That article was based on the dumbest study in the history of dumb studies.
Stock Market returns during WFH vs Stock Market returns during RTO. (free money, zero-interest rates, meme-stock mania had nothing to do with it apparently)
It's a click-bait article to attract gen-zers and HNers and it has worked like a charm
bingo. It's like measuring the effectiveness of my gardening by seeing how many vegetables I produce in the summer vs winter, and then blaming Santa Claus for poor performance.
a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally.
Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings. Such tools can be panopticon-y so you need to explicitly specify which convos "spaces" are private and which are subject to management interference.
All trash. A meeting in person is always shorter cos you don’t deal with audio issues a talking over each other and the mountain of other issues from remote calls. No amount of money in good hardware fixes this no matter what anyone claims.
Do you live in a region with poor internet, or do your coworkers? I've been fully immersed in Meet and Zoom calls for 6-7 years now, and all the issues that used to come up are now mostly gone as they were rooted in people not having the correct habits and setups.
Most people working for organizations with multiple offices have to videoconferencing all the time anyways. If video calls were really that big of an issue, having offices around the country/world would’ve stopped being a thing by now.
So what you’re saying is that if video conferencing works, regardless of it works well or poorly, it works therefore it’s not an issue. Even if a team worked faster, more efficiently, in person. It’s ok to be remote because it worked even tho they are less efficient and it doesn’t work as well.
Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.
That's not what I wanted to say. With remote teams, you need to establish a way to organize the work using written communications which are either mail/slack/sharepoint/whatever and within this framework management needs to have a "view" into what the team is doing.
It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead".
I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.
I can't reply to the reply to this comment, but you raise a key point. While employers control the data, they don't use it like people seem to assume. Managers are not managing if they attempt to resolve conflicts by attempting to decipher private conversations.
There are many ways to resolve these problems without resorting to spying on messages. In an in-person situation with a conflict, there may be no record. We know methods to resolve these conflicts, so I don't understand why people go immediately to "employers control the data so they can just use it."
I think in all team and project rooms/channels/email d-lists, yes, those should be easily readable by managers because they're not contemplated as private. I think DMs and individual emails should not be accessible to managers (absent a very specific legal/compliance/HR concern).
Bonkers or no, that is a current legal reality if you're talking about chat or email messages which are sent and received using employer-provided means. If an email address ends in your employer's domain, it's not your email account unless you're self-employed.
> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in
Obviously no what I mean that is ok if your superior and his boss are invited in your team's slack channel even if they only lurks, and you don't create a "shadow channel" with your teammates to talk on the project without being read by your hierarchy.
Same thing with corporate internet, you accept to use the corp proxy DNS and firewall (which all logs infos) to browse the internet instead of using a separate GSM endpoint to circumvent the company's surveillance.
>> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings.
How is that specific to remote work? People in the same building have the same misunderstandings with the same tools. The way to fix it doesn't involve management spying on the communications and attempting to decipher them.
Zoom has been far and away the best of the meeting tech I use. Excellent audio processing and generally reliable. (Also a nice convenient slack interface, so /zoom <RET> <RET> starts a Zoom meeting and pastes the connection info into the channel.)
Teams was okay. Meet was okay once I figured out how to grant it the MacOS access it needs. Chime started in early pandemic as a terrible, terrible joke of a product and then evolved to being a close 4th place.
I read an advice column in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago [1] in which the person writing in was asking for advice about implementing RTO mandates. They work for a non-profit and found it hard to manage people remotely. Their complaints were:
> 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office
> 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in-person. As an example, they have to produce reports for stakeholders regularly, which requires input from several people. They sync their work by frequently emailing each other changes to the document
> 3. Socializing with coworkers is more difficult, which results in less social capital for people to advance their careers with
For each point, the author pointed out that there are simple technological and management solutions for each:
> 1. Stop doing daily check-ins and trust your reports to do their jobs on their own time table. You didn't do daily check-ins in the office, so don't do them now
> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. have been around for a while. Use them and the features available to you to collaborate. Additionally, use document editing software like MS Word or Google Docs to edit the same document within a cloud account simultaneously instead of sending files to each other. This tech has existed for sooooo long that it should be considered a bit of an embarrassment if a manager in 2024 doesn't know about it yet
> 3. Work socialization must become intentional, and opportunities for advancement should be based off of merit and output instead of personal relationships
But it seems pretty clear that companies which mandate RTO are simply not equipped, technologically or intellectually, to run such an organization. It's not that remote work is inherently less productive, it's that managers are unable or unwilling to adapt their processes and communication to make it work.
Final note: it seems like another big problem with managers is they find they have little work to do if they are not monitoring people all the time and dragging them into unnecessary meetings. I think they feel threatened by the fact that their jobs are being automated away by software
> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc.
The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.
Thank you. I will fight this new trend of 100% Slack/Teams/Etc. as long as I possibly can.
Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a real time form of communication. Chats, meanwhile, imply immediate response. Hell, these apps even show when you're active -- I've gotten passive-aggressive messages like, "I know that you have DND on, but can you confirm you're seeing these messages?" chats outside of working hours.
I get why Slack/Teams/Etc. is a great supplement to email, especially when it's a smaller internal team collaborating. But ditching email is a terrible idea.
My problem with email is the amount of spam makes it unusable, and I don't just mean unsolicited advertisements. I get spam from work in the form of notifications and unnecessary CC's, so I'm accustomed to ignoring all emails.
I think it may also be generational: at my previous job, I get chewed out by my manager for not responding to some question another coworker had sent me. I was confused because I don't remember getting any questions from them, and I was told that he had emailed it to me. He's in his 40s and I was 26. I told him I get so many useless emails I never check work email. And the best way to reach me is via slack. Still, some on the team continued to use email
Sounds like you need to learn to manage your email inbox.
I have dozens of filters set up to direct emails to particular folders before I ever see them. This is precisely the way to deal with automated notifications. They're always coming from the same source; in some cases, they're not going to your email directly, but to a group address that you can easily filter on.
If you're getting unnecessary CCs from particular people commonly, you can set up a filter to automatically route that category (from:thisuser@company, cc:me) to a folder of "check this once a day (or whatever timetable) to see if anything real got through".
The answer to "I have trouble with email," in an organization where email is a normal mode of communication, is not "so the whole rest of my team needs to change their workflow to deal with me." It's "so I need to pick up some skills and make checking my email part of my daily workflow."
The rest of the team didn't use emails, only the older team members did. Honestly, none of the companies I worked for used email for communication, I think it's abnormal to be the one using it on the team.
Slack doesn't require as much configuration as you described. I don't get the point of email when we have slack
This is just culture / familiarity. Absolutely nothing about chat implies immediacy by necessity. But I agree that expectations are often set badly, and that's an important cultural problem to solve.
In large organizations I always see the same bad outcomes.
1. Lots of random DMs/Group DMs. Everything is messy, and gets lost easily. The 'closed' nature of DMs and small groups then often builds up cliques and creates office politics.
2. Move everything into open channels -> descend into pure chaos with 1,000s of channels that no one can keep up with.
Yeah, in my experience, chat is way more useful for collaborating than email. But we also haven't built up as much tolerance to its distractions. I think this is in part the notification / filtering / snoozing tooling is still maturing, and in part it's just familiarity.
Granted, the person who wrote in to the Washington Post is well meaning and all and I know her write in was edited down for brevity, but it seems like this lady is bringing on alot of the problems herself and not seeing that.
Also, is there an underlying problem with retention, re this comment:
>Developing a rapport with “Bob” could help me anticipate when the lack of promotion opportunity is about to make him jump so we can line up potential replacements.
In the vacuum that is reading the article, this reads like there are problems at the organization with people getting promotions and the person writing in is willing to let them leave and replace them than work out how to keep them.
Something about the write in doesn't sit well with me more generally, but I can't put my finger on it.
There are limits to promotion at any company. Probably no limits from fresh-college-grad to the next level of software engineer (SWE-2 or equivalent). That becomes less true at higher levels. If Bob is a Vice President of Tech, reporting to the CTO, Bob may have no realistic prospect to be promoted to any position other than CTO and if the CTO is successful and not leaving, then Bob has a lack of promotion opportunity. If the CTO keeps working out, most companies would be rationally willing to let Bob leave and replace him if that's Bob's choice (and therefore want to know when he's contemplating that seriously).
Yes but the employee has no incentive to return to the office so that they can be more easily replaced. Return to office is one-sided: middle management think they will gain something (they won't), but the employee gains nothing and loses a lot.
daily checkin, in person can happen in a minute. It’s helpful. Teams succeed together, not at the direction of 1 person coordinating. Removing them is just dumb.
> 2
lol no. That’s a dumb suggestion. It makes people less productive. Trying to replace a 30 second conversation with slack/teams etc is really just dumb.
> 3
Teams that socialise work better together. Period. You remove any socialising factor and you end up with silos, lost knowledge, depression. Etc.
