Yeah but we wanted to work from home not hybrid bullshit. This story is pandering like we won but they are still forcing me to go to an office every week for no good reason. This is just propaganda. The whole conversation in the thread has even shifted from talking about working at home full time to hybrid being ok. Insane
hear hear. Offices are outmoded, office managers are outmoded, paying for parking is outmoded.
All of it is horseshit, and like horseshit should be deposited indiscriminately and walked away from without looking back.
Yeah but we wanted to work from home not hybrid bullshit. This story is pandering like we won but they are still forcing me to go to an office every week for no good reason. This is just propaganda. The whole conversation in the thread has even shifted from talking about working at home full time to hybrid being ok. Insane
The comment I’m replying to needs to be upvoted much more than it is.
Rage on, fellow rager.
I don’t know why you think that’s all propaganda, i personally like hybrid work a lot more as well. I like my office, i like being able to go for a coffee with my colleagues and so on. I do like working from home as well - but i’m totally okay with being 1-2 days in the office. However, we do have people working 90% from home - they have to come in to the office though for various things they have to do. Printing large format plans, etc, etc. You can’t just assume 100% home full time works for everyone and shift the goalpost.
I think it should be a choice not 100% at all. I’m personally upset because I was told it was ok to be fully remote so I adjusted my life then once it wasn’t convenient for my company anymore they changed the rules on me and everyone else and gaslighted us all about the real reason.
Well, okay, that’s understandable then…and pretty shitty
And I love not even knowing where my office is, different strokes…
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
Going to the office once a week is one thing the Indian guys can’t do. Love it don’t fight it, unless you have a workable solution to end capitalism or globalism.
Capitalism ended during the pandemic? Who knew?
the place I work has tried RTO policies several times now - with very limited success. well over 90% of all white collar jobs can be done from wherever you can get internet so your VPN software will function. the customer facing part of the business has to be there 100% of the time, they dont have a choice, that’s how the business model is designed. I go in a few days a week but honestly dont ever actually need to be there. maybe 2 days a month, tops, is my presence absolutely required.
the really interesting bit, which the article didnt touch on (not much of an article to begin with) is that there is a commercial real-estate bubble. the big buildings in the downtown business district/cores of most cities, that real-estate isnt worth much if there’s no one renting the space. businesses that used to rent the space no longer need to because all of their employees work from home now. the people who invested in those big buildings are not seeing a return on their investments - and they are unhappy. that is, imho, a big driver behind the RTO movement.
the people who invested in those big buildings are not seeing a return on their investments - and they are unhappy. that is, imho, a big driver behind the RTO movement.
And those people are largely of the same class as the corporate executives and shareholders pushing RTO policies which ties a nice little bow on top of the whole situation. Rich people are losing money when employees work from home and so WFH has to go.
Given the housing crisis, it only makes sense to convert that real estate into residential units.
Those two are not as related as they at first seem.
For one, the plumbing required is different, as in literally offices don’t tend to have bathrooms with toilets and showers inside every office space. Also the lighting would be cut off for all the inside units. Communal bathrooms and no windows works for work but not as good for home.
For another, a lot of the varying housing crises (there are multiple types) relate to affordability bc of being bought up by corporate interests. Another type relates to weird zoning laws of what types of homes are allowed to be built in certain areas - and for these at least, there’s nothing stopping good homes from being made except again profits.
So it’s not impossible, but there are challenges. Mainly, how can already rich people find a way to make even moar monay? Oh yeah and something something the poors get whatever too.
It’s not as hard as it seems because of the way commercial buildings are built, the real ceiling is much higher than it looks and the visible ceiling can easily be removed then it’s just a matter of piercing some concrete, in the end your drains are mostly in your downstairs neighbor’s ceiling instead of being inside the limits of your unit. It’s super easy to run electricity and ventilation, framing is metal instead of wood (no moisture issue with concrete, no risk of splitting when using a ramset on the parts fixed to the floor), sheetrock for the ceiling is screwed to metal joists that hang from the metal frames the current ceiling tracks are hanging from…
I used to live in a building like that and the only time it was “problematic” when renovating the whole thing was when I had to change the bath drain as during the original construction they had repoured concrete around it to seal the floor after installing the bath.
