Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Tell HN: Salesforce is mandating RTO 3 days/wk for all employee
209 points by Mandatum on Feb 13, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 225 comments
Applies to ALL employees within 40 miles of an office.

Announced internally in what’s known as V2MOM, which is an internal top-down KPIs. All managers will be judged based on this metric.

This applies to employees at all organisations under its umbrella, including Slack. Includes engineers.




"Managers will be judged", meaning if an employee does not want to relocate, it is their direct manager's problem. Sounds like a great way to ruin a working dev-boss relationship.


> if an employee does not want to relocate, it is their direct manager's problem

Doesn't OP say that this only applies to employees that live within 40 miles of an office? It sounds like if you're remote, you're not affected.


40 miles is quite a lot if you don't own a car. In the city I live in, it would take me several hours of commuting (including several inter-system transfers) to get to an office that's 40 miles away from me.


If your commute's too long, just move further away from the office /j


Indeed -- I live just under 40 miles from a Salesforce office, and I used to work at Salesforce. I went fully-remote as soon as I could, because living just under 40 miles away meant that my commute was typically an hour and a half _each way_, sometimes worse than that if there was any sort of atypical congestion.


40 miles is absurd for the majority of metropolitan areas.

That is easily a 1:30hr commute, one way. Depending where your office is, 4 hours a day of commuting..


I used to commute 1.5-2 hours a day for 6 years since I was a junior after the recession and had no options. Nowadays as a highly valued senior, no fucking way.


My pre-pandemic commute was 40 miles, including three interstate highways, averaging 2hours each way, sometimes up to 3hours when busy. Did that one for 10 years.

Took remote work as soon as company offered it and will never go back to the commute.


Thats not how most of the US works.


The big tech companies executing on these return-to-office "strategies" aren't in "most of the US"; they're in very specific large metropolitan areas of the US (and also, large metropolitan areas of other countries.)


I would absolutely quit if i lived 40 miles away... 80 miles every day driving sounds awful. even if you lived right off a freeway and the company was right off a freeway and you have 0 traffic with a 75 mph speed limit you are still doing an hour a day just driving in idealized conditions. rough.


It's not every day, it's 3 days per week. However, I have done that before and it gets old very quickly.


> 80 miles every day driving sounds awful

Just to be clear, it's 3 days, not every day.


That's just as bad, you have to own a second car if you have a spouse now too.


yeah i get that and maybe i wasn't precise enough in my language on the original post but even 3 days a week is a bridge too far for me. knowing that these things are done incrementally usually the writing on the wall for 5 days a week is not that far down the line once everyone gets used to working 3 days and then the mangers says "we missed some quarterly target and they are used to 3 days lets make it 5 and eek out a little more 'productivity'."


If coming into the office 3 days a week is a bridge too far I can only assume you are either rich or so skilled that you'll never be without a job. I'm an older IT guy and when I started unemployment was around 10% so you took whatever job was presented to you, an hour commute each ways wasn't even close to a big deal. I guess we'll see how this all plays out, right now it appears that there are more jobs than workers but that can change quickly and maybe it won't be a bridge too far when you want to keep a roof over your head and feed your family.


that's over an hour minimum in best case, unrealistic scenario... the real drive for these people is going to be at least 2 hours a day... probably more like 2.5 hours in the areas we are talking about.


40 miles in silicon valley is a 90+ minute commute each way.


Oh I know — I live here. But GP is talking about people not being willing to relocate (as in, from other places back to near an office). That isn't required.


Interesting to note that San Jose is 39 miles from the Salesforce tower.


> It sounds like if you're remote, you're not affected.

For now - first they change to hybrid 3 day within 40 miles, you don’t think they can change it again ?


Several year back when Yahoo decided that everyone needed to be in the office my company decided to play follow the leader. I got a note from HR telling me I had to go into the closest office which was about 30 miles from my house. I explained that the drive was about 90 minutes each way if the sun was shining, honest to god HR sends me a link from Mapquest showing it was only 65 minutes (at 2:00pm n a Tuesday). To make matters more interesting one of my co-workers didn't have an office in his state and he was told that he could move near an office or be fired. What they didn't plan for was the thousands of employees that needed desk space in offices built for a few hundred. Suddenly HR sends out another email saying we would remain remote temporarily and that was 8 years ago.


40 miles is pretty far. That's pretty easily an hour long commute, and maybe one you weren't planning on making.


40 miles can be a 4 hour/day transit commute or a 2 hour/day vehicle commute in SFbay, the region of the Salesforce headquarters.


I mean, 40 miles in the Bay Area is 3-4 hours of driving each day you have to commute, longer if they're also going to require 9-5.

That's basically saying "because I want to feel power over my plebs I'm going to give you a 20-25% pay cut".


This isn’t great for people who live nearby and would like an arrangement where they’re mostly remote and visit every once in a while.


So managers with more pull have less reason to care.


Why not just have the manager take everyone's badge, and use it every day?

I wonder if the timing on RFID is loose enough to proxy it over the web.


infosec will see badged people connecting to remote VPN instead of in-office wifi.

Just don't cheat and fraud, easily detectable


If the only way to detect this "fraud" is that VPNs are in use, then why bother returning to the office? Seems like it's only a cost center with no added benefit.


Control. The old guard of large business cannot stand that people have their own lives away from work and how will they know that someone is actually working rather than collecting a paycheck?


It is actually odd they perceive it like this. I work much harder from home than I ever did from the office.

It is impossible to hide doing WFH like one can do “endlessly” collaborating with your colleagues at the office.


Not odd at all. First-level managers may still have a tenuous grasp of being an empathetic person, but managers of managers are only interested in growing their kingdom. To that end, WFH makes it harder for them to demonstrate a need for more headcount.

Let me make it very clear: Employees that WFH are more productive, so you don't need more of them. If you don't need more headcount, the executive has no use. If the executive has no use, they will be executed (symbolically, as a re-org).


It's not odd, it's 50% incompetence 50% feelings of self-importance


there are countless ways to detect fraud, these days we leave digital footprints all over the place, I just gave one simple example how to do it in 5 minutes with 2 SQL queries


Or maybe just don't cheat because it's not ethical?


Expect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023. They know that due to layoffs, people are likely to stay.

There is a case to be made for certain sectors definitely being more productive while at the office, especially those that are working on future products. The issue is that from a management standpoint, you can't make certain people come in while letting others who can easily do work from home stay with WFH. So generally, there will be policies mandating everyone to return to a certain extent.


IMO the cat is out of the bag at this point. People know that working from home is a compelling benefit, even worth taking a salary hit for. Management knows workers want this. Recruiters know it. All it will take is one major company to say "screw this, lets offer wfh and reap the rewards" and then they win the title of best company to work in that sector and well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them. Employees who have had experience working from home are like a dog thats gotten a taste for blood at this point. They will always be a flight risk if they don't have it. This is the new world.


