One of the primary reasons that remote work improves productivity is that it allows employees to tailor their environment to their needs, rather than be forced into a hostile office space that requires kafkaesque bureaucratic bullshit to make even minor changes.
I once had a former employer force me to take an espresso machine home that I had brought to work because it created a situation where a different shift was coming to our teams area to use it when we weren’t there and they were concerned by the liability. Very non-specific concerns, I might add. So rather than ensure teams had access to real coffee they banned employees having their own coffee equipment so we can all commiserate together over the bottom dollar filth in the break room.
This is the type of basic shit most companies can’t get right, much less the far more complicated challenges involved in creating positive team dynamics.
I have no faith that any sufficiently large company can make an inviting office environment, and this is a major reason why I am a staunch remote work advocate.
I think this is correct. It's why, before the pandemic normalized remote work, offices were popular.
What's disheartening is that a lot of "return to office" plans I've heard of from friends involve conditions even worse than what was there before. For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office.
I'm too young to have lived through the golden age of engineers actually having an office to work in. But my best experience (besides WFH) was at my first job out of school, in a cube farm - at least you had a little bit of privacy and space to put your stuff. Every office trend since then has been for the worse.
I am old enough to remember when cubicles and offices were the norm. Cubicle companies studied and improved the cubicles spaces to make them more efficient using science. Yes they actually studied what would make us happier and more proficient at work.
Then came the stupid trend of organic seating. Cubicle’s ? Thing of the past they said, yet our productivity suffered. Great for sprints but quickly diminished due to constant distractions forcing engineers to invest in noise canceling headphones.
The WFH movement is because water flows downhill. We learned that we made the office an incredibly inefficient place to work, because we didn’t follow the science and threw away decades of research because of a new ‘fad’ that the CEO’s liked. Too bad CEO’s, I have been WFH ever since corporate America thought organic seating was cool.
I will never go back, in fact us programmers should unite and unionize to solidify this benefit before they try and take this away for good and make our jobs more difficult.
Re: "'fad' that CEO's liked."
My previous CEO: "We all have to be in an open office every day to enhance productivity."
Also my previous CEO: "I'll be working from my house in the Hamptons during July and August." :-)
> Yes they actually studied what would make us happier and more proficient at work.
And they utterly failed.
But I'm willing to put up with cubes for the right job. There is no job that would be worth putting up with an open office layout or, worse, hot-desking.
I would think that if companies want people back in the office so badly, they would be willing to do something to make working in the office pleasant and productive. But I guess that's not how they think.
I keep saying—if you want me to return to the office, give me an office. Or even a cubicle. Why even enforce a hot-desking setup when the space is 20% full? It makes no sense at all!
For all the memes about cubicles the one time I had it was actually pleasant. You could have a small meeting in the cubicle. The walls were tall enough to hang up reference diagrams. Those same walls meant that sound didn't travel when your PM was on yet another call. Not being able to see a window was a downside. As was there oppressive grey-beige monotony, but I imagine with the Google colour palette they'd be much more bearable.
Here, however, I can make more working remotely than I can in office for one of the few local companies. I mean it's an obvious choice.
The walls have another benefit: they act like noise canceling headphones for your eyes.
That’s one of the issues I have with open floor plan offices: people buzzing around in my peripheral vision can be incredibly distracting and detrimental to productivity depending on the day and my mental state, and there’s almost nothing that can be done to mitigate that.
In the same vein, I also find it distracting to have people sitting or walking behind me–like my brain tries to maintain some awareness of them, which in turn makes me cognizant that people can see my screen, which itself is kind of distracting.
In an open office this is largely a no-win situation as well: if you get a position with your back to the wall, you see people milling about everywhere, and if you face a wall, the whole office sees your screen.
Yeah I get that hair raising on the back of my neck feeling when I'm trying to focus and there's a constant train of people moving behind me, its really unbearable.
> That’s one of the issues I have with open floor plan offices: people buzzing around in my peripheral vision can be incredibly distracting and detrimental to productivity depending on the day and my mental state, and there’s almost nothing that can be done to mitigate that.
Don't worry, the office-lords have solved that! You can book a focus room for no more than 60 minutes when you need to focus. PROBLEM SOLVED!!!! /s
People who complained about cubicles were probably mourning the loss of an enclosed office (which I imagine is far superior). As we are learning, it can always get worse, and what was once bad is now good by comparison to what we're getting now.
The funny thing is that way back in the beforetimes (about the 1940s, I think), regular office workers were typically in an open office layout. When cubicles were invented, office workers absolutely loved them because they mitigated a lot of the horrors of an open office layout.
A coworker took one of his scenic photos from a weekend trip and printed it out in quadrants. This was done as a cheap way of enlarging the print, but it also gave the sense of looking out a four pane window. It was later upgraded to have an actual frame to complete the look. He was the only one to have a window in his cubicle.
> Those same walls meant that sound didn't travel when your PM was on yet another call.
In about 20 years of cubicle work, that was never my experience. It might be better than open plan for that (never had to suffer through that outside of exceedingly small offices, up to ~5 total people in a bullpen), but sound from calls in a cubicle environment (especially one shared with non-technical-IC staff) can be pretty bad.
There's various sound absorbing partitions one can buy online that seem kind of neat. But many seem to start at $1000, which suuucckkkss. I wonder what the bulk rate is for material like recycled pet. Not that I have any idea how to turn it into a soft-ish adjustable sound absorbing wall...
From that picture[1] they look _tiny_! My cubicle was at least 30 sqft. Had an extra chair for a coworker to sit down during a consult and could hold upto to 4 people standing. It was a small office, not a phonebooth.
My previous office was like that. The individual offices were around the exterior wall. The cubes were in the interior. Only managers got to see daylight. It was fucking depressing.
Wife's previous office was better. Offices were around the interior, so cubes go light from the windows. Those offices had windows, so they too could get some natural light during the day.
Current office is open plan, which is kinda dumb. Seating chart has me and another middle manager next to each other. Of the people who come in regularly (no forced RTO), we're the most frequently there AND the most frequently on calls. Le Sigh.
Executive offices (and the attendant parking spots) that are occupied maybe 15% of the time are a huge peeve for me, a lowly bullpen resident.
Especially if we constantly have little break-off meetings or get togethers in the otherwise unoccupied office for sensitive things that we don't want overheard by the gossip mill. Maybe just give the office to someone who is 1) always here and 2) needs the space?
That was one thing my employer got right when they built out the current HQ. Lots of small huddle rooms and conference rooms. Anything with <5 seats doesn’t require a reservation. Anything with 5+ needs a reservation, but there are enough that they’re easily found (even pre-COVID).
The CEO and CFO still have real offices. But the other C-suite are open plan (sort of, different walls and a couple of C-only conference rooms).
As far as open office goes, it’s probably as good as it gets. I don’t love it but I don’t hate it. I could stay home, but go in 3x week.
It makes sense if your employer views your position as commodity, like a warehouse worker. "Here is your labor area we carved out for you to do your commoditized work units, one size fits all". The same reason JIRA is popular with management. Gives them visibility and "metrics" to improve. A less-charitable interpretation of hot-desking is that it's a constant reminder that your job is not secure, and that new people can come and replace you instantly, vs your own personal place in a cubicle or private office signals some amount of commitment that you have "your spot" at the company.
My personal beef that resulted in an email exchange was RTO preceded by an email saying we gotta hotdesk, because we don't have enough space for everyone. I just questioned whether it is a good idea to call people back into the office if you don't have space for them.
It was not received well. But it is not about logic.
> I keep saying—if you want me to return to the office, give me an office. Or even a cubicle. Why even enforce a hot-desking setup when the space is 20% full? It makes no sense at all!
Cynically, it makes layoffs a lot more opaque. When everyone gets to express their individuality by sitting in an identical, constantly-shifting workspace; you can't "walk by" someone's desk and notice it's cleaned out and their gone.
I don't think that's the main reason (the main reason is trying to cheap out on office rent and ape corporate fads), but it's probably a happy added perk for those who are pushing these things.
I'm lucky enough to work at a place that gives us actual offices. Some offices are larger with two desks (so some people share) but I have my own office. There's apparently some plan to improve our site and I'm really hoping they don't move us to an open plan or something.
The stupid idea is your value creation should come from internal/external prostitution works and radiating positive energies and importantly not from self playing on computers, because too much in software is measured subjectively and this mindset works for those that can game the system. This shouldn't go on forever, but kind of continue to spread until going against this trends becomes differentiation(and positive outlook in it is there's no way such trend is continuing, or perhaps even happening at at all at this point where random grumpy idiot like I am is rambling about it)
I loved my cube at my first job. We even had a biometric door that separated engineering from the rest of the company. Only engineers behind the door. Juniors and mid levels working in cubes. A few tenured engineers, the primary engineering manager, VP of engineering, and CTO working in offices. Only two meetings per week — all other time was head down programming and ad hoc discussions. The median volume of the room was silence.
I was in focus heaven and I didn’t even know it. Miss that job.
My last job had pinball machines in the breakroom. We also had folks coming over from the UK who thought those pinball machines were awesome. The pinball got taken away because it was seen as “unfair” to all the offices that didn’t have something like that.
It's not just companies. I've seen lots of people say why do they get X? rather than how can we get X?
As an example, Pinball and arcade games are often very easy to source. Where I've seen them at my workplace, they were brought in and maintained by employees. Some space needs to be allocated, and maybe needs a bit of electrical work if a high density arcade forms, but otherwise... May be different if there's no collectors in the employee base, or in countries where machines are scarce.
Yeah, the "if I can't have X you shouldn't have it either" mentality. These people are a joy to be around, they get a twisted sense of satisfaction when they manage to get X removed. I'm like, go get some therapy for that.
