I quit my FAANG job yesterday to join a fully remote company. I took a >50% pay cut but I think it is a 100% life saver. I remember spending 3-4 hours/day commuting and I am just not willing to do that any more. I've cut back on expenses and simplified my life, built up some savings so I can make do with less. My retirement savings will slow down dramatically, but if I don't hate my work life then those savings will be less of an all-consuming goal.
Thank you senior leadership for your wisdom, "If you don't like it, find another place to work". The first good advice I've heard from them in 5 years.
I did the same and for around 50% cut. Working from home allows me to spend more time with my kids (I get to have lunch with them and hear them play in the background), no toxic rush hour commute, and I get the comfort of my own space. I know there's a down side of not being able to collaborate as well with my team. But I put my wellbeing over that.
And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life. But the peace of mind and serenity I have retained by WFH is invaluable.
> And to be honest, the pay cut - while significant - made no change in my daily life.
Yep. Speaking for myself, beyond a certain income threshold there has been no substantial quality of life improvement. My last promotion made it even easier to save for an even earlier retirement, and that's about it.
Early retirement is nice, and earlier retirement is even nicer, but given a choice between retiring when my kid is 20 and being home with him every day throughout his whole childhood, there's no contest. I'll happily delay retirement if that's the trade-off that's needed in order to be there while he's growing up.
This is a critical point. There seems to be an obsession with “making money so you can retire early” and then what? Your children are grown and left home, you’ve often sacrificed them as well as your own physical and mental health, you don’t have the energy you had in your youth, for what? So you can play golf with other retirees? Or maybe you saved up enough that you can invest in a new startup. Okay fine but that’s not retirement, in fact it may be more work.
It's odd to me that people think the value in excess wealth is just living on a beach somewhere.
The value in excess wealth is what you can do with it. You can find a person in need and hand them a thousand dollars for fun. You can fund some program your town needs. You can build a "third space" for your community. There's so much you can do with wealth that isn't just hoarding it!
Personally, my goal is to have enough money to buy a giant mansion on the edge of some town and be the weird rich lady you can go to with your problems. If I get richer than that, great! It'll be a bigger mansion and a bigger town. But if you gave me a billion dollars tomorrow, I'd just use it to be a bigger weird rich lady you can go to with your problems.
I heard a financial planner say once that many of his clients don't know how to retire. My Dad worked until he was ninety making money he will never spend. If you enjoy your job and have control over your time and projects, you may also want to keep working.
Retirement sounds very appealing when you aren't spending enough time with your friends and family, or when you aren't getting enough relaxation. But there will come a time when your kids won't really want to spend that much time with you. And a hobby you spend all your time on could become an unpaid job.
There will be times in your life when you have to be all in on your job. But when its not those times, try to have a balanced life now.
I "retired." Still go to some events that are particularly interesting, usually in areas that I enjoy spending some extra time--though I did my best when I had a wage. Doing some of what I used to do anyway but on my own terms. I realize doing that is somewhat privileged but it works for me.
Those charts that show remaining time you’ll be around someone at a given age are sobering.
Even if you live 30 years after your kids are out of the house, odds are only something like 5-10% of your total time with them will be in that 30 years.
Similar figures for your own parents and grandparents. Those hours with them are few, especially at ages when they can still do much.
I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet ).
Covid was a big moment for me in a lot of ways, because I was very pro-corporate for a long time. Having seen some of the bs up close and personal, it made me realize how broken our current system really is ( I still remember 'we are in this together' lip service and 'driving is your zen time' ). Having a kid ( and seeing it grow up ) can be such a radicalizing moment.
It does ring true and I am not sure I can refute it ( management wants easily replaceable cogs for the machine ). But my overall thought is that humans are a lot of things, but among those things they are also horrible biological machines if seen only through that prism. Our whole value to the system is that we can adjust to the unknown.
Still, maybe more importantly, we are not all even the same cogs, but management tries to lazily put us in the same category. I am not sure we can even really call it management. That is actually a mismanagement of human resources..
I think I mentioned this pet theory before here, but it is no longer 1950, but the management has not evolved since that period in US. Maybe it is time to force that evolution.
Honestly, if you're not a radical in the year 2024, you haven't been paying attention.
I travel around a lot (a thing I can do because I work remotely). From SF to Seattle to Tampa to Salt Lake to the small-town corners of the Carolinas, everyone is struggling. You can feel it in the air, find people identifying with it in every conversation, see the slow decay of every place you know. The dead mall in your hometown, your phone forcing a prompt to take your data to train some AI, the favelas that are now the norm in every major city (regardless of local policy), the fact that you now get a prompt for what is effectively a payday loan when you try to order a pizza.
I think people underestimate how poisonous that is to a culture and to a body politic. When you don't believe in reform, you either shrug and let things burn, or you start setting the fires yourself. Neither bodes well.
> I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet ).
One big reason is they are very worried about their stock grants due to the stock value nosedive that will occur once they finally have to write off all those office space leases as actual losses and report the loss on their SEC forms.
If they can force RTO then all the money being spent for office space leases remains in the "business expense" category and the stock price does not tank as a result.
> I am starting to wonder if the management wants to ensure people in general do not make that connection ( and just want to have, ideally, serfs barely making ends meet)
Why do you think healthcare is tied to employment in the US?
Why do you think minimum wage in the US has not gone up in decades?
Why do you think 2 weeks leave is normal in the US?
Why don’t more Americans travel overseas?
At this point you have to be willfully ignorant not to make the connection.
Beyond a certain point, you have as much money as you wish to spend. Some people don't seem to have a top limit, but for many, those lucky enough to earn more will just put it away.
The difference in your lifestyle isn't now, but in a few decades. It's hard to know when you have enough for the rest of your life. There are formulas, though I don't really know how meaningful they are.
Meantime you're clearly leading a better life now, and may well not mind having a few additional years of it (compared to a bit less time with a lot more aggravation).
So, congratulations. It sounds like you made a well-founded choice.
I probably saved more than I had to do and probably shouldn't be as (relatively) frugal as I am. COVID definitely pushed out a significantly earlier (semi-)retirement.
My pay cut was only around 15%, but I also wasn't working for a large company, and was apparently underpaid by around 20%. This will come of a spoiled and privileged, but I honestly have no idea how we'd make our day to day life work if I didn't work from home, with incredibly flexible hours. Getting children ready for school and pick them up at a reasonable hour, without stress just isn't possible. You have to drop off your children in some kind of care before their even fully awake, and you need to pick them up almost before you get out of the office.
