Ask HN: Anyone left their job because of RTO?

[snailb]

Rumours has it, our company is planning RTO. I've been working remote for over a decade and not planning to go back to the office.

I was wondering if anyone here went through this and actually left because RTO was enforced. How did you go through it all? appreciate any feedback.

[wavemode]

Company wanted me to not only return to office, but also move to the west coast. Leaving was a no-brainer.

But the job market is really shit. In the past I've left jobs and got new offers in a week. This time around I was out of work for almost three months.

[Simon_ORourke]

> This time around I was out of work for almost three months.

I'm curious as to what your experience was when chatting with recruiters while job-hunting about being fully remote? Did you next company advertize as remote-first?

[wavemode]

I don't even care that much about full remote, I just don't want to move across the country right now. I interviewed for several in-person jobs, in and around the city I currently live, as well as remote jobs.

The job I eventually got is fully remote.

[999900000999]

Sorta.

I begged for permission to work remote when a family member got sick. I was reluctantly granted it, but they lined up my replacement behind my back. Luckily I trust no one in this business so I jumped ship before they fired me.

[MH15]

I joined an in-person team then reorged in to a pseudo-remote team. I requested to move remote or transfer offices, was denied. So I left.

Unfortunate circumstances as I liked the people but didn't like going in to an office every day to work remote.

[derwiki]

RTO announcement paired with sweeping comp cuts, hot on the third round of layoffs. It was a rough market, but I held out for a company that prioritized remote work and I’m glad I did. Linux has been fully remote for 30+ years; there is no way you’re going to convince me CRUD work can’t be done well remotely.

[user68858788]

I allowed myself to be fired for not returning. It took over a full year after the RYO deadline for the firing to happen.

[Simon_ORourke]

What was the reason they gave for your firing in the end? Some trumped-up poor performance or for being "non-engaged" with work or something like that?

[user68858788]

Their reason was that I didn’t comply with the RTO policy. It didn’t prevent me from claiming unemployment though.

[em-bee]

that one is technically easy: employee did not show up at the designated workplace. they abandoned their job. never mind that they actually did the work asked of them. if it's not done at the designated workplace, it doesn't count. they could even have demanded back the salaries paid for that time.

[yimmothathird]

I wish, market is too dangerous right now though. I was out of work for significantly longer than I should have been because my one dealbreaker for the longest time was remote.

Current job started out 3/2 hybrid but full RTO is being mandated by the end of the month. Not looking forward to it.

[snailb]

I feel your pain. The market is bleak at the moment.

I checked linkedin a few times and it seems remote jobs are decreasing for some reason.

[dangus]

I definitely understand it as a supply and demand thing. If supply for labor is high and demand for candidates is low, then obviously employers don’t have to be quite as enticing to candidates. The most attractive jobs are remote jobs so they’re the first to be filled.

What I don’t understand is why companies don’t seem to accept the obvious cost savings involved with remote work. I just can’t imagine that even hypothetically losing 10-20% productivity is worth paying office rent for. I thought the work from home studies were pretty conclusive that productivity wasn’t lost at all!

[lWaterboardCats]

Tin foil hat says commercial real estate overlords need warm bodies in their empty buildings to provide foot traffic for lease signs go down.

The weird thing is, I’m sure many people here would likely take a pay cut over RTO.

If only we used this monumental opportunity to rethink how we need to collaborate and design cities to support or even embrace remote work models.

Instead, back to concrete jungles and mind numbingly sitting in traffic or being herded from one stop to the next.

[rtpg]

Less tin foil hat reasoning that I've found: managers are lonely. CEOs are lonely. Especially when you have the space that is empty it's kinda depressing.

The tricky thing is if you have the office you gotta have space for a lot of people, even if the "ideal" amount might be a smaller space that would just feel fuller in hybrid environments.

In a recent Kojima Productions video, Kojima said something like "yeah we have the new office... please come in everyone!" It's an uphill battle, accentuated by people putting offices in places where you are doing close to office XOR low rent.

[dangus]

I definitely think there’s merit to the conspiracy theory that people who own shares in companies are the same general groups of people as those who own commercial real estate interests.

Or there’s the tried and true explanation that it’s just micromanagers who want play power games with their employees.

The senior leadership team member can’t really conceptualize a world where an individual doesn’t sacrifice their entire personal life for work, so hearing that an employee has time to do laundry makes them think that it’s anti-productivity to be home.

[brevhtff]

> Or there’s the tried and true explanation that it’s just micromanagers who want play power games with their employees.

