Social and Economic Effects of the [Bubonic] Plague
Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them.
And for about 150 years they enjoyed such a rise in living standards, until the gains were erased in the early 1500s, leading to the Great Peasants' War in Germany.
By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes. Not necessarily refusing to work in an office. The headline is misleading.
It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
The higher turnover is expected in a booming economy like the one we’re in.
These articles with hyperbolic headlines and underwhelming actual data are very common right now. It feels like the journalists want us to believe some sort of revolution is happening, be it WFH or remote work or people quitting in droves. I’m beginning to think the reality is mostly a boring return to pre-pandemic normalcy, though, given how hard these articles are teaching for something noteworthy to share.
What people miss in these discussions about going full remote is that the market for software developers is very good right now but this won't last forever. Many companies are surely going to embrace full-remote once they have built up the right processes and infra.
When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working remotely, the burden of looking for employees in the locality of your office is gone. Wages will stop growing. While WFH is very convenient, the strong market is giving developers a false impression that they won't become replaceable cogs in the future.
I think you are very much correct - for all the people lambasting working in an office, I hope they realize it will mean they will be competing against a much larger swath of humanity.
Also, I'm glad you highlighted "Mexico or Brazil". Unlike decades past where lots of outsourcing was done to India, I think many people now realize the inherent inefficiencies when teams are 12 time zones apart. The Americas don't have that problem for US-based businesses. In fact, I often see lots of complaining on HN that Canadian dev salaries tend to be much lower than in the US - seems like a no-brainer to work remotely for a US company if you are in Canada if it results in a big salary increase.
It's not really as simple as larger pool -> easy replacements though. You might find a great remote candidate with great technical skills; but there's an 8-hour timezone difference, they speak poor English (or whatever language your team mostly speaks), don't understand the market that you're working with etc. Granted that there's not much of a difference when it comes to Canadians VS USA-ians, but that's where labor laws might complicate things.
There's usually stringent laws when it comes to hiring people (depending on where you are, I guess). The company I work for, for example, had to sponsor my work permit in the Netherlands for it to be legal to hire me, since I'm not a EU citizen. That's a stressful, expensive and time consuming process for everyone involved, and in general it's just easier for them to hire local talent since they don't have to bother with all the extra steps. I'm not sure of how that works exactly in the US, but I can't imagine it's any simpler or more convenient.
Now, companies might move onto hiring more freelancer type workers to circumvent these issues, but that also has its slew of problems. They're usually more expensive, you have to spend time and resources onboarding them onto the project, they have to get used to the project and its intricacies, they have to learn how the team works, the process for paying them might be different than your usual workflow, they tend to leave just as quickly as they came which compounds the other issues even more.
I think things will mostly progress as they always have. Sure, there will be more competition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that hiring non-local talent is the easiest way to go for most companies, plus as can be seen from any discussion about WFH on HN, there's a sizable group of people that don't enjoy WFH and would rather stay in offices anyways. The WFH crowd like me will be free to pursue a company that suits their needs, and the ones that enjoy WFO will still be able to choose those companies that prefer that. Win-win, in my eyes.
> There's usually stringent laws when it comes to hiring people (depending on where you are, I guess).
These laws tend to exist when the people you hire want to live in the country you are operating from. I'm a non-EU citizen working in the EU, and am definitely worried that my residence country will kick me out, since WFH means I could very well do my job from my home country (and I'm now grateful that at least I'm paying a lot of tax to my country of residence).
The US still wants to screw me with excessive 'self-employment' taxes and if I put the local address into Upwork, Mexico wants to take an additional 20% for their own taxes which Upwork is happy to do off the top since they enjoy spending my money more than anything.
I like Ensenada. Thinking about La Paz at some point maybe. Supposedly the water is warmer there.
>> It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
If those are monthly figures they are roughly going from "quit once every five years" to once every three. It's a pretty big change, I think. Positive, IMO -- mobility is healthy for the economy.
But the caveat should be that we can't extrapolate from a unique event like emerging from an 18-month quarantine, which is the context of this entire phenomenon. I think that at least part of the original commenter's point is that the article shouldn't try to frame what may well be a temporary correction as a revolutionary shift, which I agree is what it's trying to do.
Exactly. It should be expected that (for many people) after 18 months there would be an excess of people who would have wanted to leave, if they could. Now that they can, there is a log jam at the exit door.
Seems most commenters on HN for this thread didn’t read the article.
We’re at a daily occurrence now of these “I can never go back to the office” threads. I thought HN was supposed to be an area of intellectual stimulation - not droning on about the same thing for months with no end.
I use to think the same thing, but it seems that HN is both the place where there are cool technical articles and where journalists can pump their tech-clickbait.
>By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes
I actually had someone on my team quit until WFH was over. They couldn't take WFH any more and plan to return to the job market once they're able to go to the office.
WFH also appeals to American conservatives who want to target cities, which are democratic strongholds, and reduce their power and reputation. The WSJ is the leading news source of U.S. conservative elite.
Can’t imagine not having at least partial WFH after this pandemic. If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. A good portion of my team is similarly minded, but management is insistent on disallowing WFH. I can’t wait to see their faces when the company bleeds massive swaths of engineering talent.
It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that they are. Absolutely sick of this infantilizing, childish requirement to force employees to come into the office.
People are not obligated to come into the office so you have someone to talk to, and the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth the countless hours of employees’ lives wasted in commute.
The 'hybrid model' is just a marketing trick to try and force people back to offices using the Fear of Missing Out routine.
It's classic foot in the door sales psychology.
Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote and understands that remote can only work properly if everybody is operating in the same mode - precisely to avoid the natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical room.
A good way of judging all this is to start costing your time from the moment you start getting ready for work to the moment you stop thinking about it and start doing something else.
When you do that, you'll often be shocked at your hourly rate.
We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device?
> We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device?
Assuming that there is ~260 working days in a year, subtracting 30 years for holiday we have roughly 230 days that one would have to commute on.
My average London commute was 1 hour each way. That's 2 hours per day. That's 10 hours per week. 460 hours per year. 4.6k hours over a decade. This is not a chill "going on a trip" time in a train - it is stressful rush hours madness, breathing underground air and constantly bumping into a crowd of frustrated commuters who happen to be power walking the opposite way.
To put this into perspective and assuming that an average working day is 8 hours, over the last 10 years I could've easily spent 19 months of full time work commuting during rush hours.
Also ironically ~20 years of commuting adds to almost 10k hours which supposedly would put me on a world-class expertise level in terms of being a train passenger. The problem is I'm a Software Engineer, not a professional underground train passenger.
> Also ironically ~20 years of commuting adds to almost 10k hours which supposedly would put me on a world-class expertise level in terms of being a train passenger. The problem is I'm a Software Engineer, not a professional underground train passenger.
Oh wow, that's such a good way of looking at it! I used to have a 3h20m daily roundtrip commute. Now our office is permanently closed. I work on a treadmill desk, have lunch with my wife, and after work I walk a block to my baby's daycare. I can't imagine ever going back to an office.
This is the truth. Measuring work in hours only makes sense for work that you can only do when 100% applying yourself to the task (like brick laying or stacking shelves). Most of my high value output happens when I'm in the shower, riding my bike or going for a walk.
> natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical room
It's not just ignoring them, but making it hard for them to get a word in edgewise, or sometimes even to hear what others are saying. Most of the time it's not even intentional. It's getting caught up in the moment, and/or failing to adapt to an environment where different etiquette is necessary.
> Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote
Just to be clear, truly embracing remote works means more than just having butts in seats in homes instead of in an office building. There are still plenty of people out there making most decisions in the same kind of clique-only conversations they used to have in the office, excluding not only people in different time zones but those who are just more socially/culturally distant from the inner circle. Truly embracing remote work means adopting an asynchronous workflow that makes information and conversation available to any team member at any time. Requiring them to be in the right place at the right time to gain full participation isn't embracing remote work, even if that "place" is a videoconference call.
Even US federal employment has started considering remote work as a permanent policy (where possible).
I'm currently looking for new work, and full remote has become a _hard_ requirement. In addition to the great point that you've made; if an employer is insisting on in-person work, there exists a strong signal of deeper issues. For example: dogmatic/discriminatory thinking, egoistic processes, stifled/silenced innovation.
This certainly isn't universally true, but it is a giant red flag.
There's also my responsibility. This is my responsibility by choice, and I'm not out for anyone who doesn't make the same choice. If I am hired by said in-person employer, then I am supporting and perpetuating that behavior. The transport device also happens to be destroying the planet: I would be supporting that. The transport device is a luxury: I would be supporting discriminating against people with no access to it. Some jobs are by definition in-person (doctors, baristas, cleaners, etc.), and I would be consuming their transportation resources (whether that's room on a train, or a road). The housing market madness has been driven by access to in-person work hubs.
In-person work, where it isn't actually required, is a terrible idea. It's bad for you, and it's also bad for everyone around you.
Have you considered that some of us actually see the benefits in a hybrid model? There are downsides to working remotely, just like there are downsides with working in the office. Some of us just want to get our work done.
Companies that don't allow partial WFH confuse me. All my employers, even before the pandemic, have allowed ad-hoc WFH whenever. It worked fine. If the team had a meeting or day where we all needed to be in we just said so and worked around anyone who had to WFH at certain times or days. There was never any official policy, people were just trusted to be sensible. Got a GP or dentist appointment near home, just WFH. Feeling under the weather but not so bad that you take a sick day, WFH. Need a day to focus, WFH. Hell if you know you're going to have a hangover, WFH (you never said so but it was an open secret and no one cared so long as the work got done). It was great and I can't see any downside to it at all.
I've been remote/WFH for the past 20 years, and it gets more common every year. For the past 4-5 years, I haven't even worked for companies in the same time zone/continent. Its never been an issue for me personally/professionally. The EU companies I've worked for seemed based around the 'life happens, just get your work done' premise.
Our CEO wanted everyone back in the office even after agreeing that fully remote resulted in no perveptible decline in productivity. The rationale is that serendipitous interactions happen more often in person, which I believe, but not enough to come back in full time. Anyway, engineering was pretty clear that we would have even more attrition if we had to come back in, and the CEO relented.
I’m trying to think of a less dramatic way to describe the aftertaste of that interaction, but all I can come up with was that it felt a bit like servitude—like this person felt he could dictate to me where I would do my work including an unpaid commute (it’s not like my work depends on me being in a factory, for example). I’m thankful that my skill set is basically on fire right now and I can go elsewhere without losing money, but at the same time sad for everyone else who lacks that luxury.
A feudalistic remnant in the nature of corporate hierarchy is that people higher up in the hierarchy feel that this gives them inherent superiority over people lower in the hierarchy. In reality, there's no reason that someone in a corporate hierarchy needs to have their status (including compensation, etc.) determined by their place in the hierarchy. A hierarchy should just be an efficient means to organize a group effort, and not a social order.
This assumes they make more money for the sake of their position in the hierarchy rather than having valued skills at performing well at that level of the hierarchy. Believe it or not, most people don’t do well in mgmt positions. To find someone that can perform that job can be harder than finding a good “individual contributor”. I’ve seen plenty of good technical people wash out of even basic supervisory/team lead positions. So I think there is a scarcity element at work.
In practice the CEO is a founder of this company and another successful startup and is a billionaire. I don’t have any reason to think he’s a horrible person or anything, but this one interaction chafed me.
Agreed, and in fairness the fact that it was such a noteworthy experience means that it is rare, at least in my life. For the most part the hierarchy has been just a means to organize a group effort. And even then I prevailed. I think that says a lot about the intervening progress.
Maybe in the absence of any direct incentive, but employees do have a direct incentive: their own salary. What seems more likely to boost employee morale, an executive choosing to pay himself more, or an executive choosing to pay his employees more?
Social hierarchies have their downsides, but if history is a guide, they are necessary. Any behavior that appears in all recorded cultures is likely to be a core survival advantage, and therefore very fundamental to us as humans operationally and unlikely to change.
