In my little neck of the woods - cloud consulting/professional services - Google is worse than Amazon where I just left last year.
AWS ProServe never had a RTO mandate and from former coworkers I’ve talked to, still doesn’t.
Google’s Cloud Consulting division does force a hybrid office schedule which is really dumb considering the work is both customer facing and requires a lot of travel
I’ve seen companies take over a year and thousands of man hours to move from VMs on premise to a cloud platform.
Cloud agnosticism is hardly ever a business differentiator
It'd take years to migrate STILL even with all that effort. And they can't ship features they are so busy worrying about AWS going away.
Before Covid, no team had an RTO mandate, so ProServe wasn’t really special here. In ProServe you were still expected to be in an office regularly, but it was just understood that you wouldn’t be in an Amazon office all the time because you’re likely at a client’s office instead.
Post-covid, it’s mostly the same, although now even many clients aren’t requiring consultants to come in. But when they do, you’re expected to be there.
my guess is that in the next 12/18 month all of major tech & big corps will follow the amazon's way.
I knew some folks at Google who worked 100% remote and only came into the office for critical meetings about once a month. They had proven they could operate that way with a more-or-less stellar track record.
While the conclusion — that most people do their best work when in the office — may be correct, why do you think that the cause of that is the boss breathing down people's necks rather than, say, more efficient collaboration among team members?
My personal observations of my team over the past couple of years are that people are much more engaged, issues get resolved much quicker, and information radiates much better when team members are co-located. This is something that many were in agreement on before covid.
> This is something that many were in agreement on before covid
This is an excellent observation worth highlighting: Google's belief stems not just from pre-COVID / post-COVID observation but from the relative output of teams that were same-office colocated vs. inter-office located, necessitating videoconferencing, chat, and email to get work done. Now that you highlight that, I think my reasoning is in error and it's probably more about collaboration being easier in-person. But inconveniently for those who don't want to work in person, the end-result is the same.
Suburbs cannot function without freeways, but the presence of freeways harm the property values of city neighborhoods not suburban ones.
SFH simply produces less tax revenue than an entire apartment building by land, so any statewide social services (education, freeway maintenance...) is paid proportionately more by cities than by SFH.
There are reports[0] of cities reporting that their SFH actually loses them money due to the fact they simply don't pay their fair share of taxes vs all the infrastructure they use.
It's not like the government is going "oh boy, SFH mom, here's 500$ plucked straight from some inner city mom's payroll taxes". But in the broader system of supporting many people's living styles through greater societal infrastructure, less-dense housing like suburbs do not put out as much as they take.
[0]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e... [Town of Nolensville, TN]
I've lived in SFH on the edge of a major city and on the edge of farmland and there's a wide gulf in the level of infrastructure that they had access to, and also a significant difference in the amount of tax that was owed. It's hard for me to believe that those two very different scenarios are functionally equivalent.
Moreover, vast swathes of the city I used to live next to, despite having significantly higher tax rates, were ultimately paying a lot less in tax due to severely depressed income levels and property values. There might have been a higher mean revenue per acre in the city as a whole, but there also was a much higher variance.
They work because they are mostly newish. Core functions like keeping roads functional rely on state and federal aid.
Many older suburbs are more in decline now. Especially in 2nd/3rd tier metro areas. It’s just less obvious than the inner city or rural areas. They need growth to thrive. Once they fill out, population ages out, schools decline, and a vicious cycle starts.
Money policy has kept that going by organizing the economy around real estate. I don’t think it’s sustainable to continually recapitalize single family homes.
As an example - city water vs Water wells & Septic tank/fields. Gravel roads without sidewalks, etc.
So it's not 100% evident that cities subsidize rural counties. Cities do provide the larger tax base for states, which probably subsidize more rural counties through incentives tied to certain rural activities, but making a blanket statement is probably not accurate.
The infrastructure relies on state support, which is usually from Federal funds and personal income tax. That aid is a transfer payment from cities to localities. Bigger states, bigger transfer. Also, the federal funds are sourced from bigger states to the smaller states.
Thats one of the amazing things about the US. The wealth of the coasts ensured that the smaller states weren’t left behind.
sortof yes, sortof no.
