At some point I would like people to quit vilifying a completely legitimate business setup because it doesn't fit their world view.
I want to be in the office, and I prefer it when my coworkers are there too. I respect that not everyone feels the same - but I do think it is up to the employer to decide. So I will be picking companies that suit my preferences.
Pushing people back to the office with nothing else is incredibly tonedeaf to the current state and trend of the world. This despite many of them putting up the image they care about these things.
If you're not happy, leave and work for a company that better matches what you're looking for. I would be furious if my ex-employer was giving me bad references just because I wanted to work-from-home or asked for a higher salary. And I would similarly not go around vilifying my ex-employer just because they wanted to offer me a lower salary or have me in the office regularly.
That's not similar at all. The employer has all the power and money, not the individual. If the individual did, they wouldn't need to work anymore.
I can't help but wonder if this is the flip side to the Silicon Valley mantra of "if you want a raise, job hop," where hitting your four-year anniversary with the same company makes you an old-timer and gets people on HN asking you if you're stupid. (Hopefully more politely than that, but that's absolutely the subtext of some recent message threads I've seen.) If the expectation on the company side is that they shouldn't plan on on any engineering staff being there more than a few years, then maybe it tacitly selects for "give employees a big bonus and lots of perks and just don't worry about raises because there ain't nothin' you can do to keep 'em".
And, of course, there's a chicken-or-egg aspect to that: did job-hopping become the norm because companies aren't giving them enough reason to stay, or vice-versa? When I moved out to Silicon Valley close to twenty years ago, I'd have placed the blame for that particular new normal on the companies, but after having read HN for the better part of the last decade, I'm considerably less certain of that.
I think that comes from misreading stats. If a company has huge growth and hires a bunch of new people, the average lifespan of an employee will obviously go down.
There's many well known Apple engineers (in OS software at least) who've been there for decades.
Why? Seriously, many other things aren't, so why should this be? I don't mean WFH should be forced to the employer and to all employees - I mean it should be up to the employee to decide.
The "completely legitimate business setup" is also a huge negative for climate change, car pollution, road congestion, family/personal life time (including time with kids), business and close residential areas rent (since people having to commute try to leave somewhat close and don't have total free choice of where to buy/rent property), and several other things.
Not to mention anachronistic from the same companies that sell "mobility" and "freedom" as achieved with mobile phones and internet services...
Negotiation is clearly in play before the arrangement starts, willing buyer and willing seller and so on.
After the "sale" the employer has most of the power, but the employee has a nuke - they can quit. Usually the employer doesn't want them to quit, so will make unilateral changes to the contract in the employ yes favor from time to time (ie raises etc).
Unfortunately if you are below a certain age, or of a specific skill set, the employer expects you to trigger the nuke anyway, and nothing they do can prevent that, so frankly they don't spend too much energy or money trying to make you stay.
While employees can negotiate after employment has started, they don't have much leverage other than "or I'll leave". And one can only play that card so many times before it's easier just to let you leave.
Employers have legitimate reasons for wanting non-remote workers, but those reasons don't matter to employees. Indeed most employees can't even imagine what those reasons are, or simply discount them as being meaningless. That's OK, there's a reason they are employees and not running businesses.
So to answer your question, employers decide WFH because they have all the power. They figure the upside is worth changing staff over - some will leave, for sure, but there are others out there waiting to fill that slot.
Of course other companies have different priorities and goals and are happy to employ WFH employees, so there's a home for folk who prefer that as well.
Or, if you want the autonomy, and power, (and risk) that being the employer brings you, then by all means start your own business and build a company and culture you'd like to work at.
If there is no reason for software developers (or other IT professionals who don’t have to have physical access to the servers to do their jobs) to be in the office, and we have been far more productive at home than we have been in an office that requires 2 hours of commute, extra expenditures for food, an increased chance of viral infection, noise cancelling headphones so you don’t have to deal with the stupid gossip a couple aisles over just to focus on the task at hand, then should we be required to come in just because others prefer it when their coworkers are there too?
Can’t we just leave it up the choice of the people who are working how they would prefer to work? Or do we have to enforce a skeuomorphic working arrangement on everyone just because our managers like it better?
Past entry level we expect engineers to also be working with their colleagues to determine what to build, when, and how. In an emergency, doing this on Zoom beats not trying at all. That’s about the best I can say for it.
If you really can’t afford to live closer than an hour to your office as a software engineer, you’re woefully underpaid. More likely that is the point in tradeoff-space that you chose.
This is with a large Santa Clara-based tech company, and they have competitive rates in compensation to FAANG - though that may be misleading. For example I have had a lot of experience working adjacent to people working at Apple, and it's on my list of "Never Work Here" due to the culture, expectations of time, lack of work-life balance, and all while not compensating any more for those asks. Other friends who work for some other companies on that list, however, seem a lot happier. So in my experience lumping them together is a mistake.
Previously, I worked for a British company in the US in an office with some 4 total people on my team, that I found was a near perfect setup - the main company remote and a different timezone effectively meant all communication and meetings happened in the mornings US time, allowing the majority of the day to really get into complex stuff with no interruptions. And a small team allowed for some in-person whiteboard debugging and design discussion and bouncing ideas off people, but with a small team it wasn't a constant distraction.
I found that to be my personal "Perfect Balance" - and I feel I miss that.
