I wouldnt change my job even with 30% increase if they werent offering remote.<p>If you do not offer remote, then you better be... idk NASA, Microsoft, Apple, Jane Street or some fancy shit or paying way, way more<p>If a company does not realize that 0% fully remote workforce is significant talent pool disadvantage then Im shocked.<p>>They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.<p>Yea, I do wonder how those complex, cross-geo products get built!<p>Teams across US, EU, Asia - how do they do it??
Man I feel out of sync with the hivemind sometimes. Young 20-something and work from home seems to effectively be the standard for most programming work, and it makes me wish I pursued a different career. I hate being stuck at home, video calling to endless pfps, and never seeing a single coworker’s face.
Remote work with lots of PTO available (no questions asked) is an order of magnitude more important to me than salary. I'll happily settle for a medium-sized company with a decent tech stack that offers freedom and flexibility.<p>There is (almost) no salary level that would make me trade the current setup remote work and lots of time off.<p>I am more motivated to work and be productive than when I worked in an office. And I'm happier about what I do.
The weird thing with the back to office push is how <i>consistent</i> it is across companies. It has to be a McKinsey consultant or something, because all companies that push going back in are doing the 3 days in office hybrid basically. Its too uniform.
Whether you prefer WFH or rather be in the office, I would be truly suspicious of a company that claims RTO is necessary. The reasons for RTO don't seem to be backed by rationale/logic. That should be immediately concerning to any individual contributor.<p>For example:<p>1. Some flavor of "water cooler conversation is important for innovation!" Just... what?<p>2. "Collaboration is suffering" without any evidence offered.<p>3. "Productivity is suffering" without any evidence offered.<p>4. "How can we know if people are slacking off or not". Well how did you determine that in the office setting? Was it their physical presence from the hours of 9 to 5 that convinced you?
Remote work is nice, but the biggest advantage I've have at a small company is picking my own hours. I work with teams across the world, So I can take a 2 hours break after lunch to go biking, and then come back. I want freedom in daylight hours to do things.
My new job only gives me ten days off per year. This means I'll have to start looking for a new job immediately... Because that's being trapped in a cage.
I've been remote for over 10 years, far before the pandemic, when the competition for remote positions was extreme.<p>At the time, I decided I wasn't going back to an office again if I could help it. Then the pandemic hit and suddenly <i>everyone</i> is remote and the whole thing flipped upside down.<p>Now it's a battle with return to the office or "flex". Thankfully, I am immune to this.<p>And I have taken a substantial <i>cut</i> in pay in the beginning for it to stay this way. I prefer the freedom and flexibility over more money, but that's just me.
I've been permanent remote since 2015. I will never take a job that forces me into the office. That said, I think I benefited greatly from being in an office with more senior people when I was starting out. The only argument in favor of RTO/Hybrid that's ever carried water with me is that remote work makes it harder for junior staff to succeed and learn, because there are less opportunities for collaboration and guidance/mentorship. That said, my experience in open source projects shows you can still learn as a junior person as long as you're willing to put in extra effort to do so and kind of dig for the information/knowledge you need. It's definitely an additional barrier of entry though that makes it more difficult for people who aren't obsessive about tech (and whether that's good or bad is debatable).<p>Remote isn't new. There have been systems to support remote connectivity since the 90s, and it's been realistic for a tech worker to be permanent remote essentially since Git existed. There were a lot of workers who didn't realize they could do their jobs remotely, and now they do, it's been possible for decades. That cat is never going back into the bag. At least for me, it's been great and made it possible for me to change jobs during the pandemic easily without needing to be as fine-grained in my search as there's many many more remote opportunities now.
“But, as their stock prices have suffered, Big Tech has not only dialed back on many on-site perks, they’ve also called workers back to the office.”<p>I’m skeptical this has anything to do with stock prices.
IMO the top talent will always be remote going forward.<p>My opinions of those who are forced to work in the office with no physical requirement to be there, is that they are lower quality applicants with poor negotiation power and an inability to successfully pass interviews for the vast majority of companies in the world offering remote jobs, and thus they can only lean into their one positive attribute: a willingness to get dressed and commute to and from an office everyday.
It's good to have a range of options for employees and a new advantage for startups to utilize. In the next few years we will hopefully know how different approaches affect productivity and outcomes.<p>I initially thought Google's work research teams would study this but I guess that was just a zero interest rate phenomenon and now they're also just another groupthink employer.
Can you teach old dogs new tricks?<p>Big companies are typically older. They were created and grew in an environment that knew nothing _but_ the office. Having amazing(ly expensive) offices were prized social signals for them and were huge attractors of great talent, especially when residential Internet sucked so hard in comparison.<p>They also employed tons of people in the area outside of tech (property managers, facilities, janitorial staff, accounts, etc.) and were embedded into their communities.<p>Also, their DNAs were built _around_ the office. I can easily sympathize with them saying that collaboration happens easiest when everyone's in the office; the leaders saying this likely can't imagine another way of working!<p>Asking a company as big as Google to simply give all of that up and rent WeWorks isn't impossible, but is a huge, huge ask. While some groups can easily switch to a remote workflow, as companies, they just aren't mentally or physically equipped to do that without a significant number of breaking changes.<p>That said, _my_ problem with how they are going about it is that they are walking back on their incredibly enthusiastic support for remote work during COVID-times _without saying why_.<p>Nobody's going out there and saying "So we were super excited about remote work, but after seeing a 30% drop in "productivity" year-over-year, we knew it couldn't be sustained." (This is a fake reason; I have no idea what the numbers are). They also aren't saying "We can't give up our office spaces without significantly wrecking the community that formed around us." Instead, their giving platitudes like "collaboration happens best in the office" and leaving us to conjecture the change of heart.<p>I love the fact that smaller companies are making remote work work for them, but I'm afraid that so long as big tech gets bigger, the effect is temporary at best.
