Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be much more appropriate than firing “for cause”!

> I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida. Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim).

In the Re: Amazon article linked at the bottom of my post, the employee says:

> Now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. I moved to this area 13 years ago. I own a house here. My partner has a career here. I've built a home here.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over...

Who else?

Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah.

Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare.

It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.

Of course few, if any of these execs will admit they got it wrong. That the root of the problem was their heavy-handed mandates and how they compromised the brand in the (employment) market.

And they always complain about stuff like that, even when they aren’t playing games!

I think you see where this is going :)

It's rarely so easy when times get lean, but everyone has a different experience for sure!

A great many people say they’ll leave ‘any day now’, or ‘after my next paycheck’ - but then somehow never do.

The point is, those environments, those cultures don't capture and retain top talent. Again, those who can...do (i.e., leave).

re: "Everybody leave..." Come on. You've got to do better than this. This isn't Reddit.

And I’m going to have to quote Sturgeon’s law here. “90% of everything is crap”.

If 90% of employers are crap, (or 90% of jobs in an industry?), there is going to be a lot of competition for the 10% that aren’t with the crap employers or with the crap jobs. In conditions like we have today, many of the top 10% will even relax their standards (sliding closer to crap), since they just need to beat their competition not be perfect.

All they need to do to outrun the bear is run faster than the next guy, not be the fastest in the world.

So not everyone is going to get one of those nice ones, pretty much by definition no?

I wish you luck with finding one, and making the move if your current employer sucks.

Many won’t, for valid reasons. And employers are counting on that. For valid reasons (even if we all hate it).

That is my observation.

How you decide to position yourself (and plan), and how they decide to position themselves (and plan) is of course up to each participant.

“Market Dynamics” is discussed as if it is a physics problem.

Markets are social creations - they are a human way to effectively allocate resources.

They are also constantly being manipulated and shaped to better achieve certain outcomes over others.

When these outcomes are bent to serve the benefits of the few, or to serve the benefits of a principle that isn’t human wellness, its is a pointless market.

The rules against oligopolies, monopolies, fraud and manipulation are to ensure the social purpose of the market is achieved.

By extension - a market that by nature forces RTO, when WFH is superior to the majority of humans, is a market that needs to be fixed.

A negligible % of firms include commute time as a part of your salary. WFH means that you can save nearly an hour every day, doing any number of things that add economic value to humanity.

Your statement seems to be one of 'should' due to social factors largely outside of the various actors control and/or self-interest.

Which in my experience tends to mean 'I wish was', not 'will be', let alone 'is'. Unfortunately. But pressure applied to various regulators, PR campaigns, etc. could change that! I wish whoever wants to spend the time and effort doing so the best of luck. When that happens, the factors will change.

In the end, labor markets only care about the wellbeing of participants as much as they have to - because labor will either actually not participate, or regulators will actually intervene, etc.

If someone is willing (and able) to commute 12 hrs a day to fill a job, and an employer is willing to employ that person at the rate they want, that will often happen barring better deals. Stochastically of course.

One can think of it in relation to energy states (when markets get above a certain size) if one was in the mood.

As always though, just as in said physics or chemistry problems, individual 'atoms' can and will end up in wildly different states from the median.

But that a single atom may be a movement/vibration rate equivalent to 100C doesn't mean the temperature of the solution isn't 25C (for example). Or that it won't average out over time for that atom as it collides/interacts with others.

Folks on both sides are allowed to make decisions others disagree with (within bounds), and suffer or enjoy the consequences appropriately.

While having a moral right to something (or not) is definitely important, when push comes to shove it’s the legal rights that come into play.

Legally recognized rights tend to underpin most definitions of ‘rights’ someone has, since if the legal system doesn’t recognize it, it’s nearly inevitable it will be stomped on at some point with no recourse.

And when that happens regularly, it’s hard to claim it’s a right anymore as practically it isn’t.

No one is forcing you to sell your home. You could rent your home and move temporarily until you find a suitable remote replacement.

Or, you could just quit outright.

