One aspect I don't see mentioned in the article is relocation. Remote work allows you to live virtually wherever you want. Having to go to an office often means having to live near a big city with overpriced subpar housing, possibly leaving family and friends behind. That's a huge deal breaker for me personally.
My initial reaction was that WFH allows employees to work for anyone in the country, and therefore employers are opposed because it lets the national market instead of the local market determine the price they have to pay for talent, and that employers are "fixing" the problem by demanding in-office.
On second glance, though, employees also face a national market rather than a local one, and can be underbid for the job by anyone in the country. Maybe employers like that, and employees don't.
But maybe it's like this: WFH means that employees can leave more easily. If you work in the office, and you're in my town, there's only so many places you can go. I can mistreat you (bad bosses, bad raises, bad working conditions), and your options are somewhat limited, and you're more likely to stay. But if you're full remote, the whole country is open to you (without even a relocation), so you're more likely to not take it.
So I suspect that maybe bad bosses and bad companies want to avoid WFH, because remote employees are less constrained to put up with the bad conditions.
Except these big RTO companies are mostly located in huge cities. Also, working currently in the office does not make it more difficult to leave and find a full remote job.
It seems funny to me how people always look for the ulterior motives and give basically no chance to the explanation CEOs give (collocation leads to a more productive organization).
>collocation leads to a more productive organization.
Because it's horseshit, and everyone knows it. The only orgs that truly need colocation are those built around non-digital machines. Anything data based can be handled through one screen as well as another.
It’s not entirely bullshit, as it does require slightly different behavior. Stubborn managers who refuse to adapt will lose efficiency in WFH teams.
More likely to me is that many managers were coasting and not needing to actually track work, manage, etc. there’s a big pushback when they’re forced to actually do their job and not just rely on butts in seats.
>give basically no chance to the explanation CEOs give (collocation leads to a more productive organization).
Well no, there have been years of chances for those CEOs demonstrate their position. That's precisely why no one believes them anymore.
The problem for them is that there has been zero evidence for what they're saying. No one has been able to actually demonstrate these supposed benefits (or, more precisely, the supposed harms to productivity that WFH brings). You can see this in how their claims shifted over time: in the early days of the pandemic WFH shift they offered the productivity claims you note, but it soon became clear that there wasn't any evidence for that. Then the claims shifted to vaguer, non-measurable ones about office culture and exchanges of ideas. When that didn't really convince anyone it finally shifted to "you have to because we said so".
So you're getting it precisely backwards: it's the proponents of returning to the office that now offer theories of conspiracies and secret data that totally support these moves but somehow can't be shown to anyone.
> Remote work allows you to live virtually wherever you want.
That's not exactly true per se. My wife is from the country of Tunisia and my plan was to live and work from there, but once I got to the offer stage at each and every company said I must work within the US citing IRS regulations. While I'm not entirely clear why I've also seen a number of remote jobs that are only eligible in certain states within the US as well.
The situation is even worse if you happened to move to a US territory because you're in a quasi-unemployable zone since US companies won't hire in most of the territories (I have never been given a specific reason) and the EU basically bans business with a few of them for odd tax reasons (that shouldn't apply since the banking system is still run by US institutions).
Or moving your family if you have one. I guess I’m still young for recruiters to expect me to have kids so I get contacted about jobs in other states like it’s no thing.
I wonder if we’re just fragmenting into two workforces.
The kind of work that can be done remotely (programming, design, sales, etc) and the kind they can’t (retail, weird bosses and extroverts who feel they must be in office).
So it makes sense that 50% won’t consider. I recruited for some software dev positions recently and applicants said that non-remote offices were just a different philosophy.
The remote-by-default working style that started during the pandemic has been the single biggest change in my entire adult life (well, that and getting kids). Talking to people who don't have the remote option for legit reasons (like working with hardware that requires office presence), it seems that they don't really get how big of a difference it is. As you said, some sort of fragmenting has already happened.