Yeah these buildings are made to have things routed under and over the floors. I keep hearing people saying plumbing is a giant problem, and it rings hollow to me, extra bathrooms are installed in homes all the time, literally just run the pipes, but seems no one wants to.
Unfortunately only like 10% of them are viable for conversion. Office buildings and residential buildings have very different needs and it’s expensive as fuck to add all the extra shit needed for residences.
I would love to see an actual study proving it’s possible for only 10% of them because I’ve lived in a building built like an office one and I’ve done renovations in it and there’s very little that’s different from a residential building with concrete floors once everything’s been stripped down.
It’s even more expensive as fuck to build a residential building of the size of those office buildings as well and once converted is guaranteed income forever, no pandemic stops people from living in it and there’s always people willing to rent, contrary to businesses that can change their policies or simply go bankrupt.
I come with receipts: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/converting-vacant-office-buildings-into-apartments-60-minutes/
But only around 10%-15% of office buildings nationwide can realistically be transformed to housing, according to economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate at New York’s Columbia Business School.
An economist…
Get me an engineer’s or architect’s opinion and then I will give it some credibility.
I mean, you’re welcome to provide a source refuting mine from an engineer or an architect. I provided my source, where’s yours?
That’s what I’m saying, your source is from someone in a field unrelated to the one responsible to make the modifications, that’s like if you just gave me a quote by a geographer as a source for something related to computer science. The responsibility of finding a credible source for your number is still on you.
Those residential units will be worthless too if all the offices close. Why live in the big city and pay huge rents if you work remote? Just move to a cheap area and buy a nice house.
Those huge rents exist because demand exceeds supply (amongst other reasons). People want to live in walkable neighborhoods and not suburbs where you have to drive everywhere to survive.
You can have walkable neighbourhoods without living downtown in a big city. Small villages are the original way to have walkable lifestyles. It’s how everyone lived centuries ago. There’s still plenty of those around, they just get overlooked.
Suburbs exist mainly for the purpose of commuting into the city for work. If people stopped doing that then they could leave the suburbs.
A lot of people do, but more people should think this way than do think this way
It’s more like it’s often not a consideration, because the option doesn’t really exist. And when it does, you pay an obscene markup.
Bingo, it’s not that there’s a lack of people that want to live downtown, it’s that there’s not enough space to accommodate everyone so it’s not financially realistic to most people who want to.
The suburbs thing usually becomes something people want while they have kids at home.
it’s that there’s not enough space to accommodate everyone so it’s not financially realistic to most people who want to.
There’s plenty of space, it’s used incredibly poorly due to free parking, zoning regulations, and running highways through cities. The financial component is simply there aren’t enough of these spaces and they aren’t dense enough (and they could stand to include a lot more public and social housing, but people oppose it because they don’t want “those” people in their neighborhoods).
That’s not to say that reforming suburbs to make them more livable wouldn’t be a part of the solution too.
Sadly a lot of rural areas have little to no Internet connectivity in the US because ISPs have been taking money meant for rural Internet and pocketing the money. Additionally, the internet in smaller towns can be spotty. It’s part of the reason why starlink was so hyped up when it was first announced. It’s also part of the reason why people who are allowed to work from home sometimes find it difficult to find cheaper places to live (another one being rural bigotry, though if you’re cis, straight, white and capable of pretending to be Christian, that shouldn’t be much of an issue). The cheaper the area, the worse the internet usually is.
yeah. not always the case but yeah, generally the sticks have shit internet.
Many people want to live downtown to be close to the action and with people living there 24/7 it would bring actual life to the area and would allow businesses to thrive instead of having restaurants and stores that close mid afternoon.