I mean, If I can't have it, you shouldn't have it is kind of ok-ish; but it's when they skip trying to get X and just short circuit to you have X and I don't, let's get rid of your X that bothers me.
Yup, “in order to align with global standards” has become a meme where I work, because the phrase always preceeds “we are removing one of our location-specific perks” ;(
> remote work [...] allows employees to tailor their environment to their needs, rather than be forced into a hostile office space
Some office spaces being bad doesn't imply we should get rid of office spaces overall.
If the company you're working for is so crazy on its office requirements, it could be as crazy with its remote work requirements.
Seems like this is a company specific issue, not an office vs remote issue.
Seems like you've been at a fair share of bad companies, but that's doesn't generalize to a broader picture of all office spaces.
I would oppose you _my_ office experience (which ofc doesn't generalize either), which is overwhelmingly positive. Yet I won't argue that because my experience is good, everyone should feel the same.
There are lots of reasons why offices tend towards bad rather than good. If I sat and thought about it I could probably list a dozen systematic biases towards crappy office spaces. Here are just a few off the top of my head:
- Open-plan offices, hot-desking, and other negative patterns are more cost-effective for a given amount of space.
- Cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all spaces are "easier" to manage from a personnel/HR point of view. Less griping about who gets the "good office," as there is no good office. No need to think about differences between people, we can just treat them as fungible "human resources."
- Similar race to the bottom regarding amenities (coffee, break rooms, etc.). Just look in the other comments of this thread. It's easier to target the least common denominator than provide personalized/individualized benefits in a manner that's fair to everyone.
- Insecure, distrusting managers promote bad office spaces like open plans, hot desking, etc. in order to better micro-manage their teams. Good managers can push back, but in practice the bad managers tend to be the squeaky wheels and get the grease.
I've worked for 10 different companies so far in my career. All but one I would consider a good company. But of those nine "good" companies, I have had one good office space. That's why I've been remote for the last 6 years. For me personally it was either go remote or leave the industry. I'm never making a open-plan or even cube-farm layout my primary working space again.
This isn't restricted to "offices." It's also why it's difficult to live with other people and housemates often end up in conflict. The more people you need to share a space with, the more contention each shared resource gets, and fewer individuals get what they actually want when they want it most of the time. There's tradeoffs to make, of course. We have societies and communities precisely because groups tend to accomplish more than individuals thanks to specialization and division of labor, but there's a reason humans tend to live in roughly family-sized units when given the choice, not open dorms with hundreds of other people.
Says anyone who has spent more than a decade in the workforce.
> There's no more reason for an office space to be bad rather than good. And there's no reason to think that having a good one is based on luck.
By “no reason”, you mean no logical reason. That might be true. Unfortunately a crafted reality controlled by sociopaths isn’t required to be logically consistent at every layer. Hence our current reality, where this is very much a case of luck.
> If office space dynamics and setup are important to you, then put it in your job search mental list and find a job that matches that.
Thanks for the advice. That’s /exactly/ what all the folks working remotely have done. That’s also why we are agitated by shitty management trying to take it away.
Yea I can’t help but realize after my career in offices then seeing mass wfh, the sociopath layer depended deeply on a perceived panopticon of working in the office. The panopticon was a negative motivator for workers, but also a common experience that standardized the culture and expectations.
WFH was like setting rats in a maze to free range and noticing they can be more productive but at the expense of common purpose. This brings a new dimension to the notion of “productive” that the sociopath layer is uncomfortable with. I think because it implies workforce instability.
Even Google, a company that purported to be about worker freedom to harvest productivity if top workers, has retreated to this position.
It’s a bit shocking to me still nearly 4 years later.
> Even Google, a company that purported to be about worker freedom to harvest productivity if top workers, has retreated to this position.
If you take the approach of "watch what they do, not what they say", Google is one of the clearest examples of pro-RTO: they invest in so many perks because they want to make the panopticon feel comfy.
There are other companies that don't give you a darn thing and just dangle the loss of one's job as a threat (Amazon), but I think top performers are more swayed by the "free food" approach than the "let's have a big public dashboard with the entire team's attendance" approach (again, Amazon).
> Says anyone who has spent more than a decade in the workforce.
Well, no. I have worked almost double that, and I don't feel that way.
I tend to think there is mainly an echo chamber of somewhat entitled young north americans incorrectly correlating high compensation in a decade long hyped industry (tech) with social status.
> a crafted reality controlled by sociopaths
Well if that is your definition of reality, maybe you should consider whether you could be part of your issue with office spaces...
> shitty management trying to take it away
Definitely, that kind of remark reinforces my opinion that you should reflect on whether your look at the situation is biased.
Anecdotally, I am aware of people who seem to truly believe that. I used to think it is a question of age, but even that quickly got corrected as from within my professional circle there was no clear way to determine a good predictor for office/no office preference. It seems oddly almost evenly split, which seems very weird to me.
That said, the 'entitled young Americans' thing appears to be a common talking point I see on linkedin and other corporate safe spaces.
"Have you considered the increased opportunities for synergies in the office? We should punt on this until next quarter's all hands when we can utilize our increased office presence to actualize our OKRs."
Why can't you store it at your desk? My biggest pet peeve in the office was the people storing personal items in the kitchen. I don't need to see your machine with (don't use) stickies on it or the random assortment of blender bases. I also don't need to see your dirty tupperware in the sink.
To be clear, it was not just for my personal use. I brought it in at the request of my team and it was available for anyone to use. The team had a collection jar and we all pitched in for maintenance and supplies, just like we did with our team’s foosball table (also later removed by management for poorly specified reasons).
I've been remote working since 2000 but as an EE I agree with your employer: they have a duty to remove unauthorized electrical appliances from their premises since they present a fire risk. In addition an espresso machine obviously presents a risk of injury and associated lawsuits from numbskulls who don't know how to use it.
My office requires equipment to be tested by a recognized laboratory (UL/ETL/etc). Fire safety requirements are reasonable and easy to satisfy. What you describe is nonspecific reactionary FUD.
At one recent gig, everything was fun until the company got big enough to need an HR scold. Ugh. We were told that a ping pong table was forbidden because of "health and safety issues". Needless to say, I left soon after.
The espresso machine bit makes sense. Espresso machines need constant cleaning and maintenance, which are ongoing costs in addition to the potential liability concerns from someone getting injured using the machine.
That's certainly an argument but it's just one bullet point in a supportive 5 paragraph essay. How many employees actually have better equipment and spaces at home? Is your espresso machine improving your productivity, or is it a hobby to fiddle with throughout the day? What other distractions are at home that aren't at the office?
I've never liked the framing of RTO vs WFH in terms of distractions because 1) every setup is so unique and 2) one person's "distraction" is another person's motivation/recharge strategy. For me, personally, things at my home like my dog and good coffee can keep me working for 10-12 hours easily, racking up unpaid overtime for my company. My office by comparison is a depressing space and I am motivated to put in the bare minimum time there so I can go home and log back in and actually get things done. Of course on the other hand are people who find the office campus fun and engaging and they hate their home life because of kids or no real office at home. I don't think distractions can be framed in any meaningful way due to these variances. My work slack is full of wars between the WFH faction and the RTO faction, seemingly split 50/50.
Imagine referring to good coffee, the substance that built modern America and industrialized the world, as a “distraction” and arguing that it doesn’t improve productivity. Can you imagine?
> Is your espresso machine improving your productivity, or is it a hobby to fiddle with throughout the day? What other distractions are at home that aren't at the office?
Let me respond fully to your comment. Full disclosure: remote for 8y, on the same and different tz. in office for 5y,
The espresso makes most people more productive. Absolutely.
If not the espresso, some other thing one might enjoy degusting daily.
For the espresso case. Your office is likely too far for one sitting at his desk to suddenly head over 20 mins a few blocks away to appreciate a delicious sip for 5 minutes. What if on Thursday what I really need is a delicous espresso but in total peace with nobody interrupting that moment between me and my cup?
Maybe I'm going too far with what espresso might mean to people but
Your office shaping the way I want to live my life without a doubt is going way too far.
It makes me far less productive to have to adapt my life to the office schedule, location, and the many uncontrollable distractions taking place throughout the day.
It's on me to make my work environment most productive and if I'm unable to do that then just fire me.
You will likely object, so let me introduce to you, Bud, the pug. See Bud needs to go out for a walk even more than I do. I love my dog so I take him out 4 times each day.
It makes me less productive to have to run at 5pm everyday to take the dog out the least late I possibly can. I have to stop whatever I'm doing and get back into the zone.
It also makes me less productive to go home at 5 o'clock.
See, I don't have much respect for people requiring butts on seats to appease their own insecurities. You can be damn sure that I won't give them a minute of my time unless I have to.
Also, I'm best to do work from morning to midnight in bursts. I gladly do extra hours that way, because: productivity.
I could go on and on, air is to dry as office buildings would not consider people's health unless illegal if they can save a few hundred bucks on the monthly energy bill. Lights are too blue/white/cold they hurt my eyes after a couple of hours.
All that being said, it depends on the job, for most jobs my arguments would stand the productivity tests with everyone once they've adapted to remote settings. Wouldn't apply to members of a music band, circus jugglers working in duo, dolphin trainers, nor salsa dancers. People who do these jobs are more productive on site, and the reason they never complain like me and my kind do is simple: they don't actually work in an office.
where I used to work, the micro kitchens all had their own foodservice licenses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d balked at employees bringing their own equipment
small companies don’t give a shit about stuff like that ime
A lot of people work virtually regardless of their location. You can return to the office but it doesn't stop. You still work as if it was remote because there will always be somebody in the meeting that isn't there. They could be at home, in a different building, or a vendor in another country.
