TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers

275 pointsby ewgfdgdfgdf12 months ago

32 comments

shoubidouwah12 months ago
The discussion here follows well understood battle lines, but I want to add my grain of salt: working from the office comes bundled with commute. And the crux of arguments tends to be where you fall on the [commute is hell <-> working from home is hard due to circumstances] continuum. Some say that "commute helps clear the mind / switch context", but a simple walk does the same IMO; the mandatory presence in a vehicle along with everybody else at the same time, unpaid and very often for hours everyday feels incredibly invasive, wasteful and unjust. Every person then can talk price based on their circumstances, but that's the nub of it for me.
评论 #40510268 未加载
评论 #40510262 未加载
评论 #40511077 未加载
评论 #40510288 未加载
评论 #40510652 未加载
评论 #40511669 未加载
评论 #40510246 未加载
评论 #40511018 未加载
unpopularopp12 months ago
This article doesn&#x27;t mention people who don&#x27;t enjoy WFH because of the unification of the workplace and home. Personally I hated that I can never &quot;leave&quot; work and it&#x27;s always with me at home. Also not everyone can afford an office room to &quot;close out&quot; work to a separate physical place (which is a typical reply when this topic brought up) and I don&#x27;t even think it counts.<p>I personally like working in office because it&#x27;s where I work, and then I go home and that&#x27;s my home. I don&#x27;t work at home at all (and it&#x27;s a company policy everyone knows that). But I live in Europe, work is a 30 min bicycle drive from home which I also enjoy. Considering it&#x27;s an irish news site I&#x27;m surprised that was not mentioned.
评论 #40509827 未加载
评论 #40509703 未加载
评论 #40509982 未加载
评论 #40509767 未加载
评论 #40509966 未加载
评论 #40509712 未加载
评论 #40509851 未加载
评论 #40510862 未加载
评论 #40509984 未加载
评论 #40509728 未加载
评论 #40509893 未加载
评论 #40509686 未加载
评论 #40509950 未加载
评论 #40509925 未加载
评论 #40510126 未加载
评论 #40511593 未加载
评论 #40509847 未加载
评论 #40511432 未加载
评论 #40511660 未加载
评论 #40509707 未加载
评论 #40510407 未加载
评论 #40509947 未加载
评论 #40509678 未加载
评论 #40509804 未加载
评论 #40510294 未加载
armada65112 months ago
&gt; First, there are some employees who believe that being in the office will benefit their careers. They are probably right; workers who return to the office are more likely to receive promotions. Whether organisations should promote the careerists who come back to the office in hopes that their loyalty (or submissiveness to RTO mandates) will win them promotions that their performance and effectiveness would not, is an open question.<p>I take issue with the fact how quickly this is dismissed as simply rewarding loyalty and submissiveness. It completely ignores how much junior employees struggle with WFH. Without an office there is very little opportunity for junior employees to casually talk to senior employees and learn from them. It is also much harder for managers to notice if a junior employee is doing well or not. So it is no surprise it is easier to get promotions with an RTO mandate and it has very little to do with loyalty.
评论 #40511448 未加载
评论 #40511347 未加载
评论 #40511341 未加载
评论 #40511213 未加载
评论 #40511615 未加载
评论 #40511670 未加载
评论 #40511280 未加载
评论 #40511555 未加载
评论 #40512487 未加载
rrr_oh_man12 months ago
I&#x27;ve always found it weird that it&#x27;s often called &quot;work from home&quot; and not &quot;remote-first&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not only about the location, imho. I don&#x27;t want to stay at home. I want to work where I&#x27;ll be most productive on that day. This can be my dedicated desk, my sofa, a Chinese buffet, the coffee shop around the corner, or one of the remaining WeWork offices.<p>There is also a whole different aspect to it, which imho is overlooked and underappreciated: <i>asynchronicity</i>.<p>When you build your organisation under the paradigm of <i>remote-first</i>, you can tap into a beyond-regional (= worldwide), distributed talent pool. Once you tap into that beyond-regional, distributed talent pool, however, you will get people with very diverse individual realities:<p>People who located in different time zones. People with kids. People with disabilities. People with second jobs. There are also people who are more productive in the mornings, others who just bang out amazing code late at night. People for whom this might change over time, sometimes during the course of the week. Other people who take Wednesdays off, but work Sundays instead. All kinds of things which happen at different times and are not entirely plannable.<p>To capture all these flavours of productivity, you need to also build an organization that works well with asynchronicity. Ideally, an organization that is <i>async</i>-first.<p>This means: as an IC &#x2F; manager you need to <i>agree on deliverables and time lines</i>, <i>overshare</i> information, submit <i>actionable</i> requests to your people, not require&#x2F;expect <i>immediate</i> responses, and make <i>explicitly stated assumptions</i> when needed.<p>With this in place you have an organisation that is truly resilient, high-bandwith (as <i>@paulgb</i> said), and works like a global mycelial organism instead of a rooted tree, independent of location or time.<p>That&#x27;s much more than to just &quot;WFH&quot; from 9 to 5.<p>Source: Have worked with and lead teams from San Francisco to Manila.