Soft tools for people. Some individuals need training on how to manage remote vs in-person effectively.
General discourse likes to identify the older generation as the ones who lose object permanence. The "if they aren't in a seat, they must not be working" mentality. Well, tomorrow's older generation is here today, learning to follow that same behavioral pattern. We have to begin training the culture today if we want to influence the future.
I've found it also needs to work both ways. My manager can only do so much, and if I don't communicate with them, they can't do anything about it. Some of my colleagues have been horrible at remote working, not telling anyone what they're doing, even after being asked multiple times, at appropriate times.
Some people are just really bad at remote working, on both sides of the manager/report relationship. It's not only bad managers at fault here.
One thing I've never seen work well is on boarding grads with no work experience.
During COVID I onboarded a few grads into my team (for context we managed paid media for a SaaS company). We had a good track record of bringing in grads and training them on the job, but the cohort that came in during COVID had a terrible experience, and despite our efforts I'm not sure we ever really provided a good onboarding experience for them, and I don't think the training they received was nearly as effective as the training we used to provide in person.
I think WFH is often great for experienced professionals, but ever since that experience I have felt really bad for young professionals trying to make a start in their careers.
We successfully onboarded a few grads and interns these last three years and all are productive team members today with a clear path for career progression as well. Some of them were already promoted to positions with more responsibility.
I always see these arguments and understand it can be hard. It can also not be hard and work well.
Sometimes I wonder if those of us who prefer remote work are just the same set of people who found "communicate organically with the humans around them" to be a major hindrance to their productivity.
Increasingly more over time, I have come to really miss the office I went to every day before I worked remotely. I miss having coffee and lunch with people, saying hi on the way in and out, and I really miss having team meetings and 1:1s and brainstorming sessions in person. But I don't miss my desk even a little bit. I spent as much of my time as possible working from private cubbies.
When I'm working, I don't want people around, and I don't want to be pulled into "organic" communication. In practice, the best process (for me) in an office setting was to ping people asynchronously - "hey let me know when you have a moment, I want to brainstorm about xyz" - and then get together when it works for both of you. But this is the same process used in remote work!
The downside is you can't walk-and-talk or get a coffee together or find a spot with a whiteboard, everything is soul-sucking video calls. But for me, losing the "organic"-ness of communication, specifically, is a pro, not a con.
Theoretically, sure, but in reality it's just that most managers are bad at their job. Knowing what your team is doing, knowing how to set priorities, knowing how to organize projects, making sure targets are being effectively met, etc. requires actual work.
It's much, much easier to count butts in seats and glance at badge swipe times and pretend like you're managing your team that way.
This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.
Which is silly. I have worked in infra my whole career and just one of my job duties is to know what every single team is working on and shipping to provide operations guidance/support and to anticipate and be ready for risky changes.
It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and read the transcript after if I miss it.
Most of the RTO conversation is happening outside of tech. While some is (e.g. Amazon, Zoom), we all started off in IRC or email in college or before. This isn't true for all areas of the business.
Being a good manager starts with a desire to experiment and constantly change processes to improve your team's happiness and productivity. So the 'good' manager should be able to make both work?
With RTO, however, there is A LOT more wasted time. With all that extra time walking to meetings, water cooler conversations, and the busywork of running an office I can definitely see how bad managers and employees can hide more.
It's absolutely possible. But if you're a really great "in-person" manager managing a remote team, calling that "poor management" is totally fair game, as far as I see it. That they're good at a completely different set of skills is pretty much irrelevant. I don't think there's much more nuance needed here.
perhaps the answer is not necessary, since either way the solution there is to hire managers that fit the company's design and IC's strengths vs accommodating managers with weaknesses such as being a "bad remote" managers
I think the analogy could be as follows: arguably most software companies could be powered by a dozen of really talented senior Common Lisp programmers. However when choosing a software stack for a company you have to consider how easy it is to hire and retain such developers vs hiring hundreds of average Java or Python or Rust programmers.
Does this logic work in reverse, should we accommodate ICs with weak working from the office skills?
I do agree though, the most important thing is to build a team and hire people that compliment the context the business operates in, instead of trying to mold the business around the people they happen to have working at the given time.
I’ve experienced this. Someone who fixated on back to office and hiring local devs because the only way he knew how to manage was coming to your desk and harassing you. He had trust issues.
Really good manager is highly context dependent. I had a manager early in the pandemic who was reasonably effective, but only because he was everywhere and picking up stuff via overhearing convos in our corner. It worked because he was omnipresent.
As soon as communication and the flow of information needed to be deliberate, he was more challenged.
In person, anything he wasn't present for never got considered or failed.
But isn't it management's inability to adapt to remote work signal that management's experience is poor? I get that we love to categorize argue about RTO vs no RTO but I think the real topic is how companies/organizations are deciding on which model to commit to and why -- the "why" helps with communicating and convincing adults to do something like commuting (management is hard work, right?).
I get that a contrarian stance can come up with an example to contradict what the article is trying to convey. However, I think the article more so tries to draw situations in which CEO/Management is failing generally (with WebMD) and is hoping that a forced in office environment would solve their management woes.
I do believe that a majority of organizations are in this bucket rather than the one you claimed.
If you're a poor manager of your organization's current style of work, is that still poor management, even if you're a good manager in a different setting?
To use a sports metaphor, if I'm a really good manager of a team in the German Bundesliga, but then I switch to manage a team in the English Premier League and I'm terrible at that, then that's still bad management, even if I'm not a "bad manager" in some universal sense. And it would be weird for the organization to try to fix that problem by moving the team I'm managing to Germany. They would expect me to figure out how to be a good manager in the new setting, or they would find someone to replace me.
> If you're a poor manager of your organization's current style of work, is that still poor management, even if you're a good manager in a different setting?
can we stop making excuses for people?
management is about people, unless you're literally moving to a different culture (and I don't mean company culture), your failures as a manager are yours.
I can tell you that my current manager is ruthless in that he has no issues getting rid of someone if they're not pulling their weight. I appreciate that about him. He also always has our back.
Put him in an organization in which it's more challenging for him to influence our work and I'm confident I would still enjoy him as a manager. The work might not be as successful but I'm smart enough to recognize the walls my manager runs into as well.
Sure, why not. People can have multiple skills and I'm sure there are bad eggs in the office and bad remote eggs that will chew up the majority of that manager's time and energy.
Not only is it possible but it's very often the case in my experience. A manager without any remote experience is going to have a hard time managing a remote organization or team.
If someone is a really good chef at a French restaurant, but you send them to a Thai place and they do poorly, is it lacking nuance to say the chef is doing a bad job?
There are different skills that are needed around structuring communications. Good remote work requires significantly more formal communications, while good in-person work merely benefits immensely from the same level of formality.
not only that, but they're making claims about research papers. What does that even mean?
It might even be true that some/most companies are doing it for this reason (I'm sure they wouldn't articulate it to themselves like that), but what the hell did they research exactly that came to such a qualitative conclusion? It smacks of a biased soft sciences approach to this as a means of fighting for the perception someone with money wants.
In a lot of ways RTO has put working conditions in a worse spot than they were pre-pandemic. In the Before Times occasional remoting was informal and casual - if you had a doctor's appointment at an odd time, you'd remote for the day, with no formal approval nor teeth-gnashing.
Now even small everyday things like this are fraught. There are often formal approval chains now for what used to be entirely between you and your boss. Even where there aren't formal approval chains your boss now knows that these arrangement count against the team in some opaque metrics even they don't have access to.
Likewise, hiring remote candidates has become a minefield - pre-pandemic it was often entirely discretionary on the part of the hiring manager. Sure, the default was in-office, but making exceptions to it was entirely between the people who needed to work with the candidate and whether they thought they can make the arrangement work.
Now it has to be run up the flagpole - in some places all the way up the flagpole to the very top of the company. And at every rung along that ladder everyone knows - again - that allowing the exception will count against them in opaque and faceless metrics that are being scrutinized.
A top performer has to move out of town because of family reasons? In the old days you talk to your manager, maybe your skip, they'd tell HR it's fine, and... it just goes. Now? 95% chance the person has to leave the company, because someone in the newly-installed approval chain is going to nix it because - again - it counts against them personally where it didn't before.
Sigh. In so many ways we've regressed on this so much. The level of flexibility and discretion teams have on work locations has narrowed so dramatically, in exchange for yet another spreadsheet-driven bureaucracy.
Wish I could give this more upvotes. I was fully remote for more than a decade before COVID, but now I’m seeing all the same things you’ve written about here. It’s a huge regression.
Depends on the industry. In games you had to fight tooth and nail to be remote. Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft really, really did not want devkits to be in private residences.
Pandemic comes and a lot more of that relaxes. Like the rest of tech, some studios are trying to revert but there's a lot less doctor's notes needed to justify remote now.
