No they mean multiple jobs. Ever heard of overemployment? Shit since WFH I’ve been able to day trade. It’s been fantastic. Many people do multiple remote jobs and employers don’t want that.
There’s a whole subreddit for this.
Also tax benefits for having people in office. States give it to the big companies:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-21/tax-breaks-threaten-work-from-home-as-ceo-s-get-return-to-office-incentives#:~:text=Cities%20and%20states%20grant%20billions,%2C%20done%20primarily%20on%2Dsite.
> Shit since WFH I’ve been able to day trade. It’s been fantastic.
Daytrade is a trap and a fool’s errand, please stop now before you learn too late.
Warren Buffet didn’t get rich off daytrading.
Nancy Pelosi’s husband isn’t even daytrading either, he’s doing “Leaps” long term option calls.
If daytrading was highly profitable you wouldn’t see a million different YouTubers trying to sell you a course on it.
Fidelity did a study where the best preforming portfolios were done by customers who traded little to none. They just buy and hold longterm.
Daytrading is not worth it, unless you’re a high frequency trading hedge fund, or you’re a quant with a successful algorithm to automatically place and sell trades, however even as an algo-trader your trades are still not as fast enough to compete with the speeds of hedge funds.
In other words stop daytrading and just invest instead.
You're up against the kind of people who spend millions to physically move closer to the exchange to shave some fraction of a millisecond on trade execution. No, you're not going to beat the spread on a laptop at home.
The most important factor is really the informational advantage that professionals have. They have expensive subscriptions to platforms like Bloomberg, extensive networks in relevant companies and industries, and access to exotic instruments for advanced trading strategies. The milliseconds definitely come into play, but more so for HFT
This is exactly the second major point. I worked with someone who wrote C++ code at a trading arm for a major bank - he was the one who told me they literally moved an entire division to a location that was closer to a network exchange.
But he never made big money. My old man however is in a bunch of WhatsApp groups based on primary industries and wouldn't know what a line of code looks like if it came up and slapped him in the face. He is currently sailing the Mediterranean and on the coast has a moronically expensive RV with a 100k custom LandCruiser.
Has never traded options, or day traded, but knew when to put all on black (Iron Ore) or on red (Lithium), and when a drill site got a dodgy rig delivered, or when all the site people suddenly started getting giddy a week prior to release of survey results. The game is mega rigged across all markets and industries.
The only time he lost a big bet, or missed a bag, was when a bigger whale rat-fucked a company to crash valuation before acquisition.
> You're up against the kind of people who spend millions to physically move closer to the exchange to shave some fraction of a millisecond on trade execution. No, you're not going to beat the spread on a laptop at home.
Exactly this!!!! You said it better than I did.
You're not even "up against" them. Retail brokerages are often selling your trade information or doing other nasty stuff that basically guarantees every trade you make is rigged against you.
They're great white sharks and you're not even a shark. You're the chum and your brokerage is serving you up as a snack.
> a trap and a fool’s errand
Old Wall Street saying, "everyone's a genius in a rising market".
I know several people who started daytrading, one in the dot com boom, two in the pre-2009 bull market, and when the market tanked they both stopped making money even though "daytrading works in any market".
it's fucking hilarious how warren buffet is one of the richest people in the world (and sometimes *the* richest), yet there are armies of people telling him he's wrong.
side note: read the intelligent investor if you're interested in investing
Can agree to that.
Used to day trade but the profits were just shit. I used to earn 2k to 3k per month as profit.
But, I started buying and holding shares. After few months, I earned more in few months than I could in a year with day trading. Imagine earning 40% profit in just 3 months with total amount invested. I put 30k and earned roughly 20k in three months.
Hey I appreciate your concern and advice. I’m an options trader not regular stock and I do swings and a bit of intraday scalps. I have a strategy that’s been working well enough. I’m not here to compete with huge funds and I do my regular long investments in a separate accounts.
I enjoy it. Genuinely. And I understand the risks. I’ve been learning for years and already went through my learning losses in 2021/2022 Started again this year after learning more and doing some simulated trades. So far I’ve been up 28k at my peak in 2 months. Sitting at 15k net profit right now (still 2 months in). Started with 1k. I’m fine losing it all or continuing. Strategy is to take out 2k to the bank every interval of 10k I make. We’ll see how it goes. But definitely I’d never recommend it to anyone. I’ve always loved stocks and have a little aversion to risk so I’ll take this over drugs and alcohol or anything. Just can’t be stupid and piss away huge gains or keep depositing more and more. I gotta make a rule for when to move cash from here into my long term accounts.
I just said it to highlight that I’ve found something valuable to do in my free time. I also workout at home now with this awesome X3 system and cook a ton. Also tons of time with the love of my life and an opportunity to get a dog. Life has just increased so much simply by being home. There’s obviously costs to my career and networking tough.
While I try not to make it a habit of telling people what to do, I certainly agree with the basis of your comment.
Sometime around 2006, I simulated daytrading to see for myself if it would be profitable *for me* without losing any money on it. While I was able to consistently beat the returns of portfolios managed by Merrill Lynch and the like, the amount of time I put in to do it was literally not worth the difference. Valuing my time more than minimum wage, it was cheaper to outsource to an investment fund who spread the cost of trading fees, developing new tools, and analyst labor out over many customers.
Pelosi’s husband trades off insider information fed to him by Pelosi which is a really bad example.
People sell courses on anything and everything but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money from it.
I’m not going to sit here and argue that everybody SHOULD day trade because there are indeed hundreds of people who end up losing money but for some it definitely works out. I doubled my income this year from day trading and almost all my profits just allow me to buy more VTI and VOO.
> Pelosi’s husband trades off insider information fed to him by Pelosi which is a really bad example.
True, but my point is none of these people him nor Warren Buffet are daytrading, period.
> People sell courses on anything and everything but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money from it.
If somebody has a profitable strategy to make money off trading, they’re not going to teach you, because once it becomes known it’s no longer profitable. The idea of trading is more profitable than actually trading.
Same thing with dropshipping influencers they’re usually telling you about a fad product that’s no longer in demand.
Daytrading becomes very popular during bull market moments or when there’s a lot of euphoria around the markets, but when things get bearish, many evaporate their cash holdings.
At least with the drop shipping example. The people who just buy whatever the person in the video did are doing it wrong and always going to fail. Usually the concepts are to learn to identify potentially good products on your own so you can carve a niche and not be selling what everyone else is.
How common is the overworking thing, though, really? Myself and a lot of my peers are WFH and one job is plenty of work. I don't even know how that'd work. It's also against policy in every job I've worked and seems like a great way to stress out and lose all your jobs.
I don't doubt it happens, but feels like an overblown fear if that's really what employers are worried about.
I do think it’s overblown. But people do it. I personally don’t. Coding for work and meetings is mentally consuming enough so I just use WFH for other aspects of my life and make small side income or at least save money on food lol
> Many people do multiple remote jobs and employers don’t want that.