Obviously people make it work, but I have no idea what kind of hours other people work, because doing a pick up at 16:30 would mean that my child would be the last one in the day care. In any case I don't see the point in tolerating the stress of traffic, school/day care, or just regular difficulties getting your daily tasks to fit in with a 8-16 job at an office. I have a family member that works at a hospital, she can't get her car service for four weeks because there's no available time to drop of the car and pick it up afterwards, which also fits with the mechanic. I can normally get appointments for mechanics, doctors, dentists, contractors, everything, with a few days notice because I can be incredibly flexible with my time.
This is pretty close to the average value engineers place on a remote job.
In our data set, the on-paper gap is about 18% (~37k on ~200k) if you just compare remote to non-remote, but given that the remote candidates often live in lower-COL areas, some of that probably comes from COL and not purely value placed on remote work.
The real driver is that ~half of engineers only want remote work, and the vast majority of the remainder aren't in whatever city you're hiring in.
I get that businesses are about profit and not much more, but I do find it interesting that it doesn't really register that people, given that option, choose to live in very diverse locations.
Some companies don't have the choice. If you need people to come in and operate machines, do manufacturing, care for others and similar, then you often need your employees to commute. If you don't need that, why wouldn't you hire the best qualified person, even if that person prefers to live in the Mojave desert?
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be a fraudulent person who doesn't exist.
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be interviewing for jobs they intend to quietly outsource, possibly to people worse than themselves and definitely in ways that create security risks.
- Because you think the random overheard conversations and water-cooler factor of in-office work has enough benefits to compensate for nominally lower qualifications.
- Because you think you're not perfect at detecting low-quality work and think remote employees might take the opportunity to slack off in ways they wouldn't in an office.
- Because you think it creates additional security risks by removing the implicit air-gapping of having to physically be in an office to handle sensitive information.
- Because you and your current employees actually like being in-office and having that cultural cohesion, and you don't think you can get it remotely.
...or any number of other reasons.
Like, I get that people like remote work. I do too. But the moralizing of RTO is...just incorrect, I think? There are practical arguments against it (I literally wrote a few thousand words to that effect not long ago - see my most recent HN submission), but that's an entirely different class of objection than the idea that it's just about middle managers wanting to breathe down your neck.
When I was doing this, I went in a bit later and dropped the kids off and my spouse went in a bit earlier and picked them up. They were neither the first ones in nor the last ones out. My commute was worst case 20 minutes, that also helped. It worked fine (except when spouse was traveling), but WFH Is much easier.
Only two ways that I know of that can make it work: 1) one parent needs to stay at home, or 2) hire a nanny. Both of those come with considerable costs.
Historically, you had grandparents or other extended family (which was the case when I was growing up with two working parents). But that's far less common in the US today.
While I apparently where underpaid, my boss and I had a pretty good relationship, but he didn't think a 50+% pay raise, so my wife could stay at home, was realistic, but I did ask.
My wife's boss recommended getting an au pair, she pointed out that he's aware of how much she makes, and that it was a stupid suggestion that he know that we wouldn't be able to afford that.
Not to mention that you’re putting your corporate boss’ well being above that of your children who have to cope with those circumstances. I’m willing to deal with the commute. I’m not willing to let my kids take the hit.
> This will come of a spoiled and privileged, but I honestly have no idea how we'd make our day to day life work if I didn't work from home, with incredibly flexible hours.
I don't think it's spoiled, I think you're spot on. Yeah, it's hard. And yes, you (and me and probably many others reading here) are privileged.
> Obviously people make it work
And yeah, they usually make it work, and it sucks. Or if they can't make it work then maybe a spouse or partner has to quit their job to handle that stuff and take care of the kids and then they have to get by with even less income.
3-4 hours a day commuting? I confess I used to bike to the office and that could take about 3 hours/day, but I could cut it down to a 2 hour/day by switching to an ebike. I also like biking. On my "work from home" days I would aim for an hour and a half ride every morning.
I can't imagine being in a longer commute that I didn't like.
Sf Bay Area can easily exceed 2 hours each way if you aren’t willing to pay insane money on housing. It honestly made me wonder how low income people exist there at all. I did more than 2 hours each way for many years there but only by riding the train with a hot spot.
That sounds insane to me. Again, I had a long commute by bike. Could have easily shed most of it by getting a car. Would have to shift off rush hour, but that isn't too hard to do?
Would love to see more data on this. Quick googling shows average commutes well below an hour. I'm assuming average is just not a good stat for this?
Low income people exist by either living with family or commuting insane distances from lower cost areas. I've met quite a few people who would commute from Tracy or Stockton to SF/Mountain View to work as janitors or food service workers at tech offices. It's brutal, especially when they're expected to show up in time to serve breakfast or open the doors.
When I graduated college, the drive from Santa Cruz to 85 and Shoreline was about 35min at 730am. These days that is 90-120 minutes at that same time (think google/microsoft campuses). Many can’t afford to live close to those areas any more.
I'm grateful for my FAANG job because, despite my lack of intelligence, I'm able to make enough money to provide a comfortable life for my family and save up for early retirement.
Don’t paper over everyone with the new Day 2 Amazon. There are still great things happening at Meta for example where the founder is still driving culture. They’re some of the biggest players in open source AI and you better believe Meta AI has very smart people
I wouldn’t say it’s friendly, but that’s not really the point. The commenter was saying smart people didn’t work there which is really hard to say when talking about the AI groups. I would say you can get a lot done if you’re not in a few particularly slow moving heavily layered orgs. They’re also pushing hard to flatten as they should
I did a radical change recently too, save for the fact my job (full remote) wasn't very well paid to begin with. The additional 700€/month I got for working in comparison to the unemployment benefit is absolutely not worth working 150h a month, since I still can pay for whatever small or medium things I want, and it don't make a real change to what I can't (buy a house).
On the other hand, I have now time and energy to focus on all the cool things: writing research papers and my thesis, learning accounting to set up my company, make contributions to the open-source and open-data projects I care about, taking time for friends and family. In a word: living.
I'm happy that you found something that works for you. But wouldn't it have been cheaper to move to a place closer to the office of your previous employer?
Rather than the snarky response, I’ll answer: closer is likely to be impossibly more expensive for the requirements OP needs (e.g. living area, number of bedrooms or similar).
To add in, they may have other obligations in life that prevent it as well. Taking care of elders, kids schools, spouses jobs, medical care needs. Frequently money is just not the answer
Maybe. But sign a new lease (or mortgage!), pay moving expenses, relocate away from friends/family/social network/what have you and then the job disappears after 18 months, leaving you to relocate again....
It’s not just that it’s more expensive COL but if you’re buying then you’re taking a 30 y mortgage that may not be so easy to divest when the next round of cuts come and you find yourself let go anyway.