The arc of human history, especially in the west, has bent toward equality. I think some hierarchy is necessary, but I like how one of the previous comment distinguishes between organizational hierarchies and social (status) hierarchies. I’m not sure the latter are useful at all.
An organizational hierarchy is your reporting structure, e.g,. your boss telling you what to work on. A social status hierarchy is about how society esteems you, i.e., your social capital.
There may be an ounce of truth to that, but the reality is that it mostly has to do with financial incentives related to taxes, to continue having overhead expenses to write off. Talk to most corporate accountants and they may be able to explain the budget and tax implications. What this really is, is a case of that it’s easier to do things the way they always have been done than to have to actually rethink and rework things.
What I’m saying is that this is an IMMENSE opportunity for startups to attract young/emergent talent and possibly even established talent that is prioritizing remote work.
Others are correct, corporate matters are working on how to corral their herds back into their expensive capital investments on prime real estate, even if most people have no clue what’s really going on die the the blinding light of affirmation.
The hybrid model is such a joke. For most, working in the office might as well be the 21st century business suit: an antiquated formality designed to demonstrate your obedience to authority. The hybrid model is a suit on a t-shirt. And forcing employees to be in the office X days a week means productivity on those WFH days will be nonexistent, especially if they butt against a weekend.
But of course while the WFH life will be sweet for the next 5 or so years, increasingly invasive productivity/monitoring/presence tools will make us long for the days when we could walk away from the computer and not worry about triggering some inactivity alarm.
With the "everyone remote" of 2020, one of the things that spooked a lot of companies is the employees adding to additional complications by living in states (or sometimes countries) that have different labor laws, taxes, and such without telling the company.
This resulted in things where they suddenly found out that they need to pay taxes in four states (and Canada - unless they get that employee to leave within 3 weeks... and firing them is an option).
The three day hybrid may also be something to discourage one employee trying to hold down two remote jobs (on Reddit, this is a not uncommon question and sometimes a really suspicious coworker who suddenly can't VPN or connect to slack for a day or two each week).
The hybrid model keeps a number of problems that the company would otherwise have to think about and enforce non-issues.
> With the "everyone remote" of 2020, one of the things that spooked a lot of companies is the employees adding to additional complications by living in states (or sometimes countries) that have different labor laws, taxes, and such without telling the company.
I've side-stepped this issue by being self-employed.
Then it becomes as simple as - you keep paying me and I keep working.
Well, I don't know how this works in the US, but in germany when you are self-employed, but basically only work for one company - it would be declared a fake selfemployed situation, with lots of legal and tax complications, basically forcing the company to employ you regulary.
(to counter companies pushing their workers to be self employed, to avoid taxes, healthcare costs, etc. But I am not convinced if the result is beneficial to the workers)
Not sure how it works in the US either. I'm in NZ and it works similarly to how you described it working in DE.
Though my clients in another country, I don't want to push it, they don't want to push it - so I don't care. Eventually I will jack up my rates and they will either sign me again or I'll find somewhere else.
I've found that it's much harder to form social bonds, especially cross-team, when working remotely and never seeing people in person. Socializing via Zoom is not the same. The lack of lunch and hallway conversation hurts a lot without even getting into the outside of work socializing. That in turn leads to minor issues exploding because no one has a sense of empathy built for anyone else.
Came to make a comment like this. Some jobs are great to do entirely remotely and forcing workers in those roles to come into an office is completely outdated bullshit.
But there are tons of jobs that require trust and collaboration. For those workers, in-person relationship building is a fundamental part of the job.
We need to be clearer in our job titles and descriptions about that, so that there is less conflict in expectations of remote work.
Yes it's harder for most people to form bonds online.
I have worked with people whom only have friends, and social time, through an office setting. I've worked with people who can't wait to get away from their family by going to work. My dad couldn't wait until monday.
I was that guy that socialized, and made friends through work. I'm still that guy kinda? The hour grooming, and the two hour commute is making me think I should reach out to people whom I come in contact locally.
That said, some people don't need the social experience going to an office provides.
They have full lives, and don't need to show up to the charade. If they are good employees, why force them back?
Agreed. I didn't mind for the first part of the pandemic, as I knew everyone on my team and we just kept shooting the shit on chat or video. But then I switched jobs, and last week was actually the first time I met most of them. I've found it much harder to build the same rapport.
I’ve worked at the same company for nearly 20 years. I’ve had precisely 0 lunch and hallway conversations in all of those years. Lunch time is when I go work out. If I’m not working out, I’m sitting at my my desk working. Socializing is for non-work hours. However, I’ve learned a lot more about coworkers (some of whom I’ve worked with for more than 10 years) during the pandemic from talking at the beginning of zoom calls waiting for everyone to show up.
I’m not at zero but generally avoid socializing at work. It just stresses me out for some reason. I’m pretty affable and approachable and genuinely like people, just from a distance.
I assumed they were referring to the spontaneous work-related hallway chats that middle managers and executives claim are so important. I'm not OP, but I relate, and while I'm not big on small talk I'll engage in it because I respect my colleagues and I don't want to snub them.
If you ask someone if they had a nice weekend and they give a one-word response, why not just not ask them questions like that? It seems rude to expect someone to put a certain amount of effort into conversation with you that you initiated.
Why not just do like a 3-4 day retreat to "bond" every 3-4 months?
Or even monthly have maybe a 2-3 day mini-retreat work a day or two on-site and do some after-work bonding for those who are staying in hotels, etc... I mean if it's just about bonding. I had pretty good bonding with an agency I worked with and we'd do once a year retreats and it was really nice to hang out with the team, then go back home and hang out in slack.
As a parent, a five-day-per-week commute has many more opportunities for something to go wrong than an off-site I know about a month in advance that lasts for three nights.
Every single day, lots of things have to go right: dropping off has to be at a defined time (whether school or daycare, most activities have a predetermined start time unless the kid is very young, which mine isn't any more), then I have to get to work from the daycare, then I have to hope that nothing blows up during the day requiring me to stay longer, then I have to hope nothing blows up on the trip to daycare, and so on. I'm very fortunate that daycare is on a transit path for me because my family doesn't drive and transit around here is usually more reliable than driving.
Working from home for the last 15 months has been a godsend. I don't have to deal with any of those oddities. My spouse and I have traded off who takes a few days off every few weeks or so to be "on vacation" with the kid, or we sync up and take days off together to just veg at home as a family.
If you tell me I can skip the bullshit commute and only have to plan child care around a retreat that is booked a month, or even a couple of weeks!, in advance, I will gladly take that trade. Even if it's a "bring your spouse" kind of thing, I can get a set of grandparents to train or fly in for that time (or even go to them).
Yes. And I's argue that some semi-structured time to exchange ideas, come up with ideas, "bond," etc. with everyone on some scale of team and even guests from other teams is probably better than bump into you conversations that often aren't going to happen with people on other floors, in other offices, and even on different continents.
I think that occasional in-person contact is important to avoid the "erosion of trust" that I've seen occur over and over again working full-time remote at multiple companies for most of a decade before COVID. Even famously all-remote teams have relied on periodic conferences and summits to maintain that contact. It works. It's why I never balked at travel requirements - as often as monthly - during those remote jobs.
The key is to recognize that the in-person contact is part of the mix to enhance empathy/connectedness and for those few situations where a multi-way high-bandwidth conversation is necessary. Planning sessions are an example IMO. Understanding how people really feel about priorities etc. is important, but often involves interpreting facial expressions and body language that aren't captured (or conveyed well) on video. Making it a part of your every day team work environment puts you into an entirely different and no longer remote-friendly milieu.
I find in person meetings more effective. I’d rather meet once a week or 2 and get all the big meetings done then go away to code, than have Zoom meetings every single day.
I predict that in all the full time WFH companies, some small group will start having in person meets once every X. Or some other startup will innovate past an incumbent by having a hybrid model.
Zoom is the new power point. Has anyone noticed we've replaced the concept of "the thing that is annoying about meetings is power point" to just blaming zoom.
I don't even think we have a point to make, it's just like a thing we say... like oh god another power point meeting, oh god another zoom call.
I think the real thing is "oh god another thing I have to do I don't want to" - but we're afraid to say it.
I guess I should be so fortunate that I've been working from home since the end of February 2020 and that all we use is Microsoft Teams for audio-only calls. We have never done video calls and I cannot imagine why anyone would stand for that shit.
Well, for one you can just nod along while other people speak, or shake your head. Video just increases the communication bandwidth a bit.
You can also quickly switch to screen sharing some chart and discuss it. Or you can look at a backlog, or some bit of code, or a mockup.
I've been remote for 12 years, in my experience video calls are strictly better than audio only, but of course it's fine if someone can't join with video.
It's not video that makes meetings bad, it's people.
Oh, I’m not afraid to say I hate teleconferencing.
And I assure you I wasn’t imagining the average of 3-4 hours of online meetings every single day that was compressed to 1-2 days every 2 weeks once we started meeting in the office again.
Zoom meetings have made me appreciate in-person meetings so much. It seems phrases like these, "Can you hear me?", "Sorry I was on mute", "You are breaking up", "Sorry can you repeat that", "Sorry my internet connection is bad today", take up way too much time. Then people speaking over each other and you cannot understand anyone at all.
I think once a week in-person meetings and rest of week heads down WFH would be a great idea. Or we can do everything in async communication like emails.
And no, not Slack. It is even more distracting and should ideally be used only during scheduled meeting in place of Zoom or for emergency situations.
I think that quality issues are part software and part internet connectivity. We use an internal version of Google Meet and it works fantastically well (and during the pandemic has acquired a ton of useful new features).
Internet quality and speed is a function of a few things, including where people live. I wouldn't want to extrapolate but I've not been finding connectivity to be an issue for internal meetings. Yes, occasionally there are hardware issues (e.g. I had a flaky WiFi chip in my laptop). These may be unfortunate for a particular meeting but tend to get fixed and so "can you hear me?" is definitely not a recurring pattern in my experience.
Sometimes people choose to join video calls from their phone while, for example, walking their dog (a completely acceptable thing culturally). In those instances video and audio quality can be variable; it's up to the individuals to make sensible choices around which meetings are suitable for this sort of thing.
Finally, there's a phone backup, where you can dial into a meeting (audio only) over a phone line. Some people use this if they need to take a meeting from somewhere with particularly bad connectivity. I personally have not needed to use it once in the 15+ months of WFH but I've seen others use it.
People unintentionally speaking over each other was definitely a thing in the beginning, especially in larger meetings. I've been founding it happen less and less over time, as people learned when to pause and we developed better ways to moderate large online meetings. Video makes this much easier compared to audio-only.
Overall, I think I've come to prefer video calls to in-person meetings, at least when _everyone_ joins over video. It'll be interesting to see how well the original, hybrid model (some participants joining in person and some over video) will work.
But you don't need to live as close, right? A one hour commute sounds like hell, but once a week? Meh.
I work from home, and my team is distributed, so we work fine online, but there are a few times when we say 'we'll have that conversation over a beer when we meet in person'.
I’ve always held a belief that a lot of America’s social and economic inequalities are fueled by the consolidation of good, high paying jobs around a few major cities. I’d get behind any party that tries to tackle this by incentivizing the distribution of these jobs across America. If cheaper, quieter lifestyles result from this, all the better.
At the very least, crowding the most intelligent and ambitious people into the country’s lowest fertility metro (the Bay Area) certainly seems like not a good idea from an inter-generational perspective.
It seems like you might be mixing up cause and effect. I'd assume that the Bay area is the country's lowest fertility Metro precisely because it's filled with ambitious people.
China has been in (artificially) in demographic decline for a while most of the country remains dirt poor.
There is no such cultural determinism. Many countries won't stop having children as their economy grows, in fact the opposite is happening in many places around the world.
Nobody said anything about "stop having children" (good night!) - back to reality: I think the established pattern for countries joining the developed world is large economic growth/dev, followed by baby boom, followed by declining rates of reproduction until under the replacement value. This happens not only because of changing priorities of a wealthier population and changing behaviors, but also the availability of birth control and lower mortality rates (infant and elderly).
