Of course employers want people to come back. They have millions if not billions of dollars in real estate liabilities that are effectively useless. As an aside, I wonder if there is some clever way to get a tax write off for office space that went unused due to a global pandemic - or writing off an office entirely as a loss.
If employers able to get productive work out of employees who aren't using that real estate, the real problem is getting the real estate costs off their books, not getting the butts back in seats in some arbitrary office location.
This is a problem for landlords, not employers.
My current company hasn't made such a demand, but I've also heard that in others in this country about 20% of people actually prefer to work in person daily, everyone else seems to work remotely a lot of the time.
Now, I'm probably under a certain sampling bias here, but the few times I recently went into the office, it seemed comparatively empty, unless a team had decided to meet up in person for whatever reason.
I guess not everyone enjoys the commute, especially in pretty cold weather (or just thrives while working remotely for a plethora of reasons).
I'm going to make up some dumb numbers: suppose people are 5% more productive in the office, but the office has an amortized cost of 10% total compensation. You shouldn't open an office. But say you've purchased an office outright, and maintenance is now only 2% of the cost of total compensation (8% of cost was paid up front). In that case, you would want people in the office.
In the real world, this is more complicated, because you also add in employee preferences as a reason for or against an office, you can't neatly measure productivity, you probably didn't buy the office in cash, you leased it, or borrowed money to buy it...).
Yes, and now, let's define "employers."
None of the engineers I know want to be back in the office, including a lot of folks whom I'd call a "manager." At best, we want to be there 1 or 2 days of the week, or month, or financial quarter. We always knew that we got the short end of the stick with office politics, with petty concerns like how well-dressed we were, or how tall we were, or what elitist culture people think we're from (or not).
The pandemic really showed up how much we were the losers of that whole game because of how it shifted the dynamic so that it really did become about what you did for your team. And the thing about engineering, at least on the software side, is that it's still mostly ground-up and flat. Except for a company here or there that's actually led by a McKinsey consultant, the entire engineering org isn't interested in those games, and that includes our bosses.
This.
Imagine redoing The Office (either version), but with everyone working remotely. Barely any show left. It would consist only of "can you hear me?" and banter while waiting for everyone important to join and "hey, you're muted!"
Yep. I started a job early this year and the job posting said it was in person but I'm the only one on my team in my state. My manager just didn't have company approval to post a remote position but the fact that there's an office near me gave her the ability to hire me. Now that I'm employed, it's a fairly easy process to switch to remote if I want. I personally just use the office space like a wework so haven't applied to be remote but it's definitely an option.
Something the remote crowd might not realize is happening.
Something the in-person crowd might want to consider is that a lot of interesting roles are going to involve lots of work with people who aren't in the room with you no matter whether you're in office or WFH. If you go in being highly vocal about no remote work, you may not be considered for roles that aren't fully remote but do involve a lot of videoconferencing.
And maybe that's OK with you, but do think about it.
Even my last fully-classified job, where had to be in office because we could only work from a SCIF, we still had SCIFs in Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and PA and that worked fine. Maybe because we weren't Scrum and there were only 2-3 meetings a week everyone had to go to? Theoretically, software development should be a job that is possible to do in a mostly asynchronous, largely work alone manner. Linux, GNU, and other gigantic open source projects seem to have gotten along fine for decades without needing offices. Even when I was last in the Army working in the 1st CAV HQ at Fort Hood, we had brigade HQs in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, and South Korea and that worked fine. And, of course, when I was at Platoon/Company level, I was a tank commander. Obviously, during maneuvers, you can only communicate with the other tank crews via radio. We managed somehow.
Unless you're sitting within speaking range of every person you work with, you're surely sending them messages via some chat platform or e-mail anyway, aren't you?
Consider the pre-pandemic prevalence of "phone booths" and one person conference rooms, so you can be in a meeting as the only local attendee. As far as the other location is considered, you are remote just with access to a bigger coffee maker.
If this is not shared with the non-engineering staff, then we'll end up with (even more of) a two-stream staffing problem - non-engineers will be social at work hanging out together, engineers will be productive at work being ignored.
And the implied threat of "you're less employable if you want to work remotely" is utterly pointless when applied to engineers. We're employable based on productivity not sociability. Thus it has always been.
Also seeing enough whole companies buing fully into remote, and more and more remote teams happily working together.. and tbh there sure are jobs/people for which this doesn't work out - but then good that there is more for both sides?
For those it works it is not just a lot of saved time, the flexibility to hire anyone anywhere (a lot of people are not ready to move their whole life for a new work) but also just great for environmental impact, imo.
Not ironclad, a place could be implementing it decently, but they'd have to do some convincing. (Being remote pre-pandemic would help.)
No wonder I never find many jobs in "Remote, OR!"
For me return to office would be 60% pay cut. Good luck finding another developer :)
I would not consider that to be "easily" even for mid-tier devs.
If you can't tell if you are a special snowflake or not, you can check if your company behaves you like one. Getting promotions, extra RSUs or very high bonuses should be an indicator
Everywhere I went companies had bold plans regarding hiring, but somehow never managed to realise them.
Definitely people I trust no matter what their schedule. Definitely people who worked fine before pandemic and people I hired during the pandemic that are close to useless and just pretend to work if they’re not in the office.
Someone sitting at a desk is not evidence of productivity.
What makes you think they'd be any different in an office? Have you actually walked around an office before? A Significant portion of people are faffing about for the majority of the day. But in remote there's no need to do kabuki and swap tabs whenever your boss walks by so you look busy.
This doesn't actually tell us anything nor did the source linked in the article clarify further.
For real though if you aren’t aware- it’s a social media platform for work(ing ‘professionals’).
Seriously musha68k, steer clear - Facebook but with even weirder content
A lot of things like 'I ignored my family for work' with applauding
Remote is one property of a job to select for.
You may not value it high enough to compromise on other parameters.
Sure, there aren't enough remote jobs for everyone to have one.
But everyone doesn't want a remote job, just like everyone wants a high-paying job. (Sure, everyone wants money. But they want to work excessive hours, or work in a field they find questionable? Well, maybe high pay isn't always a good trade-off either.)
There are endless startups that are hiring which are 100% remote, but they aren't handing out 500k comp packages for staff level engineers though. It's a pretty obvious case of wanting your cake and eating it at the same time.
Another explanation could be: High-paying tech industry jobs are more likely to offer WFH, and are more competitive than low-paying service-industry jobs. There are more service industry job postings, but more people applying for each tech job posting. Thus, 15% of postings offer WFH, but 50% of applications go to WFH positions. Though true, this is not evidence for the conclusion they're drawing.
Not saying this is the explanation, I'm saying that they're picking out one element of a job posting and drawing conclusions from it.
Whether that salary difference is +10% or +90% I would expect it to show up in salary data eventually, and that might be a more accurate indication of the magnitude of the mismatch than job postings.
I personally think the remote work genie is out of the bottle and it's here to stay! Unless it's a very collaborative phase or (big) hardware related like automotive there will be plenty of remote jobs.
In my opinion very few jobs should be posted as remote but adjusted to remote if that does not hurt productivity.
50% of applications were asking for remote work in one of the positions that offered remote work (15% of the total LinkedIn openings). That's a 3:1 applications to jobs ratio.
So what!?
Saying "there aren't enough remote jobs" makes the assumption of a 1:1 match ratio: 1 job opening will be filled by 1 applicant. But that's never true. Forget about the remote jobs. What's the applications to job openings ratio for the ones that do not offer remote work?
