Yeah but we wanted to work from home not hybrid bullshit. This story is pandering like we won but they are still forcing me to go to an office every week for no good reason. This is just propaganda. The whole conversation in the thread has even shifted from talking about working at home full time to hybrid being ok. Insane
hear hear. Offices are outmoded, office managers are outmoded, paying for parking is outmoded.
All of it is horseshit, and like horseshit should be deposited indiscriminately and walked away from without looking back.
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I think it should be a choice not 100% at all. I’m personally upset because I was told it was ok to be fully remote so I adjusted my life then once it wasn’t convenient for my company anymore they changed the rules on me and everyone else and gaslighted us all about the real reason.
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And I love not even knowing where my office is, different strokes…
Yeah but we wanted to work from home not hybrid bullshit. This story is pandering like we won but they are still forcing me to go to an office every week for no good reason. This is just propaganda. The whole conversation in the thread has even shifted from talking about working at home full time to hybrid being ok. Insane
The comment I’m replying to needs to be upvoted much more than it is.
Rage on, fellow rager.
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
Capitalism ended during the pandemic? Who knew?
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
the place I work has tried RTO policies several times now - with very limited success. well over 90% of all white collar jobs can be done from wherever you can get internet so your VPN software will function. the customer facing part of the business has to be there 100% of the time, they dont have a choice, that’s how the business model is designed. I go in a few days a week but honestly dont ever actually need to be there. maybe 2 days a month, tops, is my presence absolutely required.
the really interesting bit, which the article didnt touch on (not much of an article to begin with) is that there is a commercial real-estate bubble. the big buildings in the downtown business district/cores of most cities, that real-estate isnt worth much if there’s no one renting the space. businesses that used to rent the space no longer need to because all of their employees work from home now. the people who invested in those big buildings are not seeing a return on their investments - and they are unhappy. that is, imho, a big driver behind the RTO movement.
the people who invested in those big buildings are not seeing a return on their investments - and they are unhappy. that is, imho, a big driver behind the RTO movement.
And those people are largely of the same class as the corporate executives and shareholders pushing RTO policies which ties a nice little bow on top of the whole situation. Rich people are losing money when employees work from home and so WFH has to go.
Given the housing crisis, it only makes sense to convert that real estate into residential units.
Those two are not as related as they at first seem.
For one, the plumbing required is different, as in literally offices don’t tend to have bathrooms with toilets and showers inside every office space. Also the lighting would be cut off for all the inside units. Communal bathrooms and no windows works for work but not as good for home.
For another, a lot of the varying housing crises (there are multiple types) relate to affordability bc of being bought up by corporate interests. Another type relates to weird zoning laws of what types of homes are allowed to be built in certain areas - and for these at least, there’s nothing stopping good homes from being made except again profits.
So it’s not impossible, but there are challenges. Mainly, how can already rich people find a way to make even moar monay? Oh yeah and something something the poors get whatever too.
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Yeah these buildings are made to have things routed under and over the floors. I keep hearing people saying plumbing is a giant problem, and it rings hollow to me, extra bathrooms are installed in homes all the time, literally just run the pipes, but seems no one wants to.
Those residential units will be worthless too if all the offices close. Why live in the big city and pay huge rents if you work remote? Just move to a cheap area and buy a nice house.
Those huge rents exist because demand exceeds supply (amongst other reasons). People want to live in walkable neighborhoods and not suburbs where you have to drive everywhere to survive.
A lot of people do, but more people should think this way than do think this way
It’s more like it’s often not a consideration, because the option doesn’t really exist. And when it does, you pay an obscene markup.
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it’s that there’s not enough space to accommodate everyone so it’s not financially realistic to most people who want to.
There’s plenty of space, it’s used incredibly poorly due to free parking, zoning regulations, and running highways through cities. The financial component is simply there aren’t enough of these spaces and they aren’t dense enough (and they could stand to include a lot more public and social housing, but people oppose it because they don’t want “those” people in their neighborhoods).
That’s not to say that reforming suburbs to make them more livable wouldn’t be a part of the solution too.
You can have walkable neighbourhoods without living downtown in a big city. Small villages are the original way to have walkable lifestyles. It’s how everyone lived centuries ago. There’s still plenty of those around, they just get overlooked.
Suburbs exist mainly for the purpose of commuting into the city for work. If people stopped doing that then they could leave the suburbs.
Sadly a lot of rural areas have little to no Internet connectivity in the US because ISPs have been taking money meant for rural Internet and pocketing the money. Additionally, the internet in smaller towns can be spotty. It’s part of the reason why starlink was so hyped up when it was first announced. It’s also part of the reason why people who are allowed to work from home sometimes find it difficult to find cheaper places to live (another one being rural bigotry, though if you’re cis, straight, white and capable of pretending to be Christian, that shouldn’t be much of an issue). The cheaper the area, the worse the internet usually is.
yeah. not always the case but yeah, generally the sticks have shit internet.
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Unfortunately only like 10% of them are viable for conversion. Office buildings and residential buildings have very different needs and it’s expensive as fuck to add all the extra shit needed for residences.
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I come with receipts: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/converting-vacant-office-buildings-into-apartments-60-minutes/
But only around 10%-15% of office buildings nationwide can realistically be transformed to housing, according to economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate at New York’s Columbia Business School.
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I mean, you’re welcome to provide a source refuting mine from an engineer or an architect. I provided my source, where’s yours?
