This whole debate seems so absurd. Some people want to go back and some people don’t. Why not accommodate both groups? Why is it the return to office group feels the need to impose their preference on the other. The WFH group seems fine to let the in office group go in if they want… We’ve already proved that both approaches can work.
I think some (but certainly not all) in-the-office people only realize their desired context if everyone else is there to populate the office and give them easy access to co-workers. For some (not all): what's the point of being in the office if it has few of the people they need to interact with?
No idea how large that group is. Maybe it's zero. Maybe this is exclusively moneypeople doing moneypeople stuff with their spreadsheets.
> In person still has the same problem but it gives a quantum of more accountability like helping identify those mooning with multiple remote jobs.
If a dev isn't performing well go through the PIP protocol and then fire them. If a dev IS performing well but you're afraid they might be working two jobs is it really a problem (and if so, why)? This is the sort of thing that'll shake itself out over time and feels like fear mongering more than anything. People screwed around in the office and took way too long to do things too, they just had to be sneakier.
As someone who works from home, and hopes to never work in an office again...I think this doesn't do justice to the Office people's argument.
The Office people think the WFH people are poisoning the company culture. It's like if you had a neighbor who dumped sewage into your shared pond: "I prefer not to dump sewage into the pond, they prefer to do so, so let's accommodate both groups and allow each to do what she wants."
It's important to make the case that WFH does not poison the company culture--that it can result in a more successful/effective/healthier organization. I think it requires a change in mindset and/or working patterns for certain manager types to see things this way.
I don't agree with this, but I think the case can be made by those on The Office side that WFH does poison the culture. Culture is immutable, so any change to it recreates it. For some folks, being seen is contributing. Being able to swing by a cube and look over a shoulder is important. Taking that away takes something away from them. Again, I don't agree, I've work from home for nearly ten years now, but I see their point.
I think it also threatens them, because we're challenging a norm, and change is scary. They like the office, and us wanting to WFH makes it seem like the office is bad, and they're bad for liking it. No one likes their cheese moved.
Bosses also like being able to walk around the floor and see people working, and like the power trip of being able to physically tap people on the shoulder and pull them into a meeting.
Also really puts a crimp on their dating / sexual harassment game and would force them to spend more time with the wife and the kids.
My strong anecdotal evidence based belief here is that remote work requires more management effort to coordinate and that's the actual cause of the friction.
There's a greater need to schedule, document (generally more writing things down), and coordinate when working in a team with remote culture. (Either that, or you have a team with really strong social capital and everyone knows what needs to be done with little coordination overhead)
Now management type have more work on their hands to keep everything coordinated and that's why you have this showdown.
This reasoning is quickly falling apart in a hybrid model. Once a single person is not on-site, you will need to work as if everybody were remote. According to the article, Amazon is apparently is currently targeting said hybrid model.
As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening
Yeah, but ask for developers to do better documentation and you will get angry answers ;-)
Remote work requires higher seniority, more independence and more decision making on worker side, but a lot of people don't want to make decisions, so there is a lot of meetings, calls and similar stuff which is replacing normal in office interaction. Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings, finding time which fits both sides and so on. Stuff which was done by talking during walk for lunch is now meeting. Meeting in person which took 30 minutes are taking 60-90 minutes because people are not build to use simplex channel where only voice is transferred. Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Working from home you don't have all this stuff which is happening next to watercooler.
IMHO WFH is making people also less happy, it is more comfortable, but makes people more miserable.
Tons of assumptions in this that don't fit with my experience. I need a meeting, now I just send a message on teams. "Hey, do you have a minute for a call? Yes, great. No, ok, when is a good time for you?"
I wouldn't say that, it just requires better juniors.
You can't do as much hand holding remotely but remote mentoring is definitely possible. But it requires employees that have above average communication skills and an ability to debug and investigate themselves.
These abilities aren't cheap but pretty much required to pass a serious Engineering/CS program. The difference is just night and day.
> Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings
Or a well written email.
> Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Margeret Heffernan has a really good TED talk on this topic [0]
"Social capital is what gives companies momentum. And social capital is what makes companies robust. It means that time is everything because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better because it takes time to build the trust you need for openness and candor. And it’s time that builds better value."
Really good talk.
Brian Chesky of Airbnb also talks about this as "culture" [1]:
"Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap. Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes."