It’s a pendulum - management is still traumatized by COVID and are reacting to that. I hope in a few years we’ll start heading back towards more freedom for workers
I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to the office.
A few of my coworkers (3 out of ~15 people team) have/had left when RTO mandate was announced, and I know at least 4 people are thinking of leaving as soon as they have a chance. Since the RTO, a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Before RTO, they would be working until 6-7 pm and will be logging in around 8 am. Sometimes, coworkers would even log in late because they were commuting. I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. Based on my observation, I would bet that the activity/productivity drops significantly more.
Glad I left Amazon. I have been programming for 15+ years (have been in a managerial role for 6+ years), and I firmly believe I am (and my team are) more productive working remotely. I will never work for a non-remote companies even if they are big names.
I used to work at Amazon too. I also refused to go in (even though the office was only a 15 minute drive) because I signed up for a remote role and I wanted to keep that flexibility.
> I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate.
They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah.
Their data shows their decision was wrong from a productivity standpoint. But that's not why they did it. They did it so they wouldn't loose their tax breaks from all the cities that were threatening to pull their subsidies if they couldn't show enough butts in seats in the downtown areas. Also they over-hired in the pandemic and need people to leave because their attrition numbers were too low for 2022 and 2023.
> > I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate.
> They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah.
Respectfully, do you know this because you yourself have seen the data, because a person you know saw this data and told you about it, or are you speculating that this is probably the case?
Because in a meeting with the CEO (which was publicly leaked so this isn't internal information I got it from outside sources myself I wasn't in the meeting) someone called out that the data doesn't support this decision and that was his response.
I don't see any claims in that article about productivity going up or down after the mandate, however? Just that data was not used to inform the decision in the first place.
Would love to hear knowledge of internal data on this either way but it sounds like we're still just guessing.
They have a tool at Amazon called "connections" which is a super annoying mandatory survey you must interact with every day. It measures a lot of things like whether our teams have certain internal processes in place, job satisfaction, tools satisfaction, etc. The surveys provide a list of fixed answers you can choose or if you rank something "negatively", you can select an option to describe why you ranked something poorly. Some of us have indirect access to the larger data through senior-level middle management who will either show us the connections data in private Slack DMs (if you're lucky enough to have a friend up that high) or they will blatantly tell us what the data shows in meetings. For example the job satisfaction one has been down below 50% satisfaction since RTO and management has explicitly stated it's due to RTO because that's what people are writing in as the reason.
Okay understood (that’s application sounds fascinating to be honest) and the drop in job satisfaction doesn’t surprise me at all.
But what about productivity/output?
Obviously this is partially a function of job satisfaction, or a correlation. But wouldn’t it be interesting if job satisfaction went down but productivity stayed the same?
> They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company
I also work in a big "data driven company" and the same thing happened. Pretty sad that they bother engineers to justify everything they do with metrics (even when it's obviously wrong), but admitted in a Q&A that they didn't have productivity data to back up their RTO choice.
> I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate.
I would be surprised if they did this, and if they did, use it for implementing any sort of meaningful change. Plus I would not put faith in leadership to being able to interpret what this really means because they are so out of touch with how things are going. Discussions with upper leadership is heavily reviewed and curated as a means to avoid getting called out and stay under the radar. They all have a skewed view of what's going on with the teams that build and this data wouldn't feed into it in a way that would be meaningful.
Likely what they will do is keep track of stuff like regretted attrition, hiring numbers (once they get back to hiring), Connections results, project/goal delays (the well established orgs are all aggressive about tracking dates along with goals to see how things are going).
> a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto
I think this is a great thing. This is long overdue there. It's too common for employee's personalities to be all Amazon all the time. I've been to many social events over the years where I'm told to not bring/invite anyone from my Amazon circle because all they can do is talk about Amazon.
Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.
wave. I've been doing this for the last two years, but really dialed it in to the extreme over the last year. I don't give a shit if I get PIP'd at this point. If a company is willing to screw me over at every turn with no remorse and not an ounce of compassion, then this is how I'll fight back. Fuck em!
I don't think I agree. There are small shops (<500 employees) that really do treat people well. I've worked at smaller places that have given decent salaries, no-cap PTO (and actually let you use it without fuss), no overtime, yearly bonuses, shutting down for two weeks during the holidays, and actually listen to employee requests/concerns.
When you work at a FAANG, you know you'll be sacrificing some of those benefits and taking on more stress for much higher pay. The current climate is much worse than that though. It's a complete no-empathy/give-no-fucks environment, and that's not ok. Garbage in, garbage out.
I'm not looking for a hand-out, I just want to be treated as a human being. In return, you'll have a productive employee.
When I interviewed roughly 10 years ago, I asked every person I met on the team roughly how many hours a week they worked. Every single person deflected and answered a question I hadn't actually asked.
For that team at least, the job you were hired to do was to get results. I imagine OP was referring to people simply putting time on the clock and being just present enough to avoid notice, without actually caring whether they were getting the same results a full level of effort would achieve.
Even if they analysed slack+chime log activity. I guess they’ll explain it away with something like “working from office significantly reduces the need for online chatter”.
The important caveat is that we ALMOST ALWAYS need to do Chime meetings/Slack chats because our team is split across three cities -- Seattle, Arlington and Chicago. 2/5 of the team is stationed in Seattle office; 2/5 in Arlington; and 1/5 in Chicago. Not to mention that a bunch of folks from Hyderabad in India that we have to continuously work with. On top of all that, folks who are returning to the office can pick one of any weekday to go into the office (the other two days are agreed upon as Tuesday and Wednesday), so some folks are in the office on Monday, some on Friday (nobody choose to go in on Thursday from my limited observation).
That is, after all, the entire point of RTO mandates. (I am pro-remote and fortunate to work at a company that isn't RTO, but I will say that it is a breath of fresh air and notably higher-bandwidth conversations that are enabled on the few times per year that we get together in-person in an office.)
Almost any value is worth it. On your death bed you will never say I'm glad I spent those years of my life commuting for Amazon instead of everything else I could have been doing.
It’s not so clear cut. If I stay at my RTO job for a few more years, I can probably retire at 35-40, versus taking a pay cut and retiring sometime in my late 50s. I’d say that’s worth the commute.
Good on you if that's how it works, and I would say that's worth it, if all goes according to plan. But be aware that a lot of people have tried that strategy, and just end up working until age 65 and remembering how much of their 20s and 30s they wasted. Family, health, industry shakeups, change of priorities, and on and on. There are so many variables involved in trying to predict your distant future that sometimes it makes more sense to take care of the present, with an eye on the near-term.
This is just anecdata, but I spend my 20s/30s doing all sorts of hobbies that I don't even like anymore. I'm working much more in my 40s and have a high income, and I'm at least as happy as I was back then. Also I don't know what age I'll retire, but I'm sure that the money I'm saving now will buy me some comfort in the future.
No, it's not. Just think about your stress levels commuting, people infecting you with all kinds of diseases at work that lower your quality of life and have the chance to impair you to a great extend.
My commute isn’t your commute, and you can’t make blanket statements like that.
My stress level while commuting is basically zero. Tbh the commute makes me less stressed because it’s a nice time to listen to audio books and provides a physical barrier to “transition” into work mode. I dislike RTO for other reasons, but my stress level was higher while WFH than it is from commuting.
There are plenty of stressful jobs you can find yourself in, and having kids exposes you to far more diseases than working in an office.
Nothing is guaranteed, and if you're young having a few stressful years now then retiring is certainly easier than working dead end jobs for another 20.
What if you don't find commuting (I have a 12 minutes commute against the flow of traffic, I kind of like getting out and seeing the city and I enjoy driving), and aren't too worried about "all kinds of diseases at work" (i.e. Covid, Flu, and colds)? To be honest, you seem very paranoid about the risk of impairment by disease caught from coworker at your presumably white-collar tech job. This is minuscule. Does it surprise you that other's might not find your example to "just think" about not compelling at all?
I guess it depends on what you find fulfilling. Having new and interesting experiences in your 20s and 30s can have a pretty different effect on your life than leasure time in your 40s+. In my experience there is minimal overlap between people who maximized working hours in their younger years and have an exciting life outside of work later on. But I'm sure that's partly a reflection on my social circle and everyone is different; there's no one-size-fits-all life advice.
100% agree, but I don’t think a work commute will be the deciding factor in that. If I wasn’t commuting, I’d just be logging into work earlier, or maybe waking up later. It’s not like I’d be using the extra 30 minutes each morning to go adventure in the mountains.
Commuting doesn’t necessarily mean working long hours and missing out on the rest of life. I still only work 35-40 hours, I just sit in my car for 30-45 minutes each day. I definitely wish I didn’t, but for the pay I get (and the pay cut I’d take for taking a remote role), the 30-45 minutes is worth it at least temporarily.