评论 #40510410 未加载
评论 #40510417 未加载
paulgb12 months ago
&gt; Executives who are pushing employees to come back to the office are most likely to succeed if they can make a convincing case for why coming back to the office benefits employees and the organisation. The typical explanation that coming back to the office is important for the culture of the organisation is unfounded at best, and hogwash at worse.<p>Maybe big organizations are bad at communicating RTO reasons, but isn’t it pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication? I feel like the quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues is much higher on days we work in person than remote. There’s a reason why even fully remote companies usually do some sort of recurring offsite.<p>That’s not to say that the benefits of RTO always outweigh the costs, but I find the trope that RTO is just some pointy-haired boss whim to be silly.
评论 #40509721 未加载
评论 #40509701 未加载
评论 #40510972 未加载
评论 #40509944 未加载
评论 #40510570 未加载
评论 #40509787 未加载
评论 #40509779 未加载
评论 #40512894 未加载
评论 #40510549 未加载
评论 #40510005 未加载
评论 #40509812 未加载
评论 #40509708 未加载
评论 #40511486 未加载
评论 #40513319 未加载
评论 #40509980 未加载
评论 #40509730 未加载
评论 #40512691 未加载
Devasta12 months ago
&#x27;Nobody on his deathbed ever said, &quot;I wish I had spent more time at the office.&quot;&#x27; --Paul Tsongas<p>Thanks to the Covid lockdowns we now know this isn&#x27;t the case, in fact we can be quite confident a fairly large portion will spend their final moments surrounded by family and loved ones while wishing their could see one more time the thing that matters most to them: the shitty office cube farm.
评论 #40511091 未加载
评论 #40510494 未加载
johnny99k12 months ago
After my first few jobs out of college (15 years ago), I realized I hate working from someone else&#x27;s office. It feels so constrained and like I&#x27;m in school again. Remote work was very rare then with salaried jobs, but not as a contractor.<p>The company I&#x27;m working for now had an office pre-pandemic (I would meet with the director once&#x2F;month), sold the one here locally during the pandemic, and got acquired by a large, international, company where the majority of the employees work remotely and the HQ is in Europe (I&#x27;m in the US).<p>The last time I had to go to an office was for a local contract a few years ago (80 miles away from me) that required me to drive-in once&#x2F;week for a few hours. The project ended after a few months and I found something 100% remote.<p>I used to work from coworking spaces and sometimes the library, but now I have my own home office. Everyone talks about mixing life and work when working from home. It&#x27;s pretty easy for me to just turn everything off and walk away at 5.
评论 #40510944 未加载
b3lvedere12 months ago
&quot;This finding is not unexpected. Once you let workers do away with the commute to and from the office, office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings, the need to wear and take care of business suits and other costly and often uncomfortable attire, you should not be surprised that they will feel happier.&quot;<p>Gee.. how weird... people get happier when you don&#x27;t force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming and frustrating corporate [insert your favorite animal feces right here].
评论 #40509942 未加载
steveBK12312 months ago
Some uncommon topics in the WFH&#x2F;RTO debate..<p>Many employers slowly expanded the norms of work hours during remote&#x2F;hybrid, which haven&#x27;t been walked back now that they demand in-office. Jobs that used to be a 9-6 in office are now getting regularly scheduled 8&#x2F;8:30am meetings (and still keeping the 5pm ones). Employees are left with more complex working life of waking up extra extra early, or dialing into early calls, then taking a train between meeting breaks to get in before lunch, etc. This includes stressing that they get in early enough for the swipe to count.<p>A side effect is &quot;statutory swipes&quot; where others push the limits to work substantially fewer hours on office days as some sort of revenge. My wife has coworkers with long commutes who leave at 3pm when in-office. We work in financial services and this is previously unheard of, the markets aren&#x27;t even closed by then. 3pm departure is like a twice per year markets early close departure time.<p>Another issue is with some of the increase in subway violence in NYC in particular, women are not as comfortable commuting as they were 5 years ago. My wife, and plenty of women I know no longer listen to music during their commute as they want to &quot;remain aware of their surroundings&quot;. That is to say, the commute is quite the opposite of mind clearing for them.