When you have strong "social capital" or "culture", there's less management overhead, but it's very hard to come by and requires time (or hiring the right people).
The problem is the genie is out of the bottle - unless in office is enforced and required 100% of the time it's still going to be Teams calls. Even before 2020 most of the meetings I were in, even if they were in person, had a teams call going at the same time because someone had to remote in.
It already was this in some places, but being annoyed by it was allowed and supported because it wasn't normal. Outlook has been adding calls since it was Lync. Any office with more than one location would have a phone bridge, but we blamed the tech when it failed because it was fun, and now we've learned it works more than well enough and we should rely on it.
The same reason they could never accommodate the two groups of people who respectively loved and hated open offices - the people who love it only love it because everybody is forced to participate. If it doesn't include everybody, it's not what they're looking for.
Somehow those seem to also be the same people who love to stand in the middle of the open office and loudly converse with the sales team about what they did last weekend while you're on a call dealing with a prod outage because impossibly even in the in-open-office utopia of yesteryear if something actually really important and time sensitive was happening it'd involve people being on a Teams call.
Purely anecdotal on my part, but I’ve noticed that while many people are able to effectively work from home and be as productive as they would be in the office, there are many employees who are terrible at working from home.
Anecdotal on my part, but there are many employees that are terrible working in the office. The more productive ones wear (wore?) headphones all day to try and maintain some level of productivity
+1 - it’s great for excellent people, it’s horrible for junior engineers, it’s bad for people who have trouble motivating themselves and keeping on task.
There is a decent % of people that do close to nothing while working remote. It’s not black and white, there are tradeoffs and it varies based on the person imo.
I find this strange. If someone wasn't able to get work done in the office the solution wouldn't be "OK, we all need to work from home because Gary can't get stuff done otherwise".
That’s only one factor, though it’s not just “Gary” IME many people are in this category, the very effective remote people are less common. The junior engineer issue and the comms issue affects everyone. Companies are teams of people and you want to make the collaboration as low effort and fast as possible. In person is very good for that and I suspect better on net.
It’s why companies with the leverage to push for it (Apple and Amazon, Elon Musk companies) do so - they believe it to be an advantage.
How many people do you believe were "very effective" in office? The truth of the matter is most people are "effective enough".
I honestly don't know if it's actually better or it just appears better. Sure, there are times when fast communication is important, but as we see with Twitter lately it's obvious that rapid fire decisions sometimes aren't the best and while things seem very active and dynamic maybe it'd be better if communication was more considered and thoughtful. Isn't that why that whole "this meeting could have been an email" meme exists?
I agree the companies believe it's an advantage, but I don't know that it is. I don't know that they know it is. Leadership definitely thinks so, and there's a ton of institutional momentum that still hasn't shifted after the last few years, but I don't that it's actually empirically better.
I think we’ll get to see the experiment happen which is cool. If either truly has a decisive advantage in some contexts we should see that materialize in the market.
Like all startups, it’ll be in a new field. If it’s an advantage some sort of AGI/LLM remote company should be able to out compete non-remote variants.
So fix those issues?
Working in offices always had issues as well, some of those issues have been addressed over time though effort on the part of employees and managers. Nothing is without trade-offs and side effects.
The real question there is:
Are the minor issues associated with working remotely so bad that it is better to
force everyone to risk their lives on the roads every day (including in snow and other bad weather which exacerbates road death rates 100% purely because of employer demands to come in anyway)
destroy the environment with all of that unnecessary exhaust,
give asthma to their neighbor's kids,
harm parent/child relationships due to work schedules being out of sync with school schedules and work/commute demands leaving little time for parents to properly interact with their kids,
pass flu and cvoid around to everyone,
cause unnecessary deaths among their parents and grandparents,
drive up housing costs in specific areas causing homelessness as well,
and otherwise add layers of stress and unhappiness to every person's daily existence?
Put the other way around: Are all of the personal, professional, societal, and environmental negatives that directly result from people being forced to commute to and work in an office every day actually worth the supposed productivity and/or collaboration gains due to office related friction points having already been solved over time? (btw they really haven't been solved for many people either, see: the ongoing harassment and diversity issues at most companies)
Or might it be better to just solve the few issues with collaborating in a remote work setup like we already did for the office?
