It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location.
You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent.
If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person social interaction, your cultural capital will also lose value.
There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech. Americans seem unaware, but if you insist on remote work, you'll lose that advantage quick. If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
> you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe
Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.
You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.
The argument doesn’t hold water. Companies aren’t pushing RTO because they want to pay higher salaries to office-bound staff in expensive metros. If raw “input–output” and cheap labour were the only metric, they’d go fully remote, tap global markets, and slash payroll overnight.
RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity through visibility. Actual delivery of work is the only thing that matters in tech - and remote delivery has already proven itself at scale.
The idea that “physical location is your greatest asset” is backwards. If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.
In short: RTO doesn’t protect American tech workers from global competition. It just wastes time in traffic and props up bad management.
>There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech.
American companies are welcome to start offering Western European level benefits (and compensate for missing government benefits) at any time. I would happily accept 30-50% less pay for a very solid health insurance plan, pay for my childcare 30 days of paid vacation a year that I'm actually entitled to take, 6 months of paid maternity leave + some paternity leave, a contract that restricts my working hours and makes it meaningfully legally difficult to frivolously fire me and practically impossible to lay me off of the company isn't failing, and an hour paid lunch every day.
Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason. The closest is non-profits, who lack the cash to meet standard salaries but try to make up with benefits (which are, after all, cheaper), but for profit companies seem to prefer to pony up and retain the control at-will employment grants them
I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are. I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year. I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.
There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.
If the entire organization is offshore then fine, but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration. South America is ok but there aren't many software developers there.
First of all, companies have already outsourced all that they could a couple decades ago. Then when it comes to hiring in different countries, this gets extremely complicated due to taxes and regulations. While some remote-first companies can navigate this complexity (usually through some sort of HR as a service type company), most companies are not structured in such a way to feasibly hire people outside their incorporated area.
As a person working with Americans, if I may express my honest opinion, this is BS. Your advantage is the fact that you are professional, hard-working, are able to question the demands in a positive way, can communicate with American management more easily, live in the same time zone and in general you can get on with the rest of American team more easily. I would never say physical location is an asset (although I might be biased as I work for corporations that have multiple offices in various continents, for small startups it might be different).
> If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
Counterpoint, developer offshoring has been happening since at least the late nineties with eh, limited success. It's hard to get around major timezone differences and thick accents. This isn't even getting into the fatal mistake that everyone makes -- thinking that there's, for example, a billion more "Brilliant Indian Guy in Our Office" clones out there in India.
I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list:
* Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need.
* Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership.
* Extroverts: some people just prefer to be in an office, surrounded by and interacting with lots of people, rather than sitting at home in relative isolation. (I'm definitely not one of them, but I have good friends who are like this.)
> * Extroverts: some people just prefer to be in an office, surrounded by and interacting with lots of people, rather than sitting at home in relative isolation. (I'm definitely not one of them, but I have good friends who are like this.)
You know what, since the dawn of work - it's always been the extroverted way. Introverts suffered through. Now that the tide has changed, let the extroverts suffer too, it's their turn. We have done our part.
Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus?
I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.
* Doing summin: Gotta be seen doing something to move a needle. Doesn't matter if the needle is a compass, odometer or voltmeter, as long as it swings up or to the right.
I think the bigger driver is that cities and states are pressuring companies to RTO because of the massive negative impact to local businesses and governments who no longer have thousands of people coming into a particular area on a daily basis.
> Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person
The funny thing is that the CEO of my current employer lives in Connecticut and rarely (ever?) comes into the office in Manhattan. When he does come in, they shut the office down for "leadership meetings" so all the New York based employees can't come in anyway!
I wonder if it can be a genuine attempt to save positions. E.g. the board might be asking why they keep remote employees in the US instead of letting them go and hiring in a cheaper location
>selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership.
Why? If the lease was signed before the pandemic that gives a very easy "out". It's not like anyone could have predicted the pandemic and the associated shift to WFH. If for whatever reason they signed afterwards, that's just them being dumb.
I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by each role".
I also found results suggesting flexible working policies had positive properties like higher employee satisfaction, retention , and a wider applicant pool.