评论 #40511751 未加载
dhotson12 months ago
Anecdotally..<p>- Working from home for long stretches.. feels more like &quot;living at work&quot; for me. Hybrid is good. Some boundaries in my life are healthy.<p>- Most people hate their commute. I ride my bike to work and it&#x27;s the best bit of my day.<p>- I&#x27;m in a three person startup.. a ton of the software engineering and business problems I work on get hashed out talking over lunch and coffee—or in 2 minute hallway chats.<p>- I think there&#x27;s something in it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;lunch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;lunch&#x2F;</a><p>- It helps that my office environment is quiet and I get lots of uninterrupted time.<p>My main argument to support work-from-home is because I think building top-notch software is a strong-link problem.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.experimental-history.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;science-is-a-strong-link-problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.experimental-history.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;science-is-a-strong-l...</a><p>A strong link problem is where &quot;overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is&quot;.<p>In this environment you really want to attract and hang on to your top performers! So it makes sense to do what you need to do to keep them happy.<p>But also, in my experience, the best performing teams I&#x27;ve ever worked in.. we ate lunch together nearly every day.
评论 #40510284 未加载
komali212 months ago
&gt; I believe the pandemic shook things up in the world of work in ways that are still poorly understood. The great political philosopher Edmund Burke noted that &quot;custom reconciles us to every thing&quot;, and I think this applies to all sorts of workplace norms and practices. If we were used to the way things were done in organisations, we were willing to put up with all sorts of organisational policies that were burdensome (e.g., dress codes) or even abusive (e.g., the expectation that we should work beyond normal working hours if asked to do this.)<p>&gt; A year or two away from the office has opened a lot of eyes, and things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all.<p>I wonder if this has anything to do with zoomers beginning to enter the workforce. They&#x27;re often characterized as being far more cynical and vocally intolerant of &quot;office shenanigans.&quot;
评论 #40509805 未加载
评论 #40509743 未加载
评论 #40513505 未加载
robertlagrant12 months ago
I tend to agree with the premise, but it&#x27;s hard to read something so obviously one-sided. This seems like an article written to be linked to by other articles as &quot;evidence&quot;, when it seems pretty weak.
评论 #40510139 未加载
GuB-4212 months ago
It is not specific to &quot;back to the office&quot;. You generally can&#x27;t &quot;force&quot; good employees to do things they don&#x27;t want to.<p>You can get them back to the office, some of them don&#x27;t mind, some may even want it, or you may be able to negotiate it with an appropriate compensation, but you can&#x27;t force them or they will just leave. Same for everything else: being on-call, travel, overtime work, flexible hours, etc...
rob7412 months ago
&gt; <i>Second, there are employees who are trapped in their jobs, either because of family or community obligations or because they lack the skills, knowledge, and abilities to move to other jobs.</i><p>With the current job market, I think there are more people in this category than the article makes it sound. That&#x27;s actually why companies think they can get away with forcing you to come back to the office against your will...
评论 #40509837 未加载
评论 #40510103 未加载
majoe12 months ago
That article kind of misses the premise of its own headline.<p>90% of the article is the usual discussion about working from home: Are employers more or less productive, cultural changes after COVID, managers reasons for RTO, etc<p>But all of these don&#x27;t answer the why of the actual key observation:<p>&quot;...they are losing experienced managers and top performers at disproportionate rates&quot;<p>Why disproportionate? There could be many reasons, but there is surely an obvious one:<p>&quot;You can force employees back to the office, but not the good ones &quot;<p>And why is that so? Because you&#x27;re less likely to force a good employee than a bad employee to do something, simply because the bad employee has less opportunities to leave your company.<p>The more interesting question would have been, whether there is actually a disproportionate amount of good employees, which wanted to work from home and therefore left, or only a disproportionate amount of good employees, which were able to leave (which is naturally always the case).
dfgdfg3454545612 months ago
My thoughts on the office&#x2F;home work management debate:<p>- Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick<p>- Be mindful of workers with families or other dependants who see wfh as a great benefit<p>- Don&#x27;t count days in office and assess people on it - by doing this you are sending a signal that days worked at home don&#x27;t count.