Such is the consequence of complex organizations and outsourcing, as well as employees increasing demands to have a say in their schedule.
When you really think about it, collaboration is the problem rather than the solution. The modern distributed nature of work means that you need a huge amount of collaboration to even figure out what to do, when, and to resolve all dependencies.
So it's pretty maddening that managers call for more collaboration. We need less of it. The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through.
Modern employees spent half their time in email, chat and meetings. Not producing anything. And that's generous, quite a few have to find actual productive time in the fragmented 10% of their schedule. It's as if we've all become managers.
> collaboration is the problem rather than the solution
Spot on.
> The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through
In traditional manufacturing processes (i.e., physical goods), this is possible and often achieved. Productivity can be easily measured by dividing the physical output - like the number of items produced - by the factory headcount. Innovation exists in cycles that precede manufacturing, since changes to the factory layout are expensive and often require interrupting production.
Software development is a different beast. Innovation is intermingled in the 'manufacturing' process. Requirements change faster, and we need processes to accommodate that. Work happens in smaller time frames (e.g., two-week sprints). Productivity and delivered value are harder to measure. Paying customers are in the loop and provide constant feedback we need to filter and incorporate for our 'product' to succeed.
The software development challenge is more consultative in nature than the manufacturing one.
I like the phrase "serendipity is not a strategy", it gets to my biggest complaint about the arguments for going back to the office. Your shitty open plan office was never MIT Building 20 before the pandemic, and it's not going to become a womb of creativity after the pandemic just because you want it to be so. The way I know that is because you have to threaten people to come back to it, if it was special at all they'd come back on their own.
>Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
Yes. Whether remote or in person, pairing works best when there's a experience/skill mismatch. Both parties benefit because the senior has to know and explain the why and the junior learns the what. I enjoy it as long as it's small doses.
It is draining and tiresome when done for long periods but I think worth it. It keeps you sharp and builds relationships with teammates.
Pairing with someone on your level can also be beneficial but with diminished returns.
>Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
It's still by far the most effective tool for certain tasks. Inherit an extremely complex codebase with 50 levels of abstraction? You could spend a week tinkering with it, or you could step through the code with the guy who wrote it for 30 minutes. But it's not something you'd want to do every day, or even frequently.
> Remote pair programming? Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
I’ve just encountered it at my newest job.
A little of it actually seems good, but more as a “show and tell” of how some part of the system you know operates, that may include writing a little code in service of better learning.
Otherwise it seems to be a great way to get two developers to have the output of half a developer.
Pair programming isn't widely practiced for obvious reasons: It looks like you just made your code twice as expensive. There are studies justifying the cost by showing it can be recovered with less testing, code review, and bug hunting. But that evidently hasn't been persuasive. Also, anyone familiar with statistical quality control (SQC or SQA) would look at pair programming and see 100% inspection. Very suboptimal in manufacturing.
Still, pair programming makes sense in the abstract: Coding is not manufacturing. Applying SQC to code is nonsensical. Under the circumstances, 100% inspection is all you've got. Pair programming probably makes sense in cases where minimizing bugs at every step, right down to the creation of every line of code, is needed because the cost of a bug explodes the longer it exists. Probably rare cases. But worth knowing to know that coders are not working on a production line.
Yes indeed. I remember a full team of old mainframers going together in a room with printed code and review it together. 500% inspections. Many pieces of code would hold for decades without major refactoring. A lot of the code being produced today is quite garbage IMO, and you can see that in the infrastructure requirements it brings with it, growing faster than our bandwidth.
have you ever done pair programming? like actually sit there and be forced to do it? It's absolutely infuriating to anyone who values anything. I spent 20min trying to convince my "pair" that it was ok for a comment to be a sentence fragment and not a complete sentence. Every keystroke is the same conversation over and over. After that experience, i pulled rank and said i will never pair program again and haven't since.
It can be terrible in practice. Same with test driven development, also annoying if instituted by proclamation. A lot of code doesn't need these formalisms. By that I mean: Do it very carefully in circumstances where there is clear justification, and with an adequate budget for tooling and support. These techniques were invented before there was good tooling to support them, which makes bad outcomes a lot more likely.
> It's absolutely infuriating to anyone who values anything
It's not really your place to say what's infuriating to others when your pair programming experience with a _single_ (somewhat neurotic) programmer was irritating. In my experience, pair programming has been a delightful two-way share of ideas that was both refreshing and productive (but I'm not going to claim universality or such an experience).
Pair programming probably does suck when one side is extremely impatient and overbearing.
I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company.
The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
The return to office has nothing to do with productivity, trying to look at things through that lens reflects a total lack of understanding of whats going on.
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
I know i'm supposed to "contribute to the conversation" but it's important to recognize that the above point is exactly right.
IDK, I don’t think real estate part is entirely true. It’s often quoted but most companies have very little RE as a percentage of revenue or whatever metric you think makes most sense. Many more are just leasing RE and could easily have exited that position by now. Even a one time write off could be spun as a positive thing. These properties can be repurposed and have continued value without their corporate tenants.
There’s no grand conspiracy where executives are helping boost the holdings of REITs and institutional investors. Executives as a “class” and a “job” just like the traditional butts in chairs approach to work. They have to think about the entire company and it’s easier to have a singular approach. Instead of bespoke approaches by team/department/title where some people are RTO and some WFH as that quickly reverts to everyone is on zoom/teams for every meeting because of the remote people.
WFH has also provided a whole host of new and unusual problems for HR. I’m sure most executives are just tired of hearing about it. In my own experience/approximation only about 1 in 3 people are can actually self manage in a way that’s needed for remote work to be effective. I think software development is a very specific job that is very well suited to WFH but most other jobs within a company are not.
The alternative to REIT consipiracy is that execs have run the numbers and loss from remote work is greater than the loss from office work. Painful.
Headlines don't support this, articles only get clicks when celebrating remote work. But there is a very clear disconnect where headlines are saying "remote work is more productive" and executive surverys are saying "we are moving back to offices".
Execs (on the whole, not anecdotes) don't hate money and productivity. If remote work was so much better, they would be rushing to it at breakneck speed. Instead the opposite is happening.
HN Note: Only a small fraction of workers are developers or work in IT. The white collar workforce is huge an varied. The remote vs. RTO debate is about workers on the whole, not just the small sliver that are devs.
I have to disagree. History has shown over and over again that MBAs don't need to be intelligent or understand the business to get to highly paid and powerful roles. Similarly, you can be an idiot and still succeed in becoming the president of US.
RTO is dictated by those people because without the headcount in the office it's plain and obvious that most of their "work" is illusory and provides no value beyond giving them means to build their kingdoms. RTO is mostly about self important and self-preservation of this whole class.
One of the larger companies I'm most familiar with is definitely not renewing leases on a fairly widespread basis. I'm sure some companies feel they're locked in for some reason but it's just not universal.
I disagree. When you calculate the total spend of a company on Google on real estate then multiply it by their PE ratio and now that spend now has 0 return instead of 30x or so you get a pretty large double digit percentage of their market cap in delta value.
I think you are trivializing a pretty huge risk on the global markets.
Google is chump change to the global commercial RE market.
I’ve worked with/on dozen or so executive teams, public and private, bought sold RE and leased/renewed RE at most of them. Nobody cares about the landlords or the shareholders of those companies. It’s actually an adversarial relationship just like most tenant/landlord relationships. Each party is looking out for themself.
The math makes no difference when all you care about is yourself. The executives are wanting RTO because they feel like that’s what’s in their company’s best interest. I’m not buying into the grand conspiracy theory that’s floating around.
You can maybe make the argument that regional banks want people back in the office because they have self interest in commercial real estate as a whole but outside that the argument is brain dead stupid IMO.
To me, it is all so simple. Does the micro manager to a fault know they are a micro manager? Of course they do but they can't help it. It is strategic and a trade off. It is the same exact thought process but just applied at the company level.
Not necessary the company directly, but could be parent company, stockholders. What value would office buildings retain if there were no one leasing office spaces? They would be burning money by maintaining the buildings.
Where I live there’s a big movement of office->residential. It’s not free. Should it be? Was it a risk free investment? I’d argue no and no, and mention they’ll likely be better off financially as we have a shortage of housing and an excess of commercial in my market
Sure, let's say it is shareholders. So these shareholders (diverse, distributed groups) get together and collude to pressure their investment companies to sacrifice performance (WFH) for the benefit of the shareholders' other investments?
Another factor is that large employers in city centers are getting some political pressure to bring people back into town. Commuting is a major prop to city economies and tax bases.
What does this pressure look like, in practice? Sternly written letters? Phone calls? What power does a city have over a private employer when it comes to employment decisions like this? If remote is everything people say it is, the cities should have no power to overcome improved performance and lower (in the long run) costs (due to lower or nonexistent rent)
Lots of companies get tax breaks, and a city can threaten to take them away if they don't bring employees back to the office.
"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."
"New Jersey paused its on-site requirement when Covid hit. Last summer, though, the state announced that companies receiving those benefits must bring employees back to the office about three days a week — a lower bar than before, but still challenging for firms struggling to hang onto workers in a red-hot labor market."
"The state [of Texas] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time."
The article does go into pushback the states are getting from companies for imposing these, to be fair, but it's clear they have some levers to pull in order to coerce companies to bring employees back to the office.
Think about it as if it was a private golfing club, where these guys (corporate executives, real estate developers, bigshot investors, local politicians and officials, chief of police, county and city judges) all hang out in the same bar and play golf together, and shoot the shit with each other, and go to each others' kids' soccer games and so on. I'm sure there's a lot of peer pressure for them all to kind of get along and scratch each other's backs so that everyone can profit at the expense of the rest of us schmucks who are not in the club. A phone call is probably the most formal that it would get!