> well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them.

When I asked "well qualified candidates" what they prefer, there was a split between hybrid, remote and in-office with hybrid winning a plurality. People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming. Much easier to tackle complex design over a whiteboard than trying to do so over zoom. In-person beats video when it comes to transferring thoughts.


Don't bother. This is a religious topic.

People who are pro WFH will defend it to the death, those pro RTO the same and God[1] forbid you want a hybrid regime.

[1] God of offices, of course.


The difference is that pro-RTO people want to force RTO on everyone, whereas pro-WFH are not.


Pro-WFH people absolutely want companies to embrace fully remote. I haven't yet had a discussion where, after traversal of enough rabbit-holes, everyone agrees that only viable options are (A) fully-remote, (B) fully-office, (C) hybrid where everyone is in office on the same days.

Just to give one specific example - if half the team is in office huddled around a conference room table and the rest half is dialing in via Zoom, the ones in the common room will have far better connection and the remote members will feel neglected.


> Pro-WFH people absolutely want companies to embrace fully remote. I haven't yet had a discussion where, after traversal of enough rabbit-holes, everyone agrees that only viable options are (A) fully-remote, (B) fully-office, (C) hybrid where everyone is in office on the same days.

I have not had a discussion at all with anyone, that says "people should be banned from the office". I have not met a single WFH person who has said anything other than "people should not have to go to the office if working in they are more productive at home".

I don't know where this "the only options are A, B, or C come from" when quite clearly "people who don't need to be in the office don't need to come into the office" is what every WFH person (I guess outside of nonsense "thought" pieces from random people trying to get press coverage, rather than actual employees effected by these choices) has wanted. "Hybrid" plans are entirely about trying to mitigate the unrelenting harm caused by mandatory RTO.

We even get that some times it would be useful to be in the office - but again, non-mandatory RTO folk are not banning offices, whereas RTO folk are banning WFH.

> Just to give one specific example - if half the team is in office huddled around a conference room table and the rest half is dialing in via Zoom, the ones in the common room will have far better connection and the remote members will feel neglected.

If this is how your company operates continuously that sounds like a horrific work environment. Also, people who are working from home are not feeling "neglected". Again, if someone is unable to handle online communication they can go to an office - for larger companies they clearly aren't going to be alone - but you can't project their feelings of neglect on to others. I want to be clear here, "Mandatory office work because I need X, therefore those WFH people must need X as well, and the only solution is to force them to come in to the office" is projecting your personal feelings on to other people, it is not "caring" about those people, and framing it as such is dishonest.

Here is what my "hybrid" work week looks like:

    * I get paid for 40 hours of work

    * I am now required to spend 12 hours driving to and from the office each week.

    * I am not paid for that time, nor are my deliverables reduces.

    * I am spending ~25-30% more hours on work, but am not getting paid any more. Hence I've taken a 20-25% cut to hourly income.
On the plus side there are some huge benefits:

    * People can knock on my office door to interrupt me

    * I contribute to the economy by having to pay for a dog walker, having to buy an additional car, etc

    * I get the comfort of working with a mask on for four hours. It's only four hours, because if I head to or from the office earlier or later my commute would increase by an hour or more each office day.
Seriously, I understand that for some people the opportunity to socialize in person in the office is necessary, and they can do that. But for people who don't need to do that, mandatory return to office is horrifically expensive in numerous metrics, and has literally no benefit.


If half the workforce is in the office and the other half is remote, remote is going to suffer in their career progression. Not because that is "right", but simply because we are all "humans" who place a higher value on in-person interaction and physical proximity.

As a specific example of tyranny of remote workers, I have worked at a company which had the idiotic rule of everyone dialing in from their own laptops even if many of us were in office and some of us were remote. Just to ensure that remote workers are on a level playing field. Needless to say, that policy never worked in practice.


> If half the workforce is in the office and the other half is remote, remote is going to suffer in their career progression. Not because that is "right", but simply because we are all "humans" who place a higher value on in-person interaction and physical proximity.

"I will punish people who don't work in the office, because I want to be in the office and everyone else must also do what makes me happy, regardless of impact on them"

Again, I am so tired of listening to people who are incapable of working outside of office environments claiming that their own weaknesses apply to everyone else as well. Just because you can't deal handle not being in an office doesn't mean others can't, just because you can't communicate outside of a conference room doesn't mean others can't (otherwise the last 30+ years of open source development is fiction), and just because you need your work to provide you social interaction does not mean other people need it.

I get it, for you an office is better, but ffs stop then claiming that it must be better for everyone else, and that anyone claims otherwise is basically lying.

> As a specific example of tyranny of remote workers, I have worked at a company which had the idiotic rule of everyone dialing in from their own laptops even if many of us were in office and some of us were remote.

Unless the point was to keep groups of people from collecting in small poorly ventilated rooms during a pandemic I can't imagine any other possible reason for this policy.

I guess it could also be some portions of the company recognized that some of its management and employees were not able to do their jobs well enough to recognize the value of work done by their coworkers and instead rate performance based on other metrics - looks, how chatty they are, etc. Of course if we weren't having the mandatory office discussion we could also ask "are people who aren't able to rate coworker performance when they're remote using the same BS and biased measures for determining performance when every one is in person as well?".

It goes without saying, that based on everything you just said, that you are saying that it's reasonable to discriminate against people with medical reasons that actually prevent them from returning to the office. After all, if you're immunocompromised, you should know that you aren't as good a worker as that person who wanders around disrupting everyone in the office.


> I have not had a discussion at all with anyone, that says "people should be banned from the office"

Just look around, most of the threads here have someone chime in saying "i'm 10x productive at home with my wife and my dogs by my side, so my RTO CEO is an idiot". In plenty of these discussions, people don't even think about anything but themselves, in the most narrow way.


...your example is a person saying that they are more productive at home, and saying that forcing them to return to the office is stupid.

It is not a person saying "offices should be banned".

Because you seem to have difficulty with this: a person saying "forcing everyone to return to the office is stupid" is not "don't allow anyone to work from an office". Your preferred alternative "force people to come into the office" is definitionally "ban wfh".

I do appreciate that all the "I need an office to do my job" people seem to try to denigrate anyone who disagrees as in your example "i'm 10x productive at home with my wife and my dogs by my side" which is clearly intended to make this sound false. Rather than more realistically:

  * Commuting for a mandatory RTO essentially a massive pay reduction: unnecessary but mandatory commuting is fundamentally unpaid labor. For me "hybrid" RTO is essentially a 20-25% reduction in per hour income.

  * Office environments are filled with people who routinely interrupt their coworkers. It's hard not to imagine that there's an overlap between this group, and the mandatory RTO folk who insist that work is for socializing.
To be clear, I have two dogs, one of which is still relatively young and an idiot, and he is less distracting than many coworkers that I have had. It goes without saying that my wife isn't a distraction because that whole mutual respect thing.