People like Harrigan, at Columbia's business school, are perpetuating old mythology about what constitutes professional management. They also pretend to think that they know what investors want, or prefer.
>>And professionalism to them means butts in chairs.<p>What this really means is NOT what they said ("...bigger stuff needs more in-person coordination, blah, blah,blah...").<p>It is actually the phenomenon found by a long-ago study of remote vs in-person management (I wish I could locate it). It found that teams under good managers are actually made better by remote work, and teams under bad managers were made worse. The good managers focused on results, while the bad managers focused on indicators of work (time spent in chairs, at screens, in meetings, etc.).<p>In short, remote work amplifies the differences in management quality.<p>What this study shows is that larger companies have overall lower quality and far larger quantity of bad managers.<p>What they really need for performance is not more office time, as that will only paper over the problem of bad managers. What they need is far greater investment in good management (methods, training, etc.).
I wish I could afford to change careers at the moment.<p>I'd love to create / work-for a company that builds out WFH office spaces. I.e., that specializes in all the success factors:<p>- workspace soundproofing* / acoustics<p>- HVAC<p>- networking<p>- electricity<p>- collaboration technology (esp. the ultimate prize for software developers: a viable replacement for in-person whiteboard collaboration, that's also compatible with corporate network security needs)<p>- ergonomic furniture<p>- features that help with mental health: natural light, sufficient artificial light, etc.<p>- "HOW-TO" guides for dealing with other residents. I.e., policies and/or tools to make it clear when the workers can be interrupted, etc.<p>- consulting with employers to make sure all of the above can work in harmony with the rest of the company<p>* I mean "soundproofing" in the colloquial sense, i.e. good-enough psycho-acoustic improvement.
Seems like this is based on a lot of broken metrics. When working for a big company in an office there were often days when key contributors were off their peak for days at a time because of a commute that had a big crash delay or a road rage incident. Then there was a prolonged time during which key developments stalled because a critical contributor dropped his bike in the fast lane. He did recover, but still does not remember what exactly happened. And all of this super powers development and the bottom line? Some spreadsheet really needs a bigger externalities line item.
Work From Home let me move closer to my retiring parents, who live nowhere near any of these tech hubs. There were two emergencies during COVID where I was critical. All these RTO incentives, perks, and threats all say the same thing to me: "<i>You won't be here when something happens again</i>."<p>> “Bigger companies, more complex companies, are more likely to be looking for more professional types of management,” said Kathy Harrigan, a professor of corporate management at Columbia University’s business school. <i>“Investors expect that.”</i><p>hmmmm...<p>> And professionalism to them means butts in chairs. Harrigan says in-person work is necessary to coordinate the complicated, varied businesses these tech conglomerates now operate. The move to AI has only made in-person coordination more of a necessity, she said.<p>> “They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.<p>[Bernie Sanders Voice]: I am once again asking Management for evidence [0].<p>> “In the face of volatility and uncertainty, it is human nature to want to revert back to something that is a known quantity,” said Caitlin Duffy, a research director at Gartner, about the push to return to the office. “And so there might be some psychological things happening that may be overriding the evidence in front of them.”<p>> The evidence, she says, shows that offering flexibility in where people work makes them happier and, by extension, more productive and innovative. Accounts to the contrary were “unfounded.” What’s worse, Duffy said, is that arbitrarily calling people back to the office might actually hurt workers’ productivity and innovation by driving fatigue and burnout.<p>Well that's a refreshing turn of events! But can I see the evidence?<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36406079">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36406079</a>
100% agreed! And we have a study about it, too - <a href="https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/</a>
I think the RTO thing is a lot more nefarious and high level than just middle managers wanting to keep their jobs, or boomers wanting the old way, or trying to prevent moonlighting, etc. This is the same story since the industrial revolution. It's just new to many.<p>The capitalist class is not happy to have their proles to have the freedom of movement and choice of where they work. Much like how America ties expensive healthcare (and high risk of bankruptcy) to working for The man, forcing the white collared proletarians into the office shows power and importance of work over life. This also explains why it seems to be the CEOs pushing for it (in reality it is probably the board of directors i bet)<p>Officer workers almost always were insulated from the bloody history of workers rights and strikes, and I don't think there's a single white collar union in America, but I was surprised to find out how always on guard european engineers/white collar workers are about the employer trying to take advantage of you.<p>(They did eventually do 3 day hybrid, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people come in 1 or 2 days)