I wouldn't consider myself to be an irreplaceable superstar employee, but they folded almost immediately. Not sure what the point of this dance was.
You did well, because someone with actual some skin in the game considered you irreplaceable at that moment.
It's to reduce dance partners. Most people won't push back against "no exceptions", so they greatly reduce the number of exceptions they have to consider just by saying it.
Best case scenario you get marginalized, middle case, is next time there are layoff, worst case they are already looking for your replacement
Regardless, unless you actively desire to get laid off I’d be searching for a job that actually wants remote people.
One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold symptoms. If RTO is about productivity, I wonder if anyone has accounted the productivity drop caused by viruses in workspace.
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10269830/
- https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/2344756/open-plan-offic...
The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.
Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.
None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.
Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.
but yeah it's clearly body shedding with the goal of rehiring on the cheap. and/or buying time to see how AI plays out.
If I owned a share of these orgs, I wouldnt want revenue left on the table because some VP had an attachment problem.
But are they actually more productive, or are they just spending additional hours "looking busy"?
When I worked in office I "worked" 40 hours/week because I had to. Most of that wasn't actually work, maybe about 20-30 hours of actual work, sometimes less. Working from home I have no pressure to pretend to work, there's no "butt-in-chair" requirements. I get slightly more done from home, and exchange I don't have to waste 10-15 hours/week at my desk for no reason other than to make some manager feel good about having butts in chairs.
No, not work, just hey how ya doin, and then someone brings coffee, then there’s a quick gab about the game, then a half baked question before a little catchup about that show. 2-4x salaries and minutes being burnt in small untracked chunks.
Hours clocked and hours worked are not the same.
Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.
factories would disagree. there are diminishing returns as people get tired and productivity dips, but there is still a direct, linear relationship.
however its very different from knowledge- or social-based (e.g. sales) workers. there is often no direct 1-to-1
This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.
How do you think Google grows? They invented PageRank and have been on a set trajectory since?
Google didn't catch up to and surpass OpenAI by doing nothing.
Hours "worked" != productivity.
I work from home quite a bit, but I'm expected to be available and working during business hours. So other than not commuting to the office, it's not a huge difference.
What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point.
I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions.
I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed.
The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right.
So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind.
I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition.
Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege.
Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world.
I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely.
For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage.
Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.
I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride, so no American commute, lol. (Your society is done)
I like my colleagues. Sometimes you want to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.
I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)
But my work is 100% in office.
Then work from the office.
The problem starts of you demand those that don't want to be in the office to be there to satisfy your needs.
Your loneliness is not my desire to be around others.
We had this discussion like, forever?
If you like the office, that's great - go to the office! Most people want the freedom of choice, RTO is exactly about taking away that freedom.
RTO would still be a dealbreaker for me.
I've never had "good" plus that kind of commute. I've only had one of those at a time, and about half the time, neither.
So skipping the commute—and having a private bathroom, and all my own food available for lunch without packing, and fewer infections per year, and being able to deal with kid-emergencies with far less disruption to my work day et c—easily wins.
But yes I prefer a good office and a nice, active commute. I'm on track to literally never have that combo together ever in my life, but it'd be my favorite way to work.
Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.
- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?
- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?
It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.
In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.
And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.
This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago.
> why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously.
> why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
Yes, it certainly does! I'm sure they also talk to Pinkerton :)
> decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO
Just about the amount of time it would take for management to (1) realize what was happening and what it meant for their power over labor; and (2) align on a policy.
> Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
Yes, exactly. That's how you know anything about "productivity" is all a load of shit.
The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.
It is a nice building in a nice area.
I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride.
I like my colleagues. Sometimes you need to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.
I like dressing up a bit, not a full suit but nice pleated pants and OCBD/sweater/blazer.
I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)
But my work is 100% in office. But not being shut at home is nice.
I sometimes go into the office, but maybe only once or twice per month. But I am allowed that choice, I can work from my house, any of the company's locations, a cafe, or anywhere else I feel like it on any given day.
I value the freedom and flexibility. I'd be miserable being told "You must be in the office" and I'd also equally hate to be told "you must work from a desk in your house only"
You should definitely go in to the office!
But why make everyone return? We're all workers, shouldn't we stick up for each other? A huge number of people, including me, way prefer to work remotely most of the week, for all the reasons you're already aware of.
It seems to me that we should all be looking to make workers lives better, rather than worse. I whole heartedly support your choice to work in the office or remotely.
Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.
Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.
I think you are confounded by the fact your most overeager overachievers are going to return to office no matter what.
Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this.
And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. Now that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites.
I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.
How does their quantative performance compare? Is there an opportunity in the differential?
Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)
At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
To highlight just how stupid this is, here it is from another angle:
"I have to work on site so everyone else must work on site"
What is the logical conclusion here? That the workforce should be equal in every sense? Come on
Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).
> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.
> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!
