I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later.
Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
Given that description, it's completely illogical. You've described no differences at all between buildings A and B!
In reality, though, building A might be poorly-suited to work because of children, pets, or other people, or it might be located in an area that's very noisy during the hours in question, or it might be maintained to a different standard of cleanliness, one not conducive to focus, or it might have poor connectivity options available, or...
In reality, building B is the destination for many people working on the same or related projects, so people focused on the same thing can focus and share information easily, and people focused on similar or related things can focus and share information easily. The single-use environment is oriented entirely toward the work expected, without having to support any other uses. Equipment failures can be easily handled because of onsite spares. Connectivity is assured. Comfort is assured. There are likely more meal options in the vicinity, given the nature of office buildings vs residential areas. And so on.
Personally, I prefer to work from home, and I have a dedicated workspace with a 1GB fiber connection and no pets or young kids underfoot, so I don't have a commute, which averages 30 minutes where I live. But it doesn't seem ridiculous or illogical for companies to expect employees to show up at work, and many people seem to prefer separating the two.
I just remember, I've got a friend and former coworker who lives a few blocks from me, and he chooses to drive into the office a couple of days a week to work by himself, echoing in an mostly-empty building, because his wife is a real estate agent, and both of them working from home disrupt each other. She doesn't have an office outside the home, so he drives 20 minutes each way (no need for rush hour), and finds the location much preferable to either staying home or working from a coffee shop.
Different people have different life experiences, for sure, but it turns out that there are many, many logical reasons why people might work from offices given a choice.
I work in building A, and for me, that seems true. But my building A doesn't have pets, or children, or other people working in it. It's not noisy, very clean, and has a gigabit internet connection.
In short, you've completely ignored the entire content of my last comment, which is unfortunate.
And yet again: I love working remotely! Given a choice, I'll never work from an office again. Although I also felt that way from 2008-2018, and then ended up working in an office for a year or so until the pandemic, because one doesn't always have an easy choice.
I dont see why having pets or children makes WFH an issue.
I have both, and it's a joy that I can take breaks throughout the day to see the people that matter most to me (and my pets, who aren't people...but still matter)
I don't, either, since I have no pets and my youngest child at home is 12. However, when my previous company ran a survey, many parents of younger children mentioned children and pets as reasons they wanted to spend one or more days in the office.
>Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours.
Don't know where you live and work, but that's not the case for me. In most buildings I've worked in, aircon/heating switches off around 6pm. And I certainly don't leave my home heated while not in it.
Of everything wrong with modern society, the inefficiency of having separate home and office buildings ranks pretty low imho.
> Of everything wrong with modern society, the inefficiency of having separate home and office buildings ranks pretty low imho.
Another way to look at this inefficiency is to imagine how much cheaper (and, on average, bigger for an individual) housing could be if we had no need for offices. The inability for the young people to buy their own place seems to be universal in (at least most of) developed world (Australia, Canada, USA, UK, Ireland, EU, NZ, Japan, urban China, ...).
The cultural impacts of that change are pretty interesting as well, though that sounds like a thesis topic to me.
I can definitely say that for us, going from a company which was 95% in the office to 95% remote, the culture has been negatively impacted. Productivity might be on par or even slightly up but overall I believe most people are less happy.
IRL meetings are important - but you don't need them 3 days per week. My team has found meeting once per month, or even once per quarter is highly effective. We get together all day, have plenty of whiteboards, and even some team games. We make it fun and productive. It has been working extremely well.
We even fly in the folks who are truly remote - they don't live in the same metro area or even the same state. It's still a lot cheaper and more energy efficient than commercial real estate.
Yea over here (Scandinavia) people started saving money by turning off aircon during the nights.
...which caused huge issues with moisture and air quality. The buildings were designed to have forced air circulation 24/7. Changing it to 12/5 just messed up everything.
There is a maximally efficient way to operate buildings when people are not in them. This is some function of building size, ambient air temperature and amount of time people will not be in the building (and probably other things). The key point is, unless the ambient air temperature is close to 20C, it is unlikely turning off heating / cooling completely is going to be maximally efficient.
In Atlanta if you turn off your A/C at 6pm you’re not going to be able to cool the building back down by the time the employees return in the morning. Reduce it a bit, sure, but it needs to be running 24/7.
It would be a better benefit to society to turn most of these office buildings into apartments.
Not to mention the assumption that everyone "sit[s] in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there)".
Even minutes add up. I only have a 5 min commute, but with my 260 workdays, that comes to 2 x 5 mins x 260 = 2600 minutes, or 43.3 hours. That over one work-week of lost time.
But I do work with people that have one hour commutes, each way. For them, that's 520 hours a year - or almost 3 MONTHS worth of working hours, just to sit in a car. And not all are blessed to have public transport - so that two hour commute means eyes on road and hands on the wheel.
We haven't even touched on things like fuel, tollbooths, vehicle maintenance, etc.
When I was working north of DC there were people commuting from West Virginia (couldn't sell their houses to relocate), so 2.5+ hours each way so that's about 32 work-weeks of lost time. And they would come in by 7am to leave at 3pm to avoid the insane traffic during rush hour.
i work remote but live in the northern dc area. i occasionally have to head up to the harpers ferry area after work (northwest of DC by about 60-70 min without traffic, for non locals) and the afternoon rush hour literally starts by 3pm, especially on thursdays the days i usually have to go up there.
its funny cuz so many people think "oh ill leave early and beat traffic" that you are often better off waiting until like 6pm.
i still cant believe how many WV plates i see on 270 on any given work day. i hope i never end up in a commute like that
I have a 30 minute commute in comfy air conditioned public transport. I'd rather spend that time home.
But I'm willing to do it 1-2 times a week if there is need. Some things are just better and faster to do in person. Brainstorming and onboarding new employees being the two big ones.
In the short term, kinda curious what would happen to all the people who are sustained by the economic activity of the things you deem superfluous. Someone works those jobs. Provides lunch, cleans the offices, sets up the furniture and AV, maintains the building, etc...
The pure fact that it provides increased economic activity and therefore is able to support different jobs and the second/third order consequences of those makes perfect sense to me.
In your stay at home model, what would all those people do instead?
I've never understood the argument that we should continue doing something just for the sake of jobs. At bowling alleys, we used to have pinsetters who replaced the pins after you knocked them down. We had leech collectors who would collect leeches for bloodletting. We had 'computers' who would calculate equations by hand. It'd seem ridiculous today if I told you that we should've ignored advances in medicine, software, and automated pinball machines in order to protect those jobs. Irrespective of whether or not working from home is a good idea, society changes once new technologies are invented or social norms change, and sometimes that means we have to find people new jobs.
I didn't realize it was my responsibility to find these people employment. I especially didn't realize I needed to keep paying for a car, consuming gasoline and destroying Earth's biosphere, contributing to smog, and wasting my time so that these people will stay employed. Maybe, just maybe, our system needs a top-down reevaluation and maybe we can find other ways to house, clothe, and feed people who don't have jobs. Or maybe we realize there's other, more important work, for these folks to be doing.
I don't think it's your responsibility, but the proposed and in-process change is going to continue to be very disruptive, nonetheless.
One way to think about offices is that they are appealing for much the same reason that people demonstrably prefer to live in urban areas instead of rural areas. Over time, people flock to cities because of the efficiencies of having many people in a concentrated area. In many ways, the same thing is true with office jobs.
People living in suburbs or exurbs shouldn't expect to have a dozen eateries within a few blocks of their home, but it's quite common to have those options at work. The economics works because there are many more people per square mile or meter at the office than at home.
Personally, I keep groceries in my house, and almost never go out for lunch, but most people eat lunches out, and offices make that easier.
The short term will obviously be problematic for those people. However, in the mid term they can move some of those service activities to residential areas instead of business districts (provided that zoning regulations become less senseless than they are now), and in the long term those demographics can be redirected to more productive endeavours (by the combination of the appearance of new industries that leverage increased workforce availability and a general decrease in working hours).
Probably going to get downvoted by people but… There are a lot of people ITT scornful of Apple’s decision here, and saying that they’re only doing it for dumb reasons, I.e., to justify their office or because managers are old and out of touch.
Please don’t take this as a wholehearted endorsement of Apple’s policy here, but I do sort of get it. In my experience, doing collaborative creative work is dramatically more difficult in a remote environment. In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other). I’m sure remote works well for some creative teams… but in my experience, it is much harder (I’ve spoken to peers at other companies who feel the same way). If Apple thinks that collaboration and idea creation are core to innovation, I can see why they want people back in the office.
Not saying I agree with their methods though - personally I would have gone for a softer touch and a more tailored-by-team approach.
Collaborative work done remotely is a skill that can be learned and improved.
And yes, maybe some forms of collaborative work are inherently more difficult to do remotely.
But you are ignoring the massive impacts of commuting, being stuck in crappy office buildings and forced to live in an overwhelmingly expensive and chaotic city have on performance. Having spent 17 years as a remote product manager, my anecdata is that eliminating those factors from my life led to dramatically higher performance, and more importantly, a work/life balance that didn't have me quietly resenting my state of employment for the required in-person depredations.
...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience...
VS
...a 20+ year veteran with 3 kids and a house in the suburbs with a 2.5hrs of commuting per day and a job that consists entirely of conference calls, emails, and presentations.
Not everyone fits in these two groups, but they are illustrative.
The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.
The second group has usually already baked in their system of organization and discipline and can more easily maintain productivity at home.
Another dimension is how much socialization an employee needs to do their job. Someone in HR might need considerably more face time than a programmer.
> ...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience...
> The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.
The young single employee will probably not afford to live in a big city and have a short commute.
Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers. Trial-and-error is the least desirable way to work. Async and remote is about thinking and writing down before blurting out. To me the latter is more professional way to work, and for the same reason it's more somber.
>Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers
And remote-WFH meetings that aren't 1:1, are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep with their mics muted, until their name gets called and you see them suddenly snap back to reality because they were watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast.
I know I'm guilty of that and if you say you aren't, you're lying, like saying you don't masturbate.
> And remote-WFH meetings are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep, watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast.
This is a company policy problem. Remote or in-person is not going to solve that. If your employees are not being engaged in meetings, stop having them.
I'm heavily in favor of remote-WFH who prefers async communication, but this is a multi faceted problem. What do you do when the employees who actually need to be engaged in the problem use WFH to slack off and not prepare for meetings?
This might touch a nerve, but some tech workers are grown up man-children with little to no discipline (I'm sure everyone here knows some) since they got through life by having adults (parents, guardians, teachers, bosses, coaches, mentors) keep them accountable for their work/progress, and once the move form the office to home happened, they stopped doing much work and treated it as a vacation, since they didn't like their job much anyway and they were just there for the paycheck, and as their boss/colleagues couldn't see them slack off the whole day it felt like they weren't accountable to anyone anymore.
I've already seen several people let go due to this.
Maybe take advantage of the benefits of remote: Have 2 meetings instead of one, with one being a 'pre-meeting' to make sure everyone is prepared, with a few hours between them. Keep them short. Nobody is going to complain that you re holding up the conference room.
>Have 2 meetings instead of one, with one being a 'pre-meeting' to make sure everyone is prepared
So we solve the zoom-meeting fatigue problem by introducing even more meetings and disruptive context switching where the bosses/leads need to take time out of their already busy schedule to act as baby-sitters and check up on their "babies" because some people lack self discipline and can't self organize when someone isn't constantly watching over their shoulder?
Sounds like micromanagement hell, count me out. I don't know any tech company where this is the norm and wouldn't want to be in one, not as a worker, nor as a boss.
Everywhere I worked you were trusted to be accountable for your work and if a higher-up had to keep checking in on you regularly, you were on your way out.
Generally when you're having meetings about meetings, you're crossing the line into a meeting-dominated culture. History and common sense tell us that meetings may be where some decisions are made, but they are not where actual IC work gets done.
Couldn't agree more. I recently started at a full remote company, after working at very in-person-centric companies before. I'm astonished at home much genuine discussion takes place on slack and over email. It's so nice to have a physical, searchable record of where various engineers stand on these issues! And it's nice to be able to take my time and read through an argument, instead of making the argument orally and forgetting half of the points by the time we decide on a direction.
If your company stubbornly insists on synchronous video calls for every decision, of course you'll hate remote work. But if your company embraces the async nature of remote work, I think it's possible to be much more productive.
You are not alone in believing creative work and collaboration are much more difficult in a remote environment.
But yesterday I watched the movie "A dangerous method" about Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Well, at the time, collaboration was via paper mail. And my feeling is that they were more creative than we are.
I'm not suggesting to go paper mail, but I couldn't help but observe this fact.
Unfortunately I think remote work is the worst of both worlds by comparison.
IMO collaborating via paper isn't about the actual medium of communication, it's time and freedom. When every reply takes at least a few days to arrive to you you've got enormous space for experimentation, even if only in your own head. Meanwhile in remote work world we're plugged into video conference meetings multiple times a day. There isn't a lot of mental space.
You are comparing synchronous and asynchronous work, not in-person and remote. There's no reason remote work needs to involve multiple meetings a day, just like there's nothing preventing your boss from requiring multiple meetings a day when working in person.
In fact, remote work is usually more asynchronous than in-person when it's a core part of how a company works. Remote-first companies might have people working in 3 timezones with 8 hours between each of them (I've been in this situation), so meetings are a pain in the ass for everyone and everything that can possibly be done via email or other tools, is.
That’s an interesting hypothesis. I could see how paper mail, by virtue of forcing you to put extreme effort into clarity and thoroughness, could spark some novel thinking. On the other hand, as much as I think I work with great people, I doubt they’re all great in the level of those three!
I wonder how people feel about making other aspects of their lives remote. Attending remote conferences? How about remote vacations? Remote schooling for their kids?
Online conferences have been a complete bust for me. They're on par with IRC or forums, background noise with bursts of activity.
I loved going to conferences because the setting seems to often attract people that exactly are not the always-on-always-busy people, and you can go from tech talk to chitchatting back to tech talk. Also it was always a good excuse to visit another city and maybe add a day of sightseeing, or just break the habits the of every day work.
I miss in-person conferences and I don't see myself participating in a lot of online ones. You have all the problems of bad cameras, bad microphones, bad remote conferencing software. Totally willing to accept these in order to save 30-90 minutes of commuting every day, and you can get yourself suited in your team... but not willing to accept that for twice a year events that used to be awesome and fun.
Guess I have to clarify that I'm 95% happily WFH since March 2020 and I see no problems, given the right team and circumstances. I'm not one of these super extroverted people, but I do love conferences.
There have been a number of conferences I've missed this year because they returned to in person. Sorry, I'm in it for a few talks, I'm not uprooting my week to fly to Portland and hunt for accommodations. A big slap in the face when they don't even offer recorded sessions online. Like, if the conference is about sharing knowledge with the world, don't you want to let the world access that knowledge?
Do you want them to put out free content that took a lot of money to co-ordinate and produce or do you want them to spend a lot of money setting up a paywall for access that very few people will buy?
All these conferences have corporate sponsors and paid-for sessions by their employees as sales and recruiting tools. The content should be freely accessible, your ticket buys you renting out the conference space and food.
I bet for most of these conferences, those costs are rounding errors in the grand scheme. When Microsoft has Microsoft build, the cost of the space and food is nothing compared to the return they are going to get from companies who turn around a pour money into azure because of what they demonstrated at the conference. Same with other companies.