I think this is mostly it. But a little more generously, a lot of business leaders do have civic pride and if remote work is going to collapse the city's tax base, that isn't about personal profit. There are practical and emotional reasons why politicians, business leaders, educational and healthcare institutions, non-profits etc. would not want this. And this all trickles down to voters - people don't want to live in a crappy place!
I am not sure why you, and others in this thread, keep stating a performance boost. Workers claim a performance boost while actual performance suffers pretty greatly
I don’t personally believe there is an actual performance boost. I think I is the opposite, and even where it might exist at the individual level I think it is certainly (to my eye) incorrect at the team and company level.
But I won’t make that argument because it is the third rail of HN comments. So I make all my arguments assuming WFH improves productivity.
You can also stipulate that short-term productivity didn't take a major hit for the most part while having concerns about onboarding junior people, reduced level of engagement on teams, weakened company culture, etc. It's hard to separate out other factors but it sure feels like that to me.
More amusingly, not that long ago my direct boss was denying it was the case, but it was not until recent RTO call that he ( and his boss ) finally admitted something along the lines of 'yeah, we got commercial real estate on our books so like you know, we should do our part'.
So yeah, I am told to subsidize failing real estate without getting anything in return. Won't I think of the poor, poor investment managers and their real estate? Why would I? Do they think about me?
When it comes to gains and profits, the shareholders are supposed to benefit. When it comes to losses and difficulties, the employees are supposed to 'do their part' and shoulder them.
also important to read the nuance of them "feeling" like losers. Obviously if you're working in tech there's little chance of you actually being a loser in your career (which is probably the most difficult place to find success) so really they'd just need to put some effort into being social and these people would be doing well for themselves, however, in-office can be a huge crutch for people to pretend like they have a social life.
It's not odd at all that people in a similar situation tend to act the same way, particularly when they can see how the others act and realise that following the crowd is the best way to not get fired.
Many companies would benefit financially by reducing their office footprint and thereby paying less rent. The idea that boards everywhere would sabotage their own companies to appease commercial real estate investors is tinfoil hat level stuff.
If you buck the trend that everyone else is following, maybe you really are the genius in the room. But that's probably not the way to bet unless your situation is unique for some reason.
Yes, they do. The board member croneyism keeping the working man down is a bit of a simple minded reddit fantasy - in the real world, public companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. They don’t serve the interests of some hidden cabal.
If you notice that companies make similar decisions as a result of changing market trends (a global pandemic, for instance) it’s probably because those decisions were deemed the most financially sound. They weren’t colluding to screw over employees.
In the real world, public companies rely on financing for a heft of their operations. Financing is controlled by the investor class only a simple reddit mind could possibly believe exists
In theory, if there is such a thing as a "self" to have an interest in. The idea breaks down when the same 30 people sit on the board of directors of every publicly-traded company in a particular sector and also own all the property.
OP forgets ‘institutional investors’ is code for the pooled retirement funds of the vast majority of residents, as well as the institutions who hold much of the sovereign debt, which is generated to pay for social services, war, etc. It all comes down to those who are presently working supporting those who presently don’t.
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
This is argument keeps getting parroted without evidence or skepticism. Where's the evidence? Just because many people don't like RTO doesn't mean that RTO is driven by evil forces up to no good. There's nuance - on both sides of the debate! - and it does no one a service to reduce the arguments to bumper stickers.
No, employees wanting to work from home don't universally want to loaf off. No, employees that want to work from an office aren't universally middle managers trying to justify their existence. Some people work better at home, others work better at the office. Some companies have found WFH to improve productivity overall and are flexible, and other companies have found RTO to improve productivity overall. If you work better from home, go work for the former. If you work better from the office, go work for the latter. Let the market decide. If WFH is overall more productive, eventually the RTO companies' performance will suffer, and vice versa. No need to blame things on the boogeyman behind the curtain!
I think the problem is, if you want to work remote you don’t care if other people work in the office or not. However, if you want to work in the office you really want others in the office as that is the purported main point of being there so one side is forcing the other into their desired working situation. This is exactly what the OP is describing, people above/below/around compelling RTO.
So go to a company that doesn’t have RTO requirements. The market should sift employees and employers to an equilibrium where people work in the environment that suits them.
We already have this. People that can’t stand sitting at a screen all day and need to be outdoors to feel good find jobs that suit that. People who need to interact and not do paperwork find jobs that suit this. And vice versa. RTO and WFH will just be the next phase of that.
I look forward to the market showing us, objectively, which is most effective on the whole when enough companies with radically different policies compete with each other.
I have a strong suspicion which will prevail but I want to see objective real world results.
WFH is existentially painful for those that have coupled their identity too strongly to their jobs. They're confronted daily with the fact that their coworkers just aren't that into them (e.g. the job, and by extension, them) as they'd like. The likelihood this has happened goes up significantly as you move up the ladder, because the volcano gods demand sacrifice for that.
There's also a segment of the population that somewhat overlaps with the previous paragraph that uses work as their primary social outlet.
I think this and the slightly less gracious way that OP explained it is the most significant driver of RTO from the employee side.
It is also why I am shamelessly pro-WFH. The banality of this mindset as the possibly main major contributing cause from labor for RTO and all the many, many issues that office work causes is too much for me to handle.
Get some non-work friends and hobbies. Understand career mobility and productivity, if that’s what you really want to prioritize, is equally there via WFH. Leave the rest of us out of it.
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors
> The return to office has nothing to do with productivity
I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side.
I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig.
A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time.
1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin).
2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers.
3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.
Ireland is crazy for jumping on the real estate ship again. This almost bankrupted the country in 2007 because the economy had become so one-sided. I remember the dreary half-finished shopping malls and whole neighborhoods of concrete slabs falling to pieces.
And yes I know some of those bottom feeders in our place too. They're the ones constantly distracting you at work with chitchat. I have several people I try to avoid but unfortunately our pisspoor desk booking system (Planon, never buy that!) doesn't even allow to look up where other people are.
> from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
Two anecdotes supporting this.
Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered.
At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable.
If you look at RTO mandates coming out of places like IBM and Yahoo during the Before Times, there was clearly an "increase unforced attrition" aspect to them. Layoffs without the pesky WARN notices, severance, etc.
Id be more specific. RTO is pushing commute costs to workers, which is why RTO is miss priced in the market.
If your commute time was paid for by the firm, all the firms calculations would shift dramatically.
A worker rise up moment, if we ever needed more.
The commonly stated goal is to “work together” - something you can do if you have years of experience being in online communities, and alien if you have not.
This post is a perfect example of why RTO is bad for everyone, including office-likers like myself. I don't want to have to be anywhere near this guy, lol.
No they just have board meetings where they stress the importance of being in the office for "spontaneous exchange of ideas" and "culture" while also floating think pieces in business magazines about how important having people in the office is to success.
"Hey Exec team, my other portfolio investments have real estate exposure so I need you to sacrifice the performance you clearly witness from WFH employees and your own personal bonuses that are tied to that performance for the benefit of my other investments."
I worked under a C-level person who was otherwise a pretty sensible guy, but he had participated in a workshop about this, in a 1000 person company. After the workshop he instituted a RTO policy. The policy was more lenient than the company policy, but still needlessly strict. In personal discussions he stated that in the workshop they discussed that all people would slack away from work given the opportunity. He seemed agitated about it. I guess this was how the C-level was "motivated".
Interesting. Though, to be fair, C-levels are C-levels because they are the best at doing what they're told to do. So I feel like a CEO just has to say, "obviously WFH is bad" and then the sycophants will parrot that as if it was their own idea.
I don't know how it works exactly but I can show you how it works in practice. The CEO somehow managed the middle management that RTO is a good thing. Their reasoning was that the lease was signed for several years ahead, so it's a waste of resources for this space to rest unused. "Can't they "renegotiate?" "No, it's already been signed and the owners won't budge" "Can't we just wait until the lease is over and then downsize?" "Well, you need to understand what happens to us if we downsize the office, use your imagination!"
These people somehow managed to internally identify the company with the office, and reducing the (open plan) office space with downsizing the company. And they were dead serious. No arguments (we did this during the pandemic and our revenue soared, acting against the wishes of all employees means shooting oneself in the foot) would be accepted. So the best engineers left, end of story.
They don't need to explain themselves. Big enough shareholders just can express their needs to the board, a vote can be held and, if the decision is not implemented, courts can get involved.
Companies have investors / shareholders who are also invested in commercial property. They use their power as shareholders to mandate RTO so that their investments won't lose value. It's going from the top.
> the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
> and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
I can see why office culture doesn't appeal to you, you sound like a grump who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. If you can enjoy the cognitive dissonance of socializing with black squares in a zoom, that's great, but I'd rather enjoy the time I spend working, not merely tolerate it. I don't think that makes me a loser.
What I don’t get is why you would want to spend half of your waking hours, even remotely, working with people on a team whose company you don’t enjoy? The conclusion I would draw is that I’m on the wrong team or at the wrong company, and then switch as quickly as possible.
I enjoy my friends, yet I don't want to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in sitting 1 meter away from them.
It's a job, it's IT, it's easy, it's well paid, as long I don't have a literal archnemesis annoying me every day I literally don't care who I work with. Not everyone has the luxury to quit a job and find a new one right away, especially in the current climate
Some of us just don't enjoy socializing with whoever happens to be around more than we would enjoy just not socializing. I have had some good relationships with some of my co workers but I haven't made any real friends at my current job of ten years. And the people that talk the most tend to be the ones I find the most difficult to relate to, whether it's because they only want to talk about one thing (football or hunting generally) or all of their jokes assume everyone else is racist too. The specifics here have to do with my location but it seems like a wide enough issue that most of my real friends experience similar issues at their jobs as well.