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well over 90% of all white collar jobs can be done from wherever you can get internet
This means over 90% of all white collar jobs can be outsourced/globalized. Just a matter of time unless there really is a meaningful reason to stay in the US and pay US wages.
yeah, my last job was offshored to India. from what my ex-coworkers told me, problems I could fix in a few minutes would take the new group weeks to do - and that was 6+ months after I got let go. maybe they got better but I seriously doubt it. just because a job is capable of being outsourced it doesnt necessarily mean that it’ll happen.
I had the same thing happen. Job got outsourced, quality tanked but they continued to outsource more departments. Like six months later they were trying to rehire everyone. Fuck that noise.
My company outsourced some functions a few years ago and had hired Americans back within 2 years. Outsourcing is real but it’s also a terrible idea for anything with a high degree of accountability and knowledge. Currently there is an office/opco in Mexico (but the previous outsourcing was India) and if they need to hire but don’t have the budget for an American they’ll transfer someone to our team. But I know the Mexican office is held to decently high standards and everyone they’ve transferred to is speaka English well, and are on at approximately the same time as us since we’re all on the same continent. I like the Mexicans I work with but would like to see more Americans hired, but this is so much better than the alternative lol
And just because quality goes down the drain when outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t happen unfortunately.
After all, Boeing made a ton of money by just firing their best maintenance engineers.
Right. A big company can remain solvent for a very long time while absolutely undermining and destroying all of the things they were once great at.
I offered to work from home yesterday because I have bronchitis and no voice, so I told my manager it was that or I go off sick and stay there until I deem I feel better, that half a loaf was better than none, and she said “well I don’t want to set a precedent”, so I told her that I was sick then and won’t be back until I feel better. I’m the only one who can do my job, so she’s right fucked. She’s like an alien wearing a skin suit trying to pretend to human.
“I don’t want anyone to realize they can work just as effectively from home. Sure it saves them gas and commute time, but it just doesn’t pump my ego if I cannot micromanage in person.”
Precisely. So she shot herself in the foot and I had a day to recover. I might call off Monday too.
You should
I’m at urgent care right now actually to try to get some better puffers or a nebulizer or something. I might just.
Seems like she did set a precedent anyways haha just a worse one than before
The manager doesn’t get to make the decision. She’s probably going to have to go argue with her manager that also likely has no control. Stand your ground, they don’t want to fight on this hill. -source, a people manager of hybrid teams at a company that insisted on on-site.
Her manager would say yes and not care. It’s my direct manager just being micro managery.
Some directors (or whatever manager managers are called in your pyramid) like to pretend to be the good guy to individuals and force their intermediaries to look like the assholes. Middle management sucks.
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She has understaffed us to a criminal degree all because she gets a bonus if she comes in under budget. You are correct, I will take all the time I need. I had to go to urgent care last night for a nebulizer so I’m definitely still not well, it’s actually resolving pneumonia it turns out.
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Thank you!
Which leads to the question, and its an honest question and I would benefit from the honest answer: If I can do the job hybrid, why can I not do the job remote? Is it because you needed me to move some paper boxes to the printer?
In my 20 years of working in the office and an additional 4 working 100% WFH, I’ll throw my worthless internet opinion out there as to why: It comes down to the culture of the company.
Some companies see a real benefit from water tank conversations, face-to-face meetings, and the ability for managers to ask someone in person on a moment’s notice to do things. There is also a lack of trust in the employees being able to perform correctly without physical oversight in many companies. Granted and aside from the trust issue, there is some truth to that, but can in fact be realigned with the exact same benefit by retooling communications. It’s up to each company however to formulate the best course of action to remedy that and many sadly fail, resulting in RTO mandates.
Some companies see a real benefit from water tank conversations
There are real benefits to water cooler spontaneous talk. However, they don’t overcome the detriments to having all your staff commute all the time on the off chance one will occur to produce a positive result.
face-to-face meetings, and the ability for managers to ask someone in person on a moment’s notice to do things.
These are largely dead in hybrid scenarios, because those that would be meeting face to face don’t work in the office on the same day. So the practical result to hybrid is the worker loses productivity from the commute to come into the office for one or two days an sits at a desk alone all day in video meetings with their coworkers just like they’d do at home. The next day their coworker does the same while the original worker is WFH that day.
These are largely dead in hybrid scenarios, because those that would be meeting face to face don’t work in the office on the same day.
I work at an office that started hybrid after covid because enough employees quit when they went to full RTO. The IT department ended up with 2 days in and 3 days remote, but the 2 days are the same for everyone so that we are all in the office at the same time for the spontaneous conversations.
It works pretty well. 2 days to collaborate and keep up relationships, the other three days to get individually completed work done.
I am not op but I’m pretty sure they’re speaking from the point of view of companies, not agreeing with their ideas
Yep, I get that. I’m responding to that point-of-view of those companies, and how I believe its in error. I have nothing against the poster or their comments.
Water tank conversations really fuck with remote workers because they are always missing something, but if you can manage to redirect all work talk to happen in whatever communication tool the company uses, everyone tends to work better in the end, as nobody misses anything. But the only way I’ve seen companies successfully do this is by adopting remote-first approaches - when people only go to the office like once a month if even that.
Do they know that it’s much harder to unionize if you’re remote?
The thing is, water cooler chats are impromptu, they are not planned. You meet your colleague, you talk about the weather, what’s new in his life, and one thing leads to another, to maybe to talk about work and how to strategise to get something done.
These impromptu conversations happen on a whim, they happen organically. They cannot be forced.
Sometimes Alice needs coffee while Bob is using the microwave, and sometimes Bob and Alice do more than say hi, and sometimes that leads to a productive work conversation.