The standard advice is stay in the house at least five years. These people accepted permanent remote roles at companies that have been remote-friendly for only two years. The track record's not there; you can't reasonably assume that policy would continue indefinitely. It might, but it's clearly a risk.

Remote work availability and pay were often much lower. Further, if you were in my company, you had HR and C-Levels saying "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?"

I resent being lied to. Had they been more careful and put this out more as a "Hey, this is only temporary" I'd be far less disappointed. That's not how they rolled and they didn't even have the guts to simply admit "Hey, we just made a mistake here, remote work isn't working for us"

Pretty much exactly this happened at my company. They started touting these new offices they got for a steal, but in the all-hands said "our company has never required anyone to come in to the office and we never will". Three months later, they start encouraging everyone to come in once a week. Three months later, they changed it to 'we expect you to be in 4 days a week', and in the all-hands one of the founders went "We never said we wouldn't have you come back into the office. I love seeing people in person, that would be silly of me to say!"

Technically it's not a requirement, just an "expectation", so I still haven't gone in more than necessary. But I'm not expecting a great performance review next year because of it, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll stick around either (it does look like most other places are being even worse about it right now, though). I was so angry to hear that.

Not the only time they gaslit either. They also had a round of layoffs about six months ago while trying not to call them layoffs ("we let a bunch of people go today, it's not a layoff though, they just weren't performant enough to work here"), that really rubbed me the wrong way too.

Because sometimes that will be required.

You are quite correct that continuing on with the company (or in that corner of the industry) may - well, likely will be - impossible afterwards. Few things say 'burnt bridges' like a lawsuit. That said, being fired because of a promise they broke is them starting the bridge on fire anyway.

Either way, the CYA handbook is - document, document, document. And keep it where no one but you has control over it. You have no power if you can't prove anything. And documents 'go missing' or get 'automatically removed' from company equipment all the time in situations like this.

knowing if you even have a case or complaint is also important - which is only going to be possible if you can see what was actually said (not what you remember being said) or written. Sometimes we hear what we want to hear, not what was said. Knowing that BEFORE you show up in court is rather important.

I would keep it anyway for your records, due to it helping your claim for unemployment benefits by establishing constructive dismissal as opposed to termination for cause. But it might not work even then.

When changing direction results in actionable torts against employees, then employees are also entitled to be made whole (to some extent).

And I meant prosecution in the sense of ‘driving to an actual successful resolution including getting paid what you’re owed’ - which can be for breach of contract, illegal dismissal, constructive dismissal, etc.

There are a million ways for a company to fire someone without ‘firing’ them, which they’ll often use if they don’t want to pay out unemployment/owed vacation or the like. Many companies will target expensive employees first (age/seniority, expensive physical health issues, mental health problems, or they just think they ‘aren’t a team player’, or are harder to manager. etc.).

I see changes to these documents as similar to the change in T's & C's for any service I use; your continued use of the service denotes acceptance of the new terms. You're welcome to leave at any time.

Not sure what you can litigate against.

0: anecdotal from the past 15 years

If course, they rarely actually say that. But some folks have definitely been dumb enough to do so.

The issue with contract law is that most folks never put things in writing, so it’s a pain to litigate many claims, which makes it uneconomic to recover damages.

But if it’s in writing? Sounds like an easy to show breach of contract to me!

If it's a general policy that "we are remote", but your contract wasn't updated to reflect that, then don't be surprised if it changes.

If it gets changed in a way that causes you injury, guess what - you can be and should be compensated. If you can prove these things, then it should even be relatively easy to do so.

Contract law is not just things that say ‘contract’ on them. It is about agreements between parties.

Usually what I’ve done is brute force. Every State has a State bar that usually has listings. Google Maps searches for ‘employment attorney near me’ or ‘civil law attorney near me’ also usually gives a lot of matches.

I dump it all into a spreadsheet, and then go down the list taking notes and calling each one. Attorneys should give a free consult (anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour).

Try to learn as much as you can about the applicable law and the situation; and ask questions. Not just what is legal/not-legal, but their history in getting actual results for clients and what the courts will actually take seriously or not.

Don’t pick anyone right away. Call at least 3, preferably 10 in each speciality.

