One of the primary reasons that remote work improves productivity is that it allows employees to tailor their environment to their needs, rather than be forced into a hostile office space that requires kafkaesque bureaucratic bullshit to make even minor changes.
I once had a former employer force me to take an espresso machine home that I had brought to work because it created a situation where a different shift was coming to our teams area to use it when we weren’t there and they were concerned by the liability. Very non-specific concerns, I might add. So rather than ensure teams had access to real coffee they banned employees having their own coffee equipment so we can all commiserate together over the bottom dollar filth in the break room.
This is the type of basic shit most companies can’t get right, much less the far more complicated challenges involved in creating positive team dynamics.
I have no faith that any sufficiently large company can make an inviting office environment, and this is a major reason why I am a staunch remote work advocate.
I think this is correct. It's why, before the pandemic normalized remote work, offices were popular.
What's disheartening is that a lot of "return to office" plans I've heard of from friends involve conditions even worse than what was there before. For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office.
I'm too young to have lived through the golden age of engineers actually having an office to work in. But my best experience (besides WFH) was at my first job out of school, in a cube farm - at least you had a little bit of privacy and space to put your stuff. Every office trend since then has been for the worse.
My last job had pinball machines in the breakroom. We also had folks coming over from the UK who thought those pinball machines were awesome. The pinball got taken away because it was seen as “unfair” to all the offices that didn’t have something like that.
> remote work [...] allows employees to tailor their environment to their needs, rather than be forced into a hostile office space
Some office spaces being bad doesn't imply we should get rid of office spaces overall.
If the company you're working for is so crazy on its office requirements, it could be as crazy with its remote work requirements.
Seems like this is a company specific issue, not an office vs remote issue.
Seems like you've been at a fair share of bad companies, but that's doesn't generalize to a broader picture of all office spaces.
I would oppose you _my_ office experience (which ofc doesn't generalize either), which is overwhelmingly positive. Yet I won't argue that because my experience is good, everyone should feel the same.
Why can't you store it at your desk? My biggest pet peeve in the office was the people storing personal items in the kitchen. I don't need to see your machine with (don't use) stickies on it or the random assortment of blender bases. I also don't need to see your dirty tupperware in the sink.
I've been remote working since 2000 but as an EE I agree with your employer: they have a duty to remove unauthorized electrical appliances from their premises since they present a fire risk. In addition an espresso machine obviously presents a risk of injury and associated lawsuits from numbskulls who don't know how to use it.
At one recent gig, everything was fun until the company got big enough to need an HR scold. Ugh. We were told that a ping pong table was forbidden because of "health and safety issues". Needless to say, I left soon after.
The espresso machine bit makes sense. Espresso machines need constant cleaning and maintenance, which are ongoing costs in addition to the potential liability concerns from someone getting injured using the machine.
That's certainly an argument but it's just one bullet point in a supportive 5 paragraph essay. How many employees actually have better equipment and spaces at home? Is your espresso machine improving your productivity, or is it a hobby to fiddle with throughout the day? What other distractions are at home that aren't at the office?
where I used to work, the micro kitchens all had their own foodservice licenses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d balked at employees bringing their own equipment
small companies don’t give a shit about stuff like that ime
A lot of people work virtually regardless of their location. You can return to the office but it doesn't stop. You still work as if it was remote because there will always be somebody in the meeting that isn't there. They could be at home, in a different building, or a vendor in another country.
Such is the consequence of complex organizations and outsourcing, as well as employees increasing demands to have a say in their schedule.
When you really think about it, collaboration is the problem rather than the solution. The modern distributed nature of work means that you need a huge amount of collaboration to even figure out what to do, when, and to resolve all dependencies.
So it's pretty maddening that managers call for more collaboration. We need less of it. The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through.
Modern employees spent half their time in email, chat and meetings. Not producing anything. And that's generous, quite a few have to find actual productive time in the fragmented 10% of their schedule. It's as if we've all become managers.
> collaboration is the problem rather than the solution
Spot on.
> The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through
In traditional manufacturing processes (i.e., physical goods), this is possible and often achieved. Productivity can be easily measured by dividing the physical output - like the number of items produced - by the factory headcount. Innovation exists in cycles that precede manufacturing, since changes to the factory layout are expensive and often require interrupting production.
Software development is a different beast. Innovation is intermingled in the 'manufacturing' process. Requirements change faster, and we need processes to accommodate that. Work happens in smaller time frames (e.g., two-week sprints). Productivity and delivered value are harder to measure. Paying customers are in the loop and provide constant feedback we need to filter and incorporate for our 'product' to succeed.
The software development challenge is more consultative in nature than the manufacturing one.
I like the phrase "serendipity is not a strategy", it gets to my biggest complaint about the arguments for going back to the office. Your shitty open plan office was never MIT Building 20 before the pandemic, and it's not going to become a womb of creativity after the pandemic just because you want it to be so. The way I know that is because you have to threaten people to come back to it, if it was special at all they'd come back on their own.
>Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
Yes. Whether remote or in person, pairing works best when there's a experience/skill mismatch. Both parties benefit because the senior has to know and explain the why and the junior learns the what. I enjoy it as long as it's small doses.
It is draining and tiresome when done for long periods but I think worth it. It keeps you sharp and builds relationships with teammates.
Pairing with someone on your level can also be beneficial but with diminished returns.
>Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
It's still by far the most effective tool for certain tasks. Inherit an extremely complex codebase with 50 levels of abstraction? You could spend a week tinkering with it, or you could step through the code with the guy who wrote it for 30 minutes. But it's not something you'd want to do every day, or even frequently.
> Remote pair programming? Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
I’ve just encountered it at my newest job.
A little of it actually seems good, but more as a “show and tell” of how some part of the system you know operates, that may include writing a little code in service of better learning.
Otherwise it seems to be a great way to get two developers to have the output of half a developer.
Pair programming isn't widely practiced for obvious reasons: It looks like you just made your code twice as expensive. There are studies justifying the cost by showing it can be recovered with less testing, code review, and bug hunting. But that evidently hasn't been persuasive. Also, anyone familiar with statistical quality control (SQC or SQA) would look at pair programming and see 100% inspection. Very suboptimal in manufacturing.
Still, pair programming makes sense in the abstract: Coding is not manufacturing. Applying SQC to code is nonsensical. Under the circumstances, 100% inspection is all you've got. Pair programming probably makes sense in cases where minimizing bugs at every step, right down to the creation of every line of code, is needed because the cost of a bug explodes the longer it exists. Probably rare cases. But worth knowing to know that coders are not working on a production line.
I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company.
The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
The return to office has nothing to do with productivity, trying to look at things through that lens reflects a total lack of understanding of whats going on.
