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0 pointskcplate1y ago0 comments

I am quite convinced that you probably started your career around or near to 2020, you seem to have a real naïveté around what is actually important to a company and how they calculate value. Especially a company that puts real value on in office work for its employees. I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.

But here is the thing—people adapt. People adapted in 2020 when a good portion of the workforce went remote. There were griping then while people learned to balance home and family distractions with work. There were complications around finding appropriate workspace in their homes but people managed to make it work. If your company RTOs you might have a choice to make: adapt and deal with the commute/rent/whatever challenges with it, or perhaps try and convince your organization’s leadership how wrongheaded and stupid they are for RTO (Good luck…as a former senior leader in a few orgs both public and private…you better work on your argument). If you can’t adapt or convince your leaders of the error of their ways—quit and take your chances to find and compete for those remaining, but shrinking inventory of remote gigs out there.

I say all of this as a remote worker happily riding out the sunset of my career for a few more years in a lovely low stress non-management gig. I definitely don’t want to RTO, but if my company chose that route I know won’t have a good argument to counter because there isn’t one. I know and my leadership know that I can adapt and be just as productive at the office as I am at home…in short order.

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AnthonyMouse1y ago· 1 in thread

> I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.

Instead of speculating, we can look at the data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1401265/preferred-work-s...

Fully 91% of IT workers prefer to be fully remote or remote-first with no requirement to go into the office regularly, and it was disproportionately the first one. 6 of the remaining 9% still wanted to be remote first.

Only 1% of people wanted to be fully office-based. That's 3% less than the Lizardman's Constant.

> But here is the thing—people adapt.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw

kcplateOP1y ago

I prefer steak, but will eat chicken if that is what is available.

I prefer gin, but will drink vodka when that is what is available.

I prefer to fly first class, but economics often force me into economy.

A preference does not equal entitlement and frankly the only preference that matters in this case is what the employer’s preference is, especially when the workers are willing to compromise their preference where it differs from the employer’s preference.

The employer’s are the ones that hold the little green pieces of paper that you want and need and are willing to trade your labor to get. They will occasionally attach strings to those little green pieces of paper. As long as you or someone is willing to deal with those strings, your preference really only matters to you…at least to them.

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