Carol and Dave do not need spontaneous small talk to be productive.
This makes Grace very angry. Carol and Dave are ordered to be more like Alice and Bob.
Carol and Dave do not understand this, and vent to their friend Frank. Frank says that he sees this happen a lot, and suggests that they come to work for his boss, Oscar, instead. Carol and Dave give their two weeks notice to Grace.
This makes Grace very angry. Alice and Bob agree that it is an outrage, then go back to discussing the previous night’s sporting event.
Wendy is given Carol and Dave’s workload and doesn’t have time to join Alice and Bob at the water cooler. Wendy keeps falling further and further behind.
This makes Grace very angry. “No one wants to work anymore!”
Wendy has about had it with Grace’s bullshit.
The point is not to force those talks to happen, the point is to make them not happen in a limited way. In an office what usually happens is people talking to other specific people about problems they are facing, by going to their desk or catching them on the coffee room. This should absolutely never happen. Any work talk should always be accessible to everyone involved. I don’t mean the whole company, but if there’s 5 people in a project, there should never be any private conversation between just two of them - even if others don’t join the talk they should always know the conversation is happening.
Yes, I agree, it has to be fair for everyone. What I’m talking about is instinctive, primal behaviour that we can’t control because we’re social animals and when we meet we naturally have a discussion with the person we’re talking to and we might end up talking about the project without taking into account our colleagues far away from the office.
We’re still adapting to this new hybrid reality.
Coaching newbies doesn’t work that well remotely, so you’ll have to be at the office more for them to ask you questions, otherwise they’re stuck in the simplest things for days.
This is evidence that you need to adjust your training methods.
Any evidence to back that up?
That’s the line my CEO used, but we had plenty of hires join during COVID that have excelled while here, with lots of talented engineers that had to leave because they were forced to an office hundreds of miles away.
Personal experience. The juniors just out of school and interns are invariably stuck in something trivial that can often be solved with looking at their stuff for a few seconds. They don’t dare to disturb you with any questions and need a lot of explaining. Doing all the explaining through the screen is a pain and you have to hound them with calls to get them to ask questions.
Experienced new hires don’t have that issue. They can Google stuff, read a manual and know when to send a message for a blocking issue.
That’s doesn’t mean send everybody to the office. Just the new guy and the coach should be enough in most cases and reduce the presence as they hit their stride.
The juniors just out of school and interns are invariably stuck in something trivial that can often be solved with looking at their stuff for a few seconds.
If only there were a way to share your screen remotely…
And that’s why you do stand-ups every day, which everybody loves to hate.
Yeah sorry but that’s not the same. Efficient teaching is very highly dependent on nonverbal cues to properly align yourself to the person you’re teaching to. On top of that screen sharing software is clunky and necessarily has latency, which makes interrupting much more disruptive which is most detrimental when there needs to be a bidirectional high-throughput stream of information.
Efficient teaching is very highly dependent on nonverbal cues to properly align yourself to the person you’re teaching to.
I would say that is highly dependent on the type of learner you are.
My daughter is in online school right now. Her teachers usually can’t see her because most of them don’t require her to have her camera on. She often can’t see them because she’s doing screen sharing. She’s getting better grades than she’s ever had before.
On top of that screen sharing software is clunky and necessarily has latency
I don’t know when the last time you used it was, but this is just not true anymore. It’s as easy as clicking ‘share screen’ in Zoom or Google Meet and the latency is so low that it’s essentially not noticeable.
I work 80 % remotely, I know what I’m talking about. MS Teams is by far the worst latency-wise, but even on the best software you can’t get over the fact that there will be a 200-300 ms jitter buffer.
Ever had the “yeah I- so we - OK go ahea- sorry -”? That’s what I’m talking about.
Good on your daughter if she learns well remotely, but literally everyone I’ve talked to who was in education during COVID had an awful experience. Although I suppose in the school system it doesn’t matter as much since with 20-600 students per teacher there’s not much back-and-forth going on anyway.
Remote work is great for focusing, it’s great for async workflows (slack/discord/email/jira), it’s great for solo work, but it’s just plain inferior for certain highly collaborative workflows like 1-on-1 teaching. There’s enough good reasons to work remotely that we don’t have to lie about the rest.
I thought this until I’ve actually done it a few times, and been that newbie at a remote first employer.
The difference in being on boarded at a company which embraces remote vs one that is still hedging, is massive.
It can be done well.
Yes the extroverts might get fidgety, but they can schedule a meeting or body doubling session or something. We introverts have had to adjust to office work for the last century; let’s see y’all do a bit of that labour for another, better way to do info work now :p
When the company where I was managing a small team went full remote during COVID, I had 0 issues with my existing staff, but when I had to hire, that was definitely less than ideal for onboarding. We still made it work but it was nothing like the in-office onboardings from before. There are solutions though, you can do virtual sit-togethers, and if you’re reactive to slack/etc you can be even more present for them than in-person, but it felt uneasy for sure the first times. Left all corporate behind now and running a one man business so don’t need to care about this.
I think that might depend on who you’re hiring though. That’s the same line our boss told me when they pushed me back to the office. But in the time since then, we have hired several new staff who actually prefer to communicate digitally. They will email, teams, phone, or text me with questions before actually seeking me out in person.
There are some aituations for some roles where meeting in person is necessary for trust and connections to be established. Being in person lets a lot of people feel a better connection with teammates, because humans are animals and that is just how it works.