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
I know i'm supposed to "contribute to the conversation" but it's important to recognize that the above point is exactly right.
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
This is argument keeps getting parroted without evidence or skepticism. Where's the evidence? Just because many people don't like RTO doesn't mean that RTO is driven by evil forces up to no good. There's nuance - on both sides of the debate! - and it does no one a service to reduce the arguments to bumper stickers.
No, employees wanting to work from home don't universally want to loaf off. No, employees that want to work from an office aren't universally middle managers trying to justify their existence. Some people work better at home, others work better at the office. Some companies have found WFH to improve productivity overall and are flexible, and other companies have found RTO to improve productivity overall. If you work better from home, go work for the former. If you work better from the office, go work for the latter. Let the market decide. If WFH is overall more productive, eventually the RTO companies' performance will suffer, and vice versa. No need to blame things on the boogeyman behind the curtain!
WFH is existentially painful for those that have coupled their identity too strongly to their jobs. They're confronted daily with the fact that their coworkers just aren't that into them (e.g. the job, and by extension, them) as they'd like. The likelihood this has happened goes up significantly as you move up the ladder, because the volcano gods demand sacrifice for that.
There's also a segment of the population that somewhat overlaps with the previous paragraph that uses work as their primary social outlet.
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors
> The return to office has nothing to do with productivity
I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side.
I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig.
A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time.
1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin).
2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers.
3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.
Ireland is crazy for jumping on the real estate ship again. This almost bankrupted the country in 2007 because the economy had become so one-sided. I remember the dreary half-finished shopping malls and whole neighborhoods of concrete slabs falling to pieces.
And yes I know some of those bottom feeders in our place too. They're the ones constantly distracting you at work with chitchat. I have several people I try to avoid but unfortunately our pisspoor desk booking system (Planon, never buy that!) doesn't even allow to look up where other people are.
> from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
Two anecdotes supporting this.
Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered.
At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable.
If you look at RTO mandates coming out of places like IBM and Yahoo during the Before Times, there was clearly an "increase unforced attrition" aspect to them. Layoffs without the pesky WARN notices, severance, etc.
Id be more specific. RTO is pushing commute costs to workers, which is why RTO is miss priced in the market.
If your commute time was paid for by the firm, all the firms calculations would shift dramatically.
A worker rise up moment, if we ever needed more.
The commonly stated goal is to “work together” - something you can do if you have years of experience being in online communities, and alien if you have not.
This post is a perfect example of why RTO is bad for everyone, including office-likers like myself. I don't want to have to be anywhere near this guy, lol.
> the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
> and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
I can see why office culture doesn't appeal to you, you sound like a grump who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. If you can enjoy the cognitive dissonance of socializing with black squares in a zoom, that's great, but I'd rather enjoy the time I spend working, not merely tolerate it. I don't think that makes me a loser.
I have two wonderful examples of a hostile work environment, both caused by the same boss:
He had the habit of playing music really, really loud from his speakers. It got so bad that they tried to relegate him to different floors and build a separate office, just for him and the lucky few that worked with him (me included).
Another thing he did was being his dog to the office despite there being people allergic to dogs in the office.
And people are trying to force everyone nack to the office because of "collaboration".
I once worked at a company where almost the opposite was true, or at least they prided themselves on not factoring that in and in moving desks several times a year. Managers and senior people tended to be near the center of a very crowded office space, away from the windows, I suppose to be closer to the "action". Newer or less important folks tended to be near the windows.
> Mediocre teams compromise on their ways of working to avoid conflict;
Yeah, well, conflict with the corporate overlords tends to be pretty one-sided, so we’ll need to attack that problem if you want that to change. There are proven approaches. But this isn’t “compromise”, it’s workers having their work environment dictated to them.
> sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy.
Oh wow, uh, that was not the direction I expected the rest of that sentence to go.
> I’ve experienced some of my most joyful work in teams working together in the same space. I’ve benefited from flexibility and inclusion with remote work. I’ve also been able to contribute as part of larger open source communities where I couldn’t even know everyone by name.
On the topic of knowing everyone by name: so very much easier remote. Real people don’t have a name tag next to every statement they make, or hovering under their face at all times. Much harder in person.
> Working physically together, in the same space, as a whole team, can be extremely enabling.
I am still not convinced "in the same space" makes any difference. I couldn't care less if co-worker is sitting next to me or on the other side of the country. But in person, you get an extra cognitive load of being around people. Someone brings smelly sandwich, someone else forgot to shower then another one keeps chewing gum and making loud mouth noises.
> Supporting a joyful environment.
One man's joy is another man misery. Certainly having people making morning journey from across the country and then observing how they "work" may be joyful experience for a manager feeling insecure.
Best compromise I saw is that if someone can't work at home, company gives them vouchers at their local co-working space of their choosing. No commute and office experience.
> Most of all I get sad when I see ineffective teams with no ability or motivation to improve—whether remote or co-located.
This. I get that remote isn't always practical or effective, I do. But it's the staunch insistence on one way of working, and the denial that it needs improvement, that pisses me off so god damn much.
If I could actually get more work done in an office, of course I would go back. I have a huge backlog of shit to get through! But an hour commute isn't making that easier. And we all have been in the office where half the team is spread out just because they want to get away from noise, or to find a more comfy place, or they need heads-down time without interruptions. We've all been in meetings where 3 people are remote just because they needed to let a repair man in at noon, or their daughter's sick, or something's going on. And that is fine. So what's wrong with keeping that the same, and just not requiring people go in?
Then there's all the other dysfunctional shit that has nothing to do with an office, where the office is the excuse to never fix it. We can't figure out our online communications? No problem, just buy a big room and shove people in it and they can just walk up to each other all the time. We can't properly organize our documentation? Big room, shove people in it, walk up and ask where something is. No documentation? Big room, shove people, interrupt, ask how it works. Need to decide something but don't want to have a meeting? No problem, just interrupt 5 people at once and have an impromptu meeting. Who needs to improve their business process when they can just have people interrupt each other all day and never write a single thing down?
Remote doesn't magically work well either. You have to do specific things to make remote successful. I'm pretty sure the reason for mandatory return is just that they don't want to try. Even if half the workforce wanted to work in an office, they could buy a smaller office and let workers do what they need to do. But that would still require improvements to get the remote half to work well with the in-office half, so let's just avoid that extra work and force everyone into the office. That's easy for management, but sucks for the workforce, and the business.
> except for some people telling others how they have to live life
Don't act like this is a one-way street.
If you're working remotely then your employer is also telling its employees how they have to live life. It's just that in this case you happen to agree with them so it's A-OK!
RTO has benefits, just not for employees. Commercial real estate, businesses downtown, municipalities, they all benefit from this slow moving trainwreck.
