My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job).
Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable.
It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.
Stop assuming that these people are competent. I've been in the c-suite meetings where these things are decided and it boils down to "In my day the office was good enough for me, so it will be good enough for everyone else too".
Equally, stop assuming that their intent is good. Unless we have internal details, we can argue either way, but assuming anything at all seems wrong. Just as likely as they're just stupid, it feels as likely they're doing it to reduce costs/headcount.
Being disconnected from reality, or not being able to adapt is not the same as being stupid.
One of my bosses while being absurdly smart for work related things, has no clue about how to deal with millenials and younger. He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above. The younger laugh and leave
That's really nothing new. Most people get to a point where they don't quite understand the generations behind them.
You grow up in a different time with different norms. It may be easy enough to understand at a more surface level what younger generations seem to care about, how they talk, etc but it's much harder to deeply understand what it's like to be that younger generation and how, therefore, to fundamentally adjust the way you work and interact or even view the world yourself.
Another angle that makes this even more complicated is that younger people can and do get things wrong too. A fresh perspective is not automatically a correct perspective. A leader would be rightfully wary about letting someone experiencing their first transition into the workforce make major decisions about workplace design, etc.
Of course, this leads to the opposite problem of never trusting the younger generations, which is equally if not more problematic. Because a fresh perspective may not always be correct, but often it does have some kind of value that needs to be extracted and acted on.
Of course a fresh perspective is not always correct. In fact, they usually get things wrong for lack of experience. And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL) and adore the latest hype. But we seniors should be open to their opinions, and we should be open to mix with them and "exploit" their strength. E.g. our social media (Twitter, Insta and Facebook mainly) are handled by a ~50 y.o. woman who volunteered. People younger than 35'ish laugh about how lengthy the posts and the videos are, and the general tone of "Buscemy: how do you do, fellow kids?", lack of social networks that are actually used, and so on. But nobody asked them for advise, because nobody wants to be told how old and out of the loop they are.
On a more serious note, they can't take seriously they have to be available on weekends or holidays, so they prefer to change jobs rather than confronting or negotiate with their manager. It looks that our future is one of overworked seniors training short term juniors for our competition: extintion in 10-15 years.
Recently one of our juniors asked for a day per week working from home, and was denied because "team building" or something like that. Since them, I have the impression he's on a quest on how many days per week he can go without talking to anyone (avoiding team building), and I'm 100% sure he's now hunting for a fully remote job.
>And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL)
I was there when we gave up on SQL. It wasn't because we wanted to. It was because we had a terabytes of data that needed to be accessed in micro-seconds.
SQL in 2006 was simply incapable of that. Looking at what a modern machine can do is ridiculous by comparison. Try and do it on a 8 year old phone and you will have as close to the experience we had back then.
I've also seen it go the other way, with leads trusting more junior engineers way more than they probably should have. I wasn't too surprised when most (all?) of the concerns that senior engineers raised and were overruled on came back to bite them 6 months later.
In that instance it seemed like leadership was focusing too hard on making sure the more junior members had their voices heard and, I think, expected that the team would be able to just figure out how to handle the concerns raised later. Pros and cons to everything, but at least in that one instance it was really odd to see senior engineers' proposals and reasoning be thrown out with a focus almost entirely on protecting team dynamics or something similar.
Also, diversity more broadly, not just generation.
Scenario: Say you're a Zoomer, affluent parents, everything material you could want, security and opportunity, all the college prep and application angles covered, Stanford, Leetcode, FAANG, substantial war chest, now founder, family seed money and connections and safety net... designing a consumer tech product targeted foremost at "other" Zoomers in general...
In that scenario, you're going to have huge cultural blind spots, among your generation.
You might be best off throwing away the well-to-do fratbro culture-fit hiring funnel, and hopefully get a diversity of perspectives.
Diversity of thought should have always been the goal. That's really hard to do though, especially when you can instead focus on easily noticed external traits and claim that's diversity.
Throwing away the well-to-do fratbro hiring funnel would actually be a mistake though, wouldn't it? We should be adding more, different hiring funnels to try to better capture diversity of thought and background. Throwing out one funnel entirely and replacing it with another would still have a blindspot, it's just the opposite blindspot that they had before.
To be clear, I'm from Spain, and that loyalty is still a selling item among 40-and-over. Also, seniority is a plus almost everywhere, where you can win arguments with "I've been working here twenty years", even to people the same age than you but with less seniority. Going to other place even with higher salary is a loss for lots of people.
But youngers doesn't care, and I have the impression they actually fear being for too long, say more than 5 years, in the same place. They value the novelty of knowing new people and ways to get stuff done.
Chatting with some major-firm management consultants was enough to remove any lingering “… but surely they’re smarter than I’m giving them credit for” doubts I had about the C-suite.
Their view was way less favorable and more comprehensive than mine, and they’ve seen more of them and from bigger companies than I have. They talked about them like they’re toddlers.
Human psychology is wild, when employees do something unusual, it is always presumed that it’s because they are stupid or lazy
When executives do something unusual, it’s rarely assumed that they’ve lost touch with reality and factory floor. Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity
> Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity
Somewhat because people don't want to know that the people who lead them are idiots. They'll go so far as to bury their heads in the sand to not hear it.
Doesn't that explanation makes very little sense in this context? We're talking about a company that just spun out on its own and has an enormous amount of work ahead of it and presumably a window of time where the investors expect things to be bumpy financially—why would a CEO intentionally try to reduce headcount in that situation? A year in when things have settled down, sure, but right after the split?
I should note that we've had a huge amount of redundancies on top of people leaving for other opportunities. My guess is they want a very low-cost business that looks good in terms of its balance sheet so when it goes to IPO everything looks to investors.
Or they might have whatever indicators, real or imagined, saying that they should be shedding costs as much as possible.
I've even seen once spinning off a new company as a way to avoid the word "layoff" or "firing" for cultural reasons. Every few years the company would spin out a new one, moving all the parts they wanted to keep, then liquidate the old.
Can you link these studies? I often feel like people greatly misrepresent what these studies find. Anecdotally, we've been happy to cut remote senior engineers and bring in local people, sometimes at a significantly higher total comp, just because they play such an important role in coordination, which is far more important than their trivia knowledge about our system.
- the first two were conducted while we were in the thick of the pandemic and loathe to be near anyone outside of our pod. WFH made sense then, and I’m sure people were more comfortable knowing they wouldn’t get Covid WFH
- the third was in 2023 when the world opened up, but studied call center operators. Yes, I can see how they would be more productive at home. However, imho any position that requires collaboration and many interactions between staff is more productive in the office and this study doesn’t address that.
Let me quote the first one, which is meta-analysis: ". Of the articles published prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 79% (n = 19) demonstrated that work-from-home increased productivity and performance whereas 21% (n = 5) showed mixed or no effects. Of the articles published during the pandemic, 23% (n = 3) showed positive effects, 38% (n = 5) revealed mixed results, and 38% (n = 5) showed negative effects."
So it seems that there are numerous studies that show WFH is beneficial to productivity, that are done before pandemic.
Just a note that from your anecdote it sounds like you're a company that is partially (and decreasingly) remote. My experience has been that that kind of hybrid—where some employees are always colocated and others are always not—doesn't work because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented, so the remote employees are hamstrung in ways that don't happen in an organization where remote is evenly distributed.