I'm not interested in hearing why the choir here at HN thinks companies are making these decisions, I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
I was also studying many MBA books about decision making in corporate environments. Many cool things about data driven decision making. Costs and alternative costs, etc., many cool things, some even with scientific background. RTO is also analyzed in similar manner. The truth is that RTO is great way to ditch people with longer commute and/or kids easily and for free.
And unions (as they’re in Germany) are happy.
But let’s get back to reality, the business decisions are made in the style “I like this” and “I don’t like this”. Only most obvious decisions are somehow backed up. And RTO is known to work well to ditch 2-3% of workforce in few months for free. Parents go first, high performers go afterwards. Headcount reduced, job well done!
The way with severance packages can go for years with many rounds when the packages are too small. Severance packages also involve social plan negotiations with unions… Somebody will go to court for sure and sue the company… So obviously let’s do RTO, it’s cheap and quick. And improves collaboration of course. First round with mandatory 3 days in the office and second one with 5 days in cheapest possible open office with chaos, distractions and noise.
The problem is that proper studies on this topic will take years to really understand the positives and negatives of having the majority of your employees working remotely. --Researchers need to be able to track people through their careers to understand whether or not WFH is a net benefit to them and/or their companies.
So you're really going to have to deal with only hearing what people think.
RTO is trending for many reasons - some are doing this for bad reasons, I'm sure, but I also know that some managers are pushing for this because they a) see that junior developers aren't getting the necessary mentoring to help them develop and grow into seniors, and b) because they feel that people are spending more time on tasks because they're less likely to reach out if they have to ping people, wait for a response, and try to work through things without benefits like being able to draw on a whiteboard and such. --Maybe some companies are handling this better than others, but they are valid concerns.
I've long suspected it's got to do with office real estate.
You spent $10m or $100m on a building that's now half empty.
Either you downsize or commit to enterprise scale sunk cost fallacy and enforce RTO so your real estate investment isn't "wasted".
City centres also thrive on RTO, with high street shopping on a generational decline it's up to office workers and their employers to prop up the economy of the CBD one overpriced lunch at a time.
I feel that companies still misunderstand how to evaluate these metrics they're collecting on the efficacy of RTO.
IMO, RTO efficacy should be measured on a team-by-team basis. There are no doubt zero "one size fits all" approaches for entire orgs, or entire companies (and if there are, then the metrics should /strongly/ reflect that)
> I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
I think worthwhile evidence would only be available if two things, both questionable, were true:
1. an unbiased sample of companies implementing RTO are willing to disclose their reasons - e.g. make public announcements, or cooperate with academic studies.
2. they were honest about the reasons.
If common reasons for RTO would make the management look bad (and some might even be illegal in some places) then the first is less likely, and the second is highly unlikely.
You'll probably get better results than the level of Sloan from the NY Fed, the AEA or Glass Lewis. They point out that profit-seeking strategies outside of the concept of ordinary business[1] can exist on a spectrum from highly ethical to highly unethical, ideally[2] all pursued simultaneously in proportion to their risk.
[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.
[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.
Of the information I have reviewed brain storming / creative sessions are better in person versus online sessions. This does lend to hybrid approaches being useful. All other metrics were better or had no difference.
One point I did note is that there is an increase in management overhead when workers are separated, and this increase in workload by senior management is likely a pain point for them - even though there are likely productivity benefits in forcing management to communicate through official channels and have a more organised approach to task delegation/internal messaging.
From a financial perspective office spaces are a type of investment vehicle. Prior to the GFC office space was lucrative, and that was again peaking pre-covid.
There are likely secondary motivations at play beyond productivity.
And the worse of all, is that in most cases the work is exactly the same, and there is no collaboration on the office, because the team is geographically distributed anyway, so the only thing changing are the location of the video calls, and with whom to chat during coffee breaks.
This is a thing I've been constantly bringing up with our company. I _do_ think that local collaboration in the office is vastly more effective than remotely, _but_ only given that the entire team is co-located.
As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.
Exactly, before covid, I don't think I ever saw any serious efforts to shuffle team assignments to have them more geographically segregated. But now it's all about in-person collaboration for some reason.
> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare
Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.
It depends on the age of the child - having a 7-year old return from school at 2pm and hangout at home with an adult present is fine and saves you the cost of afterschool care.
A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.
My wife and I work remotely. Everyone in my team has children, so everyone's very flexible. We tend to work less during the afternoon, and pick it up later in the day. I start earlier when I'm not the one doing the morning drop-off.
