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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
> 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.
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.