I understand, there are many people who need an office environment to work, for a variety of reasons (focus, home distractions, or not having any other social environment). The problem is that this group of people - which I'm taking to include you - isn't saying "I need this, so I'm going to RTO", it's saying "I need this, therefore everyone must RTO". Oftentimes this argument is coupled with an implicit or explicit "I need RTO for this reason, therefore those other people do to and the only reason that they don't want to RTO, is that they don't want to work".

Again: No one is saying "ban offices", they are saying "offices are not necessary, and mandating them for everyone is at best equally productive, often times not, and certainly makes work much less pleasant for many of us".

A real hybrid system where people don't have to come to the office for no reason makes things better for people who do want/need to RTO as well: fewer people in offices means less doubling of offices, or less dense seating in open plan pens (noting of course that open plan and similar have only ever been shown to be worse for productivity).


But just knowing that both camps exist is important, because it means the "benefit" of fully remote is only seen that way to a subset of candidates. It makes it kind of tricky to quantify when thinking of say total compensation.


> When I asked "well qualified candidates" what they prefer

Not sure if I'm "well qualified" to you, but I assume I am...

When I was searching for a job, I basically told the recruiter/manager what they wanted to hear (after research them). I can work wherever, and since I'm located in a city, a commute is easy. There's a benefit to telling someone what they want to hear so you seem like a "culture fit".

Realistically, I like hybrid but not the 3/2 per week breakdown we see a lot. I want to WFH for 2 weeks doing my work in peace, then go to office for a few days of busy planning and socializing. This is especially helpful around holidays, vacations, etc where my schedule is disrupted and I don't want to be forced to commute. Being told in-office only would be the worst option, because the flexibility of being remote for package delivery, family events, travel, etc is too important. I understand the value people profess of in-person work, but its one of those things that benefits the company more than the individual.


Based on your nuanced reply, you already seem "well qualified" :-)

> I want to WFH for 2 weeks doing my work in peace, then go to office for a few days of busy planning and socializing.

That's a reasonable take.

> its one of those things that benefits the company more than the individual.

I disagree on that one. In-person connections are very valuable to climb the ladder faster, particularly in the early stages of one's career. They are also helpful to forge bonds with senior leadership once you are at a higher position. That typically happens with casual hallway or watercooler conversations, occasional coffees or just while waiting in line at cafes for lunch. I have seen people liking other people more once they have spent some time in person.


> People like hybrid because that allows them in-person brainstorming.

Hands down.

But I'd like to see approaches like "two weeks a month" rather than "three days a week". Start the month off with planning, brainstorming, collaboration, integration, then end it with heads-down focus.


I wonder what the breakdown would look like flying an employee in on a $250 airline ticket and renting a conference room for a day vs paying for an office that sits unused half the month?

I think it would also be interesting to see what ends up happening when cal hsr is finished. Now you can live in merced and could end up in sac, la, sf, san diego, anaheim, population and job centers all over the state really for a lot less hassle and cost of flying. Trains are generally more spacious and comfortable for getting some work done on the laptop as well, maybe you can bake the train commute into your working hours since you'd essentially be in an office that moves at 220mph around the state.


It costs a lot more than that. Airline tickets are routinely 500-700$ (eg. SF-NY or SF-Miami). Then you need a couple of nights of hotels on top. Add 2-3 meals per day. And suddenly you are looking at 1000-1500$ per person. For a team of 40-50, that's ~50K budget for 1 day of productive work.

Now compare that to an office lease where you can get. At an avg density of 200 sqft/person[1], you'd need 10,000 sqft. You can get that for ~500K$/yr[2]. You use that for 10 times in a given year and you are breaking even.

[1] https://aquilacommercial.com/learning-center/how-much-office...

[2] https://www.loopnet.com/search/commercial-real-estate/san-fr...


No go because they need to "manage" this. Everything needs to be synchronized, people need to be aligned. All the busy work needs to go somewhere.


Well it's more people can now say: I can do my job without commuting, so requiring commuting is a corporate choice. Hence, commuting is work time.

Mandating RTO is therefore very clearly a 20-25% pay cut.


There are more than enough people who prefer the office or who are neutral to it that allow them to start bringing things back to normal.


If that were true, then why mandate it?

I find this trend in every thread talking about mandates that people will come along telling us that REALLY employees WANT to be back at the office, but the thread is about a mandate so self-evidently that isn't true.

I say let it be optional and let the problem solve itself. If people want to be back: Go right ahead, and if people don't then so be it. Let the market decide.


> If that were true, then why mandate it?

I joined Google on the first "RTO" day (April 2022) when they tried to mandate it. My team only saw like 1/3 regularly go back by the end of the month, and it's still not better. I would have preferred my teammates be there to help ease onboarding. When no one went back, it reduced the value for me to return, regardless of my preferences. I stopped going in to office to reclaim my commutes, because there was no value in the office.

For better or worse, the value of in-office work is the co-workers. If the important co-workers are remote, then the office isn't valuable. Mandating it is the only way to do it company wide. Thats not to say that in-office is better, but in office can only work if everyone is there. We see this "laissez faire" suggestion all the time, and i'ts willfully missing the point.


On the other hand, this is your perspective as a recent hire. Your coworkers who have not returned have signaled that they think differently than you, that the costs for them to return to the office are not worth what they get from it.

Obviously with competing needs and perspectives, you can't please everyone, so it comes down to how to please as many people as you can and rectify the issues with the displeased people as best you can. Chances are, a company that has been around for a few years is not all new hires on boarding, so the majority of employees might be like the coworkers of yours who don't feel the need for hands on learning time or want more focus versus new hires who really do like that sort of direction and attention. That doesn't mean you leave the new hires dry, that means you reevaluate how you onboard people in this new remote world so that your new hires do feel confident about their situation and how much training they are getting. This latter approach is all too rare unfortunately; its a lot easier to throw your hands up and say you've tried nothing and are all out of ideas than to work thoughtfully on something that doesn't directly relate to your profit centers, especially when the try nothing idea is so popular in business news.


Absolutely! Before I changed jobs, I happily worked remote (95% of the days). Once I fully onboarded, I happily worked remote again.

The needs of the business are not always the needs of the employees. It’s beneficial to have your employees in office, it’s beneficial to have the flexibility to be a remote employee (social and home life preference aside). I think a reasonable reality is that you need to be paid to commute and you should plan for your employees to be together at least once a quarter but not expect it daily.


Of course, but given that there are also a certain number of people who very much seek it out, and the fact you save money as a company, seems to suggest to me that going forward, most jobs that can be performed remotely will more likely than not be performed remotely. Thermodynamics favor working from home, versus cultural memory and emotion favoring working in the office. Thermodynamics always ends up governing life's processes long term, at the micro and macro level.


No one is complaining that the offices are open to people. They're complaining that because some people want to RTO, every one else must also RTO - personal health, safety, and work-life balance be damned.