The cases where this probably isn't true are going to be the conferences like Debconf or BSDConf. Mind you, these conferences have been hosting all their sessions on youtube for years.
This part has been great. Unfortunately "networking" at remote conferences has been terrible. Most of my conferences are predominantly about networking, so overall it's been a net negative.
I agree about that. I think a nice balance would be localized meetups to watch the conference or an after hours event where you can discuss the content of the talks over a pint or hitting a few golf balls or something.
I'm not sure what you mean to achieve by this comment. Do you want to imply that working remotely is the same as "remote vacations", and so people are hypocrits for only wanting one of these but not the other?
But if you are serious about your question, please look at the context of each of these: Vacations are often defined by being in a different place. Working, however, is defined through achieving some result - for IT work, there is no necessary, physical "location" attribute.
And if they have different relationships to a physical location, it isn't fair to compare them as if they did.
Neuromatch is a conference and "summer" online school that was created due to the pandemic. It is spectacular, with thousands of lectures and hours of teaching online. It has now become an organization
For most of what Apple does, I'd expect that the ratio of in-person time to remote time needed is pretty low.
I wonder if an approach like that used by some TV series might work? They have a writer's retreat for each season, where all the people that were going to be writing episodes, the showrunners, and I think the directors would get together for several days and pitch episode ideas to the group. They work out what episodes they were going to do, outlines of the general plot, and which writers and directors would do each episode.
For a tech company maybe have a quarterly retreat that lasts a week or two. Hold it at some good vacation destination (changing each time), and for the well off tech companies maybe even pay for the employee's family to come too. Leave some gaps in the meeting schedules so that the employee will have some time to do vacation-like things with their family while at the retreat.
I’m doing my best! I’m in a very hybrid environment right now. But even people with a lot of experience find it hard. The O’Reiley book “Discussing Design” (strong recommend, it’s a good book) is about design critique, and it spends some time on how doing critique in hybrid/remote environments is hard. Sometimes things are just… more difficult, and it’s not trivially solvable.
Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team.
With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom.
I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity.
Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work.
The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.
> Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team.
> [...]
> Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work.
How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades?
Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?
In my workplace, I think it proved the opposite. Sure, the sky didn't fall, but the quality of work certainly went down.
The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer. These were things that happened naturally between engineers in a bull pen or from people walking down the hall to ask a senior engineer interesting questions.
I think remote can work for experts, but if you have a lot of juniors, they simply fail to develop.
In my experience it helped companies realize their onboarding sucked in the first place and was relying way too much on oral tradition. They were forced to act on it and implement processes that make them much better than before.
For example it was not uncommon before covid that you'd start in a new company and you either didn't even have a computer ready or were missing lots of accounts to even think about starting and do something. When I switched company a bit less than 1y ago, I received all my equipment one week in advance, got a 3h meeting with HR scheduled on my first day at 9am, a list of mandatory and mostly useful trainings to do that I had to complete in the first month. Those helped me a lot get through the eventual idle time you get when your coworkers cannot dedicate time for you in the first days. I was also assigned an onboarding buddy that I could annoy anytime to help me navigate through anything I didn't know.
Never saw that kind of efficient onboarding before Covid.
> The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer
I actually took advantage of the tools available to me and improved all of those in my current company.
There are onboarding Git repositories with both information about projects, as well as instructions for getting stuff up and running. IDE run configurations and scrips that prompt for input or give details on first run. CI/CD processes for deployments, monitoring tools that are integrated with the communication apps, useful scripts and utilities where needed.
Of course there's always the possibility for colleagues to just ask questions, but now I can also encourage them to look in the direction of general chat channels so someone else could also help them.
Somehow telling someone to wait for a few hours and getting back to them with some very basic automation wasn't chosen in the past often, even if in those particular cases more time was wasted on doing things manually or poking one's finger at the screen and explaining what to do, when that could have been a few lines of Markdown.
A laptop camera angled on the whiteboard or whatever scrap of paper the person has on hand? Thats what we've used and its fine for showing drawings in zoom meetings. Making people commute to watch someone draw on a whiteboard seems wasteful.
I have tried whiteboard over zoom. It’s a miserable failure. There isn’t a camera, lighting setup and compression algorithm on earth that will get it right. It just looks like a grainy, pixilated poorly lit mess. And you can’t hand the market to the other people.
And worse you have to schedule it in advance in 30 minute intervals. Bye bye spontaneous creativity. Bye bye innovation.
Programming remote is easy. But there is vastly more to delivering a product than writing code.
> In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other).
Getting a graphics tablet has been a pretty good idea in my experience. You get all the benefits of working digitally like layers and non destructive operations (like moving stuff around), which would be a bit more cumbersome otherwise.
Oh course I'd still argue that it's a bit worse for taking really quick notes, though being able to easily save a file or two and put it in Slack or some Wiki for referencing that exact thing months later is pretty cool, without the intermediate step of having to digitize some pictures and do the same work twice.
I do also enjoy being able to share my screen in standup meetings and very quickly showing a few screenshots and graphs, in addition to aggregating them across years for later performance reviews.
In my experience a particular pain point is the latency that you speak of, as well as people not wanting to invest about 50€ in a reasonable mic and possibly a webcam as well.
It just shows when people don't care or don't know about these things, even interviews with government officials in the news for a while here looked like they're 240p or something.
We are talking about a TECHNOLOGY COMPANY that sells the best collaborative software, hardware and philosophy the world has ever seen, and employs thousands of people who all believe in that.
The fact this has not already been used as an example to champion technology to take it to new levels of collaborative effectiveness is an absolutely steaming red flag that Apple has begun "the descent".
As they pointed out in their open letter [0] the last time this was proposed, they don't need in person collaboration every day, or even every week. It's probably only useful about once a month if that.
Apple can mandate whatever the hell they like, but there will be no putting the toothpaste back into the work from home tube. I won't even consider roles that force me to commute and work in some corporate rat's nest, no matter how nicely it might be decorated.
Are you sure? I’ve been seeing numerous headlines suggesting that you don’t actually feel that way - in fact no one does, and everyone really wants to go back to the office.
Additionally, fabric of society, progress, puppy dogs, and America. Think of the children (during your commute.)
We’re in this cubicle together. (Management thought it would cut costs.)
You get cubicles? Fancy. My last corporate gig was one step away from hot desking us. Everyone in non-engineering roles had already been moved to hot desks and a generous, adorable little cartoon bear decorated cubby to store your personal items. Engineering raised such a fuss about setting up monitors and whatnot they we stalled the full rollout for a spell, but the writing was on the wall.
Imagine that. Forcing employees into an office, but not even guaranteeing a desk. It’s hardly better than going to a cowork or even a coffee shop.
I'm dealing with a particularly stupid inter-departmental fight over hot desking right now. I'm not in the office enough to "justify a dedicated desk", but I also have lots of sensitive hardware others aren't allowed to touch covering "my" desk. I attempted to compromise with the relevant department by suggesting that we just mark the desk as permanently reserved the way other teams have, but that was rejected because "rules say...", as was API access to reserve it automatically.
Oh no, it's worse than that. I can't even get API access to book things automatically. I would have to manually log in and do it every day, and there's only so far ahead I could book.
Can't script/screen scrape that process either because the site is behind SSO, so I would truly need API keys to access it automatically.
My expectation is that hot desks will become the norm, as companies will (in time) decrease their office space in line with the % of the workforce who are actually in the office on an "average" day.
Hot desks are about the dumbest thing there is. Then why go to the office at all? So you can sit next to random people on an uncomfortable table/chair for hours?
Here we are now really only going to the office if there's some collaborative work that would benefit from face-to-face. And in that you don't really need your own desk since you're probably going to be spending most of your time in a meeting room anyways.
I think there's some people still going to the office daily and I imagine they basically have their own dedicated desk at this point.
At some point companies may even try having some employees offer to work from somewhere other than the office, like a coffee shop or even home if you absolutely had to, to deal with any over-crowding issues that come up from this. You can’t really work in the office if it is over-subscribed. Can’t have people standing around waiting for desks. (Hmmm… or conference rooms for that matter…)
Sure you won’t get the in-office perks, but the company appreciates your understanding.
Coffee shops are so much better than offices. The only time I get interrupted is to ask me if the seat next to me is taken. I can go to any one I want to at any time. I am not required to stay there for any length of time. The cute barista remembers my order. (Ok, that last one's a lie, but we can't have everything)
I guess you don't have any meetings during the workday. Most coffee shops are just to noisy to have anything close to a meeting. That's at least my experience.
Most meetings I go to are superfluous and can be replaced with a slack thread; I think the noise would encourage fewer (and shorter) meetings. Stack them all up at either the beginning or ending of the day and then go to a coffee shop for a few hours.
> I’ve been seeing numerous headlines suggesting that you don’t actually feel that way - in fact no one does, and everyone really wants to go back to the office.
Anyone with two brain cells can write a stupid article on their "blog" now a days and sound like an authority. My workplace in the bay area already has return to office for a while, guess how many people are showing up week to week? Last time i was in the office a couple days ago, it felt like a ghost town. This is the "people" voting with their actions and those actions tell me that everyone (including me) favors WFH much more than slogging to the office.
Nope. I'm lucky in that I have dedicated home office (ie. bedroom that we don't need for a bed), but I absolutely don't get sick of it. It's much better than even the dedicated offices with a door I've had at some previous jobs. It's comfortable, private, has a window, its climate is controlled by me, it's decorated the way I want (in my case filled with retro computers, my electronics workbench, artwork on the walls, etc). And when I get stuck, or have a hard time focusing, I can get up, go talk to my wife or son, play with my dog, lay on the couch for a bit, go for a walk, etc. Heck, even the 4 walls are painted colors I chose!
I've worked from this room for the past ~9 years, since we've lived in this house, and won't complain at all if I work here for 9 or 39 more.
I could've written your post myself. Every time I see an article about how Apple or some other company is planning to wind down their work-at-home policies and mandate office attendance, I'm tempted to stand up from my desk or workbench, walk over to my window, open it, and simply experience ten or fifteen seconds of fresh air in a peaceful, wooded neighborhood setting.
Maybe once or twice a week, I do just that. It's a basic exercise in gratitude. At those moments, I remind myself that the ability to work at home in a comfortable, quiet, well-equipped environment is an extraordinary privilege, one that I must never take for granted.
My fellow engineers who have to drive, bike, or ride a bus to the Brobdingnagian toroidal panopticon in Cupertino are absolutely among the industry's elite. The best of the best, both respected and envied by their peers at other companies. Most years, the majority of them likely outearn me handily... as they should, because many of them are better at their jobs than I am at mine. I wouldn't trade places with any of them for ten times their salary, and I've told recruiters as much.
I actually feel sorry for those poor souls. Commuting is for suckers and open office plans are for livestock. The progressive companies that will eventually outcompete companies like Apple for engineering talent have most likely already been started in other peoples' garages, spare bedrooms, and basements... where they'll remain.
I live in a generous but small basement, with windows on one side. I work from home 100% of the time. I spend nearly all of my personal time outside, and nearly all of my family (pup and me) time out walking and/or playing, and the remaining part of it cuddling. I’m not sure which four walls I should feel closed in by, but I pretty much only see the walls for the time I’m plopped on my couch or at my desk working, or when I open my eyes in the morning.
You’re allowed to go outside. It’s not hospitable everywhere and I get that. You’re also allowed to go any number of other places that would welcome your presence. If that doesn’t work well for you, by all means go to the office if you’d prefer. I want to spend all of my day at or near home, it’s a nice place to work and I love to spend the rest of my time out and about or snuggling my pup. You can enjoy what you enjoy and I can enjoy what I enjoy.
I can only understand this sentiment if you're stuck in a single room/studio apartment. Many of us have houses, apartments, or condos that aren't anywhere near the size of a mansion.
The trick is to have separate work/home spaces. Most fulltime remotes, myself included, either have a dedicated work-only area or work from coffee shops and the like.
The whole point is flexibility! If you don’t want an office, don’t have one. If you want one, have one. But jobs that force you into a specific office remove the choice.
If you make enough money, you can get a place to live that has more than one room.
I have a room with bookshelves along one wall and a large world map on another wall, and it has a desk which goes up and down at the touch of a button. It's such a nice room that I go into it on weekends to spend fun time on my personal computer, but it's also where I go on weekdays to work.
I have a separate living room (with a TV), and kitchen, and bedroom, and so on. Not a mansion, but definitely some variety.
Then again, that's my personality. I don't feel cooped up unless I haven't left the house in a week or so. Other people feel cooped up in a lot shorter period of time.
People literally got sick of going to the office. It's why working from home became a thing in the first place. I have no wish to see diseased ridden coworkers.
Well, that’s a radical interpretation of the text. But I guess someone else must have had the same interpretation, so to be clear: the part I object to was “literally got sick of”. I share your lack of desire to be enclosed in spaces with sick people, and covid has very much amplified my desire never to work in such spaces again. But it wasn’t the going to the office part which made people sick, other than that happened to be where some people got infected. Maybe that seems needlessly pedantic, but I think it’s a disservice to the people infected in public markets, nursing homes, hospitals, their own homes, and plenty of other places they just happened to be, to frame it that way.
Does anyone else get major 1929 vibes when they read posts like this?
I suspect there may be a day where people are happy for any job that pays them to stay alive and have food, WPA style. An office might not sound so bad after a few years of laying sidewalks and repairing bridges.
The great layoffs have begun. People are still talking like it's the Great Resignation period. The very best can dictate their work conditions, as always. The majority of the workers cannot, and remote work is not here to stay for most.
If we get to the point where the choice is between starving on the street or going to an office, then sure I'll go to an office. But as long as there's at least a few companies hiring that offer fully remote, I'll find a way to make those roles work even if it's a bad team-fit or culture-fit otherwise.
You might as well call me reversible toothpaste then.
People are getting offers, which are so insane, a friend of mine, more like a distant friend of a friend recently got a total comp package of slightly over 250k per year.
He only has to go in 2 days per week, and it's pretty flexible. You can make the days up.
But he's also the type of person who really likes to get out of the house, they own dogs so often he'll just need to get out of there.
250 total comp is a fairly junior engineer offer. College grads can easily pull down 120k in salary alone. Then there's equity, benefits, 401k matching, signing bonuses, etc.
> 250 total comp is a fairly junior engineer offer. College grads can easily pull down 120k in salary alone. Then there's equity, benefits, 401k matching, signing bonuses, etc.
According to Levels FYI [1] the average (total) compensation package at Apple for a Junior Software Engineer is U$162k in 2022 (data points skewed to Californian employees).
That website shows 33 self-reported compensation packages in 2022 from people hired as ICT2, which is how Apple categorizes junior programmers. The highest compensation package is U$229,125 from someone with knowledge in Machine Learning / AI knowledge, their base salary is U$140k and the rest is RSU (U$37k per year, for 4 years) and a one-time signing bonus of U$52k. The lowest compensation package is U$96k (only base salary, no RSU, no signing bonus). Then, based on these 33 data points of ICT2 who joined Apple in 2022, the average (total) compensation package is U$157k, with U$124k being the average base salary.