So not parent, but no. I lived as close as we could afford, roughly 20km away. Outside rush hour you can to the trip in 15 minutes, during rush hour it's 35 minutes, assuming no accidents (and this is a highly accident prone area where traffic would block up completely every other week).
Taking a 15% cut, which allowed us to move further away severely reducing our cost of living, bring us closer to family which can help out if needed. It has reduce stress, ensures that our child doesn't need to be in the care of after school programs longer than she needs. The reduced cost of living, reduction in stress and the flexibility that we're able to offer my wife's employer was made a huge, positive, difference in our lives, well worth the 15%.
Not really in VHCOL areas.
You can get by on less, if you are planning your life around your job, for sure.
But for example if your office is Midtown Manhattan, the equivalent lifestyle to own a home for your family in walkable Manhattan vs long subway commute Brooklyn vs longer commuter rail suburbs vs extreme commute exurbs is staggering.
You can buy an entire exurban home for the incremental cost to upgrade from Manhattan 2bed/1.5bath to 3bed/2.5 bath.
My parents & in-laws each have 3bed/2.5 bath homes outside of Manhattan commute range, but within tolerably unpleasant driving commute to Stamford/Greenwich. That is - they are in commuter range of where commuters live / satellite office are located.
The combined values of those 2 homes might buy a single family sized apartment in Stamford, an ok 1 bedroom apartment in yuppie Brooklyn, or a kind of dumpy studio in Manhattan.
A lot of these answers seem to boil down to "I would simply have more money".
> But wouldn't it have been cheaper to move to a place closer to the office of your previous employer
it might not be the sort of place they want to live. it also negates a lot of the higher salary argument if a lot more of it is going into paying rent or mortgage.
Hey, congrats. I did a similar thing... in December 2019. Poor timing, but a good decision nonetheless.
Even years later, I am still not making as much money as I was making back then. I could not care less about that. I'm making plenty of money, and am more than twice as happy—this is harder to measure than salary, but it sure feels true.
I spend 40 minutes a day commuting. Would I take a 50% pay cut for that? You know the answer.
Depending on how one is, working from home not only isolates you, but if you have kids, dealing with them on a daily basis while trying to work is not what you think it will be after months and years of doing so.
Yes, your life will change and be totally different.
That only matters if you spend the majority of your income. For many high paying tech workers the amount you save matters more and doesn’t change enough comparatively if your rent doubles for example.
Sure and that’s still not the majority of your income over a 10+ yr period if you’re getting paid good bay area wages as a senior+ engineer.
Not to mention that buying a house isn’t a requirement of living in a location (and isn’t the right financial choice for many places when comparing to rent).
Although I think most people in a major urban metro (broadly--not necessarily living in a city) probably don't really want to move to the mountains someplace. I'm well out of the city--where my job mostly never was anyway--but I like being able to drive in in 90 minutes or so and the other advantages that a major metro offers.
I’d switch jobs then as well, or rather, I would never take such a job in the first place. Luckily my commute is only 20 minutes by bike. I don’t earn anywhere near FAANG level either, though.
When I was looking for a job I was offered peanuts for a position requiring very specific knowledge. When I pointed this out, they said "well, if you want to earn a lot of money, go to company X".
I did. Now I'm exploring the limits of slacking off while getting a nice paycheck. I could aim higher, but I doubt my new place would allow me to slack off as much as this place does. After all, I have only one life, so I'd rather spend it doing things other than working, and I know that modern work is unlikely to bring deeper life satisfaction.
This comment, to me, is heartwarming. The free market works! You valued something more than $$$ and so made adjustments to your employment (aka selling your labor).
I think that in-office work is good for certain situations, which is why onsites still make sense. And for folks newer in their career, onsite time is really important, based on my experience.
But if remote is more attracitve, over time companies that offer it will win in the talent marketplace.
Except it doesn’t because so many companies are slowly bringing people back to office and finding a fully remote job is becoming more of a privilege. One anecdote does not validate your views.
There were companies both hybrid and remote before covid (I worked for a few). Covid was a shock that shifted remote work (as well as a lot of other things).
I would not call remote work a privilege. Rather I would say remote work is a benefit. It falls into the same bucket as all the other benefits that employees can weigh in addition to salaries when they weigh job options.
I expect a reversion in terms of remote/hybrid, but not all the way back to where it was before hand. Looked for some stats, didn't find much. From the US BLS[0]:
> However, remote work participation was still higher than its 2019 level in all industries except agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, which returned to its 2019 level.
The data only goes to 2022, but the publication is from 2024. If there are fresher stats, would love to see them, as I think things have changed in 2023 and 2024.
I don’t think this is true. This is a lagging indicator and takes time to show the meaningful data. You’ll not get your productivity gains as your top talent leaves and everyone else who is salty will coast doing the bare minimum while looking for a new job. https://youtu.be/4ec_yZCWOCY?si=RQs2bo3w_ATv9X6e
I think companies that won’t adapt and embrace remote/hybrid will slowly decay.
But that’s exactly how it works. If you are willing to make the trade off for what you value more then go for it. Many do not want to make the pay or job tradeoff and come into office, and many others (myself included) think coming in to office is generally good.
Remote is not more attractive to everyone and everyone doesn’t have the same economics on the trade offs.
That’s exactly why it doesn’t work. Leaving our rights to the market to decide does not work. It never has.
Why? Because for the vast majority of people, employers have almost all of the negotiating power. What this means is the market is slowly shaped by what employers want, not employees. Because we need a job more than they need our labor.
It’s naive to think the market is a level playing field and if employees want something they just vote with their labor and the market will adapt. That’s just not true. Most people don’t have the ability to change jobs on a whim to play the market with their livelihoods.
It works fine for tech and most white collar jobs. You can indeed vote with your feet unless you make very poor financial decisions (or have too high of needs) for most of these careers.
I’ll get downvoted for this but so many people taking 15-50% paycuts without a moments thought, or trading 50% of pay for 3-4 hours back out of a 11-12hr workday (including commute) sort of implies that there are a lot of overpaid people right now.
A better hypothesis would be that there are diminishing returns for the hours in a day a person has. Getting back 4 hours when you are currently working 12 hours has a ton more impact than getting back 4 hours when you only work eight.
Not overpaid. Even if you are paid below the market, but you are highly skilled in a job where you deliver a lot of value for the employer and you make a lot more than the average worker, you can take a pay cut. For example, average pay in US is around $50k/year. If you are very good in tech or an MD and you make $250k, are you overpaid? Probably not. If you take a $50k cut, with the remaining $200k you are still fine in many places. There is no reason to reach the conclusion you are overpaid.
At least you have a much better chance to (live to) eventually retire. I am glad to see this kind of change is not just possible, but really happening.
I'd never work for a "FAANG" style corporation, but otherwise made a similar choice when my first kid was born, back in early 2019.