There's also a nonzero risk to health while commuting. It seems like for every big snowstorm there is at least one multicar pileup with injuries or worse thanks to people having to commute when its unsafe. I bet if you limited travel during snowstorms to emergency related jobs only, pileups would be a thing of the past because there just would never be enough cars sliding in one place to even pileup.


This is a great point. Commuting to work by car is by far the most hazardous thing most office workers do all day. I bet remote workers have a measurably higher life expectancy purely from the reduced commute-miles.


> one major company to say "screw this, lets offer wfh and reap the rewards" and then they win the title of best company to work in that sector and well qualified candidates are leaping from the curmudgeony competition right to them

Silicon Valley has a habit of taking every discussion and injecting it with religious zeal. Not everyone wants WFH. Not everyone wants in-office, or even hybrid. There are team dynamics unique to each configuration, with the relative costs and benefits depending on context. Beyond that, there's a spectrum of options, from remote-only to in-office only, to RTO on fixed days a week to RTO a couple times a year.


Of course not everyone wants to work from home. Not everyone wants parental leave either or a good school district to live in, since they have no kids and it would be irrelevant to them. Doesn't mean that things like parental leave or schooling or working from home aren't huge massive factors that a lot of people think about when it comes to choosing where to live your life and how it should look like. Like I said, the cat is out of the bag.

For me, its like the earth has went from a 24 hour day to a 26 hour day, what an invention in human efficiency these two hours have been! When is the last time we gained two hours of free time as a civilization, when we went from animal to mechanical power for transportation?


> When is the last time we gained two hours of free time

I'm searching for a job now, and one of the things I'm starting to see - and place value in - are 4 day work weeks. I'm willing to take the pay cut, I don't care what day a week is the free day (but friday is the best IMO).

My mother was a very successful engineer in the 90s but went to a 32hr work week to raise me (matched school hours). During the summers she would work 8x4 instead of 6x5 and take Fridays off. She said it hurt her career for the first few years, and she had to work extra hard to re-prove herself but once she established herself, she much preferred the reduced schedule, and continued it even after I moved out.


> Not everyone wants parental leave either or a good school district to live in, since they have no kids and it would be irrelevant to them.

Do very many people think that the quality of education in their area is irrelevant to them? You shouldn't need children to see the benefits of living in a community of well educated people.


> When is the last time we gained two hours of free time as a civilization, when we went from animal to mechanical power for transportation?

That's easy:

1. The 2 day weekend.

2. The 40 hour workweek.


Considering the increases in productivity over the last 80 years I'd say workers are long overdue for some additional time off.


No one is mandating WFH any more.

RTO people are mandating RTO for everyone: "I can't work from home and/or use work as a proxy social life, therefore _everyone else_ must make me happy by wasting hours every week coming to the office for no reason - I don't care if they're functionally taking a 20% pay cut, what is important is what I want".


> No one is mandating WFH any more.

Fully Remote orgs (either full firms or subordinate organizations) exist, and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t more both absolutely and proportionately now than before the pandemic.


>The issue is that from a management standpoint, you can't make certain people come in while letting others who can easily do work from home stay with WFH.

I do not understand this. That was the reasoning given by my previous employer as to why folks had to come back to the office as well, and it just doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.

Delineation of duties and clear expectations is sort of step 1 of managing people. Some people have jobs that can be effectively done off-site, and some do not. It's just a matter of sitting down with folks and outlining what and why.

If they disagree, you provide an avenue for evaluating the business case they have, other than 'I just prefer it'. If there is a compelling case to be made, let them make it and quantify its positive impact on the business.

I just don't get that statement, at all. I didn't three years ago, and I don't now.


In my experience, it's less about the job and more about the person.

Some people just can't handle working from home. A lot of people, actually. Heavy-handed management can somewhat keep them in line, but then you're tying up extra manager time just to get certain employees to do their job.

That's not to say people can't slack off in the office, too. The problem is that someone prone to getting distracted has 10X more distractions at home and feels 1/10th the peer pressure to work like everyone else in the office.

But if you start picking and choosing who has to come back and who gets to stay home, it's a disaster. The people forced to come back to the office will resent the people who get to stay home, creating more divisions in the team.

The real issue, IMO, is that companies hired way too many people who couldn't handle remote work. At this point it's not an option to apply more management pressure or lay them off because they make up large parts of the employee base. It's not exactly fair to people who can WFH, but at some point bringing everyone into the office starts to look like the only practical solution to addressing widespread problems.


I get what you're saying, but I believe that a flat policy either yes or not, is a sign of piss-poor management, or too many employees with nebulous work that isn't being measured. Further, if I was a productive employee at one of those companies, I would stand up and say so.

It's not about the people. It's about the position (unless the person identifies that they should not do X because they are easily distractible, but then, that's where the business case comes in). If a position is deemed able to be WFH, then the position is WFH. If a position is not, then it is not. Based on duties and expectations.

Management is about setting expectations and measuring outcomes while providing appropriate support for staff. If the expectation is that you can work from home and produce at a consistently acceptable level, then that's great. And when the easily distractable person falls behind, you either develop them, or get rid of them.

That's not heavy handed management. It's just management. If it's too heavy handed to measure how productive people are in some fashion, then what even is the point of management?

The thing you said just seems like avoiding measuring someone's output and avoiding confrontation. It sounds toxic.


I assume things will just go back to the pre-covid norm (maybe norm is to strong, but it was common). The policy is of course you go to work every day. The reality is you can do whatever you want until you're missed. Reliable folks aren't questioned, trouble cases get the stick.


> If a position is deemed able to be WFH, then the position is WFH

Even for Software engineers, I see very few positions which can be fully WFH. If you are newbie, it's better to come to office. If you are a tech-lead of a big team or above, it's better to come to office. Only the independent junior engineer role seems to be a good fit for a fully remote setup.


Fully remote setups only work if they are truly fully remote, and if the seniors have the decency to research how to better handle the thing.

Onboarding can be done remote, but the best is to schedule extensive meetings / pair programming, or even just a virtual room where the newbie can work independently but ask the senior "as in the office". Or even very clear directions on when to reach out if nothing else is possible.

What happens instead that the newbie is expected to handle all the responsibility of reaching out, and when that inevitably fails the conclusion that's reached is that wfh is not for onboarding.


> if the seniors have the decency to research how to better handle the thing.

Seniors typically are already overloaded with keeping the product running and backfilling for the departed colleagues (who are being replaced by the new employees). So using words like "decency" is sure to piss them off even more.


Which also points to a management problem


Why stop at management? I mean, by definition, any corporate problem is a shareholder problem since shareholders elect board, which appoints the CEO, who hires the management team who hires rest of the org...


I can work from home, usually. I did so effectively before covid and I had tons of fun and productivity. My former company, though, was horrible in their handling or WFH, a terrible combination of strict daily meetings but with zero follow-up/help and negative socialization (as in the interactions were all strictly work related and tended on the negative side, with one employer constantly talking badly about somebody else). Apparently I thrive in socialization, and that difference between good interactions in my first remote job and negative in the second made it night and day on my productivity. I had to change job because it was severely affecting my health. Just to say that sometimes the cause is not strictly "not being able to handle wfh".


> The real issue, IMO, is that companies hired way too many people who couldn't handle remote work. At this point it's not an option to apply more management pressure or lay them off because they make up large parts of the employee base.

I'm not sure why this would be a different experience than normal performance review. My manager can set my expectations, and if I'm unable to meet those expectations while working remote, we can work out a different arrangement or I can get fired for not meeting expectations.

I really don't see the dilemma here -- the same exact thing could apply for workers who don't know how to work in an office. The solution would be the exact same: set the expectations, and if they're not met then switch things up or let the employee go.


> Expect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023.

Especially companies with a similar real estate lease footprint


The writing is on the wall. Are you really going to resign that lease on all that office space when you've proved you can do business without it? The experiment has been ran on a grand scale. The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air. If I were a company with a big lease obligation right now, I would be trying to toss the hot potato and sublet this waste of budget as soon as possible. Seems there's plenty of business owners who would happily take on that burden themselves out of pride at least these days, "we work in the office for synergy" and all that dilbert style thinking which remains ever popular.


> The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air.

Results also show lower productivity of fully-remote teams, especially when more than half of your team is new, people haven't ramped up on complex codebases and haven't made good bonds with their colleagues.


Microsoft showed the opposite. (Microsoft employee here). We were more productive by every common software dev measure when working from home. That's why Satya has been calling other CEOs out on their rather misguided need to "get the employees back in the office". It's a management problem (bad management) - not an employee problem. Focus on outcomes and create an environment that enables teams to achieve them...including ones with new hires and junior folks. It's possible. It just takes some (gasp) work. By managers.


The results were so mixed, but it also occurred during a global pandemic with massive child caretaking and education disruption so YMMV. All it shows is that people will [ab]use data to prove whatever point they set out to prove.

Ultimately WFH is more economically efficient for worker and employer, so it is up to the employer to prove to shareholders why they should be spending tons of money on in-office aside from "because this is how we've always done it."


> Ultimately WFH is more economically efficient for worker

I strongly disagree with this. WFH will be economically disastrous for the US workers in the long run, akin to what happened to the US rust belt. See the previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235 (part 1) , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784222 (part 2).


Probably because management considered remote onboarding as a temporary thing that would be over in three weeks for the past three years, instead of the new normal that would require more thought to how to onboard remotely effectively. There's been plenty of companies that were mainly remote long before the pandemic as well. Even in government sometimes employees working on sensitive info get a scif installed in their basement. If it didn't work people wouldn't do it. Sometimes its nice to also think about the personal benefits to the employee to their life outside of the work, versus the companies absolute bottom line all the time.


I have never seen a study that actually bears this out. If you've got citations I'm all ears.


Given that we are barely coming out of pandemic, I don't think we have had enough stabilization yet to conduct meaningful studies. I have started compiling research on similar topics. Initial thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235


Well, there can exist older studies. But yes, any strong claim fundamented on data from 2020 to 2023 is bullshit (on most subjects, not only WFH).


Did't Github just close all their offices permanently? I think this is going to be a crazy push-pull for a while longer.


> They know that due to layoffs, people are likely to stay.

Not really. My company announced return to office 100%. All the IT department complained. Executives reconsidered their decision... now it's hybrid mode for non-IT folks only. A few key engineers already set their green labels "open for work" on Linkedin and that scared upper management a lot.

Western Europe.


Also, they may need additional voluntary attrition and this is one way to increase it.


From my past experience 50% of the time was sort of the magic amount of time to be in the office. Seemed the best blend of focus time at home and in person time in the office. Now I'm 100% remote but next job I'd look for 50 /50 mix.


Personally I love being 100% remote and have found that I'm more productive than ever, and have more personal time than ever. I would never consider a job that required any regular time in the office unless I was desperate.


Similar here. So much dead time in the office, primarily after productive hours have been exhausted, can now go towards things like chores and errands so my evenings and weekends are actually mine in practice, not just in theory.

I might consider coming into the office a few days a week if it's within reasonable walking distance, but that usually means living downtown which is usually a cost that exceeds the regional CoL compensation adjustments that most companies make, which means it's coming out of my pocket to be possible, and I am not going to commute unless it's East Asia style train commuting during off-peak hours, where I can actually do something while in transit.


I'm 100% remote and do well, but I have to admit that even small amounts of in-office time were very effective at overcoming a lot of the communication issues and conflicts that show up in remote work.

Having an all-remote team with people who can work well remotely is a wonderful thing. It's rare to get a department full of people who can work well remotely, though.

I personally prefer companies that remove the people who can't handle remote work, but so many companies hired large numbers of unprepared people into remote jobs under unprepared managers in the past 3 years. You really have to be careful about team selection to build a fully functional remote team, but that wasn't happening during the hiring rush.


> I'm 100% remote and do well, but I have to admit that even small amounts of in-office time were very effective at overcoming a lot of the communication issues and conflicts that show up in remote work.

My observation is that with some people, I can drive to the office, find parking, find the people I'm meeting with, we go find an open room which takes time... sit down, bring up the laptop on the tv in the room....

I tell them the same fucking thing I told them yesterday on the webex.

They smile and nod and now they get it. Because I had to spend a fucking hour coming in to talk to them.

And then I've wasted half my damn day so someone who couldn't pay attention to me on webex felt compelled to pay attention to me sitting in a stinky room in a filthy chair.


I have been back in the office 3 days a week since April 2021. I would say given the lost time due to the commute, I would prefer 2 days in office vs 3 days.

Being able to see people face time face gives a different dynamic you cannot replicate with video calls.


My only reason to only do 100% remote is not about collaboration or similar stuff. It's plainly: I do not live near a big city (nor want to).


For us it's more 20%, to maybe 40% when something is planning heavy


I don’t understand this perspective. Being able to see people through video in meet/zoom I don’t feel like I’m missing out on any aspect of in person meetings. Outside water cooler sessions that we do virtually as well, what else am I missing?


One thing is overhearing an ad-hoc conversation between other devs, and being able to contribute to a solution to a problem immediately. You can't easily replicate this online.


Seems like a good way to drive unregrettable attrition. The next question is, will this cause too many people to leave or stay? Tough to grok in advance how employees will respond, and how many people might take the chance the policy has no teeth.


why unregrettable, I think it is quite the opposite - regrettable attrition because it is the people who have the most in-demand skills on the job market can/will leave for full remote/better hybrid schedules.


It's unregrettable if the company intentionally desires to downsize. Regrettable means when don't you want someone to leave, but they do. Unregrettable is the opposite: someone leaves, but you wanted them to.


is it unregrettable if your experienced people run to competitor for better working conditions, fix their product, build feature parity and simply outexecute you?