Aside from all the conversation about work culture, state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work. States hate losing tax revenue. Notoriously, it is easier to register to do business in a state than to unregister. This is even harder internationally.
For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + taxation, and every state and country under the sun's paperwork + regs + taxation. That is a real burden. Not just the paperwork + administrative overhead, but being subject to differing employment + everything else laws from *everywhere* will really muck up ability to run a consistent business.
While fully remote startups can now access services to help with this, like PEO providers like Justworks/Deel, the reality is that most of the world is not setup to accept this at scale. I run a fully remote startup and still run into issues with vendor diligence departments and accounts etc. expecting us to have a physical office, and being totally bewildered when we don't. The people involved now understand remote work, but the systems --forms, insurances, tax nexus decisions, etc -- still very much aren't setup to handle it.
Notably: if you are a bigger company, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube with all these local governments, and you bet that every locality will be trying to extract tax dollars from the big firms with deeper pockets.
The kicker? These papers are access authorization forms to APIs.
Your average tech company is probably reasonably well prepared to go truly distributed, but I bet many of their vendors aren't. Whole workflows in certain industries don't even conceptualize companies with employees distributed across offices, let alone companies with no office at all.
(I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk and even if I did I'm not at the office anything close to full time, and I don't provide my personal cell phone number to vendors... but thats a whole different topic. Employees exist without phone numbers! Entire offices exist without phones!)
I've gotten by just fine for the past few years but we are starting to see more questions about this that require us to change our legal address away from a residence. I think we got away without much trouble solely because of the pandemic, and now it's over we're going to see a lot more questions about this.
It's not worth the future of the whole business to fight big vendors/customers over addresses.
I'd probably just setup a cheap DID number with someone like VOIP.ms and have it go straight to voicemail.
I agree though, it's not a fight you should have fight. Office phones are going the way of the fax machine.
This is a real burden for small businesses. The nature of Amazon's business as an online retailer with a massive distribution network means that for any significant market they do business in, they will have employees. Practically speaking, this is a solved problem for any state in which Amazon has a warehouse (which I think is probably all of them for the US?).
The issue of state tax breaks was such a big deal during their "HQ2" contest a few years ago that it actually became one of the top issues in the NYC elections that year. (to a large extent local candidate races became a referendum on how they felt about giving tax breaks to amazon in exchange for Amazon's commitments to employ a certain # of highly paid software + product people who would potentially contribute to the overall tax base. NYC people ended up electing politicians to stop the previously-negotiated pending deal with amazon, and amazon got enough blowback to say 'we give up' publicly.
What percentage of remote-workers are in a different tax-jurisdiction? Especially post-COVID I expected that the majority of remote-work involved people already in the same US state, merely with a nontrivial commute.
Not as close as a daily commute, though.
I live 60 miles from my office. It's just not practical to go in every day, so I go in once a week. I can also go in as needed, such as if there's a special guest, event, ect.
I wish I could go in every day, but where I live is a compromise with my wife, and we have kids.
If I were to go in everyday, I'd need to be much, much closer to the office. It wouldn't work for my family: Single incomes don't work very well near my office.
But I also have a short commute and a nice office.
Still a shitty move to mandate RTO. Most people (IT folks) have spoke with do this routine:
0) daily routine to prepare for day 1) 1 hr commute to shitty office 2) login to computer, do calls with cross regional (and international) teams over Zoom/Teams/Webex or whatever conferencing system 3) teleconferencing with boss or manager 4) teleconferencing with company stakeholders 5) work on features and push code to remote systems (VCS, CI/CD…) 6) eat shitty food at nearby places, or use the low quality vending machines or cafeteria 7) logoff 8) 1 hr commute back home
There are _some_ roles which may require in-person. But those were mostly sales folks. Some IT folks that deal with physical assets did require RTO (ie, data center / network engineers).
Thank goodness I can work from home. I know in some ways that makes my flexibility more damaging to my work/life balance, but the tradeoff is worth it to me.