I'm a SWE, and we went from full office to full remote for about 6 months when covid hit. I didn't particularly like working fully remote, and went back and have been back at the offices full time since then.
That highly depends on the person. I’m primarily WFH for the last 10 years, like anything it’s not a one size fits all.
To me the benefits massively outweigh the negatives. Mostly commute tbh. It just feels more human to me in a world where it feels like your entire life revolves around work. 10 hour days between work, lunch, commute, etc. weekends are full of chores that I didn’t have time to do during the week. Balance is way out of whack, to me personally.
I agree and I think that there are a lot of weird side effects to this (potentially, at least).
I live in NYC and go into the office two days a week, which honestly suits my lifestyle just great. But I used to pay for a monthly metrocard, now I pay (much less per month) per ride. Mass transit requires a certain level of ridership in order to be sustainable. In 2023 that subway ridership was at 68% of pre-pandemic levels so not the disastrous drop-off some feared but still a significant drop. Should these trends continue governments are going to have to find some way to equity between lower income workers that must travel to their job and higher income remote workers. Likely taxing the latter, which will be very unpopular.
> Likely taxing the latter, which will be very unpopular
Better civics education should be able to overcome this vieled "fuck you, I got mine" attitude. Richer cities already subsidize rural areas, and rural areas support cities with non-monetary benefits like food. Politicians shouldn't be able to so easily divide us when we need to support each other.
Most urban value is exploited by exurban and suburban population, while paying very little tax towards urban upkeep.
Similarly, small up-state cities rely on the central 'bread-winner' city while overwhelmingly voting against QOL improvements for that city in state legislature.
Rural areas don't factor in too much.
Only in the US can it be acceptable for the city's governing body to live outside city bounds. There is an absence of basic incentive alignment and the outcomes show that.
Congestion pricing, limiting free parking, mandating weaker housing restrictions around regional transit, etc. are tried and tested ways for cities to get their due.
The cities are at fault too. NYC's insistence on housing 100k+ illegal immigrants in manhattan's 3 star hotels is a self inflicted wound. NYC isn't the worst, but I started making a self-inflicted wound list for west coast cities, then we'd be here for a long time.
Honestly, US are badly managed in general. However, produce so much economic value that they're able to brute force their way out of the mismanagement.
Knowing history, brute force only goes so far....
edit: replied to the wrong person. This was meant for a child comment. But point still stands.
I suppose it makes sense. Musk tried to put a label around it by calling that group 'laptop class'. I have some pet theories, but those center around commercial real estate.
It's a fun theory, and sounds rather plausible at first blush, but do so many of the upper management class really have so many commercial real estate investments that they're willing to break the effectiveness of their core business?
I know of at least one company with an RTO drive but leased the office, and the land owner doesn't have external shareholders. Also the company paid for quite a snack supply, so backsides in seats actively cost a relatively small but still not trivial amount of money.
there’s at least some municipalities that are essentially bribing employers with tax incentives to RTO to prop up dependent businesses like restaurants.
It could be a non metric cost vs a metric cost. They RTO and deadlines slip but they can blame that on anything. Versus losses on the balance sheet from real estate holdings. I don’t necessarily think the real estate theory is right, but I do think calculations like that happen all the time by tech execs.
There is obviously not something conspiratorial here since crossing the conspiracy would have such value for an individual company.
I think though there is a network of decision makers that when you take into account this high dimension of decision variables, there is an emergent alignment of self interest towards the office.
I work for a very small company and of course no one comes into the office. We are small enough and lack enough of those variables that we don't have to perform this office theater like bigger firms. The bigger firms don't really have a choice when you sum all the inputs.
No doubt. This isn't a one-size-fits-all thing. Some people absolutely love working in the office. Some people just prefer it. Others have a garbage home office and will never have any home setup conducive to work. I 10000% agree with this, and anyone who says otherwise is being dreadfully foolish.