So it's not that birth rates decline "as their economy grows" - the birth rates go up during the growth phase - it's what comes after in an established prosperous society: fertility rates decrease.
It's consistent enough to predict with some certainty. As prosperity has grown worldwide, so global TFR has dropped. This happens one by one with the individual countries following a predictable pattern.
China does have regulatory limits that keep their TFR lower than it otherwise would be, they are still in their (modern) growth cycle. Absent that regulation, with the economic boom they've been seeing in last twenty years you'd expect to see the fertility rate boom accordingly, and while it appears to be growing despite the regulatory constraints, it's still below replacement value. This slow growth in the face of structural prosperity changes is the impact of regulation, not organic. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...
my entire point is that such determinism is illusory and your example wrong in every way
there are direct factors that explain away TFR drops that are not "prosperity" - in fact prosperity alone has historically increased TFR pretty much every time
drastic drops in fertility rates in Europe and North America respond to very specific cultural phenomena that are unlikely to happen in a similar fashion in Africa or the Middle East, more likely to happen in South America and parts of East Asia to some extent, but certainly not across the board
social pseudoscientists can spend as long as they wish looking at past charts, they still won't see causality and there is no better example than fertility predictions to showcase The Poverty of Historicism
I think you're still missing the idea that after the growth phase which triggers a boom in population, that sustained prosperity after the growth spurt is when TFR starts falling off.
Look at any given developed society today (characterized by long-term peaceful stability and general prosperity, development of professional classes, liberalization of gender roles, shifts away from field work) and you'll see TFR falling below replacement levels. This isn't a "western" phenom, you can see it in Korea and Japan as well, for example.
It's simply practical economic decisions by individuals - kids cost a crap ton of attention and money, and when the risks of them dying have decreased (lower mortality due to medical care, less war/violence) and the obligation to reproduce is lowered (changing gender roles, birth control availability, women having options for professional careers), and kids are less useful as labor units, you get fewer of them. Predictably. Across hemispheres.
I suspect your examples are all "developing" countries, not "developed" but you've thus far only referred to nebulous regions and continents. Interested in a specific example of a developed country that has not exhibited this pattern.
Social bonds, Office chat, meetings around a table, etc. There are so many things you can't get over a zoom call that not having a hybrid model is what I won't understand. You can have the best of both worlds and if that means that there are some limits on where you can live?
I saw someone say that a lot of what makes WFH successful currently are the bonds that we had built while working together... and that as time goes on, those bonds will loosen as new people come in that don't have those experiences and those hallway talk.
I think I agree with that... but it remains to be seen how things will work going forward. I see most companies going to a hybrid model. I see a large number of turnover at places that don't offer hybrid.
My current place of employement seems to be winding up towards hybrid and I have a long commute (had before covid). I'd be unhappy with 5 days meat in seat. I'll be very happy if I only have to be there 2 days a week. Still happy with only 3. Sad with 4. I'd probably hunt for a new job with 5. Maybe 4.
On not wanting the hybrid model, while where you live is an aspect, how you organize is another.
For instance it’s a big difference if you can send and take your kids from school yourself 5 days a week or if for one or two days you need to find someone to contract just for that.
Same for having one or two cars, needing a laptop or not, etc. There are a lot of big and small effects on having to commute one/two days or 0.
Absolutely - it's a complicated equation and all things determine. From personality (some love home, some love office) to child care to technology (laptop, internet cost at home, speed) to all what you mentioned and a hundred more points.
I think, personally, most will want hybrid - to get the best of both worlds - and it's simply a matter of finding the right personal and corporate balance (if possible).
We'll see how long term the effects of COVID are. We might see WFH become mainstream... we might see a massive pushback to go back to the Old Normal. I think successful companies will find the middle to keep their talent.
Just how close are you trying to be with your co-workers? My parents don't live in the same state with me but we talk weekly on the phone and meet once in a while in person.
If you need hourly contact with your co-workers I hope it's more about doing the job then socializing. If it is about doing the job and your job is software development then are alternatives to endless meetings.
On HN and Reddit people are engaged in the characteristic activity of friendship - discussing topics of mutual interest - yet it would be pretty sad if that’s all someone had for friends.
Similarly, just because you do work with some people, does not make them your team.
Now maybe programming can be organized in a way that doesn’t really require a team. People can get projects done by interacting in a more transactional, contractor/gig-worker way. But that is a very different experience from being part of a team.
On HN and Reddit people are engaged in the characteristic activity of friendship - discussing topics of mutual interest - yet it would be pretty sad if that’s all someone had for friends.
On web forums like HN people post regardless of who might be reading. That's an important difference.
You had 18+ years spending 24/7 with your parents. Also, I'm sure the weekly calls aren't quite enough from their end, they never are for a parent--understandably!
Whenever I get a meeting I don't understand why I was invited to, I just ask whoever invited me, or my boss if customer did, what my purpose is in the meeting.
Almost always I can avoid the full meeting with the understanding that they can call me in if they need my expertise. When that happens it's typically just a couple of questions and I can go back.
Sure some weeks can get a bit busy with meetings if we have a lot of projects going on, but I'm almost never in a meeting where I feel I'm wasting time.
This is something great about video conferencing. Forced to attend a meeting that has no bearing on your work. If you are there in person, banging away on your keyboard the whole time in the corner is considered rude. On video conferencing you can just mute yourself, turn down the volume and just keep your ears perked for your name and keep working.
Probably stating the obvious, but isn't being forced to attend a meeting that has no bearing on one's work is a sign of a pretty significant organisational dysfunction?
If it's "3 days every week at the office", then you need to live close by.
If it's "two days every month", you can just stay at a hotel for that time with the money you saved from commuting - maybe even bring the whole family =)
I'd be ok with up to a max of one day a week in the office.
That doesn't restrict location too much. Only one day a week, I'm willing to put up with a multi-hour commute. Anything more than one day, I don't think so.
>The company would be run like they're fully remote
You sort of have to if some people are in-office and some aren't. For example, and I know a lot of folks don't want to hear this, but it's a good practice that everyone does video calls from their own desk.
I also hear of companies looking at reconfigurations of their spaces to be more collaboration-oriented, e.g. more space to conference rooms and enclaves with a lot more emphasis on hot-desking for the rest.
I’m not comfortable meeting at my desk unless literally all my neighbors are supposed to be participating (not concentrating on something else). My office has some phone booths that were so popular (pre-pandemic) that it's been hard to find an empty one.
> but it's a good practice that everyone does video calls from their own desk.
We do that sometimes, but I find it a bit painful. First you have to be on top of mute/unmute if you're having a conversation with the guy next to you otherwise everyone gets echo. And then, even if you are, if it's the guy next to you talking you hear him "for real" first then through the video call with a slight delay.
The hybrid model makes sense, because some people (like me) enjoy being at the office with colleagues.
I don't want a situation where I am forced to always be in the office. But I also don't want to have colleagues I never see. That doesn't mean "mandate exactly X days at work". But it does mean "be at the office sometimes".
Your only justification for forcing people to come to your office is to suit your needs. If a role can be done successfully 100%, people like you need to think about others before you start supporting upsetting someone else's lifestyle to make yourself happier.
Folks have to meet in the middle somewhere if we want a society - some people want full office, some people want full remote, some people want a hybrid. They can’t all be happy.
Saying ‘I want to meet my coworkers face to face at least some of the time’ seems like the compromise position if anything.
And you’ve got a bunch of people that want one at least every week, so they can talk to their coworkers - but without all the overhead from scheduling a big event. The world is made of many different kinds of people. Hand waving a huge portion of them away on either side isn’t great.
I feel fortunate that I will be half-retired/self employed by the time the entire industry is a mix of sweatshops and plumbing work, which will be before the end of the decade.
I think a lot of management will be out of a job in the future, and they are grasping for control. Not saying we don't need managers, just that there are lots of fat that can be removed, and people have noticed lots of the managers weren't needed or invisible when WFH.
Having worked from home for ~8 years, I don't think it actually makes that much difference - you still end up with a manager who is responsible for making sure they can handle problems you have or about you and asking you to do things, and you still have managers associated with the projects you work on (those may or not be in any way related).
The ones who randomly rearrange the seating however can disappear.
I am a manager that has been full-time WAH for 15+ years. A leader who understands their role should be empowering people to do their jobs, and providing them the tools they need to do it, be it in the office, at home, or on another planet even. That's what leaders do. If they think their job is to monitor and micromanage their teams, then they are not leaders, just bad managers. Leaders see the value in employees creating a situation where they increase their productivity. I really don't care where my employees work as long as they meet clearly defined goals and objectives. They know what they need to do, and I trust them to figure out how best to accomplish it!
The ones who randomly rearrange the seating however can disappear.
Reads to me like this is the exact chaff being separated from the wheat in the parent comment, and you know what: good. The less managers like that, the better for labor and the workforce at large IMO.
I think a few of us have had that manager and hopefully learned how not to lead and motivate people.
Just like with developers there is a huge difference between a mediocre and a splendid manager, both in productivity and how nice they are to work with.
I hear this a lot of times recently — what I'm interested by now is where the new equilibrium will be going forward.
So far us software engineers have often seen jobs as replaceable and we know we'll have another one at the snip of a finger should we quit.
But with enough people actually quitting, how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision?
Genuinely curious here: Any of those quitting for the same reason recently, how hard was it to land an equally well paid remote job?
> how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision?
We'd have to take into consideration how the demand will change at the companies who are refusing remote work right now. I'd expect that it wouldn't diminish: they will still have business goals that will require developers to fulfill. They won't suddenly say "No software people want to work for us? Eh, we don't need them anyways. Let's build toasters instead".
I changed jobs recently, though not because the old one was going to make me come back to the office. I've never seen such a frothy job market, I had multiple offers for fully remote roles with a 20%+ raise.
I'm a data engineer in the Midwest with just under a decade of experience. All these companies seem to be hiring plenty of other roles and levels of seniority as well.
You motivated me enough to finally update my Linked-In and mark it open for work. I'm also in the Midwest (near Chicago).
If you don't mind me asking, to what extent did you put yourself out there? For the longest time I just pursue whatever recruiters reach out to me, but I think I should probably do more active searching this time around.
For anyone curious, since I turned that on 7 hours ago I've gotten 7 recruiters that have messaged me, and most look like pretty decent fits for my experience, better than the random messages I usually get (and I usually only get a few that reach out each month). Guess I should have done this sooner.
That's great! I sent a few cold applications through workatastartup.com, but I mostly just updated my profile there and on LinkedIn, and flipped the switch to "tell recruiters I'm open" on the latter.
I had a similar experience to you on LI. I wasn't particular desperate for a new gig, so I aimed high on salary range. At first I was told I was too expensive, but a couple weeks in I had plenty of options at or above my range, so shoot for the moon!
I'm trying to shoot for the moon, but yeah, so far I keep getting told it's too expensive. Sounds like this 'labor shortage' is definitely just companies don't want to pay, or haven't gotten the memo yet.
I'm still getting told ranges I expected to see two years ago for senior engineers (like pre-pandemic, where Chicago's market just kinda sucks compared to elsewhere and if you're here there's almost no remote jobs elsewhere to get higher compensation, but now there is), not even for principal engineers, which some of these roles are for.
And yet I've had about 25 recruiters reach out to me in the past few days. So there's got to be a lot of demand out there.
> So far us software engineers have often seen jobs as replaceable and we know we'll have another one at the snip of a finger should we quit.
I think this is going to be the thing that cracks.
If everybody is WFH, I probably don't need YOU specifically. Programmers are about to get a big wake up call as to what their value actually is in the global market--and it's a lot less than they think.
If I were a particularly nasty manager, I would be pushing WFH like crazy and looking at laying off both my most expensive and most vocal WFH people in 18 months.
The most senior folk pulling the strings will survive. The rank and file will get decimated.
I suspect that most of the drive to get back to the office is coming from the middle manager. You just can’t do ass sniffing at home at it’s essential for their carrier advancement in the megacorps.