This is exactly why folks should be free to choose remote or to “band together” in a shared workspace - people aren’t the same and it’s so much better when we can tailor our workspace to fit our personalities and way of working.
The big secret is 1-2 people of 10 actually enjoy that camaraderie vs being home with their families and dogs, all else equal. You sound like the 1.
Doesn’t make you a loser, but it does make you very lacking in empathy for the real life consequences of the missed band recitals, lunches with a spouse and many many opportunities to build the life-long links of family via wfh for in exchange for a 2-3 year relationship with colleagues
Those colleagues won’t remember your name in another 2-3 years. But as this version of the argument goes, your short term social needs get prioritized?
I have two wonderful examples of a hostile work environment, both caused by the same boss:
He had the habit of playing music really, really loud from his speakers. It got so bad that they tried to relegate him to different floors and build a separate office, just for him and the lucky few that worked with him (me included).
Another thing he did was being his dog to the office despite there being people allergic to dogs in the office.
And people are trying to force everyone nack to the office because of "collaboration".
I once worked at a company where almost the opposite was true, or at least they prided themselves on not factoring that in and in moving desks several times a year. Managers and senior people tended to be near the center of a very crowded office space, away from the windows, I suppose to be closer to the "action". Newer or less important folks tended to be near the windows.
> Mediocre teams compromise on their ways of working to avoid conflict;
Yeah, well, conflict with the corporate overlords tends to be pretty one-sided, so we’ll need to attack that problem if you want that to change. There are proven approaches. But this isn’t “compromise”, it’s workers having their work environment dictated to them.
> sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy.
Oh wow, uh, that was not the direction I expected the rest of that sentence to go.
> I’ve experienced some of my most joyful work in teams working together in the same space. I’ve benefited from flexibility and inclusion with remote work. I’ve also been able to contribute as part of larger open source communities where I couldn’t even know everyone by name.
On the topic of knowing everyone by name: so very much easier remote. Real people don’t have a name tag next to every statement they make, or hovering under their face at all times. Much harder in person.
> Working physically together, in the same space, as a whole team, can be extremely enabling.
I am still not convinced "in the same space" makes any difference. I couldn't care less if co-worker is sitting next to me or on the other side of the country. But in person, you get an extra cognitive load of being around people. Someone brings smelly sandwich, someone else forgot to shower then another one keeps chewing gum and making loud mouth noises.
> Supporting a joyful environment.
One man's joy is another man misery. Certainly having people making morning journey from across the country and then observing how they "work" may be joyful experience for a manager feeling insecure.
Best compromise I saw is that if someone can't work at home, company gives them vouchers at their local co-working space of their choosing. No commute and office experience.
> Most of all I get sad when I see ineffective teams with no ability or motivation to improve—whether remote or co-located.
This. I get that remote isn't always practical or effective, I do. But it's the staunch insistence on one way of working, and the denial that it needs improvement, that pisses me off so god damn much.
If I could actually get more work done in an office, of course I would go back. I have a huge backlog of shit to get through! But an hour commute isn't making that easier. And we all have been in the office where half the team is spread out just because they want to get away from noise, or to find a more comfy place, or they need heads-down time without interruptions. We've all been in meetings where 3 people are remote just because they needed to let a repair man in at noon, or their daughter's sick, or something's going on. And that is fine. So what's wrong with keeping that the same, and just not requiring people go in?
Then there's all the other dysfunctional shit that has nothing to do with an office, where the office is the excuse to never fix it. We can't figure out our online communications? No problem, just buy a big room and shove people in it and they can just walk up to each other all the time. We can't properly organize our documentation? Big room, shove people in it, walk up and ask where something is. No documentation? Big room, shove people, interrupt, ask how it works. Need to decide something but don't want to have a meeting? No problem, just interrupt 5 people at once and have an impromptu meeting. Who needs to improve their business process when they can just have people interrupt each other all day and never write a single thing down?
Remote doesn't magically work well either. You have to do specific things to make remote successful. I'm pretty sure the reason for mandatory return is just that they don't want to try. Even if half the workforce wanted to work in an office, they could buy a smaller office and let workers do what they need to do. But that would still require improvements to get the remote half to work well with the in-office half, so let's just avoid that extra work and force everyone into the office. That's easy for management, but sucks for the workforce, and the business.
> except for some people telling others how they have to live life
Don't act like this is a one-way street.
If you're working remotely then your employer is also telling its employees how they have to live life. It's just that in this case you happen to agree with them so it's A-OK!
People who prefer the office can band together and get one with WFH. People who enjoy their homes or even still an office, just their personal one, don't have that choice with RTO.
You're making a pretty standard mistake often made by people who are pro-WFH.
Many people who prefer working in an office prefer to work with other people who are also in an office. They do not want to interact with people who are working remotely.
Just to be clear, this is a 100% fine preference to have.
In this case, a company saying, "Yeah get a coworking space or whatever and meet with the remote people on Zoom" is telling these employees how to live, exactly the same as telling a WFH employee to come into the office due to RTO.
And again, just to be clear, neither of these are bad things. It just depends on your perspective.
I'm sorry, but you are the one making the "standard mistake," logically. It's the incel argument. You're trying to say this is a two-way street, that the dynamics are the same in both directions. That's obviously false. It is a one-way street here. The people who are wanting to RTO are trying to exert active control over the lives of others. "You must change your habits of life to accommodate my desires." This is not what the WFH position is doing. The WFH position isn't trying to force the RTO people to do anything.
You complaining "your unwillingness to come to the office is forcing me to remain lonely in the office" is exactly the same kind of argument, structurally, as the incel argument "your unwillingness to have sex with me is forcing me to remain a virgin." Yes, there are some things that you cannot do alone, but that does not entitle you to force me to accommodate you.
>The WFH position isn't trying to force the RTO people to do anything.
Yes, they are. They are trying to get people to work with them who don't want to work with them. This is exactly the same thing as RTO does to WFH people.
And it's fine! It's just a preference and it's fine for a company to make a decision that makes some people upset.
Those people can deal with it or they can get a new job.
This is an extreme view in my opinion, as also the previous poster showed. You can have 10 people with 5 wanting to work from the office, 5 who don't want. Or 10 that all want a hybrid model. Etc. It's not all black or white.
Pushing for only one way of working or the other is telling people how to live. It has been like this for many years because there was little or no alternative. Now "thanks to" the covid an alternative came. But hey, now let's all go back to the traditional way things have always been done.
If a company is fully remote (no offices at all) before you apply you know what you're getting into. Same for a company only working from the office full time.
The issue is the companies slowly going back in a forceful manner, taking away the alternative, and all the people feeling "lonely" or having their "way things should be" being fine with that and actually enforcing this.
All surveys show people want flexibility, yet we're doing a lot to go to the pre 2019 model.
I don't get why everyone is so defensive over this?
When a company says, "This is how we work," that is them telling you to conform your life to how they work if you want to work there. That's for any value of "this" from remote, in-office, hybrid, whatever.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It just happens that the people who are strongly in favor of remote work don't seem to acknowledge the fact that committing to remote work alienates some workers the same way that in-office work alienates some workers.
"Oh but they can go into the empty office" doesn't solve the problem the way so many pro-WFH people seem to think it does.
You can dislike tradition the same as someone dislikes the nontraditional. They're just preferences not unequivocally right or wrong choices.
Everybody just wants their employer to commit to the preference that they prefer.
"Going to an empty office": why in the first place?
If there are so many people missing the office life, why don't they go to the office? Why do they need to be forced?
I really believe given the conversations I had with some colleagues (and others in general) that people who miss the office want an office full or at least 70-80% full because of the way it has always been before covid - it doesn't matter if there is 20% of people, it's just not enough.
This is what I personally don't understand, and this is why I say people are now forcing everyone else to go back to the office. Which is not as those who WFH.
Full remote (no offices etc) is a different beast - I am not talking about that.
> "Going to an empty office": why in the first place?
I don't understand what you're asking here.
My point is that a remote worker saying, "You work in the office while I work at home" is dissatisfying to many people who like the idea of working with people in person and who dislike collaborating with others who are working remote.
> If there are so many people missing the office life, why don't they go to the office? Why do they need to be forced?
Some people don't miss the office and need to be forced to go to the office – if the company decides they want employees in the office.
I don't get what you don't understand?
If a company wants all its employees in the office then allowing some to WFH isn't going to happen. If a company wants all its employees to WFH then working in office isn't going to happen. If a company wants a hybrid solution where some employees WFH and some work in office then it's going to be dissatisfying to those who want all employees in office.
Many companies I know don't reason so black or white. You can always find compromises, by making it attractive for employees to gather once or twice a week (e.g., free breakfast on wed), for example. That's good enough for many.
> If a company wants a hybrid solution where some employees WFH and some work in office then it's going to be dissatisfying to those who want all employees in office.
Right, but why should we care?
Extremes are specific situations that must be addressed differently: I want full remote, does my company allow it or not? If yes, ok, if not, either I leave, or I find another way.
Same applies for people wanting everyone at the office: things have changed over the years, why do we want or need that? It's a decision that forces 80% or more of the workforce to behave in a certain way, just because some people have a very specific need.
If someone wants everybody at the office, it's his/her own problem to deal with, as the person who wants full remote, yet forced to meet with colleagues from time to time. Extremes have huge impact over each other.
You can't make everyone happy, but it also means you should not take away a huge benefit for many. This is why I like how some companies are doing, and yet it surprises me to read that some companies are just back to precovid like WFH never existed. It doesn't make any sense.
Exactly! You only care about your own preferences. Nothing wrong with that.
So you should not be surprised when people who want to work in an office with other employees in an office don’t care about the people who want to work remotely.
> You can't make everyone happy, but it also means you should not take away a huge benefit for many
It doesn’t mean that at all.
