> Microsoft announced a report indicating that workers were indeed productive at home (and sometimes more so), just that managers were failing to have confidence in workers.
Maybe it's down to management style.
It's long known that (at least in somewhat creative and self-directed jobs) workers who are motivated and happy with their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Managers then have to work hard, to keep motivation up and people happy. Let's call this the "supportive" management style.
It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with, and do only as much as they are forced/required to do. Managers than have to work hard to control and monitor everyone, to keep the slack to a minimum. Let's call this the "adversarial" management style.
In one of those styles, WFH employees can be more productive, more happy, and more efficient. In the other, WFH employees can't be monitored closely enough to keep them from slacking.
Some managers prefer one style over the other, and not many are able to switch styles.
It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company.
Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
Cynical but true in my experience coaching multiple F250s. More competitive companies will move to a model based on managing the flow of value, while legacy companies will be stuck with a model based on managing people. The two models are very different, with the first one often eliminating whole layers of management through automation. Companies think they can save management jobs by going to a matrixed model and flattening the org, but that's just an accommodation to save managers most of the time.
In Dell's case, I can only speculate, but they need to justify office space, and managers need to manage people, and most of leadership get promoted from middle management (or sales).
Worthless levity injection attack: my client supplied Dell windows machine still hiccups on cold boots sometimes (this ticket has been open for decades), while all my personal linux machines just keep chugging away. Find a company that is automating away management layers and uses linux.
Simpler and more executable than that, actually.
1) Basic premise of waste: People need to be told what to do, people wait to be told what to do.
2) Eliminate the waiting by standing up a value stream where everyone is part of the value stream team. Sections of the stream can be activated in a parallel fashion through autonomy of action.
3) Managers quit telling people what to do, and instead become value stream engineers - focusing on efficient flow of value like it's the company's inventory, from creation to delivery to the customer.
4) This move has different demands on remote work, but since it promotes autonomy of action, the more ham-fisted demands of legacy management are deprecated.
I think you just described something I haven't been able to figure out for over a year. I loved being a manager and then director at the previous small-ish software company I was at, and then I hated it after being acquired and integrated into the acquirer's culture. I stopped being able to be a "value stream engineer" as you put it.
Anywhere I can read more about this? Blog post or book recommendation? I understand that you want to keep it simple and all but I feel I need more practical details.
Look at the term Theory of Constraints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints. There is a "business fiction" book called "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt that is pretty approachable. He actually wrote a number of books at different levels of detail. Initially the concepts were addressed for manufacturing ops, but there are some fundamental similarities for scaling software teams, focusing where you produce value, and where you can create waste and misfocus if you try to keep everything/everyone busy at 100%.
Agree on Goldratt, and the book his daughter wrote and recently released, called 1) "Goldratt's Rules of Flow." Theory of constraints is a rich subject with heavy roots in industrial engineering. Look for Don Reinhardt's 2) "Principles of Product Development Flow" as the gold standard. Also most all of Edwards Deming work touch on systems thinking from the industrial engineer perspective. See 3) https://deming.org/. Additionally, see books like 4) "Systems Thinking and Other Dangerous Habits," and 5) "Team Topologies" as examples of why legacy management are probably doomed if they don't learn how to scale teams via a coherent system. Finally, Senger's 6) "The Fifth Discipline" is total classic on why we need to shift our legacy management mental model to an organizational system that is continuously improving via systems.
It's like data structure driven programming then. Language doesn't really matter as much as the storage, in work layout and transformation of data. Focus on the data management as the framework / skeletal structure and everything surrounding it becomes more clear.
I've worked with some kanban teams who were absolute animals. Kanban is great if your board workflow doesn't get too complicated, and the team is constrained from doing scrum. Ex. locomotive software has to be fully deployed on a train before it can be checked off. That's a tough ask with scrum, but kanban can work well in this case. Whatever the case, it's back to managing flow, not people.
i have zoom 1:1 meetings all day with managers. going remote doesn't obviate the need for team planning and management. bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this. if a behemoth like dell, amazon, etc can go fully remote and still be profitable, then what does that say for any smaller company? and then what does that do to all of the CRE holdings of said behemoths?
tough situation and it may not resolve in our favor
> bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this
as a former business owner (good exit, so no bitterness here) all i can say is good riddance, and i hope they take a massive haircut as an industry.
they're the biggest pricks i've ever dealt with in running my business. 'arrogant' doesn't even begin to describe the attitude they had in the 2015-2020 time period. and they are literally no fun at parties. even the front desk receptionists were arrogant, WHILE I WAS LITERALLY HANDING THEM CHECKS. mind blowing.
example in another industry - think of all the restaurants you've ever loved that have had to close their doors because of asshole corporate landlords, for no other reason than to avoid setting a precedent for lower rents even when it wasn't financially necessary.
> for no other reason than to avoid setting a precedent for lower rents even when it wasn't financially necessary.
I agree with your virtiol, but this isn't quite correct.
You can tack "missing" rent onto the end of your financial agreement without penalty. "Lower" rent causes a reevaluation of the financial agreement basis which will almost always require a cash outlay. This is what is causing commercial real estate to be empty for 5+ years rather than lower the damn rent.
Municipalities need to implement an (in?)occupancy tax to stomp this crap out. If real estate isn't generating rent for 12+ months, tax needs to start going up on the space.
SF has a Commercial Vacancy Tax, for properties unoccupied for 182+ days a year.
My guess is that it is not well-defined and therefore generates minimal revenue. I also can't tell if this applies to office buildings or is more for street level commercial real estate.
At the end of the day I think office space is a dead weight around most companies. Any drive to return to the office on the basis of propping up real estates is ultimately going to be undermined by newer players with no skin in that game, for whom not having to pay massive real estate costs is going to be a real competitive advantage.
While we seem to be on a backswing a bit from it, eventually supporting WFH will be a matter of competitive survival. Office mandates will be the next hallmark of legacy firms who have become inefficient and wasteful in their spending.
> Any drive to return to the office on the basis of propping up real estates is ultimately going to be undermined by newer players with no skin in that game, for whom not having to pay massive real estate costs is going to be a real competitive advantage.
The question is whether that competitive advantage will outweigh the incumbency advantage of the massive current players in various industries.
Sure, the small fry ABC IT Consultings of the world might get their lunch eaten by sharp new outfits that don't have to foot the cost of a floor full of downtown offices, but a behemoth like Dell, particularly one that has already been paying those costs as long as they've existed and has them built right into their structures, isn't going to be nearly so easy to dislodge.
This is one of the huge downsides of allowing so much consolidation across the board for decades. The incumbent players become much more resistant to disruption through changes like this—it will take a huge percentage of us, the tech workers, firmly saying "no, we will not accept on-site-only jobs anymore," to make a real difference.
Tech just happens to be a place where almost every job can, with appropriate management and support, be done fully remotely with no meaningful loss of productivity.
This is why I don't buy the commercial real estate argument. If you own the building, you're paying the upkeep and taxes with either RTO or WFH. A decline in commercial real estate just means you have to mark down an asset on your books. Unless you were planning on selling in the next 10 years, the only difference it makes is a bad quarter of earnings, but that should already be priced in, and markets are forgiving of one-time write downs like that.
This only applies to companies with large real estate portfolios that play real estate as a side hustle. If you mostly rent, just don't renew your lease. If you're an office space REIT, it's gonna be brutal.
Next hallmark? I would argue that a need to mandate it is a sign we are there already. I mean there is no reason to mandate in a Shannon Information Theoretic sense to mandate a general practitioner's office (even though it is arguably an office in a different sense) because the necessity is already implicit and obvious. Going into the office when you need to take biological samples and lack proper droneage or telemedicine is a clear necessity for the job.
> bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this
I've seen several people point to this narrative on HN and it just doesn't make any sense. There's three possibilities as I see it:
1) There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason. So these overlords go to their puppets running major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Dell and tell them they must make their workers return to the office in the name of propping up commercial real estate. Apparently some people on HN think this is likely?
2) The managers at Dell/Amazon/etc. feel the need to prop up commercial real estate as an act of charity. Rather than focusing on their own businesses, they are worried about their friends in commercial real estate. This seems even less likely than 1.
3) Managers at major companies believe that there are benefits to working together in person.
Why are people so reluctant to accept option 3? You don't even need to accept the premise that working from the office is better. You just need to accept that premise that management believes it's better to be a proponent of this option.
"There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason."
The reason is easy to figure out: "Holding a lot of Commercial Real Estate assets". There's literally trillions of dollars at stake here. I would personally propose that the alternative that the people holding this trillions of dollars of assets are just sitting back and watching their entire market collapse placidly, with it never occurring to them to call in favors, use political power, buy lobbyists, buy PR, and literally everything else possible to save that money, is the crazy idea.
It requires me to believe that the 0.001% are just so amazingly honest and fair-minded that they will calmly accept the judgment of the market that their assets are no longer required. This is not a position I see a lot of evidence for.
The only thing that surprises me is that we haven't seen a lot of call for some sort of regulation that accidentally whoopsydoopsy can only be conformed to by workers in offices whoknew what a surprise and shocking unexpected consequence. Keep an ear out for it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this tried in the next year or two. Their situation is pretty dire.
4) Some companies have a significant amount of capital tied up in CRE. Preventing its value from going to from $X to $0 is valuable to the tune of $X. There is no apparent cost to the C-suite in enforcing RTO. So for no cost, you can save $X. It's simple, non-complex, and tied to obvious incentives.
Dell probably owns SOME real estate but their business is making computers and shit, not renting and selling property. They have no incentive to increase the value of any property they hold. Like most large businesses, they likely rent the vast majority of their offices so falling rent would actually benefit them.
I'm as much of a WFH proponent as the next guy but blaming CRE on the latest return-to-office movement is some crazy conspiracy theory stuff.
However, who are Dell's the main shareholders? Do they have any vested interest in commercial real estate? Are they associated in other ventures with people who have a vested interest in commercial real estate?
Allegedly, Amazon forced RTO because there were tax incentives that required butts-in-seats. I don’t think they are a cabal of puppet masters, but that does go some ways towards point #1.
> bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this
I suspect that alongside the obvious reasons (inflexible management styles, micromanagement, etc.) always discussed, this is a major driver: ongoing spend on office buildings needs to be justified, and is probably very difficult to get out of - e.g. long-term building projects, or ownership of buildings which would be difficult (or a big loss) to resell, or long-term leases signed when obviously the offices would be needed for decades, or senior leaders feeling personally invested in particular building projects, etc.
I'm not sold on this one, although I see it pretty regularly. Its got the whiff of conspiracy theory to me in that it provides a simple answer to a complex question by having two faceless entities colluding with each other for unknown reasons. Dell has no incentive to support the real estate industry, and while I'm sure facilities departments are feeling pretty unsettled by the move to offices being unneeded I know of very few companies who don't consider facilities to be a liability they'd like to reduce the need for.
About the only bit of this I buy to some extent is very senior managers who've been closely involved in building out new office space only to find it's empty.
> Its got the whiff of conspiracy theory to me in that it provides a simple answer to a complex question by having two faceless entities colluding with each other for unknown reasons.
There's no need for a "conspiracy theory" to explain it. The better way to look at it is:
Some VP at Dell leased X million sqft of office space on a long term lease that does not expire until the year 2030 (thereby getting a good deal and locking in a lower rent until that time) sometime before the pandemic flipped things to "WFH".
Now, post pandemic, with most employees in WFH status, Dell, the company, is paying $Y million/month for X million sqft of office space, which is going unused -- and they can't get out of their 2030 leases early without taking an even bigger loss. So from Dell executive's viewpoint's, this is office rent going to waste, so if it is going to be paid for anyway, we might as well force employees back to the office so we don't have to report the rental costs as pure losses on our quarterly reports to the SEC.
Yup, I think what's happened is we have a lot of upper level people are going to have bad numbers from WFH becoming the norm and thus they are fighting it. No need for a conspiracy, they're just a bunch of people responding to the same forces.
I think it's not a drive to support CRE per se. There are some state-level subsidies that companies get if they bring a certain amount of jobs into an area. Employment and showing up at the office can be a part of the deal there; if your employees don't show up at the office, your company would have to pay back the subsidies.
Think of it this way- a company has a CRE portfolio originally worth a hundred million dollars on their balance sheet.
If they sell it and take a massive loss, they'll take a big hit on the balance sheet. So, they want to hang on to it until times are better. But, people will criticize the company for hanging onto unused real estate if nobody shows up. So now the company wants to show people in the office.
I'm not sure that this is true, but it's the only realistic way I can see CRE holdings driving returns to the office
I don't understand this thinking. JPM is in long-term arrangements with CRE landlords whether employees come into the office or not. If employees come in to the office, JPM actually pays MORE, because the buildings will need the lights on and the HVAC running to keep those employees comfortable. Worst case scenario is that JPM pays exactly the same amount for CRE in both the RTO and WFH scenarios. So how does CRE drive them to bring back in employees if, as WFH advocates say, people are as productive or more at home than at the office.
I suspect that JPM is telling the truth about their internal productivity numbers being better in the RTO scenario, but I also suspect that these numbers are based on "doing things the way they were always done" and don't take into account scenarios with a JPM that is structured differently for WFH scenarios (e.g. reducing middle management and its proclivity for in-person meetings).
JPM is not simply a company that leases CRE space.
That describes a lot of hedge funds, which is why they haven't cared about RTO to the extend the big banks have.
JPM is a huge lender in the space.
If CRE falls, JPM has a tougher time than the average big bank.
They are also building a huge tower on Park Ave that was started pre-COVID and still not done.
> It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company.
