I never cease to be amazed the extent to which companies are trying to squeeze the remote work genie back into the bottle. They're desperate to find ways to make that expensive office space seem justified.
"See, look! The people are using it. They love it."
(Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)
I'm pretty sure compliance rate with the policies isn't great. People who like being in the office down to people with small WFH preference just go along. Prime with stronger WFH preference probably simply ignore the policy.
In the company I work for, this is currently in the form of nudging. "Come to the office, we have prepared healthy breakfast for you" (obviously I don't work for FAANG or a startup trying to lure employees with such stuff) and more lately "we encourage you to start coming to the office for our regular team meeting".
I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which knowledge workers want to make "replace us with Eastern Europeans/Latin Americans/Indians" as painless a drop in as possible.
If they could have done it 10-20 years ago, they would have and Covid would never have been an issue. Was in a company in the 90's trying to do that with Russian developers, and didn't Sun hire 50 when the wall came down? Paid them in Levis and the like.
True, and the location of your posterior (unless you're in Asia or Eastern Europe) won't matter in the least when the flush your group and move it offshore.
Most everyone from those "cheap" areas have either already moved/organized good pay and thus getting paid the same as the "expensive" westerners, or are completely garbage and will result in a complete rewrite that ends up costing 10x more than just hiring competent people in the first place.
This has been an ongoing issue in tech for at least two decades now. The workers in these places are generally not as skilled at software development. Their countrymen who are quite skilled have, to a large degree, moved to the US for work. My in-office coworkers from India, for example, have for the most part been at least as good as those from anywhere else including native US citizens. Those who have worked off-shore? Not so much. Quite poor, in fact. On more than one occasion I've seen units off-shored only to be brought back in a year. Companies try it because they want to save labor costs, and then regret it because the cost ends up increasing, as those who are left on-shore have to sacrifice their own productivity to make-up for the negative productivity from these workers.
> If that happens to every career, I guess I’ll become one of the managers making those decisions.
Because there are as many people who need to manage programmers as there are currently hired programmers? The number of jobs would certainly go down, or there would be no point.
> Stay on top of change, don’t be victimized by it.
Sometimes you can ride change, sometimes you cannot. You focus on being one of the 100(?) US programmers who becomes a manager. Good luck. I'll just continue advocating return to office before that happens. Since the C-suites seem to want to return to office, I'll just enjoy that for now.
"See, look! The people are using it. They love it."
(Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)