I think it's the opposite, remote workers are not reliable teammates. When we need ad hoc help from a remote engineer, we need to grab a 30 minute slot on their calendar, or we need to send them a long async email or DM chain. Eventually the conversation slows down, and they start responding once a day. When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me. More remote-more slow.
What you're describing is exactly the kind of problematic culture difference that I'm warning about. This is what I said earlier:
> because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented
Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that.
It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.
> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.
Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).
> Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that.
> It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work.
This is wishful thinking. Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project, which is the most important part, and in many cases senior engineers are on the critical path. But hey, if you're able to be productive at scale with remote work, guess you'll have a large pool of talent to draw from, so I'm hoping to see many successful companies replace FAANG.
> Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).
Yes, this is what YOU want. It's not for the benefit of the company, no matter how remote people try to frame it. But hey, if that's my only choice, then we should hire top talent in Bangalore or Warsaw instead of remote mid talent from high cost areas.
Precisely. I don't want to work for you, you don't want me to work for you, so it's a win-win: I'll keep doing good work for a company that appreciates what I can do and is happy to give me the flexibility that I need to do it well. You keep hiring people who don't mind being interrupted by a boss who values their physical presence over all else. Everyone's happy!
> Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things.
This sounds like a project management failure. One of the cardinal rules of the remote programs I run is: Never let the critical path be blocked by one person having to physically do some synchronous task. If Task X requires Person Y to approve it by Date Z, then you obtain that approval asynchronously, waaaaay before Date Z, where you would otherwise become blocked.
> In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project
I mean, I think that's what you're getting at here, so design your business processes just like you'd design a multi-threaded program: such that there are no locks and mutexes.
> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.
Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers.
I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.
You have it backwards. I'm not a manager, I'm an IC. I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product. If the alternative is that I need to spend half my day spinning on a reply, then I hope you get managed out.
Oh, this information changes a lot. I don't know if you're in a place to accept feedback right now but here's some just in case: you need to fix your attitude fast or you won't last long at any company, remote or not.
If you treat your coworkers with anything approximating the dismissive, demanding, and entitled comments you've been leaving here you are making yourself a lot of enemies at work, and if you're not the boss you won't get away with that forever.
But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.
It's not my perception of the relationship, it's their job. But that's besides the point. In a healthy team people are not groaning every time they have to help someone.
I'm a lower level TL, and we just got an intern for the summer. They needed help figuring out how to set up SSH, and they came to me. Is my work more important? Yeah, but that doesn't matter. I don't want them spinning on this while waiting for me to grant them an audience. If I truly don't have time, that's my decision to deprioritize the work, or send it somewhere else. Same with the people above me.
I agree, I try to be a good mentor and understand new developers have higher level of anxiety and I help them as much as I can. But I also teach them how to get help without being too disruptive, remote or local.
Each time you do this, you're forcing someone to forget whatever he was in the middle of doing. In the best case, your interruption might be for a much more urgent project, but often it won't.
No it doesn't. You can't plan for every contingency.
If they're not at desk, I'll wait there.
The point isn't that the project will fail if I don't get my solution right now. The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail.
We have a chat system which most people are on most of the day. If I want to talk to someone I ping them on there. We might arrange a video call, but mostly it's sorted out on chat. Email is also used for things which are not time critical and/or require more detailed explanation and discussion.
All I can figure from how some people react to being asked to type out their requests or otherwise interact over messaging rather than turning everything into a voice conversation, is that some folks, for whatever reason, find writing and maybe also reading extremely unpleasant. Poor typists? Just kinda bad at reading and writing so it requires a lot of effort rather than feeling as natural and easy as talking? Something else? Not sure.
Some people just find it quicker to be able to point at a thing and ask "What does that do?" VS using the tools to do it via computers.
Some would say that's an issue with the tools, but the tools aren't ever going to get better if the WFH people don't acknowledge the deficiency of the current system.
Putting things in writing is anathema to the sociopath or socially savvy manipulator. Writing leaves paper trail. You can't ask for unscrupulous things with impunity, or utilize fast talk or other manipulation techniques without being completely transparent.
To be honest, I hate chats. In the past I just had to worry about emails, and they probably weren't that important if they were emails, but now I have to split my attention onto chats because we have remote workers that need help. If they were in office, they could just come ask me a question when its important, and I could focus on my work otherwise. Still doesn't stop people from randomly just not replying when pinged.
My experience has been that "spin off" CEOs are often there only so they can check a "CEO experience" box in the hope that it will help them climb higher in the larger corporation. This leads to all sorts of bad decisions and a pretty miserable environment because they don't actually care about building something that will be successful and endure. They only care about speedrunning the experience they think a CEO needs so they can talk about it when interviewing for something better.
It does feel that way. They are an ex-division executive. If anything, I feel like this could be a case of them getting nicely managed out while building out that CEO experience before they go off and retire successfully into the sunset after making a shit tonne through an IPO, ignoring the gutting of the company they've done to make sure the short term balance sheet looks good; while the long term viability of it is in shambles.
What's wrong with having to justify a budget each year rather than assuming last year's budget was fine and still makes sense as a starting point for this year?
It imposes an enormous amount of operational overhead involved and destroys organization stability. All you need is a single manager in a single year who doesn't understand the benefit of something for its budget to get gutted with ZBB, and once that happens it can take years to rebuild. ZBB starts from the premise that employees are fungible and can either be freely replaced or freely reassigned, which is not very realistic.
I don't know much about how companies really implement a ZBB, if anyone even does, but I'd argue that if organizational changes are om the table every year that's an unnecessary recipe for disaster.
Budgeting doesn't have to mean asking the question of whether you need all the people you have, it's just asking what the priorities are and how to allocate capital. Priority number one should always be maintaining the best team possible, any other priority is going to fail anyway if there's no trust and everyone at the company is worried about getting fired just for budget.
If that's the main issue with ZBB for a company, budgeting really is the least of their problems in my opinion. Employees need to trust leadership and leaderhsip needs to both earn that trust and trust their employees as well.
This is actually really similar to a problem I have with how OKRs are done. They should be done from the bottom up not the top down. The idea of OKRs, and agile, sound great but they're just used as a mechanism for top down control because the company is fundamentally lacking trust.
One issue I can see is a massive performance hit at the year boundary as everyone goes into 'justification' mode to ensure their jobs and projects persist. Or just dusts off the forecasts and justifications they used last year, which sort of defeats the whole point.
Thats a fair point. Trust would definitely have to be a requirement for a functional zero-based budget.
Employees would need to know their jobs are secure and the company is just going through a regular process of deciding where to invest. As long as the perception, whether true or not, is that companies are always willing to fire employees to save a buck then no one really has incentives to honestly propose budgets and priorities.
Oh hey, our new CEO did the same exact "hybrid 4" bullshit so he technically didn't violate our employment contracts that said we were hybrid employees. Literally at his 6 month mark announced a thing that made everyone hate him which is a pretty bold move for a new CEO. The only person who supported him was a newly hired director who was kissing ass so hard it almost a rimjob. I just don't get it, there was no issue that caused the change, no metric he was looking to improve. He even told us he was willing to eat 20% productivity to be in the office.
But turns out the overlap between someone willing to write code all day and adhd is pretty strong so my team all put in the paperwork for ADA exceptions and got them, literally the only reason I'm still here.
4-day work week is a "gift" to keep people in the office, and I hope it FAILS miserably because being in the office in 2024 it's not different than dress like ancient Celts to go to a court. A nonsense.