I'll surely lose out on some currency in the long run but I'm not so sure whatever value it's going to have in the coming fifties outweighs the time with my family I've gained. On a global scale a lot of things are going to shit and I'd rather my kids think of me as someone who didn't bail on them under such circumstances.
I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point. The post is a well-written spleen vent, and I mostly agree, but I didn’t see anything new in it.
But because everyone has an opinion, I’ll share mine: I like being in the office, sometimes. I hate going to and from the office.
I don't mind the commute if I live close enough that I can just walk 30-40 minutes to the office, because then it serves as a good exercise (okay, fine. Grass-touching) that I don't have to do separately in the day.
But I realize that this is NOT a luxury most people have. Most people's commute looks like being stuck in the subway, or driving in traffic, for up to several hours every single day, and I just can't think of anything that would justify that type of commute.
The single-occupant driving commute is the most common way to get to work in the US, by far. [1] That’s just miserable: it’s stressful, lonely, expensive, prone to risks like car problems. I feel like we can do better, even incrementally. Why isn’t slugging [2] more common, for instance?
Here is mine: I like the commute, it marks the beginning and end of my workday and I get fresh air. I loathe being in the office, it is mentally taxing and I have to put in more for the same output.
Commutes can indeed be good, but you can get the same benefit with your own rituals. Currently, I shovel the snow in the morning and drink a hot chocolate to start the workday, and I take a ten-minute walk to end it. Same effect as a commute, but something I can control.
My commute is a 15 minute bike ride. 9/10 days it’s nice weather, I get some air and possibly some sunlight. Office isn’t too bad, and it’s nice to meet other adults. I don’t think I would enjoy it as much if I had a desk in a big, shared office space and a 45 minute bus ride.
Ironically those days that are so bad that I think that I almost shouldn’t try to bike, those are the days that the busses don’t run because the busses and more sensitive to the weather than my e-bike with studded tires.
Busses in Oslo don’t work if it’s raining a lot or if it’s snowing a lot. It’s really sad since it’s snows and rains quite a lot every year. Our locally public transport is more interested in trailing self-driving cars than testing out new tires :(
The serenity I had while sitting in a train is the only thing I seek from my office days. I actually listened to audio books and learned, or just watched outside and thought about nothing.
Catching cold every 2 to 6 weeks on winter wasn't amazing though.
I have an easy commute (35 - 45 minutes, but not bad traffic and pretty roads), and a comfy car. The commute is my peaceful time, when I don't have to answer to anyone.
I guess I don't really consider that an easy commute though I've done something along those lines off and on over the years. It's not bad like when I commuted about 90 minutes a few days a week. "Easy" for me is a 15-30 minute walk with maybe some mass transit mixed in there if the weather is bad.
And, yes, if I had an office to go into, I would do so some days if that were my option.
I just need flexibility and variety. Some days I work better from home. Some days it feels claustrophobic and I cannot focus. Sometimes the office helps me focus. Sometimes it facilitates communications that never would have happened remotely. Other times I’m bogged down by unwanted social interactions. Sometimes I really need to be on site with customers or at a conference building and maintaining social ties.
I’ve worked in hybrid environments for over a decade and could never go back to a full RTO position. I’m currently mostly remote and that is also driving me a little crazy.
Some people do great in the office. Some do great remote. I’m not in either bin.
This girl has pretty severe Crohn's, severe enough to make commuting in pretty much not an option: in addition to the severe fatigue, she's immunocompromised and more prone to whatever bugs her coworkers bring in to work. That's something new and unique about this post I took away from it. It's not just a rant because me no like office/commute. There are health and profound QoL issues in play.
Not the person who wrote this post, but I also have Crohn's (that isn't quite in remission). If WFH was off the table, there's no way I'd be able to work at all. With WFH, I'm bringing in more than half of total our household income. Very very grateful that this is available to me.
I think being in the office together with a plan is a good tool to use, but you need to use it well.
Just yell at people to be in the office for 2 days per week for no reason? Meh. Why?
Organize a week to have all local and international employees together for a week once or twice a year, schedule big organizational meetings and important discussions in that week, sponsor dinner and lunch together, have a team event or three? Just accept that concrete and hard productivity will crash for that week, and consider it a social event? That's actually nice and valuable.
I'm in the same vein. I enjoy being in the office a couple days a week - I feel like there's different types of focus needed for different tasks and sometimes the focus I need is the kind I get from being in a very structured environment with co-workers. Other times it's the kind I get from being in my own space in full control of my own surroundings.
But either way I hate commuting. Especially if I have to drive.
Heavily agree on the “going to and from the office”
I was just thinking about this recently as $company executives are sociopathically dangling RTO in our faces. The worst part is the commute by car.
I’m totally for WFH, but give me an office I can walk/bike to in a safe calm environment - not a bike lane next to 60 mph traffic - and I may just want to go into the office.
Furthermore, the company culture needs to be such that you can leave the office as necessary like we do in WFH. Do errands, take a break, etc. Cal Newport makes the point on his podcast that our work culture for creative jobs (anything that uses the brain primarily, I don’t know the right word) has not really changed from factory line physical in nature jobs.
I work in the healthcare industry. Because of this, a lot of people on my extended team still had to go to work, and see patients and their families face-to-face.
The worst part of 2020 for me was repeatedly removing coworkers from the intranet as they died.
Why would I point you to a blog post with an example when I already provided one in the post, and when the unspoken premise of the term RTO is a reference to the worldwide phenomena of people not going to the office to avoid spreading a disease.
You may not mean to, but you are coming across as intentionally obtuse. Apologies for my tone of that isn’t the case.
It spreads disease and increases sick days and terrible for green house gas reductions and increases inflation (increases demands for gas). The thing that gets me is the same people preaching the world is going to end because of these gases demand we continue these practices. The environmental groups are silence. Who is lying to whomp? Is it all some self delusion.
It's a bunch of people in a crowded, shared space. For respiratory/airborne illnesses, the default assumption should be that office work will in fact spread disease.
Just as a tip: the links between comments and replies on HN is pretty thin so it can be hard to follow the connection between a comment and what it's reply to.
I get fewer (not none!) of this kind of misunderstood reply after adopting a habit of quoting the specific part of a post which I'm replying to, especially when that post makes more than one point.
So in this case (and this is mainly for the benefit of anyone still confused about what happened in this thread):
> > I have heard every possible sentiment about RTO at this point.
> Don't think I've seen the point about office work spreading disease in a blog post like this before. Do you have any examples of this?
You asked for examples about office work spreading disease, in the context of you saying that you hadn't seen the claim before. I took that as an unwillingness to believe the idea until you saw evidence. If that wasn't your point, I obviously didn't understand what you were trying to say, so could you clarify?