Oh man do I feel this. I used to report to the director, just one step below the VP. Zero issues. Everything went smoothly. My team is very independent and we interacted with the guy like once a month, he’d just ask about one particular issue and move on.
Everyone is retiring here and they want to prepare new blood, that means unnecessary middle management. Everyone has them, but I was lucky. Until 2020.
This new guy wants to meet once a week. Got us all in the office FIRST, while everyone else was still WFH. I do need to be onsite for a few things, but I live 3 miles from work and being on call had been working great, but you think he was listening? Now I just spend my time sitting at the office when I could be letting my dog out with the same productivity.
Additionally he has no power of making any decisions that matter, so talking to him is useless. He doesn’t have the courage to transmit messages to other teams that could be a problem for someone else, so we are basically gagged. And whenever something happens he will defend himself, not us, so we are pretty much abandoned. The decline in quality of my position went from an easy 90 to a 10 in a matter of months.
In other words, my happy job turned into me looking for a job.
> If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving.
Agreed. I hope to never work in an office again. It's a horrible concept.
I was ok with office work during the first 15+ years of my career when I had a private office. That works very well. Commute was annoying, but I'll take it.
But then came the cubicles. Ugh. Then came the open office nightmare. I will never be in an open office again. Not an option, full stop.
You want my expertise? The options are remote or private office.
We already had partial WFH - my company has a lot of developers late in their career (aged 50+), they've been through the mill and can't be fucked with stupid hours anymore. And don't need constant supervision either.
Another thing; partial work from home has been a thing over here for a long time now, called "the new working". In practice though, it was just as bad as the open office, in that it was a tactic to reduce the amount of office space needed. Because some clipboard warrior decided that office space was their biggest expense, not staff, nor the realization that they can do more with the same staff if they make some changes to improve their productivity - e.g. no open offices, fixed workspaces, and a goal in their career.
I think asking employees to come in, say once a month is a pretty cool balance. So on that day that everyone comes together, rather make it a social thing and not a sit and work day. Have a friendly townhall and focus on cohesion & empathy. Ask them what they need, if their home circumstances can be improved etc.
They can have a much smaller office space (can be fancier since it is smaller) for people to meet if they really need to (specifically client facing), then there are internet & coffee & snacks, desks & couches available. 90% staff don't have to go to the office to be honest.
And the rest of the money being saved on having smaller offices can be funneled to employee bonuses/benefits or gear (better desks/chairs if you are chair-bound) (more frequent upgrades or let the employee choose what gear they want (within reason)), (at work I have 1x 24" 1080p screen, at home I have 2x 27" 1440p but I bought it with my own money... (which is the ultimate size and density for programming for me)), (decent webcam & dedicated microphone and good headphones), paid for tooling (like gitkraken/jetbrains/pluralsight subscriptions). Stuff like that will make a huge difference.
> ... the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth ...
Crazy idea - install a whiteboard at home and point a 4k camera at it. The broke college student version of this involves a pen, paper, and the camera on your cellphone; it works quite well.
Whiteboard area in a conference room has some challenges to recreate. That said, we've found collaborative editing replaces a lot of sloppy handwriting and people capturing with smartphones and recreating after the meeting. To say nothing of the fact, that wealthy SV companies complaining that they have to structure their entire companies arounf in-person because virtual whiteboards are a really hard problem should be basically ridiculed.
I actually agree that in-person get-togethers are useful. I'm just not convinced they can't be handles as quarterly events in many situations--as many companies with distributed workforces already do.
I didn't mean to claim 100% equivalence, just to point out how trivial it is to replace the core functionality if that's really what the issue is. Personally I think that collaborative editing tools are a strict improvement in all areas except for free form diagrams.
> virtual whiteboards
Even a fully virtual equivalent is fairly trivial. Just buy a damn drawing tablet already! Being good enough to do commercial artwork on, they're all but guaranteed to far exceed the needs of any software developer.
Having used said virtual whiteboards - they suck. Most of ‘whiteboarding’ is the low lag communication, body language, ease of just ‘doing something’ by hand. In my experience, the connection issues, lack of ability to get good fidelity in communication, random glitches and other issues, just ruins the majority of it.
Not having a terrible commute or paying 10x the national average for a closet to live in are definitely a strong plus in the other column though for sure.
For me, whiteboards are worthless. I have zero artistic skills, bad handwriting, and my thought processes are not particularly visual. When I have to participate, I usually just stand at the board and talk, and never draw anything.
For capturing bullet points, and other terse text, a Google doc is far superior.
Not so crazy. I've been looking for whiteboards (well, smart boards) with hdmi out or just using a camera for instructor at home use. A Black Magic Design ATEM allows for multiple inputs and use on Zoom as a web cam. We did buy an overhead web cam specifically for our beadwork instructor do she could show closeups of her working hands free.
Personally I look forward to hybrid but where I decide when to go in to the office as needed to get work done. Probably that would mean 2-3 days a week for me, given the kind of engineering work I do. I'm actually tired of staying home all day every day because of work. I actually kind of enjoy "going somewhere" for the day, seeing the sun rise, smelling the fresh bread and coffee as I pass the bakery, seeing restaurants setting up for the day, and the world waking up together with me as I step outside. Somehow that sensual experience gives me a sort of motivation to get stuff done.
In my current commute situation it meas going from peninsula to SF for the day, which also means I get to have lunches in the city that I wouldn't otherwise get at home, and can meet people after work who live in the city. My work is also a couple blocks from the Caltrain station, and so the commute isn't really an issue, I just walk into this big metal box and keep working and I appear in SF an hour later, it's actually kind of relaxing, and I just like trains in general, and looking out the window watching the entire Bay Area fly by me without me having to drive. In the evening on the return ride I see the fog rolling over the mountains as I look out the train window, and that's relaxing too, and as I pass by about 10 other bay area towns, I can choose any single one of them to get off the train and have dinner, or bike around the town just for the hell of it, to get some exercise.
I don't want to commute for face time though. Rather, I'd do it for things like a big space with proper air conditioning, sunlight, and conference rooms without annoying gas leaf blowers that linger in front of my front door exactly when I'm having meetings. I also work on industrial-sized robots, and even if the company were to buy extra hardware, it's pretty impossible/unsafe to be running that kind of stuff at home. It's enormously more efficient to sit in front of the actual thing than to try to cope with a video feed.
I'm a bit of an ambivert, slighly more introverted, but not an extreme introvert. I do enjoy company, and I do miss the lunch conversations about wild and awesome things that I didn't get during the pandemic. I've also found time and time again at past organizations that those in-person socializing circumstances enormously helped build mutual trust with coworkers (specifically peers, not managers or subordinates) for when things actually went wrong. We're social animals and it's still hard to get around that biological fact.
Moving to the middle of nowhere to get cheaper rent and a bigger work space isn't really what I want to do either, because I do like having access to public transportation and food from around the world, including the grocery stores of the ethnic foods I'm used to eating. I'm kind of happy living in a cosmopolitan/global part of the world. I hate the high rents, admittedly, but I realize I can't have it all.
But yeah, no, I wouldn't commute or do hybrid to please management. It's just me. I still want to make the decision about when to go in myself based on circumstances.
> I actually kind of enjoy "going somewhere" for the day, seeing the sun rise, smelling the fresh bread and coffee as I pass the bakery, seeing restaurants setting up for the day, and the world waking up together with me as I step outside. Somehow that sensual experience gives me a sort of motivation to get stuff done.
This sounds rather idyllic and I'm sort of picturing you as Belle in Beauty in the Beast as she walks around her provincial town singing to the shopkeepers as she walks to the library.
It sounds like it would suit your needs to work remotely from a rented office desk. It sounds like it’s not as big an issue for you since you’re a few stations from work, but it also sounds like the work office doesn’t afford you much over many other offices.
They will be happy to replace you with a H1B worker (who himself will be happy to migrate from India to the USA). The current situation is temporary since COVID immigration restrictions remain in place.
I’ll have a new job. They can do what they want. Hiring fresh H1B employees to replace seasoned engineers rarely ends well. It’s part of the reason we get paid as much as we do.
If I end up leaving because the company refuses to offer WFH, it won’t be getting a 2-week notice or any form of knowledge transfer from me.
I hear the thing these days is to see how long your former employer will pay you before realizing you aren't doing any work for them anymore. It sounds like a joke but I’ve seen it happen on multiple occasions. Coworker just stops showing up and 5 months later their Slack is deactivated.
I’m not denying this happens but if they aren’t missed by their coworkers - who would presumably take the brunt of the work of the missing employee - then they weren’t really contributing. Plus, there’s something terribly wrong with a company that doesn’t notice this. And in Australia at least, the employee would probably end up having to repay their wages.
It's going to be harder to justify a "shortage" of workers when companies cut themselves off from the remote worker pool. I have no doubt they will, but the lie will be much more obvious.
Companies also won't be able to claim they hire the best if the rule out remote, but of course they'll still say it.
Eh I don’t think so. If it comes to that Americans will just stop letting people come here to work and dismantle these programs. It’s actually something that has been unifying the Sanders/AOC and Trump camps for some time. I don’t know if he has but if not I don’t see Biden really changing much in terms of opening up/increasing H1B visas or any others in the foreseeable future. Maybe more refugees or asylum seekers though.
The current state of affairs is that we have a labor shortage. The country needs more and more service workers. Tech is the go to backup plan for any college graduate (from any major), so the white collar work is perfectly saturated at the moment due to tech (not just developers, pm’s, sales, designers, etc). The only need for h1b are for the truly ruthless cost cutters. Otherwise, you can continuously undercut just here locally with new college graduates or career-changers (bootcamps, etc).
Wages haven't kept pace with productivity since the 70's, and income and wealth inequality has reached astronomical proportions. IMO its time for a bit of inflation and improved employee leverage.
Inflation isn't a good thing. It is probably going to exasperate the wealth inequality and I don't see how it will improve employee leverage. It is an invisible tax caused by government artificially increasing the money supply.
Mild inflation can lead to higher employment. We had a super tight labour market before Covid, I remember reading about factory workers getting signing bonuses (!)
Here’s hoping we’ll just pick right up where we left off!
I'll be distressed if we don't have at least optional work-from-office after the pandemic. I'm vaccinated. You're vaccinated. We're all adults. The company remains in possession of empty office space. Yet most firms seem to think the best thing to do is lead from behind, wait and see, until they can protect themselves by saying "i guess everyone is doing it".
I already did. I got fired from the job, found another job that gave me roughly a 60% raise (!) (including publicly tradeable equity), and now I rent a private office in a coworking space with some of the extra cash. This was a victory.
A consequence of this is a price tag on how much anger I have, and it's fairly small. More peaceful for me this way.
Never mind that. In some companies HR mandates meetings on various social and workplace issues where they essentially being told what they should think. This blatant disregard for freedom of thought makes me think of nothing short of "politinformation" meetings in good old USSR. Teambuilding outings especially when forced and on weekends fall into the same category.
I am very lucky that I was employed only in one company before going on my own and never had to deal with the crap like that personally but I saw it happen to other people.
Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online.
The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business. I want to be able to jump on the whiteboard at a moments notice and maybe pull in a couple of others, while other people in the office can also listen in. This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business. If the sales guy and I are having a discussion and the junior front end developer hears us, he gets a sense of how we work that he’ll never get if the meeting is held in PMs on Slack or Discord.
I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office.
I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary. I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first. But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
> they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business.
You basically want the seniors' suffer the uncompensated inconveniences of WFO so that the juniors can grow.
> This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business.
This is not altruism though, juniors' professional growth is important for your business growth.
> if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week.
We know from "unlimited time off" experiments that the game theory of this doesn't play off that way. People will race to bottom yielding to tacit peer and management pressure.
> I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary ... But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
No one is saying it is arbitrary. It works better for management. And management makes the calls. That's the reason.
> I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation
Or lose the talent that prefers to have more agency on their work conditions.
That's asking for perfect foresight; the job market structure have drastically changed while they are in contract and WFH is now a competitive advantage in the labor market. That results in being shortchanged.