If you like them and they like you, they’ll either take you on contingency or ask you to give them a retainer (funds to be put into a trust they can bill against). Either way there will be some paperwork they’ll have you sign before they’re ’your attorney’.

Additionally, some things to look out for -

1) anyone that makes you pay up front for a consultation is bad news. Run away.

2) anyone that promises a result is bad news. Run away.

3) Anyone who takes a case without asking specific questions and arguing with you sometimes is bad news. Run away.

4) anyone who tells you something that seems wrong (and you can’t verify independently, even after you ask for a reference) is probably bad news. Run away if you even suspect it.

Employment law is its own speciality.

Contract law is generally a subset of civil law. Civil law is a huge umbrella, from ‘my neighbors tree dropped a branch on my house’ to ‘the mega corp. in my county has been poisoning the water for decades and I got cancer’. You’ll run across attorneys who handle many different areas, ask them what they do and what their style is.

I hope this helps!

P.S. most states and countries put their laws online. There is still usually case laws which modify it, and gotchas, etc. but you can figure out 95% of it if you find them and do your own research. Leginfo.ca.gov is the California One. When you’re talking to attorneys, feel free to ask them for applicable cases and/or codes to start looking at.

Flexibility (both in being able to say yes, and no) is important. Not being abusive is important too.

A lot of folks have lost their minds over the last few years (more than most), and it’s going to be interesting for sure how this all plays out.

Anything non-monetary that they take away from you should be offered in compensation and/or renegotiation. You should not be allowing changes to your employment contract without approval, especially ones where they are removing amenities.

The company has already had to revise down their earnings estimates a couple times this year, and hasn't bothered to replace about 20-30 other employees that have quit in the months since then (despite several of them being star employees).

That's why it felt like gaslighting to me, claiming these people weren't good employees and that's why "it wasn't a layoff" (even if that were true, it's still a layoff).

1. Real estate holding investment increases.

2. Control.

3. Silent layoffs.

There's no reason for RTO. None. They're doing it to save money and regain control of their workforce.

The result in my experience is you have either fullish remote or you need just as many desks so very little saving from a company point of view.

Sounds like motivated reasoning.

There are valid reasons for RTO like better communication or even better control over employees. It's a question of trade-offs.

[three reasons for RTO] "There's no reason for RTO. None." [perhaps another]

It’s all about pros/cons and either sides approach.

One big one you didn’t list - it’s really hard to a manager to see what is actually happening when remote, which can let some serious problems fester.

Some (but not most!) employees may be burning out, or violating security or labor rules, or not following company policies, or whatever, and these would be trivial to detect in person, but nearly impossible to do so remotely. And almost definitely impossible to do anything about effectively while remote.

Incompetent leaders cannot manage people remotely and they generally do a poor job when in person, but it's masked by their ability to micromanage and type-A the problem away.

Yup, our commercial real was essentially fully vacant. So they rolled out these silly blended schedules (literally just electronically sign in to the office by physically being there once a week, no time req). Now they can say, hey our office space is 90% utilized on a weekly basis! I think commercial real estate investors are going to see right through this charade, but maybe I'm overestimating them.

You have several from major cities (NYC, SF, etc.) saying on the record that they are going to speak to CEO's and push for RTO so that downtowns, local businesses, and neighborhoods can go back to "normal."

Not everybody works or can work in an office. Not everybody can work in tech. Cities are symbiotic, they offer employment to both knowledge workers and non-knowledge workers.

Sorry but you can't just write off the needs of that 50% of the population that aren't techcels. Yes, you will come back to cities, yes, you will re-create thriving downtowns, yes, you will do your bit.

Service sector workers will not tolerate being turned into gigbots and stuffed into ghost kitchens so the PMC elite can pretend they don't exist.

Perhaps this will make things go to how they should be, which means that you work locally because that's where the demand for your services is.

Not just income or payroll taxes, but also regular traffic simulating the local bars, cafes, gas stations & oil changers, dry cleaning, late night pizza, you name it. If these folks can't make their nut then they can't pay rent, and end up moving away or going out of business. Then the problem snowballs.

