I don't think that is why you made a suboptimal choice; I think that's why you incorrectly think you made a suboptimal choice.
They might regret losing you, but that doesn't mean that good things would have happened if you tried to apply leverage before.
The act of trying to force someone to do something, whether by (implied) threat, logic, emotional manipulation, or whatever, can mortally wound a relationship making getting a concession you want moot.
As you say, the new job was "a lot better substance-wise", so it's a good thing you didn't try to hold their feet to the fire.
1. The underlying problem was still there — the management did not value your work to have a thoughtful policy that worked for both you and your employer. Rather than working with you, they chose an adversarial approach.
2. If you had gone back, they now know you can leave, so they will be looking to replace you as soon as they can, possibly even have you train their replacement.
3. Some independent contracting work for continuity may be appropriate if you care about the team and they had treated you well.
4. It is easier to get hired while you still have a job than while you do not.
I'm curious about the reasoning behind this opinion. As someone outside of the US (UK), I've interviewed a few people who were unemployed at the time but with a good level of experience and track record. People deciding to take some time off to do their own thing has never bothered me, if they can afford it then I think everyone deserves a sabbatical option.
I don’t know how it is in the UK. Here in the US, a hiring manager sees a gap in the resume and asks about that. This has been a problem for say, women who exited the workforce to take care of their kids and then attempt to reenter it. I suppose, even if there is no negative mark, if you have a stack of 30 or 40 resumes, you start using “relevant recent experience” as a way to filter down to the people you want to interview.
There is also a tendency for agism, worse in some industries or disciplines than in others — maybe some kind of cult of youth thing going on. (I have found that development teams favor younger developers, even for senior developers, while ops and devops tend to favor a slightly older crowd).
There is a great article explaining how a software developer can get better negotiating position that can potentially bypass that resume gap: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
... but only because you can do this with software development, not necessarily with anything else.
That'll also make you more relaxed during interviews (if you do bad/ask for too much the stakes are lower)
Precisely.
If you want to keep somebody on your team, you don't play this kind of game. These sort of zero-sum take-all-the-marbles negotiations are reserved for when you don't care at all about any future relationship (which should be very close to "never").
"Give me remote or I walk."
Versus,
"I found this great role at this other company, and the work they do satisfies me on a deep personal level. However, it's not remote, and if you let me stay remote, my present position would be way better. What do you feel would be right?"
I recommend everyone read Getting to Yes.
What you should actually do is politely request that you be allowed to work remotely, as you "realized that you are not looking forward to spending a significant chunk of your day commuting, and have realized that remote work is much better for your mental health". This is still a polite request, but fairly clear that you'll probably start looking for another job if they deny.
Yes, so, present the initiative not just or even primarily in terms of your own preferences, but in terms that highlight the benefits to your employer.
How would working remotely make your contribution more valuable and more flexible to your team and your org?
Sell that first. There's no risk. Even if it doesn't work first time, if you present it as part of an open discussion about their interests, needs, and pre-conceptions you'll learn something from their response.
If you feel that being on the spectrum limits your ability to see things from their point of view, depersonalise it by getting some help from a friend to divine your employer's perspective, and then take that view and treat it as an intellectual exercise for you to optimise a scenario. You're good at that.
You're suggesting negotiating with a hard sell, but the benefit should already be obvious to a good employer: your employee is asking for this, because they deeply want it, and it's essentially no problem to give it to them. Making the effort to ask is already a hard sell.
An employer saying 'no' thinks they have the power in this situation, and is choosing to express that power over an issue which primarily affects their employee's happiness.
Hard sell or not, it's time to quit.
In a theoretical world, everything would be obvious to everyone. The real world is not like that, because different people see things differently, because they have different vantage points, different interests, and different constraints. Most importantly, they have different pre-conceptions, because they have different experiences.
Selling a proposition that makes sense to both parties is not about exerting will over someone. It's the opposite. It's about searching for ways to do things differently that results in mutual benefit.
Traditionally, employers in all industries have conceived of their role as commanding and monitoring employees to ensure they do work, which, they tacitly assume the employee wants to shirk. It is the role of an enforcer, and it is based on a simplistic paradigm that's now officially out of date.
In 2021, the pandemic has shed new light on that relationship.
With no choice but to work from home, and with new tools such as Zoom and Teams, workplaces in all industries have found new ways to do things, and changed their conceptions about what works and what doesn't work.
The first thing people noticed is that some people are more productive working from home, and experience greater satisfaction. They are able to balance their roles as homemakers, family members, employees and change agents better because they can slice time more effectively.
They regain all the hours lost to commuting.
They gain some of the hours lost to unnecessary interruptions from colleagues.
For responsible employees who don't shirk work, the reasons for productivity gain aren't difficult to explain. What percentage of employees is that? It was already more than 0, and it's only growing higher with better tools and more knowledge of remote work experiences.
The next thing organisations learned is that not all employees had the same experiences. Introverts welcomed the isolation. Extroverts felt diminished in the absence of the energy they gained from interactions with colleagues.
The longer the pandemic went on, the more we learned. Institutional learning is still occurring because it takes at least a year for some metrics to even be accumulated and derived. The impact on the bottom line of the change in real estate requirement e.g. CBD towers will be profound, but it hasn't even been calculated yet, let alone analysed by accountants and executives.
What ftf meetings are necessary, and what meetings, virtual and ftf, are a waste of time? We started to learn that only when ftf meetings were impossible for an extended period.
Sure - but this doesn't change what I said.
You're saying that an employee is obligated to sell this (what they are currently already doing for employment) to their employer. But... the employer has already proven that they value this work, paid at that rate.
Surely, instead, the employer ought to sell coming back to the office to the employee. The employer can't depend on this being the default any more.
I think you're right. It's just a matter of how long it takes for the change to filter through to different industries and different levels of management.
How long does change take?
It depends on the org. Small businesses see the impact straight away. Their capacity to react appropriately depends on their resources. No small company could have developed their own effective videoconferencing tools, but any small company could adopt the technology once it existed in 2020, and many did. Many failed. It depends on industry category, and individuals.
For large orgs, it's difficult to see anything clearly in under 2 years, because the metrics have to be accumulated from regions, deciphered by the accounts department (using out of date filters), and then interpreted by the C suite (using out of date compensation metrics).
The fact that different individuals respond differently to workplace changes makes it even more convoluted to sort out the gains from the costs in this situation, and reconfigure executive information systems and management practices.
There's no reason for it, but ego, and emotionalism on both sides. Saying:
"I'm at a point where remote matters to me quite a bit, and I won't sacrifice pay for it. If you can't do it, I'll start applying with those who will, but I thought I owed you the honest truth."
It doesn't need to be emotionally driven. Just honest truth.
And I get that, as you say, bizarrely negative consequences can follow.
Me? I respect the truth. I can work with it. I want to hear it.
Many don't.
Yet, maybe this is an additional indicator of employer value, and potential toxicity?
> Many don't.
We're not negotiating with you, we're negotiating with an average boss picked out of the "many" pile.
I get that this causes issues for many.
That is what people say when they have options and can dictate terms. It only gets emotional when one party does not have the clear upper hand and so tries to “feel” the other party out to see what they will yield.
So my "no reason for it" was stated with this in mind.
As an employer, I'd like to know. Other employers seem to be vindictive, which I find bizarre. Worse, enough employers act this way, that they poison the pool.
Then these same employers act surprised, and wonder why they get little warning when an employee leaves.
Silly.
They're not just boring, they're dangerous and expensive, especially if you're commuting by car. Commutes are responsible for a 9.91% drop in hourly wages[1].
Using the media commute time, a commuter might spend close to 10 days per year just commuting, and in some cases it's closer to two full weeks[1]:
> In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.
And in the winter... It's just torture on the body.
The people I don't want to live among are the kind that have a lot of money and not a lot of problems.
I get along better with street pharmacists than I do with doctors and lawyers.
If you're already in place and have proven that you're good at what you do, this is the way to go.
"I wanted to let you know that I'll be staying remote from here on out. This last year has been a huge improvement in quality of life for me, and honestly I couldn't imagine working out of an office again. I'd love to stay with you guys (this is a great team), so let me know if that's an option. If not, I'm sure I can wind down my projects by next month."
Good developers are hard to find, and the market right now is on fire, so you're a lot more valuable to them then they are to you.
Even back when that was less the case than today, this was my standard method of negotiating things like long leaves of absence and shortened work weeks. I've written about it previously:
https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vac...
I'd leave out the last sentence, it doesn't add anything and just makes the threat to quit more in your face thus confrontational.
Also instead of finishing with "so let me know if that's an option." I'd go more like "so let me know what options we can explore to make this happen." The first one is a take it or leave it, the second says you're flexible on details as long as you get to be remote.
The point is that you communicate that you are very interested in staying, love the team and willing to work with management to find any reasonable solution to make this work. If you make it an ultimatum the more likely response is "Sad to see you go, ok bye."
As much as I think this is true, somehow experience tells me the other way around: valuable employees leaving company X doesn't make company X sweat. Company X just hires more... and there is always someone who can be hired. A couple of months later, everything is alright again and once realized that that valuable employee was just another cog in the machine.
The truly good employers are a rarity.
They don't, especially those who know they can find someone who's eager to jump in and work for less pay.
Really? I thought the market was saturated. I've read many horror stories of people sending hundreds of applications out that lead to a few interviews that lead to zero offers.
Everything is a negotiation. You have only limited power over your employer.
If you think you can "dictate", you don't understand the relationship you have.
If what you think "dictating" works, that is because it really is a negotiation and your employer decided they will meet your demands.
"Dictating" may get you a label attached, that you are hard to negotiate with, fussy, capricious, etc.
Don't do it. It is much better to sound reasonable because it has much better chance to be met with reasonable answer.
So not everything is a negotiation. Sometimes it's just offer and decission.
Will the company fold if you leave it?
I have personally been in this situation and even then I have negotiated because the owners were only able to put so much money and above that they would prefer to just cut their losses and dissolve the company.
> If you can leave the next day there's no much room for the employer to negotiate anything.
No, you just decided to give them your terms and allow the company to only approve or deny them. You take away their ability to negotiate with you in response to your demands but you did not take their ability to make their own decision. You did not dictate anything.
You would dictate if you had actual power over the company.
You are not really a dictator if they can refuse your offer, are you?
I'm just saying that statement "everything is a negotiation" is not true. Because if you refuse to participate in any bargaining then there's no negotiation. Just a statement (from one side) and decision (from the other).
I see you are mostly opposed to the word dictate because you understand it as employee dictating what company will do. And he's obviously not capable of that.
The word dictate used by OP was about dictating the terms of decision they have to make, not dictating what the decision should be.
I am not native English speaker, but the dictionaries are rather precise that authority is a necessary ingredient of being able to dictate something.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dictate
"to give orders, or tell someone exactly what they must do, with total authority"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dictate
"to issue as an order; to impose, pronounce, or specify authoritatively"
If you don't have authority over the company you can still think you are dictating, but that's not how the company views it.
The company view is "are you too much of a problem for the benefit of keeping you?" not "John said it so we must do it because he has authority around here".
There is a bit of nuance here. As someone else mentioned, he is not saying he is literally dictating what decision the employer must make, he is dictating his own terms.
In fact, you conveniently left out a definition that doesn't fit your argument from the pages you linked:
> to influence something or make it necessary
Example (from the Cambridge URL that you linked): "He shouldn't be allowed to dictate all the terms and conditions - it's supposed to be a democratic decision."
That's exactly what OP is doing. Dictating the terms and conditions. Influencing what "must be done". Giving them an ultimatum, by dictating his conditions. He is "dictating" in this case, because he does have total authority on his own actions. If they do not cede, he will leave.
It's kind of a semantic argument, and moot at that, but even the resources you linked support OP's usage of the word dictate.