I will not say that junior programmers can not get a U$250k (total) compensation package, maybe those with a Masters degree and/or very specialized skills, but to say that “250 total comp is a fairly junior engineer offer” is a ridiculous exaggeration.
This is the only website where you can say a friend is making 250k people act like it's not a big deal
I guess lawyers and doctors make this amount of money too, but programming is the only profession you can learn with just a used laptop and a Starbucks internet connection.
And then still expect to hit a minimum of 100K within 3 years of installing Visual Studio. Even if you're a college dropout.
We are talking about FAANG salaries here. I have friends at Meta and Google who make 600k+. Similar experience level to mine.
The problem with 250k is that you can probably get a maximum of $1M mortgage with that. Can you buy a decent average house in Cupertino for $1M? Now imagine you have 3 kids and you like to take a nice family vacation twice a year. So with an average house in SV you will end up spending almost all of that 250k, good luck saving for college.
If I ever have kids, I'd probably tell them to go to community college like I did .
Even at community college, I was meeting students from Sweden, China, etc. Even went out with a K-pop supermodel once. You can attend college in California, at a community college for about $1,000 a year. Everything included.
Then go to UC Berkeley, where at most it's going to be $20,000 a year for 2 years, that's only a total of $42,000 to get a degree from one of the best schools in the world.
Now I imagine, let's say my first girlfriend finds my number, we end up having the twins that she wanted. And then our twins are super geniuses who get into Harvard.
Then maybe 250k isn't enough, it's weird though because I would think that anything over 200k is doing absurdly well.
Plus if you only need to go into work one or two days a week, just drive from Sacramento..
Barely making ends meet on 250k in SV is just part of the problem. Another part is what kind of people surround you. If all your friends make much less than 250k, then sure, 250k sounds like a good deal. But if you make 250k but all your friends (who are no smarter than you) make at least double that, then you start feeling like maybe you should too. Making 250k in SV feels like the center of middle class. Not even upper middle class. Not happy with public school education? Want your kids to go to nice private schools? Sorry, can't afford it (assuming ~2.5k/mo per kid). But your friends at Google can. Want to drive ModelX like they do? That's going to be tough with all those bills you're already paying. Yeah, you can send your kids to community college - to save money - while your friends don't have to. And again, my friends are not geniuses. They are not executives. Not successful business owners. They didn't get lucky in any way, they just applied to work at big tech, and now work there as regular software engineers. Doing the same thing I do at a startup. We are social animals, and no matter what you tell yourself, if we don't measure up to our peers we feel like losers.
This is probably true of most companies, but I feel that Apple probably does have the power and ability to put toothpaste back in a tube. If I was looking to work at Apple I'd be fine to go back to the office vs working at a generic web saas company.
> there will be no putting the toothpaste back into the work from home tube.
This is true, but it's also dangerous. The lizardfolk [1] have learned that WFH works, that's the good news. The bad news is that nothing prevents said lizardfolk from taking the jobs right out of our pockets and shipping them to places where workers have even fewer rights than in the US.
COVID-19 isn't over, and it is still capitalism's Chernobyl. It might, however, first hurt American workers because it is also possibly nationalism's Chernobyl. People accept national governments when those governments protect them, either from foreign invaders, or from the private-sector smeg-thugs called "employers". The success of WFH has proven that most work can be done anywhere. This isn't just bad for local real estate barons; it's bad for nations. Western governments have done a piss-poor job, over the past 40 years, of protecting their own people from their bosses... but what happens if they can't even do that? The world becomes ungovernable.
WFH eviscerates false consciousness, which is a good thing (acceleration) but dangerous. We no longer pretend work is the most important thing in our lives, a "passion" because we somehow lack the imagination to conceive of better uses for our time than subordinate labor. (We still do it, and competently, but not for 50+ hours per week.) The bosses no longer pretend to be invested in our careers or to see us as future colleagues rather than disposable subordinates. Work becomes a commodity, a trade of (too much) of one's finite time for (too little of) an artificially scarce commodity called money. And that's really fucking depressing. "Antiwork" on Reddit (which is mostly just meme posts at this point) is just the beginning.
----
[1] No, I don't believe the corporate upper class are literal reptilians. It's important to use imagery like this to dehumanize the private jet set, in order to prepare the public in case peaceful means to remove these people from power are exhausted and we have to go into the second half of the alphabet, so to speak.
Last time I went to work in the office I was inundated with chatter, interruption, and distraction. People walked by and said hi and then messaged me from their desks anyway. I had to leave early because there were actually things things that needed to be done. Maybe Apple has this problem sorted (and strangely I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they have a no unapproved talking rule implemented) but the simple fact is that efficient and productive work will win in the end, and that isn’t necessarily defined by commuting to a building and being trapped there between certain hours.
There's a couple of factors that companies might be taking into account when considering RTO
- We can fire people that don't want to come back (avoids legal issues with layoffs/firing and directly saves money)
- Managers need to see people working and be seen working (people justifying their position - but hard to say if this actually saves money)
- We're paying for office space (Apple just paid a lot and can't just give up their lease)
- The C-suite's mansions are close by and they need to visibly show they're working/earning their pay
Few of these things make sense for a company engaged in profit generation - except getting rid of people and amortizing a fixed/sunk cost. Are there any other reasons that "someone" would want people back in person? Is it really that much more productive to make people get ready for an office (cleaning up, putting on appropriate clothing, etc) and commuting in?
I’m not defending them. This is just a market transaction. Apple is hiring from a smaller supply pool but outside of a Jony Ive level VP there is nobody they really need to hire.
I couldn’t possibly care less what does or doesn’t happen to Apple. I’m just saying that “I won’t work at Apple!” hardly has any impact on Apple and thus on its decisionmaking.
"I won't work at company because...." Is a useful signal for other folks. I have a long list of companies I won't work for thanks to people sharing their individual experiences and opinions. So maybe if you don't feel swayed, just move on next time?
Then tell the dammed FANNG recruiters to keep to the collage kids and stop with the linkedin.
They need devs to grow their revenue, these companies were built on attracting talent. That was the 00s.
Gone are the days where people were gullable enough to think have an inhouse chef was for the employees benifit. lets face it, bigtech would tape you to a chair, itubate both ends and pump processed nutriants through your system if they had a choice.
The truth is if another guy has the same skill level as you and he can work on site you are out.
As covid comes to an end, companies has to enforce rto gradually in general and making remote as an exception. There is no way around it, because the company that allows you to walk your dog at 11am will lose to the ones that ensures you are at work at the same time. It is the competition, that’s it.
I takes me 20 minutes to cycle in to work, pretty much, from home desk to office desk.
I can commute when I want and certainly I don’t ever commute when I have to — we have no mandated office attendance. I do a core set of “days” where I’m guaranteed to come in for lunch, at the very least.
I also come home early — dodging traffic — if the afternoon is looking like I won’t need to talk with anyone. Bunking off for the whole afternoon and doing a night shift of post-dinner to bedtime is also ultra productive, if the family let me, because of the laser focus I seem to get when there are very few people to distract me.
A short amount of light exercise away from the computer is so useful for the thought process that I’ve even commuted twice in the same day, though this is very rare.
Many of my colleagues have the same quality of life but a lot of them have also committed to fully- or mostly-remote, and you feel sorry for them being left behind. Too many decisions happen because they are either discussed in person, or ratified based on the relationships between people who see each other regularly.
Thinking back to my days of spending 2x 90 minutes on the 101 (the main highway in the Bay Area) makes me feel quite unwell.
Being individually very productive is not necessarily good for a company. Just wanted to point that out as a lot of HN (and offline) commenters say - well, I get so much more done when I’m not at work. But that misses the point: what matters is the team’s overall progress, which is (1) certainly not equal to the sum of each individual’s perceived productivity and (2) heavily a function of personal relationships and communication. that is why remote might seem like a great idea for the individual coder yet have managers stressed out of their minds.
I’ve spoken to so many managers about remote. Off the record, all of them have said it is a nightmare for them to coordinate the team.
I'm a manager. My team, and most of the other teams we work with, have been working remotely for over a decade and coordination has never been a problem for us.
We have a 10 minute meeting every morning to catch up on what was done yesterday and what we're going to work on today. Then I can ping individuals after that meeting for followup discussions. On average, I have one of these followups each day. Then I have 1 weekly meeting with the other managers to coordinate our team efforts (and some DMs through the week to adjust/align as things change).
We work on software and hardware. We can operate and run our software against hundreds of remote hardware devices (in our data center). There is no need to be in the office if you have (or develop) remote tooling for your team to work well remotely. At this point, I would consider it very risky for any company to not be working toward at least the capability for full remote in the future. Who knows what lies ahead.
The OP was talking about incompetent managers, which seem to be numerous. A competent manager has no problem managing a remote team and have been doing so very successfully for decades. Remote work and remote teams have existed since the early 90's. The only difference now is so many teams went remote in response to the pandemic and managers are discovering they'e incompetent in managing remote work. Their real fear is getting fired for their new-found incompetence.
It's understandable that managers are worried if they're not fit for the new realities of their jobs.
But I have to wonder what the hell they were doing. What is coordination other than talking to each other and showing each other things? In my opinion this is much easier via calls.
I think it largely depends on what the work actually involves. For me - I personally don't like working from home. I need the separation between my place of work and my place of rest, but I fully appreciat that this is my own personal view and not everybody shares it.
However, my actual job requires a lot of communication - some of it is perfectly ok to do remotely via calls etc, but a significant portion of my job involves ad-hoc discussions, whiteboarding, throwing ideas around and coming up with a solution to a problem that is highly specific to our domain. This is the problem area, for me - I've found no combination of tools that adequately plugs the gaps that remote working has left in our ability to have those kinds of conversations / design sessions - and certainly no combination that everyone 'gels' with.
For me, it's a major issue. Productivity in those area has absolutely tanked. Pre-planned, pre-determined work is generally ok, but the more informal side of things - which is actually probably around 50% of what we actually need to do in order to keep things moving, has gone to hell, which now means we ask people to come in at least a few days a week to try to plug the gaps.
My team has ad-hoc meetings all the time while working remote. We've been throwing ideas around, having design discussions, the whole shebang. Yes, the first six months were difficult - it took us a while to figure out a new way to work. But now it's been 2.5 years since we've been in the office and we've been hiring people who live several hundred miles away or more from what used to be our office. C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.
The last part - missing out on important decisions - is it a geographical one - it's a hierarchy issue. Decisions about you will get made "above you" that you suddenly have no input into.
Until we chnage the decision making process (ie more democracy) in companies we won't have input into the truly important decisions
I've been in a place where it felt like important decisions were made not only without my input (actually fine, being a good software dev don't mean I'm a businessperson), but also where this decision wasn't subsequently communicated with me (bad, because that meant I was still working towards the previous goal).
That was well before remote work became a norm. But it is easy to fall into habits, including communication habits, that better suit one style of work than the other.
Exactly this; people who chose to live in a suburban hell with a 2 hour driving commute chose that path for themselves. I have no sympathy if they are reluctant to come back to the office.
I hate to be rude, but you sound extremely out of touch. I grew up in Sydney, Australia, which is so horizontally large that there have been suggestions to [break it up into three separate cities](https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/news/breaking-sydne...).
I lived in a bad area, roughly 1.5 hours from the CBD (downtown) and the most run-down, cramped houses are selling for $900k USD. Much more if you want somewhere near public transport or in an area that is actually nice (read: not terrible) to live in. These days it's barely affordable to live 3 hours commute away from the city.
I realise that HN attracts people who are Silicon Valley engineers, but please try to not be so blinded by your financial privilege.
We need to make young people aware of the perils of urban sprawl. People in their 20s are flexible enough to consider alternative cities and regions to live in when building their career. Having friends and close family makes it more difficult to move.
I chose to study, work and build my life in the most expensive and most spread out city in my country, without actually considering the cost of living and typical commuting distances beforehand. I can now afford living within 40-50 minute public transport ride from the office hot spots, and I think I would be happier in cities having realistic 15-20 minute commuting options even if they had a less dynamic job market. Also, studying without risks of starving and homelessness would have been nice. But the facts that smaller cities are more affordable and less spread out were rarely discussed at that time.
I believe this kind of advice would be applicable to the US too, since urban sprawl is more amplified there and there are career options outside the Bay area, as well.
I'm pretty sure that their headquarters needs janitors, a landscape crew, and folks to fix small things. They probably have a cafeteria, too. They might be a lot of high earning engineers, but I'm guessing these folks are a sizable portion of the people working there.
They likely don't get paid well.
Heck, I'd be surprised if they are employed by apple instead of some contractor - meaning they likely get far poorer benefits than the folks that have a chance of affording stuff around there.
> I'm pretty sure that their headquarters needs janitors, a landscape crew, and folks to fix small things
This is an article about requiring in person attendance for people that are currently WFH -- which almost certainly does not include janitors or landscape crew, who cannot do their jobs remotely.
You can buy a townhome in the east bay with more than an hour commute each way for over a million dollars. That ought to tell you something about the housing prices. Unless you are rich, or you AND your spouse bring in the big bucks, it will be hard to find a decent and affordable house near Cupertino.
I no longer even live close to a big city anymore. Companies that require office time, especially tech companies, don't pay anywhere enough to dictate my life. Not even Apple.
Nor you. There's a lot of people sharing the sentiment in the GP.
The village where I live has almost a hundred more inhabitants post-Covid, and none of the ones I've spoken to want to move back to urban or suburban areas. It's not for everyone, but working remote allows for a completely different lifestyle.
Personally, I'd rather leave the tech sector behind me and drive a forklift or something, than going back to commuting.
If you drove a forklift, you'd commute, if you're a farmer, you'd commute, if you pretty much did anything out of sitting in your underpants on zoom, you'd commute.
The village where I live has almost a hundred more inhabitants post-Covid, and none of the ones I've spoken to want to move back to urban or suburban areas. It's not for everyone, but working remote allows for a completely different lifestyle.
I dunno, I live in a village which probably has about a thousand people in it, a lot of people have to leave because they want their kids to go to better schools etc. Of course 1-2 years in most of the village life is a novelty. Some will thrive, some won't.
If I drove a forklift or a tractor, I'd get a job within walking distance. If I'd keep my current job I'd have a two-hour commute by car since there's no public transport around here apart from school buses.
1000 people villages here are often their own administrative districts with most services and goods available, as well as access to public transport. I expect it's also a matter of where the village is. :)
EDIT: The point being that in suburban areas there's rarely _any_ jobs, and that you simply cannot get away from commutes if you live in one. Urban areas obviously also offers occasional jobs within walking distance, but I'd assume that people moving to the countryside already dismissed the idea of living in a city either for financial or personal reasons.
I had a 1-1.5 hour commute in the city only borders until Covid, same time both in car and on public transport. And that's WITHOUT crossing any of the highly congested bridges. I have no sympathy for the arrogant assholes who can't even imagine how other people live.
Those who view the world through $500 000 salary lenses are the one’s who deserve our scorn. Not the grunt office worker who can barely scrape by enough money for co-renting something in the suburbs.
I know its generally a faux pas to talk about this, but its extremely funny to me how the above response hovers between ~+7 and ~0 depending on if Europeans or Americans are the predominant logged in crowd.
they have also chosen to make life awful for everyone between their home and work, due to the pollution and noise from
their car suffered by those on their commuter route
What about changing jobs? Let's say you had a job that was 10 minutes by car from you home. You change jobs 2 years later and, while the new job is in the same metro area, now the commute is 90 minutes. Lack of remote discourages job hopping, which is bad for employees and good for employers.