[Edit: I see that it could be read to be asking for examples of the claim that office work spreads disease in a piece arguing against RTO. Given that at this time, none of the direct replies read it that way, I'm going to say that it was at a minimum ambiguously worded...]
In context, the person was replying to someone who stated “I have read it all when it comes to RTO”. They stated they hadn’t seen a _blog post_ making _this point_ that RTO would cause more sickness. They were never addressing the claim that it does or does not. They were talking about the novelty of this argument for them.
I resisted RTO as much as anyone but eventually I took a job that required me to be in office 3 days a week because, well, didn’t have much of a choice.
I have to say being in the office has been better than I expected. I recently got together with a group of former coworkers, who I worked with for many years at a startup, and have kept in touch all these years later. We noted that this kind of friendship definitely would not have happened if we were working remote.
My only thing is, I would rather have the flexibility to choose where I work, even if only at the team level. It gets cold where I live in winter, I would love to be able to go stay someplace warm during those months, and come to the office when I want to be there.
I feel like for me, this debate isn’t really about working in the office vs working from home, it’s about control. Companies have realized that they gave over too much soft power to employees during the pandemic, so they are now working together to claw it back. They could care less where we work, as long as they are the ones in control.
I just turned down a job that I would've been amazing at, because they're in person 3 days a week.
They lost literally tens of millions in grant opportunities that I have written and the experience I bring, because they wouldn't go remote 3 days instead of just 2.
I understand wanting some time in person, absolutely. I hate it, but it does make certain processes much easier. But to not negotiate at all, even when the candidate is perfect for the job and happy with everything else? Ridiculous.
I suppose the bet from executives is: recession/influx of former government employees will allow for relatively easy replacement of candidates. I am not sure which consideration is more cynical and/or misguided.
Yes, I am great work friends with some of my former colleagues from foreign offices that I rarely saw in person. Similarly have good friends on my current fully remote team. I also have good friends from the fully in office era.
Turns out it's more on you as a person to figure out friendship than arbitrary spatial collocation.
I have the opposite problem as you: I've done tech all my life but live in a place where there are few tech opportunities, and it's a bit late in my life to switch to being a longshoreman. So I kind of have to find remote opportunities, even as it becomes more difficult to do so.
There’s what I view as a common misperception embedded in the article. RTO isn’t about empty real estate, or not mostly. Leases can be broken, everything is subject to negotiation. Sure, there’s a cost, but it could be paid.
It’s not about real estate, it’s about power. For a brief period, during the great resignation, executives felt the sting of at will employment, a weapon that was never meant to be used against them. RTO is about showing us all who is really in charge.
I run a remote company, so I don't have skin in trying to convince anyone that RTO is a good idea. And there might be some truth to this in a wider, more systemic sense, in that employers and employees are always in some degree of zero-sum negotiation. But...like, do you think management actually thinks in these terms?
I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.
> usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work
So, it is about wanting to assert control. Because they think "abusing" remote work is when workers have more control of their circumstances and don't have to break their backs or brains for their salary.
The kind of abuse I (and they) are thinking of are things like "working four different jobs and half-assing all of them" or "outsourcing your job to some guy in the Philippines".
You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well.
If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
For smaller companies yes leases can be broken but for others spending billions building college like campuses where they sublease space to businesses to sell to employees part of their worth is connected to real estate value. Others getting tax breaks by having people in an office in a downtown core.
For Faangs it's about power, control and real estate.
For the yc startup crowd it's often about investor control forcing it and fake signalling (come to my trendy office and look at people working) and inexperienced management who needs to see what effects their poor decisions are having with their eyes so they can pivot.
When you work in an open office everyone ends up just talking on Slack most of the time anyway. Except those people who have no sense of boundaries, and will gladly invade your personal space and interrupt your train of thought at any time for any reason, leading to a constant state of anxious hypervigelence preventing you from ever fully concentrating on something.
My employer invested tens of millions in telepresence, telecommuting and remote working options. When the pandemic hit they got Zoom scaled up and working for tens of thousands of employees. Which it did, beautifully.
Now that the pandemic is over, we're back to mandatory 3 days per week, minimum, with more for higher level roles. Yet except for a recently acquired employee my entire team is remote. So, WFH and meet on Zoom or sit in an office and meet on Zoom.
Unfortunately the sales people are the policy makers and they can't seem to wrap their heads around doing anything that isn't face to face. Yet we started on this investment in remote work to control travel costs.
> people who have no sense of boundaries, and will gladly invade your personal space and interrupt your train of thought at any time for any reason
You gotta game the system and learn some basic acting skills. Twitch your face. Pause just a little too long before responding. Get up in the middle of a sentence to stare out the window and just stop talking, forcing the other party to ask you to continue. Laugh obnoxiously loud at your own jokes. Stall, delay, confuse, whatever you do: make the experience not worth repeating for the offender.
Get bipolar: be the very best person you can be on Slack. But be a complete hebephrenic bug eyed lunatic when someone interrupts you IRL.
Meanwhile there are those who expect you to process every Slack ping, making them in some ways worse those who interrupt in person — since they don’t feel the distress of the person they’re interrupting through the screen.
A workplace’s culture of consideration is expressed through communication channels, but is not determined by the choice of channel.
IM's and the like are the bane of my existence. If I'm busy I can close a door or put a sign up. I can close email. Nobody expects me to immediately respond to email anyways.
But instant messages? Everyone expects instant responses. Even when their message is something like, "hey,I see you have your door closed. Are you busy?"
"Open office" - I've never been healthier (and fitter) than since I went remote. Not sharing an open office with coughing sneezing co-workers who would come in, no matter what, and commuting on trains, has been remarkable. I'd previously have 2-3 heavy colds a year. I think I've now had 1 in 5 years.
Many people overlook a key benefit of remote work: the ability to live in cities where good companies don't have offices. E.g, living in Montpellier while working for a company based in Paris (700 km away), living in Düsseldorf while working for a company headquartered in Munich (600 km away), or living in Seville while working for a company in Barcelona (900 km away).
I'm not talking about global hiring (something many people don't like because salaries tend to go down), but companies allowing remote work within the same country. This, imo, is the greatest advantage of remote work
Totally agree on the RTO forced memes. I recently participated remotely in a mostly-in-person team summit that went great. At the end of the session, Big Boss gave a rousing pep talk about how much this proved the value of in-person collaboration and my heart sank. Was that the whole point of this session, and not the technical solutions we spun? I was literally right there on the projector meeting room, and had obviously weighed in as much as anyone else. I’d been feeling hopeful because $EMPLOYER has been encouraging about the prospects of sustained remote work there, but they also own a lot of business property and I know they are going to follow suit with the others.