The only thing I’m focused on is: are companies with an in office working environment at a competitive advantage to those that are not.
I don’t care about the other stuff, imo it’s not relevant (putting aside I don’t really agree with your characterization). That said, I also think some of the issues are not so minor (remote is a lot harder for junior people starting out in their career).
Well, at least you are honest about not really caring about anything other than profit.
I'd love to see what makes you think think almost everything that matters to most people for most of their lives is irrelevant to the question of how people live and work on a daily basis. Please elaborate if you will.
Since you disagree with my characterization, I'd also be happy to consider what you think I have misattributed there.
Overall the point is simply that you are not working with a steady state system here.
Whether one mode of working confers a competitive advantage probably has more to do with how much effort has been put behind streamlining that process. If that is indeed the case, then you might find yourself saying this about any change to any process that doesn't just wipe the market and create a whole new competition environment.
There's no good reason to throw our hands up and say there's nothing we can do to make one or the other situation work better, especially when the benefits are great, numerous, and include increased productivity overall.
The reason I disagree with the framing is I can do the same thing and I just find that rhetorical way of discussing an issue unproductive.
For example:
“Are the minor issues of working in the office so bad that you’d force everyone to isolate devoid of human contact during a period of increasing loneliness and depression?”
“When you’d hurt a fresh graduates career prospects further cementing people already established in their careers in positions of power”
“By having people spread out instead of together we increase the carbon costs of supporting all these areas inefficiently instead of all in one place and that’s bad for the environment!”
Etc. Etc.
I find the useful way to discuss is to narrow in on the core issue (is working from the office an advantage or not) vs. ancillary effects that we can debate unproductively forever depending on who can rhetorically make shit up that sounds better.
And ultimately if it is a decisive advantage to be in the office (not obvious to me, but I suspect it is in most cases) then the market will force it anyway.
My guess is that real drive for RTO is from commercial real estate investors who are losing money. Some of those investors hold high ranking positions at Amazon. I imagine there is also pressure from the Seattle government who have had quite the crime issue on their hands ever since covid started.
It is funny you mention that, but it seems some companies are already making moves suggesting some level of adjustment ( commercial properties in Chicago suburbs seems to be sold at a discount, while residential properties become a hot item ). I can only point to individual instances so it is hard to call it a trend.
"Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.)"
Yes, but it's still one thing to say "I'm happy with my employer's new policy" and another thing to say "I'm happy with it, and I also support it being forced on others, no matter if it makes sense for them (professionally and personally) or not"...
What number of those 1.5 million are white collar employees? I would assume the lion's share of Amazon's total employee headcount are warehouse workers and delivery drivers, jobs where the WFH vs. return to office debate isn't even a thing.
Work from office is better when everyone does it. Those on my team who choose to work from the office end up not seeing another teammate the whole day, and just dial into all their meetings.
Work from office is better for people who LIKE work from office if everyone does it. The people who don't want to go specifically don't want to, to avoid those folks that want access to interrupt everyone around them. Honestly, I feel like work from office would suck less if the people who wanted it so badly weren't there. The commute would still suck but at least you wouldn't have the extroverts constantly wrecking the productivity of everyone in the blast area around them.
Ok, well then this "3-days-per-week" solution will only be temporary on the way back to 5 days per week, because even this way, statistically you will only have 60% of your colleagues present and will still have to do video calls. OTOH, you just need to have somebody from another office, or a customer, or a contractor, or ..., so meetings where everyone is in the same room will still remain a vanishing minority.
Most hybrid implementations have managers decide on the 3 days everyone on the team shows up. Team 1 does monday-wednesday, team 2 picks a different 3 days and so on.
Yes, naturally. Do you really think in-office is about the walls, and the furniture, and the coffee machine? That's absurd.
On the other hand: would you go to the office if it looked like your home?
No, it's not about the physical place. It's about the interaction with your team and colleagues.
I would only voluntarily go back to the office if the commute was similar to WFH. I don't even want to calculate how many hours of my life I've wasted on my 50 mile-each-way commute before WFH.
It gets initially discussed in individual terms, like "mental separation of work and life" and "getting away from the kids and the dog." That is set the trap.
What seems absurd to me is people thinking they have control over what their employer wants them to do. Especially when you aren’t unionized. You do what the employer wants or you get a different job. Or you unionize so you have some actual bargaining power.