I'm so glad to be working at a company (a SaaS startup) that transitioned to a permanent "remote first" policy when Covid hit. That transition was validated by a significant productivity increase - they have good data to say it makes business sense not to go back.
Personally, I'll never go back to working in an office, God willing.
My company extolled the amazing productivity results of the connected culture through the pandemic but is pushing for RTO. Worse, during the pandemic they hire people like me as permanent remote. Now we’re getting pressures… denied promotions because we’re not in the office. Probably time to start looking for permanent remote employers.
It seems to me like there's a sunk cost fallacy going on with larger companies (i.e. companies that were larger prior to the pandemic). They've got these beautiful buildings and campuses that represent significant capital and personal investment -- that all have no reason to exist without an RTO policy.
My company is 5x the size it was prior to the pandemic, but only has office space to accommodate ~1/7 of its workforce.
The office functions as a space individuals and teams can reserve for limited times if they want to. So there's no big building tempting leadership to implement RTO.
Most companies just lease office space. You would think that they would be eager to get out of having to lease these sorts of spaces if their employees are willing to foot the bill of maintaining an office themselves through working from home. Emotion is beating logic here I think. It should come as no surprise that the only people pushing for return to office are the managers against the wishes of many employees. They are the ones who felt slighted and made obsolete when the world showed it could do the same computer work at a desk at home versus one in an office that you are probably burning CO2 to get to. What a disaster for the planet. Visibility was like 50 miles early in the pandemic from the mountaintops in LA county with no one driving and generating dust from their tires. No longer.
Emotion may be beating logic for many of the people in this thread.
Our company has been super transparent with us from the outset that we're about 30% less productive as a remote-first company compared to everyone being in the office. This was deemed acceptable. We're biotech, we employee an army of medical doctors, and as long as COVID remains a real threat, we'll remain remote-first.
We got rid of maybe a quarter of our office space, but our company has made it clear that it intends to eventually move us back into the office at least once or twice a week for most employees to regain some of that lost productivity and especially to help new hires get up to speed more quickly.
Some high performing, individual contributor, highly self-motivated knowledge workers may be more productive in a fully remote environment, but I think it's very much the exception. For better or for worse, most people just want to do the bare minimum amount of work that they can get away with while still keeping their job, and they can get away with doing far less remotely than they can in real life.
Remote is real life. I'm so confused by these claims of poor productivety among employees. Why aren't you talking to your problem employees about them not carrying water then? It seems like its better to figure out how to get engagement from remote work than to do all the inefficiencies of working from the office. For one suddenly you have to build a new office building versus using peoples homes, that costs CO2 in construction and maintenance. Then you have to heat and or cool that building as well as your home, that costs more CO2. Then there is the going to the office from your home, that also costs CO2.
If you are in biotech, all the more reason your company should be focused on limiting its harm to the ecology of the planet as much as it can, and only keep employees whose job can't happen remotely onsite.
> Some high performing, individual contributor, highly self-motivated knowledge workers may be more productive in a fully remote environment, but I think it's very much the exception.
This probably depends on industry and job function.
For software developers working for a software company, I think it's the rule, not the exception. Our company saw a significant productivity boost as soon as the engineering department went remote, and I've heard the same from other companies as well.
Even better, being remote-first means a software company opens itself up to a much larger, more diverse talent pool. Hiring excellent ICs wherever they may be allows you to compete with the best for the best.
I live in an area with only one large software company in a 25 mile radius - one I used to work for. But I left it for a remote-first startup in Los Angeles. I still live in the same house with my wife and kids; we didn't have to move them and start over, something for which I am deeply grateful. More is expected of me (which I am thrilled to deliver) and I'm paid a lot more too.
>> the only people pushing for return to office are the managers against the wishes of many employees. They are the ones who felt slighted and made obsolete
That's interesting that you saw a productivity increase; we saw productivity drop by roughly half, and it never came back. We did aerospace software and simulation though so maybe the SaaS startup is different
As you traverse the management tree towards the top, both age and ability to influence office policy go up. And as age goes up, remote management experience/comfort goes down.
Conscious or not, the people with the power are making things most comfortable for them. They’re not necessarily acting in the best interest of the company.
I don't think it's corelated with age. In fact my experience has always been that it was older, more experienced engineers who had managed to swing things in a direction where they could consult from a home office. I was always jealous of such people when I was younger. A more difficult arrangement for new-grads or junior devs to acquire.
It wasn't until COVID that remote work became more accessible to more people.
Yes - this is a silly echo chamber thought that I only see on this website. In most companies it's not social managers vs antisocial technical folks. And even in software companies it's not the case.
In most companies, the younger half of the employees tend to want to socialize more, tend to live in smaller cramped places, and want learn from experienced people in person.
The older half of employees tend to have bigger houses with personal offices, don't want to be constantly bothered with questions from the younguns, might be married and not care as much about fraternizing with co-workers, and maybe have kids and other personal responsibilities that make the flexibility of remote work all the more appealing.
Its emotional thinking to prefer the status quo that you know, not rational thinking imo. Rational logic would suggest not signing any more office leases and letting your employees foot that bill through their own homes, saving the company money with no change in work output.
They also own houses worth millions close to the office and don’t give a f-k about other people having to spend the major part of their income on housing and commuting, not to mention the absolute evil of destroying the environment for no good reason.
this is a huge factor. I have found a lot of vp/exec folk are totally blind to the fat that their significant wealth makes commutes go away, and makes it easy to have a decent lifestyle AND be close to the office. This is especially an issue in SFBA where even upper-middle-class-bordering-on-rich still have hour each way commutes due to housing cost.
As one point of data, I've been trending towards remote-or-bust as I've aged. My tolerance for time wasters (like commuting) is low and my desire for flexibility is much higher.
I’m sure some prefer in-office more with age, but it’s definitely not the case for all!
I'm very curious if WFH can survive a recession. My gut tells me no, but who knows. Though I enjoy the flexibility of hybrid, I can't help but feel it's the worse of both worlds. Still gotta live close and commute, but don't have the consistency (colleagues will have different schedules) so you often end up in the office and video chatting anyway.
I left the US when Covid struck. No way was I sitting around there during all of this.
I took a 50% pay cut to move back to my home country, while producing the same output (and value)... the company directly benefited from that.
Now, if my company forced me back into an office I'd say no. I'd be on the market only for a remote role, still at a steep discount on US engineers.
Why wouldn't a smart company take that offer?
WFH is not going away, but I suspect the FAANG will move away from it and the startups will capture the opportunity.
I see people all the time complaining about salaries being different based on location and how it’s wrong. I actually don’t mind it. I live in a LCOL area and work for a Bay Area company. I don’t get paid as much as my SF colleagues but I make so much more than anyone around here that it doesn’t matter.
At some level I wonder if people in SF are worried about people like me and the above poster because we’re stealing jobs by being cheap.
Anyways, I’ll always be remote. There is no other option. I’m damn sure not moving to California.
Too many people discuss salary without discussing buying power.
When I did freelance work I loved picking up work from the coasts (NYC, LA, etc). They thought of me as cheap, I thought of them as a gravy train. Both sides benefitted from it.
100k in a rural, LCOL area probably has the buying power of 150-200k in NYC. I don't know the exact numbers, it's the idea that I'm trying to express here.
> Too many people discuss salary without discussing buying power.
In capitalism that is not important. If I have the negotiation capability to get a higher salary why should I accept a lower one just because I live cheaper?
Most people would accept a lower salary to WFH, or to have flexibility in their schedule to ensure they can attend to their child's lives.
The mistake "capitalists" make is thinking money is the only factor, or even the most important one.
But really, that wasn't even the point. The point is your salary isn't what grants you a good life, it's buying power. And having that buying power gives you a stronger negotiating stance anyway.
Five percent unemployment? You've still got some leverage. Nine-and-a-half percent (the peak during the Great Recession), and a lot of folks behind you in line will happily come into the office.
If its a recession why are you spending money on overhead like an office when you have plenty of potential employees happy to work from their home, an office you the employer are basically are getting for free?
Because it's much easier to squeeze in-person employees harder.
I'm being facetious, but I don't think it's entirely a bad thing. I'm not sure if you've even worked in a fast-paced environment where everyone is absolutely buzzing, but it's quite exciting and I'm not convinced there's a remote equivalent.
Alternatively, WFH employees have way fewer benefits (no in-office coffee or food, potentially no internet or equipment support beyond a laptop, no electricity, HVAC, refrigerators, badges, security, commuter benefits, etc) and don't waste 1-3 hours per day commuting to and from the office + parking costs + 1 hour just to get too and from crappy unhealthy lunch spots.
Their hours are much more flexible -- if the desk is right in your house, it's not crazy to hop on the computer quick before bed to finish up a report or send an email or review a PR. So when "crunch time" actually happens, WFH employees can spend more time working than in-office employees, and work less afterward to avoid burnout.
The flexibility has additional benefits for coordination across time zones: I work from home, and I can get up at 6 AM to meet with folks in Australia from my home office. Or I can take off early and come back at 8PM to meet with folks in India. Not an option for in-office work. If you try, you'll be taking the meeting from your couch or some other suboptimal spot, not a home office.
If your company is upwards of 5,000 employees, you probably have multiple offices. This means most of your meetings are in conference rooms with a video call anyway. Effectively no different from WFH meetings, except for crappier volume control, microphone gain, and visibility.
Seems like for giant companies, WFH is a no-brainer for coordination purposes across multiple time zones and physical locations. And for small companies, WFH is a no-brainer because there's a ton of static-cost overhead that comes with physical offices.
Plenty of WFH jobs at Amazon. Looking at a couple myself. Apple just removed themselves from my list. Actually said this was coming and they were already off my list.
Not only that, but I think those companies that are not burdened with enormous costs related to having an office will be more likely to reward / retain / hire employees.
It seems absurd that some WFH-only companies will basically give some "crazy" amount (like $10k) to new-hires to deck-out their home office, but that is probably less than the amortized office-space cost of hiring that person on site each year.
It depends if a company’s desire for butts in seats exceeds its money-saving on utilities and rental. That doesn’t apply to Apple, probably because they’re just paying the loans for their new campus, but small companies, or companies that have satellite offices might be saving a bundle by letting their employees wfh. They just have to wade though all the middle-management that loses a lot of its value when there’s no one to lord over.
Yes. One of the funny things about having a lot of money is that it makes a lot more sense to borrow someone else’s money than spend your own. I can’t speak to the specifics, but I’m willing to bet Apple took out some very large loans to build Apple Campus.
Hybrid done right can’t be so flexible that people come in 1-2 days per week and discover no one else did. Has to be e.g “do 2 days a week in the office and one of them should be Tuesday”.
Otherwise as you say people just commute to empty offices.
I think it can. Enough big companies have gone all in on it that backing out will be hard. If some try to squeeze employees into offices, employees will migrate to places more friendly to it. Eg: if a hypothetical company "bookface" is more friendly to WFH than a hypothetical company "pear", they pay similarly, and both have similar jobs for someone, said someone might just sign Bookface's offer and leave Pear if Pear attempts to force WFH.
I honestly don’t know how people thought otherwise. The idea that all this is gonna be permanent just seemed silly to me.
Yes some companies will remain fully remote. Good luck to them. I’ll be curious to see where they land after five years.
Trying to organize a 10,000 person company fully remote seems like a pipe dream. Sure it might work for a few years while there is enough old timers in the mix but after long enough the corporate culture that made the company successful will slowly fracture as all the new hires never get exposed to it.
I dunno man… this all feels like a fad. Any time somebody says “XYZ is here to stay” it almost always means it isn’t gonna stay. Way too hype. Lots of dismissal or outright ignoring all the very real cons. It all just sounds way too good to be true.
I really like WFH. But I also enjoy working with people F2F.
Discussions around topics happen spontaneously without a meeting and an agenda. Insights created in these type of meetings is very hard to replicate in remote settings.
Also, going for lunch with colleagues is something I don’t want to miss.
That said, I have been most productive working at home.
So for me, the winning model is a mix. 2 days to mingle and have spontaneous encounters, 3 days to work and have scheduled meetings.
The hardesr part of any job for me is the social part. I can get by just fine but meetings after meetings in person, awkward social events and lunches. People forming tribes and playing mind games aginst each other. That's any work place I have seen. Don't care for it one bit. I focus on technical skills since that is what is expected of me and as such a company could best extract value out of me by letting me skip all thay bullshit.
But if your job does indeed require you to form personal relationships and manage office politics I think office works out for you best. What is fulfilling to you might be bursensome and mentally taxing on others.
This is similar to open office work spaces, some people thrive in that environment while others can barely survive. It is impossible to manage time because of constant interruptions and useless time wasting things. Any productivity is a side effect of being lucky enough to squeeze a few hours in between driving, socializing, meetings and peoppe walking up randomly to talk.
I'll be honest 100% here with this regard: covid was the best thing to happen to me for my social, mental and emotional wellbeing.
You all need to stop expecting fishes to climb trees. Try seeing things from others' perspective. I would take a significant pay cut and more responsibility and move to a different location to switch jobs if that meant I would get the most wfh time. Balance is good and happy workers are positivr ROI workers.
I think once a week mandatory and another day in a week whenever there is a good reason to meet and work with in person is best balance.
Speaking of perspective, some people live with families where there is distraction and interruptions there as well so i see their view as well.
There are a multitude of factors here, but the big one is that the office provides a space to regularly socialize with peers that I'm not directly related to through blood or marriage. The concept of a "third place"[1] is downright foreign where I live, likely because for most people in my community that role is served by the dominant church.
And do what exactly? I can take my family out to the movies or a museum, but that is a little expensive to do more than once a week or so. It also does not serve the same social function that time in the office did, namely socialization with peers instead of family.
Most of my hobbies are indoor activities. Going into the office injects some much needed social stimulation and environmental variety into my daily/weekly routine.
I can appreciate 1-2 days a week in the office. There are certainly some benefits to be had there. But if I consistently come into the office 2 days a week, I know for certain that my company is going to push for 3 days, then 4 etc... And I'd much rather be fully remote than have to come in even 3 days a week. That being said, I tend to work a lot more hours when working remotely.
I find discussions and calls happen organically on Slack. I'll often get a message "I'm stuck on this bug, can we huddle?" then we open a voice chat and screen share our way through the problem
Strangely, I have far more unscheduled discussions about real work than I do when I go into the office
When I go into the office we eat lunch together, we chat about non-work related things. It's fun but they are also the days where I get the least done, and where I feel the least bonding with my colleagues
I feel closest with my colleagues and friends when we have a video or voice call and work hard to solve real problems together. There's a shared sense of achievement
I go into the office once a fortnight to pick up shared lunch that we eat together. Sometimes I'll arrange a work-from-Cafe morning where we find a great coffee shop and take our laptops for the morning
> Discussions around topics happen spontaneously without a meeting and an agenda. Insights created in these type of meetings is very hard to replicate in remote settings.
I too find this highly valuable. But there's a solution for that: Regularly catching up with people. It seems silly at first, but works quite well for transferring all those important secondary bits of information.
At my last job, I would go into the office one day per month, for the monthly happy hour. Those mornings were easily my least-productive days all month. Nice to talk to people, but very unproductive.