Some want slaves and to ensure them, to reach the "in 2030 you'll own nothing" they need the city, tall buildings used less than half of the day moving between them for the rest of the day only to keep people busy and unable to own. This is simply untenable: a city can't really evolve and we are in changing world and in a changing society, cities to change needs to be rebuild, something impossible for actual available resources, we must be no more than 3 billion to have enough planetary resources to evolve in cities, while we can be the double to live spread and have more intelligence and ideas being more in a spread model where we can evolve and sustain the climate change as well.
It's about rule and control. Some people see employees as "less than equals" and they need a thumb on them at all times. Others are steeped in Right-Wing Bullshit and are willing to burn it all to the ground for one more profitable quarter.
Curiously this ¹ is not the case in Norway.
Pretty much everyone returned ot work as they did before Covid.
A majority enjoyed getting back to work and back to the office.
Many do have more of an opportunity to work from if they need to.
In our bigger cities we have public transit that is popular.
A large percentage of people have to switch between different
routes to get all the way home.
And my commute is quickly more than an hour, between
ride time, waiting for the next ride.
Some are fortunate to live in immediate proximity to lets say a
subway station that has a line that takes them directly
to the office, that can be super efficient.
¹
"""This is playing out now in companies around the globe. And with neither side willing to give in, the fight will continue to bubble up this year and perhaps even next, leaving employees frustrated and on the hunt for new jobs — and companies in danger of undermining their best assets: their workers."""
> Curiously this ¹ is not the case in Norway. Pretty much everyone returned ot work as they did before Covid. A majority enjoyed getting back to work and back to the office.
The headlines that imply that companies in the US are decimated by employees leaving after RTO are clickbait. The job market here (and everywhere) is very tight. Even the people upset about RTO are forced to do it.
The RTO topic is a hot button issue. Journalists know they can get a lot of clicks by writing articles about companies suffering high attrition after RTO mandates, but if you look closely they use a lot of “weasel words” to disguise the actual numbers and let readers assume the worst.
Read this article, but closely and click the links. The article plays tricks like saying 36% of seniors are leaving their jobs due to RTO, but then you click the link and realize it’s from a survey where people claimed they planned on leaving their job, not that they had or were actively doing it. It’s also just a self-reported survey, and large numbers of people always say they’re going to leave their job when you survey them.
> The job market here (and everywhere) is very tight. Even the people upset about RTO are forced to do it.
These two sentences don't make sense together, so I think you meant something different, but they're both actually true.
The overall job market is quite tight, but with remote tech jobs it's quite loose, and loosening further. Many of the people upset about RTO are indeed forced to do it.
> Many of the people upset about RTO are indeed forced to do it.
And, they'll only stay until the job market gets into the hot part of the cycle again. I think the only reason the numbers are as low as they are is that RTO mandates dovetailed right into a bear hiring market. Once hiring picks back up, I bet a lot more people are going to be comfortable enough to bail.
Job openings are still above their pre-pandemic peek and still at record highs. They're just lower than they were 6 months ago https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL
Unskilled labor is doing the best it's done in years (if not decades), while senior tech salaries are still falling back to earth in the aftermath of the remote work talent acquisition arms race.
I (in Oslo, Norway), like going to the office most days. Maybe 1-2 days at home during the week now. It's a nice bike ride, which is the main reason for going, heh. And it's nice to just be a part of things. But since I go often, I don't feel I miss out on the days I don't.
Also, I do it in a sense so that I can then go live/work in a cabin for long stretches during the winter, without people really "noticing" my absence as they think of me as someone mostly in the office. I did about 10 weeks of this this winter, skiing during the middle of the day when the sun was up etc., was great.
So I like the flexibility, and WFH is important for me in the job I choose, but I don't mind going to the office when I don't need to be home. I feel I get the best of both worlds this way, the connections of being in the office, but also the freedom of being remote. It's easier to work remote when you know the people well, which again is easier to do in the office.
Public transit in Oslo has only recently reached per-pandemic levels. I don't know what the overall numbers are, but I know that some employers have mandated return to office (at least 3 days a week). My employer has not mandated that people be in a specific number of days a week and has instead chosen to reduce the office space they're renting. Unfortunately this means the days that many people need to be in the office can be pretty horrible due to there not being enough desks for everyone.
Yes Norway is fortunate to have great transportation, a work culture that respects people's quality of life, clean and safe cities
In the UK and the US workers are treated more like serfs who are told to assemble in offices regardless of how long/arduous the commute, how shitty the city is, how little the boss cares for your quality of life etc. etc.
I think that's a pretty inaccurate view of the situation. Having to go back to the office is still having to go back to the office. In your analogy, you'd still be a serf to your corporation regardless of public transportation. At the end of the day, their bosses still forced them to go back to the office.
Someone I know worked for a company that instituted wildly unpopular policies across their entire workplace, just to try and get three people to quit. They suffered massive attrition at every level of the org, this went on for something like 9 months, and in the end only one of their "targets" left voluntarily.
I cannot fathom how this was less expensive than just laying off those three with severance packages.
The problem with these policies is that the people LEAST likely to quiet are also the most likely to comply with the shit policies, because they have no other option (or it's going to be the most difficult for them to find a different/better job)
Not sure if they teach second-order effects in those MBA-mills though.
I have no idea how involved they were; I didn't get the nitty-gritty details of the story, just heard the broad strokes over beers.
I can easily imagine that HR was never told about the purpose of the changes. I can also imagine that HR has bills to pay, and a lack of desire to quit without another job lined up.
Paradoxically, the cynic in me thinks the result is quite fair. You behave like a jerk, and people don't want to work for a jerk, so they leave. They have a better job, and you have faithful minions - everybody is happy.
Because companies are amoral entities... empathy and suffering are human qualities that don't exist in the corporate structure beyond the individuals themselves. Sometimes that manifests in corporate actions but usually it's totally lost amongst all the layers.
Also there is a financial downside and legal risk to firing vs. just getting employees to quit.
Western ideals have given the masses this belief that they matter at all in the grand scheme of things. The reality is nobody really matters but a select few people that turn the crank and the rest of us are just here to act as grease. Amassing as much wealth as possible is the key to escaping this grind.
> empathy and suffering are human qualities that don't exist in the corporate structure
Corporations are run by real humans, as far as I know. They are the definition of human qualities but they give a pretty good mask to the guys doing the job, so they unleash their full humanity.
Then maybe they shouldn’t have many rights real humans enjoy, like anonymously owning property or filing objections to planning permission for ‘ruined view’
The ones you want to leave also may have a clue that they'd have a hard time finding a comparable job somewhere else. So they may be the ones who don't leave. That could give you the worst possible outcome - the good ones leave, and you're left with the ones you don't want, and they're all at the office with you.
All in all, "RTO to get X to quit" seems like an amazingly bad plan.
Even worse than that, I don't understand how execs are hoping random people will quit. I could maybe understand the reasoning (though it would still have been stupid) if I didn't have people I very much do not want to play Russian roulette with.
CEOs think all people (including devs) should be interchangeable. If they think you are not, they'd rather fire you and have you changed by a process (that has whatever X number of people) that are interchangeable.
Random people will die form time to time. thus if you are an exec you need to ensure all employees (including you) are replaceable. As such if you need to reduce headcount just counting on a few random people to quit and not replacing them (or replacing them by moving someone out of a position you wanted cut into theirs) is good enough.
Of course people are never this substituteable in the real world. however you need to do your best to make them so.