The best people will leave though


its more like only the best people will be able to interview and get jobs elsewhere for better wording conditions, and low performers will cling to their jobs and accept RTO happily where they can compensate lack of impact for facetime


FWIW, it's also possible that the folks you describe have indicated a preference for more in-person/hybrid work.


Sometimes you do this to force attrition so you dont have to do more layoffs.


By doing this you are most likely to atrophy from your most senior and experienced staff who can readily find another remote job, this leads to brain drain in the organization and sets you up worse long term for perceived short term benefits which are dubious at best. I think management has doubted the degree to which people would make remote work their hill to die on in terms of job benefits.


Losing some key staff might be better than a 2nd, 3rd, Nth round of layoffs which could cause an increasing crisis in confidence, which would lead to proportionally more senior staff leaving.


Honestly layoffs seem like a really fraught way to save money. They always trim at a nice even number like 10%, so you know they didn't run any analysis to suggest what an appropriate amount would be , and just did what number seemed right in the guts of boardmembers, probably just being a lemming doing a similar cut as a competitor to not spook shareholders too much. How much could payroll be, 30% of revenue? You cut 10% of payroll you are only saving 3% of revenue and stoking a lot of fear among your troops in the process. How much is an office lease obligation on the other hand versus the savings from these layoffs weighed against the potential revenue that labor could have generated had you kept them employed?


Why would you assume payroll is 30% of revenue? For companies dealing with limited runway there is a good chance payroll is >100% revenue, and in general for software companies payroll is the single highest expense.


This pretty much sums up a lot of the layoffs going on.

I can't vouch for all the random Google results but for US tech voluntary attrition seemed to be somewhere around 15% per year pre pandemic. It went even higher during the 'great resignation'. Companies hiring strategies were based off 15% or 20% of people leaving by surprise. They had to hire accordingly

Now big employers are freezing or significantly slowing hiring down, some are afraid as new employees they'd be targeted in layoffs (or maybe their offers would be cancelled an hour before starting), so everyone ends up with more employees than they planned for


> US tech voluntary attrition seemed to be somewhere around 15% per year pre pandemic.

Source?


Ive been to the office twice this year…it is both a party place and a place for work. Fridges are full of beer and fizzy drinks, there’s table tennis and games and they regularly do friday bar nights.

And yet barely anyone visits the office… I WONDER WHY.


99% of US commutes are extremely unpleasant, is a big part of it, I expect.

1) I prefer working in an office.

2) I must have good public schools—non-negotiable.

3) I'm going to hate & resent my commute unless it's also physically-active time (walking, biking) and fairly safe. The cost, the unpleasantness, the lost time. The risk, for that matter.

This combo means the happiest place I'm at all likely to end up is remote working. It's damn near impossible to satisfy requirement 2 and also preference 3 while working in an office. So preference 1 is sacrificed, making 3 moot and 2 easier to satisfy. It's not a hard call to make.


Interestingly Netflix would meet all three of your requirements. It's right next to a bunch of houses with amazing schools.


maybe they forgot to mention

4) Affordable


If you work at Netflix you can afford it. :)


I love these things and find them energizing when enough people show up to participate in them. Before COVID, even though a lot of people still wouldn’t ever play table tennis or stay after work for some events, you had a lot more of a real “community” at the office.

When office attendance is optional and only 20-30% of people show up, these things feel so much more forced and not as fun.

I know the point you are trying to make is that these are dumb distractions people don’t care about compared to WFH. But I think there is a “critical mass” aspect as well. Offices, for me, are much better to work in when there’s a community, and not just a pimped-out first-party WeWork


My point was that people do not really want to hangout with their colleagues. And if they do they do it outside of working hours anyway. No amount of freebies can create that utopia where everyone is partying together at the office.


Personally speaking, I would happily go to the office if attendance were more like 80% instead of 30%. Right now I rarely go because the attendance is so poor.

So I would say that it’s not just people who want to go vs people who don’t. There is a third category that basically doesn’t see the point if the office is “just” a working environment and doesn’t have enough actual coworkers there, which I find myself in, and I suspect many others do too.


I understand this point but there is no way to make people like you happy without forcing the majority to come.

Also it makes no sense in a lot of scenarios. For example i am 800km away from the office.


> I understand this point but there is no way to make people like you happy without forcing the majority to come.

I think the solution will come in sorting companies into remote or in-person, rather than having every company be a mix of both.


Yes, I don’t want to force anybody to come to the office, and it obviously doesn’t make sense for those 800km away.

To echo the sibling comment, long term, I think it would be good for teams to be separated based on office policy. One team for pure WFH, one for hybrid (which can mean many different things), one for mainly going to the office, etc.

In my case I see it as a prisoners dilemma kind of thing. I’m officially 3/2 hybrid with unenforced 3 day attendance, along with 80% of my team. I like that I can still choose to WFH on those 3 days and my team can do the same. But we have reached an equilibrium where there’s basically no point to go to the office on those days because nobody else would be there, even though we all had the option to go officially remote (so we were all ok with going to the office). I think in that case, for example, we need at least one “actually everybody should go to the office” day for the 80% that aren’t remote


We recently had a 'throwback Thursday', which means everyone was invited to come to the office and see their coworkers, etc. They even had bagels!

Maybe 1/5th of the office showed up. 3-4 times as many people as normal, but barely anyone.


I would think most peoples' preference (absent pressure from management) is to, in this order:

1) stay home, dick around (or do laundry, play with children, whatever)

2) dick around at the office (ping pong, fancy beer, etc.)

3) stay home, get work done

4) get work done in the office

Under mandatory office attendance, you are only really allowed to choose between 2 and 4, so naturally more people will choose 2. Under optional attendance, all choices are available, so more people will choose 1


Eh, this means that most people work for a company they are either indifferent to or for a company that they actively despise. My preference is actually 3 when I do meaningful work, 4 occasionally.


Salesforce has to justify their oversize pointy building in San Francisco.

Much of the demand to return to office is driven by commercial real estate interests. But they're losing. Companies aren't renewing when leases run out.


https://nypost.com/2023/02/13/remote-work-costs-manhattan-12... (Remote work costs Manhattan $12.4 billion per year: report)

> Manhattan-based workers are spending at least $12.4 billion less per year than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic drove a shift toward remote work, according to calculations conducted by Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom’s WFH Research group and reported by Bloomberg on Sunday.

> New York City Comptroller Brad Lander warned that the trend represents a risk to the tax revenue needed to maintain high-quality services.

> “If less income tax is being paid in New York City, then it’s hard to figure out how to capture enough value to maintain the subways and invest in the schools and keep the city safe and clean and all the things that really matter,” Lander told Bloomberg.

> Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly urged companies with a presence in Manhattan to require their workers to return to the office. Last April, he warned poor office attendance could hurt the city’s recovery.