My new job is 100% remote, no office in my city AFAIK, so I'm more productive... but I still meet up with my old coworkers for monthly happy hour.
The issues I've found with hybrid working are that a) people come in on different days, so it's not really the same as full time, and b) because video conferencing still sucks so much if you have some people in a room and some on Zoom, the ones in the room tend to give up on the zoom people and have side conversations because it's so much easier.
Also I can see it from the company's point of view - it sucks paying for a desk for only 3 days a week and everyone hates hotdesking.
I think office work is mostly superior for most people except for the commute (and also the ability to naughtily do house chores when you technically should be working). Maybe we should concentrate on making commutes nicer.
I think employees should also be given the choice of hot desking vs cold desking for an appropriate pay rise/cut. Nobody likes hot desking but I bet few would be willing to pay the actual cost for a dedicated desk.
> If you have some people in a room and some on Zoom, the ones in the room tend to give up on the zoom people and have side conversations because it's so much easier.
That's really interesting. We have the opposite experience. We use Google Meet and the "collaborator" mode? (Where someone can join from their device without video or audio). People use the hand raise feature even on the in-person side, and it feels like everyone gets a voice. We also don't have many people in these meetings (5 max)
> naughtily do house chores when you technically should be working
In the office I sometimes sat staring at a screen, achieving nothing except deflating my mood. At home I will go and hang the washing, and come back feeling a little boosted and make far more progress with whatever problem I had. At the office I would often take a walk. If someone thought that was "naughty" I would be seriously concerned about their effect on the company
You can't get commute nicer. It can only get worse and worse, with the growth of population and acceleration of wealth transfer from majority to minority (this is important because it either fixates or denies people ability to move to a new place to live). Even force banning cars from cities (a fantasy) won't help, because cities themselves are becoming bigger and affordable living is pushed to the outside gradually.
"What no [spouse] of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.” – Burton Rascoe
That said, while I was familiar with this old saying, I've never heard of Burton Rascoe, and I had to use Google to attribute the quote properly. Maybe keeping one's nose to the proverbial grindstone at the office really is the secret to success.
I guess hybrid is the one that works for me too. I take some time to get to know people. A fully remote job makes this hard especially if any kind of spontaneous stuff is missing. I've not done any hybrid or fully remote job but have had to take fully remote courses in my college and that semester was pretty depressing. I'm in a new country too so the overall feeling of loneliness can be a real bummer
There is a huge chunk of the economy that is agitating for RTO.
All the big consultancies are pushing it, travel sector (eg airlines, hotels, conference circuit folks) are pushing it, corp real estate and related service sector (think Aramark and other bigCo service companies) are pushing it, etc.
All these folks are on site in your BigCo HQ week in, week out, talking to your senior execs who are predominantly white men 50+ years old, trying to convince them this is like an existential crisis only they can solve and which will supercharge their firm for the next 25 years.
I've seen this shit up close and it's real. Big money and big egos pushing this agenda.
It will happen, just a matter of how long it takes.
I agree with your points, just not with the racism. The color of people's skin, age and sexuality has nothing to do the problem, even if they correlate. Please stop the hate on a specific subgroup based on things they didn't choose or have control over. Seems like nowadays the anti-racism went overboard on the other direction and now it's cool to be racist against white old men (the previous most racist group).
Also, if you have a top heavy, senior exec filled org, they likely all own expensive property nearer to the office than the average worker (in big US cities).
Think NYC. At a few companies I noticed the decision makers had nice apartments in Manhattan or big homes with reasonable commutes from CT or NJ, or both. It isn't like those property values went down, but over a long enough period of time maybe the value wouldn't grow as quick with WFH.
Also, just being out of touch with the reality of housing for most non business decision making employees.
I do agree with the thought process suggesting there are interests, who would not mind return to pre-WFH, but I disagree with the conclusion. Right now it is virtually impossible to determine what will happen and everything will be done to prevent recession prior to midterms.
Last time Apple et al blinked. Now, supposedly, it is for real. I am sure both sides know what it means. It is for keeps so some real drama may unfold in September.
I agree that there are a lot of powerful parties pushing for RTO.
I believe all of the anecdotes you list in your post.
But I'm not sure that this follows:
> It will happen, just a matter of how long it takes.
Yes, powerful people want RTO. But some powerful people are fine with remote, and some even prefer remote for business, personal, or climate reasons. Individuals are split on RTO -- some people love the office for productivity and socialization, or just getting out of the house. Others love working from home.
It remains to be seen if RTO or WFH will dominate in the long term. Based on the the lukewarm reception to RTO at every entity I know of in the last year (even very old fashioned companies, like VAs and state departments and small town utility companies) I suspect there will be a split between the two for a long time. As long as companies exist that trust their employees and want to save money on office space, WFH will be an option. As long as WFH is an option, some people will pick WFH. Likewise with RTO.
Your post seems to hint that RTO will inevitably return to the vast majority of workers. I don't buy it.
I don't buy it. Sure some industries are affected but commercial real-estate is very expensive. Why would a CEO (regardless of his age/hair/color) want to pay that expense if that's not adding to the bottom-line of the company. I'm not saying he wouldn't do it, because he might believe (for whatever reason) that his company needs RTO to be able to operate.
But I don't see how people selling that stuff could convince him. And I'm pretty sure they are all agitated (or would be if a big number of companies don't come back to the office).
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if there was one conspiracy I'd believe in it's this one. I've never seen the entire corporate world so aligned behind anything as much as they are lock-step aligned on "return to office" being the One True Way. It's as if they are all being fed the same memos and regurgitating from the same script. It makes sense that the many cottage industries who are hurt by remote work taking hold would all fight it in unison, but how are they getting every major CEO to say the same thing(s)?
I agree on all the benefits of WFH that have already been mentioned, but I do miss the daily casual interactions with colleagues, e.g. in front of coffee. I think, long term, teams will be less cohesive and companies will see less idea exchange (the unstructured or serendipitous kind)
At apple you are not allowed to discuss anything with anyone until you've gone to one of three(!!) internal websites to see if they are "disclosed" on the thing you want to discuss with them. "Spontaneous" conversations cannot happen by definition.
I think that depends on the team. When I was there I didn't work on a lot of "classified" stuff, so spontaneous conversations weren't too uncommon, at least in the NY office.
You can have spontaneous discussions with people you know to be disclosed (three websites sucks); you don’t need to re-look them up every time. You can also talk about things that don’t require disclosure.
I grew up socializing online so I am the opposite. The office was a barrage of spontaneous interruptions, and made me look for a hole in the back of the office to hide in. It’s easier to take a brainstorming walk and ping a colleague with an idea than give them the 50th shoulder tap of the day. It’s understandable that not everyone is used to communicating in this way.
And since your chat program of choice now shows you as inactive/away for that 20min brainstorming walk session, manager sees it as you not working or being productive. Better make that time up!
If you have abusive micromanaging management then your life will be miserable. Period. Blaming one of the five million tools or approaches they could use to achieve that goal is rather short sighted.
if my manager/employer is looking at that shit and complaining about being AFK for 20min I'll be looking for a new place to work. already dealt with that sort of BS in the past -- never again.
Just because something has worked one way for ages doesn't mean it can't work another way. It really is a culture thing I think. If you've been working in an office your whole life and you are used to that then I can totally see it being difficult.
If you are a digital native whose social life has taken place largely online it is likely WFH is better.
In some ways the world/technology/culture has changed so much and so frequently over the last 40-50 years that each generation's lived experience growing up is markedly different than the last. In the totality of the human experience this is pretty rare. I think work is only going to become more age segregated over time due to cultural differences.
I’m not planning on ever working for anyone else, ever again; whether in an office, or WFH. That said, I work harder, these days, at my standing desk, in the corner of my living room, than I ever did in an office.
WFH is not a magic panacea. I know a number of folks that WFH, and it’s damn near impossible to get together with them, because their jobs own their asses. They are young, and don’t mind (yet). They seem to be on Zoom calls, all day, every day.
Wait until they have kids, though…
Many folks are not able to maintain discipline, on their own, in their home. I know folks that go to co-working spaces, or even libraries (only if they don’t have a bunch of Zoom meetings).
Others actually get depressed, because of the lack of social interaction. They need to be around others.
For myself, neither of the above apply. I could happily be a hermit, and am seriously self-disciplined. WFH would work great for me.
The problem is that I have gotten used to not having others crap all over my work, and that can happen in a remote environment, every bit as easily as in the office.
It’s not “one size fits all,” which is difficult for companies of a certain size, to handle. Modern HR is built around a model, where no one is an individual, and the same rules and structure apply to everyone. That’s difficult, in distributed workplaces.
Depending on the type of work we do —and on our own personalities— it can be difficult for us to socialize outside of work.
It’s a real issue, and becomes more acute, as we get older.
For myself, I participate in an organization that affords me the opportunity for a high degree of socialization, but, without it, I’d likely be a bit of a recluse.
I'd love to go back to the office. I like the collaboration and the social side. Too bad all the local employers are cheap feudal lords, and the work they do boring. I could drive further and maybe find something better, but I'm not going back to commuting 2 hours a day and ruining my health. Remote has given me access to a much broader job pool.
I tried to do hybrid a few days a week at Google Waterloo for a few months before just quitting. They axed the parking lot, making me walk 10 minutes to and from my car or fight for an EV charging spot. Before COVID they kept making the entire office environment more and more crowded, loud, and unpleasant. As for hybrid, I'd go in for a day and nobody I worked with would be there, and I'd end up meeting everyone virtually, so it was just like working from home... but with an annoying commute and better air conditioning and Internet.
Remote is the only sane option, and I'll do it until I can't. And once I can't I'll sell my house, downsize and retire or found a startup. I'm not the only one, I'm sure. The BigCos that lose senior employees through being inflexible might find themselves competing with them later as those people go on to found their own startups.
It’s sad to look at my sleep tracker app and see the jump in sleep quantity and quality starting in March 2020 that will soon have to end because some exec has nothing to do if he’s not walking around interrupting peoples’ work.
I had to commute almost 4 hrs every day. Waking up at 5am to be there at 8am. I can play with my son, have quality time with my wife and get up at 7am and finish at 5 and I'm home already. I won't go back, God willing.
Where I live, Boston/Cambridge, there are many people that commute into the city because they pay slightly more than the suburb cities but at the cost of tremendous commute times because they can no longer afford to live in the city.
I would almost go back to an office, if the company would stop being so lazy and incompetent. Every company is insanely disorganized and inefficient.
You can never find other teams, projects, code, docs, company policies, vendor agreements, onboarding guides, meeting notes. "Agile" became an excuse to not give a shit what anyone did and let everything devolve into the lowest common denominator: tribal silos. Business units are fiefdoms.
Getting access to anything is a scavenger hunt and still takes a week after opening a ticket. There is no useful self-service automation. Desktop support for developers is pathetic while it's top-notch for paper pushers. Nobody has a baseline of training even though we all really need to know certain processes to do our jobs correctly.
Security is a complete joke. They harp on us for falling a phishing test when they have terrible UX to identify real emails, like that's the single thing other than rotating passwords that makes the company secure. Meanwhile the intranet doesn't have an SSL cert.
We can't get 10 grand for some critical SaaS we need for our jobs, but they'll plunk down that much per year on junk food we don't need. But also please work overtime for free because you're salaried and it's expected.
Get your shit together, companies. Do that and maybe I'll drag my ass all the way to your annoying open floor plan I-forgot-my-badge-can-someone-buzz-me-in germ-spreading hot-desking offices and ignore the lies you tell about this being for productivity.
I made my team fully 100% remote in September 2019. Hah! Then covid hit. The entire team was safely at home since then.
BUT.
I have to say while its a nice perk for the job (typing this from South East Asia), productivity is less than what I would like. People take work for granted a bit more and are a little more "entitled" to everything now.
And I get it. It's really nice to be able to work around your job instead of the reverse.
I think some people (like me) are better in-person managers than remote managers. And that's why the quality of remote work is spotty or so many managers want people back in house.
Let's not also forget that all the things that were cherish and use were mostly built by teams of people working together on some site. Whether it's the buildings, the internet infrastructure, the food you eat, the services your subscribe to, the software you're using right now, the computer or phone you're typing from -- all of it is built and delivered by groups of people that see each other every day in offices.
Please, don't get it twisted that just because you can code, provide customer support or write remotely -- that the other 95% of people can.
Remote work is an untested thing and really, only works for a tiny set of knowledge businesses.
So, while I love that our team works remote -- I would say most people will have to get off their a*ses and get back to the office.
Your company may suck at remote, but Apple doesn't. Two years into the pandemic, we see record AAPL profits, no visible downturn in software quality. And yet Apple's CEO, in thrall to the pet social theories of a bunch of ancient billionaires, is willing to throw it all away.
Eh. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but by entitled do you mean less scared of layoff? If so, management does have tools ( or at least should have ) to motivate employees by means other than survival..
I mean it is true. You can tell people are less concerned about their jobs ( anecdotally, my McD messes up my order a lot more often now ), but to me it only proves management had an easy ride the past few decades. Now they actually have to work.
>all of it is built and delivered by groups of people that see each other every day in offices.
Except for those tools that have always been maintained by remote collaborators since it became possible with the internet connecting open source software engineers from around the world. Plus all the businesses that have always been remote.
>I think some people (like me) are better in-person managers than remote managers. And that's why the quality of remote work is spotty or so many managers want people back in house.
Then learn to be a better manager rather than making a whole bunch of people miserable to save yourself the hassle of improving.
People will under-deliver when there is no clear outcome or agenda for their work. Within the office the pressure of contributing to work is provided because others can see what you have on your screen and if its not "work". You contribute because you have to, not because you feel that your outputs are moving the needle in a positive direction.
When you WFH that changes ('aint nobody watching your screen but you) but the underlying problem still remains. The team are not working towards a clear goal that they understand and want to achieve. When you provide that, the team will always contribute effectively because its interesting and importantly allows them to feel like their work means something.
WFH productivity is not the problem. Managers providing worthy work is.
This is cringe. As a se ill choose a company that's 100% remote over any other in office position anywhere 100% of the time no matter the salary. Been working remote since 2017 and life is infinitely better.
Question, what specifically is so horrible about being in the office?
I work remote so no judgment, I just don't know if I feel like my life was infinitely worse when I worked in an office.
Cycling around cities is fun. The gym with others was fun. Post work beers / dinner was fun. Making friends with colleagues was fun. Being able to study martial arts in the city is something I wanted to do, seems fun.
Cost of living near an office is absurd. Houses in all tech hubs in the US are completely blown out (NYC, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc.) [1].
Average house price in Cupertino (not that you'd live directly in the same place) is 2.6+ million. $300-400,000 salary doesn't cut it anymore.
I wouldn't want to finance the average house on the average Apple salary [2] or a doctor's salary [3].
Realistically, to comfortably afford a 3 million house with 10% down assuming 3% financing (good luck getting that now), you'd need clear about $780,000 per year in cash [4].
I give this is a hurdle to working in an office, but it's not a problem with working in an office in and of itself.
If you could live in a 3 bedroom luxury apartment 10 minutes from your office in an area with nice cafes, restaurants, gyms and access to great public transport to airports etc, how would you feel then?