That doesn't explain even a little bit why folks who do not like (or even very, very strongly dislike) coming into the office are being threatened, are getting cut off from any and all promotions, or even being fired for continuing to work from their home office.
> If you put any effort into the theory [that the "force everyone to come into the office with threats of removal from the promotion track, or removal from one's position" situation that's ongoing may be related to plummeting commercial real estate valuations and attempts to prop them up] at all it immediately falls apart.
I do not want to go into specifics as they may reveal the place I work at. However, without going into those specifics, I will state that my current employer does have some above average exposure to real estate and the speech some of us got from our managers was 'we should do our part'( in helping CRE recover ). Now, just because it is simple and straightforward, does not mean it is wrong. Oftentimes, money can more easily explain things that seem complex. I don't want to speculate as to why it is branded and dismissed as low effort/reddit origin, but I personally think it is weird. It is, frankly, way more reasonable explanation than other rationale put forth.
edit: Come to think of it, I understand the why. Up until now, it was all about 'productivity and collaboration'. The change in rationale would be rather jarring.
People whose jobs could only be done on-site were somewhat recently all laid off at the same time, and a lot of those people never want to be in that position again.
Other people whose jobs could only be done on-site were deemed essential enough to require them to work, but not essential enough to be treated with minimal decency by the public, and a lot of those people never want to be in that position again.
One of the most significant aspects of this issue is too often ignored. Inevitably, people focus on the _location_ aspect of this topic, and its impacts. Equally significant in my experience is the fact that my workspace at home is significantly superior to the toy office at work. Work offices have been undergoing constant degradation for decades now. Today, an "office" is too frequently a randomly-assigned tiny surface with cheap-as-possible computer & peripherals, in a loud space, from which I interact with team members over video.
Imagine being a machinist where you get barely serviceable tools at work, versus a fully-equipped custom workshop at home. For me, this isn't about Covid and recent events — it's the end state of a work environment that has seen decades of dismantling.
And Ireland, especially Dublin, and other large towns/cities are experiencing a housing crisis; And I can attest to the poor state of the traffic network for commuting (by European standards, I know Americans are more willing to spend hours commuting) so commuting in is less viable.
Yes. I actually think the Irish thing is less misleading then the fact that the headline implies some certainty about what are obviously just claims that may or may not be related to the decisions jobseekers would actually make when presented with an offer.
Well, HN is something like 70% US people. So "this is for Ireland" is worth pointing out in a way that "this is for US" isn't, because US is kind of the implicit default option here.
(It's not US-only, by any means, and info about Ireland is not something we ignore because "nobody cares about that". But it's reasonable to point out that this is not data from the conditions that most people here assume by default.)
Are there any public stats on this kind of demographics?
Other than IP and the content of comments, I can't think of how would you get that data in this kind of site
Um... I've seen such a statistic cited here, but I don't remember the exact number. I tried to be conservative - I'm pretty sure it wasn't below 70%, but as I say, I don't remember precisely.
Now that you ask, I'm also not sure of the source of that statistic. I'm pretty sure dang knows, but he may not be the source of the information. It may have just been someone's informed guess, or uninformed guess for that matter.
I do know that there are lots of people not from the US here, and that you shouldn't assume, for example, that English is someone's first language. Also shouldn't assume US vs England even for native English speakers (so don't attempt to "correct" British spelling).
I'm a remote software dev, and I prefer it. I won't go back to that silly commute garbage so that I can carry my laptop from my house to my cold, lifeless, work setup. If I could work on hardware, spend all day soldering, and building things with my hands, I would gladly go into the biz. If I could go back to having hardware at the office I could build, install stuff on, and control again... Oh how I wish I could do something like that instead. I'm so tired of the code. Simply dragging me to an office, so I can talk to other people that aren't in the office via email, chat, video etc. is friggin' dumb.