I will respond with a quote from an old movie that was a thinly veiled criticism of the communist system.
paraphrased:
A: Why can't we just let them choose where they want to live?
B: The issue is we want to live here and those that don't want to live here.
==============
In other words, individual needs don't matter. Management clearly wants people back for one reason or another. The question is only whether 'wage junkies' will stick to their guns. I don't think I am being cynical here.
The biggest justifiable reason for not wanting to go back to the office is ridiculous commutes, incredible rent prices and depending on the role the lack of necessity.
It should be up to the teams themselves to decide, once the work is done and there is nothing missed, I don't know what the hangup is from companies.
My cynical self says companies just want to make sure they can squeeze more out of their workforce or prioritize less 'essential' qualities like 'social cohesion' within the workplace. Role depending obviously, these qualities are usually just frustrating for people looking to actually just get on with work and their job.
No the biggest justifiable reason is still covid lol. High risk due to disabilities and age is super common; even in tech not nearly everyone is young and healthy.
Strong disagree here. Unless you and all of the occupants of your domicile are still maintaining strict isolation protocols, office work is no more of a risk factor for COVID than going grocery shopping, visiting family, or your children going to school or playing with their friends. No one is stopping you from wearing a mask at work and frequently sanitizing everything.
I trust the people in the office to not come in if they're sick.
I don't trust all the people I meet in the train and subway to do the same. A mask does mitigate it, but not to the levels when everyone was wearing one.
"If you can't do everything you should do nothing" never was a reasonable guideline and still isn't. Risk isn't binary, reducing one risk vector even if you can't remove all others is still valuable.
You must be past retirement age for Covid to be a risk factor more than flu is (especially well vaccinated), so it might not be the strongest argument anymore. I myself strictly mask up in cases where folks have traveled and have never tested positive, but I don’t think it’ll be easy to convince others that they should take this as seriously as I do.
> I know many people under 50 who were vaccinated who lost smell or taste for most of a year, or had other cognitive dysfunction for weeks afterwar
I am not going to take your word for this, lol. Personally, I know many people who weren't vaccinated who have cognitive dysfunction - and unvaccinated people who also experienced death.
There seems to be a lot of hype online on how Amazon employees are doing something never seen before, when in reality Apple employees were fighting a lot harder, going to the press openly giving their names
Ian Goodfellow, chief of Machine Learning quit while writing a letter the sole reason of quitting is RTO
And yet Apple employees are all in office today.
Amazon cares even less about their tech employees, their vesting schedule and PIP culture is proof of that. People barely survive a couple of years before jumping ship or getting fired, do they think management cares about them not wanting to RTO?
Amazon have the highest turnover rate in FAANG, they really never seemed to try to fix it. Im sure theyll be happy to show more people the door in the name of following Andys orders
From what I heard, though, Apple was never ambiguous that the office was the future, and once a threshold was hit (pandemic "over", vaccines, whatever), the office would again be the norm. Google was the same way in a cold email I got from them a year or so ago. I don't know what Amazon said, but if they at all left the door open to not returning, then shame on them and this is what they deserve.
Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.)
Do any of the folks in the "pro-working remotely channel" worry about getting in any kind of trouble for speaking out?
I mean, if some are happy with the policy of going back to the office for three days per week or more, good for them! I just don't understand why they (and the company) want to force this on everybody else too, regardless of whether it makes sense for them personally or not? Or whether it makes sense for the company for that matter - I'm working for a smaller but still pretty global company and currently am working with only 1 (one) person from my local office, the rest are all from other offices. But still, I only got an exemption from the 3-days-per-week rule (which apparently many employers want to impose as the new "new normal", probably to be followed by a full five days per week next year) for personal reasons, not for business reasons...
> I just don't understand why they (and the company) want to force this on everybody else too, regardless of whether it makes sense for them personally or not?
While some of these people are interested in forming interpersonal relationships with anyone in-office, the main benefit to in-office work is actually meeting with your team to work on problems and have the freedom to ask offhand questions.
There must be plenty who wouldn't mind being shown the door, and have other options. So if that was a new issue with working for Amazon, and a potential deal-breaker for them, it would be worth having a go.