And then there are the other sources of cash, i.e. speeding tickets, parking fines, and jaywalking citations.

Arguably this is the 'invisible hand of the market' doing its thing, but it's hard to run a municipality if your year-by-year tax base could change dramatically.

It doesn't need to fix things. It just needs to appear they're "doing something."

I've even heard of companies reversing the RTO mandate after the desired number of employees have left. Or just not actually enforcing it and soft-pedaling the whole thing.

It is working out.

I looked at a few financial statements for a few companies pushing RTO (Amazon and a couple of Wall Street firms). Granted, it wasn't comprehensive or scientific, but: They all made more money in 2022 than in 2019 (the last year before COVID).

So I really do not see what the problem is.

Social bonding is much harder, but important for reliable collaboration, especially when there are disagreements. I also believe that conversations are more likely to derail when they aren't in person. I've also been part of so many lunch conversations in the office that resulted in someone being able to help out someone on a different team with an issue they had solved themselves previously, learn about activities on another team that were relevant to them etc. There are ways to achieve similar things in a remote setup, but it's hard, especially to deploy across large companies with thousands of people. For the record, I've worked fully in person, hybrid and remote and think hybrid is by far the hardest to make work.

Communicating effectively on camera is a learnable skill, it's not one most people in tech have. But making sure people are trained to do a good job is a management challenge and it's incumbent upon management to make sure people are doing it. If, after two years, your team still has trouble having real conversations over a teleconferencing solution? That's a management failure.

"Lunchroom conversations" are arguably the hardest thing to foment in a remote environment for sure, but between things like cross-teams with breakouts and the like, you can do it. And some people are going to do it naturally; I know what most of my director's peers' teams are up to and I have contacts in all of them, while also touching base with them on a regular basis. If your teams don't have people who do this naturally, assign it. If you don't, that too is a management failure.

"It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

I would stress the video capability, though, because that's the thing that impacts how people feel in pretty substantial ways. I have a weekly 90-minute meeting every Friday where my product teams bring questions to both ask me and to kick around with a group, and so far the feedback has been excellent--and a direct reason cited is that I'm not just letting the meeting wander but I am leading it, I'm standing up while on camera and projecting excitement and a reason to be engaged. When compared with the interminable-drone meetings the rest of the week, it really drives the point home that you have to talk to people like you want them to listen to you, and that is much harder on a camera but it is a totally learnable skill.

Ones thing about meeting in physical space that I miss is directionality and locality of sound. If we are sitting with 4 people at a table at lunch, we can organically switch between having a single shared conversion or two different ones.

> "It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

Agreed. Different from a power trip though. IMO it's just ineptitudes.

This would simulate the thrill and "buzz" of managing a busy office for these executives to cosplay without having to drag unwilling employees back.

WFH gave those damn individual contributors some agency and prevented dead weight middle management from Lumberghing. Pretty soon they start thinking they're people and having some work/life balance.

Private equity that owns companies also owns stakes in commercial real estate. If companies start breaking leases or renting less office space those private equity firms will lose money. The worst thing in the world is your economic betters losing money. How else will that money trickle down in warm little showers of gold?

A better acronym for RTO would be KYP: Know Your Place.

It's not about making money. They need to make more of it, by pushing margin growth.

It's an absolute value extraction play from investment groups that hurts every company it touches.

Ironically, during peak covid lockdowns, "this is only temporary" may have actually been seen as reckless and irresponsible. "There's a pandemic! We need to be remote for the foreseeable future, not just temporarily!1!1" (etc...)

During peak covid, a lot of people made decisions that they reneged or reversed later. I'll get downvoted if I empathize with the executives making these decisions, but all I'll say is that no one had a crystal ball in 2020/2021. I give a lot of people the benefit of the doubt that they believed what they were saying at the time they said it (even if they have since reversed their opinion).

I don't think anyone was expecting the tech bubble to burst until it did. I don't think anyone was expecting the degree of inflation which led to interest rates which led to big tech downsizing, etc. A lot of people made a lot of mistakes. One of the top mistakes a lot of companies made was hiring people outside of their HQ cities and they're trying to correct that now.

