Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it.
I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff.
Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general).
Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan.
The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse.
My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.
Not all. I work with some remotes who are awesome. But the 24 year olds who want to work remotely from Thailand aren't getting their shit done.
In all cases, you really someone with time to look at the business as a whole to evaluate these things. For example, one of the things which has made RTO unproductive for many workers are open plan offices, which is a really easy problem to see and fix if workplace productivity is someone’s job but not if the RTO push is being driven by politics or the need to justify leases.
Come to find out at least one entire office was engaged in widespread misreporting and fabrication. Turns out fraud is pretty tempting when you can easily avoid any paper trail.
It's wilder still that the handful of times I've dealt with this have all been before RTO!
Btw I'm not saying 'cheating', that's one thing. I am meaning industrial scale fraud with remote candidates. Eg having one person interview then another (much worse) person gets the job. There are gangs that are going to almost unbelievable lengths to do this.
Extraverts, broadly, aren't afraid of picking up the phone and calling you to chat about the email they sent you three minutes ago while driving and also on mute in a zoom; introverts can use remote work to be unreachable in a way they can't if you can just walk over and impose yourself on them.
It's by being bad at work, period, but in ways that can be partially mitigated by being in-person. Poor documentation of processes, lots of know-the-right-person involved in getting anything done or figured out, using Teams (its design is remarkably awful for organizing and communicating within and among... teams) rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.
This stuff is also making in-person work less efficient but it's easier to work around the problems when in-person.
Better than resisting remote work, would be for them to suck less at managing a business. Even if they continued resisting remote work, they should do that!
What is better? I hate Teams, but Slack really wasn't much better.
The real chat part is cordoned off in ad-hoc channels that individual users can sticky, but that aren't "structural" and can't really have order imposed on them, if that makes sense.
It's like if Slack only had the DM and group-message feature, and no channels.
My thing is that while better IM systems exist, none is what I would call "Good" or even "Acceptable". Being better than Teams is not really saying much :-)
I haven't used Slack in years, so I can't speak to it, but it sucked when I used it. Back when our team was all colocated in one building, I intentionally had my IM app turned off and disconnected. Interruptions in person suck, but with Slack et al interruptions were multiplied significantly. Kind of: "If you can't be bothered to get up and walk to my cube, it probably wasn't that important."
What I want from Teams and similar SW:
A way to, with a keystroke, mark all messages as "Read" (even when focus is not on the window).
A way to, with a keystroke, print out all unread messages on my console (or in a popup window, or whatever).
In other words, just give me a damn API I can program these things with. Teams' API lets me get messages, but will not let me see if a message is read or unread.
Any app that forces me to open up the window, click on a dozen channels to read all the latest messages, sucks. Period. I should be able to read it all with one click/keystroke, and have them marked as "Read" when I do it.
This looks like channels do exist, is it new (there's no date on the page) or do they not work as you'd expect? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-new-chat-and-...
Even the small companies I’ve worked at (100-700 people) had multiple offices where you had to coordinate time to meet with the people you needed.
I’ve also worked remotely for the second largest employer in the US. Amazon has internal “interest” channels for each service team (the team responsible for an AWS service). Anyone could ask a question and usually one of the developers of the service would help.
These are my disadvantages of working remotely. I say all of these things as an advocate for hybrid work arrangements and co-working spaces/satellite offices:
1) Some people work better in an office. Offices are literally designed for working anyhow.
2) Some people didn't, and/or still don't, have optimal conditions in their house to work remotely.
I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.
3) Some jobs aren't compatible with remote work. Examples:
- Tech sales (moreso for complex sales and expansions than new sales)
- Many people who work in the public sector (even before this administration's aggressive RTO campaign)
- Most folks doing hardware or embedded work
- Pretty much everyone that we interact with outside of our home on a daily basis, like front desk personnel, doctors, mechanics, retail and restaurant staff, etc.
This creates an unfair imbalance of "haves" and "have nots". It is also very easy for the "have nots" to typecast those who WFH as lazy, especially given some of the memes of people doing all sorts of other things during core hours.
4) Some people don't naturally communicate what they're doing over Slack. This is the one thing I'll blame on management is communication.
Weekly "15-minute" hour long standups and check-in meetings covered for people like this back when we worked in offices, but it can be easy for these checkpoints to slip in when everyone's remote.
Now, these meetings existing are, in and of themselves, signs that management can be improved. Between Slack/Teams/whatever, bug trackers, Git commit histories, Office 365/Google Workspace APIs and all of the other signs of life of people doing things, there are ways for the PHBs to check that people are doing things so that they can report the things being done to their PHBs so they can report to their PHBs all the way up to the board and investors.
It would be great if more companies invested more in their processes to make it possible to assess productivity without needing inefficient meetings. This would make it possible to be a high-performing company regardless of location.
But change is hard, and it's easier for senior leaders/execs to throw their hands up and say "this isn't working; back to the office, now", especially when those leaders are already traveling all of the time as it is.
(I know that the trope of CxOs who golf/eat steak dinners all of the time is common; my experience working with people at these levels does not completely reflect that.)
5) Work-life balance is so much easier to immolate when working remotely.
When your home is your office and your work apps are on your personal phone, it takes the mental fortitude of a thousand monks to not be "terminally online" at work.
"I'll just hop back on after I'm done with the kids/dinner/etc." is the new normal. It existed before WFH, but it feels so much worse now, as the technology needed to set this up is so much more pervasive (mostly MDM being mature for Apple devices and Android becoming much more secure at the cost of everything that made Android fun for us hackers).
This has the fun side-effect of making people who try very hard to keep work and life as separate as possible look like slackers even when they're not.
6) Establishing rapport and camaraderie is much harder to do remotely. This "just happens" when you're working next to the same people every day for months/years at a time.
This was most evident when I joined a new company after COVID to avoid an acquisition. Almost everyone was super tight with each other because they hung out all of the time. There were so many inside jokes/conversations/memories that I was basically left out of, and because traveling was impossible then, forming new ones didn't really happen.
I get that many on this board view this as a feature, not a bug, but friends at work is important to some (most?) people. It's the one thing I miss from the before times more than anything else. Well, that and traveling all of the time!
7) Last thing I'll say on this: onboarding, in my opinion, is much worse when done remotely.
I've switched companies four times since COVID. ALL of these onboarding experiences have had some combination of:
- Loads of training materials, like labs and new hire sessions, that are dry as toast over Zoom but can be extremely engaging in-person,
- Some kind of buddy system that falls apart because everyone is drowning in a sea of Zoom meetings and the last thing people want to do is have ANOTHER zoom meeting explaining things about your new job that are kind-of difficult to explain without shadowing, and
- An assumption that you are a self-starter who will learn how to do your job by self-organizing meetings with people and scouring whatever documentation/knowledge/recordings/etc you can find.
This might just be a 'me' thing, but I've found remote onboarding to be a poor substitute for onboarding at an office somewhere.
At home, there have never been more than three other people in my house, when I’m “at work” with my door closed, they knew not to bother me. At work in an office there are constant distractions.
As far as “tech sales”. I’ve lead my share of complex cloud tech projects from discovery, customer acceptance to leading the delivery - all remotely. Yes sometimes I had to travel to the client’s site. But I haven’t needed to be in the office with the people on my team (who were sometimes in another country).
My coworkers are just that my coworkers. At work, “I’m taking a step back to look at things from the thousand foot few”, “taking things to the parking lot”, and “adding on to what Becky said”. I’m a completely different person at home. At the end of the day, my “friends” at work are not interested in keeping their jobs. I go to work to make money - not friends.
I’ve worked for two companies remotely since 2020 - Amazon and now a much smaller company. They both had excellent onboarding procedures. While AWS wasn’t “remote first”, my department (Professional Services) was as is my current company. Both had “onboarding buddies” and Amazon had a list of people you should set up 1x1’s with an instructions for the relevant internal systems you should use.
> As far as “tech sales”. I’ve lead my share of complex cloud tech projects from discovery, customer acceptance to leading the delivery - all remotely. Yes sometimes I had to travel to the client’s site. But I haven’t needed to be in the office with the people on my team (who were sometimes in another country).
I was a cloud/DevOps consultant/SA as well before I moved into tech presales. It's a different world, even though it doesn't seem like it would be on paper.
Delivery can be (and usually is, these days) done remotely, but I've found that finding new opportunities to expand or sell into new parts of business is easier when done face to face. The human part of the job is difficult to replicate over Zoom, in my experience.
That said, when I was a consultant/SA, I much preferred pairing with clients in person than over Zoom. I enjoyed the travel and found sharing a keyboard to be more engaging than talking at a screen for hours on end. I realize that this was probably a "me" thing and that others are totally fine with remote pairing.
> My coworkers are just that my coworkers. At work, “I’m taking a step back to look at things from the thousand foot few”, “taking things to the parking lot”, and “adding on to what Becky said”. I’m a completely different person at home. At the end of the day, my “friends” at work are not interested in keeping their jobs. I go to work to make money - not friends.
This is where we differ. I'm at my best when I'm working with others in-person towards a common goal. While I'm also motivated by money and am not pining to make lifelong friends in the workplace, I miss going to the bar at the end of a long week and decompressing with others who "get it." My wife has this, and I'm always jealous about it. For me, doing this over Zoom pales in comparison.
However, all of this is why I prefer hybrid arrangements that are mostly remote with budget for monthly team get-togethers. I don't think being on-site every day is effective, but I've found being perma-remote to be really isolating.
> ’ve worked for two companies remotely since 2020 - Amazon and now a much smaller company. They both had excellent onboarding procedures. While AWS wasn’t “remote first”, my department (Professional Services) was as is my current company. Both had “onboarding buddies” and Amazon had a list of people you should set up 1x1’s with an instructions for the relevant internal systems you should use.
These are excellent systems _if you are a self-starter and know what you're doing_. They fall apart if you are junior that develops best in a dedicated environment, or if you prefer a more "social" way of onboarding.
I’m saying that it is silly to have those roles be in the corporate office of your employer.
AWS ProServe has a 3 month training program for their early career hires and career transitioners. It was all remote.
Even for their more senior roles, they had “AWSome Builder” where you had a two month “project” simulating a real world engagement where you had a mentor and five people from the department acting like stakeholders - CTOs, CFOs, directors etc. This was also remote where you had to do presentations.
and the company you work for seems rather incompetent
The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza.
"After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.
the reason is simple: wearing a mask reminds people there is a risk and it doesn't "look good", despite its many advantages for many pathogens and pollutants; also acknowledging indoor air quality is crap is hard for businesses (and governments) to do since they would need to invest into better ventilation and filtration systems.
long term effects are rare in the (proper, confirmed flu, not your cold you think is the flu) flu
SOURCE: several studies and my own conclusion observing friends...
If it was clear, they shouldn't have trouble showing the data. Otherwise it's a case of "The data shows X, but my gut clearly shows Y"
I can certainly believe it didn't work for some companies/roles. But the burden is on the company to demonstrate it.
Funny joke. I needed a laugh.
IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc.
Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it's gone as well as it has, but it's also not surprising it's gone badly for a lot of companies.
(there is $120B+ in remote enterprise market cap as of this comment, anyone saying it doesn't work is a liar; it might not work for them because they are unwilling to make it work, but the evidence is clear it can work, does work, and did work during the pandemic)
I've personally worked at 4 different companies since early 2020. Not everyone does WFH well. Many pretend they do, but don't. Even those that do it well, do better when they meet regularly in person (have some hybrid model). Some teams/departments/functions are better at it than others, but companies as a whole I think perform better when the people have personal connections and relationships across the org. In a remote WFH situation, over time, through natural attrition, new people are onboarded and never actually meet anyone in the company and this becomes a large portion of employees that are very loosely connected in terms of their interpersonal relationships/network and this weakens the organization. I can see how that is fine in a individual contributor role of SWE, but for most roles, in most departments, it doesn't play out well (or takes a very special/rare personality trait to actually do it well).
It seemed to work at first, but over time it became clear it didn't.
are profits spiralling downward? are these businesses, overall, making less profit? because of remote workers?
or is it closer to the truth to say that no amount of profit - or asserting authority over workers - is ever enough and since companies are in a position of power to squeeze blood from a stone, they will?
I'm going to guess that most people who start companies are beholden. The investors need people to RTO for some important reasons - real estate values, economies built on supporting workers, and of course - some amount of lifestyle differentiation (a luxury of having fuck you money is being able to spend more time with friends and loved ones than the peasant class).
WFH is a one of the most disruptive cultural shifts ever - pushback was only expected.
Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before".
Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.
You seem to have strong opinions on WFH. Find a job that agrees and allows this. If your current employer requires RTO, well.. they're paying you to be in the office so show up and stop the conspiracy theories.
It's objectively vastly more expensive to operate an office building or buildings. No organization is going to decide to incur the significant expenses and liabilities associated with operating facilities with people in them if they don't need to. Very little logic supports your claims, especially regarding the "CEO" and "fad" points you are attempting to make.
I don’t know that that is a reasonable take. More appropriate would be to acknowledge that different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
I don't think we need to give their good wills. They are just using the economic reality to fuck us, and I'm sure many of us are considering fucking back when the stars are right.
At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.
First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc.
Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road.
And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.
The argument is not that face to face to build relationships with customers is not important. It’s that it’s dumb to have “field by design” roles be forced to be in an office when they aren’t on customers sites.
Besides that, it is disruptive in the office because you are spending a lot of time with the customer on conference calls and how it often works is that the people doing the work are not in the office or even in the same country.
Your client facing staff is US based. But US employees are too expensive to do the grunt work (unless you’re using one of the exploitive WITCH companies).
AWS exempted their “field by design” roles from being in the office during the first few RTO mandates. But they eventually forced them to be in an office this year (after I left).
GCP has in office requirements for their Professional Services staff now too - full time direct hire employees for both AWS and GCP.
I took a new job in 2022, at that time everyone was still working from home. My boss, who was a VP at that time, said isn't this amazing? We save on fuel, time, spend more time at home etc. Productivity has been amazing and all.
Two years later in early 2024 when they started pushing RTO, same guy repeats the standard bullshit about - we need those sidebar conversations, we need to meet face to face and all. Not a single word of how it wastes fuel, or time etc.
I realized he was powerless against the corporate policies, but just his hypocrisy was enough for me to find another (100% remote) job.
At the time, WFH was new for most organizations - and yes it feels pretty great. Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.
Certain tasks can be best done in solitude at home. Others... require collaboration. Collaboration that's scheduled in meetings or the dreaded video call are not the same as spontaneous collaboration or just popping your head into someone's office/cube and asking a quick question.
There's trade offs to both... and if a company has decided WFH isn't ideal for them, then you can leave and find a job that believes WFH is ideal.
I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption.
My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard.
I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions.
No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.
wfh can be great for individual productivity, but it can also seriously hamper team productivity.
(If they're a manager/decisionmaker of some sort then they better learn how to multitask online, which is like a 30 year old skill requirement at this point)
On the other hand I might be preparing for a meeting, in a meeting, on a plane, at a customer’s site etc. On the opposite end, there is always a list of things I need to get done. I put that item as “blocked” and move on to my next item. If it is a downstream dependency as a developer, I mock it out and keep going.
If you are dependent on one person to answer a question, what happens when they go on vacation or if they are otherwise unavailable? I make it a point to not be a single point of failure.
Also, I keep my calendar up to date, including time I need to do “deep work”, when I’m traveling for business, of course meetings automatically show up. Anyone is free to put a meeting on my calendar if they need to interact with me synchronously.
Also from what I saw, juniors struggled without always-available guidance while mid and seniors could get a lot done by avoiding interruptions. If the mix of employees changed in those couple of years, that alone could have been the entire difference.
Foolish.
Do you mean “same” or “some”?
Either way do you not believe that different companies can have different outcomes or that one company’s outcomes can change over time?
Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up.
I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.