Totally agree. This is my personal barrier towards returning to an office in a "tech city." If I could live a reasonable distance and commute, I'd have no major objection to going to an office at least part time. However, affordability is a giant concern.
Rents will follow mortgage rates as well. I just did a quick lookup of 3 bedrooms around Apple's office in Cupertino and they are about $7,000 or so a month which means you're paying about $90,000 in cash a year in rent.
What if you live like that, and have 10 min commute. And then you change workplace, and their office is 70 minutes away, on the other side of the city. Or your city just sucks to cross even halfway (mine is) due to chokepoints and insane traffic.
Question, what specifically is so horrible about being in the office?
The problem isn't so much offices in general, but the particular one in question. Apple spent five billion dollars on a gargantuan vanity project that actually leaves their individual contributors worse off than they were before with respect to personal space, privacy, and the ability to work without constant interference and distraction from their coworkers.
Some teams revolted [1], and a few even got away with it, but most employees had no choice but to fall in line. When the pandemic came along, life suddenly got better for those people... an utterly-unprecedented phenomenon that a more enlightened management team would have taken like a dash of cold water to the face. Instead, Apple management has been trying to double down on their $5B sunk-cost fallacy by herding their workforce back into the industrial-scale circular feedlot where they belong.
Meanwhile, because of the shortage of housing within reasonable commuting distance of their new campus, even those earning well into six figures are going to have to spend 1-2 hours a day stuck in traffic or cooling their heels on a bus or train for the privilege of working for Apple. The execs can afford to live nearby, of course, so they DGAF about the needless time burden they're imposing. I would be incandescently pissed about this if I worked at Apple.
Being around a large group of bustling people, having to make small talk instead of scheduled meetings, no flexibility to the day, no home cooked meals, no spending time with the kids or family, no quick naps during lunch break, no working from national parks, no working from different countries, have to live close to major population centers that is expensive, commute, no quiet time to get work done etc.
For me it's quite simple: mom lives in one state in the south, dad lives in another near the centre of the country and my wife's family lives in the north.
We spend time visiting them for a couple of weeks at a time. They all are 70+, so it is that time when we want to take advantage of having them.
Even having to go to the office 1 day a week wouldn't make that possible, thus it is an instant disqualification for me.
"- On slow days when I am done I can get up and do something else." - for me this is the best, i go for a guilt free bike ride if i'm just not feeling it, where as in the office, i'm always wondering if i look like a slacker if i'm redditing for an hour to just chill.
What you say sounds fun when you are young, i know this because i lived that kind of life too but when you get older and have a family, you have to prioritize them. You can't live in a small apartment 5 mins from work, you would rather use the extra two hours you spend commuting to bond with your kids etc... In an ideal world with infinite money and infinite space, i would choose to live 5 mins away from my workplace, but seeing as how i'm not rich, i don't want to live my life like a serf. In the end, you can't have it all so for me (and many others) WFH gives me a choice.
Older more established higher paid people, or younger staff trying to build their career.
This is where I see a lot of remote work being in favor of people who already have a career and are on the path to retirement. If you're younger looking to get mentored and build networks, you're out of luck.
In an office, you spend 8-10+ hours to work a 3-hour day. You have to commute to the place. You're basically sick with the flu (but working due to social pressures) for half of February. Being visible from behind while working, as is typical in an open-plan environment, not only suggests low status but causes chronic inflammation that'll cause you to have health problems in your 30s that normally pop up in one's 60s.
Offices suck. The only reason the cattle are being called back into them is because a bunch of propertarian squidcunts convinced some corrupt mayors to say "it's time" even though COVID is still quite active (I'm recovering from it as I type this, and it sucks).
None of this was really my experience, I was maybe lucky enough to do it, but I just rented an apartment near my office and had a 10 minute ride to work.
I saved myself a lot of money and time even if I paid more rent than others with cars and suburban mortgages.
I just told my colleagues if I had my headphones on , not to disturb me unless urgent. I got a fair bit done in the startup I worked for, it sold for a lot of money a year ago so I guess it was productive enough.
My company mandated return to office two days a week.
I quit and landed a better job that’s remote and with location-independent pay.
Working from an office is fine for some. Make it optional.
Lots of companies are still hiring. I encourage you to see what’s out there and ask interviewers if roles can be made remote.
Commuting is an expensive, time-consuming, and wasteful activity. Working from an open office was, for me, a source of near constant low level background stress. It felt unnatural, and I couldn’t work as well. Now, remote, I can deliver more quality work with less burnout. I am also feeling healthier.
Never working in a shared office again if I can help it. I’m fortunate enough to have a dedicated room in my house for an office and it’s wonderful. Been fully remote for over six years now.
I have to think they’re going to either give key devs/engineers more flexibility than this or they’re going to lose large groups of staff except for those who are there because they really like working for Apple as a company.
Anyone there who views it as just another job (even if it’s one they enjoy) who is significantly inconvenienced by longer commutes or the high price of living locally and the degraded work/life balance has got to be eyeing their options. Even a pay cut to go elsewhere is moot if it means you can live in better & cheaper accommodations in a location of your choosing.
3 WFH days a week is what my current employer allows for any dev/it/non-customer-facing roll and my workplace absolutely hates hates hates the idea of WFH. Pre Covid it was banned, for everyone for every reason. They even fought it on “undue hardship” grounds when it was requested as an ADA accommodation. Now they’ve changed because they realize that their ideological opposition to it will (and has) hurt them as they forced people going back to the office. We lost roughly 1/3 of tech-oriented staff before operations degraded to such an awful state that they changed. I lost multiple candidates for a position on my team.
I view this purely as a cynical move by Apple to help decrease headcount the way other tech companies are doing and because they’ve clearly not liked WFH in general and know that a cooling job market gives employees fewer options.
These moves may even obtain in the short term, but all job markets are cyclical and employee expectations are not going to return to pre-Covid mentality. In the medium term of 2-3 years they’ll simply gain a reputation of being a bit more worker & WFH hostile in the marketplace at the same time the most people and especially top talent have no end of options that will give them the work environment freedom they desire. And when the job market heats up again they’ll have a harder time recruiting, even if they change their policy. It will be harder to trust the commitment to flexible scheduling & work location.
Or maybe I’m wrong, I’m not high level executive with an eye on long term labor market & “human capital management” (awful term) and I’m I know there’s smarter people than me at Apple, likely some included in making this decision, but my non expert opinion gained through a bit of anecdotal experience and armchair observation of peers and trends indicates it’s a bad decision made with short-term thinking only.
I started my remote first business during COVID-19. We will eventually get an office, but a small one with flex space to rent for get-togethers every one or two quarters. Eventually we'll finalized a geographic home.
In the meantime, I pay my employees better, pay for their internet, give better benefits, etc.
(note: open to suggestions on what makes your life better as a remote worker)
> open to suggestions on what makes your life better as a remote worker
Provide good networking equipment free-of-charge. Powerline adapters are cheap, will work pretty much everywhere, don't require running wires and while they won't give you the fastest bandwidth, whatever bandwidth they end up achieving will usually remain stable with little packet loss. For people with laptops, give them APs to connect to the powerline adapters and to place in every room they plan to be working in.
Network connectivity is paramount in a remote setting and it will always amaze me how otherwise-smart software engineers put up with terrible connections and have no clue where to even begin attacking the problem (they'll often blame the ISP even though the problem is in their LAN in the majority of cases). An unstable connection is horrible when it comes to calls/screen-sharing/etc as "modern" conferencing software is utterly terrible at handling interruptions (despite something like TeamSpeak from over a decade ago did it better even on computers orders of magnitude slower than now).
Same for audio equipment. I'm lucky enough that AirPods and MacOS work well enough generally so if most of your employees use Mac they are a good option but otherwise Jabra also makes good wireless headsets that connect via USB (and handles the wireless itself with a proprietary protocol, so no Bluetooth shenanigans) so make those available if needed.
On the other hand, I wish my employer would ban AirPods. The microphone quality is largely garbage and frequently cuts out or devolves into robot-voice messiness.
If I ran a company, I would commission every employee with a nice over-ear headset with a boom mic and slight voice feedback in the ear cups. If I ever met with someone with crap audio, they'd have no excuse not to switch to a decent mic/speaker setup.
A standing desk is a must. It makes me more productive because my body doesn't fall apart from sitting all day, so if I am in the zone I can stay there but just switch to standing and back. Previously, I needed to go on walks.
My body requires this in my late 20’s.
Every workplace should provide reimbursement for a standing desk and floor mat imo.
Two weeks notice is pretty bad. All of this is moot though, in a few months they'll be remote again... if not before or delayed again. It's clear that monkeypox is spreading into the mainstream population and becoming a serious pandemic that might require even stricter measures like fomite spread precautions. There will undoubtedly be a back to school related surge and big companies will snap remote again where employees have significant leverage.
> It's clear that monkeypox is spreading into the mainstream population
My understanding was that 97% of positive cases were in men who have sex with men, but with the huge caveat that only MSM were being widely tested. Have you seen more comprehensive testing data recently?
It's an artifact of undertesting and restricted access to testing. In Nigeria, where the virus is endemic, they clearly have seen and documented its spread via airborne particles to any sex of people for decades now: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01686-z It's silly how quickly people have ignored all the data about it from Africa because it seems to be inconvenient.
The MSM community is the first major non-African cluster just like the Wuhan market was the first major cluster for COVID-19. People saying it's not a threat to the non-MSM community right now were like people who said "oh it won't spread outside China" to COVID-19 in January 2020. The virus doesn't care about your sexual preference. If you have the right cell receptors and come in contact with it, it will attack and infect.
For what it's worth, I replied to you above with numbers showing it's even more MSM than that in CA.
But on testing it feels to me we are making the same mistakes as covid.
I've had this cold/run off gunk for weeks. Longer than what is normal from allergies.
My Dr. told me I need two lesions to get a test.
Which is like saying you need to have been in Wuhan and have severe cold like symptoms.
The pox are pretty unique looking... Especially if you've had recent intimacy.
IDK maybe we sohuld bring back I. Am. Not. An. Epidemiologist (IAMAE) but wouldn't it be better - if our supply is limited - to test people who might have been exposed, so they can quarantine before they get pox and then contact trace.
Probably non-pox spread, but if you have those sores it's pretty noticeable ...
That article does not support what you claim, except stating that the virus is endemic in rats and suspected of being spread through sexual contact. Not really news to anyone who has been following this stuff. It does not mention airborne particles (not that I doubt you: our facility does takes airborne precautions with suspected monkeypox patients)
So back to my original question: have you seen more comprehensive surveillance data for the general population?
As someone who just got their vaccine and in the high risk group: ooof I hope not.
What data points to it being a threat in the 'mainstream' (I don't like that word here) population right now?
here are CA stats [1]; only .8% (mostly identify as cis) female infected.
though it doesn't show demo xtabs over time. so hard to tell if only is growing.
If it spreads through brief contact we'd be screwed..
Let alone if it spreads through droplets and or fomites.
--
Sad we failed yet again. Especially queer community, and like all things health disproportionally bipoc. seems like we had all the tools & knowledge to stop, or drastically slow, this one but failed.
Seeing photos of pox on people's faces is just truly terrifying.
I really really hope this vaccine works or at least prevents sores like that.
Hard to change behavior to avoid all sex / human touch..
Let's not spread FUD. A viral monkeypox (a la Coronavirus) would be way disastrous than the coronavirus itself (people do care more about how they look). There is nothing that suggests that's the case for now. There are also a whole bunch of viruses in Africa (ie: Ebola) that could be worse but they aren't.
I don't care really about Apple being Apple or worrying about expensive Apple mothership related problems, but I've heard continued too many stories about idiot coworkers and managers especially going into the office sick and unmasked and not taking any steps etc and then being out of the office sick etc...pretending COVID is over, in denial and uncaring about anyone else who might want to go in and join the 'fun' but it just doesn't work in non-denial reality. If productivity has remained and so many aspects have adapted 2.5 years into the pandemic with work fr he and remote adjustments, Thera just no reason to risk getting sick unnecessarily amongst ppl you can't trust to make good calls on public health. It's not coming back spreaders.
COVID is not over. I have it (mild) right now. I'm vaxxed and boosted, and I'm very glad for that, but it still sucks.
The bosses don't care, of course. They have their own offices, and people who work in open-plan spaces are replaceable, so who cares if they get sick? Not the reptilian demonfucks who sign the checks, that much is clear.
> The bosses don't care, of course. They have their own offices, and people who work in open-plan spaces are replaceable, so who cares if they get sick?
For the first time in my life, I work in a real office, and I love it. As in, I have my own office, with a door that closes and everything (still missing a name plate on the door). I've decorated it with plants and I chose the furniture myself.
That office is a spare bedroom in my house. I'm never going back to working on an open space. The north-American middle management ideology that birthed that nonsense can die in a fire as far I'm concerned.
Seriously. Sometimes I walk by an office building and see the cubicles inside. I literally tense up inside in involuntary spasm. Life in a cubicle farm is like a slow-burn version of hell.
I will do anything, anything, to avoid ever going to an office again. I will also say that if anyone is so dense as to require office work in 2022, I will never work for them, even if they later change their minds back to WFH.
We must have very different office experiences. I only go in for 6 hours or so with an hour for lunch. My co-workers are nice and the commute is short. I could understand if you like working from coffee shops and such, but working from literal home basically puts you under house arrest.
Goodness me, if I could stay in my house for an entire week I sure would! I've spent a lot of money and effort making this place perfect for me, why should I want to leave?
House arrest? What a bizarre way of looking at it. Today I went and got my car fixed at the mechanic during the same period of time I would have had to vacantly stare at my monitor and pretend to be productive at a typical cubicle job. I have more freedom of movement now than I ever did with the strict 9-5 schedule at an office.
That's the thing. Offices don't have to have a 9-5 schedule. For example - just today I started working at 10am at home. I had a 30 minute remote meeting and then followed up on a couple of things before driving in at 11. I had a 1:1 over lunch with my manager. I did some code review and talked with my co-workers. Then I left at 3:30.
I got free lunch. I got to see my manager face-to-face to have a pretty serious conversation. I got free snacks.
…but you have to live driving distance from work, ruling out almost the entire planet for living in. I will add that it also rules out almost every workplace for you, and almost every employee for your business. Face to face is sometimes better, just not worth the massive tradeoffs.
Depending on where you want to live remote work will make more sense. I'm just saying the loathing that offices get can be quickly fixed by using them less and mostly for what they're good at.
I think my highest-upvoted comment on HN is actually me ranting about how much I hate open offices (specifically me complaining about my coworkers around the World Cup).
I really haven't changed my opinion on this; do I sometimes miss hanging around coworkers in person? Sure, I have some good memories with them, but I very much do not miss open offices. If I had a guarantee of a private office, I'd realistically consider going back to in-person work, but it's basically off the table until then.
I've had multiple record scratch, conversation dies moments discussing my utter dislike of open plan offices to managers.
Some simply do not understand that it doesn't work for a large number of people.
Detest it, I get no work done, my stress goes through the roof and I'm constantly bothered by people chatting/noise, distractions in my sightlines etc.
Basically have to put on noise cancelling headphones and find a seat in the corner, what's even the point then?
I’m very surprised that the remote-first companies aren’t being more assertive with employee theft from Apple.