I don't know about that. In my admittedly limited experience as an EM of 4 ICs, I'm drowning in work, mostly because they all do great work and are now double and sometimes triple booked on projects because we haven't been allowed to hire anyone. It's more than a full time job to keep a small team supported and I don't remotely feel like I'm obsolete because the company could chose to WFH.
I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. This is great for me, because simply being a conduit of information between other people isn't the most efficient use of my time, so I don't really feel threatened by that. All of them have told me they've actually appreciated the hybrid schedule and the time in office for some of the week, and some of them told me that when I was a peer IC (before being their manager).
Our work is definitely more experimental/R&D/unproven though. Frequent communication, collaboration, and brainstorming is critical for success. If you're doing the kind of work where you can sit down today and create a year's worth of feature tickets then maybe it skews in favor of the office being more of a distraction.
> Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.
I don't get the impression anyone at the executive level of a BigCo is collecting feedback from low level managers about whether they should RTO or not. And even in the Bay Area, 2 hours a day of commuting is on the extreme end. Everyone on my team has a total of a 1 hour commute or less, and in my case that includes a day care drop off and pick up. Personally speaking, my commute wouldn't change even if we were 100% WFH because my home and the office are equidistant from day care.
We do have a peer IC who has a long commute though and it's not great for him. I do wish there was more flexibility on a case-by-case basis to tweak the number of days he's in the office.
> I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other.
Most communication norms aren't tied to the physical location, it's just easier to communicate communication norms when conversations are visible to the people not involved.
I was on two projects during covid WFH. The digital collaboration styles were night and day. One's mattermost team still has less than 50 messages total across all channels. The other team's mattermost was and remains a major collaboration point now that we're back on site. One team always had cameras on during calls, the other didn't. And wasn't just chat, just calls or just emails. The communication was different on every medium.
There was a lot of the same people on both projects, too. We all adapted to different collaboration styles depending on the project. The only difference was that project management made a few gentile pushes to enable fluid communication at the beginning of one project, and the other team didin't.
And I've noticed something similar with younger people. They're much more interactive in discord chat/calls than the slack/mattermost/zoom/chime equivalents. Not that this is necessarily unique to young people, just that older people tend not to lurk discord as much. What might be unique to that age group is they've been taught corporate tools mean bifurcated groups (e.g. teacher/pupil) where they're not equal participants.
I feel this, as I get to make decisions on my own at home. In the office I need to discuss and explain all the options, only to have my manager make the same decision I would come to.
Decision-making processes shouldn't really be affected - if someone's manager has a psychological need to rubber-stamp their decisions, then that is just as necessary with them working from home as in the office, and failure to do so will ultimately lead to conflict and probably looking for a new job in the end.
I don't think it's just about management style. It's also about the preferences of the employees.
Some people are really motivated by the social life and comraderie at the workplace. I work in a coworking space that's full of self employed people and startups who could work from anywhere, but choose to go to a bustling office to work.
But this only works if everyone goes to the office.
My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
So you can't make it right for everyone. You have to pick: Either the company is remote first, or the company is office first. A compromise sucks for everyone.
> But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
And those who prefer to work from home dislike working in a noisy place filled with people like her. Why does her choice gets to win?
How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so? It doesn't even have to be a 100% strict thing - the firm can say that every employee must come to office once a week so that face-timers can get their appetite taken care of (even though video calls already cater to that) without overwhelming the wfh-ers.
Nobody is denying that there are genuine circumstances when hashing things out face to face can be more efficient and quicker. It just doesn't have to be the default mode.
> How about let those who like face to face interactions go to office and discuss away while those who prefer to wfh from home are allowed to do so?
If you have never worked in that way, let me tell you it's the absolute worst situation.
I'd rather go back to the office instead of having it work like that.
People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
If a company has remote workers, the company ought to be remote first otherwise it's horrible for everybody and resentment is the only thing you reap from it.
This happens worse for me in the remote world. In the office I can see when Alice and Bob are talking about something important to my work and roll my chair over. I can't tell when my remote coworkers are meeting about things I should be included in but was forgotten, and they do this All The Time.
Agreed. I've worked remotely and in-person. Both are nice once you develop the right processes.
But having half the team in one office and the other half remote seemed to be the worst of both. When I was remote I felt relief when everyone else in the discussion turned out to be remote as well, and when I was in-person it was similarly nice when we realized that everyone in the meeting was physically present.
So it's not surprising to me that companies would gravitate one way or the other.
Better hybrid processes have probably been normalized to some degree during the pandemic. But it's still probably true that if you're one of a couple people on an otherwise co-located team that are remote, that's probably not a great situation to be in long-term. You'll almost inevitably miss out on a lot and the co-located team members will always be making accommodations for you.
> People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
Er, they've been doing that even pre-pandemic, and even when I'm in the same room.
>People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.
That happened a lot even during the in-office days as well. People with more seniority and influence would whiteboard new ideas and then bring you up to speed on the next daily standup on what they decided.
If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day. If you have some stellar feedback, you can bring it up then and I'm sure they'll consider it.
And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
> Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
Why aren't your developers empowered to say "I don't need to be there" to a meeting?
Why aren't your developers in the loop enough on things they're not participating in such that can still notice if an appropriate SME is being excluded?
Every job where I've grown responsibility, I find that not only did those interactions become possible, they've became expected of me.
Y'know, you were making some good points, but then you went and tarred all "developers" with one black brush.
That's incredibly condescending and reductionist, and it says a lot more about you than it does about "developers", either any individuals or in the aggregate.
Maybe try thinking of people as individuals, rather than lumping all "developers" together as one unreasonable bundle of pointless complainers...?
I'm sorry; you don't get to say "developers are like this," and then backtrack and say "I didn't use the word "all", so obviously I'm only talking about the bad ones!" That's just one step above "Hey man, why are you so upset about being called bigoted slurs? I'm only joking!"
I also think you might need to look up what a Mary Sue actually is[0]. Hint: It's not "someone who reacts poorly to criticism," nor even "someone who wants unrealistic things for themselves." (It also has an extremely loaded and sexist history.)
The word you might be looking for is prima donna rather than Mary Sue. I'd certainly agree that there are quite a few of those in the software industry.
> If you were indeed that vital to the engineering effort they would definitely rope you in for the whiteboard session. It's not the end of the world if you find out the decisions the next day. If you have some stellar feedback, you can bring it up then and I'm sure they'll consider it.
Not who you are replying to but sure - I am actually in such a position where I get the summary of what I need to do second-hand; it is great - mainly because the person I get it from is another senior developer so he knows the pitfalls; that also means he is able to lay the roadmap of what I need to do which makes things so much more easier.
Another time, it was a manager who was originally a developer and was quite hands-on - same experience.
> And honestly, roping in everyone to attend every single impromptu meeting just so you're up to speed on everything would be a huge time sink in terms of interruptions and I assure you you would complain about that too.
100% agree.
> Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
> Developers should cut out the Mary Sue, and come down to earth for a bit, we're just cogs in a machine doing work for a paycheck, that's it, and even without you, your company and projects will still go on. You're most likely not the be-all end-all of your company as you imagine.
When you have decision makers that neither have the technical chops nor consult those that have them, things usually get complicated. Because then they miss the technical perspective, don't know what is feasible and what is not, commit things that are technically not prudent, forget to take into account the potential pitfalls etc etc - all of those things have a significant impact on the hands-on person down the line i.e. the developer. All decision makers are obviously not like that - those with the awareness and humility about not having the technical insights, include developers in the meetings to cover such aspects and that solves many issues upfront for both the project and the developers.
Speaking for myself, I don't love being in those meetings but sure appreciate that being present provides the opportunity of handling things at design stage so that they don't come back and bite me closer to delivery. Are there power-hungry limelight-seeking developers who do it for visibility/building image? Sure, but I haven't seen as many of them as I have seen managers with such tendencies. And if we say that there is nothing wrong with vying for visibility and image building etc and all those things are just signs of healthy competition/ambition - well, then that applies as much to developers as it does to managers.
Your last paragraphs are describing a bad management problem which is orthogonal to roping in devs in all the meetings where decisions get made. Bad decisions can be made with or without you anyway.
My last paragraphs were trying to respond to the following bit:
> > Seems like you can never please developers: If you don't invite them to attend all the meetings, then they're offended because they feel left out from important decisions. If you invite them to all the meetings then they're angry because you're interrupting their productivity with useless meetings. You can never win.
I personally only consider full remote position because even policies like "one day in the office every two weeks" would force me to live quite close to the city in which the office is and I absolutely want to avoid that if I can (and the market says I can)
To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life
It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.”
Some people prefer working at companies that are 100% in person. Some prefer 100% remote. Some are OK with some type of hybrid arrangement.
If a person is working at a company with policies they don’t like, either they work to get the policies changed, they find a job with policies they do like, or they live with the policies they dislike and keep the current job.
Just like people who prefer in-person work aren’t going to get their way at all companies, people who prefer remote work aren’t going to get their way at all companies.
> It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.”
If only it was that simple. There's pressure everywhere. Even governments try to push people back to the office with some mantra about e.g. saving the city.
If only it was just a choice.
At the end of the day most management never come into the office all the time. They do what they like. They have 0 implications so if they have dinner with a government official and was told it's best to ask the staff back then they do it. That's all.
I think that "hybrid" is the worst of both worlds. If you attend the office you spend most of your time on video calls to people working from home. Need to run a workshop? You still have to plan it in a hybrid way using Miro and video conferencing for the couple of people who will make an excuse not to come into the office.
And at bigger companies, you're almost certainly dealing with people in multiple locations and even timezones anyway. For many of us, we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from.
> we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from.
This has been every place I've worked for the last decade, honestly. Even before WFH was a thing, all meetings took place over videoconferencing and most discussions took place over email and chat even with the people in the cube next to yours.
Working from home didn't seem like a major shift to me because no work or communications flows changed with it.
I suspect a lot of people very invested in the remote/non-remote question are either at a smaller company where everyone is on a floor or two of a building or are on very self-contained co-located teams at a larger company. As you say, my situation for the last decade has been working with people who are in three different office locations + remote, my being on the road a large percentage of the time, others being on the road a lot, etc. I drove into the office sometimes (it's not that bad a commute). But really I could go in and not see anyone I knew on a given day especially as the company grew. I basically stopped going in at all maybe 6 years or so ago.
I am sure there are individual situations where it works great, but I am currently hybrid ( 4 remote ;1 in office ) and it is genuinely killing me in terms of messed up body rhythm. Wednesday ( my day in ) throws my entire week into disarray as I try to fight it with extra doses of caffeine. And given that I am now finishing a messy project that necessitated some allnighters, I am now constantly behind on sleep debt. I am frankly fed up to the point that I am looking for a new fully remote position so that I can show it to my manager ( who is not really on board for remote work, but begrudgingly accepts some exceptions ).
It is only now that I am restarting my normal body cycle again. I should not have to put up with that bs.
We (I squarely place myself in this group) kind of are pushing office workers to adjust how they do things though. If you've got a few remote attendees in a meeting then you're running a remote meeting, for it to be effective for everyone you can't do things like scribbling on whiteboards, and you have to run it from a space where video calling actually works.
Post-pandemic I worked with a few project managers who hated this, and would constantly complain about people not coming into the office for meetings because now they had to actually plan things, rather than just finding a random corner and talking things over. I even kind of get it, semi-remote meetings are the worst of both worlds, with the people in a meeting room wanting to draw on a whiteboard, and the people who are remote often struggling with audio from whatever crap microphones are in the room.
I suspect, after another few years of having this same discussion every few weeks, things will eventually settle down with some companies choosing to be co-located companies, and others choosing to be fully remote. Similarly to how you might select which company you work for based on what they do, or the personality of the people you interviewed with, people will also take into consideration how they want to work. I very much doubt there'll be many companies which routinely have both remote and co-located employees.
It’s a thing pre-pandemic for larger teams anyway. You often have someone in a different timezone / office maybe in another department and remote or not, it’s a video call.
If the problem as you say is that managers are too lazy to plan then they should do their job instead of making it worse for everyone.
Unplanned meetings are the worst because you get forced into decisions no 1 has thought over. The managers assume we’re good because they don’t understand the implications.
I think its unfair to characterise these managers as too lazy to plan, more that previously they could often resolve things by quickly grabbing a few people and talking things over, and now that involves a game of calendar Tetris to get the necessary people on a call at the same time. At least in the case I'm thinking of this was more a corporate failure to adjust to remote work, instead of introducing a culture of asynchronous communication what used to happen in the office just got transplanted into MS Teams, resulting in everyone being almost permanently on video calls.
Previously I could dig the ground and find gold too. And previously people would come out with a leaf around their private parts. If the manager can come into the offices with just leaves I'd be happy to accept that it's not their issue.
Startup founders originally don't have to manage. Do they get the blame when things go wrong when the company gets bigger? Hint: yes. i.e. we're all forced to adapt. It's not only the managers.
> At least in the case I'm thinking of this was more a corporate failure to adjust to remote work
That's correct - the corporate includes the managers though - as many chains up as needed.
Most of the teams I have worked on for the last decade have been spread across multiple offices which lead to going into a small office for a dozen people to be on different teleconferences in large open areas disrupting everyone. We started working from home naturally pre-pandemic at one of these jobs because it didn't make sense to come in and struggle to hear and communicate for no good reason.
> We (I squarely place myself in this group) kind of are pushing office workers to adjust how they do things though.
Well, sure. We're asking that our reasonable desire to work remotely be accommodated.
Some are perfectly willing to be flexible.
Others are absolutely livid that you would dare to ask them to change how they do things to accommodate anyone else in any way.
I honestly have very little sympathy for that type of person. The "everything was just fine before, just shut up and go back to how it always was" attitude completely ignores the fact that for many, many people, things were not fine before, and WFH has been a godsend for so many.