I can believe that I'll survive without my right arm while simultaneously not looking to chop it off. Yes, sure, all my people are replaceable, but I'm not going to go around flipping a coin on whether they stay or go. Replacing them has costs and risks, and it's cost a lot just getting the people I have.
To make everyone's life more miserable, hoping that your high performers don't leave, that's just shooting yourself in the foot because "I can still walk eventually".
Let me quote the quote from Robert Townsend "Up the organization", quoted in turn by DeMarco and Lister in their "Peopleware" (needless to say they quote it to say its pure crap):
"If you've inherited (or built) an office that needs a real
house cleaning, the only sure cure is move the whole
thing out of town, leaving the dead wood behind. One of
my friends has done it four times with different companies. The results are always the same: 1) The good
ones are confident of their futures and go with you. 2)
The people with dubious futures (and their wives)
don't have to face the fact that they've been fired. "The
company left town," they say. They get job offers
quickly, usually from your competitors who think
they're conducting a raid. 3) The new people at Destiny City are better than the ones you left behind and
they're infused with enthusiasm because they've been
exposed only to your best people."
— Up the Organization
I think "RTO to make people leave" has the same idiotic thinking at its base.
Sounds like tips a narcissist would offer on life.
"Pack up and leave once people are on to you, only the true believers will follow and the people at the new city will only interact with them so they will think you are great as well!"
fire (as opposed to lay off) is something companies avoid - if you don't show good cause to fire someone they can sue you for wrongful dismissal. If a company has reason to fire you they will often tell you verbally to quit or they will fire you - quit meaning that you did it of your own will. If this ever happens to you consider carefully taking their offer - you can't quit, but when someone asks they will say you left in good standing which looks better than being told you were fired for cause (but of course you can't sue them anymore as you quit)
Layoff is what a company wants to do, but they need to do at least something to show the layoff was random. They can't just lay off one person who is bad, they need to get rid of a lot of people.
Nobody wants to prop up the board's other investments in commercial real estate and nobody has to care that they're losing their shirts either. Make big cities safe and clean and affordable again, or they will just rot away and collapse in on themselves. I've been reading about the terrible situation in commercial real estate especially in large cities which are unaffordable and crime-ridden, it sounds like there's no escape for the people who have their wealth trapped inside the walls of buildings nobody wants to visit.
It's easy to paint a conspiracy picture. Most boards are not in commercial real estate and certainly not enough to force CEOs to act against the interest of their company. They're doing this because they believe in it. Lots of people just believe wrong things despite evidence.
Employees are willing to give up serdipitous in-office collaboration while CEOs, who are struggling to navigate any of this, refuse to accept that this aspect of work life is going away.
I want the old in-office comraderie and collaboration but I'm not willing to give up WFH benefits.
My company went so far as to remodel huge new office for me. I thought it be great but then a four day onsite rule popped out of nowhere that applies to people with offices. I'm seriously considering leaving.
> I want the old in-office comraderie and collaboration but I'm not willing to give up WFH benefits.
there is such a thing as hybrid. Having an office available for use, and schedule meetups deliberately in the office, and do it regularly (but not all the time - for example, once a fortnight is a good cadence imho).
The days you do meet in the office, you will do an all day "workshop", rather than regularly scheduled work - bounce ideas, talk about stuff, etc. Face to face discussions can be done there, and it's more productive.
And in exchange, you remove things like "status meetings" etc, to make time. A project manager or really, anybody, will need to come into the office on those scheduled days in office and chat in person, if they want a status update!
It's easy and effective. What company or outfit do you work for, I can vet the board members or superior officers or agency supervisors for you. I have access to lots of data on lots of people.
I did some digging on this where I work, because I thought I was starting to taste tinfoil.
Six out of eight of the board members are involved with companies located not just in the same state but clustered around the same area. Three of these companies have buildings in the same business park. All these companies have inflicted similar RTO mandates on their employees.
I went through our financial statements -- commercial leases were set to expire this year, they've renewed them for another thirteen (!) years and committed $100M to office space improvements. They've frozen hiring, they're cutting costs wherever they can, but they found it reasonable to dump $25M each quarter on leasing costs?
Whenever something like this is "difficult to comprehend" as the article obediently avoids scratching the surface, my first guess is that someone's making money off it. Is it board members with real-estate investments? Is it organized crime? Is it Blackrock and Vanguard (majority shareholders btw)? At this point, why not all three?
Yeah, I mean it's obvious - the fact that some CEOS have vested interests in commercial real estate doesn't mean that all do, it doesn't pass basic logic test. Most are doing what the rest are doing, whether it makes sense or not. What is clear, though, is that the moment you really try to enforce RTO, people start looking for new jobs, especially seniors.
Yeah, the whole commercial real
estate thing is overblown. I think it's simpler: executive-level positions attract people who don't get very much fulfillment from their home lives.
They get paid enough to have double-shift coverage on children, or they don't have children at all. Since they don't have to be home as much, they aren't. They don't mind the commute because they get to drive a fancy car, park in a reserved spot, and are usually on the road before the traffic starts. They get all their jollies from being in an office, talking to other people with the same lifestyle, and they can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to be in an office (aside from malice or laziness). And they derive their energy from seeing all the activity -- people going to meetings, milling about, etc. They see that stuff and conclude that yes, problems are being solved, innovation is happening, and that gets them excited. It's all just vibes. No one actually doing the math on this stuff has seen a slam-dunk case for draconian in-office policies.
This to an extent true - crime statistics are showing a downward trend in general.
However, it cannot be denied that some US cities' downtowns are... not great. I was in San Francisco a year ago, and in Los Angeles a few months ago, and I wouldn't want to live in either of those. Mass visible homelessness, visible drug use, etc. are not things people want to see or endure (of course I doubt that the people living through that want it either, in large parts). And I'm saying this as someone living in the Paris area who has visited large parts of the metro area, and knows the "bad" parts around here - it isn't even close how horrifyingly bad LA and SF are.
I'm a huge fan of North America in general but US + Canadian cities just don't do a good job with this for some reason. Conservative, liberal, big, small; downtown cores all over North America are doing very poorly. I wonder if it's all down to the opioid crisis over here.
> US + Canadian cities just don't do a good job with this for some reason. Conservative, liberal, big, small; downtown cores all over North America are doing very poorly. I wonder if it's all down to the opioid crisis over here
I think that urbanism, or the absolute catastrophe that Anglophone North American is, is a big part of the problem.
People live far away from where they work, and downtowns are almost exclusively offices/commercial spaces. There is little reason to be there outside of working, so, outside of the obvious waste, during economic downturns and/or remote work spikes, there won't be a lot of people there. This leaves lots of abandoned/barely used space for people who have lost their work/housing to go to (the lack of social safety nets, especially in the US, contributes to these numbers).
> visible drug use, etc. are not things people want to see or endure (of course I doubt that the people living through that want it either, in large parts).
This isn't a safety risk in the same way that violent crime is.
I walked into a Walmart in urban California last week and the men's socks were stored in locked cabinets. I don't need statistics to tell me that the crime in that neighborhood is off the charts and it's not a place I want to live or work.
Are there safe parts of most cities? Sure! But life is usually more complicated than "that's just a {insert my political adversary} talking point", and this is definitely one of those cases.
I don't know whether it's driven by shoplifting, or maybe the company being "proactive".
At least 2 Target stores here, in a very expensive university town, have recently installed rows of locked glass door cabinets, for securing products like... soap.
One of the locations, I'd expect to have some shoplifting shrink, though not too bad. The other location, a lot less.