I think at the team level most individuals do want to make change and work in the most efficient way possible it's just at big multinational corporations what you can modify about your environment can be extremely limited.
Maybe. I do think there are a fair number of people who recognize there are downsides to never seeing coworkers in person. But, given the option, it's a tradeoff they'll make so they don't need to commute.
> Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together.
I'll take the happiness thanks. You can keep the joy, let me know when you can share in the rewards of those achievements more robustly and I'll consider sacrificing for it.
You can’t fix or change people who live to work or think the work is full of meaning at the cost of quality of life. Deeply ingrained belief system like religions (and we know what kind of mental autoimmune response occurs when those are challenged). You can only institute guardrails against them.
The majority in my company have forgotten what used to be quite standard office manners before covid. Hot food in the desk area of the office used to be a real no-no, likewise having notification sounds coming out of your laptop constantly.
My office has the exact same problems, plus we have people playing music out-loud and people taking personal phone calls for what seems like 20+ minutes in the working areas. The other week I got to hear all about someone's family get-together while trying to fix production issues.
So, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the population never had the option of remote work. The professional class bemoaning that they are being "forced" back to the office (translation: they won't pay you to work at home) is beyond a 1st World problem; it's a 1st World professional class problem. Even surgeons and nurses and dentists have to be "at work" in order to work, for the most part. The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
This reads like "you better clean your plate, there are starving kids in Africa!"
Yes, some people don't have the option of remote work, but if you have that option, how does that affect those that don't? Cleaning my plate won't feed starving kids in Africa, and taking shit over working from home doesn't help people whose jobs require physical presence.
Some people can work from home, and entire fields can't. So what? How is that relevant? Some jobs just don't require physical presence and business owners don't like that for a variety of unfair reasons. People who can work from home are being treated unfairly. How does that affect kids in Africa? Does it hurt them? Help them? Or are they utterly irrelevant to the problem at hand?
The existence of farmers doesn't really have a single thing to do with call center workers taking calls at home. Of course farmers can't farm remotely, but that's utterly irrelevant. No one is trying to force farmers and nurses to dramatically change their work environment on the whim of some middle manager who read a really good thinkpiece from WSJ.
Discussion about this problem doesn't mention doctors and farmers because the conversation is not about them in the same way that it's not about starving kids in Africa
This is a very bad take in multiple ways. Firstly, problems in the professional workplace need to be discussed too. And that's not just for the benefit of the "professional class" if these people work more efficiently at home it's better for both them and everyone else, the company, the people who pay for the services of that company, the world thanks to fewer driving emissions.
Secondly, you most be very out of touch to think that everyone who can work from home is a 180,000 a year Peet's coffee filled software engineer. Lots and lots of lower wage, lower education jobs can work from home but are getting forced to the office. Executive assistants, customer support, marketers, copywriters, I could list a lot more.
These are the worst comments on HN, just ultra lazy defense of the status quo with no real meat to it.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
I stopped caring about what random strangers think when I was in high school. The correct answer to this is to tell these random people who have no skin in the game to fuck off.
Carbon emissions are literally killing people, and are bound to kill many more millions if we don't change our ways.
So if the cooks and nurses and truck drivers have no choice, then I'd say that it's our duty to work remotely in order to do our part in reducing emissions.
People in every profession would be offended by meaningless requirements coming from the top without any plausible justification. Construction workers, truck drivers etc. understand full well why the need to show up. So do software engineers who need to work on physical devices that they can't have at home.
I actually think professional class is more prone to tolerate this attitude from the management, because it's what corporate environment teaches to do.
I personally saw WFH as another step in the advancement of labor that is not completely unlike 40h work week. Yes, not everyone can get it, but it is clear that:
1. it can work
2. it is against existing, entrenched interests
Hence the tension.
FWIW, our company just mandated RTO and there was push back, because the person making the decision made it basically within a week from publishing date and a lot of people have kids so it is not exactly a flip a switch kind of situation PLUS there are a couple of high visibility projects that rely on staff good will to push it past the finish line. No flexibility from company means no flexibility from us ( no more calls after 5 to deal with fires and so on ).
I accept not all jobs are ready for WFH ( butcher, surgeon and so on ), but some absolutely are.
WFH isn't about not going to the office. It's about breaking real estate. If the professional class can do that, it actually benefits everyone by taking some of the pressure off hyperinflated real estate markets in major cities. We could also see some repurposing of commercial space to residential, which would further take the pressure off.
If you as a professional class worker think the rent is too damn high, consider how insane it is for people who make less and work longer hours.
It's become clear to me that real estate is the economic problem, at least in the US. I said the economic problem, singular. I don't think any other issue compares.
The phenomenon of younger generations feeling poorer than their parents is largely attributable to real estate costs. I think real estate is at the root of a ton more problems too: homelessness (for obvious reasons), collapsing birth rates, low rates of family formation, even crime. Real estate is basically cannibalizing the future.
If a restaurant line cook could work from home they very well might want to. Software work can, most of the time, be done from home. So the question of if it should be done from home is valuable and worthy of discussion.
All workers deserve to have a say in their working conditions.
How one talks about it can be entitled or spoiled sounding, but the desire to influence and change one's working conditions is noble and in common with great majority of workers.
When my children were small I started working remotely while my partner worked in an office still. I looked for a remote job so that rather than being in a office and going to get some coffee I was excited to instead get to see my 8 month of doing some baby biz on my coffee break.
What a wonderful privilege it was during that age of growth. How great it would be for more people to have that experience (which was very common before industrialization).
The thing is that the office is not what it was before. The hybrid office with its roaming desks is a nightmare. I hate it so much.
Going to the office before the pandemic was totally different. Even though I did work from home regularly then too. But at the office I had the same colleagues around me (even though my direct colleagues were all in different locations). I had my own desk with my stuff. Now I just have a locker and I'm a dumb number that nobody cares about. I hate the company.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
They decided to get into a profession they doesn't have working from home as an option. They can change if they want.
Also I don't really give a F if other people think I'm spoiled.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
My experience is that the rest of the population has very little day-to-day contact with people like me and remote work only reduces it, so they simply don't care.
I get some vague interest in the details of my life when salaries are mentioned, but when I explain what kind of hoops you have to jump and what kind of lifestyle you have to lead (desk job and learning after hours) to get to these figures, interest is usually lost.
Overall people are way less interested in how strangers live their lives and visibly less envious than one would think. For most this line of work is boring and soul crushing and they don't think the salary makes it worth it.
I don't think the fact that remote work is not possible for other professionals is relevant. If it is about fairness, you could say it is even an advantage for other workers since it means less traffic congestion, better access to restaurant and less land use.