$5250 USD (not including the bonus at my new firm, which is expected to range from $5K-$35K; higher cell phone reimbursement; 50% internet reimbursement and $350 yearly allowance for equipment, etc. at the new company). Most importantly (for me), I get paid twice a month at the new company. All in all, I'd say the TC is about the same.
> started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto.
Isn't this 7-7.5 hrs? Are you not required to take at least a 30 minute break within that period? Or does Amazon pay for lunch? I thought 9-5 was a myth/thing of the past.
I've had required breaks at part time jobs and minimum wage jobs (which will never give you >35hrs/wk and your schedule is definitely not consistent). My understanding is it is state law and the 3 west coast states all have unpaid 30min breaks (if you aren't on call during break) for >5hrs work.
I am guessing that all of those previous jobs were non-exempt roles (non-exempt meaning Not exempt from regulations about overtime pay and mandatory breaks). It's worded weird and it took me a long time to even understand what the heck it meant. It is Federal US law, but there are also state laws that apply. I am not a Lawyer, I am just a guy who has had a lot of jobs before so take that for what it's worth.
I work 9-5 almost exactly (sometimes a little less) but I think that's just because we have a relaxed team when it comes to this. I usually end up making up some hours one or two evenings per week at my choosing. It's a really nice situation, but most of y'all would laugh at my TC. Everything in life's a tradeoff.
It includes lunch break at 12pm-1pm. I can confidently tell that most of my former coworkers (since RTO mandate) have been taking it slow/easy more so than they used to be.
Interesting. Maybe because I'm an intern at a big CA based tech company right now that's been pro WFH, but my timesheet will specify the regular and unpaid hours. It even puts the unpaid into a lunch category.
But then again, my internship feels like a job and I'm a bit confused. I do all the work with no direction, just report to my manager weekly and no training. Every internship I've had just feels like every job I've had except I don't get the equity and 401k that normal employees do. I've also always had to fill out a timesheet for every salaried position I've had, which seems a bit odd too. It's at least be quicker to fill out a checkbox lol.
That's not a sign of a good internship program. I've always put a great deal of time coming up with projects that are suitable for the intern, and they always have to be tailored to the individual skill-set after the process. At the end of it we either have something that worked, and we have a good sense of the capabilities and fit with the team dynamic.
I would ensure that you have someone to talk to who can discuss what success looks like for the role (of intern). With that, there is always what you want to get out of it, but if you are looking for a job, you need to have performance and goal conversations reguarly. How are you doing compared to peers or other interns, etc.
I don't think you're wrong, but my situation appears to be the norm when talking with others[0]. All but one internship I've had is like this and honestly I don't think I can adequately say I've gotten training, be it internship (excluding the one) or job (I worked prior to grad school). I've simply concluded that training is a thing of the past, or it is expected to be self-driven, and performed outside work. (Personally I do not think this is an intelligent move, but these companies are quite successful and I'm not even a millionaire, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
> How are you doing compared to peers or other interns, etc.
Hard to say, as I'm not sure who would be an adequate peer. If you are to ask me personally compared to my expectations, I would say below expectations. In part there is a lack of the adequate resources I need to do the job (I work in generative ML but I'm trying to not dox myself so I can be honest and I want to hear your advice), there is more complexity than I expected and no one to really bounce ideas off of or whom can offer advice, and I'll be honest that my motivation is nowhere near where it was when I started, so I'll admit that I could do better. But I do want to say that I am still learning a lot during this time, getting work done (my manager seems happy, I've had no complaints, and its the second job I've had where someone says "well done" more than once in a blue moon. It's been extended twice now, so its a decent signal that they're happy with my work), and having a reasonable wage does reduce a significant amount of stress. So I don't want this to come off as depressed doom and gloom, it's more that the conversation is around critiques rather than highlighting the good or benefits. I'm generally happy about the opportunity but it is clear that my experience(s) does not fit the common expectation of this title and that there is room for improvement (both me and them). But if critiques aren't acknowledged, how then can I improve? (I am looking for other teams who may offer a better fit, as that might just be it)
[0] There is a gap that I do notice though. It appears that this is not the norm for those who obtain internships that are more prestigious or the highly sought after ones. But I am not at a top 10 school and that appears to be one of the stronger variables of correlation (more so than understanding, as I do talk and collaborate with people from those institutions so I think I have a decent gauge on at least intellectual capabilities. There are, of course, people who stand out, but most seem no different). Connections appear to be a key part of getting internships and undoubtedly this is an opportunity feedback system. You take what you can get. I'm a bit surprised others do not exploit this, as it reasons that you could get top talent by creating top talent, but that's an entirely different conversation.
I don't think it's unusual to have to fill out a timesheet for salaried jobs. Most of the places I've worked have required employees to do that ritual. And I say "ritual" because it's basically just writing "8" in the "hours" field for each day and signing it, regardless of how much you actually worked. I remember once getting a talking-to for writing anything but 8 into my time sheet.
I've also worked at a place where I had to physically clock in and clock out (even for breaks and trips to the bathroom), and it was a salaried software development job. Not unheard of at all.
You may actually be hourly and not salaried. That said, it's not uncommon to be forced to log when you work, especially when there are PTO and things like that involved and that need to be accounted for.
Are you paid for the hours you work in the internship? If so then you are not an exempt salaried employee.
Pretty sure I'm technically hourly but clearly not for any practical purposes. I'm not allowed to place additional hours, even if I worked them. My work has unlimited PTO fwiw.
Though I've also worked full time salaried jobs and also been always required to fill out a timesheet. Often being told that it doesn't matter and the manager just saying they fill out a standard block at the beginning of each week. This is really what I've done at every job.
But I do want to make clear that I've had salaried positions in the past and not been given such offers. I am also not aware of any person that I know (offline) who has a paid lunch period and this includes many people in many sectors mostly in the west coast. This even includes my now retired parents.
i agree with the sentiment of your comment, but the pervasive RTO narrative from c-levels is not about restoring their employees' collective, holistic health. rather, it's couched in a narrative of productivity and community, the former being what i believe was being countered in the comment.
there's also the push/pull of the health benefits and disadvantages of commutes and other external factors that go into office-based dynamics. additionally, as i've mentioned in another comment on a similar thread, RTO mandates are not accompanied by corporate commitments to restore the cultures and environments that were present in the pre-remote migration which only intensifies the skepticism and recalcitrance of the workers.
Employees working exactly 9 to 5 is absolutely the opposite of what employers doing RTOs for "productivity" want. They want them putting in unpaid overtime and are suspicious that they aren't when they're at home because they can't see them.
In a healthy work environment where there's high morale and trust, the exact work hours are going to be off somewhat on a day to day basis in either direction based on logical stopping points. In a toxic environment, workers will pretend to work towards the end of the day then go home exactly when the clock hits 5. Once they can, workers in such an environment will probably leave.
In a vacuum, yes. In practice, a ton of people I know spent all that extra time commuting which is probably worse for most people than putting some extra work in.
To me it says that working in an office+commute is much more draining than working at home. So much so that they work only the required amount. When they worked at home, they worked more because it was more enjoyable.
Flexibility has both costs and benefits, for both employers and workers. Being able to switch off and on work throughout the day is a significant benefit for many people, and many people experience having a less well-defined schedule as a significant cost. For some people the benefit will outweigh the cost and for others the opposite will be true. (And I'm sure for lots of people, they will think the benefits outweigh the costs, while actually working in an unhealthy detrimental way.)
But one size doesn't fit all. I'm honestly sympathetic to management of companies figuring out how to balance what's best for individuals with what's best for teams and organizations as a whole.
But I strongly believe that the most successful companies coming out of this period will be those who take this problem seriously, rather than those who pine for the old days and "solve" it with a one-size-fits-all edict from the top.
Yeah, sometimes these are soft-layoffs, but even under that logic it's a bad idea: your best employees are the ones who have the most options outside of your company.
If you do a traditional layoff you get to decide who stays and who goes and have at least the chance to try and retain your top players.
If you do a soft-layoff someone else does the choosing, and the more employable the employee is on the outside the more likely they are to leave.
Just ass-backwards decision-making no matter how one slices it.
So research is finally coming to the same conclusion that a lot of people, myself included came to over a year ago.
Well managed companies don't care where you work, it simply doesn't matter. The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around. We're not solving that by requiring everyone to return to the office, the terrible managers are still terrible.
If anything companies could use this opportunity to identify people with poor management skills. If a team under-performed during the work-from-home period, then it's probably time get their manager some training.
> The problem is that management is a lot harder than many thought, but you could sort of hide the fact that you're bad at it when everyone is at the office. There simply isn't enough talented managers around.
I feel like this is true for so many jobs these days. Like I think that a lot of people (in high skill jobs) are really not good enough for their jobs. But we simply don't have enough good people for all the jobs.
Just as a programmer, so many people that are paid to do it are... bad. Managers, same. PMs (I think) same. I wouldn't be surprised if others in other professions feel the same.