When I’ve worked in the office in the past, the laptop stays closed as soon as I leave work at 5. They don’t get to have it both ways.
which is why you should not be doing overtime to meet expectation. Expectation (aka, productivity) needs to drop when RTO is mandated.
5 hours round trip commuting a day is giving up over half of your prerogative time to simply shuffling from one place to another.
The Bay Area is lucrative monetarily and all, but there's just no world where that's worth it for me.
https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...
... what?
You have to sign over most of your future earnings to the guy who's selling you the property, in exchange for (hopefully) getting the next guy to fork over most of theirs. The game is so hardcore that the pyramid scheme is as strong as ever.
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans....
Edit: also, the chart is too simple to know how they conducted and came up with the data.
Not sure there's just one right way to live though. I wasn't saying there is, just sharing some data to a discussion oblivious to the realities of most Americans.
In BCN for example commute would be most of the time ~15-20 minutes (walking+metro). Car would easily take twice as much.
Of course if you are living in urban sprawl and nothing is close and even getting something to eat requires "a trip" then yeah - door-to-door car would probably be "better"
So change my mind?
Just want to say that sitting in public transports I can do other things such as doing some work or reading a book. While sitting in a car feels terrible to me. 30 minutes of driving a car is a lot worse than sitting in public transport. Also, if I have to commute by walk/bike, I also feel much better.
In my experience that kind of activity was often not possible, especially in cases where one bus was late and I had go worry about getting to the connecting stop on time. Likewise I couldn't really read b/c I might get distracted and miss a connection.
This was all pre-Internet and of course pre-unlimited data plan. These days I might have a downright pleasurable experience on public transport listening to podcasts under those conditions. Except here in Seattle there are just too many maniacs on some lines.
I live outside Rome, Italy, my SO works downtown. It takes her 35ish minutes to get to work by train, it would take her way more than one hour by car.
Hell, it takes her colleagues living in Rome center often an hour to get to work on a 6 km drive.
The funniest thing was when I worked with a guy that commuted by train from Naples! That's 150 miles away. And he would still get back home quicker by train than people living in Rome.
I agree that kind of commute is insane, but maybe we don't all want to raise our families in shoe boxes (often surrounded by filth and crime) in the city centre (as if everyone in France lives in downtown Paris).
You may find that thrilling, but I don't. None of it.
The areas that received additional attention experienced a 20% reduction in calls to the police. The study concluded that cleaning up the physical environment was more effective than misdemeanor arrests."
> There is zero relation between filth/crime and living in the city centre.
Everybody should live in the context they prefer.
That being said, if the suburb dystopia was instead built around sensible public transport with good trains, metros and well planned gathering and commercial areas I could have some sympathy.
But no, everything is planned and built around the concept of owning and driving a car for everything.
Which is also why you end up having so many suburbs that are the facto dumpster ghettos, people not owning a car cannot even easily commute daily to a job available downtown.
Good public transport and proper city planning are some of the best social equalizers and life improving engines out there. For everybody, including and especially people wanting their own home rather than living in apartments (that by the way don't have to be small, albeit smaller dimensions have plenty of benefits too).
There are solutions but they are the hard “get people to buck all incentives and change their behavior for the common good” kind that take a lot of work.
At least, I can work remotely 2days+what ever I need depending of the day.
Over the years, I had met several workers who were doing 2h+ per leg commute.
I far prefer my current commute of walking downstairs. I could abide the 45 minute ride-and-walk commute if there were a legitimate reason I needed to be somewhere in person. No one would pay me enough to commute 5 hours a day.
the saving grace: whereas lane splitting (driving a motorcycle between two cars) is illegal in 49 states and grey-area in DC, it is outright totally legal in California.
Thusly those with interest and probably low anxiety and medium-high deathwish are exempted from traffic
At a previous place, we chose hybrid RTO over intrusive surveillance. My opinion shifted from being a full remote advocate after I caught a half dozen folks with various schemes and scams.
The straw that broke the camels back was a guy who lied about where he was living. He was going through a divorce and the ex-wife ratted him out to the state tax authority to get the reward. The company was fined by both states. The ex made like $50k.
I run my own company, I do not give a single fuck how, where, or when people get their job done. I only care they deliver.