There are top employees that have children or otherwise can’t afford not to be remote. I’d be WW2-style dropping leaflets over Apple HQ and purchasing billboards to poach them. When else in history will remote-firsts have such an utter and glaring advantage over Apple again?
The top employees that aren't moving back have already left or been granted remote as "key talent" through a politically charged process that requires a director going to bat for you in front of a VP. Apple has made it abundantly clear to everyone seeking it that you will not be allowed to go remote, you will not be allowed to work at another office, you will not be granted any sort of flexibility unless legally required. My team seemed to force out a lot of expensive senior talent to easily replace them with new college hires, so, you know, quite convenient for the company.
At this point if you are still at Apple hoping for full remote and haven't been granted it, well, good luck.
Oh they are! Every time apple leadership sends out another one of these ahem... notices, recruiters perk up and start flooding email and LinkedIn inboxes.
they highlight things like "[REMOTE]" and "[WFH FRIENDLY]" heavily
In a sense, they do not even have to know. Ratio of applicants to postings for remote vs non-remote positions is very noticeable. Those companies already have their pick.
In my social circle, people who could jump, already have. The companies that are rigid now have either people, who could not for whatever reason move or truly did not want to.
Sundar recently said that GOOG hired a ton of people in recent years but earnings have not kept up. There is apparently a productivity crisis. I predict that Silicon Valley is switching to 5 days/week in the office by next year.
I’m willing to bet that it won’t fix the productivity crisis. The trouble (at least with Google and Facebook) is a matter of aimlessness. They don’t know what to do, and they thought throwing engineers at the problem would solve it.
As a Cupertino resident, this news upsets me. Now our traffic will be three times worse on Tuesday and Thursday and probably double the other days depending on how teams split. Although I suspect almost all teams will choose Wednesday as their third day for that sweet four day weekend every week.
Hopefully they walk it back again when September rolls around.
If we completely factor out things live commutes, time zones, living costs etc, and assume all employees live a reasonably comfortable commute from the office. Then I too would prefer to have e.g 2 office days per week. Both as an employer as an employee.
But that’s not how it works. And part of the attraction of remote work is not having to live within an hour from the office. For these workers I’d much rather have mandatory periodical week long team meetings for example.
Apple hardware engineering probably does involve a good amount of in-person work.
As far as software goes, Apple's entire culture of secrecy and very top-down approach to decision-making negates the whole "water cooler conversations lead to innovation" meme. Steve Jobs' "serendipitous personal encounters" placement of bathrooms to facilitate conversations was done at Pixar, not at Apple.
Speaking of Pixar, isn't there a whole story of one of their movies getting saved because of somebody working from home and having a backup of the data?
I've might've heard of that. Speaking of Apple and WFH, a single remote employee laid the foundation for the OS X transition to Intel from his very own home office:
The article states going from 2 days a week to 3, yet most of the comments here are acting as if it’s going from 0 to 3. I don’t think this will make a substantial difference.
I also wonder whether documents in large companies are booby-trapped, maybe with letter inversion or subtle phrase changes, so that when it’s leaked to the press, they can detect the leaker.
Printers in offices leave some hidden prints on any printed paper. That's how many people got caught, including a serial killer who used a library printer. Whenever one uses company fax machines, these faxes are recorded: some executive in the valley faxed a company report to some hedge fund, she got busted.
All outgoing and incoming mails in the corporate server are stored for some years; that's why large companies use third party for mail services, as these third parties are specialized in auditing, spying, etc.
The other way people exfiltrate is using steganography: convert normal files into images, then exfiltrate these images via USB, cloud, etc.
Maybe, the easiest way is just take pictures of documents with personal phone. That's why air-gapped environments don't let people with personal phones.
Yeah, my company has a similar policy. Everyone works from home on Monday and Friday and at campus the other three days. Only, my company has fully moved to nobody has their own desk. You just show up and wander around until you find a place to work. Oh, and half of my team is remote, so all meetings are on zoom. I haven’t actually bothered to go back to campus yet and nobody seems to have noticed or cares. I actually have no idea if anyone else I typically work with has gone back either.
If I have to choose between open office and WFH, I will choose open-office 3~4 days /week. As I have kids, only morning time I can focus on work. Then, whole afternoon, I am distracted by them asking me to do something or some other random questions.
Of course, I am also distracted by colleagues when I am at office. It is also annoying. They do not care whether I am in focus mode or not. So, going back to the focus mode takes long and some times I couldn't until the end of the day.
Still, by answering their questions, anyhow I am unblocking them. When I WFH, I rarely get questions. Colleagues tend to send an email or slack and waiting my responses. So, my productivity may fall but overall productivity increases.
I do, however, hope companies move back to dedicated room culture. With that, at least I won't be distracted by others' hall way chats but questions.
Working from home requires some planning and modification in order to make it work. Sitting at a laptop in the same room as your kids has a predictable outcome.
The specific changes required are different for everyone. Things like a separate room with a solid door, though, are a good start when you share a home with other people. Teaching your kids what it means when the door is closed versus open can really help too. Same with whomever is caring for the kids while you work, setting clear expectations up front is a great start.
The H in WFH doesn’t necessarily have to mean your house, either. Maybe it’s a local coworking space. Maybe it’s a nearby friend’s house. A coffee shop, a hammock in the garden, a local park. Whatever works for _you_.
The key, though, is that you have to figure all that stuff out on your own. There’s no facilities team serving you a one size fits all solution. It’s more work. The benefit is that you get something tailor made.
I agree. It was my fault when WFH began that I didn't lease coworking space. I put money on wfh setup and home isnt big enough to separate me from kids.
Well, Apple apparently spends a premium on people; especially those working in Silicon Valley. So, they'd be well within their rights to demand something in return. Like people actually coming to work. On the other hand, the reason they pay so much is that the market for people there is fiercely competitive and laying down the law might simply lead to them spending even more to keep people that otherwise might be poached away by competitors. And that of course happens to their best people first.
You night look at this at an opportunity as well. Because why hire locally if your best people want to work from home anyway? Plenty of talent outside of California that can work remotely. Lots of companies are discovering that fully remote teams can work. There are some companies that never even had head offices.
Yes, obviously. Coming to work is what that means. If you are working from home, you are not technically going anywhere since you are already there. Coming to work does not mean "starting to work". It implies a change of location.
I disagree. Coming to work is about starting your work day. If I was loafing around playing videogames, and I work from home, and my boss texted me, "You coming to work?" I would absolutely interpret that as, "are you logging on?"
For me wfh has been something like the unpleasant social dynamics of a high school cafeteria, as opposed to the focused learning environment of the chemistry classroom. I don’t miss the commute, but I miss the collaboration. Some companies will benefit, probably by lowering compensation, but overall I think productivity drops for teams. Some individuals win, but many lose, such as those with small children, or small apartments with two working adults etc, so I do not accept the workers’ rights argument.
i mean if you live in a super expensive area (bay area) and you get to WFH from your shitty apartment/condo/house that you barely afforded, then i think you aren't getting the full benefits of WFH.
I think you’re saying that to get the most value from remote work, ICs have to move to low cost areas. That’s asking a lot from people who left their home towns (or home countries) to live in a software hub. But it’s a non sequitur anyway, since basically nobody seems to want to go back to the office, regardless of where they live.
This is correct. Workers rights come from the flexibility and trust that a remote-optional arrangement provides.
I live in a small apartment with two working adults. I’d rather work from our kitchen table than from an open office.
I believe that some people with small children like working from home because they can spend less on childcare and spend more time with their children.
Individuals have a huge spectrum of changing wants and needs. Our working arrangements can and should be flexible.
Ok I’ll bite. I don’t like the rights framing, and I don’t quite know what is meant by trust. I want to replace the word trust with information. Information doesn’t flow along the edges if the org chart, nor does it flow down from manager to employee. It’s moving between individuals horizontally and vertically, and also between groups. For anyone to be effective, they have to know what’s going on, where the project is heading, what’s crucial and what’s expendable. Working in isolation is just not conducive to building an intuition for this team awareness. All the trust in the world isn’t going to cut through the misinformation and confusion that accumulates while people are out of the office, working hard on the wrong thing.
Commuting is a giant waste of resources no question about it. Also most companies would probably work remote only just fine. That being said, I totally get why you would want people in the office if you are very ambitious, doing creative or dynamic work. It is just a different dynamic all together. YMMV
I'm sure it will be fine, though, as now most people have received vaccines that prevent them from getting covid and we now know that there are no long-term neurological symptoms from infections.
Either that or Apple is significantly risking their staff's health and mental faculties for corporate policy.
I guess we'll find out.
China's zero-covid strategy is starting to make a lot more sense to me after seeing long covid make a lot of my triple-vaccinated friends stupid for months post infection.
They can mandate whatever they want but if there's another wave everyone will quite rightly stay home again. And the current wave is on the downslope, but it's far from over.
Mandated tue/thu means they don't perceive capacity/safety issues, because its all-hands. Ignoring health issues for now, the good side is meetings won't be zoom-anyway because of the mass of non-present people thing.
Going to health, if they have HVAC and a good mask protocol for dense spaces, I don't personally see the problem in the building. Getting there, may cause increased exposure.
Apple can afford both the HMO, and the epidemiologists to work out if this change has any impact on health in the company, in the families at large, and in the wider community. I look forward to the research papers!
How do they coordinate transit? Does the metro authority run different schedules when Apple is on an in office day? Also doesn’t this cause huge traffic problems?
Source? Im friends with a fairly high level commercial real estate agent in manhattan and per his view of things, vast amounts of empty office space in most neighborhoods. covid and zoom may have changed the market forever.
My company has been fully back in-office since the vaccines came out. The descriptions of WFH I've heard online have sounded like dispatches from a parallel universe. I haven't been on a Zoom call since 2020.
The commute is really the thing that makes some workplaces intolerable, I think. You can put up with a lot more if you don't have to sit and angrily drive home for an hour afterwards.
All non remote offices are intolerable when you've become accustomed to taking lunch with your spouse and having your kids hug you at your desk when they return from school.
So many chores get done too with working from home. Laundry, dishes, yard work, errands etc, all on my lunch breaks that would otherwise be spent scrolling the internet over a sad sandwich i cobbled together in 5 minutes at 7am. By the time the end of the day rolls around I'm actually done with work, not just work work but the home work that I'd have to do in the few tired hours that exist at the end of the day after you've finally commuted home and finished cleaning up after dinner. Plus being able to attend to essential business with fickle hours is a godsend. I am no longer forced to do all my banking and DMV business on saturday before 3pm when all these things close. I can do it in the middle of the week like a retiree and not hit any lines. Running errands in the middle of the day means I don't hit any traffic either. It's still a 40 hour work week, its just one that's way more optimized for my convenience, to the point where it would be hard to put a price on the stress relief it brings.
For me, that's looking up from the monitor to watch the kitties romping together (20-20-20 eye rule reminders), taking a short movement break to throw them some toys to chase, and occasionally having one curl up on my lap while I'm thinking.
If you work a 230-day year, every ten minutes on your commute is over 38 hours of time. You're spending the equivalent of 17 work weeks in the car, or 37.5% of your 230-day work year.
I don’t care about health like a lot of people do. I go out to restaurants, I meet people, I take public transportation for other things, I’m already putting myself at risk, office isn’t going to change that.
However, this is the third year I’ve been working from home, including starting a new job where I didn’t know anyone. None of it has had any impact on my productivity and the companies I’ve worked for have only seen record profits. I am not commuting for hours every day and wasting my time and money while doing so. Nah. This is about fighting back to the tyranny of upper management who have nothing better to do than make poor decisions that affect other people negatively.
They just want people to come back to justify their corporate lease / rent on whatever offices they have. That's really what it's all about. All their productivity claims are bullshit.
I don't suspect any grand conspiracy, but I do think a lot of asset managers have had chats with high net worth individuals and gone over just what the collapse of the commercial real estate market would look like for them personally, especially with the stock market being so shaky as of recent.
I suspect these causal conversations are behind a large number CEOs return to office strategies (in addition to justifying their office investment as you mention) as well as Malcolm Gladwell's sudden revelation that working in an office is super important for everyone who is not him.
The commercial real estate market has no reason to collapse. In these cities with a lot of vacant office space, like NYC today, what do you also have? Enormous demand for apartment housing. Land owners never lose money in these hot markets where apartments are leased the day they are put to market. Your building could burn down and it doesn't matter, the money is in the deed to the dirt and the zip code, and the potential rents that this piece of dirt in this zip code can yield based on the zoning of the property.
I think that and retention. It’s well known that remote jobs make it way easier to jump, plus people are less attached to their coworkers.
That’s still not a good reason, since you are essentially trying to guilt people into staying or making their life more busy so interviewing is harder.
There is also a lot of pressure from local governments to get companies to force people back to work as the businesses built up around large biz centers suffer if everyone works from home (no one eating out for lunch, going to beers after work, getting coffees, getting dry cleaning, etc etc)
I will say I've been work from home for years now and I still do all of those things ;). Just not with my coworkers. And not always in the heart of downtown, but more local to where I am.
The money is still spent, just not in the same places.
Or, if they want more people in the area, they could zone for housing in these downtowns that they previously hollowed out the housing for to build these offices and their parking lots.
Many assumptions in your statement. You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself and record profits come at specific context, specific time and based on a historic inertia and multi-year strategy.
This is not about fighting any tyranny, this is about running companies, and the same way there are costs associated to work in an office for you, there are costs associated with employees working remotely (and not only economic), but you don't see them.
I can, because I go into office twice a week now. The days I am least productive are the ones I go in, because I lose more than the two hours of door to door commute every day. It is the fact that I lose my most productive hours of the day in waking up, getting ready, fixing a breakfast, getting myself to the office and having to small talk with people before FINALLY I can work.
Then you are accepting that what drags your productivity down is commuting, not actually working from an office. Remote working may be a solution to your problem but comes with associated costs you may be not counting (misunderstandings, wrong team member mental models, alignment calls, longer on boarding times, suboptimal knowledge sharing, less serendipity/synergies in general). Another solution to your commuting problem is find a job that is closer to your place
I agree. However I still support work from home because it’s not up to me as an employee to fight for something that benefits the company at my own expense.
Commuting, finding an apartment closer to work, living in a place that you dislike, buying lunch or making it in advance, and a whole mess of other things are expenses that fall directly on an employee.
On the other hand suboptimal knowledge sharing, misunderstandings, less serendipity, etc. are not only hard to measure but are strictly of benefit to the employer.
If WFM means slightly less productivity per dollar spent in exchange for employee happiness , then so be it. The company can absorb the expense just like it does when it pays for on site cafeterias, overtime, and bonuses or extra vacation to mitigate burnout.
I'm confused how any of those downsides are resolved coming into work? All of those things are just as liable to happen in person. To be honest meetings are a lot more to the point when done remotely. In person the first and last 10 minutes of a meeting are spent just pissing away the time on whatever, the presenters dog did something funny this morning perhaps. If you are having issues with onboarding team members or getting everyone on the same page, just have them meet more often over zoom to discuss projects. Having them come into the office comes with this assumption that people will meet up and help eachother and be productive etc, but in my experience most office chitchat is not relevant to work at all.
Productivity is hard to mature, and the more senior someone is, the more their job involves communication vs production. Communication in person is different, so while companies can be remote, and that can work well, the prices sometimes paid are subtle and hard to see/measure.