That's true, but at least most of the developers have some training. Many people are thrown into management or wants to be managers, but never put any effort into building the skill set required.
There are remarkably few people who are just born as talented managers, probably the same number that are just naturally talented developers. All of the best managers I've had have all had some level of management training. Some got training while I worked on their teams and the improvement from no training to just a few months of training is pretty remarkably.
Product management is tricky because the skills PM applicants are evaluated for are not necessarily the skills that make a good product manager. But I think this supports your point. Where it's hard to judge performance, actual talent will vary.
does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories
the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
You do know you're just parroting RTO thought leadership propaganda, right? The phrasing of structuring your work "in time and space" is rather unique and comes most recently from business thinkfluencers trying sell RTO as "new paradigm at the workplace."
The real point underpinning the CEO ball fondling is strategies for creating structure for people that need it originally assembled for students working async and remote. Moving between spaces can create structure, putting on a "uniform" creates structure, having blocks of time planned out ahead creates structure, having small incremental goals creates structure, having blocks of work with regular check-ins (cards/standup) creates structure. Like it's just your standard ADHD time/focus management but pretending that these two specific things are best for everyone.
Sorry, I've never read a "business thinkfluencer" in my life. Wouldn't even know where to find one.
The undeniable fact is that people want "work from home" because they have serious issues following schedules and making plans. (Of course working from home only sweeps the problem under the carpet and creates bigger problems down the road.)
Yes, these cats need to be herded. They can't self-organize. Also, the methods of herding cats are well-known since time immemorial, just ask any kindergarten teacher.
P.S. You, of course, are a Cool Cat and different from all the other cats. Don't need to reply.
This person has recently said that "solar panels are an ecological disaster", that "breathing is detrimental to health" because "oxygen is toxic and literal poison" and that "world war 3 started in 2010" so this is actually pretty tame in relative terms.
It's obviously an issue of ratio and degree. You're just saying anything that comes to mind to support your position instead of recognizing any nuance.
C-Suite is a cost center. Only a small portion of established companies (not startups) have executives that make a clear revenue difference. First thing AI should replace is most of the C-Suite.
If it takes being in person for your management to tell that someone is not doing anything and PIP/fire them, then I'd certainly call that poor management. You shouldn't have to look over my shoulder to know that I'm doing my job.
I think it is more the environment for some people.
Working from home, really does IMO require a Home Office, a space dedicated for work.
I know many people that are more productive at home, all of them have a home office. I know many people that are not productive at home, none of them have a home office, instead are using some Shared Space, like a corner of the living room, the kitchen table, etc.
If you do not have a dedicated home office then likely your home will be filled with distractions,
Living situations impacts this as well, if you lived a alone with no pets vs having a house full of roommates, children, spouses, pets, etc.
So from a Management perspective do they fire all the people that cant work from home, or require everyone to return to office? Or do they have different policies for different people then open themselves up to Workplace legal liability from either discrimination or hostile work place charges
My office is filled with distractions. I sit in open space with tens of people around me. They talk, drink coffee, eat food. Some of them also have pets.
How specifically would I know that? Last time I gave somebody the benefit of the doubt I ended up doing their work myself over Christmas. I'm interested to know what I should've done to avoid that.
The project came to an end (hence me having to wrap up their work), so I didn't do much. I'm on a new project now, but I have the same question. If someone keeps insisting their work is coming along great and they'll be checking it in real soon, how do I know if it's true?
Ask for proof. Some employees are lower-performing and some need more structure.
"Can you push your work-in-progress branch so I can take a look?"
If they are consistently under-performing you need to structure them. Split larger tasks into smaller sub-tasks that are more tractable over shorter time periods. If a large task is expected to take 3 weeks, split it into chunks of 1-2 days.
That way if a code review isn't sent out you get a quick signal that progress isn't being made.
Remember that as the manager you have authority. They may chafe at being asked to do intermediate checkins and splitting the work into smaller quanta - that's fine, they can grouse about it with their friends, but they still have to do it.
If they are underperforming even within this structure, have them keep a work log - which is basically a 1:1 asynchronous standup with just you and them. Read this work log daily and, in combination with smaller quanta of work, it should be fairly obvious progress isn't made.
At all points don't hide the ball from them that they are underperforming. Tell them that they are underperforming but give them the resources necessary to improve. Solicit their ideas on how to improve and consider implementing them.
Some employees can be structured to improve this ways. Others cannot - you work with HR on that latter group.
But again: as the manager you do not need to see butts-in-seats to gauge productivity. More importantly, it is on you to set a benchmark for productivity and communicate to your team your expectation that everyone hits it, and alert them in your (frequent!) 1:1s when they are falling short.
> their work is coming along great and they'll be checking it in real soon
This is the process problem in my mind. Why are they working on something that goes weeks without checking in code? They should have smaller actionable chunks that can be checked in at least once a week.
More importantly, take that same employee and put them in an office and do you really think things are going to be different? Alt tab is a thing, looking busy is a thing, and if you're entirely relying on their word that things are going well then you're going to get yourself in trouble regardless of whether you're in an office or remote.
> Why are they working on something that goes weeks without checking in code?
I think it was a couple of days' worth of work, which they told me was nearly finished for a couple of weeks. All I was saying was there was no way for me to know whether that was the true or not. Unless they pushed the code, which they were always supposedly on the cusp of doing. On the last day before the holidays I was very explicit that they needed to push their code by the end of the day, which they said they would but didn't.
Perhaps I need to be more assertive about it, or insist they pushed it live while I watched or something. I do think I'd have found the situation easier if we had a face-to-face relationship, although that's not really what I was trying to argue.
Indeed. I suspect a lot of people here work in situations where there's slack in the system and nothing particularly bad happens if the work doesn't get done.
Yeah, no. We have tight deadlines that we're expected to hit and clear milestones for reaching those deadlines. If we miss them hundreds of people throughout the organization will know and ask why, and multi-million dollar sales contracts go out the window.
I'm arguing against shrugging and saying "it's because of remote work" when your project is falling apart. Give the benefit of the doubt when there is doubt, but once there's no doubt then build the structure you need to make progress.
The mangement had several years to collect data. Maybe they checked the numbers and found that, yes, people on average are less productive when working from home.
So why hasn't anyone published that data, or even shared that internally? You know damn well amazon and meta and others have loads of quantifiable data.
Typically you’d get that sort of thing at a quarterly report if it was actually material to the performance of the company and they had actual data. Otherwise it’s just a normal thing as far as I know to support an argument with data if you have it.
Did they gather evidence from Elon's tweets or what are we talking about?
If there were actual concrete data on RTO being empirically better, the Corporate Real Estate world wouldn't have anything to worry about in the next 5 years.
I do. I haven’t seen any clear evidence that RTO results in higher productivity or profitability for firms. Forcing knowledge workers to be in an office X days per week without given them flexibility and discretion indicates poor management culture and lack of trust to me.
I only hear about this on HN and Blind and have never seen it. HN and Blind really want to prove that people working at home don’t work for whatever reason, probably as we have the managerial class performing their own PR.
> I feel like this is a cultural shift for hn, and I'm curious about where it comes from
My gut feeling - without data to back it up - is that HN has shifted from a forum mostly for founders and hackers to a forum mostly for FAANG employees who would have gone into finance or consulting in the 2000s. This mirrors the shift in the tech industry at large.
Oh, agreed then. Tbh, it could be worse. Founder culture seems to have disappeared in favor or crypto or internet "entrepreneurs", and that still seems to be pretty rare here. Not sure if there is any actual founder community still left
yeah, where's the people that want to build a business that makes something or provides a service rather than build a business that provides a successful exit?
Yes, because if you can avoid it, it makes a lot of financial sense to not have office space, cafeteria, coffee, parking space, electric bills, water, cleaning and heating. You can save ton of money by asking everyone to stay at home.
Then there's the flexibility. Our customers got a lot more flexibility when we where all at home everyday. If we had some afternoon migration, install or upgrade and it ran a little long, then no problem, I'm already home, so an additional 30 minutes doesn't matter much.
> I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work.
I'm confused. If you cant figure out people aren't working remotely then how do you figure out they aren't working in the office? Randomly check their screens? Check the check-in/out time?
It sounds like a textbook case of bad management if no one in the management chain or peer groups for those people can tell whether they're absent. I don't think that's a common situation though. Rather, tech companies have gotten paranoid about information flow regarding layoffs and don't meaningfully incorporate that data into executive decisionmaking. To escape their information vacuum, they instead look to outwardly visible signals like RTO/badge swipes as a substitute for the individualized performance metrics they've firewalled out.
> the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut
This is, for me, the funny part about it. If all those metrics, meetings, tickets and what have you, pushed mostly by the management btw, can't help them, then I'm afraid nothing can. ROT is as much of an excuse as the above.