Everyone thinks they are the good employee that doesn’t need to be managed thank you very much. Yet every manager has seen employees that produce very little if they aren’t constantly managed.

And every manager thinks they’re a good manager, too!

[dkasper]

Real estate companies are generally not wielding any power over tech companies… tech companies have all the leverage in any office leasing deals right now. I’m sure there are exceptions though.

[CamperBob2]

It may not be that simple. A lot of city and state tax revenue comes from commercial real estate...

[Simon_ORourke]

About a month back a manager on my team was hiring for a senior dev role - she was talking to HR about the job spec, and HR recommended only advertizing the role as a junior dev "since senior/principal devs will invariably apply". Bleak is the word!

[em-bee]

huh? what would be the benefit of that strategy? being able to low ball the offers because a senior dev applying for a junior position must be desperate?

[Simon_ORourke]

When I was told I immediately presumed that it's some low balling strategy alright.

"Well I appreciate you were paid X as a senior dev in your last role, but the compensation range for this more JUNIOR role is Y".

[hollerith]

So the company instituting the RTO mandate feels altruistic towards the companies its engineers might jump to next?

[momofuku]

Ian Goodfellow, of the GAN fame, left Apple and rejoined Google DeepMind because of Apple’s mandatory RTO policy.

[ein0p]

My Apple friends are telling me Apple allows hybrid just fine. You can’t be fully remote, but that’s not available at Google either

[placatedmayhem]

I recently (within the last year) left Apple. 3 days in the office is mandatory for everyone except those with explicit work from home designations registered within the HR system. Anyone with a desk assigned in an office is required to badge at that office on their org's chosen 3 days per week. Most orgs chose T-W-Th.

The difficulty is that folks that had agreements with their management prior to Covid about flexible working arrangements were nullified with Apple's RTO. So, if M and F was your arrangement prior to Covid and your org chose T-W-Th, too bad. Badge-swipes are being tracked and upper management is applying pressure to managers to get their people in the office, regardless of individuals' needs.

So, yeah, it's technically hybrid, but extremely rigid.

Going full time remote is also significantly harder now, as it must be approved by an SVP on an individual basis.

Any of this may have changed in the months since I left, but I've not heard of anything changing from my colleagues that are still there.

[ein0p]

Sounds like it’s hybrid then. Google is RTO all the way. They could make an exception for someone like Ian, I guess, but then so could Apple.

[skirmish]

Google's RTO is very flacidly enforced right now. According to Team Blind, badging in one day a week avoids any nags from automated systems.

[aaomidi]

Google fully remote employees are still fully remote.

[Joel_Mckay]

Most skilled staff will not be returning to the office, and do not require micromanagement.

Yet we did just fire one guy for claiming he was still active on a project that was put into maintenance mode 6 months ago. Some people are not mature enough to handle managing their own time.

Personally, the office space was a cost only second to labor, and people would have to be epically unproductive to offset the operational savings. =)

[rickcarlino]

Pre-COVID I had a WFH job that decided to sunset remote work after 7 months of employment. I was offered severance or relocation. The choice was simple at the time, but the market is very different now. Think it over carefully.

[cranberryturkey]

I've been out of work for 10 months. Be careful out there.

[jonnycoder]

Im on 16 months, definitely be careful

[cranberryturkey]

yeah its terrible. part of my problem is i hate react and everyone using that garbage now.

[lpapez]

I feel like this new wave of RTO is the same like any other org change disliked by the lower ranks.

Competent people switch jobs, while incompetent are fired, and the mediocrity stays and grudgingly conforms which is exactly what companies want - authority over the interchangeable cogs in the machine.

[austin-cheney]

I left Bank of America because of potential RTO for a small consultancy that was fully remote. Huge mistake. I was getting burnt out on the gross incompetence in my line of work that new employer astonishingly sealed the deal.

[dakiol]

I somehow did. My previous company started to enforce everyone living in cities in which they had offices, to RTO. I was working far away from any of such cities, and they let me continue working remotely. But seeing many of my colleagues go to the office just to open Zoom to chat with me was sad. I found another (remote) job and resigned.

[kypro]

Same situation for me really.

It wasn't the entire decision, but a large part of it was seeing people who live near an office being forced to return.

I wasn't likely to impacted anytime soon given I lived no where near an office and was working as a contractor, but I've seen it before where once you have a mix of people in office and others working remotely the remote workers tend to become second class citizens. I had this happen at a previous position where I was often left out of meetings and discussion I should have been in I suspect because people in the office saw it as bothersome to bring a laptop with video conference me in.