(Also, anecdotally, the employees seem more aggressive lately about approaching people to "help". Which tends to come across as insincere and likely a Loss Prevention tactic, which is creepy and offensive, and makes me leave ASAP. Which I guess they might chalk up as an LP win. Nope, I was there to conduct commerce. Now they've made me dislike in-store shopping as much as I dislike their often abysmal Web order pickup experience. They're not nearly the worst store, brick&mortar or online, but I don't understand why they're moving in the direction of trashy with the image.)
Daily necessities being locked up is evidence that petty crime like shoplifting may be up. People shoplift necessities when they can't afford them. Nobody is stealing socks for meth money, they're stealing because their feet are cold and they don't have the money to pay.
And why, you might ask, is shoplifting up? Might have something to do with the historically horrific levels of income inequality in the US.
No, actually—shoplifting may have historically been primarily for personal use, and that may still be the primary cause by number of shoplifters, but organized gangs of shoplifters who steal large amounts of stuff to resell online are very much a thing [0] that's widely reported on [1] across many news outlets [2] and government groups [3].
This kind of stuff is so funny to me, because it's ignorant of every other store nearby.
You know what I did in Seattle a few months ago? I walked into a Target and they had everything locked up behind cabinets. The entire place looked like it was ransacked, with most of the shelves empty.
I went next door to the Safeway and the HMart. Literally not even a block away, and nothing was locked up, the shelves were stocked and everything was fine. That Target wasn't even in a high crime neighborhood; it was just mismanaged to shit.
I've definitely seen this with Targets, but I have a lot more confidence in Walmart's ability to tolerate a decent amount of shrinkage in order to avoid customer inconvenience. When I see a Walmart acting this way I get worried.
I've been to Walmarts in the ass-end of nowhere that have stuff locked up. The shrinkage problem is in part because of the self-checkout hole these stores have dug themselves into and the fact that staffing continues to dwindle.
The Target is now closed (for 'retail crime' reasons) , but this was in the UDistrict. It's only slightly embellished, since the Safeway is approximately one block north of the Target's prior location (4535 University Way NE) and then the HMart about one and a half blocks down.
Statistically safe maybe, but speaking for Manhattan the streets have plenty of unsavory and seemingly-unsafe people around. I have a close friend who worked at an office a block away from a methadone clinic (in a busy part of midtown) and the clients would be hanging around the neighborhood propositioning people while the police did nothing. And this was before 2020.
The perception of safety is almost as important as safety itself. The visible, chronically homeless population is as visible and challenging for citizens to deal with as ever. Leaving these people to the streets is bad for everyone and definitely makes NYC feel much less safe than it might actually be.
Isn't it true that another big talking point that lots of "petty" crime is now decriminalised so we're not comparing apples to apples if "progressive" leaders are massaging the stats.
Maybe if you stay in the heavily policed portions where rich people live. Try going downtown within 3 miles of the ubiquitous homeless encampments though...
Only because many places (like NYC) don't count violent crimes as violent. If a mentally deranged vagrant runs up to you and punches you hard in the face, knocking you to the ground before running off, in NYC that is considered 3rd degree assault - a non-violent misdemeanor. On the rare occasion when this violent lunatic is caught, he is given an appearance ticket and released - non violent misdemeanors like this aren't "bail eligible". In a massive portion of these cases, the prosecutor will simply drop the charges. On the very, very rare occasion when it does go to trial the lunatic is deemed "not fit to stand trial" and simply released back onto the street. In all of these events, this is not recorded as a violent crime, so people with their head in the sand can wave their hands in the air and talk about how there is no violent crime in the city. But the often traumatized person who has been a victim of this violent assault now suffers from the memory of being attacked - more so because they know their attacker faces absolutely no sanction and is back out on the street. People who live in the city and ride the subway are constantly menaced, harassed and/or assaulted and that is an extremely unfriendly and dangerous environment to live in, even if it doesn't show up in the sanitized statistics.
This unhelpful whataboutism doesn’t refute earlier claims in this thread nor does it reinforce any opposite claims. What are you trying to say about the safety of cities here?
If you don’t collect statistics, or provide bad service so people don’t bother calling even if you do collect statistics you’ll juice the numbers quite favorably.
For what it’s worth in my area “crime is down,” petty crimes like shoplifting and theft - but violent crimes involving guns are up (brandishing, shootings), but then murder itself is down.
So of course the headline is “crime is down” and when you bring up all the random idiots brandishing weapons in traffic or heroin addicts nodding off by the Starbucks you’re now magically a right wing idiot because of petty word games.
For what it’s worth it doesn’t matter if the metropolitan as a whole is statistically “good,” if my narrow slice is poorly managed it’s poorly managed and no overly broad statistical group changes on the ground lived reality.
You can gaslight people but unfortunately for you a lot of us have years/decades of first hand experience from living in said cities. And some of us have even lived in places that don’t have similar problems to contrast! Whether it’s a “conservative” talking point or not is irrelevant.
Not really? I live in a small city of no note. When I go to the store, nothing of note is locked up behind glass. I never get screamed at or hassled by street people, have to avoid taking a 'bad' street, etc. Nobody here has ever told me to leave my doors unlocked so thieves won't break my windows like that's a normal and OK thing. Nobody has suggested I carry a fake wallet for when I'm robbed. These are real things I've been suggested when visiting a 'real city.'
I guess it's a frame of reference thing, or Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah you can point to FBI stats showing less people are murdering each other, that's a fair point. But to an outsider they don't feel anything resembling safe or normal.
Conservatives rarely talk about such things, they're a type of center leftist. I think you meant to say right wingers or, as it's being spelled now across the Internet for reasons I don't understand, rightwingers.
Crime, especially violent crime, has been going down for decades now. SF and LA has the homeless, Portland did a number on itself legalizing all drugs, and NY has a few hundred repeat offenders shoplifting in pharmacies. While unpleasant situations, hardly a hell scape Fox News makes it out to be, considering that the places scoffing at all this actually have higher occurrences of violent crime, gun crime, and mass shootings (the latter of which these cities have none).
this isn’t a blue/red thing, whenever liberals accuse red states of having bad statistics it’s usually unwittingly highlighting a certain demographic in those states they wouldn’t implicate knowingly
Most companies requiring in-office work, at least for most tech and many other skills, are showing themselves as being poorly managed places that one should avoid working at.
Tech management is often bad, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is non-technical peoples' complete lack of understanding about what their people are doing). At least when these managers are beyond physical reach of their workers, the workers have a better chance of creating a productive environment and shielding themselves from distraction and nonsense interactions.
Many of these managers actually do very little beyond low-value talking and meeting. They are figureheads who are recognized by figureheads who likewise provide little actual value.
Meanwhile, a team of 1 product/project management skill + 2 devs + 1 designer, when all agreeing on the goal, can do what a corporate organization of 100 people cannot do.
This is why most new value is created by small independent teams who are then bought up by laggard giants that can no longer do anything beyond manipulating the system to maintain some form of monopolistic control.
Therefore, if your company is demanding you come back to the office, you can bet they are not a place you want to work at (unless your goal is _only_ money).
It's not a coincidence that flat organizations make more money. It's expensive to retain 7+ layers of management.
Meta targeted middle managers in their recent layoffs, and by all indications it was a brilliant move. Netflix is famously flat. Amazon is much flatter than the majority of corporate America. Google as well.
Bureaucracy continues to thrive in corporate America because of a bug (the politics of people).
If you've ever worked in an org that is very hierarchal, you've probably experienced the following:
- More meetings than heads down time
- Answering to multiple bosses/managers
- Answering the same question multiple times (a symptom of too many managers)
- Competing projects
- Everything is a priority one task
I truly believe that companies start to die, when more than ~10-15% of the org is management.
I mean Microsoft is pretty damn hierarchical, with monstrously thick layers of middle management, and they've been going strong for decades. And by all accounts, Netflix and Amazon are stressful to work for, at least partially because these employees are having to manage themselves in addition to performing their individual work.
I actually agree with most of your points, but if you think of the market as an ecosystem and companies as lifeforms, you'll find many species employing completely different (successful) growth strategies.
I've been on teams that were undermanaged, I've been on teams that were over-managed, organizations with incredibly effective management, and organizations where management was comprised of politicians and fools who actively harmed the effectiveness of the teams they were supposed to lead.
It's relatively easy to hire great ICs. You ask them some questions to make sure their resume isn't bullshit, try to gage their enthusiasm, attitude, and friendliness, then pay them what they want.
It's really, really hard to hire great managers, because even if they've succeeded in past positions, it has little bearing on whether they'll succeed in this particular position, working with these particular people. And it's even harder to build an organizational culture whereby the right people get promoted internally to management. Almost every company screws this up, and the big companies that get this less-wrong are much less stressful to work for and more effective than their peers.
I recently had this interesting conversation with the CEO of a local company. After the pandemic, he pondered on RTO/WFH. His company is still growing and he needed to hire more people.
If he ordered RTO, he would surely lose some people, but if he kept WFH, he would be able to hire the talent escaping RTO at other firms.
Yes, WFH seems like a great differentiator to attract talent you couldn't get otherwise. Surprised more "underdog" companies aren't leaning into it. Then again a lot of CEOs are trend chasers. See also: stuffing AI into everything.
> WFH seems like a great differentiator to attract talent you couldn't get otherwise.
it is, but WFH also does hamper new hires like grads, since there's less opportunity for them to learn via osmosis. Zoom meetings aren't quite the same imho.
The University of Chicago research was a little confusing. They added a May 2024 date to the top of the official paper, but they show most people moved to Meta and Snap. 2 companies who have been aggressively forcing people back to office and are also generally higher paying than their previous employer
They should have at least added a note that their data was 1+ years old and that RTO mandates changed during that time
It’s not surprising that people left MSFT for companies that pay double or triple. The part that’s more interesting is if people are willing to take a 50% pay cut to go remote. I haven’t seen any research on that yet
So far the data shows RTO makes people leave, but it makes them leave to other RTO companies, not fully remote ones
Even if they leave a non-RTO company and join a non-RTO company its an interesting effect. It seems that being forced to RTO in the same role can lead to unhappiness and into 'shields down' (https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/), then people are more willing to look around to see if there's a better deal on offer somewhere else (even if the _other_ deal ends up also being in-office).
This is delightful to read, thank you for sharing. Ham-fisted RTO was definitely my 'shields down' moment. The 'how' matters much like the 'what' or 'why'.
In terms of on-site/remote, I'm not firmly for or against either. I see benefits in both. Similarly - it's interesting to see this from the manager PoV.
I've been primarily WFH since ~2016 after doing the traditional thing for longer. I'm not new to either. Then the pandemic came/went... and how we kept working remained a hot topic.
I saw executives above me (with more pull) get put in a tough spot: sell their new homes and relocate, or find new work.
Then their peons/reporting managers tried to convince me that I'd be safe - appealing to pride saying I was too important to be lost to things like that.
Yeah, right. As strange as it sounds... my shields were forced down out of preservation. It took over a year of (communicated) discontent before the shields finally went down for good.
Nobody else did this - it was the business/leadership. I was productive despite most of the job not being about the work.
It just so happens there are places requiring less work (relevant to the job or not) while being more rewarding. Loyalty is a funny dynamic.
There's efficiency and leniency for everyone involved by choosing to not bike-shed over things like 'Where Are My Adults'. Doing the job you hired them for. I hope.
Absolutely, it's like any other worsening of the working conditions. When I've had a conflict of sorts with my direct manager, I also started looking elsewhere for job opportunities. Obviously in those other potential workplaces the same thing could happen, but in the current job I already know it has happened, so a coin flip is a (perceived) improvement.
(Also when negotiating a new contract with a working-from-office company, there's a better chance of getting a hybrid model than if you're already an employee.)
If you have to RTO, better to RTO where you get paid better. I WFH and pay isn't what I can make if in office, I take the flexibility. If I have to RTO, I'll seek higher pay, even if it means relocating to a different location.
> It’s not surprising that people left MSFT for companies that pay double or triple. The part that’s more interesting is if people are willing to take a 50% pay cut to go remote. I haven’t seen any research on that yet
It would also be interesting to see if there are preferences when given equal pay. I suspect most people have a number where they're willing to go into the office every day, it's not surprising to me that people are willing to RTO for multiples of their current pay.
It all gets a touch weird when comparing comp, though. If someone takes a 50% pay cut, but they move from SF to somewhere that costs something like 60% less, have they taken a pay cut or not? That feels subjective to me, and I've heard both sides. Their ability to save may have gone down, their quality of life may have gone up, it feels like a wash.
Another factor that may be weighing on people is stability of infrastructure and of the remote work job market. I grew up rural and would like to return to the country (not for farming, I already know I hate that from experience). I'm also fully remote, but haven't moved back.
There are too many uncertainties. Will the remote work job market hold up, or will it collapse and I have to keep the same job for forever or uproot my whole life? Will Starlink continue to be a reliable provider, or are they going to enter the race to the bottom in 5 years?
In the end, I work remotely, about a 15 minute drive from the office, because of the certainty it brings. I don't have to watch the news with anxiety, waiting to see whether the life I've chosen has become unviable or not. That undercuts the kind of peace I'm looking for in moving to a rural area in the first place. It's probably less of a concern for the digital nomads, who seem to live in relative chaos generally (not a moral judgement, I can see the appeal, it's just not for me at this point in my life).
Maybe the RTO job they switch to is a better match with their location. Some people accepted a job assuming or being told it was permanently WFH.
From 2007 through 2010 I worked in an office in a job I didn’t particularly like and repeatedly turned away recruiters from Google. In 2010 I joined Oracle (Solaris org) remotely. As the Solaris org wound down, I continued to turn away the google recruiters with positions that would have required a move. Since leaving Oracle I’ve held two other remote jobs. If any of those remote jobs would have required me to move within commuting distance of an engineering office, I would have left.
I wouldn't characterize Meta as being aggressive towards RTO. I get contacted by Meta recruiters all the time for remote roles. Last time I spoke to one they said RTO was only for those folks living near an office
> At a time when employee retention should be of a top concern
First line of the page. The entire development of the article hinges on this being true but I see no sign of justification or reasoning behind this affirmation.
Agreed. There's a lack of justification, and moreover I would expect the opposite.
With all the recent layoffs, right now many companies might be OK with some attrition. It's one of the least ugly ways to reduce payroll costs. It's not as bad for PR or morale as layoffs would be. And you don't have to pay severance.
And if you lose more employees than you wanted to, it should be easy to hire new people because of laid off people who haven't found new jobs yet.
Sure, losing valued senior employees will have a negative impact. But they're also usually paid a lot, so I doubt business people will cry very hard about it.
> companies keep claiming that retention is a top concern when times are good.
Fixed that for you. When times are good it is hard to find people and so they care about them. However the real test is when times are not good. If retention was a concern it will show up when times are bad - but it doesn't so we know that it isn't a real concern.
Of course if it is a concern management has a much harder job. They can no longer hire as many people in the good times as they would then have to let good people go. Much easier to give them a cheap foosball table or something that makes it look like they care without making their job hard.
I don't get your point. High turnover means unnecessary costs. And especially in senior positions it might take years to get the necessary experience to get equally productive. So unless you really aim at the very bottom, you should care about employee retention.
I often attribute this to free layoffs, but the problem is that if your _senior_ leadership and employees leave, the problem is that you're in a bad situation. Laying off some people who recently joined, are a bit underperforming, etc is a great way to do layoffs. But losing your top talent is the best way to sink yourself.
However the effects are felt a few years down the line, and these big orgs usually praise the CEO for doing this genius maneuver and saving a bunch of money, only to later leave in a few years when shit is about to hit the fan. Overall its a weird time. And to note, I do like working from the office, so I happen to be in the minority who likes hybrid. Though even I cannot deny the benefits of being able to WFH and get to a doctor appointment or take care of my kid when she's sick.
This guy is really misrepresenting the numbers. Take this gem:
> Gartner research released in early May found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have received an RTO mandate from their current employer are leaving their jobs as a result
> A January 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,000 candidates found that 36% of senior-level job seekers who have faced a return mandate at their current employer said that factor influenced their decision to leave their job. One-third said they had discontinued a hiring process in the last year due to expectations that employees would return to a physical workspace.
Sounds like what happened here is that the author of TFA read the whole report instead of just the headline.
I’m still convinced that there is a distinct difference between companies founded as remote from the start and companies that switched to remote because of COVID or social trends.
The first group will almost never go office-first, whereas the second group will revert to its “original DNA” unless a deliberate culture change is made. It has to be a complete change in operational procedures, communication culture, etc. It’s much much more than simply using Slack and having Zoom calls instead of office meetings. If that doesn’t happen, the switch to remote won’t stick.
So if you like working remotely, pick a company that’s always been remote.
I thought that too, and joined a startup that was founded as remote first. However, we later acquired another company that was 100% in office, and also hired a couple key executives who didn't like remote-first. It's now incredibly painful to get anything done because most of the senior people who built that remote-first culture have been pushed out, and things have reverted to hoping someone overhears the information they need.
Private bathrooms, better coffee, no annoying co-workers, no smelly co-workers, no commute, no chance of being mugged or stabbed, better decorations and access to cheaper / healthy homemade food are all reasons WFH isn't going away.
When new hires at Google were given the tour, one of the things mentioned some fifteen years ago was the philosophy of the free snacks.
Google wasn't competing with other mega-corps; they saw themselves as competing with the best and brightest going into business for themselves or staying in academia, because it was comfortable and you could work at your own pace. The founders of the company knew they were just two chucklefucks who decided to monetize an idea they had in college; they saw that as possible for most smart folks in the world, and believed that's what they were competing against.
Looks like a generation of software leadership after them has lost sight of that, and it'll be interesting to see what happens as the bluff is called. Working for yourself can be extremely hard.
But the snacks are good and the bathroom is always close by.
> Finding AI talent, which more and more companies are going to need, is already a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Adding strict RTO policies to that scenario won’t make the talent search easier.
Putting that question-begging aside, cynically, for a company on an AI kick it could be intentionally designed to make clearing out the old guard who aren't all in on AI easier and without severance.
In fact, it stands even without the everything-is-now-about-AI journalism gloss. The expensive, grumpy seniors with the pointed questions in meetings are largely the ones who feel most able to risk jumping ship in 2024 and treating them like naughty children or unreliable juniors really winds them up.
The wisdom of driving out senior staff, well, that depends on who you're asking and what are their metrics for success!
Which also means that if a hypothetical company is indeed pivoting to AI, an AI-skeptical senior might be considering moving on anyway about now and a blunt-force RTO is one of the straws.
Here's one that's funny. I work at a F50 company, and the required "in office" days has slowly been increasing over the years.
Except if you're fully remote, which I am-they aren't requiring those people to come back. However, if I were badge in on-site, my employee account would get flagged and I would be expected to start coming back. Which is weird. I never go in, I am nearly 2 hours away so it doesn't make sense, but I can't go in for a day, even if I wanted to, or I'd have to keep going back in. Or ensue in a huge battle with HR.
My guess is most companies now believe they have procedures which can keep a somewhat quality output with average, cheaper people.
The industry (tech, others) has never given up trying to transform employees into a cog in the machine and, while software engineering has so far apparently escaped being caged onto a cog-like structure, I believe it's a matter of time.
Wow, what niche are you in that developers aren't just swapped out like spark plugs at the whims of {,product} managers? Literally didn't know this hadn't happened everywhere yet. I thought this attitude of treating programmers as real professionals died with the dot com crash.
Yeah that was my point. Programmers are no longer viewed as "professionals". I've never experienced it, but my understanding is that this used to be the case, mostly before the 2000 crash. That's when we wore ties, had offices with doors, were allowed to talk to customers and upper management, weren't herded around by "scrum masters", etc.
Seems like another world to me, but maybe there is some company somewhere that hasn't gotten the memo yet and still runs that way.
Curious if anyone here has quit due to RTO and, if so, did you make it clear on the way out? I'm going through it right now. Our company is pushing RTO and the policy is really senseless. We're not purely a tech company and the CEO has gotten earfuls from across the departments and it hasn't budged him. I worry as much about the annoyance as I do about leadership being completely unstrategic. This is costing us cycles and we are just trying to understand what outcome he is trying to drive and there is no answer.
Whether companie they used it as a ploy to get people to voluntarily quit, or not, it hasn't really worked for them.
These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere, and the ones who love RTO because they're all for office politics and wasting time at meetings and the water cooler.
Stupid shit like this is how companies commit suicide, and smarter companies end up eating their lunch.
From another comment here:
"My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job). Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. (...) They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness"
> These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere
It's always that. My opinion is it is more likely is that most people hate job seeking and don't want to switch unless truly forced. So you end up with people quitting and dissatisfied workers.
I have nothing to back this up but the majority of people I suspect don't think of themselves in the "bad" group and thus this argument is mute by default (as it assumes the employees know they cannot or will not find a job).
> These are now stuck with the desperate second rate employees who are forced to RTO because they're not good enough to find a job elsewhere
This assumes that RTO is the one and only factor top people consider. Which for most people isn't true. There are usually dozens of factors that go into the equation of should I quit.
My current company is doing a small RTO (2 days), which I don't love, but also don't mind that much. Everything else being equal I'd rather not do that.
But I have awesome coworkers, very good management, many growth opportunities and the company has a nice product. I'm not giving all that up to gamble on a different employer who might turn out to be toxic despite all the promises during the hiring process (BTDT).
Just re-watching the classic "Always Be Closing" scene from Glengarry Glenn Ross and thought, perhaps like RTO, what a great way to show your talent the door.
If I'm sitting there thinking I could more or less work anywhere else, I would be the first one to take a hike, go find employment elsewhere, say to myself, "I don't need to put up with this shit."
Our second line team lead is being threatened to RTO. No one is saying it, but I feel the excitement from other TLs about the upcoming promotion opportunity. Hope the TL didn't underestimate the difficulty in getting a job!
That is not how layoffs worked in companies I have worked at. The goal is to reduce 'head count' and in the real world cost.
They rank you by pay and tenure. Then decided if they can do without you. It almost rarely has anything to do with how good you are. But more 'my project would not finish in x time if y was gone'. Then they decide to keep the whole project or not and if they get rid of the project that means maybe 15 other people can go too.
After a particular level in many large companies you become a cost number instead of a person.
What you are working on may seem important. At least it is to you. But in the grand scheme of things most of what we work on is ethereal. I have been in this industry coming up on 30 years now. Very little of what I have ever worked on is even in production anymore. Thousands and thousands of lines of code, just gone, of no use anymore. I just hope whatever I did work on can help me with the next few thousand.
In my experience, the problem is that junior, extremely motivated people, who are often the ones doing the impactful work, cannot thrive and learn from experienced people in WFH environments.
I would actually agree with that, notwithstanding what I have written. I still think the learning curve can be steeper in that case and actually more fun.
I rather meant to teach them stuff... It's not for everybody, but a substantial part of engineers, I would think, really enjoy teaching and passing on their experience and know-how. That's not only limited to engineers, of course.
Well, not everybody, but it's quite powerful to be around people who actually care in person about how you are doing. It's a beautiful dynamic. It depends on the actual company and situation, but yes, there are people who find it quite depressing to get a MacBook sent to their home address and never experience a great office. I'm not saying it's the only way. I can understand WFH is extremely practical for most people with kids. At the same time, it deprives people starting their careers of fast learning experiences. There are plenty of examples of extremely successful remote-only companies that attract young talent, but there are also examples of the opposite.
do those junior extremely motivated people who are doing the impactful work want to work in the office?
Much more so than the senior people I find. Post Covid, as soon as we were first allowed back to the office if we wanted, I observed that the under 30s were the first to return.
I think it is common, especially early in a career, that it is more important to approach people proactively. There is a barrier to asking for help. It can be quite challenging if you are new and maybe a bit shy (not uncommon, as we know, in the STEM field) to get the most out of it. Just sharing my experience, not saying it's impossible.
It really depends on the company. Where I work, a lot of the senior employees tend to be actively hindering innovation and progress, more concerned about having a say and being seen doing their little rituals. It's fascinating to watch them sideline and destroy project after a project. The best I understand it's because anything new and competitive puts their little wheelhouses in a bad light, so it cannot stand.
There’s nothing wrong with a company deciding it wants workers in office. It might be a decision with negative outcomes and it might not be.
Some senior employees may enjoy working in the office. Some may not.
I don’t see why remote work is treated as some sort of default-correct position here on HN. Just like in-office work, remote work is neither inherently right nor inherently wrong.
If your employer makes a decision you dislike it’s up to you to decide whether it’s something you can stomach and continue to work there over.
Not being a slave to management isn’t the same as getting to do whatever you want.
This should be obvious but current employment isn’t a guarantee of future employment (both employee and employer can’t guarantee the behavior/decisions of the other).
You can quit. The same as the company can’t force you to keep working there regardless of what they do.
You can try to do whatever you want. But that’s where you figure out if you’re valuable enough to get away with it.
That’s an opinion. There are other opinions. Like I said, progress is a function of how quickly the old guard dies out (1.8M folks over the age of 55 die every year in the US). Mental models are rigid, humans are emotion driven, etc.
EDIT: @gedy Appreciate the ground truth, thanks for sharing.
> progress is a function of how quickly the old guard dies out
I will say that with respect to WFH, younger folks I've dealt with seem to be ones wanting RTO more. Mostly seems because they have no home, family, and use office for social outlet.
I mean, yes that is an opinion. Like I said from the beginning there’s no objective right or wrong on whether employees should be working remotely or working in office.
Neither represents progress they just represent different opinions.
> Like I said from the beginning there’s no objective right or wrong on whether employees should be working remotely or working in office.
I don't agree with this, but I'm also not willing to argue the point and pollute the thread with someone who has already made up their mind. My apologies in advance.
In several countries, it is a right. The evidence shows it is more beneficial for worker quality of life, and there is strong evidence remote work is not detrimental to enterprise success.
Change takes time. If you don't think it's a right, is it possible for me to change your mind? Unlikely. Therefore, time passing for those beliefs to age out while new workers age into working who do believe this is a right is the only path forward, no? Certainly, my emotional component is "workers deserve agency" but I'm also data informed, and the data shows remote work to be, if not better, not worse than pre-pandemic work arrangements.
> If you don't think it's a right, is it possible for me to change your mind
No. I think it should be up to the company to decide whether to offer remote work – outside of the situations where they must offer remote work by law.
> my emotional component is "workers deserve agency"
Workers have agency! They can go work somewhere that offers remote work. If remote work is so great then many companies will offer it.
And so we are at an impasse. Enjoyed the discourse regardless, I can't argue my position effectively without putting myself in the other side's shoes, so I thank you for that.
I agree. I get three meals a day in the office and great office benefits. I live 30 minutes away from the office. I’m glad we’re not fully WFH and I know we’re the majority in our company.
No parent misses breakfast with their kids most days. Nobody’s ever sat with their kids and not eaten. Nobody’s ever had a little snack while somebody else ate a full meal.
Weekends exist. You can eat a snack while your kids eat their meal. Plenty of parents leave for work before breakfast and get home after dinner.
Yes, if you’re taking this as a challenge to avoid your kids and eat literally every meal at work, yes having what most would consider a “normal” family life will be challenging.
But the idea that it can’t be done is nuts.
I didn’t say it was easy. But the idea that a 30-minute commute to a cushy tech job office that provides 3 meals a day is somehow incompatible with family life is a bananas take IMO.
> You can eat a snack while your kids eat their meal
No, you can't, if you are not present at meal times. Kids don't eat when Dad gets home. Kids eat at normal times, and if Dad is eating three meals at the office, Kids eat without Dad. For several early years, they then go to bed shortly after eating, and so they do not see Dad at all that day. s/Dad/Mom/g or whatever, of course.
> Plenty of parents leave for work before breakfast and get home after dinner.
Absent parents are not parenting. Providing maybe, and that's important, but not parenting.
If the other parent is doing all the parenting work, it is almost certainly not happily so. And if the parenting work is done by hired help because both "parents" are working during all weekday hours of child wakefulness, then these people have made compromises that are not compatible with parenting.
Some families have no other choices and that is unfortunate. But for those of us who do, if we choose to become parents at all, we should try to do a good job of it.
> But the idea that a 30-minute commute to a cushy tech job office that provides 3 meals a day is somehow incompatible with family life is a bananas take IMO
The job providing meals is fine. The employee eating three meals a day at work for extended periods, is incompatible with maintaining active participation in a family life. Being present is a big part of it, and you can't phone it in.
Anecdotally, I've only ever seen three types of people who tried to consistently mix 12+ hour office work days and parenthood: people in bad marriages who were hiding from their family, selfishly-deluded wantrepreneur overachievers, and addicts. All hetero men obviously. Sometimes more than one trait in a single person, and leading to divorce in most cases, which I'll argue is not necessarily a bad thing since at least one partner didn't want to be present in the family anyway.
(... everyone. Everyone could have seen this coming. So much so that it's hard to believe this isn't a naked way for corporate America to legally loyalty-test their employees and clear their payrolls of what they imagine to be more expensive "dead weight" in favor of younger, cheaper talent).
Yes. The employer/employee relationship is inherently an adversarial one. Each wants as much from the other while giving as little as possible in return.
Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable.
It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.