As if a bunch of people in suits are sitting around a table in an evil villain’s lair shouting “we need more control over our workers” or needing to prop up commercial real estate prices.
Cities that serve the ruling classes as a means of ensuring conformity, because the closer you are to your neighbour, the more the herd effect is felt. Cities that themselves serve as a means of control: you consume food and water that doesn't come from the city itself; control these and the four main arteries, and the city is yours, no questions asked.
Personally, I see it like this:
Option 1 - at home:
* stay in my comfortable air-conditioned room in my underpants on my comfortable chair at my comfortable desk or bed,
* surrounded by foods and drinks I like (I a minifridge in my room, it's awesome), and being able to quickly put something in the oven,
* picking my nose or scratching my ass wherever I want to,
* going to the bathroom whenever I want to (maybe with the laptop if I have to be available),
* listening to music on headphones or speakers,
* being able to communicate to and pay attention to family and pets for a few minutes here and there (no, this doesn't mean I'll waste my work time walking the dog or talking with people, but it means I can actually take a minute or two break and have an actual life),
* smoking on the balcony whenever I want to (a 4 second trip),
* alternating between lying on my bed or sitting on my chair or standing or running in place or dancing,
* having my breaks in my most comfortable place - home.
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Option 2 - the office:
* wasting time traveling - driving sucks and the public transportation sucks, for different reasons (and no, I won't relocate just to be close to the office, what the actual fuck, I love my house),
* having to look presentable,
* having to make idle boring chit chat with corporate drones who want to socialize,
* sharing a bathroom,
* having to choose between listening to the office background noise or wearing uncomfortable noise-cancelling headphones,
* having my breaks... in the office (and no, the office PlayStation or ping pong tables don't cut it),
* having to prepare food for the next X hours, then having to eat it or reheat it at the office,
* being able to attend to my house in case of an emergency (fire, floods, robbers, family or pet health issues and so on - yes, they absolutely come first),
* being subjected to cameras and other security theater, as if any employee couldn't wreck the company if they actually wanted to.
If you want me in the office, prepare to pay me a lot more. You won't and I understand. It makes no sense.
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As for productivity - I work hard because I feel obligated, because it's my work ethic and because I don't want to cheat or let people down. If I don't like what I'm doing, I quit instead of "quiet quitting" and doing the bare minimum.
It's much, much easier to get "in the zone" at home, to not burn out, to have time for myself (traffic + actual breaks) and to be happy.
Edit - just to sum it up - it's my only (AFAIK) life and I'm not spending 10-11 hours a day on work. That would leave me with 5-6 hours of "me time" and I'd be too tired to enjoy it.
Edit 2 - similarly, I won't put up with bullshit like:
* installing anything on my personal devices (except things like FOSS TOTP 2FA stuff I can control),
* leaving the camera and mic in my work machines intact (we all know how secure stuff is and how much we can trust corporations),
* taking drug tests.
That said, if you're willing to pay me 50 times what I currently make, I might return to the office with a suit, smile under the cameras, take drug tests, sit on my chair all day and discuss the weather with coworkers on the elevator. I'd be happy to do it for 3 or 4 months.
This point makes you look like a jerk.
Can you honestly say you don't know people you'd describe, to yourself, at least, as corporate drones? Or maybe as boring, as squares, as idiots, as retards and so on? I bet you do. I bet everyone does, and everyone, including me, is the idiot in someone else's life. That's normal.
He who is without corporate drones in their life can cast the first stone.
- There are some statistical biases in the article, correlation != causation, Simpsons paradox, etc... things like that
- Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore
What is possible is that work from home benefit companies in the growth phase while office work is more appropriate for companies that are already well established. So many possible explanations.
The usual narrative here is that work from home is just better and that management mandating return to office are control freaks, but I can't believe it is that simple. It wouldn't make economic sense, real estate is expensive, they would save a lot by not having offices, in addition to all the supposed benefits. Personally, I feel that I am really missing something by working 100% remotely, so much happens by the coffee machine and Slack/Teams/GMeet... doesn't replace that. Hybrid work is what I prefer personally. Office time for exchanging and socializing and at-home time for deep thinking and personal flexibility. Personal experience, but it shows that not just extroverts and managers want to go back to the office sometimes, because I am neither, but I still think some office time is good. In fact, I tend to be more of a lone wolf, but even as a lone wolf, I still need to know what to do, and daily calls often don't give the whole picture.
Lol the market magic hand. At that point it's more of a religious belief than a scientific fact.
> The better path is to raise the bar on management, not badge swipes.
Real estate may play a role, but terrible management practices are also definitely a factor. And if every other company is doing it, it's safe to copy their behaviour and not stick your neck out.
It's a little bit funny that 100% online businesses bought the most expensive and lavish real estate available.
It's tragic they think their workers should throw good labor after bad investment to make a white collar feel justified.
What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.
Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.
A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.
Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely.
> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
How does monitoring you contribute to anything?