It's really not a simple live and let live situation especially if some people on a team aren't local at all so they can't drop in one day per week or whatever for meetings. I'm in a very distributed group at a large company so I have no skin in this game. But if you have a largely co-located team with a few remote members, those who are co-located probably really do need to change their work practices to accommodate those who are remote--and those who are remote may have to accept that they'll probably end up not fully participating in their team's activities and decision-making and will have to decide if that works for them.
True, but how often is whiteboard work a shared activity? At least in my experience, that's vanishingly rare. It's almost always just a visual aid for one person communicating with a bunch of others.
I have never seen a remote worker trying to push an office worker to work from home because it's more efficient. I have seen plenty of office workers trying to push remote workers into the office because of synergies and "water cooler chat". It's not the same thing.
Remote workers do not push coworkers to work from home but they do push them to spend their workday in video conferencing software.
You many not feel like this is a substantial imposition, but many people feel that it is easier to have discussions in a physical room with things like physical whiteboards and eye contact. Using digital analogues can be nearly as effective, but it requires everyone adopt new processes.
I worked with teams pre-pandemic which had rules to the effect of if anyone was on a video call, everyone should be on an individual video call, which I'd argue is really the only way to have the remote people be 100% participants. So, yeah, if 75% of people on a team are in an office they're forced to work as if they were remote to a significant degree whether they like it or not.
Yeah. I vividly remember how it felt to drive all the way to the office one day only to spend my day in video calls. It was essentially like working from home with a longer drive and worse lighting.
I never mentioned efficiency or any other justification for remote/hybrid work. We’re talking personal preference here.
If someone’s preference is to work in a company where 100% of the employees are in office, then someone at that same company who pushes for remote work or hybrid work is pushing their preference on someone else.
But that is 100% fine. Just as it’s fine for someone to advocate against remote or hybrid work. Neither are right or wrong.
I think there is a big difference advocating for what's best for you and letting everyone else do their thing, and trying to control other people to please you better.
Yes, it’s true that those are different things. But the remote vs. in-office argument isn’t as simple as “do your own thing.” Sure, it can be made that simple, but it doesn’t represent the situation well.
Some subset of people who want to work in an office want to do so only with people who only work in an office as well. For these people, “everyone do your own thing” is not a satisfying solution. And it doesn’t have to be! Work doesn’t have to satisfy everyone.
If you work with people like this and say, “just do your own thing, it works for me” then you are trying to control other people because it pleases you better.
And again, there is nothing wrong with this. You are looking out for yourself, which is fine. It’s then up to your employer to make a decision on policy and then the employees decide if that’s a policy they want to work under.
No, I am not controlling anyone in that case. I am treating other people as professionals and letting them structure their work the way they think is best. Maybe it would be even better for me if they all worked from home, but I am not telling them to. I am questioning why the office workers try to make other people return to office with bad faith arguments (water cooler talk and synergies), when remote workers seem just happy to be working from home, without pressuring office workers to come and join them.
> I am treating other people as professionals and letting them structure their work the way they think is best
Again, you're ignoring that the office workers preference isn't simply to work in an office. It's often to work in an office (only or primarily) with other people also in that office.
> I am questioning why the office workers try to make other people return to office with bad faith arguments (water cooler talk and synergies), when remote workers seem just happy to be working from home, without pressuring office workers to come and join them.
You're making the bad-faith argument that a person in the office and a person working at home is a win-win situation. The remote workers may be just as happy, but those in the office are not just as happy.
I get it. People like remote work. People want to protect their right to work remotely. But at least acknowledge that some people are negatively affected by the push for remote work.
The situation doesn't need to be a win-win! Somebody can lose out on what they think is best for them. That's 100% fine. It's up to the company to make a decision and then up to the employees to decide how they'll react to that decision.
They have plenty of other office workers to talk to. For some reason, that is not enough, and the office workers need a better argument than "real product development happens at the water cooler". For the employer to make an informed decision it's better if the arguments are honest.
It can be a large win-small loss situation too. Remote workers gain two hours of commute back and forty hours of focused work. Office workers lose the open floor plan vibe (it's called back to office but tech workers don't have offices) and ability to push around their colleagues, or whichever the actual reason is. I don't understand it fully. It doesn't seem morally justifiable to me, and they encroach more on the professional autonomy on the remote worker than the remote worker does to them. The office workers wouldn't like it if they were being coerced to work from home for some BS reason.
> For some reason, that is not enough, and the office workers need a better argument than "real product development happens at the water cooler".
Here's the thing: they don't need a better argument. They don't need an argument at all. It's their preference.
> I don't understand it fully. It doesn't seem morally justifiable to me, and they encroach more on the professional autonomy on the remote worker than the remote worker does to them.
Here's the thing: it doesn't need to be morally justifiable to you or anyone else. It's a preference for working in-office with other people in-office.
I think you do understand this it's just that you don't like it because you have your own preference.
You don't need an argument for a preference. If you try to coerce other people according to your preference, you need an argument, as you would in any other context. For some reason, the RTO arguments are very bad. Is there some part the proponents can't say out loud?
No. It's possible my stock options would be worth more if the office workers adopted the more efficient form of work from home. Maybe the hybrid meetings would be more enjoyable fully remote. I still wouldn't think about trying to coerce them into that with talk about synergy or the online version of water coolers. That's a bad thing to do. Let them enjoy the office, and others remote.
> If you try to coerce other people according to your preference, you need an argument, as you would in any other context.
You may think you're more likely to get your way if you have a compelling argument but history has proven that's not always true.
The argument is, "I would like this better."
> For reason, the RTO arguments are very bad. Is there some part the proponents can't say out loud?
No, I believe the part being said out loud is, "We prefer to work at a company where all employees are in office." That's all you need to say. The only people I've ever heard talk about water coolers are the dismissive WFH people.
They exist: a managing director and an executive director at my last place of employment used the words "water cooler" on all-hands meetings among their justifications for RTO. "Coffee machine" was another variation. Swiss financial institution. I no longer work there, because I don't need to waste 2 hours/day on trains and buses just to spend my entire day on video calls with other international management. I'd rather raise chickens.
It has nothing to do with getting your way but working efficiently and with respect for the autonomy of your colleagues.
That's a bad argument. Sounds like we should not work from the office then. What comes after the "I like making others work in the office, because"? That's the quiet part not being said out loud. I'm interested.
That's not what I'm hearing or what you would read in an announcement for one the partial RTOs that have happened at some tech companies.
> If you work with people like this and say, “just do your own thing, it works for me” then you are trying to control other people because it pleases you better.
No you explicitly aren't. Not bending to someone else's preference is not "controlling" them.
This is correct only if you also believe that a company mandating RTO is not controlling their employees because they are not bending to someone else's preferences.
Not really. Giving employees the choice to work from home or not is the opposite of controlling them. Just like giving employees the option to work only forty hours a week is not controlling them but giving them liberty. It's such a good thing it's law in many countries.
No, because the company is requiring the employee to do something. The employee refusing to return to the office is not mandating action from anyone else. The company requiring RTO is requiring a specific action. The company is asserting control over the employee.
Control in and of itself is not a bad thing, the employer/employee relationship is about exchanging money for control of ones time, but it's still control.
But refusing to return to the office because your co-worker prefers to work in a full office? That's only control in the same sense that my refusing to let someone stab me in the chest is a limitation of their freedom of movement. Sure, if you want to really twist your perspective you can get there, but it's not a useful definition.
Cynical take, but to me the only preference the WFH people are putting on the in officers is the WFH's preference not to be made the source of socialization and entertainment for the in officers.
> My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
Why? Half full office sounds like she should have plenty of other people who prefer to chit-chat near the water-cooler whole day to socialize with...
> My partner works in a company with a pretty liberal WFH policy, but prefers to go to the office. But when she does, the office is half empty, and she hates it.
So make the office smaller. Although many people going to office probably prefer to have a bit more space and quiet, given how widespread criticism of open offices etc is.
The problem isn't the amount of people, the problem is that 50% of the people she needs to work with aren't there, so she ends up in Zoom meetings anyway and might as well have worked from home.
The success of WFH is the demonstration that if you treat adults as such, they are going to do their job anyway thus rendering an entire horde of middle managers completely useless.
David graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" finally actualized in a way I thought people would be forced to acknowledge, but nope, the bullshit jobs were continued to be allowed to exist.
If you think management jobs are "bullshit jobs", then I envy you: You must be working with remarkably well organised coworkers.
My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.
In my experience, managers are the ones pushing developers to skip tests, bug reports, etc.
Most of them are content to simply pile on new functionality, without any concept of polish, refinement, or how allocating time for technical work can speed up the delivery of that functionality.
understanding importance of code quality/testing
&& willingness to allocate dedicated time to achieve code quality
&& having ability/position/power to withstand management's pressure on just deliveries
In over twenty years of my career, the value was "true" only twice.
I've seen "senior" developers that are very happy to skip writing tests (or write useless tests that basically just return true) even though their management was happy to allocate the time to do decent testing.
Of course I have been lucky with who I've gotten to work with, but it wasn't only that. When interviewing we'd select for people that came to the table with good product mindset, or at least seemed teachable.
The whole leadership chain from CEO down needs to make sure everyone understands and works towards the company's goals. If someone isn't that's just the normal course of productivity issue resolved in the normal way. Sometimes it's because someone isn't as good and engineer as you thought and is resistant to training, sometimes it's as you say they're unfocused on the mission, either way having a layer of people whose entire job is juggling these folks feels like putting fingers in holes in the dam.
That's who I mean by managers, btw. Just because someone has "manager" in their title doesn't mean they're this thing. Plenty of critical product managers I've worked with.
> stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now.
It sounds like your hiring pipeline is broken if that's the behavior you observe. That's not how real Software Engineers work.
I recently read this book because I saw it recommended in Hackernews threads and my disappointment was immense. It is, without hyperbole, among the worst books I've ever read.
It's a shame too because it has a seemingly interesting premise. Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
Now roughly the same percentage believe in lizard people, bigfoot, etc. so we should maybe take self-reporting with a grain of salt but it does seem to ring true to us right? It feels like we've all seen people in jobs that don't need to exist.
And by the way that's exactly what modern economic models would predict. When we say the market is efficient we don't mean that's it's 100% completely and instantly efficient. In fact innovation relies on people recognizing areas where there are marketplace inefficiencies and exploiting them.
The propagation of new technologies through a market takes time and in that time there will by definition be useless jobs in places that technology has not propagated to yet.
What's more the main objective of a job is not always clear. That government employee who feels like he's doing nothing might actually be doing nothing but the purpose of their job might not be to accomplish anything, it might be to make them financially dependent on the government (or maybe the government would say it's a means of economic stimulus).
This is a really interesting topic and there's plenty to explore and lots of existing science to mine from economics to sociology, etc.
David of course ignores all of this and uses the premise to set up a rant about anti-capitalism (without making a cogent argument for an alternative). He includes such amazing insights as, "The only reason countries have armies is because other countries have armies. If we all agreed to stop waging war we could spend that money on better things." Brilliant! Why hasn't a great philosopher thought of this before?
He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics and that he doesn't consider that a valid argument. The problem is twofold. First, much like someone claiming they've found a perpetual motion machine, I don't need to debunk your specific version of it, I can just say, "That violates every observed law of physics, you'd better have extraordinary proof for me to consider your claim." Secondly, David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory. You can't 'disprove' his claim because he doesn't make any (or more specifically he doesn't have a central theory that can be disproven - he has an observation that broadly consistent with what we know about the world and would expect already, if surprising to some people).
And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths that it would take a book of greater length or a youtube video on par with the classic "debunking ancient aliens" to get through them all.
It's nonsense political drivel and it's disappointing that so many people here seem to consider the book profound in some way.
> and uses the premise to set up a rant about anti-capitalism (without making a cogent argument for an alternative)
It shouldn't be surprising that David graeber, one of the most famous modern anarchist philosophers, is an anti capitalist lol. I also find it strange that this burden of designing a perfect society falls on anyone that dares criticize the current one. Like when abolitionists criticized slavery, they were expected to come up with a solution for all the money cotton plantations would lose if slavery was abolished. So odd.
By the way, he did propose two possibilities to alleviating the degradation of bullshit jobs: unionization, and universal basic income.
> Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.
In the book, he argues that 50% of jobs are bullshit, not 15%.
> He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics
You may also be interested in his book Debt, an extensively cited book where he challenges the unscientific nature of modern economics. You'll find there a very rigorous critique of modern economics.
> David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory.
Perhaps the book was too steep an introduction to theories of labor and philosophy that are perpendicular to those commonly taught in public programs and held in general by a large part of society? The theories seemed quite coherent to me, but maybe that's because I had already read Marx and Kropotkin before reading Graeber. What did you think about some of these ideas from the book:
1. It's very strange that our society rewards hedge fund managers with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and teachers with 50k a year, considering by any measurement a teacher is far more valuable to society than a hedge fund manager. It seems capitalism is not good at allocating resources in a way conducive to a healthy society.
2. The general application of Marx's concept of capitalist modes of production being highly alienating for workers, but applied to modern careers like middle management for insurance companies or whatever.
3. Puritan-capitalist work ethic has turned professionalism and capitalism into a religion
4. Bullshit jobs are keeping the population too busy to protest or revolt
> And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths
Really? I wish you had some time to list some, this is interesting to me, and a huge brush to paint across the entire book. None of his critiques of capitalism itself seemed all that surprising or even really new, it was mostly more arguments against the mythological invisible hand of the market and the fabled efficiency of the market so far as I read it.
> Really? I wish you had some time to list some, this is interesting to me, and a huge brush to paint across the entire book.
I can give it a shot just as example.
