).

As for badly designed for purpose, this is just the natural consequence of bad communication: the person thought they knew when they did not, and considered "yeah, whatever, details are not my problem". In the office, there are way more opportunities to notice that early and to correct the course, based on the same situations as given in example above. Again, it is just based on facts.

[hermanradtke]

It reads to me that your company lacks standards and expectations to hold employees accountable. The in office culture uses the proximity of people to work around the lack of standards and expectations.

If the standards did exist then bad design doesn’t make it through design review or code review. If expectations did exist, then the employees manager is having a conversation about lack of documentation being a problem that needs to be fixed.

Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.

[cauch]

That's an extremely naive view of the reality. Bad employees exist, and the mentality amongst Devs is pretty bad. This is visible in this kind of thread where the first instinct of a lot of commenters is to blame everything on management without even think if sometimes part of the problem is due to unprofessional devs.

I'm not saying that everyone against RTO is a bad employee or is biased (I'm against RTO myself). I'm just highlighting the unbalance and the strong unawareness of this aspect.

For those unprofessional devs, it is ridiculous to pretend that "a better standards" will magically turn an a*hole (to take an extreme case) into an angel. You are talking about "work around", but this is not a work around, this is a relatively efficient and pragmatical way of dealing with this kind of problem. What you propose seems to fall apart as soon as the dev has a tantrum and has decided that something is not like they like.

You seem to assume that none of what you are proposing has been tried, despite it being obvious. (and it also does not mean that we are not going to continue to do that, but it is just stupid to pretend that "working from the office" is forbidden while it helps a lot to ease the problems)

Let's also notice that supervising and controlling the standards to catch it up each time it slips is a lot of effort, it is pretty risky, and the devs hate it and then blame the management. What you are saying is that the management should work very very hard to accommodate an a*hole, and at the same time, asking the a*hole to make a small sacrifice is unacceptable.

> Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.

The point of my comment is "let us not blame management when they are trying to solve problems of devs unable to understand that their own comfort is not the centre of the universe".

Let be clear: I'm not supporting forcing working in the office. What I'm saying is that the large majority here are behaving exactly like my problematic colleague behaves, pretending that it is obviously a management problem when in fact maybe the management is just trying their best to find a pragmatical solution. As far as I can tell, RTO can be the result of management trying their best because the devs are not accepting that something is inefficient in the way they are working. It may not be the case, but the problem is that people here are convinced it is not the case, not because they have proofs, but because it is what they want to believe.

[thejazzman]

I sympathize with your frustration, but if your goal is quicker communication, then the employee should be given notice of this issue and subsequently let go from the company if they refuse to comply

What if they ignore you in the office? Is that behavior OK there because they at least showed up?

I mean this sounds like either a terrible employee (not working or not capable of working), terrible manager (not communicating expectations), or a scape goat excuse because someone wants RTO

Humans also tend to be more sympathetic when they remember they're working with another human. Maybe the issue here is that someone is lacking sympathy when they don't see the other human

[cauch]

Are we really reaching the ridiculous situation where someone argue that firing an employee is a better solution than trying to mitigate the problem?

If you enforce RTO, in the worst case, the employee will be pissed and will quit, leading to the same situation as if you fired him (except that it's less risky, less costly, less damageable for the reputation, ...) (the employee can also try to sabotage their work, giving you a better position to fire them smoothly).

Do you also realize that firing someone and the whole process to re-hire someone else is a big waste of time? Why would you do that if you can avoid it?

Also, my illustration is a fixed scenario. I'm talking about a dev who can work relatively efficiently when working at the office, and cannot when remote but don't understand why. It is not about an employee who will "ignore you in the office" (why the hell would they do that, they've never done that before) or "refuse to comply" (they were explained the situation, but they were truly unconvinced by it, which means they did not really change not by insubordination, but because they were not really capable of changing).

So, you talking about "terrible manager" is irrelevant. Terrible managers exist, I've said so earlier. Here, I'm giving a real life reality where it is not the management, it is not a scape goat, it is just people who truly try to make things work.

And maybe they are wrong and there is a better solution. But that's not the point. My point is that someone said "I know it is X". Maybe it is X. But I've observe several devs saying "I know it is X" and I have he proofs that they were wrong.

So, naturally, I ask: I'm ready to believe you, but there is no way for me to know if you are right or wrong, so can you give me element more objective than just "I know it is X", for example an analysis that is smart enough to acknowledge that maybe RTO is sometimes coming from a truly honest desire to make things better.

[rakoo]

I'll say it again: it's not about working better from home or from the office.

Of course you're supposed to be working correctly as a group, and your example is a dysfunctional group because one dev who wants to stay home doesn't play well with others.