Drop the sarcasm, it's annoying and obfuscates the dialogue.
WFH employees get paid too, we're talking about the differences between costs of WFH and WFO externalized to the employee, which are not trivial e.g. commute, access to wider and cheaper housing market, all the associated stresses etc.
> As a manager it seems to me that WFH externalises one of the most expensive costs to employees: office space.
I would agree on principle but there is a circularity here. The cost of own housing used as office space is directly related to how expensive the housing was. In Bay Area the marginal cost of a 3rd bedroom could be $XXXk while anywhere else it can easily an order of magnitude less. Then it is not necessarily as the most expensive item anymore.
The more office time employers demand, the more spatially concentrated the work force is going to be housed, which will increase the cost of that extra bedroom.
Turns out concentrating the work force is also aligned with the sunken real estate investments those BigCorps had undertaken. You can bet as we look higher in the corporate hierarchy, the likelihood of personal real estate investments increase too. So it is a balancing act of those influences vs. the projected attrition rate of the workforce, who mostly did actually like WFH. That's how we landed on the unstable-as-hell equilibrium of hybrid WFH-WFO for now.
I think that most people that hate working in the office don't hate it because of the office - they hate it because of focus quality.
A social obligation here, a senseless chat there, a coffee here...a person reminding you about an unimportant email there.
There are just way too many distractions from work, at work. And those distractions are what people describe as "corporate life" because corporates over-micro-managed everything.
Open office spaces are horrible, except for the people not having to work in them - which coincidentially always decide pro open office work space.
If the work culture is manifested in interrupting your colleagues over unimportant stuff all the time, it's perceived as toxic by engineering people because they lose valueable focus time.
That is essentially what it boils down to. Add the additional time required to get there (and costs on the side of the employee for commute) and you have the perfect formula to get rid of quality work people.
While there are upsides of working in the office, there's also huge downsides that management likes to ignore in the discussion.
"I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first"
It will be interesting to see if discouraging WFH can actually be an advantage when it comes to recruitment and retention, but when all of the main players in tech are embracing WFH, its hard to see how smaller players can sell "no WFH" as a benefit.
Is this statement true, that all the main players in tech are WFH first? Didn't Apple just announce 3 days WFO are mandatory?
But in any case, I'm no FAANG, and I was just trying to explain the motivation for my preference that people WFO where possible. I wouldn't say I see it as a competitive recruitment advantage, but I'm yet to be convinced it's a disadvantage either.
> I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office.
Lets hope to god there is a large enough demand for WFH that your position becomes intolerable for more companies. I think having access to on office as an option is great, but thinking its "better" is a unfounded claim.
But so is WFH! I’ve literally had a guy beg me to WFO. Surely a better world would have a diversity of options? Or are we one size fits all now? (That size being the one that fits you)
Have you actually asked your team if they feel the same way, though? (and I mean actually asked, not just "hey bud, you're happy with coming into the office, right?")
I used to whiteboard out problems with the whole team. I loved it. We had a couple of star employees who were really good at coming up with ideas and sketching them out. Being able to get the whole team on-side for a problem and understanding the answer was great. Then I discovered (overheard conversation at a social function) that half the team absolutely hated them. I followed up in 1-to-1 meetings, and yes, over half the team didn't enjoy them, didn't feel they could contribute, and saw them as a waste of everyone's time (and saw them as me ego grandstanding). The couple of "stars" did enjoy them, and thought they were great.
During my MBA, I discovered this is common. Introverts don't enjoy this kind of interaction, and don't benefit from it. Some people don't come up with ideas by "vibing" off others - they come up with ideas by themselves. Some people can't talk about an idea until it's complete - the whole idea of "talking through" an idea to completion gives them the shudders, and doesn't work for them.
You may find, after digging, that (like me) you're doing what you love, and not what the team benefits from.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but you are making assumptions that don't necessary apply to me.
I don't generally do huge whiteboarding sessions with the whole team. Typically I write detailed technical documentation about what I'm trying to achieve, and how I think it should be done, which I share with the team who are implementing it.
It's typically only when they don't understand something that I jump on the whiteboard. And it's typically the more junior people that don't understand things.
It's not that I love huge, didactic whiteboarding sessions; I don't. What I do enjoy is explaining ideas in small whiteboard sessions with just one or two other people, or with small teams who have specific questions, and I feel that these sessions are much more productive in person than they are remotely.
I get that, I'm not saying that you might be making the same specific mistake that I did (large whiteboarding sessions).
I'm saying you might be making the same generic mistake I did (assuming that because I enjoy something, and no-one is complaining, the whole team enjoys it). And that's purely because when you described it, you sound a lot like I did before I learned that lesson.
As you say, I'm making assumptions. If you're sure that you're not making this mistake, I believe you. Well done, you're doing better than I did :)
Everyone on my team is different from goals to what makes them happy to how they work, cant expect them all to work the same and management is figuring out what’s best for each one
That's too wide a generalization. I believe your parent poster simply outlined the two polar opposites and that if somebody doesn't thrive in an environment where ideas are "bounced back and forth" then you shouldn't mandate them attending such sessions. Nothing else.
If they don't thrive in that environment, maybe they are in the wrong environment?
Is it important that the org bends to the will of a subset of workers with specific preferences, or is it important that we get a group of people who are going to get the work done?
I suppose I'm firmly in the latter group. I have goals that I need to achieve; I need a crew that can achieve them; and whoever I pick necessarily has to be aligned with the way that I work, because it's on me - and only on me - if I fail.
> Is it important that the org bends to the will of a subset of workers with specific preferences
Huh? Where did this come from? Why "bend"? You can just post on Slack: "The 'Ideation' event is coming, attendance is not mandatory, come if you want to hang out and discuss ideas about tasks X and Y!"
Whoever wants to -- and loves that way of work -- will come. Everybody else will keep on digging on their own tasks and job will still get done. Win-win, no?
> or is it important that we get a group of people who are going to get the work done?
I don't understand why are you conflating "not willing to spend an hour with people enthusiastically discussing ideas" with "I can't get dev work done"?
Too much polarization and "us vs. them", dude. Your colleagues are not your enemies.
I really suggest you read up on management styles and leadership.
Again, you sound a lot like I did before I got my eyes opened. And the leadership stuff in my MBA really helped me to see where I got this so badly wrong.
I appreciate your advice but I’m a bit of an old hand now. I appear to be coming across more forcefully than I actually act.
It’s really important to me that my team is happy, and with half the team following me from a previous job I’m fairly confident that they are happy with my style.
But that’s an assumption of course, and it’s always better to get evidence.
I am rather junior and recently joined a fully remote team. The culture is so geared towards written documentation that it's honestly not a problem. Every one is extra careful about writing up extra detailed instructions for the youngsters. Also, I'm spending a good chunk of time exploring and researching by myself obviously, but I consider that a perk since one tend to learn better that way.
I dunno man, documentation is way different to what happens in person. I’m sure you’ll learn heaps, but I think what you learn will be qualitatively different from what you’d learn in an office. Maybe not better or worse, but certainly different. Good luck to you though! Welcome to the industry.
I have worked for a few years in person before too. About quality I'm not really sure. It's probably dependent on the company / team you join.
But it's true that I got most of my workstation/tooling out of my previous supervisor, who installed his stuff since I had no preference and it made it more similar to his own machine, making the process of helping me on my desk easier. That probably would not happen remotely :)
>Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online.
In my BigCo job, your run-of-the-mill managers don't have any influence on this stuff. The high-level decisions are being made by executives who are at least four or five layers of reports away from the masses of ICs (eg the CEO is seven hops above me on my management chain), and whose entire job--as well as the entire job of everybody they come in contact with--consists of attending meetings. We experience the company and the workplace in vastly different ways, and articles & discussions like this are the result of that disconnect.
I actually don’t mind one way or the other, but I just want a clear rationale for over riding the employees preference.
I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM. I do it at work and then shortly afterwards with friends on discord.
The real reasons for return to office should be tangible. If you have metrics that people are taking advantage, share them. The only thing I’ve seen so far is out of this world productivity increases.
> I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM
Different people have different work styles. The water cooler theory is predicated on random, unplanned interactions, which are much harder over those channels. At the proverbial water cooler, an employee might engage with someone they had not planned to speak with, or maybe don't even know, and get some information or connection of value. Maybe you overhear* a couple of other people talking there and you join the conversation because the subject happens to impact you. I'm not sure how well that's replicated by Discord/Slack channels.
After a year+ WFH during the Inside Times, I have come to see the value of at least quarterly, if not monthly, face-to-face team meetings or casual events. Of course, if you have employees in different cities, like west and east coast, you can't affordably meet very often.
* I would hope people would not have a conversation that should be private in a public space, so being overheard is not a bad thing.
It's also worth noting that there's a huge bias toward pure software engineers on HN.
I do software, but I have to work with some large industrial hardware and it's so much easier to just have the hardware in front of you. Especially when you have to from time to time set up hardware that isn't even on the network yet.
Telepresence just isn't there yet, and the quality of internet connections and videoconference tools still suck. I have dual 4K monitors and still get 720p feeds or worse on most videoconference tools, you can't even read a damn whiteboard with that, let alone push physical reset buttons or e-stop buttons on actual hardware.
I mean, that's a great example of a clear rationale! If my job required interacting with machinery or hardware that had to be centrally located, I wouldn't need to be "required" to come into the office any more than I'm "required" to use Git to manage my code—I'm a professional, and that's just part of what I do.
The issue comes up with roles when that isn't the case. In most programming roles I would not have any clear reason to be in-person, and even if I did have times where I clearly needed to be in the office, I would not appreciate being forced to come in outside those times. Requirements like that are frustrating because they require a real cost on my end (less flexible schedule, less control over my environment, a commute) and simultaneously signal a fundamental lack of flexibility, respect and trust from my employer.
I also work on hardware. Oddly enough I moved my lab to my house when the pandemic hit, but I don't work with really huge or dangerous stuff.
I think there's going to be an interesting dynamic when the hardware workers go back to the office and the software workers stay home. The tendency for the software department to become isolated from the rest of the business was already present before the pandemic, but may become more pronounced.
I do a mix of software, smaller scale hardware, larger hardware, and am spooling up manufacturing.
So, right now I am in a lot, but no longer have an office. That is at home now, including enough gear to work on the small scale hardware.
If I come in, you can find me in the shop. My senior firmware engineer and I work best together, but work very well remote too.
So, I am going to move a machine here. We normally get together for a few days and will now just do it more regularly.
I am the better tech anyway, and do enough software to make me a good working extension. We expect this to be a net gain.
As that manufacturing spools up, I will WFH, only coming in when doing R&D, or to improve on or resolve manufacturing problems.
Pre-pandemic, I traveled everywhere, hated it. That is gone now.
Outside of software and other info heavy roles, having flexibility will be seen as a great thing.
As we optimize the diverse tasks, we will work better, and have many options. One of my favorites is to get up at oh dark 30, work in the shop when there are no distractions and head home after lunch. Those are the days when I get the most physical work done, and or solve the worst problems.
I've been working from home for the last 5 years, and I'm never going back. I get more done, I have more energy throughout the day, and it makes it much easier to put family first (which is one reason I think FANG and others are so afraid -- they lose a little bit of control).
So you think there is absolutely no difference in the kind of collaboration that can be done online vs. IRL?
People should get to pick a role where they work from wherever they want, but they should be realistic about both up- and downsides of their preferred location.
FWIW, I'm mostly pro-office - even after all this time - but I'm making a career change because I don't want to deal with living in the West anymore.
Maybe pushing for remote work would've worked, but I find it to be an overwhelmingly anti-social experience that sucks all fun out of being at work and I have no intention of continuing with that.
In my years of office work across a variety of “innovative” companies, tech megacorps and unicorn startups alike, I have found the moments of truly productive whiteboard collaboration rare and far between. It’s fun when it happens but I just don’t see it warranting the daily commute. Of course, that is my own opinion and personal preference.