> “It is a real concern,” Adams said. “We’re going to have to get to the table with all of our business leaders, our economists — and really, we can’t stumble into post-COVID.”

Lots of entrenched interests with incentives to require in office work. They see a piece of worker wages in their pocket already.


This is about wealth distribution and the rich can't tolerate that. WFH distributes wealth to workers and less expensive areas. City government is under pressure from business who donate the vast majority to city leaders regarding this. This will inevitably drive the establishment of laws regarding RTO and/or tax incentives to companies who force RTO.


There are two sided interests at play here. The landlord and the company. Both are rich (in a pre-pandemic world where the company leased from the landlord) but a company that has most of its office space in leases can also squeeze a bit more money by cancelling the lease.

Some companies with fancy headquarters (SalesForce, Apple, etc...) will want a RTO to keep their shiny castles full. But many companies will re-consider. I'm sitting here in an empty office space that used to house Shopee. Shopee didn't decide to go full remote but instead to move to Malaysia. I'm pretty sure there are lots of vested interests in Shopee remaining here ranging from landlords to coffeeshops to the government. But the ship has sailed. The money flow is stronger than any conspiracy the "top" elites will conspire.


I don't understand the exact counterpoint you were attempting to make.

My previous post did not mention a conspiracy, and also, money flow, aka "the distribution of wealth" was the point of my post.

All the companies with a vested interest in workers going to the office, like landlords, shop owners, taxi companies, etc., have the same desire to continue to be profitable. That profit is predicated upon commuters re-distributing their wealth to others via the commute, in office time, restaurants, etc. Those with the vested interest can all act independently to pressure governments to coerce businesses to force RTO...so not sure where "conspiracy" came from, nor is it required.

The companies with employees coming into the office do not make additional revenue by people being in the office...it is actually cheaper for them to not have employees in the office. Reducing business space costs like electricity, maintenance, custodians, etc. Also, they do not have to supply snacks, reduction in amenities like monitors, chairs, etc. And finally, they can sub-lease until their primary lease runs out. So there isn't an excellent monetary reason to keep their shiny castles full. It is typically out of prestige or an older mindset of control.

Finally, out-sourcing and off-shoring occur independently of this RTO dynamic but for the same reasons. Companies want to maximize the distribution of wealth to the leaders and shareholders. They attempt to minimize the share of profits with employees. Layoffs, pay cuts, equity reductions, off-shoring, and more are all examples of reducing the distribution of wealth to employees.


Update:

https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/02/15/adams--... (Adams: Some NYC agencies may consider remote work options again)

> However, many employees have resisted and just months after Adams’ infamous “pajama” comment was made, Gothamist reported that New York City agencies were struggling to fill thousands of jobs, partly because of the refusal to allow hybrid work.


They should turn it into an ultra high end mall and turn the upper floors into residential.

Take all the nice high end stores out of graffiti and litter ridden areas and put them inside SF tower.

I’d never go there but if it helps make downtown better I’m all for it.


Given San Francisco politics it will take 20 years to get all the reviews and permits to make that happen, and that is contingent on all parties actually wanting it to happen (which they won't).


I guess you haven't heard about the struggles malls are having.

> I’d never go there


I see rich people shopping at those high end stores though. Maybe the malls for the rest of us are struggling, but they also don't sell jackets that cost $15k lol


They have to justify their anchor lease in the building, true, but although they got naming rights it is not owned by them, I believe it is Boston Properties.

The lease (reportedly) goes 15.5 years from 2017 so they certainly have incentive to use the space but I don't think they get anything from the value of the building up or down.


Sunk cost.


Interesting because Salesforce didn't have 3 days in an office as a requirement for many of their employees as far back as 2012.


Salesforce employees read: Update your address to a 41 mile away address. (Not legal advice)


I myself am not a Salesforce employee but was just curious enough to look up the distance between my home address (Sunnyvale) and the Salesforce tower in downtown SF - just a lil bit out of the requirements (43 miles), it’s about an hr and half driving in rush hours…


It would take only about 1hr and some change if you used a bike + Caltrain Baby Bullet (if you live close enough to a station). About 40-45m of that would be spent chilling on the train

Though it looks like the Baby Bullets aren’t stopping in Sunnyvale currently which is a damn shame


The baby bullets haven’t stopped at Sunnyvale or Lawrence in at least the last 5 years, so best you can do is 1-1:10hr on train. But if you are willing to bike to Mountain View you can trade that time for exercise.


Baby bullets have never stopped in Sunnyvale.


I’ll take your word for it, I used to do this commute from a different city on the peninsula and at the time I seemed to recall Baby Bullet stopping in Sunnyvale, but I am not certain. I know things have changed a lot due to the construction and such.

Regardless, depending on where you are in Sunnyvale it may not be too bad hard to catch the Mountain View baby bullet


There are offices all over the bay, e.g. Palo Alto has one


>There are offices all over the bay, e.g. Palo Alto has one

Not much consolation to the folks in Antioch/Brentwood. That's a brutal 2hr drive in rush hour, and nearly the same via BART.


Care to tell us what RTO stands for?


RTO = return to office


V2MOM

From Marc Benioff...

"Success depends on constant communication and complete alignment. We’ve been able to achieve both with the help of a management process I developed a number of years ago called the V2MOM, which stands for: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures."

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/how-to-create-alignment-with...


Marc seems like a guy that enjoys the smell of his own farts just a bit too much.


"The Conjoined Triangles of Success" from the Mike Judge show Silicon Valley spring immediately to mind.


it's basically their version of OKRs


Hybrid is the worst of all models.


When I checked with my friends and coworkers, hybrid was the most preferred option. YMMV?


It probably depends a lot on where you live relative to the office. If you are within a short commute (e.g. < 30 minutes), hybrid is pretty nice. If you're a longer distance away (30-90 minutes), hybrid is doable but means a quality of life hit. If you relocated farther from the office, then hybrid is infeasible and you have to choose whether to move or to find a new job.


Employees often like Hybrid it because it's obviously nice to be able to not show up and still do your work when you have stuff to do at home. But its really bad for a business to have everyone working in different ways.

With people not reliably in the office it talks away most of the advantages an office can give you. I.E. Meetings with half the people calling into a conference are just bad. People talk about things in hallways and the remote folks are left out and not slacked/emailed about it.


I don't like hybrid because I prefer to go in every day but a lot of my coworkers don't come into the office very often. I'd rather teams were fully WFO or fully WFH instead of hybrid. That's not really an option at my work though.


Hybrid absolutely requires the days in office to be the same for everyone. Anything else is just stupidity on the management's part.


Nobody is enforcing anyone coming into the office at all.


The absolutely worst is hybrid with no fixed schedule, which is my current situation. We have quotas, and they don't take into account sick leaves or holidays.

I have to pray I won't have to go to the office on my gym days.