My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.
You’re right for younger children but for older children in school you can definitely handle it while working remotely. You just pick them up from school and then they can mostly do stuff on their own the afternoon. But if you have to go in office suddenly that doesn’t work anymore.
>Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.
Sounds like you think software development is like one of those stock photos with 8 people smiling and high-fiving around a whiteboard. Devs are (mostly) nerds. Nerds have been collaborating in the online world for decades. They somehow managed to achieve things and build genuine friendships without ever being crammed into an open office - crazy but true. Everytime I hear someone say/suggest "dev needs to happen in person", all I can picture is a PHB.
I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.
Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.
Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
I work together with my team and I socialize IRL with friends, family, or sometimes coworkers essentially every day of the week. I’ve been fully remote since 2018. Your comment makes no sense to me.
Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.
> Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)
I disagree, this does not make any sense to me. You can work together with other people without being physically present, and you can socialize as well. We had regular after hour meetings online drinking beer.
“The medium is the message.” People who work remote become that person who doesn’t value their team, because that’s what the environment promotes. We work in companies because of the team and the community though, that is the whole point of them.
The arguments people make here are so strange. They could be true, but they pretend that (1) life before 2020 didn’t exist and 99% of companies from startups to large companies didn’t constantly work in a single location, (2) companies weren’t already paying premiums not just to hire in areas where their offices were but to pay people to relocate from cheaper areas to where their offices were instead of just paying them a lower salary to work out of the LCOL place, (3) that there isn’t a massive amount of economic literature on agglomeration effects and the advantages of being colocated while working.
If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.
I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.
We have some sort of hybrid policy. Every single time I have showed up at the office, I either end up socialising far too much and get nothing done (I find it extremely hard to work next to people without talking to them).
Or nobody is there and I end up having driven (40 minutes each way) to the office to have Teams meetings with a wonderful view of the car park, under fluorescent lights, using a cheap low-resolution office monitor. When I could have been having those Teams meetings with a view of my garden and a much nicer monitor I have invested in
Everyone has their own explanations for why businesses do these things, and I see merit in many of them. Here's my contribution to the list.
All these complaints about poorly-thought-out RTO policies come from big corporations. If you're a senior leader in a organisation with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, it's very difficult to keep in touch with the people who actually do the work in making or providing the product or service that the business brings to the market. As a consequence, leaders come to believe that the routine of their work day - ingesting reports, engaging in discussions, and communicating decisions - is representative of what's going on in the organisation. Ultimately, I think it's a limitation of human psychology: the organisation is larger than Dunbar's number, and so starts to become opaque to its members.
My solution is to only work for businesses that are small enough for everyone to know everyone else.
I feel that the reason RTO is still such a wonderful topic to write about or debate online, is that the spectrum of human "experience" is so wide, that there will always be a significant number of people on either side of the fence.
Personally, I can't count the amount of times I've switched sides, and I don't think I'm the only one.
IMO, mandated RTO is (objectively) an effort by large organizations to make their "systems" more predictable in aggregate. The manner of predictability will be largely depend on the size of the organization (e.g. A startup vs. Microsoft) and their needs (productivity/reliability/consistency/etc), and we see this manifest in any number of the RTO announcements we've seen online.
These are weak arguments in the post. It is not the commute which is the problem. In my experience (tech specifically) office is unnecessary because I do less work, and it is more depressing because you still talk with the same people over the chat and calls. There are issues with the shortage of phone booths, and listening to every conversation does not help concentrate. Then there is poor old hardware, not many will buy Herman Miller for their subordinates. Another thing not mentioned is the total show of appearances over outcomes. Not to mention geographically distributed teams.
At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.
> “We don’t think people do their best work from home”: Prove it.
It isn't the corporations job to prove it, they're paying the salary because of their own internal calculations about what is valuable to them. It really in't that much of a stretch to say companies are serious about their motivations here - there are much easier ways to do layoffs than moving everyone into an office.
"Your company didn't collapse during COVID" isn't much of an argument. It is like saying someone didn't die of COVID so they can handle being sick 24x7 for the rest of their life. Just because something is survivable or even tolerable doesn't mean it is desirable.
People who have to be in the office should also object to RTO. Needless commuting clogs the roads and public transport. Fewer commuters mean less chance of being stuck in traffic and a better chance of getting a seat.
We have a similar push for RTO here in Germany as well where the usual U.S. centric reasons don't apply (tax break law has not changed; we're still semi-ZIRP at 2%, no H1B visas, outsourcing is not a major trend either as many companies want German speaking employees).
I think the reason is simple: Lock-in for employees. Moving for your employer demonstrates dependence and highlights your inferior bargaining position. If you have to move again to switch jobs it will be quite painful so you'll likely accept a lower salary instead.
"but it’s a sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees. "
That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)
>sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees
This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.
What RTO and WTAF means? Who knows. I clicked on link to find out but looks like website blogs my IP range. I will never know this important information..
RTO is way to force people work for two more hours per day for the same pay (1 hour typical commute one way). Hence it is done to suppress wages and make people leave voluntarily. It's not that hard to deduce.
But it is not, people work more when remote. It is harder to disconnect from work. This kind of bothers me because it seems RTO will reduce the hours spent working (on average) which should affect the output, but somehow companies expect the inverse.
> You will cause untold mental, physical and financial upheaval for many employees who now have to spend money on commuting, childcare, pet care, to name but a few.
It's indeed one of the most stupid decisions a management could make.
People will be more tired once they arrive in the office. From a companies perspective skilled people will just leave to another company. And you can't hire the best people from everywhere if you need to have an office present. And obviously there are a lot more drawbacks.
From a society perspective it contributes to traffic jams, it contributes to overfilled public transport, and it puts needless stress on infrastructure. In general, it's just not efficient at all.
Sadly many big corporations are lead by narcissists who care more about their ego, who need to feel like they can control other people, rather than their well being or having a positive impact. Some may use it to get rid of people, but that, truly has to be the most stupid way to get rid of your best employees.
If the tone of the article wasn’t so flippant I’d maybe have read all the way through it. I’m not going to read an article that sounds like it’s written by a petulant child.
bonoboTP|5 months ago
You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent.
If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person social interaction, your cultural capital will also lose value.
There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech. Americans seem unaware, but if you insist on remote work, you'll lose that advantage quick. If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
phrotoma|5 months ago
Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.
You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.
varispeed|5 months ago
RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity through visibility. Actual delivery of work is the only thing that matters in tech - and remote delivery has already proven itself at scale.
The idea that “physical location is your greatest asset” is backwards. If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.
In short: RTO doesn’t protect American tech workers from global competition. It just wastes time in traffic and props up bad management.
BobaFloutist|5 months ago
American companies are welcome to start offering Western European level benefits (and compensate for missing government benefits) at any time. I would happily accept 30-50% less pay for a very solid health insurance plan, pay for my childcare 30 days of paid vacation a year that I'm actually entitled to take, 6 months of paid maternity leave + some paternity leave, a contract that restricts my working hours and makes it meaningfully legally difficult to frivolously fire me and practically impossible to lay me off of the company isn't failing, and an hour paid lunch every day.
Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason. The closest is non-profits, who lack the cash to meet standard salaries but try to make up with benefits (which are, after all, cheaper), but for profit companies seem to prefer to pony up and retain the control at-will employment grants them
SR2Z|5 months ago
There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.
dboreham|5 months ago
zappb|5 months ago
benterix|5 months ago
xienze|5 months ago
Counterpoint, developer offshoring has been happening since at least the late nineties with eh, limited success. It's hard to get around major timezone differences and thick accents. This isn't even getting into the fatal mistake that everyone makes -- thinking that there's, for example, a billion more "Brilliant Indian Guy in Our Office" clones out there in India.
ajjahs|5 months ago
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mft_|5 months ago
* Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need.
* Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership.
* Extroverts: some people just prefer to be in an office, surrounded by and interacting with lots of people, rather than sitting at home in relative isolation. (I'm definitely not one of them, but I have good friends who are like this.)
thefz|5 months ago
You know what, since the dawn of work - it's always been the extroverted way. Introverts suffered through. Now that the tide has changed, let the extroverts suffer too, it's their turn. We have done our part.
swiftcoder|5 months ago
We can give them bigger/more-prominent zoom portraits by seniority. Should make everyone happy.
> Real estate
Probably shouldn't still be gambling company finances on real estate, 5 years after a pandemic forced us all to go remote.
> Extroverts
Great! We can put all the extroverts back in the glass fishbowl, while the rest of us do actual work from home
majorbugger|5 months ago
DebtDeflation|5 months ago
nenenejej|5 months ago
xienze|5 months ago
doom2|5 months ago
The funny thing is that the CEO of my current employer lives in Connecticut and rarely (ever?) comes into the office in Manhattan. When he does come in, they shut the office down for "leadership meetings" so all the New York based employees can't come in anyway!
AnimalMuppet|5 months ago
sublimefire|5 months ago
oytis|5 months ago
gruez|5 months ago
Why? If the lease was signed before the pandemic that gives a very easy "out". It's not like anyone could have predicted the pandemic and the associated shift to WFH. If for whatever reason they signed afterwards, that's just them being dumb.
gabesullice|5 months ago
I also found results suggesting flexible working policies had positive properties like higher employee satisfaction, retention , and a wider applicant pool.
I'm not interested in hearing why the choir here at HN thinks companies are making these decisions, I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
lnsru|5 months ago
But let’s get back to reality, the business decisions are made in the style “I like this” and “I don’t like this”. Only most obvious decisions are somehow backed up. And RTO is known to work well to ditch 2-3% of workforce in few months for free. Parents go first, high performers go afterwards. Headcount reduced, job well done!
The way with severance packages can go for years with many rounds when the packages are too small. Severance packages also involve social plan negotiations with unions… Somebody will go to court for sure and sue the company… So obviously let’s do RTO, it’s cheap and quick. And improves collaboration of course. First round with mandatory 3 days in the office and second one with 5 days in cheapest possible open office with chaos, distractions and noise.
tallanvor|5 months ago
So you're really going to have to deal with only hearing what people think.
RTO is trending for many reasons - some are doing this for bad reasons, I'm sure, but I also know that some managers are pushing for this because they a) see that junior developers aren't getting the necessary mentoring to help them develop and grow into seniors, and b) because they feel that people are spending more time on tasks because they're less likely to reach out if they have to ping people, wait for a response, and try to work through things without benefits like being able to draw on a whiteboard and such. --Maybe some companies are handling this better than others, but they are valid concerns.
MarcelOlsz|5 months ago
franticgecko3|5 months ago
You spent $10m or $100m on a building that's now half empty.
Either you downsize or commit to enterprise scale sunk cost fallacy and enforce RTO so your real estate investment isn't "wasted".
City centres also thrive on RTO, with high street shopping on a generational decline it's up to office workers and their employers to prop up the economy of the CBD one overpriced lunch at a time.
deviation|5 months ago
IMO, RTO efficacy should be measured on a team-by-team basis. There are no doubt zero "one size fits all" approaches for entire orgs, or entire companies (and if there are, then the metrics should /strongly/ reflect that)
graemep|5 months ago
I think worthwhile evidence would only be available if two things, both questionable, were true:
1. an unbiased sample of companies implementing RTO are willing to disclose their reasons - e.g. make public announcements, or cooperate with academic studies. 2. they were honest about the reasons.
If common reasons for RTO would make the management look bad (and some might even be illegal in some places) then the first is less likely, and the second is highly unlikely.
OgsyedIE|5 months ago
[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.
[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.
surgical_fire|5 months ago
Even if a bunch of companies adopt RTO, many others just embraced remote work as a competitive advantage. I can just choose to work for those.
So, RTO all you want. I am not joining.
quitit|5 months ago
One point I did note is that there is an increase in management overhead when workers are separated, and this increase in workload by senior management is likely a pain point for them - even though there are likely productivity benefits in forcing management to communicate through official channels and have a more organised approach to task delegation/internal messaging.
From a financial perspective office spaces are a type of investment vehicle. Prior to the GFC office space was lucrative, and that was again peaking pre-covid. There are likely secondary motivations at play beyond productivity.
unknown|5 months ago
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pjmlp|5 months ago
olex|5 months ago
As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.
exitb|5 months ago
threemux|5 months ago
Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.
ricardobeat|5 months ago
A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.
lbreakjai|5 months ago
My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.
zeroonetwothree|5 months ago
EmilStenstrom|5 months ago
Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting
Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)
Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.
000ooo000|5 months ago
Sounds like you think software development is like one of those stock photos with 8 people smiling and high-fiving around a whiteboard. Devs are (mostly) nerds. Nerds have been collaborating in the online world for decades. They somehow managed to achieve things and build genuine friendships without ever being crammed into an open office - crazy but true. Everytime I hear someone say/suggest "dev needs to happen in person", all I can picture is a PHB.
_petronius|5 months ago
Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.
Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
aeze|5 months ago
Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.
pheggs|5 months ago
I disagree, this does not make any sense to me. You can work together with other people without being physically present, and you can socialize as well. We had regular after hour meetings online drinking beer.
pitched|5 months ago
hshdhdhj4444|5 months ago
If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.
I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.
oytis|5 months ago
interpol_p|5 months ago
Or nobody is there and I end up having driven (40 minutes each way) to the office to have Teams meetings with a wonderful view of the car park, under fluorescent lights, using a cheap low-resolution office monitor. When I could have been having those Teams meetings with a view of my garden and a much nicer monitor I have invested in
badgersnake|5 months ago
Alternatively, you networked, built useful relationships and shared knowledge.
cjs_ac|5 months ago
All these complaints about poorly-thought-out RTO policies come from big corporations. If you're a senior leader in a organisation with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, it's very difficult to keep in touch with the people who actually do the work in making or providing the product or service that the business brings to the market. As a consequence, leaders come to believe that the routine of their work day - ingesting reports, engaging in discussions, and communicating decisions - is representative of what's going on in the organisation. Ultimately, I think it's a limitation of human psychology: the organisation is larger than Dunbar's number, and so starts to become opaque to its members.
My solution is to only work for businesses that are small enough for everyone to know everyone else.
deviation|5 months ago
Personally, I can't count the amount of times I've switched sides, and I don't think I'm the only one.
IMO, mandated RTO is (objectively) an effort by large organizations to make their "systems" more predictable in aggregate. The manner of predictability will be largely depend on the size of the organization (e.g. A startup vs. Microsoft) and their needs (productivity/reliability/consistency/etc), and we see this manifest in any number of the RTO announcements we've seen online.
sublimefire|5 months ago
At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.
roenxi|5 months ago
It isn't the corporations job to prove it, they're paying the salary because of their own internal calculations about what is valuable to them. It really in't that much of a stretch to say companies are serious about their motivations here - there are much easier ways to do layoffs than moving everyone into an office.
"Your company didn't collapse during COVID" isn't much of an argument. It is like saying someone didn't die of COVID so they can handle being sick 24x7 for the rest of their life. Just because something is survivable or even tolerable doesn't mean it is desirable.
varispeed|5 months ago
hasperdi|5 months ago
0x000xca0xfe|5 months ago
I think the reason is simple: Lock-in for employees. Moving for your employer demonstrates dependence and highlights your inferior bargaining position. If you have to move again to switch jobs it will be quite painful so you'll likely accept a lower salary instead.
dvfjsdhgfv|5 months ago
That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)
krackers|5 months ago
This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.
birdalbrocum|5 months ago
luaybs|5 months ago
gaws|5 months ago
Macha|5 months ago
RTO: Return to Office
unknown|5 months ago
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Yizahi|5 months ago
sublimefire|5 months ago
tropicalfruit|5 months ago
as if they care.
low_key|5 months ago
gaws|5 months ago
phyzix5761|5 months ago
pheggs|5 months ago
People will be more tired once they arrive in the office. From a companies perspective skilled people will just leave to another company. And you can't hire the best people from everywhere if you need to have an office present. And obviously there are a lot more drawbacks.
From a society perspective it contributes to traffic jams, it contributes to overfilled public transport, and it puts needless stress on infrastructure. In general, it's just not efficient at all.
Sadly many big corporations are lead by narcissists who care more about their ego, who need to feel like they can control other people, rather than their well being or having a positive impact. Some may use it to get rid of people, but that, truly has to be the most stupid way to get rid of your best employees.
Esophagus4|5 months ago
tropicalfruit|5 months ago
don't you feel like everything is getting worse in some ways?
the delusion is to think you're special because you work for a big evil company.
EverydayBalloon|5 months ago
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yladiz|5 months ago
MarcelOlsz|5 months ago
notadrian|5 months ago
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