Edit: To be clear I'm a proponent of remote work. Our company has been remote since before covid. Pro tip for anyone in the job market: look for companies that were remote pre-Covid and be skeptical about WFH promises if the company was forced to go remote after 2020.

I bought a house as soon as I could once the interest rate drops happened. Prices were going up by more than my net income each month.

"Yes, we see all of these price changes, but don't worry it will go back to normal after the pandemic" ... which people went along with for a while, until it was clear that prices weren't dropping back to normal.

While no one has a crystal ball it was known pre pandemic that bubbles were there and unsustainable and not far from being at bursting levels.

I know many in my circle were talking about when the dominoes would fall and which ones would topple which others in 2020-2022 as the pandemic raged on. The inevitable outcome of the social supports on top of the economic bubbles happening and then both likely ending at similar times was predictable in anyone thinking in longer terms than the next quarter and next fiscal year.

Meanwhile CEOs took advantage of conditions to go on insane M&A deals, hiring sprees and personal project schemes with little framework for any of that succeeding long term, and burning tons of cash with stock buybacks to keep up with the expected growth targets.

Once the 'Bubble' everyone saw about to burst met the realities of the pandemic and costs rippled through supply chains no one should have been surprised. Unfortunately the tech segment is way too much follow the leader/money right now and once the few big names start moving it happens regardless of it being good or bad.

I've come to view this as a personality type, the eager salesman (or less charitably, the habitual bullshitter). They will say whatever serves their needs at the moment, and never carries any long-term weight. When they say "we never said that", they actually mean it -- because what they remember were their unspoken motivations, not the words they spoke to achieve it. You can probably find them in the hierarchy of most organizations, as they're good with words and ready to commit to new strategies. They must be, because they need to have a new strategy ready for when the old one inevitably fails. Admitting to mistakes is not part of their personality, the most you will get (if anything) is that their idea was sound but the problem was in the execution or in unforeseen (by them) circumstances.

Learn to recognize the type. If their goals align with yours, they can be useful idiots, but always have a counter-strategy for when the winds inevitably turn.

Before COVID, most places operated without tools such as Microsoft Teams and an assumption that remote work is untested and unproven to work in their setting. This is now not the case, and people are rightly questioning why a return is necessary. They've proven they can make it work and that they know what works, but are unjustifiably being told otherwise by people that don't actually know what works.

When the internet goes down, why aren't people simply just sending faxes? An example of pride in their work: Imagine being asked to work for a week on a project and once completed, being told to delete it without consideration because management irrationally decided to go a different direction before considering your project, you'd be understandably upset even though you were paid to do it.

The compensation is correlated with confusion.

If that were the case there wouldn't be a push to return to the office. There is a difference between making it through an event like COVID vs making forward business progress. Certainly there's a place for remote work but the higher you go in management the more you see the holes remote work creates. Realistically, employees should push hard for return to office and then no work out of the office. The reality is that as the job market tightens the expectation is going to be in office AND work from home. Vacation days will morph into work from home days. An expectation to answer emails after hours is already turning into an expectation to be online and available for zoom calls much later than normal working hours.

I truly hope the line between leave and work doesn't blur.

You're missing the inherent power dynamics of owners versus employees

The C suites at the top down to middle (mangle) management want RTO because their goals align with real estate value and tax incentives

Mangelement want it because acting as vague wardens for a bunch of people tied to desks for no reason means their jobs have meaning

This. Finding the balance is challenging.

- It is often unhealthy to expect too much from work.

- most software/hardware tech employers ask employees to be more than contractors and to care more than just a paycheck

- at the same time we see corporate decisions that are largely shortsighted, and sometimes even self-defeating.

I don’t have a history of belonging to a union, nor promoting worker-owned cooperatives, but I am a student (so to speak) of public policy and history. To use political economy terminology, we often see misaligned incentives: people with a little technical experience, calling the shots on everything from where we work (office, remote, etc) to how we work (remember cubicles? They were better than open office for anyone like me.)