Yep, if I’m fully in office I accept that that is my reality. With hybrid I dread the days I have to go in.


Plus you have to pay for things as if you were going in every day. For example a dedicated vehicle and more expensive property closer to work. You save a small amount in fuel and vehicle wear & tear, but you cannot make the big lifestyle changes you'd be able to make due to full time WFH.


This is why you never work a remote job for a company that has offices near you. If they don’t want you working remotely, let them fire you and give you severance. Not mandate an insane commute.


I just don't understand the mandating. This seems stupid. Most employees know what they need to get their job done. Adding unneeded and unwanted constraints is dumb.

The funniest part about a lot of this is most of the layoffs are coming from the transition way from "Cloud" which is going to cause more layoffs and more tightening.


Salesforce spent billions on their building in SF. Their company value is partially based on the value of this building. If the building sits empty, the value of the building, and therefore the company, will drop.

This is why they are doing this. To keep the value of their very expensive building up.


> If the building sits empty, the value of the building, and therefore the company, will drop.

No, this is not how commerical real estate is valued.


There are many ways to value a commercial building, but the majority of those are based on rents/occupancy rates. Even the "comparable sales" method basically includes rents, because sales rates on commercial properties are very dependent on expected ROI.


But it's not their tower


so about 1 hr to 1 1/2 hr extra commute time.

so about 15%-20% pay cut. on a per hourly basis.


Did these people take pay cuts when they went remote because they got some time back? They did not, so they’re not taking a pay cut.


? OP is saying in effect that going remote was a pay raise…


Fully-remote will be a big hiring advantage that startups have over the large legacy companies.


You know, we tech workers really ought to organize to put a stop to this mandatory return to office nonsense.


Too many people who want to lick boots and play office game of thrones for that to happen lol.


Every place and culture has its perks. With wfh, the culture became less real and more technical.


Soft layoffs


Or, more in line with recent bs terms: Quiet-firing


Acting your rage.


It'd be stupid to go straight to layoffs and have to pay those people when you can eliminate all of the ones already on the fence without as much cost. Mark my words, I am confident they'll let go 7-10% next.


Interesting approach but presumably it only makes sense if they've got little concern about who leaves, which would only be rational if they were cutting deep.


The upper management doesn't care about who leaves, as their goal is to force attrition.


They already did a 10% layoff in January.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/technology/salesforce-lay...


Twilio is on their second layoff, it would not be surprising to see others do the same.


Twilio has never made a cent of profit and is losing ~1billion per QUARTER. Not comparable to salesforce in any way.


It's kind of funny, as Salesforce sells a remote platform.


My friend works at Salesforce and is classified as fully remote, he hasn't heard anything regarding this.


Jobs are really loving the idea that they fully own you.

Wild.


I am sort of happy. Mexico, South America and other locations were getting pretty expensive for obvious reasons. My job will be mostly unaffected, but my living expenses (as DN) will be greatly reduced.


Last week there was a NYTimes' The Daily podcast episode about how SF's downtown is empty.

Some balance is good.


And I had just started working through a Salesforce Admin certification course to pursue applying for some jobs there. Suppose I can just save that time and do something else now!


personally dont disagree.

at big tech productivity fell off cliff with remote work. lot of “fake” growth and fake “success” because of fed zero rate policy. but party over.

especially entitled people earning $200k++ year have little room to complain about first world problem.

only “innovation” especially at big company like this is more and more professional manager get hired..dont know the tech..do not understand product or they customer..just hire more and more in empire building exercise.

time to work hard or find new job.


Was there proof that these people earning their wages worked less hard at home?


Given the 40 mile radius, I do wonder at what point is this changing the requirement of the job for those on the border of this. The commute at the extremes (San Jose, Fairfield, and Petaluma are all within radius) will require ~2 hours of drive time every day. Is this supposed to be done on personal time or employee time? If it's personal, that's a significant impact/ask from Salesforce for a previously-remote job.


CrowdStrike, a company touting remote working prior to the pandemic, is also returning to 40% office occupancy for anyone within ~40 kilometers.


Elliott Management took an activist role at SalesForce recently, I suspect this is the first of many ways Elliott will look to remove people without the need of severence. This happened at athenahealth as well where the layoff date was spread about the office, resulting in a mass exodus of people. The resulting layoff was much smaller and thus less costly


Old school move by Salesforce but not that surprising. I've never thought of it as a good place to work.


> Applies to ALL employees within 40 miles of an office.

Wonder what happens if you decide (while being employed) to move to a city that has no office. Would management just accept it?


Does someone know if this is official at a global scale? From the little I know they were asking people's opinion on it, not mandating it per se.

Disclaimer: I don't work at Salesforce.


Yes, Apple is forcing that now, employees are given verbal notices for not adhering to 3 day RTO, based on the scoop.


Who keeps track of where you live? Just tell them you’ve moved 40 miles away and keep working remotely.


So do they have to go into that falling over tower in SF? Or is that just the SF tower by name only


I will get a mailing address just outside of an office. F all that.


the v2mom concept is pretty old school Salesforce. I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for "ohana".


Just quit if you don't like the job.


"You can work remote forever" was a trend during Covid when it was hard to hire people. Like Yo Yos, Pet Rocks and fidget spinners, the fad has passed along with the leverage that developers had.


"We'll go back to hiring exclusively regional/in-state employees" isn't something these companies are champing at the bit to return to. It's fun to pretend that these lazy, slovenly employees were the only winners of the remote bonanza but access to 49 other states' worth of talent was a massive boon for companies and more than likely offset their imaginary productivity losses from WfH.


Isn't their main office/HQ in a really dangerous part of town crime wise?


No, it's one of the safest, cleanest parts of the city.


Ha! I've been to SF once in the last 5 years. Right in front of the salesforce tower a homeless person lunged at me with a broken bottle. It was a half hearted lunge but still, not exactly the sort of thing I run into regularly!


From what I've seen of San Francisco, it's still possible that counts as the safest, cleanest part of the city.

(I had similar experiences the two times Salesforce mandated that I be schlepped out there from the other side of the country)


Ahh am mistaken then, maybe it was Twitter HQ (maybe not even them?), I read an article where people were literally scared to go to work or leave after dark but I could not remember which company it was. It was about 2 years ago


Maybe you're thinking of Amazon's former Blueshift office in the old Macy's building in downtown Seattle.[1] This building is located across the street from a McDonald's that has long been a nexus for anti-social activity in the area.

[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-moves-employees-out-of-...


Yeah, Twitter is on a fairly rough stretch of Market Street.


I assume gkoberger was being sarcastic


Ahhh, Fool me once! I was a little surprised there are nice/safe parts of SF but I only travel for work there, at most a week or two at a time. So thought maybe I just hadn't been to the nice part of town.

EDIT: damn I didnt think it was this bad 938 crimes per square mile in SF [1]

[1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime


No




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: