Which is it?
As for the layoffs, I don't have anything to add to that. There a Microsoft decision.
It's short term benefits for all, but ultimately the workers will lose out.
In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.
Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcasm. One of the reasons I didn’t take a remote job last year was the lack of deep social connections I’ve experienced in other remote work.
I’ve observed that the best work is often done by small teams with deep social connections. Think the original Mac team in 1983 or id software in the early 90s. I want to like and even love some of the people I work with, even if the time is short and I’m fired. Because life is short and even a couple years with someone I connected with is valuable when it’s 8 hours a day for 1/40 of my life.
That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have any personal relationships. No hard choices then.
yea and I already feel those effects. had an office for one month and then they closed it in order to transfer elsewhere. Was already configured to WFH so no issue transitioning. Meanwhile I haven't seen a human face in 2 weeks and haven't interacted with someone my age in 3 months. I guess that is great for true hermits, but I liked SOME interaction.
This also seems to have an indirect impact on my career aspects. Some of the best parts of office was the growth as you worked directly with experts in your domain and seeing how they tick and hearing their war stories. You can hear all that passively in a cafeteria as you're on break. That goes away and I now interact with maybe 5-6 people max per week, and I wonder if I am even growing anymore.
Oh well at least the pay is good.
People switch jobs frequently is the norm anyway.
Factor in that with the boomers retiring, the workforce is much smaller, especially among those with more experience. Unemployment is expected to stay low for some time (in the US at least), which means workers have more power. This is especially true for work that requires more experience or education. Those roles will be harder to fill overall, and the expected outputs are higher.
As a person working in a fully remote, global company... and as a hiring manager, I can attest to the challenges in hiring and maintaining a remote workforce. Hiring is tough, but keeping employees is also tough... because it is so easy to leave in a time of low unemployment.
But.. that's actually great? With more companies accepting remote work as just your average way of doing business means what I can fire my boss too, without breaking a sweat. Because I would have ample opportunities to find another, similar, remote work just easily. Oh, I don't need to take the day off for the interview.
I think you meant " fully takING advantafe of remote work ". Not to nitpick. I just genuinely thought you meant you were taken advantage of by your employer.
Those sound like benefits to many.
> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.
This is only a negative for people who were already making absurdly high incomes in HCOL areas. For many people away from the coasts, salaries are now higher because they have access to the kinds of jobs and companies they didn’t before.
> Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.
Has this every not been the case? Besides, there are only two kinds of layoffs. Massive ones that do not take performance into account, and rarely take input from your direct manager about who is going and who is staying. On the other hand, for layoffs in which performance is taken into account, I’m sure many prefer the criteria to be more about their work than how chummy they are with the boss and how well they politick.
I can see how these might be disadvantages for a certain kind of worker, but for other kinds they are huge wins.
I don't live there anymore but in my home county in Eastern Europe, the WFH boom from 2020 brought in thousands of well paying tech jobs from US companies which might have never arrived if not for Covid. Tech workers there are making bank now, relative to local CoL.
Who knows, maybe this trend will accelerate now that the tap of zero interest money which enabled companie to out-bid each other for SV labor has dried out and many start-up and scale-ups need to actually be profitable for a change, they might look towards skilled remote workers abroad to fill their ranks till the next bull run.
Interesting times ahead indeed.
This goes both ways for employer and employee
This appears to be the lump of labor fallacy. Other employers are now competing for those workers too!
The UK has lower salaries than west coast US and a large pool of suitable workers.
Big tech has a presence but why haven’t they moved their main operations to the UK?
:)
Cities need to downsize but at the same time regionalize. Smaller cities with HSR and equivalent will work to reduce the need for individual vehicles, which saves on costs, environment, energy consumption, and people's overall health.
Working in a local community is much better for everyone involved than people spending 1+ hours each way every day to get from their home to their work and back again.
The same applies to retail, hospitality and most other service industries.
Manufacturing (particularly heavy industry) is better to be localized to transport hubs (rail, river, sea ports) because of the tonnage that has to be moved in and out, as well as localizing the polluting and environmental degradation (no one really wants to live next to a steel mill).
The latest CT is that the WEF is trying to somehow lock people into their suburb and restrict freedom of travel. That's complete and utter nonsense.
E.g. the option for remote work is really nice for many and may be required to be viable in the future... but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office? And does it really just make us more expendable?
I do not believe I am special in any way but I am remote since 2000 and while working with the clients I often work with teams. At no point I felt like I am loosing some "fundamental part". Maybe because work team is work team and nothing more. I do not consider work as a source of friends even though I have acquired couple this way. Mostly I have friends outside of work.
In some ways yes. It is much harder to brainstorm through conference calls for example.
>And does it really just make us more expendable?
technically yes. It's very easy to be "forgotten" in a remote setting if your job is isolated out. They won't even have a face to place on someone when it comes to re-orgs.
The HN Community isn't.
HN isn't a coherent whole with one voice.
And, as a sibling comment pointed out, neither, typically, is any individual contributor. We can even change our opinions.
It may be 'easier' to fire people when you don't have to deal with their physical presence, but I doubt that factors much into the decision overall. My bet is that companies are battening down the hatches because they see strong headwinds economically (or are using other layoffs as an excuse to clean house).
Good companies will retain good talent. They won't jettison their valued contributors just to have their competition scoop them up.
The emphasis here is on Good. Bad companies likely will jettison many of their good employees, either by setting bad policies and having them opt out, or by firing them direction because they aren't paying attention. Remote work is one of those factors that some companies are struggling to set policies for.
Unfortunately, there are many 'bad' companies, and many people on HN work for them.
If you can't get enough good employees in office, then it is smarter to go 100% remote as you now have an easier time hiring and working globally.
Marketing teams, creatives and other similar groups need more face-to-face interaction because what they're creating is all about interaction, with the company's customers, their consumers (if not B2C), etc.
Those building the product after the marketing and other designers have created their designs don't require as much F2F time. They need whiteboards and C4 diagrams (in IT at least) when architecting systems, as well as some team F2F for thrashing out system level functionality and how it will be implemented (shared services etc).
But an individual developer, writing code, doesn't need F2F time with anyone. They need the capability to be available (video calls, text chat etc), but it's not an inherent requirement.
Having done an in-office RIF and a remote-in-COVID RIF, I can confirm that the decisions are made in Spreadsheetville and the actual notifications are different but not different enough to detectably feedback into the plan.
I think it's fair to say that people would like to work remotely while also not being converted into a commoditized faceless resource; and I think that it's clear to anyone at the moment that we haven't quite worked all the kinks out of total remote work , yet.
An ideal remote environment would be one where the human at the other end of the line is still remembered as being a human and cherished rather than just treated as a gig worker-drone.
In that case, I’ll just assume you’re a bot and simply parroting what you’ve been programmed to say.
> assumes all companies are run by saturday morning cartoon villains
Then took a moment to do a quick mental check, recall faces and dress codes and behaviours, and I could hardly disagree, they are run by cartoon villains!
Both ex bosses of mine and pop CEOs fit the bill to such a degree that it's scary.
My last job had a similar structure but the office was ~15 minutes away so it was harder to push back on some "well let's just all work on this here together for the next 3 weeks since we're local" type asks and didn't work out as well. I don't mind collaborating but after years of not being used to coming in every day coming in is honestly not much better to me than the idea of "my job requires me to fly out for weeks at a time" type travel (which I've also done before).
Is the expectation here that "people on HN" are a monolith and only capable of singular thought? Are you suggesting there can't or shouldn't be any room for diversity of thought and debate?
And the two extremes don't even cover the whole spectrum of opinions you can have.
I personally like working in the office, I believe humans are social animals that need more than just interaction through voice and crappy video with a bad angle, yet I hate the commute. So I'm completely fine with the hybrid approach we have right now at my company. Although I would understand if for cost-savings they'd make us 100% remote.
Working from home where I'm mostly independent is great, I can concentrate much better. Working from home on something that needs collaboration is hard. Meetings in Teams are psychologically exhausting. You can't see the reactions of people when you present something. This feedback is necessary.
Maybe if we had some kind of VR/metaverse kind of thing it would help, but it would need to convey facial micro-expressions in real-time. Audio would need to be placed appropriately in the room.
Like for VR meetings to make sense it shouldn't be necessary to mute your microphone. The app would need to make it sound like you're in a room together and multiple people can be distinguished properly by ear.
Sometimes it's nice to be remote, sometimes it's nice to be in the office. Some people like it 100% remote, other 100% on site.
It's a community of individuals having a debate.
But I get your point! :-)
It does seem that way...
Wait for it… even single person can hold 2 or more conflicting opinions or views at the same time. Fun part is they also can and will use them in discussions as they see fit.
There is no law or logic involved.
“You” can, especially when “you” are a diverse group of different people, not a single entity. But this isn’t even a “both ways” situation.
> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don’t allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it’s going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that.
You can, in fact, with perfect consistency criticize people for not allowing something while also criticizing other people for forcing that same thing and not allowing the opposite.
And that's w/o going into politics )(if you do, leftists will jump up and crap on capitalism).
Welcome to the crapnet.
Lets use a much simpler decision problem to show that you are wrong to not think of things as happening in both ways.
Consider rock paper scissors.
If I want to pick rock, because I'm worried about them picking paper, it doesn't mean I can't be wary of scissors, because I'm worried about them picking rock. For, were I to not be wary of them picking scissors, they could always pick scissors, and therefore, because I had it only one way, I would be exploitable. So now I have to be wary of them picking scissors, but what if I am only wary that they pick scissors? Then I will now play rock. Yet now they can play paper. So what if am I only wary they play paper? Then I must play scissors. Yet if I do, they play rock. So what if I am only wary they play rock? Then I must play paper. Yet now if I do, they can play scissors.
So actually, it isn't that you can't have it both ways, but that you must have it all ways. Anything else and you can't reason properly about the expectations.
> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home
This is also false. People on Hacker News are not always doing this, they are sometimes doing this, and then sometimes doing other things. There are also many people on Hacker News and each commenter may have a different opinion. Some people on Hacker News prefer working from home. Some people on Hacker News do not prefer working from home.
I feel that you are trying too hard to set up a 'it has to be one way' dichotomy to make your decision problems simpler, but it isn't actually true that making your problems simpler and easier to reason about means that you are doing more correct reasoning. Demanding that others simplify their thinking in a similar way is a request, not for correct thinking, but for use of a time savings technique that you prefer.
Being very clear on that will probably make it more obvious to you that what you are requesting is not as necessary as you seem to think it is: for he calculated his expectation with regard to how exploitable this could make us, then gave you that expectation. This cost you almost nothing to incorporate into your own estimates, so on the whole, it saved you time, at the cost of his time, a cost which you are not paying, but which you benefit from in expectation through correction of the estimates of your faster to calculate yet more exploitable false dichotomy.