I've been WFH for a decade, at the end of the day, if i'm forced to come in to an office then i'll just take my business elsewhere. There are plenty of companies willing to pay me for my time and more than happy to have me work remote. I don't see how i could possibly be the only one.
This reads like some crab mentality; since heroic nurses and factory workers can’t work remotely then we should bemoan those who can and do work remotely.
Should we also cancel telehealth programs so those nurses that actually do work remotely don’t become spoiled and entitled?
I have flipped burgers, assembled camcorders, and driven airport shuttles. The thing about those jobs is that the workspace was well designed by someone who understood the tasks. Writing quality software requires long quiet concentration, yet we keep cheaping out on open plan desks.
There is a way of generalizing this to all of them, though, which is: Why should any of them have to do anything they don't actually have to do for their job? A relevant example to many hourly jobs might be managers being inflexible in their hours more-or-less just because they can. (Though this has gotten "better" as more and more businesses staff down and they're being inflexible because they have to be to be open at all... which is not exactly manifesting as an improvement for the worker, though.) Doctors might wonder why they went to school for over a decade and have 1.5 administrators per doctor and still need to spend the majority of their time filling out paperwork. Etc.
* Employers should pay the cost of employee travel to work, at least count the time spent traveling to work as work hours. If I'm driving into work it's not really my free time.
* If I lived near my workplace, I wouldn't care about working from home so much. Society has done something seriously wrong where most people cannot live near where they work.
* By getting the professional class off the roads, traffic is better for those who have to work in person. By tearing down the offices that aren't really needed and replacing with residential and other mixed use, we might have a shot at rearranging things where the people that need to be physically present at work can live close to work.
Spoiled, or righteous indignation? Never have we been more productive as individuals, and efficient as an org. And no one has presented any actual functional reason to be in an office. No one wants to take a step backwards.
No. It's forced in-office that is a problem which impacts all desk jockeys, regardless of what bucket their country or neighborhood gets slotted into.
The fact that other roles cannot work remote is beside the point. People want a reasonable say in their work environment regardless of the nature of their work. And they'll negotiate accordingly if the work requires physical presence.
Desk workers aren't spoiled for pointing out the waste and abuse of involuntary butt-in-seats policies. The accusation comes across as trying to incite discord.
This is crab bucket thinking. Dragging people to the office doesn't improve the plight of other workers.
Keeping more people away from commutes though does reduce traffic for those who need to get around.
Central commercial real estate could actually provide useful things, rather then "places people sit at computers they could do anywhere".
Distributing the work force out means more mixing of class and profession. Service jobs can be closer to where people live because they're more distributed.
>" The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled."
So people who can work from home should go to the office to satisfy "the rest of the population"? This is some novel concept. Have you tried approaching company owners and CEO and ask them to make their compensation to be more in line with the general population as well?
Nearly anything can be bucketed up into some kind of "this is an N-class issue, think of the non-N class!", so I am not sure this is a great approach to problem solving. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, investors, CEOs, world leaders all have problems and they all want solutions. My doctor who exists in the top 0.1% is still entitled to say, demand working less than 80 hour weeks and whatever else their "class" problems entail.
if their professions allowed them to work from home they should be
don't know what this argument is supposed to be? seems like something a ceo made up to emotionally justify their position rather than based in any sort of objective reasoning
things shouldn't get better because other things haven't gotten better? is that the crux of your argument?
What? Is your argument basically "you can't have problems because other people have problems too"?
My partner is a nurse. Of course she can't work from home. Her job is literally touching people, putting things in them and taking things out.
They're not making her go to the hospital just to fuck with her.
My job, on the other hand, does not involve physical contact. In fact, I don't even need to leave home, as demonstrated by years of working at home. I deliver value at home so I get paid for it. It's as simple as that really. It's completely irrelevant how other people deliver their value.
I once worked in an office where one of our engineers ended up moving out of the open office into an office of his own.
He would often get offended in the open office around the other engineers. Why? Language. He once asked me not to say "damn" around him because he's very religious.
It was a C/C++/C# codebase, so that was never going to happen.
Having your own private bathroom is a really underrated perk of WFH. There are of course many more benefits to WFH, but using your own bathroom is something no office and their disgusting communal bathrooms could ever compete with.
Having your own bathroom is the best, but one thing I liked when I worked in Italy is that they had real bathrooms in most offices. It's very normal to have a little room with a door that fully closes, rather than those stalls where you can see people's feet, as well as smell and hear everything.
I mean, I kind of get having that kind of thing in, say, an airport or somewhere with security concerns, but being treated like that in an office environment is horrible.
To add to this, when there are annoying things like that in the office.. most places there's no people in charge. There are facilities teams but they don't really care if the toilet flush is not powerful enough, or if one of the taps is leaking, or a quarter of the chairs are wonky.. and you can't really say it to your direct manager since it is not work related.
The company I work for took the opportunity to switch things up at the office during the pandemic. One was switching to what can only be described as 1/2-ply toilet paper with perforated designs. They bragged about how much it saved while mandating back to the office. They also swamped out the food at the cafe, good luck getting anything fresh.
No thanks, I'll take my 2 ply, my own toilet, and actual nutritious lunches.
Okay, so I have this idea. And by idea I mean effectively a fever dream: Separate building connected by underground tunnel with one of those moving sidewalks and the building is filled with personal bathrooms for each employee.
Each employee is given a small budget and menu where they can decide what amenities their bathroom gets stocked with. You can decorate it according to your whims.
There's so many logistical and even geometric problems with the idea. But just imagine the retention numbers if someone was actually able to pull it off. You have your own personal bathroom overlooking a serene wooded area, wall mounted TV doing sports ball recap, small private library, and scented candle with that sent you can't get enough of.
[Although, honestly, I would be happy if they just made the toilet stall dividers go from the floor to the ceiling.]
I am curious that nobody has not mentioned a great movie "Office Space". A brilliant sarcastic comedy about office culture in the late nineties. I think the time is ripe for a sequel.
It is a classic for a reason. Consider watching "Corner Office". It is not in the same category and frankly it is a little weird, and the jokes are a hit or miss, BUT.. there are moments that capture office life a little too well.
The author really doesn’t help their point by dwelling on the sacrifice of the individual for the team. A team that doesn’t maximize the value of the individuals by finding ways they complement each other in their differences will always be less than it could be. And too much have we asked individuals to sacrifice for too long for too little.
The way we used to work is an emergent reality that had begun to fray long before the pandemic, see multilocation strategies, selective remote working options, hotel seating with over subscribed occupancy. The cost of commercial real estate was already being eyed carefully. As a senior executive in multinational mega corps I can tell you definitively “bring your own office” in 2019 was seen as bigger than “bring your own device” in terms of potential to reduce cost, increase productivity, and maximize EPS. The biggest barrier was the 5-10 year real estate development and tax abatement cycles, but you were already seeing compression of available seating and over subscription with a 10 year plan to compress to only essential coworking. Further, while panned now, the WeWork model was seen as the future - essentially elastic occupancy as opex, burstable cloud like office space flexibly located where the talent lives.