I grabbed my copy off the shelf and opened up to the middle (page 157 to be specific, but if you want to give me another page number between 1 and 326 I'm happy to do the same thing for that page).
The first thing I see on that page is a quote from Barack Obama and some commentary on it:
> "I don't think in ideological terms. I never have," Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.' That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
> I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he's also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.
> So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement--and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature [sic] took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
> To those who accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for suggesting that government plays any conscious role in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs, I hereby rest my case. Unless you think Obama was lying about his true motives (in which case, who exactly is the conspiracy theorist?), we must allow that those governing us are, in fact, aware that "market solutions" create inefficiencies, and unnecessary jobs in particular...
Okay, lots to digest there. Let's ignore the grammatical mistake (it should say legislation instead of legislature).
Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect. Graeber says:
> here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement
That quote isn't only taken out of context, it's given a new context that's an outright lie.
Obama was not president in 2006 and in that quote he wasn't "reflecting on his signature legislative achievement".
In fact, the next line in the article he cites starts, "Shifting back to how he sees himself in the Senate..."
This is senator Obama, more than a year before he announced he was running for president, answering a specific question about why there needs to be a provision in healthcare legislation for job training for workers who would be displaced if the US moves to a single payer system.
Given the proper context that quote reads very differently and doesn't at all support David's argument.
And even if the context of the quote was what he fabricates it to be (reminder - it's not), the argument still doesn't make sense to me.
Even if a different system would eliminate those jobs it doesn't mean that in the context of the current system those jobs are "bullshit".
If we allow technology to progress far enough almost every job will change or manifest enough to be markedly different from the jobs we have today. People used to get paid to deliver ice door to door. We invented freezers and now there are fewer ice delivery jobs. It doesn't mean those jobs were "bullshit" when the people were doing them, it just means that technology progressed and made them obsolete ... like it eventually will with every job. Of course a bunch of new jobs were created in the process. And those jobs, along with every job, will change and disappear over a long enough time horizon.
So are you arguing that all jobs are bullshit? Well don't we still need people to do stuff? Hmm well we'll need a system to decide who does what. Some kind of distributed system where we vote with our dollars perhaps...
And there's 3 or 4 other ways to cut down the argument there. And that's just a random half-page of the book. The whole thing is like that.
That's a pretty good find, I haven't found anyone else pointing this out. I don't have my copy of the book on me right now to look at that unfortunately as I'm on a trip.
Looks like a miss for him on Obama's take on jobs in healthcare (I even a tweet from what looks like Graeber's account musing about this Obama quote). I wish he was alive so we could email him about it.
Anyway, what we're looking for is logical fallacies in his critique of capitalism. You certainly found a mistaken attribution and thus incorrect assumption about the mindset of someone in power but as you indicate it kind of doesn't matter, because the core argument is that one argument against single payer healthcare (or just fixing America's objectively broken healthcare system) is that people will lose jobs as a result. Here's an article from Politico pointing this out: https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for... . People do make this argument, about the healthcare industry and others.
So for his underlying point, that the American healthcare system is propping up a lot of bullshit jobs, you seem to disagree, but I don't think that counts for a logical fallacy. Having myself interacted with the American healthcare industry, I have to agree with Graeber. Each interaction involved a rat's nest of bureaucratic nonsense and tens of people. The hospital I went to had a person whose entire job was middle-manning the insurance companies and the patients. So we could start with Graeber's general argument that probably a lot of those jobs aren't really necessary. These companies seem to agree when they do waves of layoffs. It's not even really an anticapitalist argument.
The anti-capitalist critique part of the argument is that the jobs are bullshit because they don't help, or in fact harm, society. This is the "single payer would be better" argument. Again I don't find any logical fallacy here, just perhaps an argument you disagree with. It's a similar critique he applies in the mutual fund investor vs teacher argument: why does the mutual fund investor get paid more when teachers are more valuable? Why do Americans spend so much on healthcare when universal or socialized systems can give more healthcare to more people for less money? Whatever the Americans are doing simply isn't efficient, but it's propped up as a star of capitalist resource allocation: even here you seem to imply that simply critiquing the American healthcare system is somehow anticapitalist. Now that I think about it, actually, it's not anti capitalist to argue that the American healthcare system is inefficient, it's simply objectively true: Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else, including countries with socialized healthcare.
However he is obviously anticapitalist and also takes the position that the jobs are bullshit because healthcare should be universal and thus insurance company jobs shouldn't exist (my interpretation). What's logically fallacious about this?
As for the argument that part of the reason the American government (not just pressure from think tanks or whatever) maintain this healthcare system because doing so props up a lot of jobs, which Graeber does incorrectly make based off a misquoted statement by Obama, yes, the chain of thought doesn't work, but it's not the only thing America props up for a jobs reason alone. The TSA, which fails the majority of its audits, is a rather famous example of an institution maintained by the USA simply as a jobs program. https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...
Anyway, you did find a bad quote that I haven't seen anyone else point out, you may have some other pretty interesting insights to Graeber's book. I'd personally read a collection of "random half-page point by point" breakdown by you, it would interesting, and rigorous critique is important to me.
One other thing:
> Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect
I don't understand why this makes anything suspect? Nor do I see much to indicate The Nation is a leftist paper. I found this article as a good measuring stick: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-taiwan-war-mil... So certainly the paper is not a Tankie one, which would definitely make the whole thing suspect as simply a mouthpiece of the CPC, but it's clearly not, so I'm not sure what your concerns are, other than that it might lean different politically than you.
I've noticed that Graeber's books seem to draw critics who complain that the book does exactly what it says it will up-front, with exactly the amount of rigor it says it will have, up-front. That he's not writing the Principia Mathematica of [topic of book] with each one seems to be a sticking point, even when the book never claims to be attempting that.
I see similar complaints about works like Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (nb I wrote that Principia reference before thinking to include this part). "There's too much of his opinion in it!" framed not as a caution against treating it as a straight unbiased "take" throughout, but as a flaw in the book. But... it lays out right up front that his intention is to first lay out each philosopher's positions as he understands them—and only a subset of those positions, explicitly avoiding some whole categories of philosophy—and then to provide his take on their position in the broader story of philosophy, which parts have been enduring and influential, which have fallen off, et c. And then then the book does that thing it said it was going to do. What do readers expect? Do people skip introductions and prefaces or something?
Bullshit Jobs goes out of its way to call out the limitations and scope of what it's attempting, it's not like it's trying to trick people.
(another thing I've noticed is people having trouble with the "concisely and confidently assert in a paragraph, then back up the position and directly address obvious criticisms in the following paragraphs" style that Graeber uses in, especially, Debt. I've read upset reviews that complain that Graeber ignored X, where X is some obvious problem with something he claimed, but he didn't ignore it, he explicitly covers that problem and attempts to address it, but it seems some readers check out the second they think of a problem in some argument and just go "ah ha, caught you you fraud, you didn't fool me!" and then, I dunno, skim-read until the next assertion, I guess?)
SmallCo working model and self-management doesn’t scale to BigCo. So while it may work for a 50 people to a few 100 people company, with 10-50 engineers, the model quickly breaks when you go in the 100s of developers. At that level, coordination of work between groups becomes a full-time job. As does hiring, supporting career development, etc.
> It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with
I wouldn't be surprised if that's a LOT of Dell employees.
I recently dealt with their service department and it was the worst warranty service I've had on any product. Reiterates my prior position of never buying Dell products again.
Took two, multi-hour iMessage conversations including taking 5 videos of my product each time, to prove warranty was triggered. Was at the point of asking "should I take a video of putting your product in the garbage as well?"
The craziest part was once that was done, they immediately shipped me a brand new replacement with overnight delivery. Product was already on the way before I realized they actually had granted me service.
Eizo on the other hand was a 5 minute process, but then the monitor was gone for a month being serviced.
Apple I would just walk into the store and either get it replaced on the spot or serviced and pickup when done. I've never had service denied or had to battle for hours.
So the dumbest possible outcome - they are out a new replacement monitor, and I am unhappy enough to never be a customer again.
Are you sure it's a new replacement monitor? Every warranty product I received was always a refurbished one, even if the product broke in less than a month (confirmed by support as well).
I also will never buy dell in my lifetime, and have encouraged all family/friends not to as well.
You should do what everyone else does. Buy the same monitor on Amazon and return your broken one to Amazon. Mostly joking but I wouldn’t fault anyone they did bc Amazon is awful
It just astonishes me that in the year 2023 I got caught out on the old "well the specs look good" scam. I know Dell makes a lot of dreck, and have been thoroughly unimpressed with the kit that our office bought in bulk.
On paper this should have been a great monitor - 27", 4K, USB-C data & power, nice height/tilt/rotation adjustable stand, multiple inputs, USB hub integrated, etc.
Probably worst tech purchase of the decade for me.
I had a really bad dell monitor experience this year too. I had a still image on the monitor for 30 minutes and it caused extreme permanent burn in. Returned it and got the cheapest no name monitor with the same specs and it’s been great and half the price
Nit: They're called "Autocratic" (specifically Authoritarian) or "Democratic" styles. [0]
Servant Leadership is what I've found to be most productive when managing developers - the idea that the manager is there as a servant of the team, to remove problems and allow the team to work at their full capacity. However, this assumes that the team wants to work at its full capacity.
I've seen large corporate teams that do not. They clock in a couple of PRs a day, leave their cameras and mics off in meetings, etc. I can understand the desire to get them in the office to control them. But that's not going to solve the problem - you can't force a developer to write good code by standing over them and watching them.
It's a management problem. If the team isn't performing, getting them in the office isn't going to help. Replace the manager with a more effective one.
Unfortunately, that would get in the way of the office-work tradition of using middle management as a reward. If you expect people to actually be good at managing things, that means you can't give out management positions as a reward to anybody who plays the office game well.
This so much. We need to accept that management is a skill not a status, and pay managers according to their ability, education & experience same as we do for everyone else.
A good manager is not ego-driven and is perfectly able to function when being paid less than the people they manage.
And then we can just give people more money and keep them in the role they work best at instead of having to Peter Principle them up to their level of incompetence or lose them.
The "adversarial style" is just an excuse for bad managers/companies.
If you can't tell that a worker is not producing because they are WFH then you are plain and simply incompetent. It's actually much easier to pretend to work in an office than it is at home in my experience.
Another very common excuse to use this "style" (I don't agree it's a stylistic choice at all) is to cover up the real cause that employees are not productive. These can be a ton of reasons including:
- hiring incompetent people
- not paying your employees what they're worth (often the cause for the first one)
- not letting them actually do their job (micromanagement, unnecessary bureaucracy, etc)
- not giving them challenging work
- inability to listen and change (employee's concerns are ignored)
This is correct, except that the two "management styles" presented are the two extremes of a spectrum.
Apart from that, WFH does make management a lot more painful and tedious from a practical perspective. Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications, and their resolution is at the mercy of how long each person in the chain takes to receive each message, acknowledge it, follow up on feedback, make changes, clarify, finalize...
Maybe instead of setting arbitrary broad-brush WFH policies, just divide every role within WHF-able and non-WFH-able baskets under each business head.
> Things that a team could discuss and resolve over a coffee break now need to be pushed through tedious official communications
Maybe that's a good thing? If the team can solve it informally why can't it be done over other mediums? Most of the time this happens because there's a lack of documentation or other issue.
Doesn't have to just apply to SD. In fact I think SD is probably the least affected.
But Commercial, HR, Marketing - all face the problem of spiraling communication loops. Physical presence does make a difference in planning and implementation, believe it or not.
I would not distinguish supportive/adversarial management styles as much as the workload chunking, responsibility for delivery and management of it.
Suppose your team consists of individual independent contractors or for example the team members are all spread across multiple offices. Such an arrangement is effectively indistinguishable from WFH arrangement as you do not really have the aforementioned face to face contact anyway.
Can management make it work? WFH may mean slacking in hackernews, office will mean slacking at the water cooler. Do you really need multiple a day face to face conversations "how are WE doing this"? Maybe the workload actually requires intimate contact for efficiency/quality. Maybe you can chunk workload into 40 hour chunks, have workers independently arrive at solutions and just sync once in a while.
On one hand yes, this is management lacking control. On the other hand this is about trust in workers and workload chunking.
It's down to the caliber of employees and managers that a company employs (that's the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about).
In my experience, remote just doesn't work for cheaper (or "best cost" whatever the current term is).
A lot of firms tried "cheaping out" on coders over the years, hiring employees from bootcamps and doing internal coaching. In my experience that breaks down completely when going remote because of the amount of hand-holding required. While they could drop-in and check-in on the coders almost once per hour in office, it's more like once per day when working from home.
Firms that paid more and hired proper Software Engineers don't have the same experience at all, mostly because ICs now have several hours extra per week to concentrate and focus.
I'd argue that regardless of WFH versus office, managers can't force folks to work. It's just that in the office they can pretend that they're forcing them to work, even when X employee is simply sitting in a chair.
It basically ends up just punishing the employees who do work, and the slackers still slack.
You make an interesting point on managerial styles potentially biasing the decision making process for a WFH policy. It definitely is a situation where there are managers/directors/VPs who only know the adversarial style of management and imposes policies based on that perception.
At the end of the day, it is a high level leader making these decisions and it is likely a high level leader with experience/conditioning within an industry PRIOR to the pandemic so I would guess that they are more conservative or "old-school" with their perspective on company/workplace policies.
In your example I'd say it's more down to the team. If you have a solid team then you're set, but if you have low performers (which is sometimes the fault of the manager but certainly not always) then I imagine it could be more difficult to manage someone out remotely.
In my latest 1-on-1 my manager was asking me to go back to office. In the same meeting a bit later when I said I’m underutilized and asked for more work, he said there isn’t much work to be done at the time other the sustaining I’ve been already doing.
He just wants me to be in office just for the shake of being in office..
> be in office just for the shake of being in office.
That's what most companies which now have a 'hybrid' model do. Many around here (UK) advertise at being 'hybrid', meaning 2 days in a office a week. But, really, why?
I think most companies don't have a solid justification for this.
IMHO, if there must be set days in office they must be special days with everyone in office the same day and a focus on face-to-face interactions. If it's to code in office instead of at home 1-2 days a week there is no point at all.
In my case I would not care about going to the office if it were anywhere near downtown. That way I could go down to my local pub or game store after work. However, my company is located in the periphery of the city. If I want to go anywhere that means getting in my car once more.
If you look at a financial point of view lot of companies need to show that offices are still critical for working, because office valuations (that the company may own or long term lease) are plummeting.
This conspiracy theory is repeatedly being dragged out but can you give any kind of proof that offices are actually something that moves a needle on any companies financial statement in a way that INCREASES profits?
Commercial real estate often operates under multi-year leases, so companies have property leases anyway, they figure they might get some use for it. Other than that, the pressure mostly has to do with the networks/social circles that those higher up in companies run in. Local governments have historically worked hand in hand with companies to make their locations good places for businesses because they benefit from the increased foot traffic/population/tax base. Now the two sides (companies and local/state governments) have competing interests and the heads of companies are being pressured and wooed pretty hard to get people back into offices.
If you're an executive and have a choice between pissing off your employees (who you view as fungible) and pissing off people in your network who could make your life/the life of your company more difficult, the obvious answer is to piss off your employees. If local and state governments can't depend on office workers for $$, they might need to start doing things like raising corporate tax rates or stop giving companies incentives/grants/exemptions. Basically in person is worse for the company's long-term bottom line but it's better in the short term for the people making the decisions. What does the CEO care if the company takes a hit in ~5 years? They won't be working there. They do care if they have to start paying more taxes or explain to the board why all of a sudden they have to start paying expenses that previously were offloaded due to agreements.
That's my read on it anyway. It's a fascinating social problem wherein the interests of the higher ups and the interests of the company as a whole are at odds.
> That's my read on it anyway. It's a fascinating social problem wherein the interests of the higher ups and the interests of the company as a whole are at odds.
Well there's plenty of readings like that, but there's very little evidence they're actually _true_. They're just stories told around fires about evil gods depriving poor workers of wfh.
I see plenty other (often misguided) reasons why managers keep pushing for RTO, but "my companys office space, oh egads" is almost never one.
I mean to be fair, it'd be nearly impossible to get evidence one way or another given we're discussing the true motives of people and those are impossible to objectively verify. I don't think there's any shady conspiracy, just incentives that are aligning in weird ways and that in most American companies worker satisfaction is something that's pretty easy to let fall compared to other factors. I also don't think that the managers etc. are doing this on purpose: I think it's a case where the publications they read and the members of their network they listen to want RTO and they trust the words and interpretations of business publications and the people they meet with often over those of their employees.
Knowing the 'gods' are stupid rather than evil doesn't change 'acting in their own interests but not the interests of employees/the long term health of the company' problem. Why are they buying into these misguided reasons? Because it benefits them to do so. Why are they listening only to the RTO side? Because those institutions are more trusted by the decision makers.
If you have a 100 million dollar CRE building on your balance sheet, and sell it for 50 million, that's a 50 mill hit. Companies just don't want to realize the hit and kill their performance for that quarter
my company is actively tracking everyone and their attendance, and then displaying metrics on attendance in all hands meetings. it's like high school or something.
This is a bit comical. I've always figured that hiring a manager to just play baby sitter for professional adults is the most inefficient use of company resources. I understand that there are certain industries which this might be more important but I'm going to guess most industries would benefit from having better hiring practices and a more trusting culture.
I'm not at Dell but that would be me if I were forced into the office. I have teammates in every CONUS timezone and none are anywhere near my closest office. I'd essentially be in the office working remotely.
> > they claim it is to promote coworking and socialize
And they are right, look:
> get stuck in traffic, +20 minutes
and
> half of the workers are wfh
you have seen way more people than if you had stayed at home. Especially while driving, at the red traffic lights, or while overtaking cars/or while they overtake you :)
> > remember they are not even from the same city lol
it doesn't matter, distances should not matter, you could befriend someone that is 50 km away, why not - it doesn't matter that you're doing to meet him/her only once a year.
My employer is not my mother or father. They have no business prescribing me extra-curricular socialization, nor are they afforded any privilege to dictate anything else about my personal life.
They're not prescribing extra-curricular socialization for your personal life, though. They're prescribing on-the-clock socialization for your professional life.
Seen this story regaled close to 100 times now. If you think complaining about this situation is going to result in the company allowing more WFH and not enforcing more WFO I’ve got some bad news for you.
Not sure why people keep thinking it’s a gotcha that will work in their favor.
I think a big part of many people’s contempt for their jobs comes from the sense that it’s an endless, thankless stream of tickets and demands. Seeing people in person, remembering they’re human, can help make the rest of the job more pleasant. A day of socializing might make the other four days of remote work more productive, increase job satisfaction, increase retention.
Personally I like a clear separation between work and home. If I'm just going to be socialising then I want it to be on my own terms. I'd rather just go for a walk than spend all day in an office with people I don't really like that much. If I'm going to be working then I want to be productive. I like to finish the day feeling like I've done something.
But perhaps the question is whether it's good for the company or for society as whole. That's a much more difficult question but I suspect that it is good for society and possibly the company too. It's normal to not like all aspects of society but it's still better than the alternative.
It's quite clear to me that tech companies know that reneging on WFH will cause some employees to leave. I think that this is actually the entire point. You can do a soft layoff, without ever having to say the word layoff, and without ever getting "Tech company XYZ announces layoffs" headlines.
The problem, I think, is what kind of employees may leave. If it's the best of the cream, then the company is in trouble. And frankly, the best employees can allow themselves to say "I want to work from home. You don't allow? Then goodbye".
In my opinion, above a certain size, companies don't really care about employee quality all that much. So long as they meet the initial hire criteria it doesn't matter who's a 5x or 1x dev anymore. It's just one FTE anyway in the planning.
At this point the company has become a bullshit churning machine whose effectiveness is measured by its rate of churn. They milk cash cows that gained traction in decades past, while most new work is just part of the churn.
We had an example at our office several years ago where employee X was a great worker, nothing to say about that, that was having his own "working" rhythm (e.g., until late at night, mornings off, etc.), and was coming to the office only from time to time, just because the manager was really pushing hard, or for certain office events.
This spread and people started to ask - can I work from home?
-> only 1 day
Why? X does more than 1 day, and sometimes X is not available when I need.
... as a manager you can only "yes, but ..." that much. At a certain point people (who I would like to remind everyone again and again: most of the time are people with a high college degree, used to read books, papers, and do things, not 3 years old kids) connect the dots and say "alright, it's time to go". And before they go, they let the entire apple tree rot to hell. If that doesn't happen it might be because this spreads and goes to high management that asks the manager "WTF are you doing?"
That's when either more rights come in equally for everyone, or ... they need to let go of their best employee, or they need to find a compromise. Just having the nicely protected "best" employee is never a good strategy. Eventually people get pissed off and leave, and if they don't, congrats, you have just made the "non-best" employees even less motivated and less productive.
This was so before COVID. If you are good and productive you can often negotiate WFH like any other benefit.
Honestly it seems like it’s part of a tech career trajectory. Once you are very established and your skills are built up there are several tracks available to you. Two of those are WFH specialist or 5-10X experienced dev and WFH consultant.
The cube farm grind is something you go through to get your skills and network up.
I have seen the same in other knowledge areas: corporate law, finance, some types of editing and design, accounting, etc. WFH becomes one of the options at more senior levels.
The other reason it’s a more senior option is that senior people are seen as better able to self direct and thus requiring less micromanagement.
That seems to be true in my case, the first decade of my career was spent in cube farms and cramped offices. I learned a lot and made a few networks, and now I’m at a fortunate point where most jobs are available to me with a phone call if my current job sucks. Especiallly when I’m asked to RTO.
Pre-covid my entire team was office and I was the only remote. Without wanting to brag, it's factual: my Drupal knowledge made it worth for them to keep this up. Post-covid my entire team is scattered to the winds. You couldn't get them to come to the office because almost no one is within the same metro as the office.
They are going to quickly discover that this is the case. I left Lockheed right after they started forcing everyone back into offices that didn't even have enough desks. Those whom were actually creating value there all had plans to leave to. Plenty of them left as soon as they got the news lol. Sure it's a way to do layoffs without saying 'layoff', but the impact is going to be felt much harder down the line.
I'm not sure that there is a terrible large correlation between "best of the best" and "refuse to ever work in office." When I think about the engineers that I most respect and admire, they are very split on wfh vs wfo opinions.
I don't think this is correct. It is a little hard to tease out perfectly (e.g.: school computers having gone to chrome books in a big way might not be the statistic you want), but globally Windows marketshare has gone from 90% a decade ago to ~%75 now:
I'm not a part of this space personally so I can't say for certain, but one answer could be the not-PCs and cloud. Some people find a tablet with a keyboard perfectly adequate for their all-office needs. Even if the "sys-admins" still need PCs that is still a very substantial conversion of the market share away from PCs. If you reflexively scream at the notion of how horrible that would be for your working process, I do not blame you but note it could work for some.
Do you really need to be part of “this space” to know that Microsoft has a 90% share in PCs and most of corporate America and even personal computers are running Windows?
Even the people who like tablets are still buying Surface laptops - running Windows.
They aren’t buying iPads and definitely not Android tablets.
Even a lot of iPad aficionados are moving back to Macs now that they have a lot of the advantages of iPads - slim, lightweight and ridiculously long battery life.
Nokia at one point started handing out very generous severance packages to get people out. The management thought that the bad workers would be the ones to take the deal.
Nope, the oldest and most experienced ones took the money and used it to start their own companies.
(As I always point out...) This is known as the "Dead Sea Effect" and it was traditionally associated with companies like IBM but now we're seeing it across the board with tech layoffs. The best people know they have options and they have a good network so once a company starts showing signs of slowing down they bail out.
Those headlines are usually associated with a bump in the stock price; it's unclear why they'd be trying to avoid them. Perhaps they think it undermines future hiring or retention, but so does RTO.
It can be bad optics for companies which took large sums of money from the government recently (say, for pandemic relief or major tax breaks of some kind) to then turn around and announce large layoffs. It guarantees that the CEO is going to have an unpleasant day or two in front of, say, a Congressional committee or maybe a state legislature hearing. And letting CEO's avoid unpleasant consequences of their own decisions is definitely an important factor in corporate decisions.
It's situational - sometimes a layoff headline may push your stock price down.
I imagine current round[0] of layoffs is opportunistic - companies know they'll want to do some layoffs at some point, but when's a better moment than when everyone else is doing layoffs? The public at this point doesn't even care anymore - there's been too much of it going on, it's not novel, it's what everyone's doing.
--
[0] - I'm not sure if "round" is even a good term anymore - it's been what, half a year already, of ongoing layoffs in tech companies? I've been seeing at least one headline per week about some recognizable name in tech announcing/executing layoffs, since February, or maybe even January 2023.
The problem is they are leaking talent, as those who know that can pick another offer that suits their needs will do without thinking about it too much.
I’m beginning to think so as well. You can get significant layoffs without having a “layoff” event, and you don’t have to provide any of the support that is required when firing people.
It’s clearly not what an employment lawyer would call “constructive dismissal” but it sure feels like that is the intent.
Sorry I'm habitually talking about us employment law that is generally as anti-worker as it is possible to be while still pretending that employees have rights.
It's also I realize kind of iffy. If Dell said explicitly "we will not ever require RTO", and you moved following that, then maybe your lawyer would be willing to bring a case, but in this case Dell is saying "if you live within an hour" you have to come in to the office. Given my employer's RTO has given me 3+ hours of commuting a day that seems in the region of what the US considers reasonable.
“Live within an hour” is interesting for Dell, given where their office is. At peak commute times this barely even covers north Austin, but off leash likely covers the entire metro area.
oh yeah - my mandatory RTO means I now need to drive for 2.5-4 hours a day.
Previously I could commute via public transit + work on commute buses, but given the lack of masking, vaccination requirements, or separation, driving is now the only safe option.
Not just for covid either: not going to the office meant I did not get sick for years - within a month of RTO starting I had one coworker saying that they would have been in the office but the (at the time) rules said you couldn't come to the office if you had flu symptoms even if you hadn't tested positive for covid. e.g. The only reason a coworker didn't come in while knowing that they work sick was because at the time it was explicitly prohibited.
If it’s in your contract then yes but if you were hired to work in an office but allowed to WFH for some time because of company policy I doubt it would be seen as such even in the UK
People are still acting like the current job environment doesn’t suck. Where are these trustworthy companies currently that aren’t also announcing layoffs or that you can count on not to have layoffs?
I don't think you can count of any company not to have layoffs, that's quite dependant on the economy, company performance, sector, etc.
If a company promised no layoffs ever, I wouldn't believe them. But if they promised to continue WFH, I'd believe them, since that's directly under their control.
Most employment is from small businesses, by the numbers. Most small businesses are struggling-to-fragile at best as most fail. The "not paying for office space is a sizable plus" contingent alone would give a substantial number of WFH jobs Counterintuitively there are loads of jobs from the companies who are struggling.
So many allow WFH. There's thousands of open software positions in SF alone, and plenty are ok with remote. Some are even ok with me being in the taiwan time zone. I'm managed to stay consistently employed in the Taiwan time zone with SF and NYC based jobs the last 2.5 years.
Curiously, for some candidates, almost every letter of the FAANG, WILL give a full WFH offer, today, and they are willing to put this down with ink on paper.
Working from the office is a management strategy. It goes like this:
If you work remote, you have to actually write down things, like 1. who your workers are, 2. what the teams are, 3. where they are, 4. how to contact them, 5. what they're working on, 6. who else they depend on or who depends on them, etc. There are a lot of new tools to learn, you have to learn how to ask for someones time and schedule time. That's a lot of work that managers don't want to do.
If you work from the office, you mostly have to: 1. walk around the office and ask someone. Interrupt whatever they're doing to ask anything you want anytime. Of course, there may be many offices, but then you call the other offices and ask the secretary to go around and ask people.
It's also very easy when wfh to accidentally leave a paper trail or records of conversations you'd rather stay hidden. In an office you can just talk in person with no record.
Wfh is a right that white collar workers are gonna have to fight for, the way all unions have had to fight for the rights workers deserve. Don't threaten to quit, threaten to unionize.
As long as tech workers can credibly threaten to quit I think that’s easier than unionizing. Unions are great when you have a single big employer (a monopsony) like the public sector or a dominant single company, like a factory in a small town. Then the “monopoly” of the union is matched to the monopsony of the single employer. But there are still many tech companies competing for skilled workers. As long as we can say we quit if they force us back to the office I don’t see the need to unionize.
Unions are applicable for any number of employers and jobs, big or small, many or few.
Sure, threatening to quit is easy. But doing the easy thing isn't the same as doing the right thing. Unionizing allows us to prevent unpaid overtime, demand more vacation, better health care, fewer contractors, more diverse hiring, fewer hiring restrictions, and of course, things like wfh, child care, family leave, maternity and paternity. Things corporations making hundreds of billions in profits could easily do, but will never do unless we organize.
I guess my "don't bother unionizing" take is extremely dependent on where you live. I'm in Sweden where we already have very generous benefits and labour friendly laws.
> If you work from the office, you mostly have to: 1. walk around the office and ask someone. Interrupt whatever they're doing to ask anything you want anytime.
In the office one person at a time can DOS attack my attention and everyone else can see I'm busy helping them. Slack is far worse, multiple coworkers are DDOS attacking me and 10 more unread messages pop up before I finish helping the first guy.
See this is exactly what I mean. People don't want to learn how to wfh.
There are easy solutions to these problems. Put up an away message and silence notifications. Set office hours when you will respond to messages. Time box. Give estimated response times. Provide an escalation method for emergencies. Keep a weekly rotation for support requests.
All of this is well established in fully remote companies. But you can't expect to completely change the dynamic and expect it to work perfect with no changes.
> walk around the office and ... Interrupt whatever they're doing to ask anything you want anytime.
Without sarcasm, I think a lot of people think this is what "important hallway conversations" and "collaboration and innovation" are. I also find it hugely disruptive, and it caters to people can mostly only communicate verbally.
I check my slack when I have some slack. If it's super urgent and important, page me. If it is important and not urgent, set up a meeting. If it's urgent but not important, stop doing it. If you let slack pop dialogs or notifications, then you're going to get a lot of urgent-but-not-important shit.
This same thing happens in an office if it's not small/one big shared workspace. Literally no difference. Also if you have other offices/remote works this can happen even with WFO.
People message me while I'm on zoom, I tell them I'm busy but I'll get to them in the order they reached out. It works just fine. I have a note on my computer I add their name to and once I get off zoom I check if I still need to reach out to anyone.
Much of the discussion is philosophical about commutes and keeping an eye on kids while wfh. But those issues aren't new.
What's egregious to me is companies committing to something which has major life and financial implications to the people that work there and then pulling the rug out.
Yeah that's the most interesting thing for me as well. I'm also curious about how wfh was granted and then removed: was there a contract change to guarantee it? Or did they simply "promise" to do so? If there was a contractual change to guarantee wfh, can they make another change and remove it just like that?
I've learned the hard way to never organize my life around benefits that are "promised" but not in my contract. This here is exactly what happens every single time: the person who made you the promise leaves the company and the promise goes along with them.
Most US workers aren't under an employment contract, it's at-will in both directions. That said, everything is negotiable, and if one is sufficiently motivated and has the leverage, an employment agreement can be crafted even without jeopardizing the at-will relationship.
What are these "contracts" you're referring to? I've worked full time in tech for 25 years and I've never had a contract of any sort that I'm aware of.
I think the disconnect is that in Europe employment contracts spell out a lot. In the U.S. they are really don't cover a lot about how you work. The common phrase in the U.S. is "additional tasks and duties as required", which could mean anything.
How is removing WFH different than say, a layoff? Both promised things early, something that employees build a life and expectations around. A layoff is announced, employees are impacted. Does that mean employers should never do layoffs?
> Unlike some other companies’ approaches, Dell seems to be asking workers who live within an hour’s commute to work from the office for three days per week, rather than specific job roles.
Hour during rush hour or hour as measured by Google Maps without traffic data?
So they're basically asking people to spend 40 hours a month, unpaid, in their car going to and from work with no compensation?
You say this like it’s a new and offensive idea when in fact this has been the norm for as long as paid workforce has been concept.
With regards to hybrid jobs: you can get a job closer to home, but there is a reason why house prices are more expensive in tech hubs and why wages are lower where housing is cheaper. So you can either have cheaper housing but lower income, higher income but higher house prices, or have both but pay the penalty with you time (ie longer commutes).
This is how it’s always been and why fully remote jobs have been a great life hack. But you can’t really complain about having to spend you own time commuting should you have a hybrid role.
You say this like norms are not meant to be challenged. That fully remote jobs are a life hack, which shouldn't be normal (i.e. hack).
Having experienced the full-time WFH during covid, I believe many feel that the extra time not spent on commuting can be better used for life. Why bother with extra commute when it does not bring you anything?
In the past for the paid workforce WFH has not been possible. You had to physically be present to perform the labor. In these modern times with computers and internet, we now have the ability to communicate and even perform most tasks related to the job when being in a completely different place than my coworkers.
Companies only get the benefits of people being in the office (more interaction, more control), but not the penalties (unpaid commute time).
Norms should move with the zeitgeist, in the spirit of the time and age we live in. Why stay stuck in the way of working from 50 years ago?
> You say this like norms are not meant to be challenged.
You’re free to challenge the norms. I just don’t agree with the arguments made on this occasion and had listed other reasons why beyond just social norms. Ie you’re already being compensated by choosing to live in a bigger yet cheaper property then you’d have afforded if you wanted to live closer to work.
Ultimately there is always going to be a trade off but that’s your choice not your employers.
WFH is completely independent from the idea of moving to a suburb to afford a bigger house.
You're literally just making up an imaginary scenario of people moving just because they can WFH and then acting like that's "compensation" built into WFH.
We aren’t talking about WFH though. We are taking about people with long commute times being compensated for their efforts. And the exact reason people move out of the city, and thus have a longer commute, is precisely to buy something bigger somewhere quieter.
This isn’t a weird new concept I’m throwing out there either. It’s a well discussed topic. So much so that I could name several TV shows that feature this as a plot point.
Of course, there is a trend to people choosing to relocate to cheaper areas once the requirement to live near a (n expensive) city office is lifted. As such, this would often provide ample space for a WFH office.
I do about 95% of my work on my recliner with a laptop and a lap desk. No additional living space required. Occasionally I'll go in the computer room with the dual monitors when I feel I need them for something, but that's certainly not required.
Yes, they can complain - and should. We all should. If there’s no real reason to commute, if the actual work doesn’t require it, then we should push back on this.
“How it’s always been” is a lousy reason to keep doing something if there’s a better way.
The pandemic forced employers to allow WFH so they could keep the money spigots flowing. We learned that it isn’t really necessary to burn additional fossil fuels and contribute to pollution and donate commute time for free.
It’s entirely logical that workers are complaining about a unnecessary constraint that costs them time, money & restricts where they can live.
> this has been the norm for as long as paid workforce has been concept.
Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't mean it's fair or right.
The standard work week was once 12-14 hours a day, 6 days a week. Things change.
> But you can’t really complain about having to spend you own time commuting should you have a hybrid role.
Of course you can. You can complain about anything, and sometimes with very good reasons.
Ultimately employers are free to demand that employees RTO with no travel time compensation if they want, but it's silly to say this is something the employees can't complain about.
So one person buys/rents an expensive house just to be closer to the office and not have to commute. Somebody else makes the decision to live 1.5 hours away to save money.
How would travel time compensation work in this situation? Why would companies not discriminate implicitly or explicitly against employees who live further away?
I am not advocating for travel time compensation; I am advocating for the right to complain in general.
I work from home the vast majority of the time currently with very occasional visits to the office. The office for me is 15 minutes away. I would never accept a job that required a greater than 20-minute single direction commute, so travel time compensation is not on my radar of things to worry about.
Maybe there’s a language barrier here because “can’t really complain” is British slang for “it’s a bit silly to moan about” rather than “I forbid you from speaking about such a subject”.
At the end of the day, someone has to pay for it. Higher and higher salaries, more and more perks and benefits, less and less hours put into work.
Sure there is time savings in not commuting, but there are also time savings in face-to-face interactions, team spirit etc.
Instead of cooking some food and eat alone at home you can eat and discuss with colleagues or friends who work in the same area.
Instead of commuting people waste their time on social media, news and other junk before, during and after work. A commute via bus, train, subway, bicycle can often be productive or even relaxing versus taking the car. It's an often needed break between work-time and free-time. It's hard to make that break when working form home.
> Instead of commuting people waste their time on social media, news and other junk before, during and after work. A commute via bus, train, subway, bicycle can often be productive or even relaxing versus taking the car. It's an often needed break between work-time and free-time. It's hard to make that break when working form home.
You seem to be extending your own experience as if it applies to everyone equally, but it doesn't.
I find commutes neither productive nor relaxing. I do not need a break between work-time and free-time, I have an office space at home to provide that compartmentalization.
I spent a decade working in an office park with no restaurants and only over priced cafeterias with low quality food. Everyone brought their lunch and usually ate in their office while on conference calls. My employer was responsible for the selection and hiring of the cafeteria management company.
I made more points than just an appeal to tradition. Let me reiterate:
You already get compensated by having both a higher paid job and living in a bigger property in a cheaper yet desirable neighbourhood. And more to the point, your employer didn’t choose where you live, you chose that yourself.
If you were commuting to different site(s) than the one listed as your “base” location then it would be a different story. But most businesses already compensate you for that. They just don’t pay for you travelling between home and your base location because that was the expectation you agreed to when you took the job.
Was the agreement WFH though? Was it actually written into their contract? Or was this just something they informally agreed to while it was difficult to hire staff?
I’m not saying changing policy against your employees wishes is a good thing but if your acceptance of a job is predicated on the condition of being fully remote then you’d want to be damn sure that is written into your contract. And if it is, then your employer cannot change those terms without issuing you a new contract.
Also I know plenty of people who haven’t changed jobs in the last 3 years.
People like yourself have been fixated on that one sentence because it’s easy to dismiss and ignored the other points I raised.
I’m still yet to hear one single reason why it is “offensive” to have to pay for your own travel into work. I’ve given plenty of reasons why I don’t see an issue with it but nobody has given any reasons why it’s offensive beyond simply saying that it is so.
Here's an answer: because it's time from our life, stress, cost, and physical risk that we are taking for someone else's benefit that we am not compensated for. That is highly and inherently offensive, which is why most users aren't bothering to engage you on it. People aren't going to spend their time arguing over something that is self-evident; if the other person can't see it that's their problem, not ours. Horse, water, drink, etc.
I think most people aren’t nothing to engage because they’re, and your, point of view is completely unrealistic, overly simplistic and clearly not ever going to work in the real world. So instead you have to make emotional pleas, ignore counter arguments because “isn’t it obvious…” and generally pull all the usual shades debate tactics that one does when they know they can’t win an argument on merit alone.
How does such a compensation work fairly when someone people pay the premium to live closer? What’s stopping you from working on the train and counting that towards your working hours? Etc. what’s stopping you from getting a job closer to home?
There’s so many flaws to your argument and the only point you make that cannot be refuted is your sense of entitlement. So it’s not surprising I’m unconvinced.
But we might just have to agree to disagree on this topic. I suspect this is more a question of perceived morality than it is something tangible that can be proved.
> What’s stopping you from working on the train and counting that towards your working hours?
Laws and agreements?
You’re supposed to guard company data, you can’t just open your laptop in the middle of anything and let everybody on the train take a look at your code or any other company data.
Also, you’re assuming that the train is not crowded enough that you can sit comfortably…
I do take your point but on the trains I commute on, it’s really common to see people with a laptop open and worked. I do this myself on occasions too. So it’s certainly possible for some commutes even if it’s not a universal truth.
Sorry for the quality of this comment. Ironically I was typing this on my phone while on my commute home (train, not driving) and my phones autocorrect must have gone into overdrive. Too late to edit it now though.
You’ve fallen into the same trap as many others by refuting the easy claim that bad things should change yet don’t address the real question of why you feel entitled to this change.
You call it “idiocy” yet literally nobody has been able to put into words why it is so.
The real idiocy here is how one sided the discussion has been. The supporters, like yourself, simply say “it should be like this because I say so”. Whereas the opposition, such as myself, have detailed a number of reasons why, such as cheaper housing vs regional wages.
If it were really as clear cut as you claim, I wouldn’t be reading through a page of meaningless straw man arguments like I am right now.
We aren’t talking about WFH vs working in the office. We are talking about the argument made that companies should reimburse employees for any time spent commuting.
It is idiocy in my opinion and I am acting accordingly. I don’t need to prove it to you or anyone. I don’t consider employment offers that don’t align with me along this axis. I have plenty of options that do.
> It is idiocy in my opinion and I am acting accordingly
You’re acting like an idiot?!
> I don’t need to prove it to you or anyone.
You’re the one engaging in the conversation. If you don’t want to explain your point of view then why bother posting in the first place?
> I don’t consider employment offers that don’t align with me along this axis. I have plenty of options that do.
You have plenty of job offers where your employer pays for your commute?
I’ve been in the industry for several decades and the only time I’ve ever known this happen is when someone has site visits, which isn’t the scope of our conversation here. So I think you’re either misunderstanding the conversation here or just posting BS.
There's a lot of evidence of internalized capitalism on this site, but I'm happy to see a variety of opinions for and against remote coming out in the comments
I’m definitely one of the bigger socialises on here (probably because I’m European). I just don’t believe that a company owes you for your commute time. I feel that it pushing entitlement a little too far.
Given the shitty wages most people are on, how some people walk for 2 hours a day, every day, to get to and from work because they can’t afford a car…and then we have this thread. It just feels like there’s a real disconnect from reality going on right now.
> I’m definitely one of the bigger socialises on here (probably because I’m European). I just don’t believe that a company owes you for your commute time. I feel that it pushing entitlement a little too far.
Incorrect, it is a reasonable and deserved level of entitlement. When you spend hours of your life for someone else's benefit you are morally entitled to be compensated it.
> Given the shitty wages most people are on, how some people walk for 2 hours a day, every day, to get to and from work because they can’t afford a car…and then we have this thread. It just feels like there’s a real disconnect from reality going on right now.
Crab mentality. Multiple shitty things exist of different scales and all of them should be fixed. Everyone should be paid for commute time AND no one should have to walk two hours or have a low wage job. Calling out the wrongness of the former does not mean we are okay with the latter. The subject matter of thread happened to be about the former.
Because commute time is work time. Plain and simple. There are very few unemployed people that take the tube for 1 hour in the morning and in the evening just for the sake of it.
Since work from anywhere showed that a lot of work can be done remotely, if a company wants someone to work on premises it is obvious that they have to pay for the extra time and effort spent.
> Because commute time is work time. Plain and simple. There are very few unemployed people that take the tube for 1 hour in the morning and in the evening just for the sake of it.
So if I take the tube to see a show, then work should pay for that as well? I’m not working while sat on the tube any more than I’m working while on the way to the theatre.
And if people do decide to work on the train, then they can count that towards their working hours so there isn’t an issue.
If you’re not working on the train, then it clearly isn’t work time any more than that lunch break which companies also don’t pay you for.
Also what about people who have chosen to pay more for a property that is closer to the office? Should they be excluded from this subsidy? Effectively penalising them for not having a long commute? How is that fair on them?
> Since work from anywhere showed that a lot of work can be done remotely, if a company wants someone to work on premises it is obvious that they have to pay for the extra time and effort spent
The ironic thing was during COVID some people were complaining that their home expenses had gone up due to working from home and thus insisted they should be compensated for that too. The British government even issued tax credits to help such individuals.
It wastes time. It wastes fuel. WFH actually does work: there is this new fangled thingy called the internets that is a series of tubes which distributes things oh so magically.
But certain management types feel great knowing that their drones are being good little drones.
I didn’t see them lowering salaries when WFH was implemented in the first place so I don’t think that they should raise salaries when removing it. A few people I know had WFH written into their contracts so I guess they would be able to renegotiate or keep home working.
In the end this has always been about manager/owner power, not about getting work done or doing the right thing by your employees.
I remember at least proposals from companies like Facebook talking about lowering salaries for people moving to lower cost of living areas. Not sure how broadly it was implemented.
The real bind is fitting travel around family life that changed since 2020, kids going to different schools and spouse changing jobs means work life balance is shared differently for most people. I can see the issue going beyond pay, people can't be into places at once, but you can put the hours in when remote spread over the day.
I know multiple people first hand who moved away from their expensive homes to cheaper and bigger ones during the pandemic when WFH became a standard.
There are exactly zero ways you can force those people from their homes back to city apartments. Their kids go to school in the new city, their SOs might have in-person jobs there, they have a huge yard and better quality of living. Some of them theoretically work under an hour away from their current job.
If companies force WFH, they will just quit and find a new remote-only job.
Dell is in Round Rock which has precisely zero train options besides the model railway exhibition each December, so unless you’re one of the Borrowers, you’re talking crap.
Round Rock is near where a lot of those large and cheap houses are in the first place. The people in small and expensive apartments downtown moved near Round Rock or Cedar Park during the pandemic.
> You are free to live closer if you want to work there
How? Most people can barely make rent as it is, the problem is that almost everywhere the large employers are in the city centers and people can't reasonably move close to there.
Why would people suddenly need to take up childcare? Did those employees conflate WFH with skimping on childcare? I know the answer to that.. I had those colleagues. It's a shitty move on their part, their output was definitely less and reflects poorly on people who actually did their hours WFH and outputted more!
> Why would people suddenly need to take up childcare?
...that's what immediately struck me as weird as well about the article. It seems to be presuming that raising young children while simultaneously doing a fulltime WFH job would sort of naturally be a position that an employee would now find themselves in.
Elsewhere in this thread, the question of whether or not that's possible is being hotly debated. But, be that as it may, I would expect that, if this does occur, it would occur by agreement between employer and employee and with some sort of accommodation around lost productivity.
But, maybe, the actual substance of the matter is that Dell allowed its people to WFH and now all of those couples that could previously have only one breadwinner due to having small children are suddenly drawing two fulltime salaries due to combining WFH with parenting responsibilities. If that's actually the case, then I kind of agree that there's a real problem there, but would contend that it's only tangentially related to WFH.
Huge mounds of salt because I'm not a parent - but I have colleagues that do that and it's never bothered me, I suppose I assume it's more a risk of interruption than it is stopping you putting the hours in at all. If someone was a strict '9-5' (or whatever) type and also had child(ren) interrupting or distracting them, then yeah, that's taking the mick a bit. But otherwise, it's not like I don't answer the door or empty the dishwasher or whatever.
Very young children obviously require a great deal of care, but somewhat older children might get dropped off by the school bus at 3 PM and then occupy themselves for a few hours at home with an adult present.
WFH means no commuting. Someone could have childcare arranged for their working hours, but if they're suddenly leaving the house an hour earlier and getting home an hour later, they'll need to make other arrangements.
Childcare is a job, especially with younger kids under, say, 6. The idea that you can execute childcare and your full time job effectively, simultaneously, is just a joke.
The idea that your job should be taking over your life is dangerous.
You work to live not the other way.
Family is more important than a job. So yeah, giving only 20-30% of your life to your job and keeping the rest for your family makes more sense than the other way around.
I basically agree, but that's not what OPs post was about. The fact is you cannot effectively work a full time information job while caring for children. WFH was never supposed to mean "childcare plus do some work when you have time".
Sure you can. There is no point in a child's life that requires undevoted attention 100% of the time.
There is no point in a child's life that requires 100% attention during the day.
Even once they reach preschool/primary they don't.
You are of the opinion that it is more important that an employee be available 100% of the time from 9 to 5, I am of the opinion that it is most important that an employee get their job done.
I would 100% prefer a competent employee where I have to block out some brief segment during the day, than someone less capable where I can schedule a meeting whenever I like from 9 to 5.
I would also 100% prefer an employee I can trust to do their job regardless of supervision than someone who needs hand holding for everything.
Handholding is for interns and new employees learning how to work in industry (vs. academia or opensource).
I expect FTEs to be able to do their job without persistent oversight, and I expect them to do their jobs without persistent oversight.
As a parent and a very crappy multitasker I try to be 100% present into what I am doing: spending time with my kids&family or working. Mixing the two doesn't really work for me and context-switching is also very costly.
Which is completely fair, but it's also wrong to do what folk are doing in this thread and state that that is universal, and that therefore at least one parent must be unemployed (I don't think that is the intent, but it is the outcome of what they are stating is fact: you can't WFH if you have kids, and therefore RTO is the only option, but you can't RTO if you have kids).
as someone mentioned above, in the long run it's impossible to do any intense work with kids under 6 in the house, you end up either neglecting them (probably by giving them an ipad to stare into for hours), or you end up neglecting work by doing activities with the kids.
Above 6-7 yo they are obligated to go to school, unless you homeschool, which is also incompatible with fulltime, good faith employment.
Schools don’t run the entire workday nor the entire work year. Especially if you work at one of those employers that likes their employees to work long hours, with “unlimited” (i.e. zero) vacation days. But that’s a somewhat different social malady.
Just because you are unable to get your job done while having children around doesn't mean that's true of others.
It tells me that your only measure of getting a job done is "are you 'doing your job' from 9 to 5 with no break" rather than "are you getting the work your job requires done". Which is the standard trope of all these "we must be in the office, because without being in the office we lack the emotional maturity and competence to do our job" asshats.
I am done listening to all this "you must be in the office to do a job that has no functional requirement to be in an office" BS from people who are apparently not capable of doing their own jobs without being hand held.
Just because you can't do your own job without being in an office doesn't mean other people can't, so stop projecting your own issues on others and accept that maybe other people have different weakness. I can recognize that "Getting my job done without an office" discipline isn't universal, why are you folk incapable of recognizing that your own weaknesses are not also universal?
> Just because you are unable to get your job done while having children around doesn't mean that's true of others.
No, it really is. There's probably some age threshold where you can say "I don't care what you're doing, don't bother me for the next X hours" (that's not taking care of your child though). Below that threshold... what do you expect to happen when your kid wants to play and has a meltdown next to you?
Some days they demand ~100% of your time and there's no way around it - you would not be able to do your job while trying to look after the kid.
I have to agree with a message you're replying to. It does work for some people, especially if both parents are present/work from home. You actually save 5hrs of commute time and have an hour for lunch. If you split it between two parents in a smart way it's smooth sailing. My wife and I both did it and we both progressed in our jobs at the same time.
Having two parents at home during that time is massively different though. "unable to get your job done while having children around" did not imply anyone else around. I agree with you that's much easier, but if that's what the original comment meant, they ignored a significant assumption.
> I mean… Do you always make so many random assumptions about the thoughts and lives of people you don’t know and know absolutely nothing about?
I'm not sure why you're accusing me of this, when I was replying to the person saying that if you're a single parent your only option is unemployment
> Let’s play this game.. Maybe your job is just not very demanding and you get paid for doing basically nothing all day?
Feel free to, maybe it is, I don't think so, but that's kind of moot as I don't have kids. What I do know is that I have plenty of coworkers who are parents who seem able to do their job while their kids are around, and my experience working with them was very periodically rescheduling meetings rather, and not once them being incapable of doing their job.
Let's try this again: I am not saying that looking after kids is easy. I am not saying that looking after kids takes time.
What I am saying is very simple: people who have kids, of any age, are able to do their jobs. Requiring them to return to office means immediately and instantaneously that at least one must quit. Not because they're not doing their job, but rather because their employer has required that they be in the office from 9 to 5, they're now (let's be optimistic) away from home from 8 to 6. At that point the message is extremely clear: if you have children you cannot work here. An absurd hypothetical of children need only one minute of you being there during the day means you can no longer be in the office, and therefore are no longer permitted to work for your employer. Again not because you're not doing your job, but because you're not in the office.
It's also super fun that childcare penalization disproportionately impacts women. In the US at least, you only get 12 weeks of guaranteed maternity leave, but it's generally recommended that you breastfeed for 6 months. So the mandatory RTO policies say "are you a new mother? time to stop being employed in tech because mothers don't belong here".
I just checked, and it turns out that babies and toddlers don't stay awake an in need of attention for 100% of every hour. They are also not awake for 100% of 9-5 work hours. This is not rocket science.
Here's the thing: if you're a decent human being and someone is in a meeting and their kid wakes up unexpectedly you can reschedule the meeting or delay it a couple of minutes. If someone is not in a meeting then who gives a damn if they spend an hour or two in the middle of the day playing with their kid?
It's super easy.
Any business has a choice. You can reward working exactly a 9 to 5, or you can reward getting the work done and doing incredible work.
You are making it absolutely crystal clear that you would rather a person who is doing a 9 to 5 and not remotely interested in doing anything else is more valuable than any amount of skill or work that isn't 100% available for BS meetings from 9-5.
It's also not lost on me that these policies universally favor people who don't have children, or who are not expected to look after children. While the deployment of child rearing would ideally be a 50/50 split, it is still split such that women are expected to do that, so a policy that says "you can have a job or you can have kids" is inherently biased against women.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Anyone who claims being a parent is "super easy" is immediately outing themselves as either someone who has never done it or someone who is really bad at it.
It is incredibly hard to deal with kids while working — for either the kind of job where you have to sit and mindlessly make widgets for 8 hours a day or the kind where you need to think and focus. Kids are not awake 100% of the time but a) when they are they demand up to and often 100% of your time, b) you don't get to decide when they are awake. As for your idea of "oh just reschedule the meeting or delay it": sure, once or twice that's fine, but if you had kids you'd know that this happens _all the time_ and feeling like a total flake who can't concentrate sucks for the parent and the employer.
(Yes, they can find a new job blah blah. I'm more concerned with your lack of empathy though.)
It seems like the only thing you're interested in is insisting that your work arrangement is the best and every other one is wrong, even when you aren't doing them or don't understand their challenges.
I don't believe you've spent extended time taking care of kids through whole days on your own while trying to get work done. It's not super easy, if it's possible at all. Seriously, either you've been in an exceptionally good situation (but the kids were a bit ignored) and you're just not aware of what those days look like for most people, or you're making things up and trolling actual parents.