I see RTO for all in the same light as when IBM required all their technical staff to wear full suits all day, even the ones crawling under desks. It's a relic of the past that will eventually die and everyone will be better for it.
It is a bad manager that can’t just deal directly with those people. They should warn, then PIP, and then fire those people. You don’t need to punish the people that can work remotely because some people have no self control.
So, yes I do find it surprising that instead of managers just doing their job they think it is better to force RTO. They are catering to their lowest performers rather than cutting those people and supporting their good employees.
Those people just hide their lack of work in the office. Walking around with a clipboard and attending random meetings isn't achieving any more than napping.
And it depends on the company, but software is already heavy on metrics. Scrum is basically one giant dev productivity tracker hilariously sold as being for the benefit of the team.
How does that work for ICs? I'm genuinely asking. I've always been in a position where at some point I'm going to have to produce working software and it would be pretty obvious if I wasn't getting anything done.
Are people just shuffling JIRA tickets around and hoping nobody notices?
Some companies are so deeply unproductive that yes you can pretty much shuffle JIRA tickets and then once a week do a visible fix that took you 30 minutes of actual work. Or say you looked into these three tickets and found that they need X or Y which you’ll get to next week
a lot of people have been working remotely since long before covid, and many of them were very effective. there are some skillsets that an effective remote team has and many teams that suddenly went from in-office to remote still don't have those skills (and often they aren't even aware of that and just think that remote development is not going to work).
I love to work from the office, I prefer it. I hate working from my desk at home, next to my bed. We have two desks in the bedroom. I'm in MGMT. Today I'm working from home as I can't afford the commute time, last week was pre-pandemic 4 days in office.
What I don't like is changing what WFO looked like. If someone had to WFH for personal reasons (e.g. repair, packages, child issues, doctors appt), they just did it. Four days a week was normal, five was never normal. If we are trying to do 3 days and go to four, then everyone needs a dedicated desk. If you aren't willing to put a dedicated desk for people, you don't have a mandate for WFO, you have a mandate for hybrid.
I sit next to an officer who is not ranked highly enough to have a desk. A first year associate should have a dedicated desk.
It took the pandemic and a world in panic to swing the pendulum in this direction. It's going to take as much to get it back, and it may not go back to exactly the same thing.
That sounds like a problem with the engineering team's roadmap/work: if an individual who doesn't do work and doesn't impact the team's goals, then how is that a problem with the individual? Maybe there needs to be a more concrete or interesting (non BS work) roadmap.
Except every study done since the pandemic has shown no effect on productivity from remote work, yet somehow every thread on this is filled with totally real stories about someone they know who doesn't work.
They are real. What they are missing is that said person wasn't working much before. They only noticed their lack of output when working remotely, as busyness was no longer visible.
That's not at all my experience. I was and am much more productive in the office, and it has a lot to do with changing my environment to a place of work. In order of my productive environments: the office (decent private cubicles, not open concept) > coffeeshop > table at the park > home office.
Why is it so hard to believe that people like me exist? And no, it's not because I like to bug my coworkers or that I haven't considered improving my tooling or home office. At this point in my career, with my personality and demeanor, I get a lot of work done at the office, without the misery of trying to force myself to focus and be productive like I do when I'm at home.
You could always go to the office by yourself (or a coworking spot, or really anywhere) if the point is just changing your environment and you don’t need to bug others. Everyone gets to be happy and productive, no mandatory RTO needed.
That is what I do. But we'll lose the office or downsize if enough people commit to hybrid or WFH, and I'd probably have look for another job with a firm that has committed to RTO.
I'm hoping these things self-select to a happy equilibrium. I'll fill in the folks that left due to RTO, and they can fill in for my company that has a hard time finding talent in a 2nd or 3rd tier city?
If it’s not about your coworkers though you should be able to find a nice coworking spot or cafe even if they close the office. Your company may even be up to pay for it given all the millions they are saving on office space. Hope it works out, though, everyone needs a good place to work.
Except no one can actually measure or confirm these apparent hordes of lazy slackers that are totally out there. Just legions of secret non-working people.
Maybe all the big companies have measured and all concluded that on average WFH is less productive.
Individual productivity of office workers is nearly impossible to properly measure but aggregate productivity is easier though certainly far from perfect.
Because they haven't. Again, every study on this issue hasn't shown a drop in productivity.
>Maybe all the big companies have measured and all concluded that on average WFH is less productive.
And yet curiously neither the companies themselves nor any outside actor has been able to produce any of those measurements supporting such conclusion after years of trying.
I guess every company, government agency, and private entity in the world are all colluding to hide the evidence of lower WFH productivity despite desperately, desperately wanting to show that that's the case to support their RTO demands. Who can stop this nefarious conspiracy?
Do you think rto solves that? Your manager isn't going to be following your around physically. They're in meetings 6 hours a day. Everyone knows that one person who takes the 1 hour lunch break, leaves early, talks about this super hard bug that somehow takes them 3 weeks but no one has time to look into it.
This is a management issue though. If they aren't willing to address folks who aren't working (blatantly in your words) when remote, they won't when in office. It's just now everyone gets collectively punished.
It's also pretty easy for management to turn into a useless exercise of checking boxes and moving cards around. That is to say, it doesn't track actual work done in a useful way.
I think it is retaliation. Employees started pushing for WFH, raises, better work/life balance. Employers (especially bad ones) like to have control and so this is to get employees back in line.
Its cliche because its true. In a certain sense its not all that surprising: execs hang oit with other execs. They go to the same sports games, vacation at the same spots, attend conferences etc.
Ok, so they're at the same sports games, vacation (really?), conferences. So what, do they hang out and brag how many of their employees work from the office? Is it embarrassing for one exec of their company allows WFH? How does this "power" show?
"Offices across the U.S. are at an all-time occupancy low, and commercial real estate is starting to see an all-time high of almost 20% of unleased space, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reduction in real estate spend has enabled companies to reduce their operating expenses, thereby positively impacting their financial health. This poses the question: Are return-to-work mandates better for the workforce or for business bottom lines?"
Don't some real estate contracts require specific occupancy rates (measured at monthly levels?)? At level of detail that is affected by people not in office? How long are commercial real estate contracts usually for?
I think there is something to this. We have a long term lease for what is now an empty floor at 799 Market in SF and our landlord will not let us buy our way out of the lease, even at 100% of remaining rent. There are about 120 seats on our floor and about 1000 in the building. I’ve heard only sixty people use the building in a given day. So the usage rate is much much lower than the occupancy rate, i.e. we count as occupants even with zero usage.
OMG we had half of the 4th floor of that building on sublease when the pandemic hit (and for 2 years prior). The week of the first lockdown in 2020 we were all set to sign a new long term lease for an entire upper floor and half of the one below. Lockdown happened and we told them "let's just hold off on this for a bit". They were, of course, disappointed and desperate to get us to sign.
We held off, and it quickly became obvious the pandemic was going to be a long term thing. So when our sublease expired in September 2020 we moved out and have been fully remote and distributed ever since. We lucked out and dodged a bullet by not signing a long term lease for more space than we needed at the absolute top of the market.
Granted, we were already 60% remote at the time so it wasn't a completely massive shift. But that's it, we're remote and distributed and we're never looking back. Good bye central office!!!
This impulse isn't true for us (I'm the CEO) and so I've wondered why this accusation toward management is so common.
I suspect, but obviously don't know for sure, that merely making use of the real estate doesn't factor at all. It's more "come into the office because that's how I know how to manage people" and "somethings actually are hard to do remote."
We are productive remote for some things, but then get stuck on tricky issues that seem to get solved instantly when we are together. So we solved that by gathering twice a year at company retreats and having budget for more mini-gatherings. But our feeling is that going back to the office will never happen.
Thus, having demonstrated powerful leadership by forcing return to office without actually making the office a place anyone wants to be, the CEO returns to his den to hibernate until interest rates reach 2%.
The thing that I keep coming back to, is that if a company is taking an action, it should be about reducing friction to go to and making the office space a better place to work.
If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.
Yes, I view it as an amplifier for the existing management culture. If your system is supportive and focused on shared goals, RTO falls naturally into a balance where people come in when it makes sense (e.g. meaningful meetings & collaboration) and stay home when it does not. If your system is distrustful and based on dominance displays, which is far too common, the mandate is inflexible and transparently based on things like not expecting managers to be effective at measuring productivity, and it will be unpopular for those reasons. Both dynamics existed before the pandemic but the change in what people were used to and the current business climate demanding performative layoffs really cranked the intensity up.
> If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.
Cheaper staff reduction without redundancy payments!
Except for the intangible domain knowledge loss, but that won't appear on a finance spreadsheet.
And you get to target people with families who can’t move so easily, without explicitly targeting them, helping ensure whoever is left is really focused on the company mission and not any other less important aspects of their lives like being there for their kids or partner or whatever.
RTO to me just seems like a cyclical bit of performance art. It doesn't solve actual business problems, and no one is actually measuring whether it does.