However, I'm not sure it is the way to go for employment contracts where you have an ongoing relationship with the other party.
If you your image is already of a bright immature developer (basically a prodigy grownup child) and you hold a lot of value for the company, then it might be useful to do something like that just to make the point that you really mean it, if they did not feel you are going to go through with your threat.
On the other hand if the image of myself that I try to create is that of a rational person that aims at finding solutions to problems, that wants to take more responsibility for bigger problems for the company, doing something like that could potentially be very damaging.
There is many ways to make the threat believable. First is not making threats that you are not willing and prepared to go through. If you have a history of mentioning on multiple occasion that you are going to leave the company then your next threat is not really believable because the only difference between it and previous attempts is in your mind.
Second, I am prepared. Having facts and being prepared for the discussion is immediate indication to the other person that you are serious enough to put some effort. Never go to a discussion like that on a whim, just after a stimulus that triggered you.
Third, I reduce this to just business. Business is language your managers talk and understand on daily basis. I explain that I have obligation to the family and there is only so much I can do to stay at the company if I have other, better paid options. I don't complain at the company, I don't try to create false image of accomplishment that somebody can see through. Instead I put it logically so they understand I have logically arrived at conclusion they also agree with that there is absolutely no way for me to stay unless they concede at least something. That this is just business and I have no ill thoughts or intentions, that as much as possible I would like to remain at the company but it is the logic that compels me to change job.
If I wanted to stay working remotely but my company did not I would try to do following:
1. Set up the meeting in advance and give advance of the topic that I want to broach. This gives them time to prepare but also makes it less useful for them to say they need to think about it after we have finished the meeting.
2. I would come prepared with arguments to show that working remotely was not detrimental to my productivity and in fact I was more productive because I was able to manage my time better.
3. I would empathize with why they would want to bring people back to the office, but then point out that even though not every person is, I am grown up, reasonable person and I don't need handholding to manage my time and keep pulse on my productivity.
4. I would say that my family is so happy with me working remotely that now this becomes a requirement so much, that if I can't meet that requirement with my current company I will have to start looking around for a job that will suit me. No hard feelings, but I am pressed by outside factors.
5. I would point out there is a new market for remote work and I am more than capable of finding a new job that will be paying reasonably for remote position.
6. I would ask that if they have some specific concerns about me doing my work remotely when the rest of the team does not, they bring it up to me and I trust we can reasonably discuss and find some solutions and we can delay my decision to leave the company until such time they decide that it is not working for them.
The outcome is still the same (they agree or not) but now they know they are talking to a reasonable person they can solve future problems with. Because I am not unpredictable and unreasonable it pays more to invest a little bit in the relationship.
Whenever someone on my team has approached me to say they have a better offer but they'll stay if I can match the terms I've always recommended they take the offer even if I'd be sad to lose them. Keeping someone on the team who is unhappy enough to go through the hiring process and find a new role is a short term fix at best.
And although some companies make their hiring process like pulling teeth, there are plenty of employers where you only need a single day off work.
And don't all managers try to keep an eye on employees' frustration levels? If you don't, you should; it's kinda important for retention. If you only learn people are unhappy when it's too late, how are you going to know to take corrective action?
Of course, there will always be some people who get offers it's pointless to match - if I develop business software, and a guy who's always wanted to be a game developer gets a job offer from Valve, maybe he should take it :)
You can't necessarily infer "is unhappy here" from "has an offer from another firm".
You absolutely can infer that if the person has come to you saying they're considering taking the offer. People don't consider offers from other companies unless there's a reason why they might want to leave where they are now.
Some people think an offer is leverage they can use to improve their current role, but really it's a signal that the person is already half out of the door and the company should say goodbye and start recruiting a replacement.
It seems pfp did it right by first making their requirements well known and then putting themselves in a good negotiation position.
Or they may have not been lying but just reacting to circumstances. They can’t give everyone everything needed to make everyone stay if the threaten to leave but they can do it for the one who does actually threaten to leave.
As a team lead I don’t believe in convincing someone to stay if they took an offer. Their heart and soul has left the building!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
Today I learned.
More importantly, BATNA gives you confidence in your asks. Many people simply don't negotiate at all. Trying to negotiate salary and conditions in the absence of a BATNA requires a level of social skill and confidence that many people simply don't have.
"Sorry, but I'm currently not accepting in-office work. If my employment is contingent on new in-office policies, I'm afraid I'll be tendering my resignation."
I completely agree, but for most people it requires them to have something to fall back on. Which can be extremely hard to establish in our current economic climate, since it prioritizes businesses over people.
The logical position is to treat your (and every) employer as an aggressively exploitative entity, that wouldn’t hesitate for a microsecond to cut you loose.
Build contacts, develop your network, plan your career, and most importantly, actually work consciously towards having absolutely no loyalty, empathy or compassion for any employer... that will still be a more generous position than how any employer will view you (unless they are actively breaching their fiduciary duties).
I would take that advise with a massive grain of salt. I know someone that was working for a company that wasn't exactly working with state of the art tech. He pretty much dictated how he wanted to work there: iMac instead of a really weird PC setup, modern tooling instead of C++ which he really disliked. He went totally megalomanic, negotiated even different working hours, went with Taxi to work and 2 years later he had some kind of burn out and had to pause working for a year. In his own words, he wasn't able to program anymore. I think he completely lost it.
That said, there are plenty of places offering long-term remote. Why would you work for a place that you need to force to give you the treatment that another place would be happy to give you? Probably with the job change it's even possible to get a little extra salary.
Absolutely this. The market for talent is going to be incredibly hot in the coming months. You should have no problems finding remote work.
Every situation is different, but I wouldn't use it as an ultimatum. If you see cockroaches in the kitchen, then there's probably rats. If your leadership doesn't have the maturity to look past their dogma and continue a successful experiment, what other bad decisions are they making at your expense?
This comes a privileged position. There many, many developers who don't have that kind of sway with employers. The most likely option is, if you threaten to leave, employers will just say, "OK. Go ahead." And easily find a replacement.
I've been in this position a couple times with pay raises... and to be honest once this happens the job is more or less dead for me anyway.
To only pay me what I asked because I'm leaving absolutely obliterates my trust.
I have no way of knowing if this has resulted in better salary increases over the years than if I had played it differently but it certainly feels better than working for people who I feel are cheating and lying to me.
In any negotiated situation, both sides can usually give a bit more until they reach their limit. Maybe the employee could offer an extra few hours of focussed work and the employer can offer an extra 5% salary. That’s where the negotiation lands.
That can flex on either side as leverage and options move, but it’s just business.
The alternative is to nail everyone to the wall in every negotiation but that doesn’t seem constructive long term.
If you really want to stay, you can still look for another offer with the conditions you want, and use it to point out that the company is being unreasonable in its demands and that market conditions for labour have shifted, and actually they are putting themselves in a bad position trying to enforce their preferences against prevailing conditions.
(IMO most people shouldn't go more than a few years without checking the job market and getting an offer, even without intent to switch jobs.)
Also - it's wrong and arrogant to make the claim that there is universal disdain for office work. You can have your view, that's fine, but don't assume that it's consistent with the views of others.
I'm not joking either. I tried negotiating this (pre-covid), only to get a "final offer" of a measly couple of remote days etc. Being on the spectrum, I took their word at face value, found another job that does 100% remote, and put in my resignation. Surprisingly that "absolutely final" position wasn't that final anymore, and they'd've rather had me remote than not at all. Had the new job not been a lot better substance-wise, the whole exercise would have been total waste of time.
Of course you'll want to dictate from a position where you can follow your ultimatum if need be.
The nearing end of Covid is where people like us can - indeed must - make a stand against the returning suffocating madness of boring commutes, noisy open plan offices, incessant context switches; against sacrificing one's creativity, flow and personal space to placate the emotional instincts and biases of the excessively social who rarely do the heavy lifting in our sector.
Stay determined and keep up the good work.