COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then

The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.

I have much better no-interruption stretches of programming which yields better results overall.

Perhaps something of a corollary of the saying, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The Amazon senior folks making these decisions almost certainly have reasons. If people quit, maybe they just don't care who it is. I really wonder if they AB tested RTO. Given it is Amazon, I would put a small wager they have.

Further, the impact between middle managers and individual contributors is uneven in remote work. The article mentioned there was a desire to reduce management. Remote work was an interesting experiment IMO to show the (lack of) effectiveness of middle management. Perhaps the impact to ICs is negative, but the middle management can be more effective. Arguably that would give greater "focus" on the specific KPIs desired by the VP level. Again, would be super fascinating to know the data used by Amazon here, of if this is a rare decision truly made by fiat alone.

Others have mentioned Amazon's real estate holdings. I kinda think that is likely. Amazon made huge investments to stop leasing offices and to build and own their own offices. If nobody is there, the surrounding neighborhood is devalued, in turn devaluing the offices further. It would be s considerable loss on paper. ICs perhaps are about as effective in office under a whip compared to remote, and if some quit - then maybe all the better to reduce head count.

As a senior engineer, I benefit from remote work. But it’s sad to see those informal lunches replaced with Zoom “coffee.”

Let's stop pretending that remote work is new. I've worked remotely on and off from the beginning of my career. Majority of my mentors have been remote, at least two of whom I've never met "on real life" - one of whom shared tremendous technical experience over 18 months we worked together three provinces away, other who has taught me corporate life and consulting skills from four provinces away (I'm in Canada, think states:).

I've spent four years as ops manager recently on a troubled project and I agree thay extreme situations under shared duress can build a specific, very strong kind of bond (not the only kind, mind you!). It's just that physical presence is completely orthogonal to it.

I have a hard time believing all this concern is for "young generation and their social and mentoring opportunities". Young generation grew up with remote and social networking infused in their lives (for better or for worse, separate conversation :)! If a senior person doesn't know how to mentor or communicate remote, let's be upfront on that and discuss it openly and coach them. But let's not blame the "juniors" for that :-).

People say this, but "this is the kind of true bonding experiences with which I'm familiar" isn't the same as "this is the only way true bonding can occur." I'm certainly old enough to remember the dismissive scoffing in the '90s that true friendships are made only in person, not with people online.

But if you really think there is no difference between these two things then you are living in a fantasy world.

Proximity does a lot to encourage socialization between super senior people and super junior people.

Without proximity, it's much easier for either side to put off or brush off things that would be good mentorship opportunities. You don't have to go into work the next day and see your coworker face to face to explain why you ditched them on that pair coding session or whatever it may have been.

All this is just made up bullshit though.

It’s not bullshit. It’s perhaps exaggerated, and many of the “work from a desk in a specific building” people are the ones who can’t mentor them anyway, but there are benefits in

It doesn’t have to be, you can mentor people in a fully remote environment, but it’s far harder for most ok both sides - especially for young people and people on HN that think WFH means you don’t actually have to work.

Yes, these policies are quiet layoffs.

I could see it be the other way around, or various factors balancing each other out. From my experience the current young generation is more willing to trade money for QoL , and quit when they feel QoL is bad, than the previous one.

How did the last 40 years of tech do it? Were the boomers that invented all this stuff resigning left and right or not have children? Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?

Nowadays I go to the office (open space) only during evening hours when at most 2 hackers are there. Working from home probably not productive when you have smaller kids. Maybe good for the kids though.

Yes, Bill Gates worked like a maniac and didn't see his family. His wife took care of the kids. I think that's a terrible example to set (I wouldn't want to do it) but each to their own.

“Now what — I say! — what's the big idea bashin' me on the noggin' with a rollin' pin!”

My view is that offices were a thing because there was no technology to do otherwise and back then equipment was too large / expensive to be kept at employee's place.

Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.

Often the owners also have shares in the business and influence this return to office aka sustain my property portfolio nonsense

Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office.

The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.

My boss goes in to the office even on non-office days.

If I still lived in an apartment - ie, no separate room at the house to use as an office - I'd probably go in most days as well.

I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few days later the schools closed, and my family was all working at home. I already had some lab space at home due to my side business.

Now, I didn't really mind working from work. It's a few minutes bike ride from my house.

Oddly enough, things were happening so quickly that even being a few days or weeks ahead of the game meant that we were charting new territory within our company, which is a large multinational. For instance, with no specific location, we started collaborating beyond our original group. We improved our use of rapid prototyping services. We got a lot done despite, I think, having a more relaxed pace of work. Though I work in "hardware," what that means in this day and age is spending somewhere between 0 and 100% of your time programming. I spent a lot of time programming while looking out the window, taking a break and going for a walk, and so forth.

It was also comforting to go back, eventually. I like the people. It could get lonely at home. I'm definitely not a introvert.

(Edited to clarify: March 2020)

For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.

And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 day a week.

True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.

RTO is an eyewash.

At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.

Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)

An added benefit of this is that it makes working from home look more productive, if they're keeping score :)

Yes, there will be some pressure pushing back and dread by corporations stuck between the ol’ rock of competition and the government-favor hard place, but it is unlikely to win out at the corporate level unless some real independent competition rises that is putting on massive pressure by not having commercial real estate capital expenditures.

A small office in a city can easily cost $1M per year, sure there are tax benefits, but they’re not benefits if you are competing with someone that does not have those expenses at all or far fewer, even after paying for team meetups that also fund a family vacation.

I don't see how real estate companies can influence companies/tenants, they don't hold much power here since everyone is shrinking or cancelling their leases

Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty

Same here. Leaders up the chain get a "use it or leave it" mail for office space and suddenly everyone is asked to keep those seats warm by coming in x days a week.

If leadership wants people to RTO instead of just giving up seats, then it's 100% on them.

Problem is office space doesn't work like that when the entire team is in on 'office' days to collaborate, you need the all seats. If you right size down to 60% seats (3 days office, 2 home) and have people rotate, you lose the 3 in-office collaborative days because everyday it's likely 30% of people are dialling in from home. You save 40% rent but it's closer to full remote in terms of collaboration.

Only in the short term. It left the desirable parts of the building empty. It might be possible to rent out this space. That's what happened when the company I worked for downsized the factory; they just partitioned the building and rented out the empty space.

Tldr: fear of looking bad because metrics are more important than actual results

As you may be surmising, this not only carries rather major domestic risks if pension and other domestic funds start crumbling, but it also has massive implications for foreign countries’ domestic financiers and social stability, but it also has geopolitical implications from it.

During the post housing fraud period, a rather understated change was implemented to encourage accounting to not mark real estate to market value, i.e., record what the market is willing to pay, but rather keep real estate on the books for whatever value one would like to keep it at by various methods and practices.

What that essentially affected was a cooking of the books to prevent on book from showing losses. It is essentially still going on, but especially in commercial real estate since the COVID happenings.

You now still have massive buildings essentially still totally empty, all still valued at full occupation valuation even though they are, e.g., only taking in barely enough to cover operating costs in a freeze state, i.e., minimal services.

This is where things like property taxes come in, as the properties are still assessed at fabricated values, and property taxes are used to fund the local governments, everyone with financial interests in commercial real estate (many, because it was considered very safe) are now crying for mom. It gets a bit off topic here, but I think you get the gist.

Various aspects of the Taiwan government, including the national level, are engaging in big digital nomad pushes. Small counties like Taidong in particular have been actively exploring revitalization through incentive programs, exploratory "hacker house" type events, and engaging with NGOs in the field to advise on how they can get more digital nomads into their county.

That theory is bullshit though. Yes, there are companies that stand to lose if office buildings clear out. But they're not the same companies that make the RTO decisions. The companies making those decisions could actually gain if they ditched the office buildings... facility cost is some absurdly large line item on the ledger for most businesses.

Without a clear connection between the two, I have to chalk this up to irrationality. Companies are still run by humans, and humans are irrational more often than rational. Especially with something like this, where there's no clear precedent to steer by.

But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.

Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.

But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.

That being said:

Deflating a real estate bubble is painful, just ask China. By artificially keeping up demand for office spaces through unnecessary RTO, banks and governments avoid having to go through that, at least for the time being.

And yes, with (partially government-guaranteed) mortgage-backed securities and all that, large-scale devaluation of commercial real estate is going to be a huge pain.

In NYC where the vacancy situation is particularly dire, politicians have been banging the RTO drum for a while.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...

I find this argument uncompelling as everyone can obviously see that things changed since February 2020, and sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad. It could easily have been the correct decision to acquire more office space years back and it could just as easily now be the correct decision to divest that office space if more workers are remote, and it's not anyone's fault for not having seen into the future that there'd be a global pandemic.

Certainly nobody will blame managers for real estate decisions which were made prior to 2020. But a large number of companies revised expectations that workers would return to office as late as Q1 2023 and some even later.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/15/23721410/return-to-...

> sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad

Sure. In a rational world, the office space costs are sunk and everybody just moves on. But seeing that RTO just decreases competitiveness for hiring without hard benefits to show for, this indicates that the decisions are not rational. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to fall for, and that is even before considering how business leadership roles attract narcissists who have a hard time taking blame for anything.

Occams razor requires you to drop assumptions that aren't required to explain a thing. A conspiracy involves a lot of extra stuff, furthermore it is often hard to find evidence for - usually because they just don't exist. There are so many problems with them, it should really be a matter of last resort.

Conspiracies do exist of course, but I feel you should only use time to explain the world if you have sound evidence, and still be open to falsification.

The "owning class" consists of a bunch of companies managed by a revolving door of middle management and an even faster revolving door of upper management. And they don't own a damned thing.

I've worked in places where sales people were seated next to programmers, and the sales people were shouting through their phones continuously. The programmers complained endlessly about all the noise - without effect. First lockdown we had showed an increase of at least 300% productivity - hard and reliable numbers because all output was tracked voluntarily by the team (management never asked for this). Number of builds, commits, releases...everything was way up. It was quite shocking.

As soon as lockdowns were lifted managers began talking about being in the office fulltime, because it was so good to talk to each other and align your work. I remember working in a team that did 1 day a week at the office, that day we couldn't get anything done because everybody was just chit chatting all the time. Even if you wanted to - it was just impossible to focus.

Our security officer (CISO) remarked how the lockdown enabled him to think seriously about a security issue for the first time in almost two years. Isn't that tragic?

Companies are as rational as consumer behavior. You can't make this stuff up. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The loss of programmer productivity can easily be overshadowed by gains from other parts of the business. I know it's not always the case, and nobody wants to hear that their suffering is better for the company as a whole since it devalues your work, but I would be super curious to hear why the decision was made.

Productivity is not progress, for sure. You can be very productive building the wrong thing. I've been there, wasting a year on some crap that was canned. But you need to be able to deliver and not actively frustrate your devs that want to get shit done. Otherwise the 'adapted to the market' is just a scam at best.

btw, not every dev is the same. Some actually do like being in the office, even putting on music and have lots of small talk. That's also fine, if it works for them. And I also see benefit of going to the office myself (once a week or so).

I'm pointing out the pattern of sales & management incompetently projecting their own needs and biases onto the whole company and treating devs as grunt workers, forcing them to comply with their rules and fulfill their needs regardless of how it impacts their ability to concentrate and deliver. Software development is not grunt work.

I see fulltime RTO orders as a reflection of this. Smarter management will understand what devs actually need and take that seriously. Usually this kind of management has a technical background. Office can be a part of that, sure, but wfh invariably is too, I'm convinced.

I've worked for dozens and dozens of managers in my career. Some will go out of their way to buy you the best laptop, even make you coffee and give up the best seat in the office just so that you can work in peace. Because they know that such investments in their staff will pay off. Then, others will loudly interrupt you, deny any small request out of petty resentment, and blame any and all problems on your laziness - that is if they actually show up to notice there is a problem.

Either officially, or unofficially.

What globalization did to manufacturing, remote work is going to do to knowledge work.

And in most cases, if the bosses give up on RTO, they’re going to be explicit about this. Because why not?

But I'd argue what could be outsourced profitably has been outsourced already. And countries which welcome digital nomads who "work from home" while visiting on tourist visas are getting fewer also. In fact the Thai Government launched DTV which can be seen as precursor to measure and later capture (read: tax) some of the benefits of that for themselves.

And if you think this isn’t having an effect on offered labor rates, available positions in certain countries, etc. then you’re not paying attention to the current market.

There are massive shifts to offshore work at most FAANGs actively going on right now. But it takes time.

Are there attempts to crack down/extract extra taxes? Yeah. But most are ineffective and/or don’t meaningfully change the economics. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed/extracted from the super high peak of Silicon Valley comp (for one example).

A lot of folks in the US are just waiting to see what happens before they move, or are stuck with high mortgages.

You dont want to explain to a retiring generation of "scream it into relity"-babyboomers that there retirement plan is wonky, especially after investing fiscally conversative.

Maybe the thought never occurred to you, but most companies with more than 10 employees generally frown upon things like bringing a $100,000 oscilloscope home in the trunk of your car. Some will outright consider it stealing. There are insurance considerations too - your house burns down with $250k worth of test equipment inside, who is paying for that? There is a lack of critical thinking when it comes to extreme WFH arrogance.

Yes, the scope can be taken home. That is both physically possible, and there's plenty of rational employers who would rather have the lab equipment at home with the WFH engineers adding value than in the lab collecting dust. Even if it means some of the equipment needs to be duplicated.

And taking lab equipment home doesn't mean sneaking it out in Jonny Cash's big lunchbox [1]. For some employeers it can be as simple as "hey boss, can keep the logic analyzer at my home office?" while others might have a more formal sign-out process. There are no doubt other employers where the answer is always "no", but in general it's completely possible to take equipment home without stealing it.

The idea of taking expensive things home isn't limited to the tech sector either. Consider trucking - it's common for employee truck drivers to take their $500,000 trucks home.

[1]: https://genius.com/Johnny-cash-one-piece-at-a-time-lyrics

(I'd love 250K of test equipment all the same LOL).

> There are insurance considerations too - your house burns down with $250k worth of test equipment inside, who is paying for that?

My employer already has insurance on their equipment, and I already have insurance on my equipment. I see no problem here.

Even if there was a problem, why do you expect ME to be saddled with the burden of a problem that clearly exists between my employer and their insurer? Why should I (and thousands of others) pay the cost of 20 hours a week in commuting, when my company and the insurance provider could spend a couple hours to fully think through their terms?

> There is a lack of critical thinking when it comes to extreme WFH arrogance.

I recognize that not everyone can work remote. At the time the shutdowns began, I was working for a defense prime in an airgapped lab. Obviously, I couldn't bring my equipment home. But, in that case, there was a reason for onsite work - national security. For most devs, there simply isn't a similar justification for onsite work.

None of what I said in my toplevel comment is intended to disparage anyone with a job that demands onsite work. Note how I never disparaged anyone in that situation, nor did I disparage anyone who runs a company where people are in that situation. I merely stated how much I like my situation, with some quiet jabs at companies too stubborn to afford the same benefits to themselves and their employees. Develop some reading comprehension before you start slinging accusations of poor critical thinking.

So I see it the exact opposite way. I see a staggering level of arrogance in Amazon's move to sequester thousands of people in an office who simply don't need to be there. It's detrimental to the workers' health and happiness, it's a needless cost on Amazon's behalf, it pollutes our environment, and it does jack to improve their product. It's just a power move.

It’s time to shut up and “toe the line” as I’ve been told from regarding this kind of matter. If it chokes down to it, you could even be a specialized and expert in the field that they absolutely need; if you defy them, at least be ready to move on or even be laid off. In this kind of authoritarian system, nothing else takes priority over obedience … no matter how much your corporate “family” would be cutting itself deep in the flesh. I know this from experience and repeated observation.

But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.

Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)

They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.

How is anything about those fact "inconsistant" when besides a few fringe scientists, everybody in the sector knows that for a fact.

A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.

The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.

The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.

I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.

Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.

Do you call every request for equality as a straw man?

We couldn’t even do it during a global pandemic, deeming all sorts of people “essential” without meaningful compensation.

Your assertion is not based in any feasible reality, at least in America.

For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.

>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?

depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.

I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.

I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.

It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.

Parent comment asked, should people who can't work from home be paid more?

Which seems like a specific case of the more general "we should pay people more if their jobs are more difficult", so your examples would more accurately be expressed as

"should we pay sewage workers more because they deal with feces" and "should we pay commercial divers more because they are submerged in freezing water for hours each day"

If all the WFH people got this sudden improvement to their lives, what will society do to help out the people that can't? Is fairness and equality not important when it comes to the working class?

The disrespect to the lower classes from this community is unreal.

They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on.

Productivity < Compliant Workers < Stock value

I suspect that "most compliant workers" and "most creative engineers" has little overlap.

It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).

Never believe a marketer telling you that you NEED marketing. Life will go on even with very limited marketing. You and your neighbors do not need it. Capitalism does not fall apart if it gets more expensive to force someone to learn about your product when they do not want to.

1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.

2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.

The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.

But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.

Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?

When I say "local transit authority", I mean organizations like the BART for the Bay Area, the MTA for Chicago, or the MBTA for Boston, my home town. The graphic designers in those places are often responsible for surprising amounts of the look and feel of a city's public transport, so I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback.

MBTA related, I finally rode in a new Red Line car, are those radically different?

https://www.mbta.com/stops/place-brntn

I can't wait to see the influx of books about this topic 10 years later.

Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".

Perhaps especially in the case of larger companies, sunk costs on office space may be a factor

Even worse, in many cases the costs are not entirely sunk. You might be able to get out of a lease with a penalty, if you own the buildings you can sell them. In either case its cheaper to keep a building unused than to run it as an office.

While business leaders want to think of and portray themselves as these hyper-rational actors whose every choice is either made from ingenuity or total necessity, this is obviously false and I think the prestige and optics of office spaces heavily play into the priorities of managers, especially as compared to people who do any other kind of work

Those people are world-class politicians or born super-rich. When you put a selection filter that exclusive in a population, you force every other attribute extremely close to the median.

And the median of competence on any field is much smaller than the mean.

This opens a new avenue I'd never considered: that some of the RTO pressure is perhaps due to keeping real estate prices up. Maybe there is somehow pressure from commercial landlords towards the tenants to keep the building occupied, or as you stated places that own the building don't want it to be devalued by appearing (or actually being) abandoned for years.

Sort of similar, a friend of mine was fired. Ostensibly for not bringing in enough revenue/profit in a consulting business. Very few of his hours where billable, so he looked unprofitable. The issue: He was working on internal tooling, building systems that everyone else rely on to do their jobs effectively. His value was hidden in the work of others, but that's not measured.

When looking a "work from home", you rarely see companies measure job satisfaction, stress levels or even do proper exit interviews. The sort of things you need to keep on top of the keep people long term. Many customers won't report back to your boss that because you sat a your desk at home you where able to help them after your normal working hours, saving time the next day. In consulting tracking billable hours is normal, but if you don't track when and where those hours are worked, you're not going to see that some work better at the office, while others have a skyrocketing productivity boost at home.

Other times you have bosses that wants "butts in seat" because they don't trust their employees. Hell, we had a sister company where the employees sat in a fucking horseshoe configuration at the office, on the "inside" of the horseshoe, so the owner could sit at the open end at check that people where working at all times. Do you think that fucker is going to let people work from home?

The problem though is their new small business employed mostly office-type workers yet they still had that hourly/retail employee mindset. Treated their employees very poorly and had high turnover as a result. Then COVID happened and suddenly everything got better for everyone.

He was forced to trust his employees working from home and they loved it. He, of course, was high anxiety all the time worried that his employees were slacking off. I asked him, "are they not getting all the work done?" and he was very adamant that was completely irrelevant. From his perspective, if an employee was doing anything other than "work" while on-the-clock they were stealing from him. It was a pretty clear message.

As soon as COVID was over he forced everyone to come back into the office... And shortly thereafter he had to sell his business because he couldn't find anyone to work for him anymore. No idea what he's doing now but I still see people with his attitude everywhere (in varying degrees from mild to extreme).

On the plus side that guy would never ever bother his employees after work hours. Which is quite a step above employers that treat their employees as always-available serfs.

The companies already know all about the positive time savings from not sitting in traffic commuting. But they believe that benefit is negated by employees getting less work done at home. My previous comment about employees "saving time" by working from home isn't seen that way by companies mandating RTO : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929902

For some regions, where salaries don't match housing cost, I don't think it's unfair to ask your employer to pay half of your commute. Either you pay a salary that allows relocation, or you pay at least some of the commute time. Again it's not as if work stops just because you leave the office, if you're a developer at least.

And employees will typically want companies that will cater to their every whim and pay them very well to be catered too.

Where the two meet is the labor market.

Conditions are changing, and ‘hard’ force is being applied again.

Employees know what the job will entail 99% of the time because it's their career focus. For that reason they don't really need much from their employer other than the tools necessary to do their jobs (e.g. a computer).

If you think employees in tech have just been asking for computers and money - for well over a decade and a half - then you’re living in a completely different industry than I have been.

1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.

2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.

3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.

We haven't really hit a true recession yet, esp for the laptop class. I think you will see more of this.

I had coworkers at Amazon who never lived near any office and were hired with the understanding that they'd always be remote. After several years, they were told to "return" to an office that they never worked in before hundreds or thousands miles away or to resign (without severance of course, since it's "voluntary", and of course refusing to quit or move would lead to firing "for cause"). Are you saying that this is okay because it's Amazon, and their employees don't need to be treated as fairly as anywhere else, or are you arguing that this should be allowed anywhere? I can't imagine why this would be reasonable at any company, but I can't tell if this is an anti-Amazon sentiment or just a consistent opinion that seems crazy to me.

Wouldn’t that be some constructive dismissal, or am I misunderstanding the US labor law?

When I was laid off through the PIP’s way just before the 2022 official layoffs, the first thing I questioned was if they were firing me for no cause, and I collected both Amazon’s severance and the government mandated severance for non-cause dismissals.

1. WFH is amazing and just as good for productivity and back-to-office is just a flex by evil managers.

2. WFH is bad for global productivity and so we need back-to-office.

Seems pretty straightforward that if #1 is right, then full-remote companies will have a massive competitive advantage, and the issue should be adjudicated decisively once more companies implement b-t-o.

You’re assuming a fair world. It isn’t. As an employee the game is rigged against you.

But also unlike many, I believe that that weight, whatever it is, to be overwhelmed by the colder calculation of profit, growth, etc.

If our corporate overlords could get it done with 50% of the present workforce fully remote, they would, happily. Even better if they were in Bangladesh. Which is another reason to be careful what you wish for.

Well, it turns out that these specific German business cases, which are hard enough for the average German developer to understand, are even harder to explain to someone if there's an additional language barrier between them. Most people using that software don't speak English, so there's always a proxy between the developers and the stakeholders.

I could write a lot about this (I actually deleted two very long versions of this comment here already), but I really would not recommend that any company recruit too many people from outside of its own country, apart from a few exceptions where that fits the business model. Having some diversity in your team structure can help, but as with most things, too much is not good. But many companies will have to learn that for themselves. I have already seen some that did not survive that lesson.

I thought I'd enjoy going back to the office, until 5 days a week was enforced and I was frequently getting interrupted.

As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home, you have to be deliberate about it. I felt the office just made it more convenient to hang out, but it never really happened because I was too burned out by the work.

Not sponsored, I encourage you and anyone else who suffers from clothing-drain to try different brands too. Stretchy, breathable, and clean/crisp looking work best for me.

Sizing up also doesn't work for women - we look slovenly then unless we go tailor everything which is more time and $.

I prefer being able to work in a sports bra and sweatpants.

They’re aware. What a strange comment. Are you mad?

Edit: you have more nipples than I do, and I’ve never felt compelled to talk about it until right now.

I was using hyperbole as a rhetorical device to point out some of the absurdities of professional dress codes - I would have thought that was evident from context. Imagine a man who worked in a building that doesn't allow shorts even though it lacks A/C; he might make a comment along the lines of 'god forbid the customers know we have legs.' Or men who are in professions where they have to wear full suits in the summer.

I talked about it because my femaleness is directly relevant to why I feel uncomfortable in professional clothes since the biggest reason is bras, which men don't wear.

I'm a woman. I have breasts. They impact my life in some ways. Sometimes that impact is relevant to a discussion - in my case, it's a factor in why WFH is more comfortable. I have sensory issues that are probably familiar to the numerous people on HN and, since HN is generally full of curious people who have a cultural disdain for doing things 'just because' or following uncomfortable social norms for no reason, I shared a variable that may not have been considered because a lot of people here actually like being introduced to data they hadn't incorporated to their worldviews yet.

If you can't grok hyperbole, I'd recommend looking up some middle school Language Arts lessons.

Also, sexuality =/= gender, and mentioning that I have breasts and that they're a statistically unusual size isn't 'exerting' anything any more than Yao Ming complaining about clothes/shoe shopping would be. If you can't hear someone talk about their body without sexualizing them, that's a you problem.

My bra size isn't even manufactured/sold in my country, and at one point in my life I was a size that was so rare one company in the world made it.

And this is without getting into non bra issues like my shoulders being much smaller than my bust by size and while some alterations are possible, changing the shoulders requires essentially redoing the entire garment if that can be done on a garment at all. Truly fitting professional clothing would essentially require bespoke or made to measure clothes and I'm not rolling in money. (And even if I was, I'd prefer to spend it on weird tinkering hobbies like the rest of you.)

The clothes that fit me best off the rack involve substantial amounts of stretch and are too casual for the workplace. (Mostly tops; skirts are very easily altered).

If you're happy with token interactions, sure. Your colleagues are right there (even talking to you while you try to work!). But IME, and from what I hear others say on HN and elsewhere, those aren't really "friends". The relationships are very superficial. How many of these people would help you move? With how many do you keep in contact when one of you changes jobs? I know exceptions exist, but those seem to be rather rare.

So, if you actually want a deeper relationship, you still have to look for it deliberately. Only now, you have even less time to do it, since you're stuck in the office for 8 hours a day and possibly a few more depending on your commute. Whereas if you're at home, if it's not practical to go have lunch with a buddy or something, at least you can deal with some of your chores that can be time-consuming, while not requiring you to interact with them continuously, like laundry, waiting for a delivery, slow cooking something, etc.

5 days on office places are silly in my book. They’ll lose anyone talented enough to get another job. I’m an in office person for the most part, but if you take away my flexibility I’m frankly just going to work for someone who gives it back to me. Why wouldn’t I want the ability to work from home when I need to pick up the kids early or similar? In my experience the best of both worlds is when you let people work where they want but try to staff your teams with half of each preference or with people in between and then label certain days as preferred in-office days. Notice how I said preferred and not enforced. I my teams it has usually developed sort of naturally, often depending on what is for lunch.

That doesn't make it reasonable to _force_ people back into offices though. Companies requiring in-office work so that the workers can experience social interaction that they don't have time for outside work sounds pretty dystopian, and arguing for that for one's own personal benefit at the cost of others feels pretty selfish to me. To be clear, I think it's totally reasonable for a company to hire someone with the understanding that they'll be in-office, but the issue with what's going on now for me is that plenty of people who were hired with the understanding that they _wouldn't_ ever have to be in an office are now being told that they need to. I'd argue that forcing someone originally hired remotely to pick between coming into the office or resigning is effectively equivalent to firing without cause, and it's disappointing that it isn't viewed that way legally.

A significant percentage of my social circle is former coworkers. I still meet up with some that I haven't worked with for over a decade. Or even several decades if you count pre-career jobs.

It'd be pretty weird for me to assume those interactions have to be token interactions.

I've been friendly with most of my co-workers, but aside from the two above, I wouldn't consider any of them "friends". As in we'd never randomly hang out outside of after-work drinks.

In my 10+ years working in offices, I made exactly one friend (someone who I see outside of work).

I would rather not commute and spend that time with actual friends, more quality social interaction over quantity.

(YMMV of course)

I'm very much a prefer-to-work-in-the-office-with-the-people-I'm-working-with person, but I've not made many long-lasting friends in my 23 years in the workplace since leaving full time education. May short-term friends, yes, but not long-term, compared to the balance of people I've met in “hobby time” & similar.

One of those things where I’m happy to hang out with a friend for an hour so if I’m already out, but travelling there only to return after an hour is less attractive.

Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.

So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.

So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)

There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.

That's not the case with WFH setups. WFH scenarios do not care where people are. They could be in the office, in a stairwell, or on the beach.

So one position is inherently one of control, and the other is one of freedom. Maybe that's controversial to say, but to me it's plainly true.

"If anyone has an office in a building, then everyone must have an office in that building and must be forced to work there."

And I just don't follow that. Why must it be this way? So that the office is full?

If so, then: If having the office full every day is an important metric and WfH interferes with that metric, then the problem is not that the people make choices.

Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.

Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.

If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.

No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.

"I need to have people around me to do my best work, and you are going to be one of them -- no matter how much that fucks you up."

I have some thoughts: Things change. Or at least, things can change. Or at least, things should be allowed to be able to change. (Usually.)

There was certainly a time when a news reporter worth their salt would never be very far from the office unless they were engaged in field work -- after all, the office was where the calls/faxes/wires/twice-daily mail/walk-in stories showed up, where the archives and typewriters and other business machines happened to be located, and where the copy editors and printers also were located.

But these days: A news reporter can potentially assemble their story from wire sources wherever they are. They can get a whiff of a scoop and be on an airplane to get closer to the source rather quickly, and can even continue to write their story and communicate the whole time that they travel. Sending a draft for review or editing is as simple as sending an email -- and this can be done without wires from just about anywhere on earth.

They don't need to go to the office anymore to find a scoop, or to report the scoop -- extroverted, or introverted, or whatever, and that's been increasingly the case for a rather long time.

And that's a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, I think. (Now, if only regular news would simply cease just regurgitating stuff they found on social media and actually get a scoop for themselves...but I digress.)

So, in the past few years: For reasons, we've broadly discovered that some people can do much of the same with engineering tasks at home, and that some appear to even be able to be more productive (in a dollars-vs-quality-output fashion) at such things without ever (or at least, without regularly) setting foot in a centralized corpo office. Some even report an increase in the quality of their life in general when they have this freedom to work...from wherever.

I think that this is a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, too.

---

If an extroverted engineer requires people to be around in order to [try to] do their best work and live their best life, but some/most/all of their peers are working remotely because they found their own happy place, then: That's a conflict of goals.

Perhaps the correct resolution for the conflict is that the extroverted engineer should find a way to apply their abilities in tasks/careers where other people are both inherently and necessarily present, instead of one where other people may have broadly chosen to work in relative solitude.

I mean: Some of us introverts in many fields have been seeking increased aspects of solitude and freedom of movement for a long, long time -- and lately, we can achieve that more easily in a far broader selection of trades. That's good for introverts, and introverts are people too even if they're not necessarily very vocal about it.

But when that's incompatible with an extrovert's own proclivities, then: Perhaps things have changed, and perhaps the extrovert may need to change with them if they require people to be around to try to most-effectively live their own best lives.

If 10% of the workforce loves pizza and the other 90% is lactose intolerant should we order pizza for the office every day and just let 90% of it go to waste? This is only really a discussion because working in an office was the norm for so long.

Some that are hybrid optional list themselves as (remote), but do so fully remote companies.

It shouldn't be, but it is for many.

Most times I mention online preferring to not work remote I get people calling me some sort of corporate shill, or worse.

(Or the posts just get downvoted to oblivion by people who can't articulate their objection more meaningfully than that!)

> Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice.

The problem is that it is genuinely hard for a company to support both (and/or flexible mixes) well, and if you ask for a little of the old way it becomes a tribal binary us-vs-them thing. I work in the office most of the time because I prefer to keep work and home separate, and I find I work better that way, but I'm still working on a remote team because practically everyone else is remote. We have a day-per-week policy (well, more of a string suggestion) but most people ignore that.

> It's called having a preference/choice.

Unfortunately while people are usually all for being flexible when being flexible means doing things the way they prefer, being flexible in both directions is rarer than it should be. For instance: I dislike phone calls and video calls, to the point of significant anxiety, but trying to get people to just send me an email or IM instead has been an uphill struggle with some. Of course I'll clench my arse and take part in a call when it is the best way to deal with a situation (as it sometimes really is) or because there is no choice (perhaps it is dictated by a client, or those up high), or the dailies and other regulars (calls that are habit/routine are less of a problem) but otherwise I much prefer to communicate in person (“in person” in person, not virtual in person) or by text mediums.

If I leave this tech job, or lose it for any reason, I think I'll have to retrain for a different industry, even if that means taking a hefty pay cut, heck even if that means mind-numbing minimum wage work. Working on a remote team is not great for my mental health, and it very much seems to have become the norm. Luckily in current DayJob we have found some sort of balance that works well enough, and I've been here long enough (and I'm sufficiently good at what I do) to be inconvenient to dispose of, and the people who wouldn't take the hint about not wanting to take a call for a chit-chat are no longer here, but at some point that might all change.

It should not be. I work from home 100% now, but feeling alone is a very real issue for many of us. I have friends I talk to during the day via IRC or one the phone, regular chats and video calls with colleagues and managers, family is right around the corner and I try to get out every day and talk to people.

For some the isolation is wonderful. For others, like me, it's amazing for doing focused work, but I also need people in my life. For some problem arises when their sole social circle is people they work with. If you struggle to talk to people you don't know then coworkers quickly be an "outlet" for socializing.

I don't think I'd enjoy it at all if I didn't have so much family and loved ones around, just sitting in an apartment all day by myself. What interaction you have with co workers with so much fewer social cues can hurt more than it helps, really.

I'll bet you many managers in favour of RTO feel exactly like this when they work from home, and base their decisions on the way they feel.

Another dimension to that spectrum is a development of a working cohort. Essentially a half dozen people or more that hire each other at new jobs and move together from company to company. A true best case there us to meet a potential co-founder.

Though, I have had a remote colleague whome we spent days on video calls together working on a problem. I am not sure remote is in-office is actually mutually exclusive. The people willing to spend 5 hours on a call peer coding with you might be the same that you actually become friends with in office

I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?

Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.

Unless you have dozens of friends already the likelihood is you’ll often be alone after work.

Thankfully I’ve made my friends and have a family but if I was just starting out I don’t think I’d even have met the people that are close to me. My friends are mostly from work or work friends of my college friends.

People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.

I think this WFH epidemic was an opportunity to enlighten a lot of people. There are many, many people (myself included), who were husks of human beings. Alive, technically, but not living.

We work, we eat, we sleep. We had money, but at the end of the day we were losers. I knew this to be the case when I realized what I looked forward to what dinner. Eating a meal was the highlight of my day, and the highlight of every day. And then the weekends I stayed in, exhausted from work.

When people lost the office, it was an opportunity for them to realize they had absolutely no life. No friends, no socialization, no passions, no desires. Some realized that and took control of their life, and others took offense to that realization and demanded the office back.

It was very much a matrix red pill versus blue pill situation. Live in lalaland on autopilot? It's tempting.

Not even close. Hobbies are done in groups, which can be stood up in your local area. This shit was figured out in the 1700s FFS, with no internet, with no online message boards to coordinate preferences, with no real choice in WHO they interacted with.

We invented "third places" like coffee shops, where average people could show up, buy a coffee, and chat with literal strangers, where you would often get into discussions about philosophy, politics, this newfangled "science" stuff, and all sorts of topics, usually involving people guessing about things they didn't even have a right answer to. But that didn't matter because the point was to interact with strangers.

The scientific method was literally a bunch of wealthy people exploring a brand new hobby by finding each other in "journals" (basically hobby magazines), sending each other snail mail, and chatting about their different experiments.

Companies have decided they can just stop supporting an open environment, and charge you for the right to exist, and now we don't have a third place in the US, because nobody has the time or money or energy to socialize after work, because work takes so goddamned much out of us.

So no, please do not force me, who has a perfectly functional social life and several great friend groups for life, just because you don't know any other way to meet people. That's not my problem and forcing me into the office so you can take advantage of the requirement that I am there to socialize with me is not an okay solution.

Work doesn't pay me to be your friend.

Now I live on the other side of the province, and holy shit is it hard. I've been here for over 6 years and I haven't been able to maintain a single friendship. I could try harder, for sure, but that's my point. It was effortless before, and now it feels like being social takes serious work.

I still work from home, and I've settled into a quieter way of life. It's nice, I enjoy it. That said, I'm not surprised others don't.

Well, anywhere I can be sure no external person can see what I'm doing on screen. So a cafe will work if I can sit in a corner with my back to a wall. And even then, I'm giving up my tooling to make work easier on myself and more productive, like a nice, large monitor. Coworking spaces let me alleviate the second part, but the first problem is even more pressing there: now, everyone around me must be expected to understand what I'm doing, and thus is a bigger danger to my companies data security.

It's not for possible for everyone, though, and the bar is not "is any IP loss realistic" but rather "what are the policies my employer demands", independent of if they are sensible or not. Make sure you're not getting caught breaking company policy, kids :P

I also like the commute. I get in early to miss the rush. I end up walking more. I have the ability to switch from work to home on the way back. After work drinks also help.

That's all based on one 30 minute train that is extremely reliable, air conditioned, and getting a seat. I couldn't do it if I had to drive or take 3+ trains.

Maybe there are many companies who do allow for flexibility, in which case everybody is happy, so you don't hear about them, since they have better things to do than "not-complain" about their situation.

I'm lucky to work for such a company, and the main issue of discussion these days is whether we like or not the new office decoration. Managers are free to decide how often their teams have to come in, and, from what I hear, their underlings did have their word to say. Some people like coming in often, others less so. But basically, it all depends on who you're working with right now, and whether it makes sense to meet in person. This seems to work great for pretty much everybody.

This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.

Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.

As is sitting in an area and seeing who everyone goes to ask questions, and even overhearing the discussions.

So someone can learn how to phrase questions, what are useful types of questions to ask, what types of questions get someone told to ‘do their own research’ vs gets in-depth help, etc.

For a junior, that is very valuable because they often literally don’t even know where to start.

For someone with more experience, they often either already know all these things, or know how to find them out pretty quickly even without the help of watching what is happening, yeah?

I always maneuver myself into such a place that I have something to work on for myself.

Not all offices are like that, though! It takes some awareness & outgoingness from leaders and experienced folks, but it is possible to cultivate a socially engaging remote work environment. At my current employer, there seem to be two ingredients: 1) management and mentors who will happily talk about stuff that isn't work-related, and 2) an annual retreat where you do get to meet all of your coworkers in-person, in an environment where bonding is the main purpose.

There’s a local tech Slack in my area that I keep up and I have a text group that I’ve built up over the years that sometimes grabs lunch or hits the gym. Keeps me balanced.

Counterpoint: That's an exact description of how I felt working in an office.

I work for a remote-only company but use a workspace almost every day. I get to chose my own “office” and the people in it, I also pick the commute I want, this one is just 5 minutes away.

Popular

> Amazon tells

Sucks

A few advantages: 1) you have a wider pool of people to choose to co-work with, since they can have other employers, too; 2) you can choose who you want to co-work with; 3) you get to (mostly) choose which and how many hours you wish to co-work; 4) no stress about being late due to a commute or childcare commitments, since co-working hours are optional.

[1] I deliberately arrange to work on things that aren't confidential on co-working days.

If “employers” want people back in seats, let’s just make it law that they have to compensate you for the travel and expenses and time of travel by either cutting work hours or pay overtime, and pay for all the expenses associated with commuting; or at least make them deductible from taxes like all other income generating activities.

In the Netherlands, and probably a lot of other EU countries, transport to work has to be compensated by your employer. If you live within biking distance this means providing you a bike (usually via a service like Swapfiets these days), and otherwise you get your train/public transport costs or fuel costs if you drive a car completely covered. It's even tax-deductible I think, though I've never bothered looking into that option since I just take my own bike to work.

I know that having benefits like a free bike feels good, but the total compensation you are getting is much lower than that of people that work for big tech and pay for their own transportation.

But even ignoring all that, money isn't the be-all, end-all. Having worked in the US for a stint, I'll take my "low" pay in the Netherlands any day of the week over rotting away in a soulless US megacorp headed by legitimate psychopaths, where they can decide to fuck you over at a moment's notice for any reason and you have no recourse.

After all, what good is money that you can't spend? If you gave me a trillion dollars but it meant I had to spend 12 hours of my day dedicated to work, what use is that? I'll take my sane working culture I have at the moment despite me earning marginally less (if you ignore literally all the other benefits of living in the Netherlands, that is) all day, every day.

Money isn't everything. People claim it is are often missing something money can't really buy.

The Netherlands has good bicycle infrastructure but the majority of people still go to work by car.

The commute time between countries is similar.

considering i also got free lunch everyday, 24 days of PTO, monthly stipends for gas and app subscriptions, 6 month parental leave, it’s pretty hard for me to look at the european market and see the government mandated some of those benefits but to pay for it i’d make roughly 1/3 to 1/2 what i make in the US, and subsidize the poor performers to boot. literal fucking joke to compare europoor salaries with american lol

Inflation from money printing and immigration is eating away higher salaries and lower costs that made suffering the corporate hell tolerable for many people; and in Europe money printing and immigration is going to collapse the social welfare and quality of life fabric of society.

Most tech companies compensate for costs. My current employer doesn't blink paying ~$60 per day for my parking and lunch on days I come to the office, but that still means I spend 50 min each way getting there. My 2c.

But they aren’t perfect, and they’ve been good relative to other employers.

Having transportation covered is an extremely rare benefit in the US.

A company is also not mandated by law to provide you with a bicycle.

You also do not get your cost fully covered if you drive by car. Currently it's capped at 23 cents per kilometer which is not enough for most cars.

It's not a tax deductible, it's just (income) tax free.

To me, feels super refreshing to talk to people when Im at the office, and to be fair Im much much less productive in the office. But makes me appreciate when Im at home and when I dont need to be in the car for 1 to arrive my home, take everything and go to the gym.

It feels like, going from time to time to the office when almost everyone is there, gives to the remote working more sense and value. And viceversa.

You can come in every so often (weekly) without issue (or by choice).

When you're forced to come in every day, that becomes different.

My problem is that i really hate flex desks and now you don't get your own office anymore.

But my problem is more with my home: I'm now buying a farm and i don't think it will feel the same way as it does at my flat. Its surprisingly hard to 'get out' to not feel annoyed by my flat. But i don't have a good outdoor view only a small window and i do not have a extra office space.

I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.

Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.

It's a hidden layoff.

The less productive are the ones dragging their feet, coming up with excuses to stay home and hide as much as possible from peer scrutiny.

Almost like best engineers enjoy coming and working with the team, while the worst dread it.

Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.

I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.

The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.

I’m curious what you mean by this.

At best, it signals the company is done with growth and is going for a high-profit, low investment (including low innovation) policy.

But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.

Yup! Remote workers need to realise this, and build up a local social life.

Or worse, the middle management is given authority to give these mandates, and are in their highest level of incompetence and use it as a "power move".

You need social interaction, so go out and get social interaction.

I don't. So why should employment cater to you rather than me?

It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).

But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.

Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.

But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.

I have. lots of people get a lot of their social interaction from work.

The genie offers them one wish each

The Irishman says 'sure i'd give anything to be back in galway, stuck in a snug, with a pint of porter' and <poof> he's gone.

The scotsman is amazed and roars 'take me back tae glasgae!' and in a similar puff of smoke is gone.

The englishman, looks around and says 'I say, its going to be awfully lonely around here without those chaps around, can you bring them back please?'

- buying a house you never see the inside of while the sun is up

- buying a car whose purpose is making the two hours every day you spend commuting a bit less miserable

Now, when I weigh 30 minutes of commute versus being cooped up in the same room I was in for the whole pandemic and almost lost my mind, it's easy: office whenever I can.

That said, I'd be very loathe to _have_ to come in to the office. There are whole weeks where it just doesn't work out logistically, and it's nice to be able to work from home.

Hybrid is probably the ideal; but even so I live 15m from the office and when I go in it's empty 90% of the time anyway. I don't know if I'd take a 45m commute until the kids can get themselves home from school (daily pickup/dropoff) - but I do miss 2h beer lunches on a Tuesday after closing a ticket to blow off stress.

That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.

That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".

When everyone can choose what work best for them! We are not the same - and face to face meetings have their huge benefits from time to time anyway.

Except for those poor souls working for Amazon.

Similarly, in the old days when I had jobs where I was expected to wear a shirt and dress reasonably smart to the office, I enjoyed getting changed into other clothes afterwards. It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.

I actually try to dress 'properly' even when working from home. I know most people find it silly, but I feel I work better when wearing 'work' clothes.

Before kids I would also become depressed if I worked remotely full time. But today my "alone time" is already pretty much gone outside work hours so I don't mind being by myself during the day.

I did feel somewhat isolated when I first started working remote. I also moved to a new city at the same time, and I didn't have much to do... besides work. I had to force myself out into the world a bit, and it got a lot better. It helps that I found myself in a community where I could easily find things that I found appealing.

No, they don't. It's intentional.

Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.

In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.

Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.

Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.

That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.

The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.

It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.

If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.

The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.

More that they assume (or demand) the worker is going to pay this cost on their behalf.

And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.

So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.

Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.

Or to complain about the significant monetary penalties you'd have to pay, when it's surely easier to pay those on your salary than theirs.

And used someone else being worse off than you to justify being right about it.

Having said that, complaining is free. We both can do it.

they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day

I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.

Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.

Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )

Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!

But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.

Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.

Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.

Not really. At a company the size of Amazon teams are often in other buildings, if not other cities or countries entirely. The zoom calls continue unabated.

If you have 3 days of office, you'll always be in Zoom calls because at least some of the team members will be at home.

>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.

I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are

1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back

2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).

Low reward, high risk.

They would also show data for increased productivity from ending full remote and going back to the current 3 days in office if they had it, instead they claim it's the case but won't let you see the data. It's just bullshit corporate talk

No company wants to show confidential metrics on employee productivity to the world. Yet, many companies have recalled employees. Maybe you think every single of these companies are incompetent and stupid? Or the HN go-to conspiracy theory that executives own real estate and want it to recover?

Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.

> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.

The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.

That being said, you shouldn't confuse your personal hallucinations as the opinions of Amazon execs.

Now, take your own advice and get back to servicing your masters :)

the only reason executives really dislike remote work, is because as "face people" they have never had a place for it. It doesn't benefit them in any way, so how could it possibly benefit anyone else? they have never had a position like yours. they both deeply understand that no one is like them, and bizarrely believe that everyone works like they do and benefits from working in the office.

I have worked closely with executives throughout my career and the only common thread between them all is the intense hatred for telecommuting. I have never met an executive which understands it well enough to understand its place in their work environment. These same executives frequently called me after hours asking for work to be done immediately; work that could only be done in the office because that's where all of my digital tools were located and where the network connectivity was, etc. Zero recognition that one of those things could solve the other.

Well, it's that, or they just want to be dicks and give out orders. That could be it, too.

It's probably 50% of each. "executives get benefits, plebes do not."

I think I saw it mentioned in an old HN thread once, but I'd like to see a study between the WFH desire and its relationship with (a) commute times, and (b) commuting method: walking, cycling, driving, urban transit, commuter rail, etc.

If your commute was a 15-30 minute (one-way) bicycle ride, how different would you feel about going into the office more often?

I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work everyday from March to December (rain or shine, as long as the streets were clear).

See perhaps the video "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

Also the Oh The Urbanity! channel, a couple who live in Ottawa/Montreal:

* https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity/search?query=winter

Anyway that depends entirely on how specialized your specialized equipment would be. I had a quick browse of your profile, it looks like you're a firmware engineer so I assume what you have is a few thousand worth of electronics hardware like oscilloscopes and that other magic stuff that firmware people have so nothing that would break the bank or fall outside of your homeowner's insurance, but you get what I mean.

That said, most non-hardware IT people have laptops nowadays that they are expected to take home, I've got two current-day macbooks so that's at least six grand of hardware sitting at home, plus the rest. I should double check my insurance <_<. At least the macbooks themselves are covered by my employer's insurance.