They’re bringing a few people back for 8h/day two days a week when they could bring a lot of people back for 24h/day seven days a week. What’s more logical from a business perspective?
well over 90% of all white collar jobs can be done from wherever you can get internet
This means over 90% of all white collar jobs can be outsourced/globalized. Just a matter of time unless there really is a meaningful reason to stay in the US and pay US wages.
yeah, my last job was offshored to India. from what my ex-coworkers told me, problems I could fix in a few minutes would take the new group weeks to do - and that was 6+ months after I got let go. maybe they got better but I seriously doubt it. just because a job is capable of being outsourced it doesnt necessarily mean that it’ll happen.
I had the same thing happen. Job got outsourced, quality tanked but they continued to outsource more departments. Like six months later they were trying to rehire everyone. Fuck that noise.
And just because quality goes down the drain when outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t happen unfortunately.
After all, Boeing made a ton of money by just firing their best maintenance engineers.
Right. A big company can remain solvent for a very long time while absolutely undermining and destroying all of the things they were once great at.
My company outsourced some functions a few years ago and had hired Americans back within 2 years. Outsourcing is real but it’s also a terrible idea for anything with a high degree of accountability and knowledge. Currently there is an office/opco in Mexico (but the previous outsourcing was India) and if they need to hire but don’t have the budget for an American they’ll transfer someone to our team. But I know the Mexican office is held to decently high standards and everyone they’ve transferred to is speaka English well, and are on at approximately the same time as us since we’re all on the same continent. I like the Mexicans I work with but would like to see more Americans hired, but this is so much better than the alternative lol
I offered to work from home yesterday because I have bronchitis and no voice, so I told my manager it was that or I go off sick and stay there until I deem I feel better, that half a loaf was better than none, and she said “well I don’t want to set a precedent”, so I told her that I was sick then and won’t be back until I feel better. I’m the only one who can do my job, so she’s right fucked. She’s like an alien wearing a skin suit trying to pretend to human.
“I don’t want anyone to realize they can work just as effectively from home. Sure it saves them gas and commute time, but it just doesn’t pump my ego if I cannot micromanage in person.”
Precisely. So she shot herself in the foot and I had a day to recover. I might call off Monday too.
You should
I’m at urgent care right now actually to try to get some better puffers or a nebulizer or something. I might just.
Seems like she did set a precedent anyways haha just a worse one than before
The manager doesn’t get to make the decision. She’s probably going to have to go argue with her manager that also likely has no control. Stand your ground, they don’t want to fight on this hill. -source, a people manager of hybrid teams at a company that insisted on on-site.
Her manager would say yes and not care. It’s my direct manager just being micro managery.
Some directors (or whatever manager managers are called in your pyramid) like to pretend to be the good guy to individuals and force their intermediaries to look like the assholes. Middle management sucks.
I’ve had a personal policy of not working from home when I’m sick, even before the pan. I want solid recovery time because experience has taught me that doing anything else just keeps me sick longer. Take all the time you need, even if you only need it a little bit but could otherwise power through. She put herself and you in this situation. Reap all the recovery time needed to return at 100%.
She has understaffed us to a criminal degree all because she gets a bonus if she comes in under budget. You are correct, I will take all the time I need. I had to go to urgent care last night for a nebulizer so I’m definitely still not well, it’s actually resolving pneumonia it turns out.
Hope you feel better.
Thank you!
Which leads to the question, and its an honest question and I would benefit from the honest answer: If I can do the job hybrid, why can I not do the job remote? Is it because you needed me to move some paper boxes to the printer?
In my 20 years of working in the office and an additional 4 working 100% WFH, I’ll throw my worthless internet opinion out there as to why: It comes down to the culture of the company.
Some companies see a real benefit from water tank conversations, face-to-face meetings, and the ability for managers to ask someone in person on a moment’s notice to do things. There is also a lack of trust in the employees being able to perform correctly without physical oversight in many companies. Granted and aside from the trust issue, there is some truth to that, but can in fact be realigned with the exact same benefit by retooling communications. It’s up to each company however to formulate the best course of action to remedy that and many sadly fail, resulting in RTO mandates.