This is nit true for every role, and is mostly for roles that have to work with people whose primary jobs are interpersonal or connection making like executives and leadership.
It does not really apply to roles where deliverables are already spelled out and information exchangenis formalized and you don’t need to convince someone to do something ad hoc. Plus some people do just fine doing all of those things remotely, but they have to work with people who don’t.
for trust and connections to be established.
What is more trusting than a recorded Zoom meeting.
Oh, you mean you need me off the record to be made complicit in malfeasance.
Pass.
No, a lot of people just feel more trust from being in the same room with someone and getting a better feeling from being in proximity with the person. It has nothig to do with on and off the record. Do you really record all of your zoom calls to CYA?
Think of it like attending a concert in person compared to listening to an album, it is just a different experience in person. Not everyone gets that out of in person interactions, but a lot of people do.
It has nothig to do with on and off the record
It is exactly what it is though… you don’t see that?
Way to ignore the point
As someone who works hybrid and frequently has both in person and online meetings that are rarely if ever recorded, no I don’t see that as the default expectation.
I can see that it could be, if the people I was interacting with were evil and untrustworthy, but that wouldn’t be a job I would stick with for any length of time. What I have seen is that quite a few people just work better with others if they meet in person occasionally.
There is a reason that a lot of knowledge work has conferences to share knowledge in person.
Idk man…
Introverts thrive in non-social settings. Introverts tend to be good at technology.
Extroverts thrive in arenas, where they can set odds and smash opponents into submission.
It all sounds like a stern conviction of supporting the bullies, and preventing work from being done.
That is just putting everyone into extreme ends of social interaction when the vast, vast majority of people are somewhere in between. Even the most extroverted people I work with like some human interaction, just less than the more social people. I don’t work with anyone in an IT setting who fits the extremes you are describing, although I have met them.
Tax breaks from cities saying they have X employees working in city Y and they bought a bunch of commercial real estate that is worthless or needs to be converted to residential. They gambled and lost and now want to either say they didn’t lose or subsidize their losses to employees & taxpayers.
Defeated? Wasn’t the aim full WFH?
Hybrid is a compromise that makes no sense to either party. The company still has to maintain an expensive office while being limited to the talent pool within commutable distance. The employee still has to waste countless (albeit fewer) hours travelling while being limited to job opportunities within ~20 miles of their residence.
We have hybrid and it actually really works. We hire countrywide and if you don’t live near an office you are fully remote. But if you do live near an office you can go in anytime. I don’t like going to the office, but if I need to print or ship, or need to meet a client or coworker it’s nice to have the option. Also anytime I have an issue, I can pop in the office to check out new hardware, or work if my home is unsuitable due to whatever ( power outage, noisy maintenance, over 90 degrees since we don’t have AC, sick kid). However, I think hybrid only works if there is no minimum requirement on time in office. If it is at the teams discretion the home office becomes an amenity. We also downsized from something like 200 cubes to around sixty, so that helps too.
I think hybrid only works if there is no minimum requirement on time in office.
Then it’s not really hybrid, it’s actually fully WFH with the option to come in. Hybrid forces you to come in.
I would call that “remote first” to avoid ambiguity. My current employer is like that too, with offices or co-working spaces in select major cities around the world.
The key differentiating factor is that you can go into the office if you feel like it. It’s only “hybrid” in the sense that you decide, on a purely personal whim, whether you want to or not.
Personally, I live fairly close to a big office, but have only go in for big yearly meetings. And with a remote first culture no one bats an eye at that.
Yeah, we’re the same. It’s hybrid in that we’re expected to come in when it makes sense to do so, but that’s more or less left to us. If your internet isn’t working then you’re expected to work from the office, that sort of thing.
As someone who has WFH for the last 10 years, I do wish I could go into the office occasionally to have face to face meetings for large projects. Those are actually very useful for faster communication and effective for full understanding between groups in a way that video calls just can’t do. We are, after all, social animals and there is something about breathing the same air that can’t be beat.
I’ve worked from home for the past 10 years as well, and the face to face meetings don’t do anything for me, personally. With a job done entirely on a computer, I can’t think of anything that works better in person.
Can i ask what job/position you have? Im trying to learn more about people who dont see the need for in person meetings. Was wondering if it maybe had to do with their job or how they approach a problem
I’m a programmer.
Would you believe me if i said that it makes perfect sense in my head then? I’m a team lead/tech coach and senior dev. Ive seen people develop better at home because otherwise they get distracted by god knows what at the office and for them id tell them to wfh as much as they want, for al long as they need.
Personally, i have too much distractions at home to prevent me from developing and at the office i feel some mental force making me focus at work.
Both are a-ok though!As for things that work better in person : as a team lead i try to read body and room language during some meetings with my team ( most i dont, just a few ) and that is easier in person for me. But that shouldnt stop anyone unless its like, once in a blue moon. As soon as its not that rare, its hybrid with limitations and people like yourself are no longer as comfortable as they could be!
there is something about breathing the same air that can’t be beat.
Mmm halitosis and communicable disease…
Hybrid does make sense. There are people who work better in an office ( like myself ) and there are people who are better working from home ( like my coworker ). The company i work for believes hybrid is the way to go so that you can supply an office for people like me, but also hire people who work remotely. However, nobody is saying you need to have an office that can house 100% of you employees. 60% is good enough as not everyone will be in the office at the same time. Money saved!
That said, some meetings are better to have in person so once in a while a required in person meeting is needed.