评论 #40509849 未加载
评论 #40510438 未加载
评论 #40517924 未加载
99990000099912 months ago
Having the experience of both working remotely and in office recently, you&#x27;d have to pay me a minimum of 50k per year more to RTO.<p>I don&#x27;t want to commute. Above 150k or so I&#x27;m only keeping 50% of every dollar above that . So we&#x27;re taking another 25k a year, or about 2k a month. I&#x27;m spending 2 hours a day on my commute. That&#x27;s around 160 hours a month. That means I&#x27;m only making 12.5$ an hour commuting.<p>I also have to give up being able to shower mid day, cook, lay on my couch, etc.<p>I live in a high cost of living city right now, but I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue.
评论 #40510455 未加载
评论 #40511797 未加载
Feeble12 months ago
&quot;Remote workers were not only more productive they were more satisfied with remote work than they had been with working in a traditional office&quot;<p>I think some citation is needed here, there are multiple studies and they have very varied outcome. This one for instance find that productivity drops 18% when working from home: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w31515" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w31515</a><p>At best he is cherry picking his studies and ignoring the contrarian studies, at worst he is blindy pushing his own interest and views.
评论 #40509895 未加载
评论 #40509720 未加载
评论 #40509931 未加载
codr712 months ago
News flash: You can&#x27;t force the good ones to do anything against their will.<p>And whenever you force anyone to do anything against their will, there are serious consequences that are not easy to fix.
acconrad12 months ago
I&#x27;ve been remote for years even before Covid. RTO vs remote comes down to how and where you work best.<p>When folks want to go remote I ask them &quot;when you were in school, did you study better in the library or at home in your bedroom?&quot;<p>If they said bedroom, I assume they can work from home. If they say library, I think RTO makes more sense.<p>As much as I love remote, the best answer, like all things, is that best is relative to each person. What works for you doesn&#x27;t work for others.<p>Imho the best approach to measure productivity is to see where people do their best work and support that. And if you think something works for you but it isn&#x27;t (i.e., low performance rating), well... time to head into the office or find a new job. You, the individual, also have to be willing to change if you&#x27;re not performing your best because you _think_ remote will work for you but in reality you&#x27;re not nearly as present or productive.<p>Mandates, as the name implies, sort of admits that the ideal isn&#x27;t best for {someone} otherwise you wouldn&#x27;t need a mandate; people would naturally come back into the office if they so chose because it was best for them.
pjc5012 months ago
See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rte.ie&#x2F;brainstorm&#x2F;2023&#x2F;0904&#x2F;1402957-offices-workers-bosses-managers-executives-psychology&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rte.ie&#x2F;brainstorm&#x2F;2023&#x2F;0904&#x2F;1402957-offices-work...</a><p>There&#x27;s usually a hugely simplified model of the workplace in play, where workers are turning some handle marked &quot;economic output&quot; and bosses are selfless agents of the company which is in turn entirely operating in the interests of the shareholders. People don&#x27;t like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships, the social reward of &quot;subordination&quot;&#x2F;&quot;bossness&quot; given to managers (which doesn&#x27;t work when they don&#x27;t have any visible subordinates), and so on. That requires a lot of anthropology.<p>(Personal observations: I don&#x27;t mind being in my current office, but commuting is a pure deadweight loss; the social benefits of contact are real, as are the benefits of being at home; many of my coworkers are on a different continent and I cannot be in the same office as them anyway)
评论 #40509790 未加载
tssva12 months ago
I choose to retire earlier than planned rather than return to the office. I retired last August at age 54. I got remarried in October and now spend my days managing a horse farm and restoration of a 1800s farm house which came with my wife. By managing I mean generally getting in the way of and annoying the actual farm manager and our general contractor. It beats commuting and sitting in an office all day.
binary13212 months ago
I wonder if the divide has something to do with how much space and comfort a person has in their home. Someone who lives in an apartment with three kids and their in-laws might prefer office work more than someone who lives in a roomy house in the woods or suburbs.
mytailorisrich12 months ago
RTO mandates are sometimes a simple action to a difficult issue that the company is not able to face.<p>In my case we now have a RTO mandate to work from office at least 2 days a week, which means staring at a screen and attending Teams meeting from office instead of from home (there has been no thought beyond &quot;you have to be in office&quot;)<p>Why?<p>Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder. But apparently, it&#x27;s due to WFH and the fact that management has been horrible, that the company has gone through several rounds of layoffs with massive reduction in headcount over the last few years, and that salaries have essentially been frozen for 3 years has nothing to do with it.<p>So, yes, CVs have been sent out.