My biggest takeaway from this was the ableist messaging:
“You cannot dangle what people need to effectively work in front of them like a carrot and subtly threaten to take it away. It’s ableist. You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features at the office, so don’t do it with that either.”
> You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features
This is only because there's usually legal protection for that kinds of accessibility features. If employers could legally, it would be way more common to threaten to take them away.
I have no doubt there are some that do so illegally.
I would agree with their sentiment. I don't know how common it would be, but it would certainly happen at least in some occasions.
When I was young, I worked in a call center in which the bathroom was taken away as a punishment for bad rates on multiple occasions, until someone called the Dept. of Labor over it.
The thing I keep coming back to here is how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.
I understand that most of us worked our asses off to get to a skilled position and that in many ways it makes far more sense to be able to work from home. I myself am being dragged back into the office 5 full days a week and it's a 45 minute one way commute on a good day, so I'm salty about that. But hearing people who live 10 minutes from the office in $450,000 houses complaining loudly in the lobby about being forced back into the office right near the minimum wage security desk is a little uncomfortable.
Never think that pure hard work leads to success, placement, privilege, or anything else. The farmhand in a field works harder than 99.9% of high paid tech employees. Hard work is important, sure, but it’s all about relative value contribution in the market, nothing else.
It’s easy to find another farmhand, it’s hard to find another ML engineer
I agree, and I've argued vocally against RTO from my privileged position because I have that value that makes me hard to replace.
I just want to make sure that we're not forgetting the people who weren't able to become high-level ML engineers for various social and economic reasons and are locked into 10 hour hard days in person.
A lot of people bullied the ever hell out of the current ML engineers today. A lot of those bullies are only just now experiencing the economic effects of their actions from 10-30 years ago.
Kids knew which kids they’d have to clean to the house of 20 years in the future and they intuitively want to knock those elite kids down a peg while they still can.
Never forget the extreme resentment that those around nerds have for a nerds mind. When this country stops treating nerds like shit and celebrating anti-intellectualism, I’ll start being worried about the plight of the lowly security guard.
Eh, the difference is that for some roles being in-person is obviously necessary for the role while in others it isn't. Most people I know working in lower-level roles in-person recognize this because they've experienced more than their share of blatant management power games themselves.
There's definitely a generational divide though. Older folks seem more likely to view being at the office as just a natural part of how work "works", while younger people are more likely to understand when it's necessary and when it isn't.
It's a different story for lower-status jobs that could be done from home but aren't allowed. But when it's such a clear signal that you aren't trusted by management/society/etc, you really do have something to resent!
I'm not saying accept it. I am a vocal critic of the RTO policy at my work and have been for years.
But keeping context and perspective is important. Even in your example, it would do the security guard some good to take a moment and be grateful that he does have that minimum wage job and a place to stay.
It's not meant to encourage you to settle and get screwed over. It's meant to remind you of what you have and often those things should drive you to fight harder for other people and yourself.
> how we all must sound to the janitors, security guards, baristas, etc, who can't ever work from home.
Absolute bollocks. This is the Elon Musk screed and it's baseless. Do you think fast food workers gripe and moan when extremely well paid pilots or nurses go on strike?
Every worker wants every other worker to succeed over management.
I have no sympathy. America has made it so easy to convert hard work into a better job. Nowhere else on earth has it even close to this easy to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Security guards are usually security guards because they want to be (most require a concealed carry license). I do not care if they think they are underpaid. They can always snap and go murder half the building. Id rather we didn’t even have a security guard, since the tweaker whod try to come into our building to do drugs is almost certainly not going to literally shoot the place up because overpaid tech workers were talking about not like RTO…
I personally see WFH as a way to improve working conditions in general. Just because some jobs really need to be done in person does not automatically mean all of them should be. Similarly, not all should be RTO. As such, it is valid to point out ( and even complain ) that trying to apply 'one size fits all' RTO solution is silly at best.
And just a point of perspective, it was only recently 40h a week ( 1940 ) and child labor (1938) was not considered some sort of communist plot intended to overthrow capitalism.
My favorite environment is a 5-10 person office, no more than 5 miles from everyone’s home.
I know how to make that work in a startup, but its premise doesn’t scale beyond a pizza box.
Has anyone figured out a better way that works at 100 people?
One idea I’m curious about is pods. Could you build a small team who all live close enough together? Could they coordinate remotely with the mothership?
The default seems to be to just embrace remote.
Or issue a RTO as a ‘polite’ way to decimate the team and reduce burn.
At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet.
Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situations would be handled by a phone call or email.
Meeting in the coffee room to chat becomes rare because schedules and tastes (eg. office coffee versus off-site coffee, bagged lunches versus going out) differ. Also there's too many people and too much churn to really get to know anybody.
Arranging meeting times becomes difficult outside smaller 5-10 person units so asynchronous communication becomes predominant.
What I've seen work is not trying to co-locate a full team at all. Doing so only leads to silos and hiring difficulties. Instead have small offices which people from a small geographic area use. Those people will be on different teams and in different departments -- which is good for inter-team communication and synergy. This is exactly what offices normally miss because teams are co-located resulting in a relatively high 'distance' to build a rapport between teams.
I actually would not mind a slightly bigger org - like even up to 100 or so...but everything else you noted i'm 100% in agreement with. I'll call this the "village way"...because what you noted - to me at least - seems like how villages, small towns, whatever you want to call them had to exist a hundred years ago or so...like, not just before digital, but i mean, even when base telecom was not a common thing....so i would imagine most folks in a town/village worked for one of a few extremely local workplaces. I'm not saying having only very few employers in an area is good, since that would be giving a central group way too miuch power. But, yeah, i kinda yearn for a sort of village approach. And, yes, it could also mean that the "local pod" is everyone in the local area working together in one place, but remotely coordinating with a mothership as you put it. That all sounds pretty decent!
But, this approach is not something that powers-that-be would even begin to support...even though, i betcha, this approach would have tons of people actually invested in the success of the org because of the good that it represents in allowing people to earn a living without making commutes and such that much more difficult. I know that if my employers supoorted this sort of model, i would not only work karder, but actually give more of a damn, and really care to have the org succeed. Basically, i would contribute far more to the org. But, nah, the bosses just want to squeeze the lemons, and not care how they get their juice produced. ;-)
So what happens when someone wants to change teams for whatever reason? Or they're presented with a new opportunity? On the other side of the city--or in a different city. Do they have to move?
Those that are most pro back-to-office are the ones that are either very extroverted, and have human-to-human roles. Or the people that simply can't disconnect between work and home. I know some people that say they simply can't focus on work, unless they're at the workplace, or some other non-home office.
But by far, it's the extroverted managers that seem to hammer on about return to office.