> According to a recent research paper published by University of Pittsburgh, compelling evidence suggests that organizations are leveraging Return-To-Office mandates not to enhance firm value, but rather to reassert control and shift blame for poor performance onto employees.
At the risk of sounding cyncial, this is to be expected. Management, especially C-suites have put themselves on a pedastal where they can do no harm. Its almost always blamed on the employees.
Example, the recent Boeing fiasco is being portrayed as an employee failure[1] by giving employees safety lessons, while ignoring the years mismanagement and cost cutting.
I'll go one step further. RTO mandates are being used to mask how shockingly bad most manager's written communication and critical thinking skills are. When their ability to "manage by walking around" is taken away you very quickly notice how terrible their writing (and thus thinking) is.
I've experienced this first hand at multiple companies and it's fairly cringe-inducing to hear the excuses made for simple asks like having a written meeting agenda, project specification, or high level feature descriptions. Work breakdown meetings with these types over video calls amount to them trying to tell other people what to write down and ending the meeting as quickly as possible (perhaps the only upside).
Ascension to management appears to be a more extreme, self selecting version of the Peter principle for many. They can't make a living, or their desired income, in a role that has a well defined output and thus search for hiding places within organizations. Remote work puts them back into a role with expected outputs, and that's basically panic-inducing for someone who opted out of such things long ago.
My verdict: too much pride to admit that whatever communication skills they ever had have atrophied in the cauldron of management-level in-office politics. More energy than is required to learn to write coherently will be expended protecting identity and status. Companies will have to die and be replaced by those with more sensible policies and hiring discernment.
I would never rely on a company to allow me to work from home out of the kindness of their heart. I've been consulting for 12 years now and working remotely the whole time. I think I've only ever had to come to the office a handful of times during the past 12 years and it was because a manager wanted to take me out to lunch.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want me to return to the office, give me an OFFICE. Not a bullpen, not an open workspace, not a folding table in a warehouse with 200 other people. Maybe also some support staff, for office management, travel arrangements, and other things that suck productivity.
If you don't want RTO just leave and work somewhere where remote is the culture. I just don't get this whole thing where you're still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Just better for everyone if the in office people work in office and the remote people go to remote companies.
You act like they’re sorted into two distinct categories that never change. Why should the working agreement be upended at a whim with no data and then everyone sheep along? It’s the churn, with real consequences for where people live and socialize, send their kids to school, for the weakest of reasons.
"Executives should focus on figuring out the right workforce model for their business while recognizing that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The key is to focus on implementing a model that is reflective of the nature of their own business model and stakeholder needs. This does not mean that hybrid work with mandating office attendance a few times a week is the only option."
Actually thinking about the goal of your business and your operating model sounds like table stakes...?
I have seen poor management manifest more in WFH scenarios with work and official communications extending well past normal working hours, usual latency in tasks notwithstanding.
Also, this is tangential but I would be interested in what proportion of employees actually have a good home workplace set up, because it seems highly dependent on income and many (including myself) aren't generally equipped to make it as complete and focused as an office.
The absolute psychosis of management around RTO is truly baffling. It’s very telling that in the face of no evidence whatsoever of negative effects of remote work even after several years their reasons for demanding return have become increasingly abstract and now they’ve reached the “because I said so” phase.
I don’t get it. Isn’t remote a godsend for so many companies? Especially in our industry where half the orgs don’t even make any money. They get to save on rent, salaries. What am I missing here?!
OK - let's say that's true. That's not an argument against the RTO Mandate. It's an argument for it because the case that is being made is that in-office management is easier.
Fully agree with this post, and further think that a lot of execs have specific issues they feel from this:
- They often got into their role because of their IRL presence including:loud/aggressive voices, tall/physical imposing stature, etc.
- They like the feudal trappings of a big office with floors full of their reports, with a high end looking office, with assistants who get their coffee, etc.
Now that they're working at home, they lose their IRL advantages and perks, and it's actually a more meritocratic environment where you have to manage to metrics/plans more than walk around and catch the vibes. This penalizes bullshiters, which make up a high proportion of the executive class (speaking as one).
I tend to agree. Remote work done right encourages a data driven culture centered on documentation ( Notion, Slack as the communication hub of the company) vs meetings.
Return to office is part of the austerity doctrine. There is a concerted effort to rein in the newfound powers of workers, and bring back more traditional order to the worker / employer relationship.
Plenty of CEOs and their ilk have been on the record talking about the need to rebalance the equation between workers and workplaces, pointing to the collapse in commercial real estate as one of the consequences of this imbalance. Remote work is just one facet of the overall idea that people need to be made hungry again and that the worker/workplace balance needs to move back towards the workplace and the needs of companies.
As Clara Mattei said in an interview with Marketplace recently:
> The idea here is that austerity is all about getting us all to have to depend more on having money in our pocket in order to make a living. Together with the precariousness that an economic downturn brings about has the political effect of silencing demands for better conditions or even demands for more radical social changes towards a society that is based on different principles, and not on the exploitation of wage work.
The protests against the squeeze in the food system in the EU and France is particularly enlightening, as central authorities seek to extract the “inflation” from the growers of food rather than the middle-men and retailers where study after study shows its where the majority of “excess profits” have occurred.
There’s a tendency to be focused on bad management and bad managers, but the truth is that there’s a much larger movement here to rein in the power of workers.
If this the theory proves correct, soon we will experience a push in editorial narrative towards national debts, crisis and money issues and the need for America and other countries in the west to live within their means, and how each of us needs to do our part.
We are already experiencing broad labor problems.
You can track, to some degree, the anti-austerity and anti-budget protests happening globally here:
Just bear in mind that things are not quite so simple as “bad managers.”
I will say there are plenty of them and finding people who really get how to manage a remote teams is extremely challenging. Most of the people who talk about managing remote teams don’t actually know how to do it effectively, and I can tell you as someone who’s been managing remote teams for 20 years it was kind of funny to watch everyone become an “expert” because managing large remote teams effectively is a different skill set than managing people in office environments.
So yes, for sure the RTO mandates are definitely correlated with poor firm performance and a desire to blame workers for poor results: the study is right. But I’d also submit that it’s part of a larger trend to try to pin the economic consequences of irresponsible spending on the working classes (please note, if you make your money from a salary or RSUs and a salary you are effectively a member of the working class, not the same as socioeconomic classes).
Any time I post on austerity it gets downvoted, but that’s fine. But I think it’s important to at least be discussing austerity principles and how they are being used in these important social changes, as they are profoundly powerful in understanding what’s happening. Do downvote if you think this has no value, but please leave a comment as to why. This is a place for intelligent discussion, and I hope it won’t become another Reddit-esque echo chamber as it does seem to be headed that direction at times. I deeply value the HN community and what I have learned from other smarter people here.
I strongly suspect that we both have the continuing class war but also actual problems with debt and even real world resources availability. Which is not to say that those things would be as bad for the average person if not for class warfare, but poor management and just difficult situations do spread things more thinly.
I remember Stephen Wolfram mentioned that he managed Mathematica Products via email since it was founded in 1988. I was wondering how he could that so effectively.
It's hard to be a good manager and if it's easier and more consistent for these companies to extract acceptable performance in office vs. remote, why wouldn't they do it?
People act like remote is right and in-office is wrong (or vice versa), but they're just choices with consequences. There's no objective right or wrong here.
From some stories, depending on the area, the management at Apple reached "horrible shitshow" levels that abused a lot of other reasons people stayed in the job.
OTOH they infamously were very anti-WFH from start, so on this I'd say they didn't change
Remote management carries with it the same overhead as outsourced management. Outsourcing has slowed because the coordination costs are quite high and difficult to figure out. I think the backlash to remote is largely due to this being a very hard to solve problem.
Another WFH/RTO article. How many are we going to do? Has the argument changed in any way? Or are proponents of both going to use the exact same arguments as ever?
Here… allow me…
WFH: I will never admit any abuse on my part or on anyone else's ever.
RTO: This is happening. And everyone agrees, so you will have no choice.
I laughed at least a little when I read this because if I really think about the quality of comments on this subject the last few months, that is a relatively fair -- if sarcastic -- summary.
But you bring up an interesting point about WFH:
> I will never admit to any abuse on my part or anyone else's ever.
I see this a lot, too. I think the problem stems from the different ways that companies operate. Many, many companies -- regardless of role -- are having employees work remotely much the same way they were working in the office. And that's not, necessarily, stupid. When I first flipped to remote work, I was was working for a global multi-national telecom that went through bankruptcy. My reporting structure had my boss in the UK, his boss in Green Bay, WI, and his boss (who, at that time, never directed my work) was ... two floors down. I worked in an office outside of a test phone switch outside of a legacy phone switch occupying a whole floor with three people in it, none of whom were on my team, only one of whom was even in IT (my organization). Moving from "coming in and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" to "staying home and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" was a no-lose transition.