But yes, I agree that it’s a no-brainer to let employees choose the work style that suits them best.
I switched my tech company to full WFH. I also implemented detailed surveillance on all employees, which I don’t disclose. It shows me keyboard/mouse activity levels and window update rates. It’s very interesting information, I have much better insight how and when people work, which are very different from each other. I also have other productivity measures and now I can really understand when someone is not working vs stuck or having difficulties. I expect for slackers this coming world will be harder to hide in.
Seriously? I would never, ever consider doing that to my employees. It’s plainly obvious if someone is doing their work or not without tracking their mouse movements.
What’s the name of your company so I can tell everyone I know to avoid it like the plague? My company is gingrapp.com. We’re hiring and would never subject anyone to this.
Are you afraid your employees would leave you if they found out? Good. You should be. And I’ll be here to treat them with respect and scoop up your talent.
Exactly. Why employ people you don’t trust? It sounds very tiring. I certainly don’t have time for it running a successful, fast-growing company.
I’ve employed people before who eroded my trust in them. I either fired them or nudged them to find a new job, depending on the severity of the thing they did to make me not trust them.
You must be fairly young and idealistic. It’s really hard to know people well enough to be able to trust them. Especially in this new WFH environment are you going to know your employees after a few skype calls? I’ve been in tech for over 25 years now and a manager for last 15, the level of deceit one comes across is mind blowing. In one case we had an employee we all liked and thought well of, did decent work, extremely friendly,
and we caught him trying to copy all the company’s code to a USB drive attached to his workstation under his desk. People are crazy you never know what they will do.
You must be too cynical and jaded then because at 41 y/o with a family and a fair amount of life struggles under my belt I still can't see your point.
With programmers in particular it's painfully obvious if they work or not. You are expending tons of unnecessary (human) energy to maybe scoop 5-10% more productivity. It's not worth it.
There are also a lot of people who work better (and more!) when they feel free.
I mean, you do you of course, but consider that you're only surrounding yourself with one kind of people and are missing out on everybody else -- and no, they are not slackers.
This is actually illegal, and the information you have provided is enough to get a search warrant in the U.S. I have forwarded this thread to my local FBI field office. Have a nice day :)
If you are doing this on US soil, it is a felony to surveil employees without their express knowledge and consent. Hacker News has your IP address information so unless you are using a proxy or are outside of the US you'll be hearing from the FBI shortly.
I think you might be confusing audio and video surveillance with computer system logging. We can log anything we want it’s in their employee contract that they have no expectation of privacy on company computer systems and it should not be used for any personal business, which again WFH is great because clearly they have their own personal computer they use to access remote access and all our logging is on the server side. If I have timestamps of every key stroke and every mouse move and screenshots of their desktop every 1 minute there is nothing illegal about that. Even if it was remotely grey area it would be covered by their employee agreements, confidential agreements and proprietary information agreements. Your fake outrage is a joke.
Regardless of whatever wording you have included in your employment agreements, your statements on the matter indicate that you are surveilling your employees without their knowledge. Your public comment to that effect could actually be used in court to throw out whatever wording you have in your agreement, as your statement nullifies the assumption that your employees have read the agreement (you don't believe any of them have, and you believe the wording that is there is vague enough that they are unware of any actual surveillance -- this is damning as it is exactly what a prosecutor would have to prove in this case, and you have openly admitted it). Don't worry I already archived the original thread and included it in my report to the FBI.
When your employees bring a WFH device into their home, and your spyware collects metadata on their keystrokes, you are in violation of federal wiretapping law as you are collecting metadata from within their private home network and exfiltrating it through connections not initiated by the employee and without their consent or notification.
By law you must indicate to your employees that you collect metadata on their keystrokes (under privacy laws, this is still just private information in aggregate). Every time one of your employees enters private information or logs into their bank on their WFH device, and you log your metadata on these keypresses, you are committing another felony. Even the DoD has to provide a warning every time you log into a DoD system describing the surveillance being used on the device.
Depending on your employees' locations, this may also be a GDPR violation.
There are also numerous export control laws governing surveillance software that you may or may not be in violation of depending on your location. This is why obtaining this kind of software is difficult, especially in the EU.
People like you should be afraid, not your employees.
Please do explain. What is illegal? Recording minute granular measure of keyboard and mouse activity by employees on our internal company computer system. You’re in a fantasy world, the FBI is literally laughing at you right now.
So either you live in a place where human rights don't exist, or will be in an entirely new world of pain and humiliation once you are found out. And in the meantime, since can't own up to your snooping, you can't act on it at ALL without parallel construction, i.e. without being a liar and a cheat. What you gain by this is only valuable to those who can't lead and inspire. What you lose is invaluable yet unknown to you. Sad.
Care to explain how a private employer collecting telemetry data on their own computer system whom the employees are paid to work on would be violating human rights and why would I feel pain or humiliation? We log everything in many situations. We also have full keylogging and all command logging via auditd. There is a lot of idealistic and childish responses to my approach, including yours. I’m not snooping anything by monitoring our computer systems in the way I do.
You treat people like toddlers, you can't even look them in the eye and tell them that, and then call me childish? Anything else, you anonymous coward? The fact that you can't tell that to the people you do it to says it all. No, I don't care to explain to you what was your responsibility to look into before you even put it into action.
> I’m not snooping anything by monitoring our computer systems in the way I do.
You just spoke of monitoring people, not systems. You spoke of "slackers". Now you're already backpedaling. I hope you get caught, and sued into the fucking ground.
What in the world are you talking about? You honestly believe I can be sued for monitoring employee activity on a private businesses computer systems? The level of entitlement expressed by some HN commenters is unbelievable. Snooping would be somehow spying on their private computer or information not their usage of their work system. We have every right to record everything and anything. I’ve actually considered expanding it to include periodic screenshots, maybe once per minute.
There is nothing for us to be “caught” you have no legal or ethical grounds. My guess is I’ve touched a nerve with you because you have realized if your manager could see such data then your scam might be up.
Can you provide a reference for that? I am logging the employee’s use of the corporate computer system that they don’t own and are being paid to work on. That is total nonsense it can be illegal, there is zero legal expectation of any privacy on a private companies computer systems. Why in the world should there be?
That’s ridiculous, and only proves my point that management is obsessed with meaningless metrics and what employees do with their free time rather than whether they’re completing their assigned duties or not.
I feel very empowered by WFH as a manager. I get gamed much less by the developers I manage. For instance I assign a duty or task as you mention, and I can now clearly see if anytime was spent on it or not. So during my progress reviews if a developer says he is still working on it, been a bit more complex than he expected, yet I can clear see when he was active on the system, and due to proprietary nature of our software, you can’t really spend much time that is useful outside our system, so if I see only 1-2 hours actively working, my activity data is second granularity, and I have statistical reports and graphs written up in R, so I know with absolute precision, but they don’t know. I now know clearly who lies and who doesn’t. I don’t tell the ones who lie that I know. Instead I just focus on the technical issues on their task, sometimes I just do it for them, to humiliate them.
They get pretty embarrassed when I complete their assignment in 2 hours after our meeting an assignment which should have taken them maybe one day but they have supposedly been working on for the last 8. It’s a very effective technique and so far has been applied to more junior employees with great success.
There is something you might be missing. I'm a developer. Quite a bit of my development time is not spent at a computer. It's spent working things out in my head while walking or jogging, or even just wandering around the house.
I agree it will be spoofed if employees know what is being measured. It’s the main reason we don’t disclose it. I can already see the people who will spoof it because many of the employees make sure to connect each day, but then often just leave it and never type anything almost the whole day. I’ve also thought about adding additional telemetry data like, unique commands run, num files accessed, web access stats, etc. The last 15 months of data is pretty interesting data set with only basic activity measure and I’d imagine would be even more interesting with better context.
Of course I do that to and did that before the pandemic. I review all code commits and review reports and results from the system. I also track completed tasks and assign them complexity level. Am I stupid or something? How would I know who is completing tasks or not. This was how we operated before WFH, the change is implementing direct surveillance telemetry on employee activity on the system. Another improvement is that collaboration is all now over internal chat, which I can review these discussions and get a sense of level of collaboration. When I overlay all the information it gives me an extremely good idea of what is actually happening.
To be blunt, yes, unless you're trolling. Nobody could like you, you'd be the laughingstock of the company. The literal bootlicker too inept to rise and just tries to make others miserable. I say try because I guarantee you nobody gives a shit, they all just cash in the paycheck and wonder why it takes the company so long to fire them.
Absolutely, I’m able to use the insights to work to increase productivity. Remember I don’t disclose I can see this. It has let me better manage cases, first the slacker that assumes because I’m old and a manager I’m stupid and they can BS me and not work, but also importantly find the hidden skilled developers, there have been a few that have completed complex tasks very quickly considering their activity on the system, so I can ramp up their load and complexity, wheres before they had hidden from me how good they really were.
Your posts are clearly designed to elicit as much outrage as possible.
Either that our you need treatment for paranoia. Not only are your incompetent employees screwing you over, but your competent employees are also out to get you by “hiding” their abilities from you. Come on.
> None have ever showed the slightest interest in anything I do when not at work.
Right, but they do what they can to increase the time you are at work. I'd say requiring 40 mandatory hours in an office is a start to that, and they do plenty to try to grow those 40.
I've never, ever encountered a manager that was interested in what anyone did when not on the clock. (Well, my manager at Boeing did invite me to come flying with him, and I did, and got a nice aerial tour of Seattle.)
Of course, I'm sure they exist. Not often, though.
The people who want to control other peoples' lives go into politics and activism, not business.
I had a job where I worked in a cubical next to the main door, unfortunately also next to the head of engineering's office. I actually got in trouble with him because I would frequently walk by* and also a lot of people would talk to me as they hung around the area (literally the water cooler...). The experience completely soured me on the whole company, and as soon as I could I found a remote working job and am much happier now!
*after I was told I walked around too much I kept an internal record of every time I left my desk and for what reason. It turns out, the main reasons I walked by was 1) meetings, 2) lab work, and 3) bathroom. I was hoping he would bring it up again so I could show him the Excel sheet!
I find it kind of absurd that management thinks it’s appropriate to chastise employees as if they are naughty children. It’s dehumanizing to say the least.
Why does management care what I do in my free time, so long as I get my job done? It’s a power trip, plain and simple.
I hope you gave a reason if they asked why you’re leaving.
Ask again when the job market isn’t as good. And be careful, when layoffs come, those that aren’t seen as much will be thought off as less useful, even if it’s untrue. I’m for WFH where possible but let’s not pretend time zones and in person interactions, just to name a few benefits of colocation have no benefit or that they don’t appeal to anyone. Personally, my personality is such that I need to be at the office to be productive. I don’t actually think I’m in the minority.
Sure, but how many years of my life will I waste, wringing my hands in fearful anticipation of when the job market tanks?
Either way, I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to get a job, or have enough saved to weather the storm. In the meantime, the sense of freedom that comes from WFH is unparalleled.
I was talking more about the stress of keeping the same standard of living during a downturn. Again, I am pro-WFH but fear the vulnerability one is in when not seen in person. I've been bit before. Perhaps it's a critical mass thing, the more people WFH, the more my fears will assuage, but for the time being, I guess I just don't know. Remember, during a down turn, the company wouldn't even have to lay you off to get rid of you, just rescind their WFH policy. If you're far away, they know you won't relocate.
There are a lot of WFH options now and more every day. Many, if not most new startups will never have an office.
I’d be far more worried about being saddled with a huge mortgage to live close to an office. In a downturn, it’s not like there will be office jobs either. Yet you could still easily get stuck paying 1M+ for housing that would cost <300k in locations where you could wfh.
Personally speaking, I cannot wait to have the opportunity to be back to the office 100% of the time. I just cannot cope with the lack of proper division between my home life and work life.
Some of my colleagues agree, but I obviously recognise the fact that most do not.
Even before the pandemic our organisation had hybrid working conditions and I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re aiming for again in the near future; for good or for ill.