Software and hardware engineers have been a key differentiating factor for tremendous technological advancement and meteoric corporate growth. Why don’t we have more influence on how we work at the least?

One key aspect seems damning: could it be because for most of us, as we get successful, we don’t pay it forward? And where are the ‘politically active’ retired engineers? Many of us cash out and become investors ourselves. I suppose we get working on other interesting technical problems and treat the lack of workplace control as immutable? To some extent, I’ve seen the problem and it is us.

Or maybe the business world is structured so that being “just a worker” relegates you to a second class status. Maybe there’s no point in hoping even a group of 1,000 of the relatively wealthy of us (to throw out a number: let’s say we define that as having net worth over $2M in the USA) could’ve made a difference? But I know this isn’t true; I largely notice a gaping hole where collective organizing could be.

Of course, there’s plenty blame to go ‘round. Anyone who seeks venture-capital has to make a Faustian bargain, trading a blood infusion for improbable expectations of growth.

The tech industry has grown so rapidly, adding people at a breakneck pace, that maybe we don’t think of this as being important. New SW/HW hires at least get paid well, we tell ourselves, even if they don’t really get to shape or work places as much as we should.

Our negotiating power is not as strong as it once was, and it isn’t getting any better, in my view. Will we act? Soon? Ever?

There will always be toads, but there might be some people in there, too.

The engineer who wants to deliver their project in return for their salary, in contrast to the sociable c-suite exec, who wants to cosplay the work environment of yesteryear.

This applies to the wider corporate world and not even just the tech industry but I understand it's relevance as this is HN.

There is a famous prayer where one asks to be strong enough to change the things one can, humble enough to not requiring the changes you can't, and wise enough to know the difference. I don't remember it literally, but should be easy to find.

Anyway, work from home just got promoted from something you can change into something you can. As it happened, the healthy thing changed from not expecting it into demanding it (if you want).

My phones are 1) a VOIPphone, and 2) a mobile device. The former relies on the internet; the latter can't send a FAX. PSTN is 90's technology, fewer and fewer people have a PSTN line.

Yup - it was much cheaper, my previous phone connection was from a cable company, and I already had internet. And as it turns out, VOIP seems to be more reliable than PSTN. And my (boutique) ISP specializes in VOIP.

I wouldn't have even bothered with VOIP, and just relied on mobile telephony; but I don't trust mobile providers, and I wanted a landline-style local phone-number.

That's why there is resentment. There was resentment before too, but it was more below the radar because it was always shot down with "we work better in person" and there really wasn't much an argument to be had.

But now those people have hard data that they clearly work just as well at home or even better. So now they have data to back up their desires.

And then there's all the people that didn't know they wanted to work remotely, until they were forced to experience it.

Literally the only people losing in this arrangement are the same parasites who win at literally every other juncture in our society and just, I'm sick to DEATH of it. I will DIE on this hill. I hope the commercial real estate market fucking craters. I hope every company doing this RTO shit dies on the vine. I hope it sucks for every single person in the parasite class who loses more than 2 dollars on everything. I hope it crashes the price of real estate in big cities and makes them affordable again. I hope it makes my home worth less because homes shouldn't be a fucking investment vehicle in the first place.

To borrow the bugs bunny meme, I wish every landlord a very happy get a real job.

So it depends on circumstances and preferences. Both modes should be possible.

But that doesn't solve for the folks behind us on the ladder; how effective are we being at mentoring and growing those people, how easily are they learning the small nuances that we picked up in hallway conversations, serendipitous meetings, and so on. For the company, this is a real concern, but it's harder to measure. To better advocate for remote work, I think we really need to pour more time and energy into this and call out techniques that can be more effective here. For example: having leaders write a weekly newsletter, or getting into the "Why's" much more intentionally when people are remote.

You adapt. The hallway conversations are not some natural world order either. Do you want juniors to pick up skills? When you're starting work on something interesting, post "I'm doing X in (conference link), feel free to join." in a channel. Invite people for a lunch call.

Humans are great at adapting to their surroundings. Mentoring/growing juniors will continue but in a different way that works better for modern work arrangements.