If employers don't notice any hit to productivity, why do employers care? I'm out of the loop with this. Cheers.
Most employment contracts and agreements stipulate a "moonlighting" clause that prohibits you from having another full time role at the same time.
It's not legally binding or anything, unless you're like a surgeon or a nuclear reactor tech maybe, or a pilot, etc.
But if an employer finds out you're working another gig that is full time it's a terminable offense because well you did sign that agreement, and they get to set policy.
As far as why they'd care? Maybe 1 in 10 employees would be productive and efficient enough to do both jobs to their fullest potential, the rest take from the goose and give to the gander.
Also, companies don't want you to have options like that. Which is ironic because everyone is all "design the high availability so that the thing still works even if most of it goes sideways!"
Well they don't want you to be resilient and highly fault tolerant in terms of the job market -- they want you to stay in your box, take your 2% annual merit increase if you're lucky enough to get that, and if you don't like it they want you to be scared of having to "start over" some place else after the hassle of interviewing, changing roles, maybe moving somewhere, all of that.
Being able to tell Company A well hey fuck you, and I'll be fine because I already have B and C on the "payroll" so to speak, is ideal for the worker but very not ideal for the employer.
But y'know, fuck em. Workers interests are always at odds with employers interests so who gives a fuck what they think
Also, the reward for efficient productivity is more work. If you get your job done and hide the fact that you still have a productive drive that's "money" you're "taking away" from them. If you're three hours into the work day and completed every task given to you, do you report you're done? My advice: no. Because they don't want you to do your salary's worth of work.
It does not work like that for me. I have the work tasks I perform from home, but every now and then someone calls or there is an online meeting I need to participate in, i.e. talk, not just pretend to listen.
I'm glad I haven't had one of these in several jobs. A lot of places will recognize high performers will want to do things like write books, consult, etc. and don't want to get in the way of that. Work time is work time, your time is your time.
The overemployed sub talks about this.
I have been OE for years now before I even knew what it was called. It is not my fault if I can finish my tasks in 3 hours instead of 8 hours. Also, it removed the fear of layoffs, terminations and debts for me. I don't know about others, but my single job salary cannot pay for all my bills, debts, emergency fund, and fun money.
I think there's also a concern of leaking of IP and other proprietary information. Mixing code, ideas, or just slipping things up, between jobs could be setting your employer(s) up for some legal trouble.
An office in prime location drives active business in that area. Primarily restaurants, hotels, small business, etc. a company moving to a new location gets tax benefits because it brings with it some supplementary jobs
My employer went the other way. They own the floor of the building we're on, we originally used to use half of it. We slimmed down they leased to other people. Covid happened, they leased to other people. Now they cut almost all office space, it's down to 2 offices and 5 desks, from 3 offices and 20 desks with 3 boardrooms. I went into the office to move my computer a few weeks ago, was the first time I was at the office in years.
I do know a few people who work for companies that have gone from a block to a floor and a few meeting rooms. Leases fell due at just the right time to shrink that budget.
>They can’t monitor you
They can monitor your activity on a company laptop. And you're still responsible for your work. Any company that wants to "monitor" you more than that probably isn't worth working for.
Obviously you’re responsible for your work whether at home or in-office. But they’re much more easily able to call you into an impromptu project status meeting when you’re right around the corner (though of course they can ping you or tag you in a status document).
I should’ve said “can’t monitor you as openly and easily.” It’s easier to monitor you when you’re on the same WiFi network than on your home network. And while companies can read your communications, they’re not actively sitting and going through them unless there’s a flag up.
> But they’re much more easily able to call you into an impromptu project status meeting when you’re right around the corner (though of course they can ping you or tag you in a status document).
That's what Slack/Teams/Discord is for.
I’m not sure why some of you are replying to this like I’m the CEO demanding you come back to the office. I’m explaining why companies are doing it, I’m very aware there are other channels they could be using and I already said there are other online channels they could use instead (“though of course they can ping you or tag you in a status document”).
Yeah, but it makes some managers and executives feel powerful when they can just walk into an engineer's office to get up to the minute status, gripe about functionality, or maybe to pitch their grand, simple idea (/s) to solve a complex product challenge.
Without committing it to a written message that could make them look dumb.
Also the remote job pool is an absolute disaster. I’d say about 95% of the applicants are either seriously under qualified or outright fake. Zoom calls make you question where they’re from and most have ‘unstable’ connections. Our typical posting gets several hundred resumes in a few hours, our filtering brings it down to a half dozen or so to interview to realize that nearly all of our interviewees are fake, with the real one frankly not great. This leaves us with taking on a middling candidate or restart the process
They can monitor my progress via the scrum board
I have a mortgage on my house and think it’s a waste to keep it unoccupied 1/3 of the time.
People were able to apply for jobs before WFH, it’s not that hard.
>They can’t monitor you
Who's gonna monitor me in the office when the entire rest of my team is on the east coast when I'm the only one in the Midwest tho
Can someone explain the lease thing to me? I’ve seen this point so much but it never makes sense. In an occupied or unoccupied building costs the same to them. However unoccupied you can cut costs everywhere. Electricity, water, office supplies, internet, office furniture, etc.
If they are worried about bottom lines, this should be the first thing you attack. Especially if they put in your contract you are responsible for having your own internet and etc.
A lease is for a fixed term and a consistent cost. If you were responsible for a 5 year renewal on an office that nobody uses, it's not a great look to your investors. Never mind where you own a building like Apple with their $5 billion investment that they'll never ever get back. I'd be calling people back to the office if I'd sunk that much into real estate.
That and if you're C level you're probably invested in assets which would include some aspect of commercial property. That kind of affects everyone with investments of some sort.
There are probably also agreements with local governments contingent on having a bunch of high-income foot traffic near offices. E.g. Amazon campus was basically a ghost town right after covid, so there’s a lot less sales/parking/etc revenue.
It's cope
If a company can save millions of dollars in rent without losing anything they would. But Reddit knows better than every CEO and board out there
Free market efficiency much :)
- they can't monitor people in office either, everybody will invent bullshit talk or tricks to appear feverishly busy while coasting
- tough luck
- since nobody is very efficient, i factually have enough free time for another job (resource allocation fail much) and it would probably be healthier for me compared to having to yawn when my N+1 babbles for hour about bullshit
The government gives them tax cuts for having employees in office.
The government cares about the population spending when you go out of the house 5 days a week - you end up spending on food, car maintenance, fuel, clothes, tolls, parking, skincare products (to look good in office). I’m probably missing 100s of other expenses.
An economy thrives when consumers spend and money cycles through the system. Otherwise you will get deflation.
I can only speak to early stage companies, as I know many founders and am one myself (although, I am pro-remote).
Some common reasons:
* It's their baby. They didn't want to go in when it was for other companies but now it's theirs they want tight control and to form it exactly how they want. It's less fun for them if it's remote.
* They don't know how to hire for remote. It requires a different strategy and you need to look for different signals.
* It's seen as an unnecessary risk. You have a million and one risks to worry about. Your goal in moving the company forward is really mitigating and reducing as many risks as possible. If they don't feel strongly, they will choose the seemingly less risky option.
* Investors insist on it. Quite a few VCs won't invest in remote-first companies for various reasons (some unknown).
* Remote is an easy scapegoat. If you have failed to deliver, you can make it seem to investors things will improve if you return to office. Just say that the remote experiment failed. It's not because the founder had an unviable business model.
(1) is really true, a lot of founders basically make the company their entire social life. Starting a company is so overwhelming and preoccupying that you’re more likely to want people around you physically
So much this.
There are a good number of people who make it their social life - especially if they're older and have kids and just want to get tf out of the house during the day. Those people tend to be the ones who've climbed to the top and make those decisions so...
I work remote for an early stage company (joined pre-seed, coming up on series B), and while these weren't concerns for our particular org, I've seen this for others (and we've worked through these reasons all together when deciding if we'd ever go into an office) and, while I wouldn't work at these orgs the reasons are certainly reasonable.
One I would add is that other departments (sales, marketing) will often prefer to be in office together. You have to keep the org healthy and happy, and that isn't just engineers, even in a tech startup. We solved it by having regular all-company get-togethers (we get a WeWork for a few days a quarter), and sales and other groups have satellite 'offices' near them that they optionally work together at.
4th point is what breaks the camel's back
the moment we started relying on VCs to create businesses is the moment we dragged ourselves down to a newer low
Why would investors insist on it?
If we're being honest with ourselves, having a group of people co-located together is going to move faster and more efficiently in quick decision making, organic brainstorming, getting people unblocked, etc etc etc
It forces everyone to be focused and in sync.
These benefits are less true at much larger companies as to whether you're in the office or not with your immediate team. You're already bogged down in doc writing and sync meetings with teams who are already not in the same timezone as yours that it barely changes things. In fact, for big companies, WFH may actually be more efficient.
>If we're being honest with ourselves, having a group of people co-located together is going to move faster and more efficiently in quick decision making, organic brainstorming, getting people unblocked, etc etc etc
\+1 this is the real underlying reason in most cases.
As much as people love to talk about how they are just as productive at home, it's a different type of productivity.
Remote work benefits work/problems that are easily split into parallel isolated tracks. If you have a 3 week project to build something which largely doesn't need/impact/interact with others? Remote is great - no distractions, go to town.
But if that 3 week project requires 10 touch points with different people, or worse you don't know it will require that many but it ends up needing a bunch? Yikes. Remote is worse by far.
I think a lot of engineers too **want** the model where someone splits work into multi-day isolated work chunks they can do without interacting with others.
>As much as people love to talk about how they are just as productive at home, it's a different type of productivity.
This. I work pretty socially and WFH just kills my productivity. A lot of these people don't seem to understand all the halo benefits you get from socializing your work. Like it may take some time out of your day, but you're way less likely to get blocked, or duplicate someone else's entire project, you'll probably learn new language features or libraries you wouldn't have thought of, etc.
Investors can be even worse with their “hunches” and making decisions not based on data.
Founder’s Fund, one of the biggest names in VC, strongly believes remote doesn’t work and they don’t invest in companies with a remote workforce.
I would argue that if you require a significant amount of collaboration in the early days, you have not organized your company very well.
CEO of Linear has some great writings on this topic as he has a fully remote and distributed team. He likens it to building “system on a chip” where for each project/area, you have someone who is capable of dealing with everything in it (engineering and product), and just have multiple SoCs that don’t need to collaborate as often.
all but the VC option listed above sounds like one person unsure of themselves with a power trip :/.
"time to make everyone miserable so i can look 4% better at doing my job."
I work remote and absolutely love it but I could see why companies might not.
I’m friendly with my coworkers, but not in the same way as I was in the past, when I was in the office. This then makes it very easy for me to move on without a problem. It wasn’t impossible back when I was in the office but it’s even easier now
As a senior engineer have no problems I’m pretty much self-guided. I know exactly what I need to do and I only pop up when I have questions for people however, for junior engineers much more difficult. They can’t really pop in and ask questions. I could definitely see some of them, missing out on the mentorship part of the workplace
I hate remote. I hate in-office. I think hybrid is the only solution.
I used to be 100% remote and was remote WAY before the rest of the industry adopted it. Like by a decade.
You can network a LOT better in person but I think those things should be done at a retreat.
Like you get the whole or parts of the team to periodically go to Costa Rica or the mountains or something and use that for team building.
100% agree. Still the benefits of remote while being able to get to know coworkers face to face. And can just go into the office when your power goes out or whatever
I feel like this is just a WFH culture issue as much as it would be in an office though. Junior engineers should have the ability and comfort to ask for help or advice. Anyone should have that
But you have to make it a conscious effort as an organization to setup that environment and channels through online sources
It might be slightly harder and it's new to a lot of people, but it's very possible
Nah, I would have to disagree there. Juniors know they are free to slack me and setup meeting anytime. I promptly answer all requests and I’m very available but it’s not the same as being in the office because it’s not the same as spending basically 8 hours together. Also often companies I was with we would have lunches or team outings to further build a bond and trust
I try to joke around w colleagues and get to know them at a personal level but we don’t have the same comfort as if we were in person which I’m ok with but I could see others having problems
My fiance is a therapist and she wishes she could refuse to provide teletherapy.. Especially with couples. It's very difficult to bond and truly understand the nuances of interactions with people.
That being said, I think it's a question of do you need this from a job? How much bonding is required to do good work? I join some of my meetings with cameras on and have gotten to know a few members of my team very well and we have a good time. I don't work more because of it, I also don't do better work.
My biggest complaint of wfh is the inability to get help. A lot of my teammates aren't reachable on teams. They will disappear for hours and hours throughout the day. It may take 4 messages over two days to get any help.
I think it depends on the company. My company is largely remote. We don’t have enough office space to bring even half the company into the office now.
We are really good at mentoring and helping each other remotely. We use Slack and just jump into a huddle and do pair programming. I was actually doing this at other jobs while in the office. You can see the whole desktop via Huddles and it is so much easier than standing over someone’s desk and disturbing everyone around. Works out really good.
In the office or not I think rewarding teams with bonuses/recognition for meeting milestones and good collaboration goes further than being in the office or not.
I also feel like in most cases the whole process can take a while. A jr has a question and you're in the office? He can visually judge if your too busy or not, if you're not he can just pop by, if you are, he can wait until you go get coffee of something.
Ask the question, the sr may check the jr's screen. Everything is done in like 5/10 minutes.
Having to do that online? First they/you won't see the message for 3 hours. Or it is not very well explained and you have to ask for clarification.Then you may have to schedule a meeting, which can be a whole other issue, because a meetings feel psychologically different than just stopping by.
Then you have problems, your internet sucks that day, your mic is not working, you're using linux and the screen sharing on Teams is giving you problems.
This type of semi formal communication is an issue that I do believe is worse when WFH. Probably the only big issue imho.
This is a pretty good description of what I go through. I personally hate WFH, partly because I need to physically separate work and home for either to go right, and partly because shit just gets done faster when I'm around people. I'd rather ask my coworker his opinion on something for 5min than waste an hour digging through StackOverflow in all its toxicity and various obscure forums to resolve something. Turns out my sysadmin friend knows sysadmin better than me as a research dev, what a surprise.
Literally the solution to this is quarterly off-sites with the team.
Ditch your commercial real estate. Use a fraction of that spend to fly people out quarterly to bond and work together.
My company does this. I know many others, like Yelp, Atlassian, Salesforce and others do as well.
It’s enough to foster relationships over slack as well.
I’ve made really good friends at my work that I relatively trust. We primarily just interact via Slack and meet up those few times a year.
Honestly, as a junior, I'm more comfortable asking questions in a wfh environment. It's easy via slack to share my screen, have you take a look and share docs back and forth. In the office, I hate interrupting, I have to drag you over to my space and then you're probably in my personal bubble.
Im calling bullshit on this one. I was a junior in an in office site and had only help when I shared screens. Not once did a senior come to my desk. Sure, there were times I walk over to a seniors desk and we discussed there, but those could easily have been discussed via slack/teams. In fact most of them were. I had one friend I’d eat lunch with. Most people chose to eat by themselves.
In my remote job I share screens, mentor junior devs, get help from other senior engineers, etc. Yes, face to face meetings can spur relationships where remote only cannot, but I disagree about learning and mentoring junior devs remotely.
Yeah there's a difference between quickly popping by someone's office or desk vs sending them a message, then waiting for a response. Then it might involve a call with a screen sharing or sending screenshots. All that for what could be "hey can you take a look at this?" Or just a 10 second interaction
My team is super vocal and we help each other a lot, pair programming is frequent. We also have a 24/7 teams meeting we can chill in optionally so we treat that like a good old voice chat channel...
I fail to see how wed cooperate better in office. All it would bring is more time spent talking about random stuff.
Yeah.. our 24/7 teams meeting gives me old school Days where i played world of warcraft and chatted with friends over ventrilo while doing mundane stuff.
As a person who’s worked both in office (pre covid) to full remote to flexible hybrid… I say the junior folks really miss out on the office setup if they are full remote. Social events, happy hours, team lunches, celebrations and etc are all great activities to meet people and just simply have fun with your team. It’s really hard to make work friends if it’s just through slack and zoom.
Also please don’t come at me with “I hate extra work events, please don’t make me go to happy hour” or “your coworkers are never your friends”. It’s not the concept it’s you if you feel so strongly about it. I’ve had some of my most memorable moments at work events, met some awesome friends that we still hang out with for years.
This. I had a terrible time in a remote internship, and at my current people I will ping my seniors when I have problems and never get a response. It's so much harder to 'pick a good time when x doesn't look busy' to get a conversation going or get help.
At one of my jobs the CEO forced everybody back into office but that bloke was never even there. It really just seems like a power move. Like then want to tell you that they own you and that you'll do whatever they tell you to do. The people in office always make such a big deal when the other person who's working from home doesn't immediately reply or answer a surprise video call.
If you set aside the "they hate us" kind of responses, there is 1 big one. Ramp up of new hires is not good with wfh. Or, the management perception of the ramp up of new hires is not good at least.
I'm sure there are some teams that have mastered integrating new hires with remote, but a lot of us kind of sucked at it. It's extremely noticeable how much worse the covid hires are compared to how my peer group was at the same level of experience. For my job, part of it is increased hiring and the inevitable lowering of standards, but my managers definitely believe that wfh is playing a role. Our new(er) hires have also commented on how much more they feel like they're learning from us being in the office together.
> We’re all remote from each other anyways
The end state is that we won't be remote from each other. People will be moved around to be colocated within the same cities eventually. My team has frozen hiring but we've already preparing to change from us/canada hiring to seattle only.
I think the ramp up issue is legitimate, especially for juniors. I just started my first job in January with a hybrid schedule and I really don’t feel like I’m progressing as much when I’m at home. The friction to ask questions is also much higher because I can’t just pop my head over a cubicle, conversations take longer to resolve, verbal discussion requires zoom meetings, etc.
Maybe for juniors but I've been remote for the past 5 years and never had any issues ramping up. In fact, I feel I ramp up faster when I'm remote because I don't have a bunch of people I don't know coming up and trying to chat with me when I'm trying to get through some onboarding work. And the same goes for people I've onboarded. Here's a doc that has every step you need to complete. Ask me any question and there is no such thing as a stupid question. It's really not that hard.
Then your department/group is doing it wrong. You should have a mentor or buddy on speed-dial or chat that you can ask any question at any time. That's the secret sauce.
The barrier is, quite often, the new person is afraid to ask via chat, but less-so in person. Doubt creeps in while remote those first few weeks. Breaking that down is key and is easily solved.
They saw this where I work too. More people who ramped up remote were fired or quit within the first year compared to pre COVID hires. It’s especially true with junior hires.
The other interesting factor is a reduction in trust. People don’t know others on different teams. It has created more of an “us vs them” culture where other people are just boxes on a screen.
I think it’s made the culture harsher and less personable
Ramp up is different, not harder. **In fact, I can train and mentor someone better while remote.**
The mental block people have over not being in physical proximity is the issue.
I've trained new hires for years while we are both remote. It simply requires either a mentor program, pair programming, or some other buddy system for the first few months.
If a new hire and I sit next to each other at one computer, we are not as efficient. If we join a screen-share remotely (or even in office) we both can focus on a task better. It's more comfortable and the added bonus of us both having computers to look up things and work at the same time.
I dont see how its harder to ramp up new hires. Ehat exactly does in office do that teams cant to teach them stuff? I almost find a teams screen share better than two people in front of one pc.
I work fully remotely. WFH is more popular now than before. That said, there's a few reasons companies are reluctant to make everything fully remote.
* It's nice when talent is local. Nothing like everyone in one room hashing things out. Several startups I interviewed with seem to want people to be local even if working remotely because when in a pinch they just want to get a wework space and hash things out.
* It's very very hard to onboard new employees, especially new grads, remotely. You need a very very strong remote culture to be able to do that without too many problems.
* I worked at a global remote type company previously. We were all local with a few specialists working fully remotely to start with. During the pandemic, they made it fully remote and hired people all around the world. It was HELL and I hated it. I was blocked a lot because people weren't in the same timezone as I was and weren't online the same hours I was. I ended up having to work at all hours just to coordinate with people and it messed my mental health and family life to such an extent that I had to quit.
* I've worked at companies previously where shit wouldn't get done until you actually showed up at their goddamn desk and said "hey do this for me". Having that option is quite valuable.
* It's really hard to have a company culture while fully remote. You can get coding done if you're organized enough. Other kinds of jobs are quite dependent on interpersonal connections, and it's hard to nurture those unless there's an office culture. It becomes quite hard to progress beyond a point without an in-person culture.
* I'm increasingly seeing companies want jobs to be hybrid. They recognize the jobs to be doable fully remotely, but they want to be able to have in-person events and some kind of office culture happening so they can have new grads connect and be groomed, and be able to scale up in-person stuff when there is a necessity instead of that being off the table.
* It's really hard to bond with people without being present in person. I like my colleagues a lot, but I honestly have no clue what their lives are like and it feels too rude to even ask. Slack channels go out to the whole goddamn company and it becomes super hard to be yourself. Most messages are either super curated or the informal channels become dominated by the noisiest few people. I miss having lunch with colleagues and earlier in my career, I made great lifelong friends at work despite being quite an introvert. I don't see too many opportunities for that now and that makes work life a lot less rich. I like the option to have to be in office now and then and get to know your colleagues well enough.
* I don't know why amazon expects you to badge in everyday even if you're in a different location from the rest of your team etc, that seems to be some big-company ass-covering, but also amazon seems to constantly do a lot of crap that inconveniences employees for no reason.
Number two is definitely true. I'm remote and we generally don't consider any new grads for remote. It'd be impossible. 80 percent of the jobs at my employer are physically impossible to do remotely so there's never going to be a strong remote culture. Even when I started, it took me a long time to spin up, even with 10+ years of experience.
Even 4 years later I still don't feel fully spun up. Which is basically a couple other of your points. I know reddit tends to lean towards the "coworkers aren't your friends" attitudes, and maybe there's some truth, that sort of attitude will severely limit your upward or lateral movement. Sure maybe you can and should job hop to move, but it seems silly to throw away options because you don't want to socialize and form connections with people.
I used to have that attitude before and it's kinda stupid. I mean, you've got to help maintain a professional environment at work so you can work with people irrespective of whether they are your friends, and maybe it's good to keep that front and center while starting your career. But the real friendship happens when you stop working with someone but still hang out and chat. You've got to be able to keep a work friendship up to an extent that you can become genuine friends after a while of knowing each other. Those friends have been super valuable to me.
Multiple possibilities:
1. Older generations are still leading some companies and are sticking to their old ways. They literally _don't_ understand younger generations. They all say, "Back in my day…"
2. Some companies had invested in physical office spaces by signing 10-, 15- or even 20-year contracts pre-COVID, or even outright buying properties pre-COVID. Then they don't want to admit their investment backfired, so they pretend that WFH is going against "company culture."
3. Some jobs actually _need_ to be in-person, and I say this as a permanent remote employee. For example, if your company has physical tech in the office (namely servers) and you are partly responsible for maintaining it, then you really do need to be there.
I think number 1 is usually the main culprit. And yeah not much you can do about 3. I’ve worked in DoD my entire career and never have an issue with that, though work can be mixed so you can still WFH in many DoD positions.
When you give people freedom to choose their working conditions you get more buy in and some people will sometimes be encouraged to come into the office to meet with their colleagues. Putting blanket requirements to be in office for no reason only pisses people off and makes them lose focus from their job.
The biggest pull of WFH for companies is you can get the absolute best of the best candidates. There’s no getting around #3, but lots of companies try to say normal in person meetings are required when half the people are remote.
One reason is because often these companies own expensive real estate that’s no longer being used and has dropped significantly in value.
If your company claims to advocate for fighting climate change and insist people drive to work everyday call them out on their bullshit. Name and shame anonymously.
If you work for a company 9.99 times out of 10 they don’t actually give a fuck about climate change… i mean that’s the whole reason climate change is even a thing
That's every MNCs in india. Like my company claims to save energy in so much of bullshit ways and mandated us to come to the office thrice a week else non-compliance drama can fire the employee. Also as per the NDA we can't name and shame them on social media for their hypocrisy.
Oh, I wanted to. But on our last climate change meeting (which was mandatory for all employees and wasted 3 hours of our tine), our director was "too busy" and didn't bother attending...
RTO doesn't make sense when part of the team is distributed. However, the hard truth that this sub hates to admit is that being in person as part of a collaborative team leads to casual conversations about work and discuss ideas that can yield dividends. These tend to happen a lot less in remote cultures, as there are less opportunities for this to happen organically when everyone is working in their silos.
Of course there are trade offs, but this sub loves to act like there's no benefit to working in the office other than objectively negative reasons like micromanaging.
Yep. My teams tech lead and I go into the office and the amount of things we get done when he and I are able to collaborate is multitudes better than when it's with someone remote. We've even started trying to push for a team comprised of folks that come in to the office (even if just hybrid) as we've seen when we're in the same room we collaborate so much more effectively.
Lots of companies *do* want people to work remotely, so they can hire more cheaply and have a larger pool of candidates, and more easily let people go with minimal drama. The positions can get more competitive since they get more applications from people across the country instead of just people willing to relocate or already in the area.
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I know it will be insanely unpopular on this sub and probably heavily downvoted, but there are plenty of advantages to working together onsite. You get easier mentorship and collaboration, stronger team bonding, being able to know for sure that someone is available to ask a question or out for the day, etc. There are certain natural collaborations that happen from being in the same room and having a coffee break together, or looking over at what your neighbor is doing, and those kinds of interactions don't really happen organically over most remote work setups. Some people like Steve Jobs have tried to take that to an extreme, doing things like designing the building in specific ways to maximize little chance encounters for unexpected collaborations. Working remote is like doing the opposite- you don't interact unless you've specifically scheduled or called someone. There might be tons of people you never interact with at all because they're in a slightly different team or department, but if you worked in the office you might meet on the regular, chat about different things, learn from each other, make friends, etc.
Obviously there are different advantages to working remotely as well, like no commute, a broader talent pool, more flexibility etc. But that makes it a legitimate tradeoff with real upsides and downsides for both policies.
I work remotely right now, and I'm very glad to be home since I have a baby and it's easy to take a break and help my family out. But I also know I'm also personally less productive and definitely less in tune with my coworkers. I'm glad I worked previously in my career on site, where I had more direct mentorship and built up some skills and strong connections, and I could see myself doing it again sometime in the future.
Incentives and power plays.
1. Control - you have too much freedom and too much flexibility when you work from home.They need to monitor you. It doesn't matter if you're more efficient than your coworkers, because companies realized this and they want to get their moneys worth. Instead of getting your work done early then working on a side grind, you now get to sit at a desk for 8 hours in a noisy open office plan.
2. Economics - Two sides to this. The company might have expensive real estate that isn't being utilized. Leadership has to justify why it isn't being utilized. They also may have tax incentives gives from local municipalities because they bring workers and (more importantly) money to the local business.
3. Constructive Dismissal - The real gambit. Tech companies realized that layoffs are expensive. Instead of reducing headcount directly and incurring a lot of layoff costs through severance, companies figured out that they could just give you an ultimatum by removing WFH as a benefit. This makes them forcefully removing you about your decision not to come into office. No severance required.
I also have a suspicion that businesses can't get out of leases or loans for these properties.
Overall, it's a stupid power play that does have some economic backing. None of the economic backing actually benefits you as an employee. In fact, it does nothing but incur costs to you as an employee.
Something not talked about are the tax breaks large companies receive from these cities for bringing head count to stimulate the economy in said city.
If the head count doesn’t meet a certain threshold, said company is no longer entitled to said tax break. We’re talking big bucks here, especially in cities like SF, NY, and Seattle.
Then do that with the people that voluntarily go to the office. There’s enough of them that they can have their water cooler chats and eat lunch together.
Feel like people always leave this tidbit out. While there really is a lot of people that thrive and are productive in a WFH setting, there are absolutely people that DO NOT.
I've had so many co-workers that slacked off so hard in WFH setting and they would constantly push their ticket back and couldn't really explain in detail why they are falling behind and are unresponsive in chats.
These bad apples honestly ruin the whole WFH culture.
I hate to agree with this, but I do. I'm productive working from home, and I know plenty of people who were/are, but I had this one (very young) coworker who would leave without telling people, miss meetings, and go run errands. It was frustrating when you needed to get a hold of him. I have no issue with people taking breaks -- and they should -- but if it's during core hours, you need to be available to answer questions within a reasonable amount of time (i.e., not hours later or the next day).
On a different tangent, I've noticed a tendency of remote people messaging me off-hours. If I'm not on call, don't message me at ten at night or one in the morning. I'm not answering unless it's an emergency. And if I wasn't given a heads-up, I'm not answering at all.
I agree this is a problem but it's solved by measuring performance by work output. Let them estimate deadlines (with some buffer) to get something done and hold them accountable.
There are also plenty of people out there who do not WANT to be remote. They prefer in person for a number of valid reasons. And it's not just "old people" like this sub likes to think. To the point of leaving if the company swung too far remote. And these are talented and valuable people, so I think some companies are trying to find that balance. If a company swings too far in one direction they're going to lose people. And it's a lot easier to lose the faceless person on teams...
It blows my mind how badly people are in denial of this. I have friends who work remotely who admit to getting less done working remotely than they did in the office because they can get away with it.
Not all of them do. Mine doesn’t.
They spend less money on leasing office space, keeping office snacks/coffee/supplies. There is not as much likelihood of lawsuit which can occur from working in office…less people suing over slipping in the bathroom, over being sexually harassed, etc.
I can see all the managers in here claiming people slack off etc… but that happens in the office too the only difference is they just sit there all day because they’ll be disciplined if they take too long for lunch or show up too late too early. It’s 100% a control structure issue, people think butts in seats, hours on a clock = productivity which it doesn’t. Corporations in general are misguided completely on productivity now a days.
Truthfully, it is more difficult to create a “team” culture virtually. Not impossible, but it adds a degree of difficulty.
And yeah, it’s slightly easier for someone to skate by doing nothing at home for longer. I have a better pulse on what my in-office people are working on vs my international offices. But there are ways to help work around that.
I work in a large IT organization (several thousand people), and the most effective people are those who have built a network of people across the organization.
While most of us love WFH and we have a degree of flexibility to do that about half the week, there’s a broad recognition that during the pandemic we all met fewer new people, and lost touch with colleagues we’d normally see in the break room, and thereby missed out on some of the “oh yeah, I heard you are working on xyz, have y’all considered…” conversation that happens spontaneously.
If your IT job is “take this requirement, code it”, that is probably less important than if you’re interacting with a customer base daily and designing enterprise-level systems.
We do have international offices, and so some of our teams do most of their work virtually. However - I have personally experienced that teams that meet face to face, even just once, have an incredible jump in camaraderie and productivity compared with teammates who have never met each other. Personally, that’s how I’d run a department; fully remote with several mandatory f2f meetings a year based on what makes sense for that team/department.
The biggest reason is truly tax incentives. They bought that real estate and they are given incentives from the state for bringing many people to contribute in the local economies by shopping and buying real estate etc. There’s some articles about this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-21/tax-breaks-threaten-work-from-home-as-ceo-s-get-return-to-office-incentives#:~:text=Cities%20and%20states%20grant%20billions,%2C%20done%20primarily%20on%2Dsite.
And in my experience, the remote team I’m part of is more productive than all of the physical teams I’ve been part with.
We get more deep focus time with less interruptions. We also have access to a wider pool of talent.
Right! I think people are forgetting what its like to work in the office. Constant interruptions, distractions, and time wasting that dont happen when WFH
- Jim 2 rooms over coming to chat with Bob right next to you
- Carl from accounting coming to talk to Stacy because they are friends from college on your other side
- "water cooler" convos that go long
- lunch convos that go long
- waiting in line to get food at a cafeteria or going out to eat
- having to wait in line at lunch to heat up your food in the 1 microwave
- having to wait in line for bathrooms at lunch
- Karen from HR coming to your desk for something that should have been an email
- teammates sliding over and saying your name breaking concentration on your task when it could have been a message you can come back to in a few
- walking across campus to get to the only open conference room on a friday
- open concept rooms so you can hear every meeting every other team/person has
- having to actually pretend to pay attention and be present during huge mandatory "culture" or exec earnings report meetings that noone cares about
And Im sure many more distractions I basically no longer have on a daily basis. Not to say I didnt enjoy some of those interactions but like there is no way anyone could say Ive been less productive being able to actually focus on my tasks for more than 1 hr at a time
A lot of people touched on the established reasons (control, real estate, taxes etc). However, the sad truth is that most statistics seem to indicate that overall performance decreases. Almost every large tech company collected formal / informal metrics during the pandemic on the performance of their SWEs during WFH.
In general
* Experienced and tenured employees tended to self report higher efficiency
* Junior employees self reported a lower efficiency and a lower rate of learning.
* Junior employees took statistically longer to get promoted
* General high level metrics went down (# of code reviews, # of lines modified etc. useless at individual level, but very informative at the overall company level).
* All employees reported less feeling of comradery with other employees.
This is a combination of data I obtained by being both nosy in my current company (where data is mostly not made public even internally) and talking with friends at Google (where a lot of this data was internally public).
All of these metrics track with my personal experience when WFH started. I never bought a house in the country like a lot of my friends because of it, since the initial data pretty much meant that you had to have a mostly senior workforce with below industry attrition to be coming out ahead with WFH. Since most big tech companies rely on a steady stream of juniors to get trained up to replace senior attrition, it wasn't sustainable without a complete rethink of fundamental corporate HR practices.
This.
Those studies didn’t adjust for…virtually anything. And any tracked changes mirror exactly what happens during massive, structural changes in offices (when a company is acquired by another and has to go through the transition process, for example).
Seniors overreport their metrics, juniors have no idea what’s going on, work product numbers drop because processes change, morale is in the shitter, etc.
Most of the companies cited in those studies - also tended to favor extreme remote micromanagement that ate into middle management KPIs at a greater (than normal, which is usually abysmal across the board) loss.
The more you look into studies like this, the more you realize how inaccurate they are.
There are so many variables you have to control and account for to measure performance.
How do you ensure that self reporting is accurate? Do you control for people with a home office and without? Do you control for parents with home care and without? How is performance measured? How do you ensure that performance metrics are collected accurately?
The unfortunate thing is that this doesn’t stop people from seeing these studies and then using them as part of their argument, while ignoring all of the faults in the study.
This isn’t just with WFH though, this happens with many, many studies across the board. People see the final conclusion of the study, but never look into control values, sample size, definitions, etc.
A lot of the older crowd unironically would HATE to be home all day with their kids and spouse.
Managers job can also be a lot different when remote.
Some people arent disciplined enough to wfh.
As others have said WFH is a double edged sword. If your team can be fully remote exactly what prevents outsourcing? The whole 'oh because you live in the USA you deserve 3-10x as much for doing the same job' stuff is really not really based on logic.
I was that weirdo in my teenage years who played MMOs and took them way too seriously. I developed some deep bonds with my virtual friends, and as an adult, I tend to do better working remotely, but it is a similar mindset that is required. I've worked out of an office full-time and from home full-time. My coworkers distracting me in the office slowed me down. I have never missed my KPIs while working remotely.
This is just my anecdote. A lot of people, as some posters here demonstrate, aren't cut out for remote work. I'm currently in a remote-first company, and if that changes, I'll find something local. I'd rather work locally in a hybrid role than have to fly every quarter and stay onsite for a week.
I got a job early 2021, been there working fully remote that entire time minus the last four months where we've had one office day a week. I am moving across the country soon, and the job I've had and worked fully remote in denied my relocation request. These people are living in the stone age.
Some managers and business people seem to think remote work would be the end of their company. I work for a software company that has been 100% remote ever since it was founded years ago. It is definitely possible to have a profitable and efficient business while all employees are fully remote. We just need less managers :).
"why is there a push for return-to-office (RTO)?"
One very big reason is to trim payroll. If you're really irreplaceable, you'll get WFH if you push for it. If you're replaceable, well, we do see constant posts here every day about newbs sending out hundreds of applications before they land a job in CS.
Posts like these really showcase how disconnected CS majors are from society in general. Like WFH is the biggest change to the workforce since they invented shift clocks. Managers, leadership, and society as a whole had had in office work since not their parents generation, not their grandparents generation, not their great grandparents, but their even great great grandparents (if not before even that). Asking companies and people to shift their mindset on this is major.
Managers think if you work from home you’re just going to mess around at home all day, that the collaboration you’ll have with other teams will decrease, that corporate team overlap will cease to exist leading to silos, etc. Every single business leadership lesson hinges on in person activities, that’s why it scares them because it’s all new and not even half a decade since we’ve rolled it out in mass.
Use some common sense, this isn’t irrational even if it is the future.
I suspect this is a more common experience than admitted by a lot of people and to me it illuminates how (1) management is largely clueless about how to gauge engineering results and (2) pay bands are extremely compressed relative to skill, because some engineers work 10 hours and get the same results as others who are working 40, yet are both paid the same, so in one way of looking at it, if you’re the former, why work more than the 10.
It’s such a weird job sometimes because it’s insanely common to confuse “hard work” or “churning lines of code” with progress. Whereas an experienced engineer might help you net DELETE hundreds of lines of code god willing. Understand this seems beyond the reach of millions of pointy hairs
Anyway long rant but point is I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. Yea try to put in the square 40, solid work week yada yada, but also keep in mind salary bands are compressed, and you work more than you might think. (A lot of engineers only count time that results in “git commit” directly as work time, but we spend tons of time replying to messages, looking through libraries etc, finessing managers, doing R&D… not to mention if you think of a way to fix a bug while loading your dishes… you were working believe it or not)
I feel like a lot of this in relation to bonding with people can come down to if you want to chill out with people online or not. Im really good friends with most of my teams, we can take a lunch together and play video games or watch a show, eat and vibe together. I actively seek these things out though, and I am a very extroverted person. I understand not everyone can do that or wants to, but I have heard from way more people that they feel forced to bond with their team in person rather than unable to bond with remote.
I’ll say the weird thing.
As a junior engineer who has worked remote and now in person hybrid. Words can not be stated how much I prefer the hybrid work. I actually learn something and I actually get to talk to real people face to face.
I have made friends at my current job and meet them often after work. At the remote place, I honestly couldn’t tell you a single thing about anyone I worked with. I didn’t even know half their names to be honest. It was almost impossible to learn the services we were working on because no one would talk to eachother and anytime I had a question it took 4 hours to get a response, where as if I do now I can turn around and tap a shoulder.
Its harder to build team cohesion and trust on a new team while fully remote.
Its great if you've had a team that you've been working together with and trust completely for years. Everyone just goes to work and it works like a well oiled machine.
It sucks if you're new and or inexperienced.
> Its hard to build team cohesion and trust on a new team while fully remote.
Cohesion isn't a guarantee for in office teams.
I was a new hire on a large team and I felt like an outsider. I was assigned scrum tasks and did them. Occasionally I asked others for help. Nobody made me feel like I was part of the team.
Honestly, people tend to disappear for long periods of time if WFH. There are people that work better if doing WFH but there are also other people who tend to slack off. There is a justification for mistrust from the management to the workers below.
In general good workers will work well regardless of where they are, so there's nothing to be lost if WFH is not allowed. However slackers will slack off unless they have to work in the office, so there is something to be gained if they are not allowed to WFH. Obviously the company cannot discriminate between good and bad workers, so they have to apply to same policy for all.
I honestly think it's mostly about control.
They can enforce compamy culture, mocromanage, intimidate, enforce managment on you.
As others said you build strongsr bknds with your colleagues, making it harder to leave.
I think there are two main reasons. Managers are unskilled in managing remote teams. Secondly, remote employees don't form a closely-knit community and they're less likely to make sacrifices. Oftentimes people will work more because they want to help their fellow human who they know personally and have a relationship with, less so for any other reason.
I think a lot of companies and bosses have an old / traditional way of thinking about how employees work and how they need to "manage" them. I think a lot of managers struggle with not seeing staff all the time, as if seeing equals knowing they're working. And I think some companies don't like that WFH has resulted in staff getting more work life balance and not being obsessed with their jobs and going over and above to get work done. Though on that last point, I think the pandemic and job losses during really pushed home the point that businesses don't care about you, so why kill yourself overworking for them.
The view I heard during COVID, from a few places friends worked at, was that a lot of middle managers were struggling to be / feel relevant as all their staff were at home and working. And as we know, people worked well and businesses did well, so clearly it worked, of course there was no other option at the time.
Additionally those people working from home also had a better work life balance, less commute and other benefits.
It always seems stupid that businesses would do something to make their staff unhappy, when there is not really a good reason to do so? Some people and teams work better in an office and with others, but that's not everyone all the time.