It seems like the vast majority of the 28k people are just there to observe and not actually saying anything. I don’t think simply joining a slack channel is an endorsement of anything.
it's funny because in like 2004 when I worked in an office, I'd rather send someone a message on something like IRC then go over and talk to them in person.
"One person wrote that their new car had a mile limit of 16,000 a year; they leased it considering a lack of commute."
It seems to me that the amount of pampering expected by these employees is going a bit too far.
It's a job, the employer defines their policies (EDIT: abiding by the local laws) and you decide if you want to continue working there or go and find a new job. That's it, that's how it works in a free society.
> It's a job, the employer defines their policies (EDIT: abiding by the local laws) and you decide if you want to continue working there or go and find a new job.
I mean, sure, but it's in employees best interest to voice their opposition for policies that will cause them to incur hardship. The time commitment alone is insane - commuting is probably the biggest waste of time anyone can incur, especially when a 30 minute commute with no traffic turns into an hour or 1.5 hour commute with traffic, which only got worse as more and more companies reinstated their in-office policy in 2022 and beyond. For anyone with an hour commute, they end up wasting 20 days a year sitting in a car.
Surprised this is the top comment. It's so oversimplified as to be absurd. What employers are allowed to do is heavily limited. There are countless laws on the books restricting employers in the US. And in many countries in Europe there are far more restrictions. Does that make us not free societies? I don't think so. Companies at scale have a lot more leverage that individual employees so unions and laws are needed to keep them in check.
Whether this particular complaint about a lease is in the realm of legal limits is unlikely but you have conflated two issues.
There is a lot of that sentiment on corporate fora ( which includes linkedin ). The general spirit is condescending and words used tend to include keywords like 'entitlements'. It makes me think its a coordinated propaganda effort.
I am actually debating starting a project tracking this ( I almost did at the beginning of pandemic after the ridiculous 'commute is your zen time' messaging ).
It's not actually the top comment; HN puts new comments at the top for a few minutes to give them a chance to shine in case it has the information needed to actually dethrone the most upvoted comment.
I’m kind of confused here: why can’t we just have teams self select? There are apparently over 700 people self selecting into a channel for in office advocacy: form teams out of them based on their roles and let them have their in-office teams, with relocation assistance as necessary to put them in commuting distance to the same office.
The issue is that the people who perform poorly when working remote are often the most likely to select WFH if given the choice. WFH has become somewhat of a refuge for people trying to avoid interaction and work, which is the root problem driving other teams to want them back in the office.
In a perfect world we’d have a way to accurately evaluate everyone’s remote work and painlessly dismiss those who can’t handle it. In the real world, it’s not so easy at scale.
I personally work remote and on remote teams, but the successful ones were all hired and built as remote from the start. Whenever I’ve been on a team that started in-office and then tried to switch to remote, a significant fraction of the company ends up failing to adapt, avoiding work, failing to respond in a timely manner (e.g. replying 1-2 days later to simple requests), or otherwise just abused the situation. This quickly ruins remote work for everyone.
What about the people who hide their poor performance by being in the office? You can easily do 'water cooler conversation' for 6 hours a day if you can't be bothered to work, which doesn't fly when you work from home. An hours worth of coffee before starting the workday was the norm at my last job.
In office yes, remotely not. Simply they are having a lot of problems, they can describe why this is a problem, they may miss Daily so there may not be an occasion to ask.
It is also much easier to be busy working from home. Much easier to say that someone spend last 2 hours answering on questions on Slack or similar, or on e-mails, or was waiting for answer from somebody else (very often they will ask question before lunch break).
In office team is doing self monitoring, remote it doesn't work so well.
Especially in case where most of companies pretend to work from office working from home.
I say we put ‘em all on a rocket ship and send em to another planet. Middle management are the ones who want to go back (mostly). Let ‘em go. Won’t be long before they are using tree leaves as currency.
If something goes from higher ups it is constrain, team can try to squeeze into constrains, some people will be unhappy but this is something over theirs heads so they will be able to live with it (especially people who joined company before COVID). If this will be left to teams in many cases there will be peer pressure, some kind of blackmail and similar, latter this will result in a lot of passive aggressive comments and behaviors.
You really don't want to do self select within a corporation, it creates a lot of friction; especially the self selected groups are basically in opposition to each other.
>"By arbitrarily forcing return-to-office without providing data to support it and despite clear evidence that it is the wrong decision for employees, Amazon has failed its role as earth's best employer," one employee wrote, according to the report.