Some companies see a real benefit from water tank conversations
There are real benefits to water cooler spontaneous talk. However, they don’t overcome the detriments to having all your staff commute all the time on the off chance one will occur to produce a positive result.
face-to-face meetings, and the ability for managers to ask someone in person on a moment’s notice to do things.
These are largely dead in hybrid scenarios, because those that would be meeting face to face don’t work in the office on the same day. So the practical result to hybrid is the worker loses productivity from the commute to come into the office for one or two days an sits at a desk alone all day in video meetings with their coworkers just like they’d do at home. The next day their coworker does the same while the original worker is WFH that day.
These are largely dead in hybrid scenarios, because those that would be meeting face to face don’t work in the office on the same day.
I work at an office that started hybrid after covid because enough employees quit when they went to full RTO. The IT department ended up with 2 days in and 3 days remote, but the 2 days are the same for everyone so that we are all in the office at the same time for the spontaneous conversations.
It works pretty well. 2 days to collaborate and keep up relationships, the other three days to get individually completed work done.
I am not op but I’m pretty sure they’re speaking from the point of view of companies, not agreeing with their ideas
Yep, I get that. I’m responding to that point-of-view of those companies, and how I believe its in error. I have nothing against the poster or their comments.
Water tank conversations really fuck with remote workers because they are always missing something, but if you can manage to redirect all work talk to happen in whatever communication tool the company uses, everyone tends to work better in the end, as nobody misses anything. But the only way I’ve seen companies successfully do this is by adopting remote-first approaches - when people only go to the office like once a month if even that.
Do they know that it’s much harder to unionize if you’re remote?
The thing is, water cooler chats are impromptu, they are not planned. You meet your colleague, you talk about the weather, what’s new in his life, and one thing leads to another, to maybe to talk about work and how to strategise to get something done.
These impromptu conversations happen on a whim, they happen organically. They cannot be forced.
Sometimes Alice needs coffee while Bob is using the microwave, and sometimes Bob and Alice do more than say hi, and sometimes that leads to a productive work conversation.
Carol and Dave do not need spontaneous small talk to be productive.
This makes Grace very angry. Carol and Dave are ordered to be more like Alice and Bob.
Carol and Dave do not understand this, and vent to their friend Frank. Frank says that he sees this happen a lot, and suggests that they come to work for his boss, Oscar, instead. Carol and Dave give their two weeks notice to Grace.
This makes Grace very angry. Alice and Bob agree that it is an outrage, then go back to discussing the previous night’s sporting event.
Wendy is given Carol and Dave’s workload and doesn’t have time to join Alice and Bob at the water cooler. Wendy keeps falling further and further behind.
This makes Grace very angry. “No one wants to work anymore!”
Wendy has about had it with Grace’s bullshit.
The point is not to force those talks to happen, the point is to make them not happen in a limited way. In an office what usually happens is people talking to other specific people about problems they are facing, by going to their desk or catching them on the coffee room. This should absolutely never happen. Any work talk should always be accessible to everyone involved. I don’t mean the whole company, but if there’s 5 people in a project, there should never be any private conversation between just two of them - even if others don’t join the talk they should always know the conversation is happening.
Yes, I agree, it has to be fair for everyone. What I’m talking about is instinctive, primal behaviour that we can’t control because we’re social animals and when we meet we naturally have a discussion with the person we’re talking to and we might end up talking about the project without taking into account our colleagues far away from the office.
We’re still adapting to this new hybrid reality.
Coaching newbies doesn’t work that well remotely, so you’ll have to be at the office more for them to ask you questions, otherwise they’re stuck in the simplest things for days.
This is evidence that you need to adjust your training methods.
Any evidence to back that up?
That’s the line my CEO used, but we had plenty of hires join during COVID that have excelled while here, with lots of talented engineers that had to leave because they were forced to an office hundreds of miles away.
Personal experience. The juniors just out of school and interns are invariably stuck in something trivial that can often be solved with looking at their stuff for a few seconds. They don’t dare to disturb you with any questions and need a lot of explaining. Doing all the explaining through the screen is a pain and you have to hound them with calls to get them to ask questions.
Experienced new hires don’t have that issue. They can Google stuff, read a manual and know when to send a message for a blocking issue.
That’s doesn’t mean send everybody to the office. Just the new guy and the coach should be enough in most cases and reduce the presence as they hit their stride.
The juniors just out of school and interns are invariably stuck in something trivial that can often be solved with looking at their stuff for a few seconds.
If only there were a way to share your screen remotely…
And that’s why you do stand-ups every day, which everybody loves to hate.
Yeah sorry but that’s not the same. Efficient teaching is very highly dependent on nonverbal cues to properly align yourself to the person you’re teaching to. On top of that screen sharing software is clunky and necessarily has latency, which makes interrupting much more disruptive which is most detrimental when there needs to be a bidirectional high-throughput stream of information.
Efficient teaching is very highly dependent on nonverbal cues to properly align yourself to the person you’re teaching to.
I would say that is highly dependent on the type of learner you are.
My daughter is in online school right now. Her teachers usually can’t see her because most of them don’t require her to have her camera on. She often can’t see them because she’s doing screen sharing. She’s getting better grades than she’s ever had before.
On top of that screen sharing software is clunky and necessarily has latency
I don’t know when the last time you used it was, but this is just not true anymore. It’s as easy as clicking ‘share screen’ in Zoom or Google Meet and the latency is so low that it’s essentially not noticeable.
I work 80 % remotely, I know what I’m talking about. MS Teams is by far the worst latency-wise, but even on the best software you can’t get over the fact that there will be a 200-300 ms jitter buffer.
Ever had the “yeah I- so we - OK go ahea- sorry -”? That’s what I’m talking about.
Good on your daughter if she learns well remotely, but literally everyone I’ve talked to who was in education during COVID had an awful experience. Although I suppose in the school system it doesn’t matter as much since with 20-600 students per teacher there’s not much back-and-forth going on anyway.
Remote work is great for focusing, it’s great for async workflows (slack/discord/email/jira), it’s great for solo work, but it’s just plain inferior for certain highly collaborative workflows like 1-on-1 teaching. There’s enough good reasons to work remotely that we don’t have to lie about the rest.
I thought this until I’ve actually done it a few times, and been that newbie at a remote first employer.
The difference in being on boarded at a company which embraces remote vs one that is still hedging, is massive.
It can be done well.
Yes the extroverts might get fidgety, but they can schedule a meeting or body doubling session or something. We introverts have had to adjust to office work for the last century; let’s see y’all do a bit of that labour for another, better way to do info work now :p
When the company where I was managing a small team went full remote during COVID, I had 0 issues with my existing staff, but when I had to hire, that was definitely less than ideal for onboarding. We still made it work but it was nothing like the in-office onboardings from before. There are solutions though, you can do virtual sit-togethers, and if you’re reactive to slack/etc you can be even more present for them than in-person, but it felt uneasy for sure the first times. Left all corporate behind now and running a one man business so don’t need to care about this.
I think that might depend on who you’re hiring though. That’s the same line our boss told me when they pushed me back to the office. But in the time since then, we have hired several new staff who actually prefer to communicate digitally. They will email, teams, phone, or text me with questions before actually seeking me out in person.
There are some aituations for some roles where meeting in person is necessary for trust and connections to be established. Being in person lets a lot of people feel a better connection with teammates, because humans are animals and that is just how it works.
This is nit true for every role, and is mostly for roles that have to work with people whose primary jobs are interpersonal or connection making like executives and leadership.
It does not really apply to roles where deliverables are already spelled out and information exchangenis formalized and you don’t need to convince someone to do something ad hoc. Plus some people do just fine doing all of those things remotely, but they have to work with people who don’t.
for trust and connections to be established.
What is more trusting than a recorded Zoom meeting.
Oh, you mean you need me off the record to be made complicit in malfeasance.
Pass.
No, a lot of people just feel more trust from being in the same room with someone and getting a better feeling from being in proximity with the person. It has nothig to do with on and off the record. Do you really record all of your zoom calls to CYA?
Think of it like attending a concert in person compared to listening to an album, it is just a different experience in person. Not everyone gets that out of in person interactions, but a lot of people do.
It has nothig to do with on and off the record
It is exactly what it is though… you don’t see that?
As someone who works hybrid and frequently has both in person and online meetings that are rarely if ever recorded, no I don’t see that as the default expectation.
I can see that it could be, if the people I was interacting with were evil and untrustworthy, but that wouldn’t be a job I would stick with for any length of time. What I have seen is that quite a few people just work better with others if they meet in person occasionally.
There is a reason that a lot of knowledge work has conferences to share knowledge in person.
Idk man…
Introverts thrive in non-social settings. Introverts tend to be good at technology.
Extroverts thrive in arenas, where they can set odds and smash opponents into submission.
It all sounds like a stern conviction of supporting the bullies, and preventing work from being done.
That is just putting everyone into extreme ends of social interaction when the vast, vast majority of people are somewhere in between. Even the most extroverted people I work with like some human interaction, just less than the more social people. I don’t work with anyone in an IT setting who fits the extremes you are describing, although I have met them.
Way to ignore the point
Tax breaks from cities saying they have X employees working in city Y and they bought a bunch of commercial real estate that is worthless or needs to be converted to residential. They gambled and lost and now want to either say they didn’t lose or subsidize their losses to employees & taxpayers.
Defeated? Wasn’t the aim full WFH?
There are a lot of great ones in here, but there’s another perspective I think should be added. For a long time, employees have been commoditized. We’re resources. Interchangeable. And that gives companies tremendous power.
WFH puts us on more even footing. There are entire cities supported by a single industry or even company. Now we aren’t limited geographically in who we can work for. If you’re toxic to work for, we can leave. It saps the power of the leadership to say “my way or the highway.”
I don’t think this is the secret underlying reason. I agree it’s real estate values that are mainly driving it, but I think this is absolutely part of it. Toxic leaders (and every company has them) are finding people are less willing to tolerate their bullshit because they aren’t over a barrel to the same degree. Still need universal healthcare to really break their back.
Yeah for quite some time I have been saying labor is priced artificially low. All of the barriers to finding a new job while working. All the risks of even short-term unemployment. Workers are already fucked by the power imbalance but without any liquidity in the labor market it’s so much worse. WFH adds liquidity, they hate it.
We do need universal healthcare absolutely, take that out of the labor package but WFH I think will only be beneficial in the short term (for employees - I do think it beneficial for the environment) it’s a shorter step from WFH to outsourcing to get the cheapest labor cost. I see this happening even at my company, an event management company so we are all about in person stuff - we lost an accountant and they wouldn’t let us get a replacement, already we have the infrastructure to work from home so they said “no but you can have a consultant who works in India, she can do it cheaper.”
Not that they couldn’t have done this anyway, but in this particular case, they wouldn’t have done. WFH opened that door for this company.
That sort of move has been threatening the tech sector since the early 2000s and it hasn’t happened yet. Yes, some jobs moved overseas, but the timezone and language differences mean the ROI isn’t as big as a spreadsheet that accounts for salary says. Having to stay at work until 8pm and meet with the team in India at 8am their time isn’t going to be nearly as productive as meeting with people within a couple timezones.
but WFH I think will only be beneficial in the short term (for employees - I do think it beneficial for the environment) it’s a shorter step from WFH to outsourcing to get the cheapest labor cost.
I hate to break it to you, but as someone who was self-employed and doing contracting work throughout most of his career, I can’t tell you how many times I was replaced by remote/offshore Indian programmers, over the decades, for cost reasons. Was definitely going on way before Covid and WFH, and should not be a reason why to fear/stop WFH.
I’ve also seen the opposite happen - Bean counters think out sourcing to India will save lots of money, then they end up paying a more expensive us consulting company or independent consultant to come and clean up a mess, then they have to hire in house devs to maintain the code. Most of the out sourcing groups I’ve interacted with had a mentality of "we’ll do what was explicitly asked for and not a single thing more, and if we hit a roadblock, we’ll call it out and stop work until someone state side figures it out. And I can’t really fault them for the mentality - they know they’re being used because they’re cheaper labor, they don’t have any sense of ownership of the code, and when they develop stronger skills, they leave for a better opportunity.
I know there are strong devs in India, but I don’t think they usually end up in the out sourcing companies.I’ve also seen the opposite happen
Yep, that too. Made a lot of my consulting money fixing problems/issues that were created from overseas workers.
I know there are strong devs in India, but I don’t think they usually end up in the out sourcing companies.
No, they don’t. At least I’ve never seen them, and I’ve worked on a lot of projects. You get what you paid for.
“we do need”? Because everyboby is murican oh the whole Internet
I’m curious if the move to large corps investing in residential properties is due to the collapse of value in the commercial market.
Me too. That’s a good question.
I worked hybrid 18 at home, 22 at the office and it sucked.
It showed me three things:
• It showed me that I was far more productive when I was at home and I was comfortable and not distracted.
• It showed me that I was coming into the office for absolutely no logical reason (even while there, all discussion was via Slack and Zoom).
• It showed me that the company’s leadership was incompetent.
This wasn’t even a ‘we paid for the space, we have to use it’ issue. This was an office job at a light industrial facility where no one had to be in the office. If they didn’t have us come in, they could have knocked down the office area and put in another line or two. Just incompetence.
I treat office days as social days for exactly this reason. I know I’m not getting anything done, there are too many distractions, so I MUST be being forced to come into this disaster zone for one reason - to recharge. So that’s what I do.
I told my boss that I get less done in the office. The temperature is always wrong. The monitors aren’t as good as what I have as home. There’s distractions. So many distractions. Sales guys are loud. People walking up to you. You can’t ignore a person standing next to you like you can ignore a slack message.
I told him I’d go in, but it would be a day of bullshitting and not doing much work.
Fortunately, he hasn’t really pushed the issue since. If the CEO gets the idea in his head again it’s going to be conflict.
What I’d really like to do is form a union, but labor in the US is extremely weak.
The only way I got anything done in the office was to wear noise-canceling headphones all the time. At which point, why bother coming in? I couldn’t hear anyone anyway.
I’m pretty lucky, in my industry, remote work has become the norm, so much so that my previous employer ended up closing the local office where I worked when I first started because [1] most of our colleagues were all over the country and [2] nobody thought there was a point to going back. I’m looking for a new job, and every prospect I’ve checked out so far is doing the same, almost fully remote. It just doesn’t make any sense to do otherwise.
Our company is doing the opposite and forcing everyone to RTW 5-days a week. Can’t wait for the exodus and the “I told you so”
ITT people with drastically different ideas of what hybrid is.
Why do I feel like the next phase of this is changing the expectations of hybrid to be more like “9 in the office, 1 day from home”
A smart CEO can downsize the office space and save money, thereby increasing his profits.
The problem is they signed long office space leases and breaking out of them is very expensive, plus they get tax breaks for driving foot traffic to commercial areas. Not that they would ever admit that is the reason instead if a bullshit “team spirit” diatribe excuse.
Considering it all started during the pandemic, a lot of those leases are going to come up for renewal soon.
Subletting is a thing.
They can rent the space to other businesses as “temporary office”.
Did we actually believe any of them at the time? I think they already knew that remote work was going to continue, and they were trying to get as much money out of the transition as possible.
One problem was that they had wasted real estate, and they had to justify it to shareholders. So they pretended that they were going to bring everyone back to the office.
If you think about it from a medium run perspective, of course employers are going to want more remote work because then they don’t have to pay for utilities or parking or rent or buildings. Of course this depends on the exact setup, but for many businesses it was clear from the beginning of the pandemic where things were going to go. And if we want to get even more cynical, we can point out that when your labor pool spans the country or even the world, you have a greater ability to underpay employees.
They want remote work so they can get the cheapest labor. Be on guard for average salaries to start dropping.
I’ve been outsourced more than once, while working in an office.
You guys are getting paid at your job?
If you can do your job from home and your job can be taught under 5 years. Then 5 indians guys can do it together for 10 times less total than you cost. And that will be the case until what happenned to China happens to India, which should take roughly 40 years.
We found this to be NOT true. Half, at best. But wait.
So it’s 1/10 in its heyday, but when you pay someone 1/10th salary in a land of 1/50th salary, that person becomes a target. They look comparatively rich, their house gets repaired, their kids show the signs of an economic bump, etc. So now your guy can get robbed or kidnapped, so you need a driver and protection. And the kids need to go to a different school with a gate. And the spouse needs to get back and forth safely. And then a better house, moving to a gated community or apartment, with more guards. And suddenly you’re paying for company housing, schooling, cars, drivers, tutors, guards, cameras/surveillance, cooks, maids, deliveries, and even extended family is moving in for safety.
So it’s still a bargain on paper, but then it’s just half. They don’t mention this because it’s hard to sell an idea when 80% of it is eroded.
Your employee or team now works on the other side of the world, with a different culture and management style from what you’re used to with Americans, different communications and workflow, and everything’s still around the world so it’s a day’s delay for everything.
The culture and work environment has trained some regions to NEVER admit they don’t know something; just nod, smile, and try to figure it out with confidence. Dunning-kruger be damned, sometimes that’s not a good way to do something in my field, which is incredibly technical. We can’t even educate the locals on risks of bad supply chains (curl|sh anyone? Flatpacks and CPAN and NPM and composer? Find out why these are risks) and doing so with the different “never say you don’t understand or you’re fired” environment is an added challenge. “Did you check for compliance?” will only ever get a “Yes”, even if you don’t mention which standard.
So your management - especially in offshores - needs an entirely different mindset and workflow, and you need to have people to check on the compliance and readiness and completeness who will say when it’s not ready because they’re not gonna be fired for it. This kind of thing surprised us and it will surprise the "I just wanna save money and this guy said 1/10th! " crowd. It’s not “you get what you pay for”, so don’t misunderstand; it’s just different. And if you can cope with all the differences and don’t freak out that you’re not saving so much for same-same work, it’s … an idea. In my case, the offshored staff slowly shrunk until we moved the offshoring to Poland.
Hybrid isn’t good enough
Far better than what most had, though. Still, until companies also start paying people during their commute, it isn’t enough.
My wife works in a large suburban office park off a major highway. The company designs hardware so obviously they have people in the workshop on-site etc, but you could remove three of their office buildings and keep those people at home. She also flies out from the east coast to the west coast twice a year just to sit in a conference room for two days straight… it’s like no one has ever heard of Zoom.
I’ve been working from home for nearly a decade and a half now. It has enabled me to keep my job after moving halfway across the country. I have dinner ready when the wife and kids get home, the laundry done, and can go for a jog at the local park for a few laps when I want to and yet I still get shit done and do a great job.
It just absolutely baffles me that CEOs aren’t chomping at the bit to downsize their office space footprints, get off those leases or sell off their properties, and let everyone work from home.
I have dinner ready when the wife and kids get home, the laundry done, and can go for a jog at the local park for a few laps when I want to and yet I still get shit done and do a great job.
You are so much more not-lazy than I am. Going for a jog after work? I salute you.
If I don’t plan to do stuff after work then my weekends end up being a rush of errands and housekeeping.
Long term leases and supporting commercial real estate, which they are likely invested.
In other news…
“we lied and tried to force RTO because we wanted people to quit so we could avoid the bad-press of layoffs. They didn’t quit, we had to do layoffs to keep the stock price up because as a ceo I’m paid in shares. We’re done the layoffs for now and we enjoy skipping out on rent for office space.”