“ lack of proper division between my home life and work life.”
This tells me you’re doing WFH wrong or don’t have enough discipline for it. That’s okay, wfh is not for everyone, but don’t blame this on anyone but yourself.
There are tons of ways to have that proper separation, including but not limited to, replacing the transitional commute with a walk to switch contexts. You can find a lot of tips and techniques on the web.
When I’m done with work for the day, I’m done, and it doesn’t intrude in my home life, even though my “office” is literally in the next room.
I am reasonably productive WFH (I was 2 days a week remote before pandemic and have had fully remote jobs in the past)- but the way some people talk about it really bothers me.
The people that want it, really want it, are almost like zealots about it. Where if anybody mentions that they struggle with WFH, they get mad almost like it's a kid raising his hand to tell a teacher they forgot to collect the homework.
And I get it - Going full remote would literally be life changing for a lot of people. But there has to be nuance there.
People often talk about the importance of a "third place" in communities. A place that isn't home or work for people to socialize. The WFH zealots are advocating for a complete elimination of even a "second place" - But the workplace is something a lot of people benefit from. You form deeper connections and sometimes friendships with your coworkers, some people use it as a way to concentrate away from the responsibilities of home.
Getting rid of the office would have huge implications on our society as a whole.
I also feel that WFH was easier for me when I did it after having been in office for a long time. Both in terms of connections with the team and having office time helps instill discipline around work. As newer generations enter the work-force without that, I can see it being really hard for them (in both directions - in that they slack off and don't do anything or that they become workaholics.)
I really like your point about losing our "second place". It's a great way to verbalize the feeling I've had that permanent WFH on a major scale takes American individualism to the logical extreme.
Rather than learning to live with each other, we'll all just retreat to our own little castles (or shacks), taking all focus away from making public spaces enjoyable for everyone. Who needs public transit when we never leave home? Whatever your station in life is where you'll stay, there are no trains coming.
We'll all have a carefully curated whitelist of like-minded neighbors to protect ourselves from witnessing any of the negative externalities of our lifestyles. Our only view of the outside world will be entertainment news that coddles our doxastic anxiety, telling us the exactly what we want to hear at all times.
>takes American individualism to the logical extreme.
It's funny that you opened your comment complimenting how I verbalized something, but this feels like an even better verbalization of it.
What's the answer to my crappy 2 hour a day commute? Remote work, not funding public transportation.
It's all about convenience without stopping to think of what we're losing as humans. We didn't evolve to live these siloed lives without any sense of community. I feel like American society forments a lot of loneliness.
And the tone of it really comes through in the people who advocate so fiercely for it - there's an entitlement there.
I'm sorry, but seriously how out of touch do you have to be that 14+ months into the pandemic you still think that people can't have poor WFH experiences for reasons out of their control?
Lack of a dedicated home office, children/family members interrupting, noisy surroundings, bad setup, etc. I'd argue that "brain chemistry unsuited for WFH" qualifies as well.
I understand that life circumstances and general aversion to WFH can make one not like it -- absolutely. And the reasons enumerated are fair.
I don't think your original parent poster meant ill, IMO they were just saying that bending your home WFH setup to your will is achievable but I get it that some people just don't want to -- or their estate is too small or otherwise unsuitable for WFH (like kids not understanding your need to focus).
Where it gets problematic is that even if some people absolutely can't do WFH (and some absolutely can't do work from office like myself for the last 10 years and a half) and even with us respecting each other, the end result is not always productive -- one group doesn't work well with the other (reasons unknown, at least for me?) and it all kind of ends up in "us vs. them" mentality. :(
I don’t blame anybody at all. You may well be right, there are likely many ways to make working from home more comfortable for me. Although I’ll add that I only have one room so my “office” is literally my bedroom.
However, why must I make it work if/when I get other options? I liked working in an office with other people.
I definitely don’t mean to generalise - I know loads of people who don’t feel the same way as I do. I was just sharing my personal experience.
WFH will also be the ultimate hiring perk. It now basically costs nothing, since the costs have already been realized. Also, everybody wants it, so it’s high value among candidates. You can basically offer the same comp as a current employer but add WFH and you have a compelling offer.
I don't think people quitting directly correlates to WFH. A bunch of people I know who wanted to quit during the pandemic are quitting now instead. No one wanted to risk being unemployed during the pandemic.
This. I know a ton of people who were planning to move going into 2020 who put it off because interviewing is still a massive clusterfuck right now. I’ve been warning the execs I deal with that they should expect a massive uptick in the exit of competent people in the coming months as things normalize.
Level - how so? I’m on the extroverted side of an introverted team/industry. I love WFH because of its obvious superiority. Yet it seems to me it is more isolating of more introverted colleagues. It is a lot easier for them to take a back seat in discussions and a lot harder to draw them out.
I had the impression some people got their positions via water cooler talk.
They just became friends with their bosses when they talked about private stuff at work.
Introverted people usually don't do this and missed out on this opportunity.
Remote work removes many of these non-work related things, that could still impact your work. People who profited from it in the past won't so much in the future.
Take a look at Dice, Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs, Github Jobs, etc. Look at the amount of remote positions there are now. Objectively, your comment is false.
As someone who hires, remote at least does have its pluses - one can reasonably expect comp (costs) to decline and perks are gone. Not sure why I wouldn’t just hire a team in Eastern Europe though once remote is the way.
You're not going to hire a team in Eastern Europe for the same reasons why, in our current time, most companies don't use that method of hiring: time zone differences, language/culture differences and size of qualified talent pool. American developer salaries are so high not just because they're located in high COL areas, it's because most of the high performing developer talent is in the US. This isn't saying there isn't talent in Europe but per capita, the US has the lion share of the talent.
IMO these people are shooting themselves in the foot long term. If companies learn to WFH full time these people will eventually be replaced with cheaper labour from oversees.
I wouldn't be so sure. Many overseas contractors I've worked with lack communication skills that Americans have. Whether it's due to cultural differences, native language, or something else. And these gaps can waste a lot of time.
Totally true. They're already being replaced domestically by cheaper labor coming here from overseas. Imagine if there wasn't all that paperwork involved and their hiring pool gets larger at the same time.
I've seen that happen several times already and I'd say you are usually wrong.
I mean yes, you absolutely can hire much cheaper devs, sure, but I've witnessed the fallout from them not being good at their jobs which then mandated bringing me and several other senior devs onboard so we can fix the mess and get the project back on track.
So can companies utilize the global market and hire cheaper devs? Yes. Is that usually risky? Also yes.
(Exceptions exist of course, e.g. Eastern European devs are usually high quality and are happy with 2X, if not even 3X-4X, less payment than the American ones.)
That seemed like an awful lot of words to describe the entirely predictable fact that the job market will pick up significantly as we shed pandemic restrictions and that workers in low-wage service jobs tend to quit a lot. A few anecdotes about people liking WFH doesn’t make the trend any more mysterious or novel.
I think we've gone a little overboard with the whole, "unprecedented times" stuff. Sure, pandemic economics are weird, but they're not "up is the new down" weird, basic economic principles apply, and we're not throwing out the whole book, just writing a new chapter.
Color me surprised. For some managers it may become a time where they'd have to look for a new job and likely not because that was what they wanted.
Yes there are very good managers that help great deal in facilitating development. I am sure those would be just fine.
But I suspect there are more managers who are busy with nothing but convincing the rest of the company that they are needed and irreplaceable while doing useless work.
Of all the people I know who prefer to work in the office rather than WFH, it's always for reasons unrelated to the actual merits of WFH. For example, they live in a tiny apartment in the city with wife, kids, nanny, and need a place to go to get away during the day. Or in one interesting case someone wants a chance to hit on other employees.
People are not atomic units at work. They are part of teams and part of a larger organization. The question is not where you work best, but where the teams and larger organization work best.
Silicon Valley leaders, such as Google, have long invested significant resources in incentivizing people to stay at the office - great food, massages, ping pong, lectures, etc. The value of being at the office hasn't changed, and Silicon Valley already experimented with mostly remote work and rejected it, years ago. I remember Yahoo (IIRC) abruptly canceling their experiment and bringing people back to the office.
I'm surprised to see some SV companies now planning for WFH. Nothing has changed in that regard, especially for them - it's not like their employees didn't understand how to use Zoom and were forced to do it by the pandemic, like people in less tech-savvy industries.
Make the office worth going to. Have socials that are interesting enough to come to. Meetings all day should be done digitally since we have a globalized economy.
Organize in person events that are worth attending. Maybe we found a new purpose of management…
Can someone whose company is doing hybrid WFH share a bit about how zoom and in-person meetings are scheduled and happen?
Do people coordinate their in-person days so that meetings can be in-person?
How do zoom meetings happen when some employees are in a meeting room together, and others are on zoom?
It’s easy enough to have a big screen in that room to put remote participants on-screen, but how do remote people know who is talking or see all around the room? Where are cameras placed?
I did hybrid at a company a couple years ago, and the way we solved the meeting problem was that everyone at the in-person meeting would connect via their laptop as well. All in-person laptops would be on mute except one, who would have a good camera that could capture the room.
I found it pretty natural to _also_ look at the camera while also looking around the room, as if you were just making eye contact with a new person. And while the "highlight" border would only ever show for one in-person person, cameras are usually close enough that your eye is naturally drawn to whomever's mouth is moving.
> How do zoom meetings happen when some employees are in a meeting room together, and others are on zoom?
Generally, remote attendants means everyone takes the call from their desk. (some exceptions if the structure allows it, e.g. people in a meeting room present to a distributed audience, but for general meetings that's the default)
Many traditional companies are bound to the office for a simple reason: they have offices as a financial investment. This is true even for super rich tech companies, who went into a big real estate buying spree during the last few years. If they don't have use for these offices, the value of such real estate will go down precipitously. They are forced to keep the office style, at least for a majority of their employees.
But why? Isn't that a sunk cost fallacy? In fact, running those offices is going to cost more in operations and maintenance that having them under-utilized?
Presumably they bought empty commercial real estate. If it remains empty they'll get back most of that investment when they sell.
I'm convinced that distributed teams, where team members need to cooperate a lot, will be almost always (often significantly) less productive than co-located teams.
I'll mention something trivial yet having strong effects. While working, I often come up with a bunch of random work questions. When co-located, I often look at the person who could answer / I could discuss with. Are they in the office currently? Are they currently looking deeply focused or are they already distracted / looking bored so asking them would not probably cause an issue? If yes, I can ask them and get an immediate answer to solve a problem / clarify my thinking etc.
There's no corresponding possibility with WFH which leads me to shooting an IM which is often answered too late thus delaying the problem-solving. You could say that the difference between getting an answer in 1 minute or 10 minutes does not make much difference, but in reality it can have big consequences. With 10 minutes latency, you've probably already switched contexts and will take a look at the answer later, thus introducing even more delay.
Another thing I noticed that different people manage differently with WFH. Some people communicate often and even build relationships over Zoom calls with ease. Such people typically have great communication / interpersonal skills in the first place. But OTOH there are people who hardly ever initiate communication, very often keep muted in most calls etc. Those are usually the more quiet ones in IRL, but in WFH they are even quieter, and it shows. This is very much amplified when the team did not ever meet each other IRL.
I think that the "best WFH performers" can form great distributed teams. But it's not going to work for the majority of teams, who are likely to see productivity decrease.
I actually believe most of the WFH communication problems could be solved / mitigated with better technology (VR office), but we're simply _nowhere near_ that.
My last job was remote even before pandemic, but the pandemic was used as an excuse to fire people... who a few months later turned into off shore replacements. Thankfully I received an SBIR which will cover half my salary for a few months. But it’s also a good time to quit due to child and health care tax credits!
I fully agree regarding unions or even co-ops. The managers at this job wanted me to have ideas about the future of the product... that is, do their managing for them. Why would I contribute in that manner after you demonstrated your view of the workers as disposable?! I will take my ideas and capture the value, myself or with a like-minded group. Not be the phd face lending legitimacy to your mismanaged business.
I agree, for years American s worked liked dogs, for 2 weeks vacation when Europe gets six weeks off paid. We spend more time at work with coworkers than we do with our family’s. We need to rethink our work model.Please, I am not going back
If it really has to be hybrid only, would it be better if the in person office was set to one week a month? That way the remaining 3 weeks employees can do WFH, and also decide which one week/5days they would like to go in person.
I feel like this approach would make it more collaborative for employees as they can decide which days they want to go in person, probably pick a day when some/few office colleagues want to go into the office. Any important meetings can also be set for those days. People wouldn’t have to move to their actual cities in this fashion, also companies would still be seeing people in the office. Just a thought.
As a 59yo I have come to appreciate how my future post work (fulltime) life may look, and what limits I'd need to place on EITHER WFH or Back-To-Office life.
So thank you plague, for showing me what my future holds.
I need to figure out how to segregate my work issued laptop from the rest of my home network when I'm working from home. I don't trust work IT to not be scanning traffic on my home network.
Despite a lot people leaving the workforce permanently, the stock market keeps going up, GDP forecasts are very strong, and so are corporate profits. It goes to show the remarkable ability of companies to adapt in the face of adversity, and also the resiliency of the US consumer ,especially the high-end consumer. "If 50% of employees quit, fine, we'll just boost the productivity by 100% of the 50% who remain using cloud, zoom, and other services"
It's not because of productivity gains, the Fed has been pumping money into the economy without regard for inflation and we're finally seeing the financial system respond. everything is more expensive, not just stocks.
Given the high-inflation environment we seem to be in currently, I wonder if employees might actually start to capture some of that increased productivity in the form of increased compensation?
I don't expect employers to pay more willingly, but if these supply/demand changes continue, perhaps they won't have an alternative?
I wonder if partial WFH causes more or less environmental pressure in in the bigger picture. No need for daily travel from the worker's perspective, but e.g energy usage at home increases. Also, companies still keep their office spaces with all the creature comforts, heat those buildings "just in case", etc. It's like we have double options for everything now.
I think there's a pretty big downside to WFH: lack of in-person contact reduces team bonds which causes much more... volatility? I.e arguments are more likely to spiral out of control since you don't really know other people / care about them.
A concrete hypothesis might be: Less people would have left Base Camp if they were not remote.
What you're describing seems more like a remote gig. I don't read WFM and remote as the same thing. Remote is WFM but WFM is not necessarily remote. You can have an in-office job that's WFM for 4 days per week, but that's not remote.
If it has to be hybrid only, then how about going into office for one week a month and the employees can pick whichever days they want to go in person to office and do WFH the rest of the month. I feel like this will make employees collaborate more and choose to come in person on specific days all together.
A lot of middle & senior level "aggregator+PPT+strategy rejig only" managers are going to find themselves out of a job if people dont come back into offices. The actual "task doers" will hopefully get their way this time.
If people haven't been changing jobs in the past year, and a typical tech turnover is 15%, we can probably expect a lot of turnover this year. It's going to be an interesting amount of churn.
I cant wait until I can go back to the office 100%. WFH, while convenient, is something I never wanted. I didnt want it 20 years ago when I started to work, and I dont want it full time today either, even with the covid experience. Human interaction is not tradable, and online conferencing sucks even more then a real meeting.
That's fine! (I've said this in another similar thread recently:) The push here (to the extent that it's organized) should not be "abolish offices, everyone is remote". It should be "trust people to choose the environment where they work best". If you like the office, then you should be able to choose a company that has an office for you to work in. I personally work remotely and find it suits me. But I wouldn't mind working in a hybrid situation either, where being in the office was occasional/available.
> then you should be able to choose a company that has an office for you to work in
This is the key part though, this isn't an individual choice, it's a company (or at least team) one.
If the rest of your team is in the office, and you aren't, then you aren't going to be "in the loop" and you aren't going to be an effective engineer.
If the rest of your team is not in the office, and you are, well, at that point it's not really different from a coworking space. The advantages of in person communication simply don't exist.
So... expect teams changing from/to in office to be painful, people who disagree are going to have to choose over leaving or sucking it up, and that's not a nice choice to be making. Unfortunately this is somewhat viral between teams too, because your manager is effectively on the "manager team" as well as the local team, and people do move around between team...
Moreover there will be plenty of times were you want to work for company X for reasons unrelated to whether or not they work from an office, you like the company mission, the technology, etc. As a result even once things settle down you can't expect everyone to be happy with the office/no-office/partial-office choice that is made...
The problem is that the "I like the office and everyone else should too because it legitimizes and popularizes my choices" crowd will never say that out loud so you don't know which arguments are in earnest.
Well, probably a lot of "I like the office" implies "... because I like being around my coworkers" and that obviously falls apart if you're the only one.
I would go back to office if my commute was like 20 minutes by bike and I would share a small office with one to three other people on my team.
But my commute is 1 hour one way, some people don’t get seats on the train, U-Bahn in Berlin is like a can of sardines during rush hour and the bigger part of my team is in another country and the customer is at the other side of Germany. And the office is one big open office with ~40 people working. You need noise canceling headphones to keep your sanity. I couldn’t focus without them.
I‘m glad they don’t want to force us to come back.
My commute is a 5 minute walk. And thats no accident. I very deliberately chose my flat to be quite near to work. Has saved me about 5000 hours of commute time so far.
I have a hard rule on myself - if the commute is more than about 20-30 minutes or particularly unpleasant, I must change jobs or move house. Life is too short to spend such a huge part of it in a commute you don't enjoy.
Yeah, my wife has a 10 minute commute by bike. I make her change her job, so I can be nearer to mine.
No, sorry, it’s great where I live. Great nature around the corner, everything walkable, still a town with restaurants, but there aren’t that many interesting full stack dev and devops jobs and they didn’t pay as good. So, I’ll stay remote as long as I can.
For those starting out in SV now, that’s usually a choice of giving up a great job or paying super expensive rent/putting all your savings in a house or packing in with roommates.
We need some way to support both preferences. I’ve also been working professionally for more than 20 years and I absolutely hate working in an office. This past year working from home has done more to improve my mental health than I could possibly imagine. Just the thought of having to work in an office again makes me sick. But I can also understand that there are people like you. I don’t really understand why you feel that way, but I don’t really need to as long as accommodations are made for both people like me and people like you.
Good for you. Just don't be surprised if you're the only one at the office when you get there, though. You might need to find human interaction outside work.
Being the only one talking to the VPs and CEO in the office during lunch is probably going to be a great career boost. So don't be surprised when the people who go into the office get the nice promotions and you don't.
Interestingly my whole team is very much in favor of being in the office a few days a week.
I think a lot of people on the 100% remote side of the debate are heavily underestimating the value of relationship building and team cohesion (for most people). You can't replace the frequent face to face social interactions, lunches, and drinks after work with a Zoom call. We are social animals and the more channels there are in an interaction (words, voice, body language, etc...) the richer that interaction is, and the more we get out of it. A likely counter to this will be "well I don't care about those things", ok, that's fine, but that is not true for everybody.
"Team cohesion" can work against you if you don't fit (which can be caused by a large variety of reasons). So maybe people estimate it very well, and calculate that less interaction is better.
No one said your co-workers must or should be your only social connections. Simply that it helps if they are A social connection.
You're still going to deal with your co-workers eight hours a day. Dealing with people who think of you as a friend is a lot easier than with people who don't.
I want to deal with my co-workers as professionals, definitely not as friends. They are not my friends, I’m paid to work with them. Companies are more productive when you remove social drama, not less.
There's always social drama because humans are social creatures and not machines. Hiding your head in the sand doesn't make it go away but merely means you're at it's whims with no influence on it. The difference is that if you're viewed as a friend other people first give you the benefit of the doubt since they assume you had good intentions. If you're not they don't and then things can escalate very quickly and not in your favor.
It sounds like you’ve worked under terrible management if you’re having these problems. On a properly run team people don’t squabble and politic. It is possible to work in a healthy manner, remote or otherwise. The drama you avoid when remote stems from not being forced to co-locate with individuals for a large swath of your waking hours. That is a breeding ground for unhealthy behavior.
I have yet to see a non-tiny company that doesn't have political squabbles cross-team and especially cross-department. It's the nature of many groups competing for finite resources and diverging goals. I have however seen many engineers be utterly obvious to the politics going on and getting burned by it in the end.
Basecamp was a fully remote company that got enough drama to cause almost half the employees to leave within a single month. Remote doesn't prevent in-groups but rather it allows them to grow in really odd ways without anyone noticing until it's too late to stop cleanly.
You're just not on those Zoom calls. Presumably the office romances/drinking sessions are gone, but politics continues unabated.
Perhaps this is fine for you, but I want to point out to others that just because you don't see this happening anymore, doesn't mean that it has actually stopped happening.
For you. For the happy marriages that didn't happen, probably not.
I suggest that lots of this WFH/WFO stuff is super personal, and what benefits one may disadvantage another, so it'll be interesting to see how all of this pans out over the next few years.
It’s unprofessional to suggest that you can only be productive if you are surrounded with friends. I will happily produce with a team made up of people I would never socialize with. It happens all the time as none of my real friends even know how to code. Not once has this impacted my performance.
Firstly, the context of what I wrote was building trust and team cohesion within the organization. I don't think having or not having friends and family is relevant to that.
Secondly, we spend a lot of our finite lives working, do you want that part of your life to be cold and robotic? Wouldn't life be richer with a wide range of human relationships?
WFH fosters far more trust than “I must see my underlings churning away to be comfortable”, which is currently the driving force for those trying to return to the previous norm.
Every contractor will tell you that you can be far more productive than normal employees because you don’t get quagmired in silly social drama. Look at open source software, it is absolutely possible to create great software without even knowing the other team members. This whole concept that reproducing high school in a professional setting adds to productivity is entirely unfounded.
Lots of different valid opinions, here. I've worked about half my career remote. In terms of team cohesion, socialization, and communication, I've seen remote outperform in-person and vice-versa.
Can't you have multiple Zoom calls with some one-on-one rather than a single Zoom call?
Do you have good internet? If not, upgrading it might improve the video signal.
What about something like Discord with voice setup so you can literally chat every five minutes if you want?
Could you not use one of the VR programs on Oculus Quest that create virtual meeting rooms like Spatial?
What about playing a game together once a week online? Could be something that requires a ton of cooperation like Rainbow Six.
I'm not saying that real lunches or whatever are not great and a step up in bandwidth, but I feel like if you really take advantage of all of the possibilities then you can still have social opportunities online that can build real cohesion. Which I think you are not really trying.
Because in most companies, you're having lunch with VPs and CEOs regularly? I've only worked at one company where I regularly saw anybody at the VP level and up on a regular basis. Unless you're working at a small company, this example just doesn't have any basis in reality.
I was poking fun at them saying no one will be in the office by pointing out that if you're literally the only non-manager in the office then you've got some advantages.
And the best jobs go to personal referrals from those who are trusted. Which is easier if the VP you used to work with is vouching for you than if they don't know you.
Where do you work that the C-level people eat in the same place as the office workers?
I’ve worked at a Fortune 500 company for 20 years and I’ve never so much as seen a C-level person, even though we all work on the same campus. They have separate parking garages, separate buildings, separate fitness facilities, separate eating facilities, etc.
I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but some seem to believe this.
From what I've seen, its a losing game. You can kiss all the ass you want, socialize whatever. But when there is an opening in companies like that, it seems like the boss's son-in-law/college crony/etc. always gets the job..
Where I live, people are apparently not a chicken as where you live... Most of my coworkers are happy to go back to the office. I guess we have about 10% which would like to have full WHF. OTOH, I also dont care what the majority wants. What counts to me is what I want.
Right? Hey bro, I really don’t need to interact with you. You think I give a shit about your need for human interaction when you’re making me commute daily and pretend to fake work half the time at a desk.
WFH doesn't seem worth all this anger. It emphasizes to me that Internet rage/outrage is a social activity, to a degree, an exciting opportunity to join with others, share emotions with them, and have some power.