I'd gut-feeling a guess that all of the companies trying to bring employees back into the office are working that way or very close to that way -- some variant of "Be in front of your computer during your old office working hours". Well, except for coffee, several co-worker chats about Netflix/Sports/Nonsense. At the only job where I had this kind of schedule (for a period of time), our corporate policies allowed for checking personal e-mail, doing online banking and other personal activities on work time provided they weren't excessive (while signing off on them being monitored, of course). Is running a load of laundry between toilet breaks excessive? At what point does "doing non-work things during those working hours" count as abuse? How do organizations operating this way plan to catch the time thieves? These are all things that managers are panicking about, right now, because some of their employees basically stopped working[0], or they perceive the work being done would be done better if they could go back in time and put asses in chairs.
For roles where this is possible -- and obviously some aren't (and those have bigger trade-offs with remote work, as well) -- performance should be based on the simple question "Is the work getting done in a suitable time-frame?" Isn't that what they paid for? And if performance of all remote employees across the board is unsatisfactory then you have at least two things going on -- you've hired wrong, or you're failing to onboard well. And some people are slacking off, or literally doing no work, remotely. Why are they still employed? Are these people super-productive in the office? I suspect remote work shakes out a lot of people who'd rather have a different job. Those are the people that do shoddy work "in the office" and no work "at home[1]." I've had coworkers do this -- on a couple of occasions we didn't notice because the mistakes stopped which resulted in the team completing more work!
Where I'm currently employed, we have a few meetings, rarely before 10:00 AM, rarely after 3:00 PM. We're designing/building/adding new features to our product, together, and we all work radically different hours (despite most of us being down the street from one another). We're in a crunch time, now, so we're working radically long hours and spending more time on calls, but that will subside. I work from wherever in the heck I happen to be. I have an abundance of hardware/network setup so that I am never connecting to remote resources while developing. Outside of "I delivered what I said I would when I said I would" there's not a whole lot of oversight and I work between 40-50 hours a week like I did when I was in the office at my previous job. I start work between 5:00 and 8:00 -- sometimes I take a mid-day break and finish between 6 and "whenever." We have meetings every work-day so I work M-F, but it's common when someone didn't want to put something down and worked into the late evening to just leave a note and sleep through most of the following work-day. It's about "getting the thing done" and only about "how much time it's taking you to get it done" if you're burning out on 16 hour days when you shouldn't be. The intensity is no less -- probably more -- than it was when I was "in the office at my last job." But the impact of that intensity is a lot less when I have an abundance of control over when and where I work.
[0] It's because they're lazy, right? Have you asked them? Do they know their performance is not adequate? I know of one person who nearly quit a job because he was working 15 hours a day coding boilerplate. He was hired because the team was overwhelmed, but he wasn't working out because he couldn't complete simple things on time. When someone shadowed him for the day, they discovered he wasn't using a handful of scripts and was spending hours writing ... boilerplate.
[1] This happened "in the office" -- in my late teens I did desktop support for an organization with three offices/one main office. Two people usually handled "the non-main offices" working between them in various places. Over a month-long period, one employee stopped coming to work, completely. We discovered only when we rotated in new people to the "offsite offices" and the guy he was paired with said "that guy told him he was working at the main office." I guess he figured out we all kind of worked as an island and he only needed to tell one lie to collect free money.
People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.
I run a team of embedded systems developers writing software for a kiosk system, and our productivity is about the same as it would be in-office. We've had to make technology decisions at times to avoid doing low-level bring-up but almost all of the work we do doesn't require a shared lab space. My team is very effective at meeting organizational goals. We're more effective than many of the higher-paid "flagship" teams at the organization. We've delivered key strategic projects that the CTO considers very successful.
So no, remote work doesn't "kill productivity." It's a different way of working. There's a skillset and a set of attitudes and habits that successful remote working requires, and you have to start building that in new hires almost immediately if you want them to be successful. Like any transition in business you have to have a roadmap. And you need to think about the work your team does and how you're going to provide organizational supports without having everyone in the same room.
I'm also doing embedded systems work, these days focusing on a lot of low level board bring up that requires a fair bit of hardware test and instrumentation. I ended up fitting out a home HW lab this year because I just couldn't afford to get blocked on hardware issues and I was absolutely shocked at how inexpensive it was. I'm old enough to remember when an oscilloscope weight 50lbs and was a five finger investment. Now, you can get something nicer than I ever had in an office for $350. Complete no brainer if it saves me half a day a year (and oh, man, has it...) Same thing with logic analyzers. You can spend next to nothing for basic functionality or, if you're willing to spend $1K, you have access to very nice kit. Same thing with soldering stations.
I _might_ have a bit more space working at an office, but rarely have I had better access to tools.
This. OP is probably a manager, and managers are often psychopaths who would absolutely steal if they could get away with it. Thus they assume that everyone else would steal if they could get away with it, and so WFH must not be allowed, because everyone will be slacking off and playing CoD.
Why don't you try leaving your laptop on a park bench for a couple of days? Maybe because not all people are like you?
And even more people, most people I would say, are not right-wing absolutists and they in all seriousness believe that it is the employer who robs them when they do the agreed work. So, in their minds, they don't even consider themselves doing anything wrong, they are just taking the opportunity to get a little compensation for what was stolen from them
This isn't any more evidence. But the fact that I'm currently logged in, working, is evidence that you're not on the right track. And yes, I did post on Hacker News when I was working in the office.
I’ve done remote work for years and never done this, and worked with many many people who didn’t either. So I guess maybe some people just want to do a good job and build something successful. I’m sure there are many people who do not but probably they don’t magically become successful if you can wrestle them into a desk chair in an office, either. They probably steal office supplies.
At my prior ultra mega corp we meticulously capture telemetry on everyone’s work habits super big brother like. We had been for 5 years before covid and ramped up considerably with covid. Our sample size was over 300,000 knowledge workers.
We found an average 20-30% productivity improvement and nearly 40% morale improvement with remote work.
When our elderly CEO decided enough was enough and forced everyone back into the human hamster wheels we saw a reversion to the pre-remote work performance across the board basically immediately and employee satisfaction dropped considerably below pre-pandemic levels. Interestingly the people who refused to comply with the mandate saw their performance improve even more, which made the employee review consequence for non compliance stick.
This is a statistical average so there are outliers, and the population was bimodal. Some people genuinely did better in the office and saw performance improve when they returned. But that definitely was not the mode.
So, I feel for the folks who aren’t part of the general group that does better at home, and they are the ones who say things like this. Remote work is great for business not because it improves morale and productivity (which it definitively does) even if it doesn’t for you). It’s because warehousing bags of mostly water to sit all day on zoom commuting to telecommute with their teams scattered all over the world is economically inefficient.
We saved like $5m/y with bring your own device by ceasing the corporate subsidy for blackberries. We could save hundreds of millions by ceasing corporate subsidies for your chair with bring your own office.
The fact a board can improve EPS by a significant amount, improve morale and productivity, by not making industrial human chicken coop seating available is a no brainer, but it’ll require passions to cool and the elderly CEOs to retire.
Edit: I had a preexisting remote work agreement with this company. As the RTO lockdowns and roundups became more severe (we had a less than 20% compliance rate with the mandate for at least a year), they claimed my RTO agreement hadn’t been properly approved and wasn’t valid. Suddenly I had to come into an office where I didn’t work with anyone locally, everyone I worked with was in Europe or NYC and I was on the west coast so had to go into the office at 4am to start my zoom meetings (I usually started at 5am at home, rolling out of bed and logging in), etc. I did the only honorable thing and write a widely distributed screed about the absurdity of RTO (more impactful when a senior dude does that), and quit immediately. I got a much better job at a late stage startup with no RTO policy, pays better better work, and the people I work with are happy and productivity.
Actually, funding every employee to buy a really kick ass ergonomic chair for home office is use is probably dollar for dollar one of the best benefits most companies could offer, and may even make financial sense - less missed days for surgeries, happier healthier employees, etc.
> Companies With Flexible Remote Work Policies Outperform On Revenue Growth
> The report shows that the three-year industry-adjusted revenue growth rate of companies that have what Scoop calls a “fully flexible” policy—meaning they allow employees or teams to choose when or whether they come to the office, or are fully remote—is 21%. Companies in the data set with more restrictive policies—say, those that have corporate mandates for a couple days per week or those that require full-time work in the office—had only a 5% industry-adjusted revenue growth rate, the analysis found. When excluding the tech industry over the same period, public companies that were “fully flexible” outperformed by 13 percentage points.
You should offer office-optional, if you're tech you should really offer office-optional. I'm genuinely shocked how people didn't see these results coming, companies are simply unwilling to invest the money to give every employee a nice office tailored to their own productivity but guess what -- employees will do that on their own if you let them, for free.
1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time).
2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager.
Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.