Even skilled laborers, like plumbers and electricians, are not in a profession. They're members of a trade.

Doesn't everyone, you know, hate this kind of stuff? I know I do.

For more mundane day-to-day work I don't care for it, but I think it can be a handy supplement to mostly remote work.

Both TFA (and the comment you are replying to) are about people specifically hired for remote work prior to the pandemic; the status quo before COVID was those people working remotely.

I mean, this is a ridiculous argument supporting remote work because it works so much stronger the other way.

You literally had companies change centuries worth of corporate work for overnight to switch everyone to remote work.

If anything the people who want full time return to office have a much stronger argument that companies have suddenly changed everything on them, as opposed to the people who are complaining that now that things are normal companies are reverting the changes they made for a once in a lifetime pandemic.

Sometimes it takes a black swan event to reveal how broken something is and how things could be better another way.

It used to be the norm in the US for children to be allowed to work in coal mines and factories too (apparently in 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were children under the age of 16[1]), but after some photos were taken of them exposing just how bad the situation had gotten, it helped shift public support to pass legislation barring child labor. Nowadays I doubt hardly anyone would be in support of that now.[2]

[1]: https://www.history.com/news/child-labor-lewis-hine-photos

[2]: https://energyhistory.yale.edu/child-labor-pennsylvania-coal...

The status quo was "people that work from home aren't actually doing work", or "people that working from home aren't as productive", etc. I remember going to the dentist and telling the dental assistant that I work from home, and her response was "don't people think you're slacking off?" and my response was "no, because I'm an adult". There was an almost insurmountable stigma around remote work. As terrible as the pandemic was, it exposed an irrefutable truth about remote work: people can still do their jobs perfectly fine at home.

I spent most of my career working in offices, until I went fully remote about 2 years before the pandemic. There are aspects about the office that I miss. I'm not vehemently against going back into an office, but it would come with some pretty big caveats: the office has to be relatively close, there are no fixed days or amount of days I'd be required to come in, and I'd have the flexibility to come and go as I pleased. I doubt many companies would agree to that arrangement, mainly because of the real estate costs, which is why I stick to remote work.

I don't want to go back to a world where I have to convince a company that a remote worker can still provide as much value as one in the office. I don't want to be forced to stay late at an office to finish something that I could knock out twice as fast at home. I can only hope that we don't spend the next few years going backwards to arrive at a status quo that was misguided and not grounded in reality.

In my last position (exclusively work-from-office), I had two co-workers (out of nine) that were seriously counterproductive: the rest of us had to work around them. I don't know why the bosses hired them, and I don't know why they kept them on - perhaps they thought they were somehow rescuing them.

At any rate, these guys weren't just less productive; they were seriously counterproductive. And this was a strictly office job; we were more-or-less forbidden to work after 5:30PM.

The bosses had some kind of "company culture" fantasy, that they could weld us together into a bean-bags-and-table-football crew of clones, who would both work and play together. Interestingly, neither of these bosses had ever done an office job in someone else's office...

Unless laws change to require them to [1], workers organize to require it be provided [2], or you've had the working arrangement codified in your offer letter or other contractual documentation so that requiring you to come into an office is constructive dismissal [3]. This whole "employers can do whatever they want" era can't come to an end quick enough.

[1] https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislatio...

[2] https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotel...

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urg...

(recently dropped a couple grand on sending tech workers to a conference on how to unionize their tech workplaces, looking forward to seeing that pay some dividends)

You don't understand why people don't want to have to go job hunting to keep a WFH position?

It's one thing to say "this is fine, get over it", it's another to say "I don't understand why people are resentful", I think that second part is pretty obvious.

The status quo was horribly broken, and it took a worldwide pandemic for many people to realize that things could be different and didn't have to be so awful.

If you look back at the history of work experiences, there were several old "status quos" that we no longer accept. We don't accept, manual labor for 60 or 80 hours a week. We don't accept an expectation of staying at one employer for your entire career and then retiring on a pension. But society evolves. Assuming that something as disruptive as COVID should just be put aside without evolving how we operate in our world is exactly where the resentment comes from.