Both this and open floor plans were never about data. This is about control.
Nearly all employers, especially all of the oldest and largest will steadily pull their workforce back into offices where the bosses can satisfy their egos with the notion that seeing their people work makes them in charge. They don't just want to get things done. They want to see the buzzing activity of the office and feel like they are in control of it.
And this will happen in spite of any protests from the employees. By now most companies, especially tech companies, are well practiced at forcing undesired changes on large groups of people. They even have most of their customers actually paying to be spied on. Something no one would have accepted even 15 or so years ago.
So long as the company is arranged as a hierarchical power structure, this will be the way. That's the whole point of talk about things like "culture" as well.
The reader may take note that, between companies in a supply chain, there is no talk about or desire to control culture even though those companies clearly depend on each other to do their business at least as much as they depend on their respective employees.
Only within the company does anyone seek to control and define "culture". That is because setting company culture is means of controlling employee behavior. And it only applies to those who signed employee contracts. Consultants, general contractors, support staff, and vendors are almost always treated more as real and self-determinant humans than the employees the company leaders seek to control.
In short, your boss doesn't see you as a peer or as a fully capable rational agent. They see you as a ward under their care. This is a side effect of the power imbalance created by the structure of the company.
Isn't it strange that almost everyone on earth desires to live under a democracy more than a dictatorship but when it comes to the interactions that will dominate most of their days for most of their lives, somehow people are okay signing up to work under a dictatorship?
...And anyone still under the illusion that Amazon is or was ever earth's best employer might want to try talking to the delivery drivers and warehouse workers.
> "I look forward to the prospect of seeing more of my [unwilling] coworkers in the office," one [nagging, sociopath] person reportedly wrote in the channel.
Because that gives the game away of what the in-office people actually want.
Remote people want to work remotely. Full stop. If the only thing in-office people wanted was to work in an office it would be no issue — they have an office. But that’s not it, they want to be in an office and conduct meetings entirely in-person.
Wfh people are expressing a preference for where they work based on what makes sense for their life situation. In-office people are expressing a preference for how and where everyone works.
If I came into the office, put on headphones, only talked work things on Slack and called into all my meetings that were down the hall I suspect it wouldn’t count.
... People that want to meet in the office don't give a damn about the office space. If they could all bring a lunchbox and a laptop, they would prob. be just as happy to work from a park, or your home instead.
It's not about the space, it's about the physical proximity, and the sharing of events, ideas and knowledge with colleagues.
We’ve started using gathertown where I work and it gives you a bit of the best of both worlds (minus the nice in person social lunch type of thing). We’re fully distributed/remote.
With gathertown or something like it I think you can get close to in office collaborative productivity, but without it I don’t think you do on net.
In person people more naturally collaborate and discuss problems, cycle times are faster (IME). Remote could be great if people were good at pushing async comms and were easily available during working hours, but that’s rarely the case imo. People seem more reticent to jump into a call when remote than to talk in person (among peers).
I predict remote companies to be less competitive on net. It’s possible the hiring advantages could overcome that, but I’m skeptical.
There’s an interesting circularity to real estate values in downtown Seattle since Amazon owns so many offices there. GREF wields an outsize power inside Amazon so methinks they’re advocating for hard RTO it to stop cratering the value of all their assets.
Employees should fight for something that is of value to them, not their employers. Maybe there's a fear of losing their job when they aren't seen in the office? Or maybe the fear is if that they are the only ones in the office, they are more noticeable, so there's safety in numbers. If more of the herd is there, then it will be less obvious the ones who stand out. I for one am glad I work for myself.
This is an extremely important issue to consider when it comes to remote work. It's imperative to find a balance between giving developers the flexibility they need and setting expectations for productivity.
Unfortunately most managers are ill equipped to navigate different working styles
As much hand-wringing is being done here, this ship has sailed. Remote work is a magnitude better than butt-in-seat-teams-calls-remotely any day.
And by having people spread out is also like load balancing your workforce in case of geographic badness.
But in my experiences, the ones who suffer the worst are the extroverts who crave human attention at a workplace. And these also tend to be upper management.
But being able to close those stupidly expensive skyscraper rentals is also amazing. Might actually free that space up for living, and better rates!