They're afraid that people will see that they're not needed in the organization. It's easy to fake that when everyone is forced into the same location and the people who like to talk do just that.
Rather than sharing our own anecdotes about how we feel about RTO - maybe we can try something different and discuss the specific points raised in the article?
Particularly this point: in office collaboration is digital
I feel the other points have been hashed out to death on other similar HN discussions:
- in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
- at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
> in office socialization is shallow and distracts from more meaningful socialization with family and friends
Many people's adult friends come from work. Sometimes their spouse does too. I've noticed a phenomenon where more junior team members in particular would go into the office, even though the senior folks rarely did, and I think part of this is just to meet people because they may not have built up a friend group in their city yet.
> at home office is far more accommodating to fit an individuals needs
That's the case for me, although it depends a lot on your physical home situation and the social dynamic at home. I think for some folks the office is an escape.
Is anyone aware of a study between political affiliation and RTO views? I feel like it's become just yet another political/social echo chamber warfare topic and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a huge correlation between political ideology and RTO opinion.
Liberals dominate the jobs where RTO is even an option. Conservatives are trying to eliminate it from the US government for a reason.
It’s entirely political. Conservatives hate the idea that “lazy” limp wristed soy boy ML engineers can make more money than their good old boys making tractors at catapiller.
There should be a law that says for absolutely every job whatsoever, you are on the clock as soon as you leave your home, and 100% of all commuting expenses must be reimbursed by the employer. If employers expect you to travel to a particular place to work, they should pay for all of it including your time. The only reason this doesn't make perfect sense is because the insanity of commuting on your own dime has been normalized.
If such a law were in place almost no company would ask any employee to commute anywhere unless it were absolutely necessary. Return to office is really easy for them to ask for when they aren't the ones who have to pay for it.
I arrived at this conclusion too after 3 years of smart working, it's unreasonable to have today an obliged/implicit sacrifice of time and money that's commuting to the work place.
I can see commuting being regarded as a total time waste requiring employer compensation in the US, where most people commuting are driving. But in countries where commuting is done via public transportation, the time spent commuting can be productively used for personal improvement in the form of reading.
Only in some cases. Often public transport at commuting hours is too crowded to practically do so, or is a bus rather than a train so that many people would get travel sick if they tried to read.
This would just mean that people living farther away would have a harder time finding jobs, or negotiating salary/promotions, because they are more expensive for their employer. Yes you could have laws making it illegal to discriminate based on commute distance, but you know that employers would find other pretexts.
> The point is micromanagement and needing to justify the large office spaces they invested into.
Justifying office space is not a useful business strategy. I think it’s best to treat people you disagree with as reasonable and consider what their motivations could be. In this case I think it’s clear there is one big one—-productivity. It’s clear that some people (not everyone!) use remote work as a way to do minimal work (see r/overemployed). Moreover there are some benefits to in person collab in terms of being able to discuss things quickly and rely on people to be there.
And I say this as a remote worker who loves it and never wants to RTO. But I don’t assume the other side is acting in bad faith, I think there’s pros/cons to both. Mostly remote work is great, but not always. Sometimes my teammates randomly don’t respond to me on an urgent issue and I have no recourse. Sometimes they aren’t making progress on work I am counting on and I can’t tell if they are even working.
Being able to jump into a zoom call with everyone immediately outweighs trying to book a room or walking over to someone's desk. I can easily waste more time and look like I am working in the office where at home it's hard to coverup nothing has been done.
There has been some bad faith over hiring and then forcing rto to avoid termination payouts. We see Musk plans to do the same even moving government offices to states like Wyoming.
Most companies are not bad faith actors just copying others.
My job is still remote but pay is now based on zip code for both new hires and for self-driven relocation. If I move and the zip code is not near one of the few office locations in major cities, my pay and/or the pay band for my job title is adjusted.
I was hired during COVID with the expectation of a fully remote first policy, for good. Now it's this micromanagement where I need C-level approval to change my address. And there are one-off exceptions all over the place both for hiring and for relocation.
It tells me that leadership and the board don't give a shit about me. I am a cog in their machine. Expendable.
I am quietly looking for a new job and not stretching myself as much at my current job. Not coasting, but also not answering those slack pings as quickly, or referring people to the help desk process instead of solving their problem then and there. Putting me and my needs first more often.
Truly remote first companies should be at an advantage both for hiring and for cost efficiency.
They absolutely are at an advantage in hiring - our data set has remote companies with 5-10x the candidate pool of non-remote ones, even ignoring differences in salary asks.
The question is: are they at an advantage in effectiveness? I think they probably are, but it seems like a reasonably open question, one that we should see an answer to in the coming years. If in five or ten years remote companies aren't crushing non-remote ones, that's going to be pretty strong evidence that there is good reason for in-office work.
"At my place, we don’t innovate, we don’t develop new products for a mass market; we do lots of data entry, emails, and writing reports in SharePoint or with comments and track changes in Word."
"...we are not designers or knowledge workers solving issues, we handle data!"
The second sentence is what got me.
I know it's implied as the author's perspective, but speak for yourself.
I am a developer, designer, knowledge worker, and my products are used to solve business issues. There would be no point moving data around and making dashboards, products, automation, except for solving business problems or pushing the bottom line up through innovation.
The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.
I agree with the general thrust of the article, that in person routine working isn't needed. I work fully remote and collaborate better in many respects that way.
There is also value in having face to face meetings and conversations, body language, microexpressions, aspects of tone are all significantly more palpable in person.
BUT, that doesn't mean we should be in the office all the time, just for occasional face to face meetings. My employer is in another state, I visit for a bit every quarter or two.
It also doesn't change the fact that the return to office is motivated by micromanagement and stop losses on real estate.
“ The whole point of our jobs is to facilitate the needs of the business.”
But people conflate the needs of the business with the “needs” of the executives or investors. I have little faith that any exec that I have met that is capable of putting their own ego aside and honestly describe how RTO helps the business. Maybe it does help the business, but I haven’t seen anyone make that case.
I think a lot does boil down to generational differences in real estate entry prices.
Sometimes I think millennials fell into a trap following GenX back to urban living, but missed out on the sweet spot late 90s/early 00s where cities were attractive but also cheap.
I worked with guys 10 years older than me who bought apartments at 1/5 the prices my generation saw, but had starting salaries more than 1/2 of what ours were.
maybe this is an unpopular opinion but this culture of aggressively and publicly airing all grievances of current employer seems counterproductive for the job search when this person leaves due to said grievances. or maybe it's just a pre-match for future companies that "appreciate" this type of transparency. :shrug:
I'd bet that most people agree with you, which is why the people who actually do it get a lot of attention--from the other folks who want to, but can't. This particular topic notwithstanding, employers have so much leverage that it's risky to stick your neck out but I'm thankful there are people who do it.