I think that if private companies offered pension plans, reasonable raises and promotion paths, many people would accept it. I think the company hopping stuff is largely a response to the death of annual raises and internal promotions.

Yes, some companies will go back to hybrid or complete in person, but it is also clear that remote work can be done in a much wider context than it was before the pandemic.

Secondly, companies that pulled this bait and switch deserve to be called out and loose reputation among workers for it. My current employer had recruiters and even the CEO bragging about our remote work policy, just to pull it out from under everyone.

When everyone was forced to do it, many learned that it is not only possible but results in better overall life satisfaction.

I’m sure some people learned they really hate remote work, but my guess is there were more converts the other direction.

Also, the commercial real estate market is getting fuct. And a lot of big corporations hold commercial real estate in their portfolio.

The labor market has changed. Many people got to try WFH and fell in love with it. Not everyone, but a huge number that had never been exposed to it before.

Now if a business wants to stay competitive they need to tap into that labor market. The vocal resistance to RTO is expected, we'll never go back to having such a large percentage of the work force working in an office. It's just that a lot of managers haven't figured that out yet and/or are personally incentivized to keep up the charade.

It's not even necessarily falling in love with working at home but just working not in shitty office environments. For most people "the office" is some miserable building in an office park in the middle of a food/service desert. Employees that need to commute to that office don't get paid for the hours of their life wasted in traffic or any financial expenses related to their commute. People with kids have to pay even more money for some child care if they can't be home when their kids get off from school.

Working from home/wherever allows someone to save on those money and time costs. They can be home when their kids get off school. They can make a sandwich at 11:23AM because they're hungry. They can stop pouring dollars into a daily commute. Hell they can even live where they want instead of somewhere in commuting distance of a shitty office park.

Many of the WFH challenges are the same as working in an office, like inconsiderate entities disturbing you or placating middle managers by attending meetings. At least you can bear those challenges in comfortable clothes in a comfortable seat. You can then take a break and shit in a bathroom you don't share with dozens of other inconsiderate coworkers. WFH isn't perfect and people don't need to love it to at least prefer it over the dystopian hell of offices.

We (as has happened with a lot of things) basically have two camps of people and a culture that makes us believe we are only allowed to make "one-or-the-other" choices (I blame the rise of consulting, KPIs, and 'benchmarks'.)

So two camps are arguing about their preferences but with the stakes that "my preference has to be the moral and logical choice," which will always just lead to nowhere.

Why? People at my org had been begging for WFH before the pandemic, and the pandemic helped us win that battle.

Why should we cede ground back to our bosses when we are happier and more productive now?

Isn't "companies going crazy and forcing good employees into situations where they'll quit, when they could just as well... not do that", something to push back against?

It's now been shown that it's possible and that productivity is very similar. So that's why companies forcing the return to work are resented.

Says the ownership class.

When we are given a rare and unique opportunity to shift our labor culture in the favor of those who provide labor, we would be beyond stupid not to seize that opportunity for everything it's worth.

No secret that the answer is: to privilege the anxious social needs of those uncomfortable working remotely. And those whose career is on the hook for over-investment in trophy real estate.

Two, people love to handwave away the difficulties in "just find another job." This isn't trivial like switching toothpaste brands, somebody who's been with Acme Corp for 3 years has invested time with that employer, learned their ins and outs, and has banked some social capital there. Saying "oh, just find another job" is saying "just toss all that out and start over."

Three, if you do change jobs you have no clue whether the next company might get swept up in the RTO craze at a later date. When Acme Corp's pro-RTO CEO or another c-level person trot over to your new workplace, guess what? Now it's no longer remote-friendly.

We're not living in the same world we were pre-COVID and many of us see no reason to go backwards.

They saw the light. Simple as that.

They also noticed, if more employees in the market demand remote, chances are higher that employers will allow it.

Because these companies hired a lot of remote employees in the interim. Also, many of the employees of these companies decided to buy houses in areas where they could afford to buy a house instead of continuing to rent - and now after several years these companies want to renege?

How can you not understand the resentment? This is the biggest FUCK YOU in the history of corporate America.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[2] "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin