Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing.

Young = under 40s - have grown up with the internet, github, working/studying remotely and so on.

I've worked in companies where the CEO and senior management are all 50 something, and in a couple of companies where they're all approaching 40. Can you guess which company used PCs and which one used Macbooks?

Going back further, I can remember working on Sun boxes, because management was reluctant to use that 'new fangled NT3.51 or even NT4.0'.

The point being, as the workforce demographic changes, so will the opinions and approaches. And the cycle will repeat.

In-office doesn't mean heading out the door at 8:30 and coming home at 5:30 but something more like leaving at 7:00am, dropping off kids at before-school daycare ($$$), driving back to the train station to make it in by 9 and then coming home at 6 after your 1-hour commute to the closest affordable suburb. An 11-hour day, and you are paying out the nose for childcare if you can even get it, and you'll spend all your PTO on kids doctor appointments and parent-teacher conferences and the like.

That was probably the low point in my, and others, working life that coincides with the age for raising a young family. It sucks.

There's talk about less than 40 and more years old. I'm over 40 and prefer remote. In our space it's younger folks that prefer hanging out in the office.

However, I can be more flexible and drop my toddler off at daycare after my daily stand-up since he mostly is fine watching shows during that. Then I pick him up right before his nap time. This scenario is awesome, but albeit just temporary until my family resumes our previous arrangements that was interrupted by a surgery.

My responsibility hasn't changed and I'll fill in randomly throughout the week as needed but, now I just have extra flexibility that I would never have in an office. Even comparing it to a small city, living in the suburbs easily meant a 15-30 minute commute and wouldn't allow me to have the opportunities I have now.

No, I won't return to the office and I'm not sure anyone will actually convince me to do so. I'm mentoring interns and juniors developers without any concerns remotely.

20-30: Needs mentorship, can live closer to the office

30-40: Has young kids, moved to the burbs

40+ AND Management: Developed management approach pre-pandemic, pre-Slack

40+ but IC: Could go either way

This is still HUGELY simplified, and please do not take offense if you are e.g. 30-40 without wanting kids. But "young kids" is just a huge difference in terms of the morning schedule and flexibility needs, especially as most families near urban areas have both parents working.

You hit the nail on the head. Senior managers who are unwilling to learn to do their jobs slightly differently are a big part of the problem. Imagine forcing an entire work-force to commute so you can physically stop by someone's desk to interrupt them vs sending a message or scheduling a meeting. Senior managers want productive staff, but instead of listening to what they need to be productive, they set up roadblocks to satisfy their own lazy vanity.

If a chat conversation isn't getting a point across after a couple of back and forths (five minutes is too long,) then it's time for a phone call. Discussions in chat are fine. Flat out lack of understanding is best fixed when they can hear and interrupt for clarification.

If I do need to call someone, I simply message them and ask if they're available for a call. There's no need for preamble.

You wouldn't send a letter with just the salutation, you'd include the message! Why treat a Slack message like it's a phone call instead of like a (short, rapidly delivered) letter?

I'm also huge proponent of https://nohello.net/en/ in the workplace and elsewhere.

On async channels it is recommended to get to the point quickly. Sure send pleasantries, but no need to wait until they are answered. You can immediately also get to your point. Instead of sending "hello" and then waiting you would be sending "Hello. I hope you are having a good day. It seems that the turbo encabulator is complaining a vapour lock in the secondary log file. Have you seen that before?"

The https://nohello.net/en/ site describes this communication style better.

If you use chat like it's a conversation then you'll have a bad time.

If you use it like it's business communication like short-form email it's better.

It's bizarre that the same people who will send an email that says "Hey, send me this information asap" will start a text chat with "hey how's it going"

People who say hello and then wait for a reply will wait a long, long time for a reply from me.

The people in that argument were located on 2 different continents 7 hours apart, that would be a non-issue if they were in on the same floor in the same building. This is not an argument for working in the office, just to adjust to the environment.

Maybe you are right and they are just fine having not experienced the in-office environment.

You don't have to go too far back in time to when work from home was also the norm (when everyone stayed at home on the farm). The office age was the aberration.

But I suspect you're right. I learned a huge number of skills being in high velocity office environments, shadowing/observing others, etc. Starting out remote must be much harder.

At work I'm looking out for myself.

Anecdotally, I hear it's more younger employees who like going into an office for the social interaction.

What's going to be interesting is seeing what happens as the current generation of senior management age out and retire. Do companies start to lean more towards remote work? And if so what happens about the younger workers coming into industry at that point, presumably they're still going to prefer being colocated for the same reasons, and that will need balancing with the older folk's preferences.

Anecdotally, I know that on my team, the younger teammates were the most eager about returning to the office. I'm nearly 50 and wouldn't go back in if you held a gun to my head.

This sounds more like a way deeper loneliness and community problem than a workplace problem.

Absent the Covid years, I'd probably agree more. A lot of managers, execs, and other senior people may not have liked commuting but it was just part of the job. But they're people too and many realized they could manage without going into an office all of the time. People do come in, especially for things like customer visits, but it's mostly a sometimes thing.

As a geek, most of my time is spent working alone, even in ill-defined projects that require a lot of coordination and communication. Working from 'home' (more from wherever I want) is better. Also, although I agree that we lose something if we communicate remotely, I don't terribly care. When I communicate, information is more important than emotions. And they want me to work in an open floor office, ugh.

Suits spent most of their time in meetings. They also care much more about the emotions and human touch. They've spent years optimizing for firm handshakes, nice hair, good smiles and that weird clicking noise :).

Basically, suits want the office, geeks don't. Productivity doesn't have much to do with it :)

Now that the cards are laid out flat, in retrospect it's easier for everyone to see and discover that the productivity and value may have been stolen. I'd love to see some investigation into showing the potential connections more concretely.

Many execs and upper management would have read or watched the movie about MacDonalds and how they make loads of cash through owning the property and renting it back. Board member or not, they try to use it to boost earnings.

With those workers leaving the city loses revenue, on top of downtown areas dying off, which exacerbates the tax base problem further.

Anecdotally, my org mandated 3 days back but has pretty slide, across the entire org, back to 2 days. The genie is out of the bottle and there is widespread, if quiet, resistance from everyone, to include senior managers.

Cost reductions from facilities are nothing unusual.

It's definitely a rabbit hole that goes deep and one runs the risk of ending up with a spiderweb of red threads on their wall :)

It's the opposite actually. WFH is more efficient, but efficiency is not the reason why we work.

Every self respecting man needs friends and enemies. The more watered down a man's life is, the less intense the friendships and rivalries are going to be.

WFH is just the last step in a long process watering everything down, where the commoditification of every experience is making us dull and full of apathy.

The problem is that a disease like that becomes endemic in society, so people's beliefs become weaker and weaker, but not having strong beliefs closely correlates with people having next to no belief in themselves, which again closely correlates with WFH preference because people think they don't have what it takes to thrive in an office environment because they are scared of the strong sentiments of friendship, rivarly, love and revenge on the workplace and in life in general.

Work is just something I have to do so I can feed and house my kids.

Oh, it's definitely not only about money, any more than the other "treat your employees well and you will provably make more money" things are.

It's about power, ego, and classism.

It's about an entire category of management that has no actual ability to manage people beyond eyeballing whether their butts are in seats.

It's about execs who can only feel good about that corner office when there's a whole floor of people in a cube farm to see that they have the corner office.

It's about avoiding ever having to question the assumption that the only reason regular plebeians ever actually do work is because they have the boss breathing down their necks every 5 seconds (and, of course, the ever-present threat of being fired and left destitute), because if people did start questioning it, they might realize it also disproves the assumptions underlying the most common objections to things like UBI. Which would shatter the upper class's power over the lower classes for good.

This is not to say that it's not about money, of course. The commercial real estate angle is a real one, for sure. But an awful lot of the assumptions that lead to calling for RTO have much less to do with money, and much more to do with maintaining a neofeudal power dynamic between bosses and workers.

I take it you're not a manager. Reducing people to "power", ego, corner offices... that's all very simplistic and (sorry that this offends) naive.

I've been fortunate to work in places where management is involved, technical, and impactful. It sets direction, identifies bad plans and wastes of time where work should be cut, identifies places where work can be combined, it resolves (and asks) difficult queries, and it works to grow the individual team members and make the workplace a good environment.

The cartoonish Clueless Idiot Manager Villain has just not been my experience. Sure, I've seen bad managers, but also bad individual-contributors.

I guess I’ll have to tell the junior I’m mentoring that we are doomed.

Annnnnnyways, I’ve been having a great time mentoring a junior engineer at my company. We regularly meet to discuss his work and I constantly stress “please bother me if you have questions.” I reach out once a day to ensure he’s good to go and he often reaches out a few times a day for questions. We assign him work that is challenging, but within his skill set and abilities.

In summary, anyone saying juniors will suffer either has no idea how to mentor remotely or are just lazy. Adapt or die.

Edit: I will add that my company flies all remote employees into the office once a year for the sole purpose of team building. We did our hackathon in person and focused on building those bonds that can help people work better together. It’s technically optional, but who wants to turn down a free mini-vacation?

Finding a student/junior who is able to do well in your business environment at a distance does not imply that it is scalable across all workers businesses need to hire.

If you truly need an in-person job or employee, you can find one.

Not at all. Even if there was such a thing as "mandatory remote work", that does not preclude going to an office. Remote work allows working from anywhere.

The premise is that, absent of job obligation, there is little reason for the seniors to show up at the same place as the juniors. If such obligation is placed on them then you have an RTO mandate.

Might be possible, but most can't do it from what I've seen.

So if you go full wfh your pool of people who can mentor shrinks by a large factor (4x is my bet).

This is solved by having a structured mentorship program and guidelines, and really good onboarding.

Of course, this means businesses have to invest in this sort of thing, and of course, they don't, because they implicitly got it for free by having seniors covering for juniors for so many decades it obfuscated the problem

These are solved / solvable issues. Socialization at work can be facilitated in a myriad of ways, even remotely. Games are popular way of doing it, virtual happy hours, team building activities etc.

I wish I could emulate walking-over-there on zoom

There needs to be a normalization of "peeling off" the main chat room

at the end of the day after doing this I do feel more tired, but I get plenty of self-scheduled productive little discussions.

I still feel you're losing something without in-person (including social) interaction. I know for me personally, I would say I have much weaker connections to many people I've never met in person. That said, there are a bunch of other factors involved with building new connections as well that aren't purely about being virtual.

Separately, I hold what amounts to office hours 3 times per week, where anyone who feels like it can show up to ask questions—but new hires are encouraged to do so until absolutely certain they don't need to, and also to keep track of questions between sessions.

There's more, but this is the part that's easy to explain.

What didn't work... crucially, waiting for newbies to ask questions doesn't work; they won't. You need to actively go looking, and also bring up areas they might not even know they ought to ask about.

a lot more than three years. remote work goes back decades before covid.

GitHub, Shopify, and Stripe all started as remote companies.

the really annoying thing is not the legions of people who believe it all started in 2020. the really annoying thing is that there's a ton of excellent literature on how to do it, and when it suddenly became mainstream in 2020, the newcomers ignored all that literature.

There were remote employees before (especially in Production Engineering and much of Support), but R&D was almost all in person.

(Source: I miss the productivity of the Elgin Street office ...)

I think the effects are going to start presenting now, but because it's a new phenomenon for most organizations, it won't be recognized for another year or so. The next 2-5 years are going to be littered with stories along the lines of 'progress ground to a halt and nobody could put their finger on why, so we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work and eventually realized it was a lack of any remote strategy'

The fact that senior employees are leaving for remote work ensures junior people are all they have left! Junior people are, shockingly, not as productive as senior people... who would have thought?

This is a genuine question. The RTO push has befuddled me for awhile because the money that's already gone into the offices (like the leases) were decided on awhile ago and will be paid out regardless if people come in or not. Perks like free lunch and snacks also cost more when you force people to come in. So I don't really understand the financial aspect of it.

Maybe it's management needing people in office to justify their jobs for some reason? I don't know.

Edit: I'm staff-level for what it's worth. I've also noticed that this article doesn't actually reflect reality; nearly every job listing I saw this year said that the applicant will have to be in the office 1-5 days a week.

you answered your own question. sunk costs fallacy.

As for your "well known fact", I'm not convinced it's either well-known, nor necessarily a fact (I can buy it happens some places, but would question whether it's an inherent limitations or an issue with management in organisations who don't know how to handle remote work)

Going by the principles of capitalism or game theory it would be more surprising if this wasn't true and board members overwhelmingly worked for the good of the company instead of their personal wealth

the one that made entire industries basically vanish? the one that no one was prepared for?

like, I been 100% remote since 2015 for orgs that were already equipped for that, and life went on just fine when COVID hit. Jr. Devs at orgs that weren't equipped for remote definitely suffered, in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas.

Doesn't this just prove the point, though? You seem to be saying it takes additional resources and time to make WFH work as effectively as normal, in-office work. Many workplaces are resource-constrained and may not be able to implement those practices.

> the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work

Not “some people were less productive, others were more productive,” which is obviously the actual truth.

Don't insult me like that.

I won't pretend I don't know people who only work 4 hours a week, but stop acting like you know me.

I love work from home because I can get actual quiet. Not music downing out distractions. Quiet.

If you want to insinuate that I don't work, or perpetuate a culture that assumes I will not work as hard because there's no hall monitor, then get bent.

And if this is true it just proof of the merits of WFH. If everyone is 'slacking off' and productivity is basically unchanged, it just shows what a waste of everyone's lives working in the office was.

Add in the new AI tools and productivity is getting another bump.

I guess you're just getting left behind.

We won't miss you.

WFH I'm expected to track my productive time and ensure it adds up to 8 hours. Maybe some people can get away with fudging their records but I think there's a pretty widespread understanding that coworkers who regularly have lengthy periods where they're neither responding to DMs nor producing output aren't actually working for the full workday.

In office, if I spent an hour to go for a walk and to a coffee-shop during my 8 hour workday, it was understood that I was probably doing some backround processing while stretching my legs.

WFH if I disappear for an hour, it's assumed I'm not working (and I'm certainly not tracking that as productive work time)

there are a lot of do-nothing, go-nowhere meetings that fill the gap and make it appear like things are happening.

WFH just shows that the emperor has no clothes and that a lot of time is spent doing BS tasks. there is still a ton of BS, but I can be chopping veggies and prepping a crockpot meal while on pointless 30+ people calls.

If we want to talk about conspiracies, let’s talk about management’s belief that everyone producing value is secretly trying to game the system

Many people genuinely believe that collaboration is qualitatively better and easier in person. Regardless of where you stand, you can't deny that there are pros and cons:

* The bandwidth of typing on Slack is slower than talking in person. Also, one winds up spending a lot of time on Slack correcting small misunderstandings that are easier clarified quickly in conversation. And two people typing full-paragraphs back and forth often at the same time, can be clunky.

* On the other hand, Slack leaves a good paper trail and you can easily reference what you discussed. And it's low-effort and doesn't immediately interrupt the other person.

* But no good alternative to whiteboards, etc.

Also, as much as everyone hates it, management does have to deal with low performers -- a nd cases you can't really tell if that person is actually working through tough eng problems all day that take a long time, or are they just watching youtube videos all day. So as ugly as it is, "butts in seats" is a sort of proxy for at least eliminating that variable. I know this is controversial ("Boo, only a bad manager cares about how much time someone is putting in!"), but I offer that viewpoint as an alternative to "clearly about money."