The pandemic accelerated this stepwise from 20% to 100% overnight. I could see it in the eyes of the CEOs as they saw the culture they understood disappear overnight and the emotional entrenchment that “this can’t be allowed to persist.” Despite all the prior plans and agreement, an emotional reaction took hold. They saw the productivity improvements and were unswayed. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about productivity, it wasn’t about efficiencies. It was about a way of living being threatened, a way the CEOs were manifestly beneficiaries of, and was the only lifestyle they knew and understood. They didn’t want things to change. To buttress their desires, tax abatements and leases obligated use of the real estate. But make no mistake, the RTO movement is almost entirely driven by a near maniacal gripping onto a way of life the decision makers benefited from and can’t let go of.
Joy of the team, sacrificing the individual for the greater good, watercooler serendipity, “think of the kids,” etc, are all smokescreens for the real motivations: fear of an unraveling of the emergent reality that todays leaders owe their entire successful career to, and at that level, that’s all they have in their life. That office culture is literally the cornerstone of their identity, and being more or less all narcissists, they believe their identity is the cornerstone to the world.
The rest of the article is pretty good. I wouldn’t stop reading based on the intro.
The essence is there’s a continuum of work styles along a two dimensional system (in office - remote / sync - asynch). Each quadrant has its own benefits. They seem to assert the middle, hybrid, is the worst of all worlds, and it’s better to pick a style and lean into it. They offer a variety of ways to lean into a style.
IMO I think this is overly simplistic and the most efficient reality, and likely the emergent one we land in within 10 years, is a mixed reality. Coworking works well for some, doesn’t for others. The skills for a remote workplace benefit a multi location team, a hybrid team, or a fully remote team equally. Some tasks are async, some are sync. Once a team has one person not on site, the team only functions as a remote team; otherwise the person not onsite isn’t a part of the team. Recognizing that any team level work would be handled as if everyone were remote.
There will be a contingent who work best in an office. They will continue to have one, albeit a smaller space with fewer and fewer amenities as the occupancy cost / person is squeezed. Those that work best remotely will land at a place that values them for the way they work best. We will continue to refine our work protocols to accommodate this new way of working. The CEOs of today will become the CEOs of yesterday. The new CEOs will be the ones who emerged ahead during the pandemic. The new mid level will be the ones who excelled in remote school and remote entry level.
Bring your own office will become the buzz word. Boards will see the cold hard reality of occupancy cost per head in office rising relentlessly. Tax abatements and leases will have frayed. Then, either the weworks of today or its replacement will have its day.
tristor|2 years ago
I once had a former employer force me to take an espresso machine home that I had brought to work because it created a situation where a different shift was coming to our teams area to use it when we weren’t there and they were concerned by the liability. Very non-specific concerns, I might add. So rather than ensure teams had access to real coffee they banned employees having their own coffee equipment so we can all commiserate together over the bottom dollar filth in the break room.
This is the type of basic shit most companies can’t get right, much less the far more complicated challenges involved in creating positive team dynamics.
I have no faith that any sufficiently large company can make an inviting office environment, and this is a major reason why I am a staunch remote work advocate.
AlexandrB|2 years ago
What's disheartening is that a lot of "return to office" plans I've heard of from friends involve conditions even worse than what was there before. For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office.
I'm too young to have lived through the golden age of engineers actually having an office to work in. But my best experience (besides WFH) was at my first job out of school, in a cube farm - at least you had a little bit of privacy and space to put your stuff. Every office trend since then has been for the worse.
sircastor|2 years ago
Galanwe|2 years ago
Some office spaces being bad doesn't imply we should get rid of office spaces overall.
If the company you're working for is so crazy on its office requirements, it could be as crazy with its remote work requirements.
Seems like this is a company specific issue, not an office vs remote issue.
Seems like you've been at a fair share of bad companies, but that's doesn't generalize to a broader picture of all office spaces.
I would oppose you _my_ office experience (which ofc doesn't generalize either), which is overwhelmingly positive. Yet I won't argue that because my experience is good, everyone should feel the same.
turtlebits|2 years ago
dboreham|2 years ago
xhkkffbf|2 years ago
gamblor956|2 years ago
wormius|2 years ago
starcraft2wol|2 years ago
0_____0|2 years ago
where I used to work, the micro kitchens all had their own foodservice licenses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d balked at employees bringing their own equipment
small companies don’t give a shit about stuff like that ime
iteratethis|2 years ago
Such is the consequence of complex organizations and outsourcing, as well as employees increasing demands to have a say in their schedule.
When you really think about it, collaboration is the problem rather than the solution. The modern distributed nature of work means that you need a huge amount of collaboration to even figure out what to do, when, and to resolve all dependencies.
So it's pretty maddening that managers call for more collaboration. We need less of it. The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through.
Modern employees spent half their time in email, chat and meetings. Not producing anything. And that's generous, quite a few have to find actual productive time in the fragmented 10% of their schedule. It's as if we've all become managers.
tcgv|2 years ago
Spot on.
> The perfect workflow is where you tell me with clarity what to do, and then let me do it without distractions or changing everything halfway-through
In traditional manufacturing processes (i.e., physical goods), this is possible and often achieved. Productivity can be easily measured by dividing the physical output - like the number of items produced - by the factory headcount. Innovation exists in cycles that precede manufacturing, since changes to the factory layout are expensive and often require interrupting production.
Software development is a different beast. Innovation is intermingled in the 'manufacturing' process. Requirements change faster, and we need processes to accommodate that. Work happens in smaller time frames (e.g., two-week sprints). Productivity and delivered value are harder to measure. Paying customers are in the loop and provide constant feedback we need to filter and incorporate for our 'product' to succeed.
The software development challenge is more consultative in nature than the manufacturing one.
just_boost_it|2 years ago
karaterobot|2 years ago
manuelabeledo|2 years ago
Why would I be entitled to interrupt someone to review my code, just because they are sitting next to me?
Always on zoom? No, thanks. It invariably devolves into micromanaging.
Constant KPI awareness? Most companies cannot even agree on how a valuable KPI looks like.
Remote pair programming? Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing?
strict9|2 years ago
Yes. Whether remote or in person, pairing works best when there's a experience/skill mismatch. Both parties benefit because the senior has to know and explain the why and the junior learns the what. I enjoy it as long as it's small doses.
It is draining and tiresome when done for long periods but I think worth it. It keeps you sharp and builds relationships with teammates.