It means that removing what some see as a huge benefit may have negative business consequences — or it might not.
> They are trying to get people to work with them who don't want to work with them. This is exactly the same thing as RTO does to WFH people.
This is not at all the same. There is a clear difference, again, between the RTO position which requires positive action from other people (travel in to work, come into a physical location) and the WFH position, which does not require anything of their RTO colleagues beyond what the job requires anyways. How can you not see the difference here?
"They are trying to get people to work with them who don't want to work with them." What is this supposed to mean, concretely? Are you saying that because Bob is not in the office you don't want to work with Bob, but Bob is forcing you to work with him? This is not the argument WFH people are making. It is management that has a vested interest in requiring people to work together. I've never heard a serious proponent of WFH arguing that you have to work with them.
Are you saying that having remote team members requires you to use tools and practices that you don't have to in an in-person setting? I would counter that Jira, Zoom, Slack/Teams, Email, etc., all of these "remote/async" tools are not unique to remote workers. And they pre-date the normalization of remote working. Even in a fully on-prem model the vast majority of companies are still using these tools because of the convenience and control they give management, because they have offices distributed geographically, and because they want to be able to communicate beyond the in-office hours of operation. Again, this is not something that the WFH people are pushing onto the RTO people, it is something management at large has decided for the company.
Really, it's hard to take you seriously and I'm sorry for my attitude, but I can't help but see this as an extremely entitled position that is requiring other people to go out of their way to accommodate your desires. If I'm misunderstanding, please correct me and name a single positive action that a WFH proponent is requiring an in-office proponent take that would not be part of their regular job responsibilities in an in-office setting. Not a "they are depriving me of my preference because they just won't do what I want," but something they are actually requiring you to do.
Each of the 2 groups wants to inconvenience the other group. You’re free to argue “positive action” (whatever that means) or make one group out as worse than the other though. I just happen to think that both are equally right/wrong (which is to say not at all).
> I can't help but see this as an extremely entitled position that is requiring other people to go out of their way to accommodate your desires
Oh, so like when a WFH person says, “I don’t want to ever come into the office”? They’re making anyone whose desires include not working with remote workers accommodate their desires.
Again, I can’t state this plainly enough: Nobody is right and nobody is wrong here.
We’re talking about groups of people with different preferences and unfortunately these preferences are at odds. Two of these groups include:
• People who would like to work in an office only with people who are also in that office – no remote work.
• People who strongly prefer remote work.
It is a question of which group does the company choose to upset. Of course there are other groups involved as well, but you get the idea. Somebody is going to be upset to some degree.
If they choose to upset the pro-office people, they are not wrong! If they choose to upset the WFH people, they are also not wrong! If they choose to upset everyone they are not wrong!
What I mean by positive action is, you are requiring me to actively do something. I agree that we all have preferences, and often we cannot satisfy everyone's preferences, particularly when they are at odds as you have pointed out. Fair.
However, I see a very big difference between a preference that requires other people to take specific action to satisfy, and one that does not, and that's exactly the dynamic I see here. It is that expectation that other people will do things that they prefer not to do in order to satisfy your preference that I see as entitled.
As an aside, I'm not arguing right or wrong. I actually see many benefits to a good office environment (see my sibling comment in this discussion for the problem I have, basically that the majority of office environments are not good). I'm arguing coercion vs. freedom. My argument is that the RTO position is coercive in a way that the WFH position is not, that it's not the same.
I will take several simple example to try and explain how I see this difference.
Consider a Christmas party. I want to wear red and green. I don't care what other people wear. I'm not putting any restriction or obligation on other people. I can satisfy my preference through my own actions alone.
Now consider that I wan everyone to wear red and green. I am not going to be happy unless everyone is wearing red and green. In this example I cannot satisfy my preference without convincing or coercing other people to respect my preference. I am expecting my preference to win out over everyone else. I can frame the argument as "why should their (individual) preference to wear white supercede my (collective) preference that we wear green and red?" It is not the same because my preference in this scenario requires other people to actively change what they are doing.
Now, as you have said, this is not necessarily right or wrong (maybe we're taking theme photos, who knows), and I'm not making the argument that WFH is morally superior or necessarily more productive/better in any way. All I am doing is pointing out that your position is coercive in a way that the opposite is not.
> All I am doing is pointing out that your position is coercive in a way that the opposite is not.
Mission accomplished I guess?
My point is that it doesn’t matter which is more coercive because each party doesn’t care about inconveniencing and upsetting the other as long as they get what they want.
It matters because I think that this coercive aspect does has moral implications. It is a core moral position for me to be as minimally coercive as possible in all actions. Or put differently, I believe all people are equal in value and should have equal access to self-determination and freedom of choice. At some level cooperation at the level of civilization and society requires that we surrender our individual freedom to some degree, but I believe one of the strongest lessons of history is that, as a general rule, nobody is a better judge of what is "right" for a person then that person themselves.
With that as a principle, coercive choices require, morally, a higher bar of justification.
If we truly throw concern for others our the window, I believe we ultimately lose the foundation for cooperation and polite society and eventually degenerate into some form of "might makes right," and I would argue we're already there to some degree.
As you can probably guess, I am doubtful that the value of RTO justifies the coercion required, at least as currently envisioned and with offices as they are currently designed. And the proof of this, to me, is the exodus of workers from companies making this mandate.
I recognize that company ownership has the ability to require this, but they have to recognize that this kind of coercive action is counter to a spirit of cooperation and "ownership."
From the employee POV, even if I was a RTO supporter, I would not be in favor of mandatory RTO because of this coercive aspect. I prefer not to force my preferences on others in any aspect of my life.
I recognize that this may be a point where we disagree, but that is why I was so passionate to point out that the two positions are not the same. They differ on a point that is critical from my point of view.
Everyone in this conversation perpetuates a more fundamental mistake by sticking to tribalism.
You didnt get paid for commute time earlier.
COVID recovered it for you.
one hour of your time in this century, is FAR more valuable than time in any other century - simply because you can spend that time on a multitude of pursuits to enrich your life than ever before.
Anyone ambitious, self driven will fight for those 2 hours + a day lost in commutes, because they can use it for themselves.
At the margin, people who needed a few hours more to accelerate their lives will have fled bad firms.
I am fine with RTO if you start paying me for those hours.
Traditionally companies have been working from the office. This shortly switched for a period of time, showing that working remotely can be done. Going back and finding no compromises is an outdated view of work that companies and unfortunately some individuals too seem to push on their employees/ peers.
But you can't deny that anyone who doesn't want to work in an office is pushing their view on those who do want to work with others in an office, right?
RTO has benefits, just not for employees. Commercial real estate, businesses downtown, municipalities, they all benefit from this slow moving trainwreck.
Hence my choice of phrasing: "benefits to results".
There are certainly perceived benefits to management and/or related to real estate interests, including but not limited to: easier observation and suppression of employee organizing, different legal exposure profile as fewer people are casually creating business communication that may later be sifted during legal discovery, propping up commercial real estate investments, etc.
Very large household-name companies often own or otherwise control significant amounts of commercial real estate, which sit on the company's balance sheet.
If commercial real estate in general loses value, the value of these assets is also reduced, which will eventually be reflected on their balance sheets.
Even in cases where the real estate is leased rather than owned, the future rents owned are liabilities that are also a part of the companies' financial reports. If the demand for commercial real estate goes down, they won't be able to fully offset liabilities by subletting or selling their commercial real estate, which will show up as losses, write offs or write downs.
I think at the team level most individuals do want to make change and work in the most efficient way possible it's just at big multinational corporations what you can modify about your environment can be extremely limited.
Maybe. I do think there are a fair number of people who recognize there are downsides to never seeing coworkers in person. But, given the option, it's a tradeoff they'll make so they don't need to commute.
I don't understand why it is always either working in the office or "never seeing coworkers in person". I work remotely full time, and every three months, we gather with my team for a couple of days.
Those gatherings are great. Working with my team remotely is also great.
The team is very distributed at this point and budgets pretty much preclude traveling for team get-togethers. (Which I agree can be a fairly satisfying alternative to coming into an office 2 or 3 days a week.) But as it is, probably most of the people I work with I have never met in person.
I don't even need video. Worked closely with a guy for a couple years, only when I left the company and added him on linkedin did I learn he was black. There really wasn't a need for me to know much about him to get our work done.
No. But you probably do if you go out to dinner or some event with them. Over the years,I found that I could have most of my contact by phone but it really helped to have spent some some with someone in person.
> Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together.
I'll take the happiness thanks. You can keep the joy, let me know when you can share in the rewards of those achievements more robustly and I'll consider sacrificing for it.
You can’t fix or change people who live to work or think the work is full of meaning at the cost of quality of life. Deeply ingrained belief system like religions (and we know what kind of mental autoimmune response occurs when those are challenged). You can only institute guardrails against them.
If achieving great things doesn't mean the American dream of a house with a vegetable garden, a wildflower meadow, and a little patch of grass for kicking a ball around, I'm not interested.
The majority in my company have forgotten what used to be quite standard office manners before covid. Hot food in the desk area of the office used to be a real no-no, likewise having notification sounds coming out of your laptop constantly.
My office has the exact same problems, plus we have people playing music out-loud and people taking personal phone calls for what seems like 20+ minutes in the working areas. The other week I got to hear all about someone's family get-together while trying to fix production issues.
So, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the population never had the option of remote work. The professional class bemoaning that they are being "forced" back to the office (translation: they won't pay you to work at home) is beyond a 1st World problem; it's a 1st World professional class problem. Even surgeons and nurses and dentists have to be "at work" in order to work, for the most part. The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
This reads like "you better clean your plate, there are starving kids in Africa!"
Yes, some people don't have the option of remote work, but if you have that option, how does that affect those that don't? Cleaning my plate won't feed starving kids in Africa, and taking shit over working from home doesn't help people whose jobs require physical presence.
Some people can work from home, and entire fields can't. So what? How is that relevant? Some jobs just don't require physical presence and business owners don't like that for a variety of unfair reasons. People who can work from home are being treated unfairly. How does that affect kids in Africa? Does it hurt them? Help them? Or are they utterly irrelevant to the problem at hand?
The existence of farmers doesn't really have a single thing to do with call center workers taking calls at home. Of course farmers can't farm remotely, but that's utterly irrelevant. No one is trying to force farmers and nurses to dramatically change their work environment on the whim of some middle manager who read a really good thinkpiece from WSJ.
Discussion about this problem doesn't mention doctors and farmers because the conversation is not about them in the same way that it's not about starving kids in Africa
This is a very bad take in multiple ways. Firstly, problems in the professional workplace need to be discussed too. And that's not just for the benefit of the "professional class" if these people work more efficiently at home it's better for both them and everyone else, the company, the people who pay for the services of that company, the world thanks to fewer driving emissions.
Secondly, you most be very out of touch to think that everyone who can work from home is a 180,000 a year Peet's coffee filled software engineer. Lots and lots of lower wage, lower education jobs can work from home but are getting forced to the office. Executive assistants, customer support, marketers, copywriters, I could list a lot more.
These are the worst comments on HN, just ultra lazy defense of the status quo with no real meat to it.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
I stopped caring about what random strangers think when I was in high school. The correct answer to this is to tell these random people who have no skin in the game to fuck off.
I think your answer basically proves his point that we are becoming a highly entitled group of people. We struggle to empathize with other workers and, I would say, companies and managers. We tell ourselves this very simplistic stories like "all managers are bad", "all office work is a waste of time", "I should just get tasks on my async proj manager tool". I am telling you, with this level of entitlement, just hope the tech industry keeps growing so the job market remains an employees' market.
But what is the point? If we can all agree that going to the office sucks, how is the "professional class" being forced back in the office make the other workers' day suck less?
I'd argue it's quite the opposite!
If I stay at home, I'm one less person compressing them in the metro, or helping gridlock the highways or taking up parking spaces (I live in the city where parking is scarce for pretty much everyone). If I can work remotely every day, I'm likely to leave my apartment in the city center and go live somewhere far away. That's one less person competing for housing.
We are also in the class that's driving housing prices up (via geographic arbitrage) and pricing out a lot of forced in-person workers (who actually live "far away" as you said, and not in the city center). And that does breed a lot of resentment.
So in some ways (i.e. housing prices), you working from home does directly make these people lives worse, as you are now their competition for real-estate.
> So in some ways (i.e. housing prices), you working from home does directly make these people lives worse, as you are now their competition for real-estate.
But if enough people like me move out from the city, there's a possibility that prices will go down in the cities, right? So that should help the people who need to be physically present at work.
Why is it when employees expect more it's "entitlement", but when managers do so it's just business as usual? Especially considering it's the employees creating the value.
I think it's fair to expect employees to exert the mental effort to empathize with the companies they work for when the companies show effort to do likewise.
Early in my career, a senior colleague used to reply to complaints with the simple statement "you only get the company/boss that you deserve".
By that, he meant that if you complained, you were always free to leave and find a better fit elsewhere. I learnt to appreciate that saying as I grew older.
If you think you deserve a better office space / coworkers / manager / CEO, then go look for it elsewhere. If you don't find it, then you are probably in the place you deserve, like it or not.
Yesterday morning I woke up and it was raining. I could hear that sloshing sound as cars streamed past outside carrying people to work and school. It's a sound I've hated for as long as I can remember because it means a miserable wet and grey morning with everyone seeming slightly depressed.
I didn't have to go outside that day, but I'll never forget how lucky I am and that other people still have to.
But what difference does it make? I can feel sorry for people all day but I can't stop the rain.
On the other hand, nobody listened to people like me who were saying open offices were bad for us and we can't concentrate properly in them. So much for empathy.
The real world is just high school with bigger stakes. You can "not care" all you want as long as you're quiet about it. But if you start badmouthing the bully or whining in class every day about not having enough time to eat lunch, you might improve things but there's a much higher chance it just turns out bad for you.
Carbon emissions are literally killing people, and are bound to kill many more millions if we don't change our ways.
So if the cooks and nurses and truck drivers have no choice, then I'd say that it's our duty to work remotely in order to do our part in reducing emissions.
A place I used to work you had people transporting their 100kg sack of meat in a 2000kg car over 100 miles every single day just to place said sack of meat at a desk and be on Zoom (well, Skype at the time) calls all day.
And this happened day in day out with nobody ever questioning the sanity of such a practice.
Exactly - these same cooks and nurses are so anti-worker that they can’t see fellow workers having a positive outcome and be pleased, while simultaneously dealing with less traffic?
Press X to doubt; sounds like billionaire brainwashing noise to me.
Skepticism about the environmental impact and motivations of the tech sector - an industry that consumes vast amounts of energy for largely intangible ends. I suspect you've got your story flipped on it's head and the people with the largest impact are not cooks, nurses, and truck drivers, but software engineers.
The comment you replied to asked us to consider the views of the rest of the population. Well, my point is that framing the WFH/RTO debate as a duty to the environment while selling ads for a living does indeed look entitled and a bit spoiled.
People in every profession would be offended by meaningless requirements coming from the top without any plausible justification. Construction workers, truck drivers etc. understand full well why the need to show up. So do software engineers who need to work on physical devices that they can't have at home.
I actually think professional class is more prone to tolerate this attitude from the management, because it's what corporate environment teaches to do.
I personally saw WFH as another step in the advancement of labor that is not completely unlike 40h work week. Yes, not everyone can get it, but it is clear that:
1. it can work
2. it is against existing, entrenched interests
Hence the tension.
FWIW, our company just mandated RTO and there was push back, because the person making the decision made it basically within a week from publishing date and a lot of people have kids so it is not exactly a flip a switch kind of situation PLUS there are a couple of high visibility projects that rely on staff good will to push it past the finish line. No flexibility from company means no flexibility from us ( no more calls after 5 to deal with fires and so on ).
I accept not all jobs are ready for WFH ( butcher, surgeon and so on ), but some absolutely are.
WFH isn't about not going to the office. It's about breaking real estate. If the professional class can do that, it actually benefits everyone by taking some of the pressure off hyperinflated real estate markets in major cities. We could also see some repurposing of commercial space to residential, which would further take the pressure off.
If you as a professional class worker think the rent is too damn high, consider how insane it is for people who make less and work longer hours.
It's become clear to me that real estate is the economic problem, at least in the US. I said the economic problem, singular. I don't think any other issue compares.
The phenomenon of younger generations feeling poorer than their parents is largely attributable to real estate costs. I think real estate is at the root of a ton more problems too: homelessness (for obvious reasons), collapsing birth rates, low rates of family formation, even crime. Real estate is basically cannibalizing the future.
Your comment is much more insightful than 99% of the responses, which mostly seem just angry. But I have to think that the primary reason for the real estate problem (which, I agree, is quite serious and the cause of many other issues) is that housing became financialized, and the primary way for the middle class to save money. It doesn't have to be that way; mobile homes, for example, do not work like this, they work more like cars (financially). The dearth of people working from the office in NYC or SF lately does not seem to have made any meaningful dent in the rent, primarily because the drivers of it were financial.
If a restaurant line cook could work from home they very well might want to. Software work can, most of the time, be done from home. So the question of if it should be done from home is valuable and worthy of discussion.
All workers deserve to have a say in their working conditions.
How one talks about it can be entitled or spoiled sounding, but the desire to influence and change one's working conditions is noble and in common with great majority of workers.
When my children were small I started working remotely while my partner worked in an office still. I looked for a remote job so that rather than being in a office and going to get some coffee I was excited to instead get to see my 8 month of doing some baby biz on my coffee break.
What a wonderful privilege it was during that age of growth. How great it would be for more people to have that experience (which was very common before industrialization).
The thing is that the office is not what it was before. The hybrid office with its roaming desks is a nightmare. I hate it so much.
Going to the office before the pandemic was totally different. Even though I did work from home regularly then too. But at the office I had the same colleagues around me (even though my direct colleagues were all in different locations). I had my own desk with my stuff. Now I just have a locker and I'm a dumb number that nobody cares about. I hate the company.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
They decided to get into a profession they doesn't have working from home as an option. They can change if they want.
Also I don't really give a F if other people think I'm spoiled.
The thing is that the current environment is sort of what you'd expect if most people don't come in most days any longer. I think some companies are giving a permanent desk to people who come in most days but most coworkers are probably still not coming in regularly.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
My experience is that the rest of the population has very little day-to-day contact with people like me and remote work only reduces it, so they simply don't care.
I get some vague interest in the details of my life when salaries are mentioned, but when I explain what kind of hoops you have to jump and what kind of lifestyle you have to lead (desk job and learning after hours) to get to these figures, interest is usually lost.
Overall people are way less interested in how strangers live their lives and visibly less envious than one would think. For most this line of work is boring and soul crushing and they don't think the salary makes it worth it.
I don't think the fact that remote work is not possible for other professionals is relevant. If it is about fairness, you could say it is even an advantage for other workers since it means less traffic congestion, better access to restaurant and less land use.
I've been WFH for a decade, at the end of the day, if i'm forced to come in to an office then i'll just take my business elsewhere. There are plenty of companies willing to pay me for my time and more than happy to have me work remote. I don't see how i could possibly be the only one.
This reads like some crab mentality; since heroic nurses and factory workers can’t work remotely then we should bemoan those who can and do work remotely.