I've worked remotely my entire career since the 90s with only a few short exceptions. It's a dealbreaker for me and always has been. I do not like to have people around when I'm working, I don't do office politics, I'm not willing to keep my mouth shut when Ted from Accounting starts talking right wing bullshit, and I'm more productive sitting on the patio of a cafe than I am in some shitty cubicle. On the few occasions I ever was required to come into an office and desperate enough for a paycheck that I did it, I always figured out the company was shady somehow. I'm closer to the end of my career, such as it is, than the beginning, but I'll be damned if I'll ever work in an office again. If you rented some luxurious ass space somewhere and spent your seed money on expensive furniture that's your problem. I need a laptop and a chair and a table and coffee and nicotine and for everyone to shut the fuck up and quit bothering me so I can do my job.
I'm currently negotiating a deal to get relocation assistance in exchange for being in the office sometimes, on a job that was intended to be fully remote. In my case, I need to leave my current state of residence for health reasons soon, and this company's campus is attractive enough that I'm excited anyways.
where does that number come from? and i cant imagine it applies equally across industries if it is true. 50% of software related job cant be 5 years to retirement?
And if people are just interchangeable widgets, that's a clever strategy.
People aren't, though. The most valuable people are the ones who have the most options, precisely because they are valuable. If you play that game, you're going to differentially lose your most valuable people. That's not a smart move.
I think there is a fallacy “if I am more productive at home than therefore all must be more productive at home”. Consider though that the most sophisticated companies in the world when it comes to analyzing human behavior are asking for employees to return to work, do you really think they would do this if this meant a productivity decrease. I’m suggesting the harsh reality is that while you may be more productive at home the majority of your colleagues are not and they unfortunately have ruined it for everybody. I don’t think this has anything to do with sunk office space costs, it’s about bottom line productivity.
Work is not only about what the company wants but also about what the employee needs. I don't see much difference between the ability to work from home and the ability to avoid working on weekends; the later is an acquired rights in many places, the former can come over time.
I would never work in an office again or for a company where the leadership pretends like there's some value to working in-person. My time and space are way too valuable to give them to some company. They can get my work on my own terms.
I’m so disgusted by the entitlement of “founders” and business folks who have never coded, forcing the technical people who make their lives possible to suffer for a pointless commute.
It’s to the point that I realized the tech industry may not be for me. I don’t want to be a shill for Bezos or Musk or some other tasteless billionaire. I may opt to leave entirely.
I’ve started religiously studying for the LSAT. Maybe if I work hard, I can push to make America better so these insipid fucks cannot play with our lives.
office work does not have to suck. main thing is to have small offices, 3-4 people per room. no open spaces. flexible working hours(if there is no trust between the employer and the employee, don't take the job in the first place). very few mandatory meetings. commuting should be no longer than 30 minutes by any means. good lavatory/facilities(you'd be surprised how important this is). small kitchen(home meal prep, or making simple lunch from scratch if needed), good dining and shopping options close by. air conditioning. no direct sunlight or strong neon lights. good furniture so you don't feel like you have travelled back in time into the 90s. good chairs and large computer monitors. and that is about it. it is not that hard to offer good working conditions.
> We are not pioneers or a Silicon Valley tech firm!
Working in a silicon valley tech company your still not innovating, I spend lot of my time making bullshit suck less.
And if I was innovating, and for the few times I did actually get to do something cool, I want a quiet room with no distractions so I can focus and research and hack on things. I think one of my most productive and innovative times at work I did a work-cation for a couple week, to a different timezone by 3 hours, no people interutpions and no slack interruptions.
This is not a good article. It has pretty much no argument against RTO and is entirely one-sided, not even mentioning any of the real advantages of working in an office.
Hopefully by this point everyone understands that office working has significant upsides for some jobs/people, and only downsides for others. Can we please stop saying "it's good" or "it's bad". It's like arguing whether marmite tastes nice.
For me, as a lowly code monkey I could never work anywhere where going to the office was mandatory again. The advantages aren't worth the commute. I would imagine if I was in upper management I might be more tempted though. Zoom just can't match real life.
I think OP is not arguing if working in the office is good or bad. The point, as far as I can understand, is about the way the return to office is presented to the workers. With sugary lies and fake cheer. It's like they're addressing toddlers in preschool.
This article and many in the comments represent the extreme sense of entitlement that tech workers have earned.
This attitude that you're a rockstar dev who doesn't need to collaborate closely with other people, that your coworkers are a tedious distraction, that your boss just doesn't understand, is completely childish. You are just trying to paint this picture of yourself as a lone genius. In the back of your mind, you think you could run the company all on your own, but you're wrong.
Generously, maybe 1-5% of people on HN actually embody this 2010s docudrama archetype, but it's not possible that all of you are that guy.
Why don't you just quit and put up your shingle as a contractor? You can set your own hours. You will have no pesky coworkers breathing around you. You can sleep until 2PM as long as your work gets done. You can be your own man. That is, unless, you don't think you could get a contract on the merits of your work...
Oh no, if only it were possible to collaborate without being forced into an office! Hopefully we can invent some sort of technology for communicating asynchronously to make this possible.
Professional collaboration almost always takes place on video calls these days - because headcount growth has been offshore for many years now, or because Silicon Valley campuses are too large to practically traverse in the “passing periods” on the hour and the half-hour between meetings.
Being seated in an open office makes it harder, not easier to join a video call. Especially since people below the rank of Director are not “entitled” to such luxuries as conference rooms, for most of the meetings they participate in. You’re at the mercy of noise cancelling technology at your seat on the floor, same as when you’re doing focus work. Only the microphone side is even less advanced than the headphone side. All to simulate the quiet room you could have had by staying home.
Some people enjoy going to the office to get out of the house though. I agree some of the messaging about needing to RTO is illogical but going to an office for work can be beneficial to fighting loneliness. That shouldn’t be a reason to RTO however. I think if you don’t enjoy the office it’s time to find a remote job and that anti-return to office rhetoric doesn’t necessarily apply to every company.
You should still have a seperation of spaces with your home and your work. If not, you focus less when working and relax less when chilling. It's doubly counterproductive.
You can have a separation of spaces within your home. I have a home office. The only time I go in there when I'm not working is if I left something there (and it's really nice that "swinging by the office to grab my earbuds" doesn't involve a commute).
As a result, I just don't think of that room as part of my home. I'm never tempted to go in there and use that room for something else. For the most part, it's as if that room only exists during the workday.
Thank you senior leadership for your wisdom, "If you don't like it, find another place to work". The first good advice I've heard from them in 5 years.
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