I believe in the words of my company : everyone, everywhere. And that includes an office or, which has happened, from working from spain, germany or thailand which are all remote locations in no way connected with the company. These were people who legit lived abroad or were looking after a vacation home of a friend
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Re-read that post. They didn’t say 60% of the time they said office capacity should be 60% of the workforce at minimum.
You can make more coherent arguments arguing the actual words the other guy said.
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Well, slow it down before posting eh?
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Last time im going to comment at this, This will have no use to explain to you but hey, im going to try anyway.
No, the minimum is not set to force people to go the office. Its so people like myself, who work better in an office, to have a spot when needed. You are reading what you want, not what im saying.Fuckin hell guy. Can NO ONE in this thread read? Go back and reread my post, I’m literally clarifying that exact thing to the other dude.
Tf is with reading comprehension??
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No i didnt. You seem to have missed the spot where i said we hired and had people work remotely from completely different countries. I may have not mentioned the in person meetings are preferred in person, but can be done remotely was well by those that want to work remotely and not be in the office. However, some meetings have gravitas to them and are preferred in person. And im not talking about once a week or w/e. It all depends on the team workflow, type of job etc etc.
Ive worked on projects that were 100% remote that ended well, but was working on a project recently that was going so bad that a (preferred) in person meeting was requested because a full day of body language reading while discussions were ongoing, was required. If a person lived far away ( which wasnt the case here ) then that wouldve been totally fine ! They couldve attended the meeting remotely ! I planned the meeting as a teams meeting incase somebody wanted to work from home, and had planned a small meeting room for those that didnt.
I didnt shoot myself in the foot, im saying a hybrid workfloor is all about being flexible to anyone’s needs and every situation because nobody is the same and not everyone wants to be at the office 100%.
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I can understand that frustration, and in those cases the c-suite is wrong and shouldnt push hybrid in an attempt to go back on wfh. Hell, those c-suite people should gtfo. I believe hybrid is the way but not for those reasons. I believe that because it benefits everyone and can get the best out of both, not because i want to kill wfh. Wfh is here to stay and should be encouraged if thats the way you work best!
Hybrid is always worse than either fully remote or fully in office. You end up with people coming into the office and sitting on Zoom or posting on Slack, and people at home missing out on conversations that don’t happen there. So you have to do twice as much work to keep everybody on the same page.
For perspective, I was 100% WFH for about 10 years. A couple of years ago I got a new job (huge compensation boost, and massive perks boost).
Lucky for me, which was one of the reasons I looked into it, my work is a 15 minute bike from where I live, they offer free breakfast and lunch every day, and a gym. So there are plenty of personal incentives for me to go into the office.
But what I find so surprising is that virtually everyone in my office thinks that hybrid is the best for productivity. Literally every person I’ve talked to about this agrees (quietly, of course, they don’t want to lose it) that the spontaneous meetings, the overhearing what other people are talking about (and jumping in with your own knowledge), the ability to quickly turn around and chat with another person, makes collaboration, and by extension productivity, way higher.
My biggest thing is that, as a senior software dev, the junior devs come to me for help quite frequently. When we’re in the office, I would say the average is about 3 times a day. When one or both of us is WFH, it probably doesn’t even average to one. There is something about sending a message or an email or requesting a zoom meeting that seems to be enough of a hurdle to ask what is a simple question. So they end up spinning their wheels a lot longer.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I get that WFH is a huge benefit to the employee. Which is why I did it for so long, with two young kids it was a god send to be home all the time if they needed to come because they were sick or if I needed to run out to the doctors with them. And, of course, commuting just absolutely blows (I think that’s the biggest drawback of any non-FWFH schedule). So I do support it.
However, I think we need to be realistic about its benefits. Companies want people back in the office because, generally speaking, people are more productive.
You realize that you’re experiencing massive selection bias right?
A) it’s not very socially acceptable to talk about how much you’d rather be at home with your cat than here talking with this colleague.
B) everyone you work with chose a hybrid job.
i.e. “People who choose to work a hybrid job think hybrid is better”
Or in your case, “people who get to go into a big tech office with free meals and gyms and laundry think it’s better to go into the office”.
Try working a hybrid job where you commute 45min each way, and still have to cook yourself three meals a day and then come back and tell us whether you think hybrid is really more productive. I spent a year at a MAANG firm as a contractor and got to go to their head campus near SF and thought ‘damn, if this was what working was like, I could more easily see myself going into the office’, then I returned to my home city and went to their office their and saw the stale muffins that were breakfast and remembered the whole rest of my career and what companies are like and returned to the real world.
Yes, I understand the hurdle in asking people questions, but quite frankly that is addressable through numerous ways from zoom office hours, to better team rituals and culture, to slack bots, occasional meetups, or just plain old fashioned pair programming… all methods that cost far less and cause far less disruption to people’s lives then forcing in them into an office 3 days a week.
And you know what else is more productive for a company? Having everyone working 60 hour weeks in the office all the time. Who. the. fuck. cares. We live in a world with literal billionaires. Working more doesn’t make the world a better place it enriches assholes who never learned how to share or be happy with what they have.
it’s not very socially acceptable to talk about how much you’d rather be at home with your cat than here talking with this colleague.
Make no mistake about it, most have said they would rather be WFH. It’s just that most of them also accept that office work is more productive.
everyone you work with chose a hybrid job.
Or, more accurately, didn’t leave a FWFH job when it went back hybrid. But, sure, this definitely biases the sample. Which is why I provided a link that studied this, and just gave my personal experience that seemingly further confirms the studied.
But also, keep in mind that while this sample is far from perfect, it’s many times better than people posting on lemmy claiming that they work better from home.
Try working a hybrid job where you commute 45min each way, and still have to cook yourself three meals a day and then come back and tell us whether you think hybrid is really more productive.
You’re missing my point. I get that it’s better for the individual to be full WFH. I don’t deny this. But we’re talking about productivity here in the office.
Yes, I understand the hurdle in asking people questions, but quite frankly that is addressable through numerous ways from zoom office hours, to better team rituals and culture, to slack bots, occasional meetups, or just plain old fashioned pair programming
Can you point me to some study that confirms that this would replace it? If so, I would happily change my tune. But I think most people work kind of asynchronously, and this is forcing them to sync these moments (when, IME, they happen kind of spontaneously, and I don’t see how it would replace the times when I’m talking to one person, a third overhears it and says “I have something useful to add.”), which isn’t natural.
Who. the. fuck. cares.
Again, I support FWFH because I think the flexibility is important for the individual. That doesn’t require me to be under the delusion that it’s equally productive. It’s not, and I think going forward that’s going to be more and more obvious.
But also, keep in mind that while this sample is far from perfect, it’s many times better than people posting on lemmy claiming that they work better from home.
No, it’s literally just as biased, but in the other direction.
You’re missing my point. I get that it’s better for the individual to be full WFH. I don’t deny this. But we’re talking about productivity here in the office.
But here’s the thing, it’s not more productive to go to the office.
Have you read the actual “studies” being cited in that Forbes article?
In the first, they randomly assign employees to work from home scenarios, meaning that random employees here and there are working remotely while everyone else is in office. This is not a study of whether a company can work effectively remotely it’s a study of what happens when you take an in-office company and tell someone to work at home at random once in a while.
In the second working paper from Stanford, if you actually dig into how they’re measuring productivity, every single study they bring up is one that measures the effects when a fully in-office company, like an Indian call-center, suddenly shift to remote work because of a global pandemic, not one studying how fully remote companies or teams compare to their in office or hybrid counterparts.
Can you point me to some study that confirms that this would replace it?
No, but I can point you to many high functioning fully remote teams and companies… As mentioned above there’s not a lot of actual good research on this.
But I think most people work kind of asynchronously, and this is forcing them to sync these moments (when, IME, they happen kind of spontaneously, and I don’t see how it would replace the times when I’m talking to one person, a third overhears it and says “I have something useful to add.”), which isn’t natural.
Regular rituals like stand-ups, retros, demos etc give people some opportunities to ask questions like this, and like I mentioned, pair programming gives constant opportunity for this. When I was at a MAANG company our team also had “in-office zoom hours” where we’d all get on a zoom call for 2 hours, 3 times a week, and it was an opportunity for people to openly discuss things and ask questions as if we were all sitting at desks in the office. One team I was on used gather.town to replicate an office experience for this.
Remote work doesn’t just magically happen, you do need some culture and rituals and effort, and companies that aren’t setup for that aren’t going to thrive like that, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.
In the past year I spent half my time with a team that was entirely in-office with just us contractors being remote, and it was awful. Documentation was terrible, they constantly did conference room zoom meetings where you couldn’t tell who was talking, and critical information was communicated by tapping people on the shoulder. Did it work for them? Sure. But it was a nightmare to try and take their system and suddenly do it remote.
I then spent the second half of the year with a completely remote team, and it was amazing. Even for those of us coming in as relatively green backend devs, we excelled. We were talking with the team on slack and zoom constantly, and pair programming with multiple people on a daily basis and we learned a ton and got a ton done.
High functioning teams get stuff done, if you can put together a high functioning team just using the people who happen to live within biking distance of your office that’s great, but in the long run I have no doubt that company’s that can accept talent from anywhere will come out ahead.
Honestly, that was a lot of words to say you don’t really have anything but personal experience. No offense to you, but your claims and opinions don’t hold any water for me because I don’t know you.
As I said, if you actually have anything that can demonstrate that it’s better, or even equivalent, I would love to see it and would absolutely reconsider my position. But “everyone’s just doing it wrong” rings hollow to me because I just don’t see how it can actually replace what I see happen when everyone is together. Especially if we consider the context where people are saying hybrid is the worst, when evidence seems to be that hybrid hits the sweet spot.
Honestly, that was a lot of words to say you don’t really have anything but personal experience
That was a lot of words to give you examples of practices that make remote work productive.
And it was in response to you typing a lot of words to say absolute jack shit but bring up a Forbes article that found that when companies that weren’t ready for it suddenly shifted to remote work because of COVID, productivity dropped a little. Congratulations genius, that doesnt show that hybrid work is more productive, it shows that you don’t know how to read studies but will take a pro business rags’ trash at face value. No offense but show me a study that shows that hybrid or in-office work is more productive than remote, because you have yet to do that.
The last paragraph is the most important, imo. When I last worked an office job, in the before (Covid) times, the rare occasions when I would work from home due to being sick were my least productive days from the company’s perspective. But they were essential for me to mentally recharge or recover from illness (in a civilized society of course we’d have free healthcare and unlimited zero-work sick days).
If I had a similar job with WFH days I would almost certainly be less productive than I would be if I was 100% in the office, but I’d also be less stressed, happier, and healthier. Less likely to need full sick days. Less likely to job hop after a year. Less likely to sneak alcohol in my coffee mug to deal with coworkers and clients. And the world would keep on spinning, no one would die, there would be no measurable impact on the world other than the stock price/CEOs bonus maybe being down a few cents.
I get that being more productive is how we can sell healthier work habits to the capitalists, but let’s not drink the koolade. There’s an immeasurable number of things more important in life than one’s productivity at work.
You can rent smaller offices with fewer fixed desks and some open ones free for anyone to use for whenever people needs to pop in. Hybrid offers benefits too.
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Sounds like poor provisioning? In my office we a booking system for the meeting rooms, but we never had an issue with taking hot desks. Maybe a few times your favorite choice might be taken, and that’s all.
Offices always have had limited meeting rooms and same reservation concept applies. Not a new challenge.
Right. We have an office calendar that books rooms automatically if you post on it. Had that since we’ll before we were wfh.
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Tangentially, the disaster recovery plan for a company I worked for 20 years ago included provisions of shift work for 9-5 people. If one of the major offices were to become unavailable due to fire or whatever, the other location would accommodate the extra workforce by going 6-2, 2-10, essentially doubling the desk count until a permanent solution was found. Back then, everybody was 100% office based.
There are a lot of great ones in here, but there’s another perspective I think should be added. For a long time, employees have been commoditized. We’re resources. Interchangeable. And that gives companies tremendous power.
WFH puts us on more even footing. There are entire cities supported by a single industry or even company. Now we aren’t limited geographically in who we can work for. If you’re toxic to work for, we can leave. It saps the power of the leadership to say “my way or the highway.”
I don’t think this is the secret underlying reason. I agree it’s real estate values that are mainly driving it, but I think this is absolutely part of it. Toxic leaders (and every company has them) are finding people are less willing to tolerate their bullshit because they aren’t over a barrel to the same degree. Still need universal healthcare to really break their back.
Yeah for quite some time I have been saying labor is priced artificially low. All of the barriers to finding a new job while working. All the risks of even short-term unemployment. Workers are already fucked by the power imbalance but without any liquidity in the labor market it’s so much worse. WFH adds liquidity, they hate it.
We do need universal healthcare absolutely, take that out of the labor package but WFH I think will only be beneficial in the short term (for employees - I do think it beneficial for the environment) it’s a shorter step from WFH to outsourcing to get the cheapest labor cost. I see this happening even at my company, an event management company so we are all about in person stuff - we lost an accountant and they wouldn’t let us get a replacement, already we have the infrastructure to work from home so they said “no but you can have a consultant who works in India, she can do it cheaper.”
Not that they couldn’t have done this anyway, but in this particular case, they wouldn’t have done. WFH opened that door for this company.
That sort of move has been threatening the tech sector since the early 2000s and it hasn’t happened yet. Yes, some jobs moved overseas, but the timezone and language differences mean the ROI isn’t as big as a spreadsheet that accounts for salary says. Having to stay at work until 8pm and meet with the team in India at 8am their time isn’t going to be nearly as productive as meeting with people within a couple timezones.
“we do need”? Because everyboby is murican oh the whole Internet
but WFH I think will only be beneficial in the short term (for employees - I do think it beneficial for the environment) it’s a shorter step from WFH to outsourcing to get the cheapest labor cost.
I hate to break it to you, but as someone who was self-employed and doing contracting work throughout most of his career, I can’t tell you how many times I was replaced by remote/offshore Indian programmers, over the decades, for cost reasons. Was definitely going on way before Covid and WFH, and should not be a reason why to fear/stop WFH.
I’ve also seen the opposite happen - Bean counters think out sourcing to India will save lots of money, then they end up paying a more expensive us consulting company or independent consultant to come and clean up a mess, then they have to hire in house devs to maintain the code. Most of the out sourcing groups I’ve interacted with had a mentality of "we’ll do what was explicitly asked for and not a single thing more, and if we hit a roadblock, we’ll call it out and stop work until someone state side figures it out. And I can’t really fault them for the mentality - they know they’re being used because they’re cheaper labor, they don’t have any sense of ownership of the code, and when they develop stronger skills, they leave for a better opportunity.
I know there are strong devs in India, but I don’t think they usually end up in the out sourcing companies.I’ve also seen the opposite happen
Yep, that too. Made a lot of my consulting money fixing problems/issues that were created from overseas workers.
I know there are strong devs in India, but I don’t think they usually end up in the out sourcing companies.
No, they don’t. At least I’ve never seen them, and I’ve worked on a lot of projects. You get what you paid for.
I’m curious if the move to large corps investing in residential properties is due to the collapse of value in the commercial market.
Me too. That’s a good question.
I worked hybrid 18 at home, 22 at the office and it sucked.
It showed me three things:
• It showed me that I was far more productive when I was at home and I was comfortable and not distracted.
• It showed me that I was coming into the office for absolutely no logical reason (even while there, all discussion was via Slack and Zoom).
• It showed me that the company’s leadership was incompetent.
This wasn’t even a ‘we paid for the space, we have to use it’ issue. This was an office job at a light industrial facility where no one had to be in the office. If they didn’t have us come in, they could have knocked down the office area and put in another line or two. Just incompetence.
I treat office days as social days for exactly this reason. I know I’m not getting anything done, there are too many distractions, so I MUST be being forced to come into this disaster zone for one reason - to recharge. So that’s what I do.
I told my boss that I get less done in the office. The temperature is always wrong. The monitors aren’t as good as what I have as home. There’s distractions. So many distractions. Sales guys are loud. People walking up to you. You can’t ignore a person standing next to you like you can ignore a slack message.
I told him I’d go in, but it would be a day of bullshitting and not doing much work.
Fortunately, he hasn’t really pushed the issue since. If the CEO gets the idea in his head again it’s going to be conflict.
What I’d really like to do is form a union, but labor in the US is extremely weak.
The only way I got anything done in the office was to wear noise-canceling headphones all the time. At which point, why bother coming in? I couldn’t hear anyone anyway.
I’m pretty lucky, in my industry, remote work has become the norm, so much so that my previous employer ended up closing the local office where I worked when I first started because [1] most of our colleagues were all over the country and [2] nobody thought there was a point to going back. I’m looking for a new job, and every prospect I’ve checked out so far is doing the same, almost fully remote. It just doesn’t make any sense to do otherwise.
Our company is doing the opposite and forcing everyone to RTW 5-days a week. Can’t wait for the exodus and the “I told you so”
ITT people with drastically different ideas of what hybrid is.
Why do I feel like the next phase of this is changing the expectations of hybrid to be more like “9 in the office, 1 day from home”
A smart CEO can downsize the office space and save money, thereby increasing his profits.
The problem is they signed long office space leases and breaking out of them is very expensive, plus they get tax breaks for driving foot traffic to commercial areas. Not that they would ever admit that is the reason instead if a bullshit “team spirit” diatribe excuse.
Considering it all started during the pandemic, a lot of those leases are going to come up for renewal soon.
They can rent the space to other businesses as “temporary office”.
Subletting is a thing.
Did we actually believe any of them at the time? I think they already knew that remote work was going to continue, and they were trying to get as much money out of the transition as possible.
One problem was that they had wasted real estate, and they had to justify it to shareholders. So they pretended that they were going to bring everyone back to the office.
If you think about it from a medium run perspective, of course employers are going to want more remote work because then they don’t have to pay for utilities or parking or rent or buildings. Of course this depends on the exact setup, but for many businesses it was clear from the beginning of the pandemic where things were going to go. And if we want to get even more cynical, we can point out that when your labor pool spans the country or even the world, you have a greater ability to underpay employees.
They want remote work so they can get the cheapest labor. Be on guard for average salaries to start dropping.
I’ve been outsourced more than once, while working in an office.
You guys are getting paid at your job?
If you can do your job from home and your job can be taught under 5 years. Then 5 indians guys can do it together for 10 times less total than you cost. And that will be the case until what happenned to China happens to India, which should take roughly 40 years.
We found this to be NOT true. Half, at best. But wait.
So it’s 1/10 in its heyday, but when you pay someone 1/10th salary in a land of 1/50th salary, that person becomes a target. They look comparatively rich, their house gets repaired, their kids show the signs of an economic bump, etc. So now your guy can get robbed or kidnapped, so you need a driver and protection. And the kids need to go to a different school with a gate. And the spouse needs to get back and forth safely. And then a better house, moving to a gated community or apartment, with more guards. And suddenly you’re paying for company housing, schooling, cars, drivers, tutors, guards, cameras/surveillance, cooks, maids, deliveries, and even extended family is moving in for safety.
So it’s still a bargain on paper, but then it’s just half. They don’t mention this because it’s hard to sell an idea when 80% of it is eroded.
Your employee or team now works on the other side of the world, with a different culture and management style from what you’re used to with Americans, different communications and workflow, and everything’s still around the world so it’s a day’s delay for everything.
The culture and work environment has trained some regions to NEVER admit they don’t know something; just nod, smile, and try to figure it out with confidence. Dunning-kruger be damned, sometimes that’s not a good way to do something in my field, which is incredibly technical. We can’t even educate the locals on risks of bad supply chains (curl|sh anyone? Flatpacks and CPAN and NPM and composer? Find out why these are risks) and doing so with the different “never say you don’t understand or you’re fired” environment is an added challenge. “Did you check for compliance?” will only ever get a “Yes”, even if you don’t mention which standard.
So your management - especially in offshores - needs an entirely different mindset and workflow, and you need to have people to check on the compliance and readiness and completeness who will say when it’s not ready because they’re not gonna be fired for it. This kind of thing surprised us and it will surprise the "I just wanna save money and this guy said 1/10th! " crowd. It’s not “you get what you pay for”, so don’t misunderstand; it’s just different. And if you can cope with all the differences and don’t freak out that you’re not saving so much for same-same work, it’s … an idea. In my case, the offshored staff slowly shrunk until we moved the offshoring to Poland.
Hybrid isn’t good enough
Far better than what most had, though. Still, until companies also start paying people during their commute, it isn’t enough.
My wife works in a large suburban office park off a major highway. The company designs hardware so obviously they have people in the workshop on-site etc, but you could remove three of their office buildings and keep those people at home. She also flies out from the east coast to the west coast twice a year just to sit in a conference room for two days straight… it’s like no one has ever heard of Zoom.
I’ve been working from home for nearly a decade and a half now. It has enabled me to keep my job after moving halfway across the country. I have dinner ready when the wife and kids get home, the laundry done, and can go for a jog at the local park for a few laps when I want to and yet I still get shit done and do a great job.
It just absolutely baffles me that CEOs aren’t chomping at the bit to downsize their office space footprints, get off those leases or sell off their properties, and let everyone work from home.
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If I don’t plan to do stuff after work then my weekends end up being a rush of errands and housekeeping.
Long term leases and supporting commercial real estate, which they are likely invested.
In other news…
“we lied and tried to force RTO because we wanted people to quit so we could avoid the bad-press of layoffs. They didn’t quit, we had to do layoffs to keep the stock price up because as a ceo I’m paid in shares. We’re done the layoffs for now and we enjoy skipping out on rent for office space.”