Pairing with someone on your level can also be beneficial but with diminished returns.
gardenhedge|2 years ago
I don't know about strict pair programming where one person instructs and the other person types, and then they switch after a while.
But.. if you mean two or more devs on a call looking at code.. then that is very much a thing.
wiseowise|2 years ago
Yes, and because your work depends on them.
invalidptr|2 years ago
It's still by far the most effective tool for certain tasks. Inherit an extremely complex codebase with 50 levels of abstraction? You could spend a week tinkering with it, or you could step through the code with the guy who wrote it for 30 minutes. But it's not something you'd want to do every day, or even frequently.
hotnfresh|2 years ago
I’ve just encountered it at my newest job.
A little of it actually seems good, but more as a “show and tell” of how some part of the system you know operates, that may include writing a little code in service of better learning.
Otherwise it seems to be a great way to get two developers to have the output of half a developer.
Zigurd|2 years ago
Still, pair programming makes sense in the abstract: Coding is not manufacturing. Applying SQC to code is nonsensical. Under the circumstances, 100% inspection is all you've got. Pair programming probably makes sense in cases where minimizing bugs at every step, right down to the creation of every line of code, is needed because the cost of a bug explodes the longer it exists. Probably rare cases. But worth knowing to know that coders are not working on a production line.
Devasta|2 years ago
The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.
The return to office has nothing to do with productivity, trying to look at things through that lens reflects a total lack of understanding of whats going on.
chasd00|2 years ago
I know i'm supposed to "contribute to the conversation" but it's important to recognize that the above point is exactly right.
voisin|2 years ago
This is argument keeps getting parroted without evidence or skepticism. Where's the evidence? Just because many people don't like RTO doesn't mean that RTO is driven by evil forces up to no good. There's nuance - on both sides of the debate! - and it does no one a service to reduce the arguments to bumper stickers.
No, employees wanting to work from home don't universally want to loaf off. No, employees that want to work from an office aren't universally middle managers trying to justify their existence. Some people work better at home, others work better at the office. Some companies have found WFH to improve productivity overall and are flexible, and other companies have found RTO to improve productivity overall. If you work better from home, go work for the former. If you work better from the office, go work for the latter. Let the market decide. If WFH is overall more productive, eventually the RTO companies' performance will suffer, and vice versa. No need to blame things on the boogeyman behind the curtain!
mattgreenrocks|2 years ago
There's also a segment of the population that somewhat overlaps with the previous paragraph that uses work as their primary social outlet.
wnolens|2 years ago
I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side.
I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig.
A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time.
1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin).
2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers.
3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.
wkat4242|2 years ago
And yes I know some of those bottom feeders in our place too. They're the ones constantly distracting you at work with chitchat. I have several people I try to avoid but unfortunately our pisspoor desk booking system (Planon, never buy that!) doesn't even allow to look up where other people are.
amerkhalid|2 years ago
Two anecdotes supporting this.
Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered.
At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable.
I can see such people wanting RTO.
whywhywhywhy|2 years ago
You must be a great person to work with if this is whats going on with your internal monologue about the people you interact closely with.
tbyehl|2 years ago
intended|2 years ago
If your commute time was paid for by the firm, all the firms calculations would shift dramatically.
A worker rise up moment, if we ever needed more.
The commonly stated goal is to “work together” - something you can do if you have years of experience being in online communities, and alien if you have not.
coldpie|2 years ago
pid-1|2 years ago
wiseowise|2 years ago
Projecting much?
unknown|2 years ago
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wbobeirne|2 years ago
I can see why office culture doesn't appeal to you, you sound like a grump who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. If you can enjoy the cognitive dissonance of socializing with black squares in a zoom, that's great, but I'd rather enjoy the time I spend working, not merely tolerate it. I don't think that makes me a loser.
lawn|2 years ago
He had the habit of playing music really, really loud from his speakers. It got so bad that they tried to relegate him to different floors and build a separate office, just for him and the lucky few that worked with him (me included).
Another thing he did was being his dog to the office despite there being people allergic to dogs in the office.
And people are trying to force everyone nack to the office because of "collaboration".
bilsbie|2 years ago
But only senior people could have windows so they covered his windows in cardboard …
x86x87|2 years ago
francisofascii|2 years ago
I once worked at a company where almost the opposite was true, or at least they prided themselves on not factoring that in and in moving desks several times a year. Managers and senior people tended to be near the center of a very crowded office space, away from the windows, I suppose to be closer to the "action". Newer or less important folks tended to be near the windows.
hotnfresh|2 years ago
Yeah, well, conflict with the corporate overlords tends to be pretty one-sided, so we’ll need to attack that problem if you want that to change. There are proven approaches. But this isn’t “compromise”, it’s workers having their work environment dictated to them.
> sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy.
Oh wow, uh, that was not the direction I expected the rest of that sentence to go.
> I’ve experienced some of my most joyful work in teams working together in the same space. I’ve benefited from flexibility and inclusion with remote work. I’ve also been able to contribute as part of larger open source communities where I couldn’t even know everyone by name.
On the topic of knowing everyone by name: so very much easier remote. Real people don’t have a name tag next to every statement they make, or hovering under their face at all times. Much harder in person.
varispeed|2 years ago
I am still not convinced "in the same space" makes any difference. I couldn't care less if co-worker is sitting next to me or on the other side of the country. But in person, you get an extra cognitive load of being around people. Someone brings smelly sandwich, someone else forgot to shower then another one keeps chewing gum and making loud mouth noises.
> Supporting a joyful environment.
One man's joy is another man misery. Certainly having people making morning journey from across the country and then observing how they "work" may be joyful experience for a manager feeling insecure.
Best compromise I saw is that if someone can't work at home, company gives them vouchers at their local co-working space of their choosing. No commute and office experience.
baz00|2 years ago
Company: What are your thoughts on returning to the office?
Staff: What are your thoughts if we all say fuck off?
And that was decided.
0xbadcafebee|2 years ago
This. I get that remote isn't always practical or effective, I do. But it's the staunch insistence on one way of working, and the denial that it needs improvement, that pisses me off so god damn much.
If I could actually get more work done in an office, of course I would go back. I have a huge backlog of shit to get through! But an hour commute isn't making that easier. And we all have been in the office where half the team is spread out just because they want to get away from noise, or to find a more comfy place, or they need heads-down time without interruptions. We've all been in meetings where 3 people are remote just because they needed to let a repair man in at noon, or their daughter's sick, or something's going on. And that is fine. So what's wrong with keeping that the same, and just not requiring people go in?