Should we also cancel telehealth programs so those nurses that actually do work remotely don’t become spoiled and entitled?
I have flipped burgers, assembled camcorders, and driven airport shuttles. The thing about those jobs is that the workspace was well designed by someone who understood the tasks. Writing quality software requires long quiet concentration, yet we keep cheaping out on open plan desks.
There is a way of generalizing this to all of them, though, which is: Why should any of them have to do anything they don't actually have to do for their job? A relevant example to many hourly jobs might be managers being inflexible in their hours more-or-less just because they can. (Though this has gotten "better" as more and more businesses staff down and they're being inflexible because they have to be to be open at all... which is not exactly manifesting as an improvement for the worker, though.) Doctors might wonder why they went to school for over a decade and have 1.5 administrators per doctor and still need to spend the majority of their time filling out paperwork. Etc.
* Employers should pay the cost of employee travel to work, at least count the time spent traveling to work as work hours. If I'm driving into work it's not really my free time.
* If I lived near my workplace, I wouldn't care about working from home so much. Society has done something seriously wrong where most people cannot live near where they work.
* By getting the professional class off the roads, traffic is better for those who have to work in person. By tearing down the offices that aren't really needed and replacing with residential and other mixed use, we might have a shot at rearranging things where the people that need to be physically present at work can live close to work.
Spoiled, or righteous indignation? Never have we been more productive as individuals, and efficient as an org. And no one has presented any actual functional reason to be in an office. No one wants to take a step backwards.
No. It's forced in-office that is a problem which impacts all desk jockeys, regardless of what bucket their country or neighborhood gets slotted into.
The fact that other roles cannot work remote is beside the point. People want a reasonable say in their work environment regardless of the nature of their work. And they'll negotiate accordingly if the work requires physical presence.
Desk workers aren't spoiled for pointing out the waste and abuse of involuntary butt-in-seats policies. The accusation comes across as trying to incite discord.
This is crab bucket thinking. Dragging people to the office doesn't improve the plight of other workers.
Keeping more people away from commutes though does reduce traffic for those who need to get around.
Central commercial real estate could actually provide useful things, rather then "places people sit at computers they could do anywhere".
Distributing the work force out means more mixing of class and profession. Service jobs can be closer to where people live because they're more distributed.
>" The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled."
So people who can work from home should go to the office to satisfy "the rest of the population"? This is some novel concept. Have you tried approaching company owners and CEO and ask them to make their compensation to be more in line with the general population as well?
Nearly anything can be bucketed up into some kind of "this is an N-class issue, think of the non-N class!", so I am not sure this is a great approach to problem solving. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, investors, CEOs, world leaders all have problems and they all want solutions. My doctor who exists in the top 0.1% is still entitled to say, demand working less than 80 hour weeks and whatever else their "class" problems entail.
if their professions allowed them to work from home they should be
don't know what this argument is supposed to be? seems like something a ceo made up to emotionally justify their position rather than based in any sort of objective reasoning
things shouldn't get better because other things haven't gotten better? is that the crux of your argument?
What? Is your argument basically "you can't have problems because other people have problems too"?
My partner is a nurse. Of course she can't work from home. Her job is literally touching people, putting things in them and taking things out.
They're not making her go to the hospital just to fuck with her.
My job, on the other hand, does not involve physical contact. In fact, I don't even need to leave home, as demonstrated by years of working at home. I deliver value at home so I get paid for it. It's as simple as that really. It's completely irrelevant how other people deliver their value.
I once worked in an office where one of our engineers ended up moving out of the open office into an office of his own.
He would often get offended in the open office around the other engineers. Why? Language. He once asked me not to say "damn" around him because he's very religious.
It was a C/C++/C# codebase, so that was never going to happen.
Having your own private bathroom is a really underrated perk of WFH. There are of course many more benefits to WFH, but using your own bathroom is something no office and their disgusting communal bathrooms could ever compete with.
Having your own bathroom is the best, but one thing I liked when I worked in Italy is that they had real bathrooms in most offices. It's very normal to have a little room with a door that fully closes, rather than those stalls where you can see people's feet, as well as smell and hear everything.
I mean, I kind of get having that kind of thing in, say, an airport or somewhere with security concerns, but being treated like that in an office environment is horrible.
To add to this, when there are annoying things like that in the office.. most places there's no people in charge. There are facilities teams but they don't really care if the toilet flush is not powerful enough, or if one of the taps is leaking, or a quarter of the chairs are wonky.. and you can't really say it to your direct manager since it is not work related.
The company I work for took the opportunity to switch things up at the office during the pandemic. One was switching to what can only be described as 1/2-ply toilet paper with perforated designs. They bragged about how much it saved while mandating back to the office. They also swamped out the food at the cafe, good luck getting anything fresh.
No thanks, I'll take my 2 ply, my own toilet, and actual nutritious lunches.
Okay, so I have this idea. And by idea I mean effectively a fever dream: Separate building connected by underground tunnel with one of those moving sidewalks and the building is filled with personal bathrooms for each employee.
Each employee is given a small budget and menu where they can decide what amenities their bathroom gets stocked with. You can decorate it according to your whims.
There's so many logistical and even geometric problems with the idea. But just imagine the retention numbers if someone was actually able to pull it off. You have your own personal bathroom overlooking a serene wooded area, wall mounted TV doing sports ball recap, small private library, and scented candle with that sent you can't get enough of.
[Although, honestly, I would be happy if they just made the toilet stall dividers go from the floor to the ceiling.]
I am curious that nobody has not mentioned a great movie "Office Space". A brilliant sarcastic comedy about office culture in the late nineties. I think the time is ripe for a sequel.
It is a classic for a reason. Consider watching "Corner Office". It is not in the same category and frankly it is a little weird, and the jokes are a hit or miss, BUT.. there are moments that capture office life a little too well.
The author really doesn’t help their point by dwelling on the sacrifice of the individual for the team. A team that doesn’t maximize the value of the individuals by finding ways they complement each other in their differences will always be less than it could be. And too much have we asked individuals to sacrifice for too long for too little.
The way we used to work is an emergent reality that had begun to fray long before the pandemic, see multilocation strategies, selective remote working options, hotel seating with over subscribed occupancy. The cost of commercial real estate was already being eyed carefully. As a senior executive in multinational mega corps I can tell you definitively “bring your own office” in 2019 was seen as bigger than “bring your own device” in terms of potential to reduce cost, increase productivity, and maximize EPS. The biggest barrier was the 5-10 year real estate development and tax abatement cycles, but you were already seeing compression of available seating and over subscription with a 10 year plan to compress to only essential coworking. Further, while panned now, the WeWork model was seen as the future - essentially elastic occupancy as opex, burstable cloud like office space flexibly located where the talent lives.
The pandemic accelerated this stepwise from 20% to 100% overnight. I could see it in the eyes of the CEOs as they saw the culture they understood disappear overnight and the emotional entrenchment that “this can’t be allowed to persist.” Despite all the prior plans and agreement, an emotional reaction took hold. They saw the productivity improvements and were unswayed. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about productivity, it wasn’t about efficiencies. It was about a way of living being threatened, a way the CEOs were manifestly beneficiaries of, and was the only lifestyle they knew and understood. They didn’t want things to change. To buttress their desires, tax abatements and leases obligated use of the real estate. But make no mistake, the RTO movement is almost entirely driven by a near maniacal gripping onto a way of life the decision makers benefited from and can’t let go of.
Joy of the team, sacrificing the individual for the greater good, watercooler serendipity, “think of the kids,” etc, are all smokescreens for the real motivations: fear of an unraveling of the emergent reality that todays leaders owe their entire successful career to, and at that level, that’s all they have in their life. That office culture is literally the cornerstone of their identity, and being more or less all narcissists, they believe their identity is the cornerstone to the world.
The rest of the article is pretty good. I wouldn’t stop reading based on the intro.
The essence is there’s a continuum of work styles along a two dimensional system (in office - remote / sync - asynch). Each quadrant has its own benefits. They seem to assert the middle, hybrid, is the worst of all worlds, and it’s better to pick a style and lean into it. They offer a variety of ways to lean into a style.
IMO I think this is overly simplistic and the most efficient reality, and likely the emergent one we land in within 10 years, is a mixed reality. Coworking works well for some, doesn’t for others. The skills for a remote workplace benefit a multi location team, a hybrid team, or a fully remote team equally. Some tasks are async, some are sync. Once a team has one person not on site, the team only functions as a remote team; otherwise the person not onsite isn’t a part of the team. Recognizing that any team level work would be handled as if everyone were remote.
There will be a contingent who work best in an office. They will continue to have one, albeit a smaller space with fewer and fewer amenities as the occupancy cost / person is squeezed. Those that work best remotely will land at a place that values them for the way they work best. We will continue to refine our work protocols to accommodate this new way of working. The CEOs of today will become the CEOs of yesterday. The new CEOs will be the ones who emerged ahead during the pandemic. The new mid level will be the ones who excelled in remote school and remote entry level.
Bring your own office will become the buzz word. Boards will see the cold hard reality of occupancy cost per head in office rising relentlessly. Tax abatements and leases will have frayed. Then, either the weworks of today or its replacement will have its day.
I once had a former employer force me to take an espresso machine home that I had brought to work because it created a situation where a different shift was coming to our teams area to use it when we weren’t there and they were concerned by the liability. Very non-specific concerns, I might add. So rather than ensure teams had access to real coffee they banned employees having their own coffee equipment so we can all commiserate together over the bottom dollar filth in the break room.
This is the type of basic shit most companies can’t get right, much less the far more complicated challenges involved in creating positive team dynamics.
I have no faith that any sufficiently large company can make an inviting office environment, and this is a major reason why I am a staunch remote work advocate.