It’s fairly easy for most people to compare their own productivity before and after working from home. Mine is significantly greater. The number of hours I’ve spent working has drastically increased due to losing my 2 hour commute, and the focus I’ve been able to achieve at home is like nothing I’ve ever seen at an office.
Personal productivity isn't the same as organizational productivity. This is one of the key things at the heart of the WFH discussion. It's entirely possible that you personally wrote more lines of code, but the team still fell behind in products shipped. This could be due to many different factors. One easily identifiable one is that while good employees might be more productive WFH, poor performers are even more poor when WFH, and it becomes much more difficult to actively manage/coach/mentor poor performers when they are remote.
There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)
Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.
Communication is great for organizations, but I don't understand what you are getting in person that you don't get over zoom talking about whatever you need to talk about. It's not like the entire org is talking to eachother at once in person. At best you talk to like a handful of people a day, probably a good amount of that talk has nothing to do with work. Meanwhile with zoom I've been having so many more directed meetings with key people. Like before, we would sit in this in person meeting and say something like "it would be nice to get Steve's input on this, if he were here in this meeting" and now with zoom we can actually get steve in the meeting. We meet with people from around the world who might have relevant input.
If your issue with wfh is team isolation, just have more meetings and get better at communicating. The issue is not the venue, its the event.
> You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and say if you can’t evaluate your own productivity, you aren’t trying.
If you are running any kind of scrum, or you are tracking estimates on tickets, you can create a velocity for yourself. You can track that velocity over time - weeks, months, years.
You can track the velocity of your peers, or at least your entire team and compare your velocity to that.
You can look at how many features you implement.
You can look at how many code reviews you do and compare that against how many code reviews your peers are doing.
And finally, you can calibrate your own measurements against your bosses feedback on your performance.
There’s a lot of data to be tracked, and so I really do believe that if you don’t know your own productivity in relation to your past productivity, or to your peers productivity, it’s because you are not collecting the data, not because there’s no data to collect.
Many assumptions in your statement: people are fully capable with self evaluation of their own productivity and companies aren’t bringing people back because of some cost associated with remote work. Apple, in this case, is making people come back to justify their super expensive and ridiculous new campus.
To be fair, most tech based companies have very long pipelines. Google is making money off software written over the course of two decades. Intel has a 4 year pipeline for chip tape outs. A lot of tech companies were positioned well to increase revenue due to the pandemic.
So just because companies are making more money, doesn't mean productivity hasn't gone down. It could be that it's just lost in the noise at the moment and won't show up in the data for a few years.
I feel like this is a really good point - Most people are likely pretty bad at measuring their productivity, and honestly my expectation is that (if present), the productivity impacts of long term WFH are likely to manifest in ways that aren't entirely obvious.
For example, it seems evident to me that there's going to be a lot less "cross pollination" (for lack of a better metaphor) between people in a WFH environment as opposed to an office. For those with plenty of experience, this will have a fairly minimal impact, but for anyone else I'm concerned about missing out on the little things that are seamlessly transferred in face-to-face interactions over time. That thing that takes you 30 minutes that can be resolved with a 5 minute chat with the guy who knows, etc. Things you won't even really think to ask about that don't get brought up.
Even less direct things as well - eg random new product ideas that come from a chat with a coworker, or improvements, anything like that. Those can all add up to improving products and productivity, and are difficult to measure the effect of.
All of this stuff is in the tail though, and we probably won't see the effects for years (and it'll be muddied by people who do genuinely work well in WFH environments too)
>random new product ideas that come from a chat with a coworker, or improvements
I've had this happen plenty of times over text.
I suspect the "cross pollination" might get balanced out by the ability to interact with anyone at the company, rather than just those on your floor or building.
That's a good point as well - I suppose you could argue the likelihood of entering a conversation like that over text vs in person. In my experience you're generally a bit less likely to end up off track in text as opposed to talking, simply because it's usually slower - you can't bounce ideas back and forth at the same rate (not to say you can't, though)
Unpopular opinion, but you can’t just look at “companies made more profits” and decide that means WFH is more productive.
People starting dying from covid while crypto markets soared, so I guess killing people with covid fuels bitcoin.
Or possible they huge money printing influenced the picture.
EDIT: Not saying we weren’t more productive, just saying that HN tends to be very scientific but is really ignoring correlation != causation which we all would point out for most other things.
I didn’t say work from home is more productive, I meant the record profits while the ENTIRE company was WFH suggests that at the very least, drop in productivity cannot be an excuse to bring EVERYONE in.
Correlation does not imply causation. A company achieving "record profits" does not necessarily have to be because there was no drop in productivity.
It's entirely possible that a company can have a drop in productivity and record profits at the same time.
Anecdotally, my company had record profits during the period of WFH, and I personally think my productivity stayed the same or improved. However, as a company we also shipped significantly less new features/products than we did in years past (and my opinion as to why is because we had significant organizational delays caused by miscommunication about timelines and priorities (stuff that in theory might have been improved if we were not WFH)). If we had not had a drop in the amount we shipped, it's possible our record profits would have been even higher record profits.
Sure, which is why the entire "productivity" discussion is a bit speculative. I note that in the OP article, productivity of any kind is not cited as a reason for the return to office. Neither is profit, for that matter.
Clear "Correlation does not imply causation" case. The fact that people stayed more time at home implied they consumed more of everything online and accelerated digital services adoption making companies related with digital services sell more, plus less expenses (no travel, less expenses in facilities) made higher profits. Remote work correlating with Higher profits is a correlation not a cause afaik.
Corporate overlords will only sacrifice the bottom line for one thing: the illusion of control. It's why open-plan offices and Scrum are still things, despite the money left on the table by adopting them.
Scrum is more than "periodic team meetings". It's daily standups, sprints, sprint planning, backlog grooming, retro (cited lengths for these meetings are aspirational; usually they take 1.5x-2x the recommended times). It's sprint goals and sprint commitments, failure to meet which will be recorded and used against you in performance reviews and disciplinary actions. (Don't tell me they're "forecasts" now. They're commitments because people higher than you in the org chart use them for long-term planning.)
The only reason why major companies undergo Agile transformations -- and why these almost always take the form of Scrum -- is because of the promise of fine-grained metrics, analytics, and control of the SDLC by upper management. That's what the agile consultants pitched to the CTO. Everybody involved in a typical Scrum shop is playing a game of Mornington Crescent -- of pretending to deliver quality software in an organic developer-customer relationship when what they're really expected to deliver is stories, estimates, and burndown data to their bosses (or their bosses' bosses).
Anyway, that has not much to do with WFH, aside from the fact that calling workers into the office comes from the same place as imposing Scrum: the bosses need to feel in total control.
I was introduced to Scrum at 2 companies that didn't use Scrum this way, and am currently at a company that uses it exactly as you describe. It was a shock and it's a real pressure cooker.
Many have commented on correlation-vs-causation. We get it, there is lag in the economics and the profits have partly been boosted by COVID. However, there has also been inflation-riding on behalf of these companies, and the same argument can be made in reverse: what evidence have they presented that WFH is causing a drop in productivity? None whatsoever. This move is simply to get employees back on the chairs so that the corporations may exert the same level of control they had in the past. On the other hand, those that are doing just fine and aren't cynical about their work practices are embracing WFH.
Okay, so hardware engineers can work from the office. Having a single set of rules for everyone else that doesn’t need to come in is something I don’t agree with.
Voicing dissatisfying as part of a mass popular outrage is a good way to get rules changed. Leaving a company also achieves that, but is a little more drastic.
I've long-considered that social media outrage, even something tech-specific like blog articles getting passed around on HN, is sadly sometimes the most effective form of customer service on these huge platforms that have mostly automated support:
As far as it being commoditized, I think it might work a little differently in examples like the OP where the outraged people is the workforce itself. It's a more focused audience.
If you don’t like it, there’s the door? That’s a terrible solution to a problem. The my way or the highway approach assumes there is no room for growth or understanding of other positions. This is the root of no-compromise.
>This is about fighting back to the tyranny of upper management who have nothing better to do than make poor decisions that affect other people negatively.
No, this is about Apple spending $5B on a state of the art amazing HQ that no one was doing much complaining about except those folks walking into the windows.
I remember when the plans for the new HQ were first unveiled. There was some disquiet from colleagues about the shift towards open floorplans. Not sure how it ended up being received by those who did relocate to there.
> I recall some disquiet from some colleagues about the shift towards open floorplans.
I can’t blame them for that. I am of the opinion that Frank Lloyd Wright may be the greatest sadist ever to walk the earth for popularizing the concept.
Why would you commute that long? I’ve never had and would never tolerate a commute longer than 20 minutes. I go into the office every day of the week because the time spent in the car is negligible when you consider it’s just podcast time.
I'd say it's a pretty rare luxury to be able to commute less than 20 mins for your entire career. There are tons of jobs that happen in major cities that don't pay enough to live within 20 minutes. Many don't pay enough to reasonably commute by car.
Plus there are a lot of life circumstances that make people accept different tradeoffs over time (schools/districts, medical care, aging/ailing relatives, space vs price, urban vs natural, car vs transit etc).
Beware, this attitude works while employees have relatively strong bargaining power. As tech layoffs accelerate, this bargaining power dynamic may change. Unless there’s strong unionization efforts on this basis, I suspect WFH is not long for this world in its current, widespread form.
I get your point but I’d hardly say asking people to come to the office for their job 3 days a week is
“tyranny of upper management”. If this is your tyranny then I’d say you have had a pretty lax career.
Good for you I suppose and let’s hope times don’t get tough.
But I do reject the concept of 3 days a week not being an absolutely huge impact on your life, depending on your circumstance. It's life altering for a huge number or people. Others It's fine, or preferred.
If you are doing something against your will, it is tyranny. If you do things based on reasonable conversation, it is partnership. That said, to be fair, most entities are organized as 'on command' workplaces and management does not really understand and/or like empowered workers. Now, we can quibble over money and such, but most employees already voted, quite vocally, some with their feet.
Does an average person wake up and thinks 'gosh golly, today is a good day to write a better way to track people for ad targeting purposes' or 'today is a splendid day to test that software package'?
I don't. If I don't, it is against my will. It is not rocket science. It is basic logic.
Naturally, you could argue that you are doing it for money and this negates it, but, well, it does not. It just means you are paid to do something against your will.
But wait, I can go somewhere else! That is freedom. You are just changing one tyranny for another and that does not change the fact that it is tyranny.
Thanks for the detail. I think I follow the perspective but let me ask a couple of questions to make sure I got it right. (not intended to bait you here but want to know where the nuance lines are)
Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)
Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny?
Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone?
No problem. To me it is an interesting question in itself in general; as such I do not think you are baiting anyone.
I am mildly concerned that what we are experiencing in our chat can be classified as 'cultural differences'. As such, our assumptions and cultural norms may not be the same.
With that in mind, I probably should define few things.
1. What is tyranny[1]?
- oppressive power
- a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler
- a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force
- an oppressive, harsh, or unjust act : a tyrannical act
A lot of people default to the 2nd one, because it is, the one most covered in our history lessons. That said, just because it is the most recognized definition, it is not the only one. I have a pet theory as to why, but that is probably not a place for such musings on my part.
2. Beyond that, I noticed that the questions attempt to conflate societal and governmental rules, which is fair as you want to establish the lines, but I fear it may muddle the point somewhat. It is possible I am channeling Chomsky a little here, but would you be willing to accept a distinction between private power ( corporation ) and societal power ( society and its byproduct government )?
If so, I think we can try to answer those questions.
>> Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)
Food and shelter are necessities. For practical purposes, any governing structure quickly recognizes that hungry and homeless population ( especially if it outnumbers fed population and population with an abode ) is a recipe for an end to that governing structure. As such, most bodies do try to keep basic minimum needs met.
That said, it does not appear to meet the definitions above at this time. Although, we are slowly reaching a boiling point of renting/housing being so expensive that it is "oppressive, harsh, or unjust act". Food-wise, it does not appear to be the case yet despite record inflation. Most can still eat, albeit not as much, or as well, as they used to
>> Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny?
Depends. What is the society we are discussing? Is the contribution unfair? If so, tyranny definition could apply.
>> Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone?
Maybe? Is the law enforced in an unfair manner ( say only women are stopped )? If so, tyranny definition could apply.
In short, I do not really believe in one and zero type answer. If anything, it is a spectrum of sorts and this does not even begin to cover the deeper dive into differences between corporate and non-corporate power structures.
Sorry but where are you getting your definition of tyranny?
“cruel and oppressive government or rule.” It kinda comes with the weight that you have no free will to leave and do something entirely different.
Is it really cruel to make you jump in your air conditioned car and drive to work? While listening to music or a podcast…Then work in an amazing office with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people. Same you did 3 years ago 5 days a week and now 40% less?
I would rather drive the car through a beautiful landscape (that I pick), instead in rush hour trafic that I don't have a choice in..
>Then work in an amazing office..
That I did't choose...
>with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people.
That I didn't pick..
There is a poem in Malayalam with a portion that goes like this "Bhandura kaanjanakkotilanengilum bandhanam bandhanam thanne paaril". It means, "bondage is bondage even if you are in a golden cage".
So the point is that office work is vastly less freedom (thus a kind of oppression), even with all its perks (that is for the few that indeed have those perks).
I think you would agree, when you choose a job you are choosing it based on a few base components. Job duties, pay, culture, location, travel requirements, hours per week etc... If these do not match up with what you want then its your job/right to get a different job at a different place with different components.
It will take a while to determine which jobs lose or gain productivity from WFH. Some regimented jobs like radiologists, or call centres we’re doing a lot of WFH well before the pandemic. Jobs that require focus probably also benefit, but in a lot of cases it’s just regaining lost productivity from the switch to open office plans.
The sort of major product breakthroughs that more creative people had during walks, cross team pollination over coffee breaks, or extended lunch brainstorms are probably fewer though. It’s hard to measure.
The rest of the world has gone back to hybrid or full time office long time ago.
I have a feeling, most of us here in the states will go back to hybrid eventually.
However, it won't happen for a while.
But once you start seeing unemployment rate tick up past 6-7%, employers will have more leverage. All of a sudden, you will have more employees willing to commute.
If you are in a recession, why are you maintaining an expensive office lease instead of taking the free office your employees are happy to provide for you?
You're missing the part where maybe they want some people to quit right now. IBM would do this with employees that had been working from home for years, that they had even encouraged to work from home. All the sudden, they would say 'hey - we've decided that we should be an in-office department now' - so pack up from Colorado and see you in Poughkeepsie Monday! Don't like it? Well you can always quit...
Market is cold, so now’s the time to do RTO. All the people considering quitting will have a much harder time putting their money where their mouth is.
I am a bit of a pessimist but RTO feels inevitable to me.
Lately I've been wondering if the army of 100% remote folks realize their shift to entirely virtualized interactions creates opportunity for AIs to compete on equal grounds.
An AI assistant won't be taking your place in the office anytime soon. But the writing's on the wall for AI assistants to start appearing in your Zoom meetings [0]. Once they can churn out code 24x7 without eating or sleeping, glwt.
I got a certain amount of schadenfreude from seeing Apple's opulent "spaceship" campus sit essentially empty during COVID. A building shaped like an asshole is probably a good place for assholes to go to work.