Then there's all the other dysfunctional shit that has nothing to do with an office, where the office is the excuse to never fix it. We can't figure out our online communications? No problem, just buy a big room and shove people in it and they can just walk up to each other all the time. We can't properly organize our documentation? Big room, shove people in it, walk up and ask where something is. No documentation? Big room, shove people, interrupt, ask how it works. Need to decide something but don't want to have a meeting? No problem, just interrupt 5 people at once and have an impromptu meeting. Who needs to improve their business process when they can just have people interrupt each other all day and never write a single thing down?
Remote doesn't magically work well either. You have to do specific things to make remote successful. I'm pretty sure the reason for mandatory return is just that they don't want to try. Even if half the workforce wanted to work in an office, they could buy a smaller office and let workers do what they need to do. But that would still require improvements to get the remote half to work well with the in-office half, so let's just avoid that extra work and force everyone into the office. That's easy for management, but sucks for the workforce, and the business.
mk89|2 years ago
This wasn't the case during covid, of course, and also during the beginning of post-covid.
It seems all is behind us. Not sure what the value of all this is, except for some people telling others how they have to live life.
paulcole|2 years ago
Don't act like this is a one-way street.
If you're working remotely then your employer is also telling its employees how they have to live life. It's just that in this case you happen to agree with them so it's A-OK!
watters|2 years ago
At this point, I haven't seen a single attempt from any company to offer such a rationale.
We can reasonably infer that such policies are not rooted in any evidence-oriented analysis.
x86x87|2 years ago
bgidley|2 years ago
sebstefan|2 years ago
awalias|2 years ago
mdgrech23|2 years ago
ghaff|2 years ago
willcipriano|2 years ago
I'll take the happiness thanks. You can keep the joy, let me know when you can share in the rewards of those achievements more robustly and I'll consider sacrificing for it.
toomuchtodo|2 years ago
oneoff777|2 years ago
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walthamstow|2 years ago
cityofdelusion|2 years ago
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|2 years ago
I've never encountered this perspective before. Why was/is this disliked?
rossdavidh|2 years ago
calamari4065|2 years ago
Yes, some people don't have the option of remote work, but if you have that option, how does that affect those that don't? Cleaning my plate won't feed starving kids in Africa, and taking shit over working from home doesn't help people whose jobs require physical presence.
Some people can work from home, and entire fields can't. So what? How is that relevant? Some jobs just don't require physical presence and business owners don't like that for a variety of unfair reasons. People who can work from home are being treated unfairly. How does that affect kids in Africa? Does it hurt them? Help them? Or are they utterly irrelevant to the problem at hand?
The existence of farmers doesn't really have a single thing to do with call center workers taking calls at home. Of course farmers can't farm remotely, but that's utterly irrelevant. No one is trying to force farmers and nurses to dramatically change their work environment on the whim of some middle manager who read a really good thinkpiece from WSJ.
Discussion about this problem doesn't mention doctors and farmers because the conversation is not about them in the same way that it's not about starving kids in Africa
_uhtu|2 years ago
Secondly, you most be very out of touch to think that everyone who can work from home is a 180,000 a year Peet's coffee filled software engineer. Lots and lots of lower wage, lower education jobs can work from home but are getting forced to the office. Executive assistants, customer support, marketers, copywriters, I could list a lot more.
These are the worst comments on HN, just ultra lazy defense of the status quo with no real meat to it.
bcrosby95|2 years ago
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
I stopped caring about what random strangers think when I was in high school. The correct answer to this is to tell these random people who have no skin in the game to fuck off.
Hackbraten|2 years ago
Carbon emissions are literally killing people, and are bound to kill many more millions if we don't change our ways.
So if the cooks and nurses and truck drivers have no choice, then I'd say that it's our duty to work remotely in order to do our part in reducing emissions.
x86x87|2 years ago
oytis|2 years ago
I actually think professional class is more prone to tolerate this attitude from the management, because it's what corporate environment teaches to do.
A4ET8a8uTh0|2 years ago
1. it can work 2. it is against existing, entrenched interests
Hence the tension.
FWIW, our company just mandated RTO and there was push back, because the person making the decision made it basically within a week from publishing date and a lot of people have kids so it is not exactly a flip a switch kind of situation PLUS there are a couple of high visibility projects that rely on staff good will to push it past the finish line. No flexibility from company means no flexibility from us ( no more calls after 5 to deal with fires and so on ).
I accept not all jobs are ready for WFH ( butcher, surgeon and so on ), but some absolutely are.
api|2 years ago
If you as a professional class worker think the rent is too damn high, consider how insane it is for people who make less and work longer hours.
It's become clear to me that real estate is the economic problem, at least in the US. I said the economic problem, singular. I don't think any other issue compares.
The phenomenon of younger generations feeling poorer than their parents is largely attributable to real estate costs. I think real estate is at the root of a ton more problems too: homelessness (for obvious reasons), collapsing birth rates, low rates of family formation, even crime. Real estate is basically cannibalizing the future.
mchanson|2 years ago
All workers deserve to have a say in their working conditions.
How one talks about it can be entitled or spoiled sounding, but the desire to influence and change one's working conditions is noble and in common with great majority of workers.
When my children were small I started working remotely while my partner worked in an office still. I looked for a remote job so that rather than being in a office and going to get some coffee I was excited to instead get to see my 8 month of doing some baby biz on my coffee break.
What a wonderful privilege it was during that age of growth. How great it would be for more people to have that experience (which was very common before industrialization).
wkat4242|2 years ago
Going to the office before the pandemic was totally different. Even though I did work from home regularly then too. But at the office I had the same colleagues around me (even though my direct colleagues were all in different locations). I had my own desk with my stuff. Now I just have a locker and I'm a dumb number that nobody cares about. I hate the company.
> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.
They decided to get into a profession they doesn't have working from home as an option. They can change if they want.
Also I don't really give a F if other people think I'm spoiled.
Tade0|2 years ago
My experience is that the rest of the population has very little day-to-day contact with people like me and remote work only reduces it, so they simply don't care.
I get some vague interest in the details of my life when salaries are mentioned, but when I explain what kind of hoops you have to jump and what kind of lifestyle you have to lead (desk job and learning after hours) to get to these figures, interest is usually lost.
Overall people are way less interested in how strangers live their lives and visibly less envious than one would think. For most this line of work is boring and soul crushing and they don't think the salary makes it worth it.
ForgotIdAgain|2 years ago
Devasta|2 years ago
chasd00|2 years ago
someone7x|2 years ago
Should we also cancel telehealth programs so those nurses that actually do work remotely don’t become spoiled and entitled?
erik_seaberg|2 years ago
jerf|2 years ago
tenebrisalietum|2 years ago
* Employers should pay the cost of employee travel to work, at least count the time spent traveling to work as work hours. If I'm driving into work it's not really my free time.
* If I lived near my workplace, I wouldn't care about working from home so much. Society has done something seriously wrong where most people cannot live near where they work.
* By getting the professional class off the roads, traffic is better for those who have to work in person. By tearing down the offices that aren't really needed and replacing with residential and other mixed use, we might have a shot at rearranging things where the people that need to be physically present at work can live close to work.
broast|2 years ago
ericfrazier|2 years ago
paulryanrogers|2 years ago
The fact that other roles cannot work remote is beside the point. People want a reasonable say in their work environment regardless of the nature of their work. And they'll negotiate accordingly if the work requires physical presence.
Desk workers aren't spoiled for pointing out the waste and abuse of involuntary butt-in-seats policies. The accusation comes across as trying to incite discord.
XorNot|2 years ago
Keeping more people away from commutes though does reduce traffic for those who need to get around.
Central commercial real estate could actually provide useful things, rather then "places people sit at computers they could do anywhere".
Distributing the work force out means more mixing of class and profession. Service jobs can be closer to where people live because they're more distributed.
FpUser|2 years ago
So people who can work from home should go to the office to satisfy "the rest of the population"? This is some novel concept. Have you tried approaching company owners and CEO and ask them to make their compensation to be more in line with the general population as well?
cityofdelusion|2 years ago
r3d0c|2 years ago
don't know what this argument is supposed to be? seems like something a ceo made up to emotionally justify their position rather than based in any sort of objective reasoning
things shouldn't get better because other things haven't gotten better? is that the crux of your argument?
neutronicus|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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jhp123|2 years ago
globular-toast|2 years ago
My partner is a nurse. Of course she can't work from home. Her job is literally touching people, putting things in them and taking things out.
They're not making her go to the hospital just to fuck with her.
My job, on the other hand, does not involve physical contact. In fact, I don't even need to leave home, as demonstrated by years of working at home. I deliver value at home so I get paid for it. It's as simple as that really. It's completely irrelevant how other people deliver their value.
mortallywounded|2 years ago
He would often get offended in the open office around the other engineers. Why? Language. He once asked me not to say "damn" around him because he's very religious.
It was a C/C++/C# codebase, so that was never going to happen.
lobsterslive|2 years ago
davidw|2 years ago
I mean, I kind of get having that kind of thing in, say, an airport or somewhere with security concerns, but being treated like that in an office environment is horrible.
gardenhedge|2 years ago
sirspidermonkey|2 years ago
No thanks, I'll take my 2 ply, my own toilet, and actual nutritious lunches.
Verdex|2 years ago
Each employee is given a small budget and menu where they can decide what amenities their bathroom gets stocked with. You can decorate it according to your whims.
There's so many logistical and even geometric problems with the idea. But just imagine the retention numbers if someone was actually able to pull it off. You have your own personal bathroom overlooking a serene wooded area, wall mounted TV doing sports ball recap, small private library, and scented candle with that sent you can't get enough of.
[Although, honestly, I would be happy if they just made the toilet stall dividers go from the floor to the ceiling.]
amelius|2 years ago
Something like:
https://brnskll.com/shares/didnt-wash-hands-alarm/
Zigurd|2 years ago
francisofascii|2 years ago
klooney|2 years ago
rpastuszak|2 years ago
paulcole|2 years ago
Completely false. There are more successful companies than there are most talented people.
unknown|2 years ago
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lr1970|2 years ago
A4ET8a8uTh0|2 years ago
jibbit|2 years ago
fnordpiglet|2 years ago
The way we used to work is an emergent reality that had begun to fray long before the pandemic, see multilocation strategies, selective remote working options, hotel seating with over subscribed occupancy. The cost of commercial real estate was already being eyed carefully. As a senior executive in multinational mega corps I can tell you definitively “bring your own office” in 2019 was seen as bigger than “bring your own device” in terms of potential to reduce cost, increase productivity, and maximize EPS. The biggest barrier was the 5-10 year real estate development and tax abatement cycles, but you were already seeing compression of available seating and over subscription with a 10 year plan to compress to only essential coworking. Further, while panned now, the WeWork model was seen as the future - essentially elastic occupancy as opex, burstable cloud like office space flexibly located where the talent lives.
The pandemic accelerated this stepwise from 20% to 100% overnight. I could see it in the eyes of the CEOs as they saw the culture they understood disappear overnight and the emotional entrenchment that “this can’t be allowed to persist.” Despite all the prior plans and agreement, an emotional reaction took hold. They saw the productivity improvements and were unswayed. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about productivity, it wasn’t about efficiencies. It was about a way of living being threatened, a way the CEOs were manifestly beneficiaries of, and was the only lifestyle they knew and understood. They didn’t want things to change. To buttress their desires, tax abatements and leases obligated use of the real estate. But make no mistake, the RTO movement is almost entirely driven by a near maniacal gripping onto a way of life the decision makers benefited from and can’t let go of.
Joy of the team, sacrificing the individual for the greater good, watercooler serendipity, “think of the kids,” etc, are all smokescreens for the real motivations: fear of an unraveling of the emergent reality that todays leaders owe their entire successful career to, and at that level, that’s all they have in their life. That office culture is literally the cornerstone of their identity, and being more or less all narcissists, they believe their identity is the cornerstone to the world.
The rest of the article is pretty good. I wouldn’t stop reading based on the intro.
The essence is there’s a continuum of work styles along a two dimensional system (in office - remote / sync - asynch). Each quadrant has its own benefits. They seem to assert the middle, hybrid, is the worst of all worlds, and it’s better to pick a style and lean into it. They offer a variety of ways to lean into a style.
IMO I think this is overly simplistic and the most efficient reality, and likely the emergent one we land in within 10 years, is a mixed reality. Coworking works well for some, doesn’t for others. The skills for a remote workplace benefit a multi location team, a hybrid team, or a fully remote team equally. Some tasks are async, some are sync. Once a team has one person not on site, the team only functions as a remote team; otherwise the person not onsite isn’t a part of the team. Recognizing that any team level work would be handled as if everyone were remote.
There will be a contingent who work best in an office. They will continue to have one, albeit a smaller space with fewer and fewer amenities as the occupancy cost / person is squeezed. Those that work best remotely will land at a place that values them for the way they work best. We will continue to refine our work protocols to accommodate this new way of working. The CEOs of today will become the CEOs of yesterday. The new CEOs will be the ones who emerged ahead during the pandemic. The new mid level will be the ones who excelled in remote school and remote entry level.
Bring your own office will become the buzz word. Boards will see the cold hard reality of occupancy cost per head in office rising relentlessly. Tax abatements and leases will have frayed. Then, either the weworks of today or its replacement will have its day.
zx8080|2 years ago
Order the team to work from office 996. Unlock their potential, don't compromise! Kill the individual autonomy.
</s>
oofta-boofta|2 years ago
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