Likewise, people who need to be watched over are not the employees I want in the first place. I’m not running a daycare for children. Adults can make their own decisions, if you need me over your shoulder to deliver you aren’t useful to me to start with.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-n...
Companies shouldnt burden the rest of their employees for social verification, for something that isnt a problem for the company.
Although analogies compare dissimilar things with a common attribute, your analogy relies on saying all employees are security breaches. These are employees competent to work in medium sized all the way to big tech companies as software engineers.
Why not just require a single background check or interview them on-site?
"People can wear anything they want out in public, I don't care"
"Yeah, well if they wore a suit made of plutonium, or one covered with guns that fired randomly in every direction, I bet you'd care then".
I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that he probably does the due diligence to verify that his employees are legally able to work wherever the company is, and aren't using company resources to launch cyberattacks on the NSA, aren't international terrorists trying to destroy the moon, etc, etc.
He lived in another state but paid taxes where he supposed to be living. The company was held liable.
> I run my own company
Then you should understand what for you can be held liable and what your responsibilities are. It may be very expensive not to know. In extreme cases you may be held criminally liable.
> I do not give a single fuck
It’s just a recommendation: I’d suggest you do because your tax authorities certainly do.
The point I’m making is if you want to feel like a Big Boss go ahead and stand over people, if you want an a-team doing a-team shit hire people who don’t need a babysitter.
* You hire someone, and then figure out someone else is doing the work (usually because they are making stupid mistakes, and the person you hired can't be that dumb)
* Your staff work odd hours that make coordinating hard (side gigs / hussle's etc).
* I think the rumored record of multiple full time jobs someone was working was 5+.
* We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.
We deal with sensitive information. Having data go overseas etc is a no go for our business at least.
Note: If you have to deal with government agencies that have gone remote you KNOW that the throughput is sometimes < 50% what it was before. You can almost immediately tell as someone dealing with them. No one answers their phones, all voicemail, all super long delays (week+).
> * We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.
I'm not sure how this is justified as a problem.
CEO of multiple companies: A-OK
SVP serving on multiple companies' boards of directors: A-OK
Salaried office worker working for multiple companies remotely: Fraud
Hourly worker working three jobs to make ends meet: A-OK
My employer allows outside employment for some roles if appropriate. It requires disclosure and may not be possible depending on what you do. Double dipping is not acceptable.
I’m a VP level person who serves on a couple of boards and help with a family business. It’s all disclosed and approved with mutually agreeable boundaries.
Another example is an attorney - it’s ok for some private practice, but not ok if that practice will reasonably involve an entity that the company is likely to interact with.
As far as I see it, both companies get an a-tier person who outperforms the rest of their staff. This person gets two paychecks. Everybody wins.
But in the “we own your time and soul” employee relations model he’s a “crook” or a “fraud” because they aren’t sitting in the company canteen talking about bollocks all day.
the BigCorp owns your life, the rights to tell you where to be 75% of your waking hours and what to do.
get the eight hour job done in two hours and slack off for the rest? that's theft and fraud. get it done in two hours and admit to it? that's more work for you for the same pay, to fill the rest of your time.
then you go online and some overly enthusiastic yc sponsored clown will dunk on you for not giving your life away to a corporation
If you want to be a $250k engineer and fuck around on Netflix waiting for something for 75% of the workday, you’re demonstrating a lack of maturity and professionalism. Or you work for a really dysfunctional place.
If you’re running your own shop, you’re empowered to run it to your needs. That’s awesome. Mine are different.
If during an afternoon where they have to wait for somebody else, I’d rather they go for a casual walk and think through a hard issue slowly and carefully than sit at a desk artificially, writing dumb emails to keep up the charade they are “busy”.
(Of course the person they are waiting on now has to read said emails instead of finishing their task - busy work is net drag on everyone.)
For jobs that require thought we do very little to provide space for reflection, and imho that’s dumb.
I work (remotely) for a company that treats their employees like adults. I have a work-provided laptop, but it doesn't contain any surveillance-ware and my boss doesn't care where I am or what I'm doing as long as I'm getting my stuff done and showing up for zoom meetings. When they hired me, they ran a background check to ensure that I was who I said I was, among other due diligence.
There are more companies like this. They may not be in the majority, but they exist.
It's nice to be treated as an adult and it goes both ways.
Barring that, the younger working demographics have made it abundantly clear there’s a zero tolerance for the traditional corporate bullshit. When mandates first came down, they responded with “coffee badging” and the like; I don’t doubt there will be another adaptation, like arriving late and leaving early, baking the commute time silently into the work day.
The writing is on the wall, and the modern worker knows how badly they’re being screwed over. I’d argue it’s a wiser decision to let the workers do their jobs from wherever, consolidate offices into continental HQs, and decentralize the workforce to disincentivize collective action. Workers get the flexibility they need to survive in the current cost of living/housing crisis, and companies don’t risk bleeding talent or earning the wrath of a Union election.
Everybody wins except commercial landlords, but they’re not exactly the good guys here anyway.
The engineering boom-bust cycle is a recent phenomenon (past fifty years) relatively speaking, and it doesn't mean it's a permanent fixture of civilization unless we choose to accept it as such. I reject permanence and advocate change, and so should you.
Besides, "Gen Alpha" won't be in cube farms even with a RTO, because Glorious Leaders (TM) in tech threw out cubicles, personal identity, and privacy in favor of hotel seating and clean desk policies. A return to cubicles would be a marked improvement over the present status quo, if we could just figure out the right marketing buzzwords to trick the C-Suite into believing it's the Next Big Thing (TM).
All of these companies have been incredibly successful… but can they sustain their historically unprecedented growth? Maybe. But when that train slows down, Intel is the example of what happens.
That said, if we abandon this idea of “infinite growth forever” and accept that market saturation and incremental improvements provide opportunities to rebalance structures and remediate institutional flaws, then there’s a lot more hope to be had. You can’t build new things forever, and eventually need to take time to pay off outstanding debts, improve existing systems, modernize legacy infrastructure, and basically make everything simpler and sustainable for whatever the Next Big Thing turns out to be.
…unfortunately for me, making that pitch to leadership usually just gets me laughed out of the room because maintenance and efficiency isn’t “sexy”, nor does it boost their share valuations. Ah well, won’t stop me from trying.
Gen alpha? You're talking about a generation that the oldest cohort is ~10-11 years of age.
Will there even be enough of them given their potential parents can't afford a house? Will they go into tech after seeing this "learn to code" cohort getting screwed in the marketplace?
I find it so ironic that around the turn of the century, cube farms and suburbia were the ultimate evil and seemingly a fate worse than death in the pop culture.
Meanwhile in 2024, me and my Gen Y/Z colleagues daydream about a comfy dedicated cubicle and a quiet 3.5 bedroom with matching furniture and a spot to grill.
IME when working in a Product role, it worked better from the office. Doesn't have to be every day, but being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings.
Tech positions don't even need daily video calls IMO. My team experimented with a few days of written status updates and it was fine. But they chose to have a 10-mins stand-up mainly for socialization.
i do not understand what people are talking about when they say things like this
personA: hey @personB you got 20 mins to talk about XYZ?
personB: yeah gimme 10 mins
personA: k, i’ll grab a coffee
personA: /zoom start
that’s ^ not scheduling a meeting. that’s having the same direct conversation but with like one extra step (joining zoom).the rest of what your comment says is fair enough. i just see this mentioned a lot in anti-WFH leaning comments. often about how hard it is to mentor a junior.
(i can’t remember the exact slack command but you hopefully get the idea).
And that's without taking what sibling poster said: sometimes people take 1h, 2h, 1 day to reply you on Slack.
With face to face communication you convey more than "the message".
This comes from personal experience: dealing with tech people with Slack-only communication is fine. Dealing with non-tech people is much different.
For example, I just RIGHT NOW have to ask a Salesperson about whether a feature is ready to go into prod. I can just walk 10 meters to their desk and get an answer in 5 secs. OR I can write to them in Slack on email and get an answer Monday, because they have 20 unread Slack messages and 500 unread e-mails.
You might call this "a bother" to them. To this Salesperson, which happens to be my buddy: this is how they prefers to work.
Most roles can be hybrid/remote. Regardless of Tech, Finance, Marketing, whatever, if the job involves sitting in front of a computer or being on the phone all day it's a good candidate. If you were doing the job remotely from March 2020 through the end of 2021 and being effective, it's a good candidate.
It's still possible, but I don't think would be as easy as an annoucement.
I was told Amazon's offices has none of these.
I know some folks that work from the west coast with customers on the east coast, and they regularly are taking meetings at 6am from home, then commuting in, and getting home late.
If we return to the office, we should not also be expected to work long hours when we're at home. It's the worst of both words.
which is called being on call, and it needs to be paid. Otherwise, you're right, you cannot be expected to work (at home or not) in off hours.
And it's quickly becoming the status quo.
They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?
"Come to my cube if you need me".
Way before the pandemic, I almost never had those tools running on my work laptop - unless it was for a (rare at the time) cross-geo meeting. A coworker once sent me a screenshot of how I appeared in the IM tool - Last seen 120 days ago.
Sadly, that went away once we hired our first remote person.
We have offices on both sides of the Channel. It means travelling, which is expensive, hard to align, and really disruptive, but since the RTO mandate I suddenly realised _how valuable_ those in person interactions were, and how much more creative we were thanks to those watercooler chats.
I'm interviewing elsewhere, so I'm having a bit of fun seeing how far I can push the malicious compliance.
I'm not sure this applies to Google. Their offices and food are pretty nice. And their gyms are top-notch. If you stick with the salad bar, I'd venture to guess the freshness and nutrition variety will be better than most IT guys can get at home.
Of course, this does not mean RTO won't suck.
So, are there really so few biotech / hardware people here? Hard to do lab work from home.
Yeah, but here's an exception!
Going through your routine:
1) Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office. In fact in the beforeCOVID times, people made an effort to live closer to where they work. Sure many can't afford to, but we're not talking about baristas here, right? But highly paid IT staff.
In the cases like Google the office is far from shitty.
In the cases like Amazon, the offices are more mid, but located central to where people live in cities. (We'll come back to this)
2/3/4) Legitimate problem, that exists SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF HYBRID. If everyone RTOs 5 days a week like Amazon did, it's no longer an issue.
6) If it's a nice office like Google the food isn't shitty. If it's a mid office like Amazon, it's downtown surrounded by the best restaurants/cafes the city has to offer.
Err...what? Let's not rewrite history here. Plenty of people -- especially in tech -- worked remotely before Covid. Yes, the numbers increased dramatically, but don't make it sound like it was unheard of before the pandemic.
Also: tons and tons of people have no choice but to live far from the office. Rent is cheaper and more plentiful the farther out you get from metro centers, simple as.
> made an effort to live closer to where they work
sacrificed a lot to live closer, out of necessity, pre-covid. Then, it turned out that WFH can be made to work, with little to zero loss in productivity (if not gained productivity).
They’ve also been aggressively moving teams overseas. My guess is they won’t RTO, or at least not until their headcount matches desk count in core regions.
7 million square feet of office space.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/google-ends-agreement-with-l...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/19/googles-huge-san-jose...
But it's really nice to have the flexibility to WFH when I need to, especially just mornings to skip traffic.
I feel like the commute is what people are actually feeling the worst, because it’s unpaid time that they just straight up lose. Being close to the office resolves it for us.
If anything, an office makes for more unproductivity than working remotely. No random people showing up at your desk with "can you help out real quick (LOL) here and there", no "hey we gotta wait for colleague XYZ before we head for lunch break", no coffee room talk...
Stop thinking all people are the same.
Some people are just unproductive at home, some are more. That's life.
I know plenty of people that are absolutely unproductive at home, they just get distracted easily as the previous user.
And there's many people that just can't work without carrot and stick provided by people/bosses around them judging their daily routine.
Seriously stop thinking that every person works as you.
We are all different and reality is that WFH is tough for many people from many points of view, it's not for everyone.
I work (or at least spend the time at the PC even if I don't) around two hours more per day from home, while the office made me quit much sooner.
I think more management needs to realize that forcing in-person isn't inherently beneficial. There can be value in meeting up if it's appropriately planned, though.
My current management has been very accommodating with remote/hybrid. If there's a meeting where face-time is beneficial, people voluntarily come in -- but there's no pressure to do so. Generally, we find it easier to pop into the office for a day every few months to whiteboard things instead of dealing with Miro/Zoom. We have a mix of remote folks who live next to the office, some folks within a couple hour drive, and some who need to fly in.
A former job of mine used to fly people to the same location 4x a year for a week to hash out a quarterly plan and grab drinks. The whole agenda was laid out and not a minute felt wasted. While not everyone went 4x a year, everyone was given the opportunity to do so, and this helped alleviate friction.
Another job of mine had remote folks fly in every 3-4 months for a couple of days at a time. Some teams did it more frequently (1x/mo for a couple days) when critical projects were in the pipeline, but they'd return to normal afterwards.
But Americans just can't give up the freedom of being stressed in their cars.
A 5-10mi change in destination in almost every system that I'm aware of can add a tremendous amount of time to a commute.
There's also the associated side costs: getting ready to leave work (more for women, many feel socially obliged to put on makeup), extra clothes washing (personally, I don't like to wear clothes I had to travel in public transport with), having to schedule around errands like tradespeople coming in for repairs or picking up parcels from the post office, and for those with children all the shit associated with that, like picking up said children from daycare (whose opening times often conflict with expected work availability) or transporting them to school and after-school stuff like sports training... and finally, even though people like to deny even the most obvious (like in Munich, the current explosion of covid in wastewater tracking), there is still a pandemic raging on plus all the other "regular" bugs like influenza, RSV, measles and whatever else shit children catch at school, distribute to their parents, who then distribute it around work.
Had society actually learned anything from the two years of Covid dominance, in-presence work would be the exception not the norm, and people who have to perform in-presence work be compensated for their commute.
This is a lukewarm take shared by most, but it at best doesn't cause outrage or go viral, and at worst gets you accused of being a bootlicker for the C-suite.
So none of us speak up and the dominant perspective continues that nobody wants to actually go to the office.
And we didn't even need to throw crazy money, just full remote and 16 weeks of vacations per year.
It's amazing what amazing talent you can get paying with time rather than money they don't need.
(And no, free food and snacks don’t count. Amazon doesn’t have that anyways.)
Some companies are asking to RTO for half the week even if you're 50 miles away. Depending on where you're at that could be a ~5 hour round trip commute. If you factor in parking in certain places like NYC you're almost forced into taking a train so having meetings during the commute wouldn't be too realistic. That would mean getting to work at 11:30am and leaving at 3:30pm to work a usual 9-6 hour job. If you take a lunch with your commute then you end up working 3 hours total at the office.
It's not surprising that Amazon has moved to 5 days a week despite so many people gaming the system and not actually caring about being in person. There's likely some algorithm driving this entire movement that doesn't take into account any of the real nuance that team dynamics requires, let alone taking into account that there are tangible benefits to remote work.
All the communication of RTO invokes the most fanciful and vague references to "magical hallway conversations" and "increased collaboration" without a single data point to back up any of the claims.
It has been almost humorous to watch such stalwarts of "data driven decision making" turn up a giant goose egg with respect to actual evidence on such a huge, impactful, and far reaching decision.
RTO has similar data. If we require a highly distributed workforce to be in a specific physical location x amount of time, y percentage will resign and we don't have to pay severance or announce layoffs. That's easy to calculate vs. the lost productivity of individuals or the impact of losing top performers and lowering the bar.
Because people didn't actually embrace the hybrid model, wasted time on petty protests like this, undermined morale and the hypothetical benefits of in-person colocation.
If everyone actually tried 3 days a week, and had the benefits of in-person collaboration (instead of people coming in to the office to just sit on Zoom calls), then maybe the company could've kept doing 3 days a week instead of forcing everyone to 5.
We have people living on space stations and promising nuclear fusion, but we still have to be in the office to be productive? Gimmie a break.