I just checked, and it turns out that babies and toddlers don't stay awake an in need of attention for 100% of every hour. They are also not awake for 100% of 9-5 work hours. This is not rocket science.
Nope, just for the majority of that time. You might be able to squeeze in a couple of hours of work, but not anything remotely close to what you could do in a full work day.
Here's the thing: if you're a decent human being and someone is in a meeting and their kid wakes up unexpectedly you can reschedule the meeting or delay it a couple of minutes. If someone is not in a meeting then who gives a damn if they spend an hour or two in the middle of the day playing with their kid?
It's not an hour or two.
It's also not lost on me that these policies universally favor people who don't have children, or who are not expected to look after children. While the deployment of child rearing would ideally be a 50/50 split, it is still split such that women are expected to do that, so a policy that says "you can have a job or you can have kids" is inherently biased against women.
Whether or not you have kids is your choice, and it's on you to make the required arrangements for childcare. It's not on the employer - some of them are struggling as much as you are - to deal with your choices. In most developed countries, maternity leave (and paternity leave for those who have it) is paid for by taxes via social security, not the employer.
Sorry but this is just not true. You have to train your baby/toddler to sleep during the day as well. If two parents are both home and working from home it works pretty well. You save 5 hours of commute time and 2 hours for lunch. That's plenty of time to organise your day.
Before Covid, if someone was constantly being interrupted in meetings because of child care responsibilities when they were allowed to work from home, it was seen as a bad thing. WFH did not mean you didn’t pay for childcare.
Here is the problem, and it's not a technical problem, you guessed it, it's a people problem, and it doesn't have a solution, because people suck:
- It's probably more difficult to do great work WFH than F2F. But I mean "great", properly great stuff, novel, hard, high stakes, high pressure, high coordination, moonshot level.
- It's probably not difficult at all to do mid level boring stuff WFH, and everybody saves time and money on top.
- 99% of orgs do the later kind of work
- 99% of orgs don't like to admit they do the later kind of work
I guess we need to start enforcing WFH policy in our contracts. I have zero trust in companies to respect WFM without it. Something like, if they break the policy, an amount of X months will be paid for the employee.
An employment contract will absolutely exist for employees. Just because at-will means it can be terminated at any time doesn’t mean there is no contract.
Usually when you get a job offer you'll be sent an offer letter stating role, salary, start date, etc. Often companies ask you to sign it when you accept the offer, but those letters always include language explicitly stating that they don't constitute an employment contract.
I mean of course, starting a new job involves signing tons of paperwork. Employee agreements, IT security policies, sometimes codes of conduct or confidentiality agreements... but no contract.
Edit to my comment: Based on the answers below there seems to be confusion about employment contracts. Signing a letter that specifies your position and salary, as well as NDA forms, are all contracts, but not employment contracts in the traditional sense I meant here.
Traditional employment contracts, which were common years ago but are now used principally for C-suite positions, typically have terms employees can sue to enforce such as WFH.
For most positions in tech, nothing in the paperwork will give you a way of enforcing WFH if the company changes its policies.
That's what I meant by my comment above, which I can no longer edit. (I should have been clearer.)
Neither article gives Dell reasons for telling people to come in more often. The only quotes are from the past, and allude to productivity in new hires being low — the same reason Zuckerberg is bringing Meta back into the office.
I just got laid off in April after months of downtown and getting on bad terms with my manager. Out of the blue he started micromanaging me, and what was once a truely remote frontend job in a completely different timezone (good) became a game where he'd call me in the middle of my day (late evening for him) and then send me passive aggressive slack messages when I wasn't immediately available. There's this managerial idea that people need to be butt in seat ready to go on a video call whenever they feel like initiating it, and that's just one more thing that stripped autonomy away and removed any sense of agency I had in how I got my work done. I was already in a zoom call at 6am most days, so I'd work for a bit, rest or go outside to enjoy the limited daylight, then come back and finish or go to a cafe.
He was definitely promoted beyond his capability though, and as a "director of engineering" couldn't keep his hands out of the minutiae of day to day code discussion.
I think those that choose to stay at Dell, should now add their commute time to their working hours. Over the past three years we've clearly demonstrated that WFH is effective and productive - shift the cost of travel to the office onto the employers if they want butts in seats so badly.
All the people here saying WFH employees are happier than those who aren't are completely incorrect in the long term. This claim does not account for a very large group of employees: The junior engineer.
A junior learns at a fraction of the pace of a senior and relies on direct 1-1 help, together with learning by observing others. This is quite difficult online and requires a lot of hand-holding which most mid-level / seniors are not willing to do.
So saying that WFH policies should be the norm is no longer an acceptable statement. It sacrifices the longevity of the team and the company if juniors cannot be onboarded quickly.
Easy, in todays market, there are plenty of experienced developers who are being laid off so you don’t have to hire juniors.
There is no statistic longevity in tech. It’s well known that the quickest method to make more money especially when starting out is to change jobs after two or three years.
Salary compression and inversion is real.
Yes I know it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors. It’s a local maximization problem
It’s not like sitting in one place makes someone a more “senior” dev in anything but tenure. Juniors who stay at one company tend not to be developers with 10 years of experience at the end, but instead developers with 1 year of experience 10 times.
> If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors
It's self-correcting: the fewer seniors there are, the more they cost. Eventually hiring a junior becomes the more economical option. The market gets exactly as many seniors as it deserves :)
Companies generally offload the expensive resources first requiring the cheaper, juniors to step up and take on more responsibilities. This is good of course, but if the junior cannot get support to learn their new responsibilities, they'll just be stressed, we'll get lower quality code and overall the morale goes down.
Junior developers do “negative work” almost by definition. They can’t work independently without guidance. If they can, they are inappropriately leveled and should be at least mid level developers.
Not just juniors. I'm a senior engineer (10+ years exp). I recently changed teams, and even with knowing how things work at the company, onboarding has been challenging. It takes a lot more active effort on my end, and the results are still worse than in-person onboarding.
I mean, boo hoo. I taught myself programming by reading docs and stackoverflow while working head down for years at a company that had no other professional developers. 1.5 hours commute each way. I'd 100% have taken a WFH arrangement over that and I'd be just as good.
All i can say to that is well done! But a company that sells software today requires far more mentorship for the junior than figuring it out yourself as a lone developer in a non software company. Take telecoms for example where you cannot even Google the right acronym let alone understand how to use the company's internal programming framework to build an application that won't be deployed for another year. Most juniors drown with such large loads of info in my experience.
I don't think the return to office trend will abate until the economy returns to growth mode.
We are in a tightening economy where stock prices are jumping double digit percentages from layoff announcements.
Everyone seems to recognize that forcing employees to return to office will result in attrition (aka soft-layoff).
Perhaps when growth becomes the focus again, companies will switch back to work from home. The public line of reasoning will be something dumb like "eliminating office costs" or "reducing emissions associated with commute".
3 days in the office is fine for me. Though I work sometimes with hardware. Big corp I work for asked to be in the office 4 days and the managers asked in private to be whole week here and they might spare us from next wave of layoffs. Logical solution is job search. I feel very bad for my new subordinate. One year ago I promised him nice salary, good home office rules (he’s doing remote master degree) and rather boring tasks. Salary was reduced half year ago and now full back to the office. Poor guy…
Companies think that a hybrid model is some kind of fair compromise, or perhaps the best of both worlds.
Hybrid means you'll commute to work to arrive in an half-empty office. In this office are people sitting in calls all day.
You cannot have good old fashioned face-to-face meetings in a hybrid model. Because part of the crew will be remote on any given day.
Likewise, you cannot catch up on a project at the coffee corner, because the remote folks won't see that. You need to put all of that in writing, just like you do when everyone is remote.
The work-related stuff does not change back to the old ways when you go hybrid, it will remain in remote mode.
What hybrid does offer is in-person socialization. Breaks, lunch walks, etc.
If its not left up to 100% employee choice and nothing else (and therefore, the policies, processes and procedures don't equally accommodate remote workers) then I think its a power play, as there is no discernible benefit to the business, as others have stated, the Microsoft study that came out, as have other studies, shown that WFH has been a net increase in worker productivity.
I do think it should be an employee choice though, there are some folks, even if its less than majority, that work better in an office, for whatever reason, and they should be supported too
One thing that I worry about is that the “choice” is actually not real.
Those individuals that work better in an office setting, do they work better when everyone else is in the office and they get to interact with them in person?
If the person shows up to an office that is pretty sparsely populated and then has to sit in Teams calls — does that even meet their desire?
I’m saying this as someone who is strongly pro WFH, have seen my own productivity rise, etc.
The idea is that indeed, yes, choice is real. Being in an office should have tangible benefits beyond seeing people (its nice to just not be home to work). Having to be on calls isn't supposed to be negated by being in an office, since you need to accommodate remote workers too right?
If the only reason you're going into the office is to socialize with other people, then I think there's bigger questions to ask
Unfortunately we live in a world where business leadership at most companies can be boiled down to "monkey see, monkey do". Leaders at mediocre companies can mimic what great companies are doing, and usually get some percentage of the results that the great companies obtained.
And, merely appearing to increase productivity is often just as valuable as actually increasing productivity, at least from the perspective of an individual manager.
Forced return to office has the benefit of "everyone else is doing it" and at the same time, management can pretend like it has measurable benefits to the business, even if that runs contrary to the available evidence.
It's hard to teach old dogs new tricks. Management doesn't like wfh because they've probably been "managing" for a long time and would have to change the way they work. Ask a Sr. dev to stop doing what they think they're good at and now start doing something else in a different language with different metrics for success and you'll get the same reaction.
> The news comes from COO Jeff Clarke, who sees the move as one that begins to more clearly define what hybrid working means for the company.
Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. It's not a solution, it's a new problem.
Generally, when management creates a new problem, consultants pop up to sell them a solution. Do we he have an industry of "hybrid work consultants" yet?
I'd love to see a number of businesses split into companies that are Office or WFH, and see the competition that occurs.
My guess is that ultimately high performers will migrate to one or the either and it may depend on what industry. I think many of the conversations happen in silos (software devs) and the reality is messier than anyone thinks.
If you're remote and move, then work requires you to change office location, in UK employment law I think they have to cover moving expenses. That could mean you get a moving allowance that you put into bricks. I'm not sure how it works but I'd hope that the building and land at kept at the same size.
If a company makes a promise like this, and you either accepted the job because of it, or you already had the job but did something like moving across the country because of it, and they then break their promise, would that count as constructive discharge for purposes of unemployment?
I'd be really curious to read the memos — if there is any... — explaining the rationale leading to those decisions. What concrete problems have they seen with the WFH setup? But also what advantages? How does it compare to the pros and cons of working at the office?
These companies made a bad bet on the long-term impact of the pandemic. At the time, it seemed like remote work was the inevitable future, but now we are out of the pandemic and it seems totally possible to return to before, so why not?
I might not work for them, but this does affect my perception about them and potentially purchasing products from them if they treat their people like this.
The entitlement is bizrre. Sorry but you need to go to office and collaborate with your team members and be part of the office culture. Not sure how working in your pajamas is good for anyone. Obviously there are edge cases but the babying is out of control. Get up and go to work. The entire country runs people working important jobs in medicine, utilities, plumbing, etc who don't get to write code in their pajamas. We need to do a salary swap with actual essential workers..people have lost the sauce.
I wouldnt categorize my job as just doing tasks. It's more of working with others to reach common goals. Just because the task can be done at home doesn't mean its optimal. At the end of the day get up and go to work. Adults are turning into children now.
I mean I'm kind of shocked we're still getting away with WFH at all; it was just a blip in time and will be gone within 5-10 years entirely. There are very few pure software roles that don't require high-bandwidth, interactive, in-person communications. Simply from a political view, those who are in the office more, by definition, are winning (politics is people).
> There are very few pure software roles that don't require high-bandwidth, interactive, in-person communications.
I would counter that new tools will surface, and they will be remote oriented, making it even easier for people to work from home. At some point, only the "old guard" would want to go back to the office, and will eventually diminish dramatically, like paper did after computers took over.
> Simply from a political view, those who are in the office more, by definition, are winning.
While this may be true, what about upper management who are fully remote?
Strictly my opinion: upper management who are not servant leaders and individual contributors of their own account are, in fact, doomed. No amount of Kafka-esque office theater will save them from cuts.
As for support businesses (food / clothing / commercial real estate / parking / technical services), nearly all of that is also doomed. Urban planners had best figure out how to address the issues of keeping more valuable services (commercial kitchens, entertainment, boutique retail) from fleeing to places closer to home.
How so? There are still many more people doing fine working from home now than before the pandemic. I would say we probably have enough data to judge that WFH works for some jobs/businesses and not others. I don’t think many people expected every business to switch to 100% permanent WFH. The fact that some companies are pulling back doesn’t mean the experiment has failed.
Or probably just some politics based on beliefs and sensitivities took hold, as often, not specific to this company and topic? ;)
(Otherwise, why not bring up this data to justify something that you know will frustrate some employees?)
Maybe it's down to management style.
It's long known that (at least in somewhat creative and self-directed jobs) workers who are motivated and happy with their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Managers then have to work hard, to keep motivation up and people happy. Let's call this the "supportive" management style.
It's also known that frustrated, unhappy workers are more likely to skip as much work as they can get away with, and do only as much as they are forced/required to do. Managers than have to work hard to control and monitor everyone, to keep the slack to a minimum. Let's call this the "adversarial" management style.
In one of those styles, WFH employees can be more productive, more happy, and more efficient. In the other, WFH employees can't be monitored closely enough to keep them from slacking.
Some managers prefer one style over the other, and not many are able to switch styles.