评论 #40510164 未加载
m0llusk12 months ago
Hard to find a link with all the noise, but there was a big employer in Singapore that studied work from home well before COVID and started to switch to remote work because it made employees so much more productive. Yet this piece casually asserts &quot;Against all expectations, remote workers appear to work harder and more productively than workers in traditional offices.&quot; The only people with these expectations were those who ignore the literature on productivity. Kind of sad that this seems to include most managers and workers in tech.
callamdelaney12 months ago
Is the advantage of &#x27;close collaboration&#x27; worth the disadvantage of working in a glorified sweatshop? Give me an office and I&#x27;ll come to the office.
irrational12 months ago
My company has some positions that are work from home. Those who work from home receive $80&#x2F;month for internet. So, by going into the office, I have to pay for my own home internet, gas and maintenance for the car, work clothing, etc. And that isn’t even including the time question (time to get ready, time to drive in and back home, time to find parking and walk in, time to find a place to sit, etc.)<p>So, having to work in the office is a pay cut.
评论 #40511750 未加载
chrisjj12 months ago
Evidence needed for this claim remote working &quot;does away with&quot; &quot;office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings&quot;.
ChrisArchitect12 months ago
Related:<p><i>Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40339852">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40339852</a>
kisamoto12 months ago
Isn&#x27;t a lot of the WFH&#x2F;WFO debate centered around personal preferences? A lot of people like WFH but that doesn&#x27;t mean there aren&#x27;t also a lot of people who do actually like&#x2F;prefer to be in the office.<p>Of course generally it&#x27;s not up to them, instead up to the management who sets the office policy but to describe the people who don&#x27;t like going to the office as &#x27;the good ones&#x27; seems a little short sighted.
评论 #40510010 未加载
noirscape12 months ago
I&#x27;ll take the controversial position and say that RTO (with a semi-flexible hybrid option for sudden appointments) is the best outcome.<p>Some context; during the pandemic, everyone suddenly had to do WFH, including uni studies. In my case, I did both an internship and my studies, so my main exposure to WFH is through this lens. WFH as a mandate policy ended when I got an actual job.<p>The main concerns when it comes to WFH I experienced are as follows:<p>1. Lack of commute means no hard checks on work-life separation. Commute sucks. It&#x27;s also a period for your brain to turn off any association you still have with work, a period in which you&#x27;re unreachable by anyone and in general helps you vent off the day&#x27;s stress. It&#x27;s also way too easy to overwork yourself without commute when you don&#x27;t have to go home on time. With commute, there&#x27;s a clear endpoint because the next bus is otherwise in an hour.<p>2. Complete collapse of social interactions. &quot;Get friends&quot; isn&#x27;t so easy when most third spaces are unavailable (amped up by COVID as a &quot;worst scenario&quot; since they had to close, but they&#x27;re declining on the whole), you&#x27;ve got introverted tendencies and in general your culture is becoming much more distant in terms of the barrier between &quot;acquainted&quot; and &quot;friend&quot; with casual interactions. Most people get their social interactions in a day from work and unless you&#x27;re either living with family or friends, WFH won&#x27;t change that. It just makes people depressed from what I can tell, something which statistics back up (although people who are hard on WFH usually try to blame this on other worldly ills, post-COVID measured a notable spike in mental issues and one that&#x27;s somewhat settling now that RTO is a thing).<p>3. Productivity collapse and lack of oversight. Lack of oversight if you have a job with clear requirements, clear goals and clear means to achieve it is great. It completely fucking sucks if you&#x27;re a junior or need to actively test and check up with other people in the office to see if something fits to desired spec&#x2F;need to talk about why something doesn&#x27;t logically fit spec. Email, Slack and Teams have a degree of formality in them that a simple &quot;hey, can you look at this for a sec&quot; when someone walks past your desk doesn&#x27;t have. Especially during my internship, I noticed this problem as the lack of oversight kinda started to spin out of control after a while due to changing bosses and mediocre rapport with other employees at the company. Never unsolvable, but absolutely not good and I do have concerns with how well training up juniors into seniors (a basic part of career growth as you become experienced with the ins and outs of your job and learn what works) is going to go when direct interactions with seniors (who can rapidly answer institutional knowledge questions or know the &quot;core tools&quot; from the back of their head) are as low as they are with WFH.
firesteelrain12 months ago
One thing I have never seen mentioned is how organizations are dealing with IP theft such as source code. You could share IP with non employees such as a spouse by simply sharing your screen. It’s one thing to sign an NDA and another to have signed it but then inadvertent or intentional screen sharing is another.<p>I work in a highly regulated industry so not sure how this would work.
评论 #40509997 未加载
评论 #40509829 未加载