The tech scene here SUCKS, but I much prefer the lifestyle to a large city ( plus, I can buy a house here. )
Not sure what will happen if the days of remote work ends. How will I get a gig?
There was a time in the mid 2010s were they were obsessed with "servant leaders" and "leading from the front"... those days are long-fucking-gone. Guarantee the executive class will not be forced into office.
Absolutely, they will find some kind of excuse to justify their jet-setting around and spending time in their various homes across the world, while insisting that the worker bees cannot possibly do their work outside of an office.
The same way you did in 2019. Like it always was.
MSP is a reasonable description of my firm. We have a helpdesk etc and provided calls/jobs/projects are fixed/process within SLAs etc then all is fine. I am now a lot more chilled about where people work from. In return, I know I get a lot back.
However, collaboration in person is useful and no amount of email or webrtc is going to replace that. We loosely require two days per week in the office.
The most obvious example of this is citing evidence that WFH makes people more productive, but there are various other arguments that try to position WFH as beneficial for both employers and employees.
I have opinions on many of the points made by both sides, but honestly it strikes me as the wrong argument to be having. The reason I want to be able to WFH is because I prefer it. I don't care if it's better for my employer or not, the same as I don't care whether working on Saturday and Sunday is better or not - I simply won't do it.
I know I'm in a privileged position to be able to say "I won't work in an office" and others have obligations that undermine their ability to show RTO employers the finger.
I guess I'm just surprised that people demanding WFH, simply because they want it, seem to be in the minority, judging by HN comments (fraught, I know). Perhaps this is a culture clash? I'm British, and this might be a US-centric thing.
The others don't inherently care more about their employer than themselves, they care more more about the money impact it means for their compensation. More efficient = more valuable to employer = more compensation. For employees benefit only = less valuable to employer = less compensation.
The workers that progressed labour rights in the past surely mostly needed their jobs too, so this situation doesn't seem unique at all.
Unions can definitely solve it, be it the actual optimal thing to do for each individual or not, should everyone involved unionize. Even then though, workers would also like to work 2 hours a week for the same pay... it doesn't mean a union forming to do it would be successful. The same dynamics eventually come back into play: is it actually more efficient? If not, is that money loss something the union workers are willing to take? It's tempting to say "they can just force the business to cut profits anyways!" and... sure, they could, but they could do that while being more efficient and get even more money too. I.e. ultimately the union and people that make it up are just as interested in making sure they balance doing a certain amount of what they don't like with a certain amount of being efficient to get the most out of it. Whoever you make the group that needs to be convinced it's worthwhile you still need to convince it's the overall more efficient choice.
On the topic of unions though, unions typically form for lower paid workers. Not that they never form for higher paid workers but they tend to have more options already, less to gain, and more to lose when joining a union compared to a lower paid workers. The amount of effort a business will put in to avoiding a union will also vary with pay as the relative asks tend to scale as well e.g. on pay a union for ~70k/year auto workers wanting a 10% pay bump is cheaper to accept than a union for ~140k/year tech workers wanting a 10% pay bump.
I think tech workers will eventually make and join unions regularly. Maybe not in the current pay and political climate, but eventually. Until then our relatively small problems of "having to deal with showing up in person at work for one of the higher paying jobs" are not going to be as huge of drivers to unionize as places that wanted to keep fingers or earn a more average salary.
that just naturally follows from the employer-employee relationship and the fact is WFO has been the default for decades. So, somewhere the onus is falling onto employees if they want to go against what the default has been
If Amazon engineers unionised, this RTO mandate could be fought without appeals to employers' business motivations. Workers shouldn't have to grovel for rights, we hold as much power as employers, and refusal to wield it is what hamstrings rights efforts.
My bias is that returning to office is best for the company. But that doesn't mean I'm right. Here we have a poorly controlled but real-life way to see which one is better. I get that we don't have optimal test conditions, but if Google switches back in a year like /u/xyst suggests, then I assume it failed. Not sure if companies have a reason to discourage working at home if it is equally likely to produce good results.
The problem is that not all jobs are suited to objective performance metrics. The other problem are the PHBnazi middle managers who are insisting on RTO for personal aggrandizement reasons. They won't always win the day.