The crucial point is that only the group can decide what is best for itself. If the group (you and your colleagues) decide the fix is to be full office, then fine, you as a group decide to come back to the office. If the fix is to alternate some days home with no collaboration and some days at the office where you concentrate all the discussions, then fine. Whatever the choice, it's yours and that's what matters.

The issue is not RTO, it's mandatory RTO.

[ShadowBanThis01]

The issue is people are paid to do what they're told.

It's incredible how infantile a lot of the reactions are here. This guy took an on-site job and is now whining that he has to go back TWO out of the FIVE days he EXPECTED to be there.

[cauch]

The point of my story is that Devs are sometimes really bad to decide what is best for their team.

The problematic dev was convinced their way of working and communicating was perfectly fine (even after multiple time where collaborators reacted). The rest of the devs team were also agreeing. They were measuring their efficiency as the number of tickets they were doing. As the same feature with small crucial tweaks were coming their way again and again, they were pretty happy with themselves: they were doing a lot of tickets, none of them too challenging. They were even saying that they are more efficient in remote than before.

But the persons outside of the team were noticing the problems and paying for it. The research and development team (that I was part of) had to wait a long time to see features we desperately needed put in production, as each time it was not what requested (and no, the requirements were correct, the devs just went in the wrong direction because they read half of it because they assumed they knew). Same for the other team having to collaborate with the devs. Same for the managers, who were seeing clearly that there is a problem, continued to explain to the devs and show them proofs that the work was not done properly, but the devs were convinced "a lot of managers are useless anyway, they just say that because they want to feel important, let's not change anything".

The problems were communicated clearly to the devs, but they just ignored it, and when we were forced to change the way of working, they complained that "it was done without any explanation" and "it is mandatory".

So, no, the opinion of the devs on what is best is not always trustworthy. And this is my point: someone said "We know why companies don't give explanations". I'm just saying: I saw plenty of devs saying exactly that while I saw myself that this was bs. I'm not saying it's never that or that it cannot happen, I'm just asking: do you have objective element to support this, or is it a "smart conclusion from the very very smart dev team who know better than everyone and yet don't understand how much inefficient they are"?

[helij]

I think you focus too much on this one person in a few of your messages here. The issues you present are easily mitigated no matter in the office or work from home. It takes

[cauch]

I'm forced to detail this one person situation because people reacts by re-inventing the situation so that it fits what they want to hear.

This one person is just one example, even a bit extreme, of a mentality that I keep seeing over and over again.

The problem is not this person, or "working from home" or "at the office", the problem is the mentality here: they are basically saying that asking someone to go back to the office can only be part of an evil plan from incompetent management.

As you say "the issues you present are easily mitigated". One way to mitigate s to ask the person to work at the office. The problem is this mentality of excluding this mitigation as if it is not as good and as legitimate as another one. All the other mitigation that you will come up with will have inconvenience for one or several actors. It is just biased to say "I can solve the problem by clicking on the button A or on the button B, but if they click on the button A, they are incompetent evil management, because after all, they could have clicked on button B. Button B has also some inconvenience, as much as button A has, but not directly to me, so it means it is objectively the best choice"

[tonfreed]

This is a good point and something else I have noticed. Juniors are the ones suffering without oversight from those of us that have made all their mistakes before.

There's been more than a few times where I've thought "if I could just sit next to this person for half an hour, I could save myself a frustrating 3 hour teams meeting".

[wildrhythms]

Here is your source:

>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.

>The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work.

tl;dr It's yet another way for these hugely profitable corporations to not pay their taxes.

https://archive.ph/eOeIv

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

[cauch]

As I've said "I'm sure bad management and bad direction exist", you showing me one example of bad management or one motivation for having a bad management does not prove anything.

It's a fallacy similar to this one:

1) vaccines help avoiding sickness (equivalent to: working in the office can be a way to solve real problems that the dev doesn't care about)

2) big pharma can make a lot of profit by selling vaccine (equivalent to: working in the office can make profit for the company)

According to your logic, number 2 would "prove" that number 1 is impossible.

[blub]

Are work contracts somehow deficient in the US?

In the EU countries I know, each contract has an office location specified. Alternatively, it specifies that the job is remote.

Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time. If you don’t like that folks, then stop whining and unionize please.

[pjc50]

A lot of this stuff was done outwith contract, in both places, during the pandemic.

> Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time

Well, yes, and this is why people are getting mad. People should also be much more explicit about the cost of their commute; you can argue back and forth about the benefits of being in the office, but almost all commutes are deadweight loss and some are both miserable and expensive.

[tonfreed]

I think this is pretty much bang on.

Our team was going into the office once a week, some of us had even started going in twice a week because it just made meetings easier.

Then the RTO mandate happened and we suddenly have to be back in 50%. Three times a week is excessive (even if it is only every alternate week), and the entire team's enthusiasm to come in and work together has evaporated nearly completely.

We were never given a reason why, either, they gave us a completely contrived response about "company values" when pushed.