I left for a remote-first company a month ago. I didn't want to return to office, but I to be honest I wouldn't have minded that much if I lived close. I just wasn't in that position.

[makingstuffs]

Yeah, I got a job as a dev at one of the UK's high street fashion retailers during the pandemic. Got a load of praise from directors n everyone else for implementing a proper development workflow within the department, as a junior.

After the pandemic we all got an RTO mandate and I found a new, fully remote, job within a month.

The director of the department I was in at the original employer told me she would not be ‘grassing’ on me for not going to the office but it didn’t sit right with me so I left.

After all that I made sure that my current contract has an addendum clearly stating I can:

1. Be fully remote

2. Work my hours whenever I want as long as my core responsibilities are met

3. Work from anywhere in the world.

I’ll be honest, it is great I have that not but it does make finding a new job a bit harder as I am not willing to sacrifice the freedom I’ve earned here.

[chrismatheson]

I had one of those “don’t ask don’t tell” arrangements. Works fine until the top CEO mandates more and more and the middle manager can’t “hide” you any longer. (Personal experience)

Probably a good move on your part

[snailb]

Or you manager changes.

[intelVISA]

#3 must be fun for tax purposes

1&2 are non-negotiable

[austhrow743]

You just file in the country you were hired in and illegally work on tourism visas in the others.

[doix]

I always wonder how #2 works, does all/most communication happen asynchronously? Doesn't that just slow everything down? 1&3 are more important to me than 2. I just plan my location by thinking about the hours I want to work. If I go East, I shift my day forward, if I go West, I shift my day back (apart from some extremes I guess).

I can't imagine all/most discussion async. I much prefer things to get discussed and resolved quickly, rather than having a back-and-forth of 10 messages last days because people are out of sync.

[aaomidi]

async means a lot of things for different people.

For me it’s not doing the “syncs” in a specific time. I huddle up with a coworker if I need something figured out. If the person I need to talk to isn’t there I talk to the next person with the closest experience in what I need to do.

This makes collaboration a lot more effective and organic for me instead of trying to fill in a 30’ slot.

[aaomidi]

I was a full remote employee. The RTO Google did, didn’t impact me. But it ruined the remote culture that was built and created a tiered culture where full remote employees had access to a “privilege” that no longer existed for others. It ruined communication and created unnecessary friction and anxiety. Decided to leave.

[throwaway22032]

I left my job because they enforced WFH.

It went like this, paraphrased:

Hi boss, I don't think that avoiding any form of social contact is good for me. Since it's clear that this is now the new expected working environment, I am resigning effective immediately. Toodles!

I guess it'd be a bit like that but the other way around.

[Spivak]

This captures exactly the split I've seen at my office. If you have a social life outside of work you are probably strongly WFH because why would you spend your social energy with coworkers when you have friends you like and chose.

But for people for whom work is life and what little social interaction they get is at work you're strongly RTO because that's your lifeline.

And our current CEO moved states for this job and he's lonely as fuck so our office went RTO.

[throwaway22032]

For me it's actually been the opposite.

I enjoyed the social interaction in my job and it didn't really affect my ability to see friends and family after work or at the weekend.

Since WFH became commonplace most of them have moved out of the city so it's actually harder now because my friends live all over the place.

It also feels like people are less likely to go out in general now.

My comment was more about the fact that I just think that social distancing was a load of bollocks and that we could have just gone to work with some people WFH as before and gotten the same end result.

[pestatije]

RTO - return to office

[temp3000]

Not the good RTO (Rostered Time Off)

[Suppafly]

yes, it's been a common acronym for several years now.

[dividedcomet]

Yep, though RTO was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had had 3 direct managers in a year and a half, had projects sunsetted out from under me, and several reorgs. Add in a forced return to office and I was out of there.

[cjoelbrowning]

One thing I’ve observed is that outside the main tech job markets (bay area, nyc, etc), many remote jobs offer higher salaries than similar in-person roles.

[muzani]

Yup, main reason I left my previous job post-covid. Traffic was worse, and they downgraded the office to a smaller, damp room, with a really loud air-conditioner. Half the team left after I did.

Current job does 2-3 days hybrid too, but it's more like synchronised days. If you can't make it, or if you're more productive at home, nobody yells at you to. Many people love working in person, but even the most extroverted ones don't like being forced to, especially when they're also under pressure to get work done.