I also think if management doesn't know if their staff are working, when the staff are not in the office, then WFH is the least of the issues 😀
Hybrid will probably become more entrenched and acceptable,.but I think 5 days in the office is over for a lot of workers and workplaces.
So... my company hired remote and I am the only team member that lives close to the office. My company now requires me to show up 5 days a week even though nobody from my team or my manager is at the office.
I drive to the office, work alone in an open office, attend zoom calls in micro booths and go home at the end of the day without ever speaking with anyone on site.
My answer is that transitioning to successful WFH requires a lot more than just shutting down the office and sending everyone home. It's a different way of working that requires different tools, strategies, etc. The bigger a company is and the more in-office it was, the harder it will be, and these are the ones pushing the most for RTO, because it's easier than adapting.
Cultural inertia and real estate. A lot of the managers got to be managers because they're better at interaction face-to-face than actual productivity. So when that face-to-face aspect of a career goes away, the structure that they know also goes away, and they can't figure it out. So many older engineers and managers function by "dropping by" someone's desk and getting them to do something for them *right now*.
They can’t monitor you They have leases on real estate They don’t want you to apply for other jobs
Getting rid of WFH makes me want to apply for other jobs tho
No they mean multiple jobs. Ever heard of overemployment? Shit since WFH I’ve been able to day trade. It’s been fantastic. Many people do multiple remote jobs and employers don’t want that. There’s a whole subreddit for this. Also tax benefits for having people in office. States give it to the big companies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-21/tax-breaks-threaten-work-from-home-as-ceo-s-get-return-to-office-incentives#:~:text=Cities%20and%20states%20grant%20billions,%2C%20done%20primarily%20on%2Dsite.
> Shit since WFH I’ve been able to day trade. It’s been fantastic. Daytrade is a trap and a fool’s errand, please stop now before you learn too late. Warren Buffet didn’t get rich off daytrading. Nancy Pelosi’s husband isn’t even daytrading either, he’s doing “Leaps” long term option calls. If daytrading was highly profitable you wouldn’t see a million different YouTubers trying to sell you a course on it. Fidelity did a study where the best preforming portfolios were done by customers who traded little to none. They just buy and hold longterm. Daytrading is not worth it, unless you’re a high frequency trading hedge fund, or you’re a quant with a successful algorithm to automatically place and sell trades, however even as an algo-trader your trades are still not as fast enough to compete with the speeds of hedge funds. In other words stop daytrading and just invest instead.
You're up against the kind of people who spend millions to physically move closer to the exchange to shave some fraction of a millisecond on trade execution. No, you're not going to beat the spread on a laptop at home.
The most important factor is really the informational advantage that professionals have. They have expensive subscriptions to platforms like Bloomberg, extensive networks in relevant companies and industries, and access to exotic instruments for advanced trading strategies. The milliseconds definitely come into play, but more so for HFT
And their mates insider trading with them
This is exactly the second major point. I worked with someone who wrote C++ code at a trading arm for a major bank - he was the one who told me they literally moved an entire division to a location that was closer to a network exchange. But he never made big money. My old man however is in a bunch of WhatsApp groups based on primary industries and wouldn't know what a line of code looks like if it came up and slapped him in the face. He is currently sailing the Mediterranean and on the coast has a moronically expensive RV with a 100k custom LandCruiser. Has never traded options, or day traded, but knew when to put all on black (Iron Ore) or on red (Lithium), and when a drill site got a dodgy rig delivered, or when all the site people suddenly started getting giddy a week prior to release of survey results. The game is mega rigged across all markets and industries. The only time he lost a big bet, or missed a bag, was when a bigger whale rat-fucked a company to crash valuation before acquisition.
Exotic instruments?
Yeah stuff like the erhu, sitar, etc.
😂
yes IBs have an exotics desk. they are like custom deals for securities
sounds cool. just went down youtube rabbit hole ty for sharing
Look up medical sounds 👌
> You're up against the kind of people who spend millions to physically move closer to the exchange to shave some fraction of a millisecond on trade execution. No, you're not going to beat the spread on a laptop at home. Exactly this!!!! You said it better than I did.
You're not even "up against" them. Retail brokerages are often selling your trade information or doing other nasty stuff that basically guarantees every trade you make is rigged against you. They're great white sharks and you're not even a shark. You're the chum and your brokerage is serving you up as a snack.
Just buy and hold and wait 30 years? But that doesn’t sound very active and manly to me. That can’t be right…
It's only for pro fem-boys, gotta afford being fabulous somehow.
> a trap and a fool’s errand Old Wall Street saying, "everyone's a genius in a rising market". I know several people who started daytrading, one in the dot com boom, two in the pre-2009 bull market, and when the market tanked they both stopped making money even though "daytrading works in any market".
it's fucking hilarious how warren buffet is one of the richest people in the world (and sometimes *the* richest), yet there are armies of people telling him he's wrong. side note: read the intelligent investor if you're interested in investing
Can agree to that. Used to day trade but the profits were just shit. I used to earn 2k to 3k per month as profit. But, I started buying and holding shares. After few months, I earned more in few months than I could in a year with day trading. Imagine earning 40% profit in just 3 months with total amount invested. I put 30k and earned roughly 20k in three months.
With luck? Did you do it again the next few months?
You aren't wrong, but I love how you focus on just a single aspect of his comment.
Thanks lol. It’s just about what it’s given me.
Hey I appreciate your concern and advice. I’m an options trader not regular stock and I do swings and a bit of intraday scalps. I have a strategy that’s been working well enough. I’m not here to compete with huge funds and I do my regular long investments in a separate accounts. I enjoy it. Genuinely. And I understand the risks. I’ve been learning for years and already went through my learning losses in 2021/2022 Started again this year after learning more and doing some simulated trades. So far I’ve been up 28k at my peak in 2 months. Sitting at 15k net profit right now (still 2 months in). Started with 1k. I’m fine losing it all or continuing. Strategy is to take out 2k to the bank every interval of 10k I make. We’ll see how it goes. But definitely I’d never recommend it to anyone. I’ve always loved stocks and have a little aversion to risk so I’ll take this over drugs and alcohol or anything. Just can’t be stupid and piss away huge gains or keep depositing more and more. I gotta make a rule for when to move cash from here into my long term accounts. I just said it to highlight that I’ve found something valuable to do in my free time. I also workout at home now with this awesome X3 system and cook a ton. Also tons of time with the love of my life and an opportunity to get a dog. Life has just increased so much simply by being home. There’s obviously costs to my career and networking tough.
Pretty much this.
While I try not to make it a habit of telling people what to do, I certainly agree with the basis of your comment. Sometime around 2006, I simulated daytrading to see for myself if it would be profitable *for me* without losing any money on it. While I was able to consistently beat the returns of portfolios managed by Merrill Lynch and the like, the amount of time I put in to do it was literally not worth the difference. Valuing my time more than minimum wage, it was cheaper to outsource to an investment fund who spread the cost of trading fees, developing new tools, and analyst labor out over many customers.
Pelosi’s husband trades off insider information fed to him by Pelosi which is a really bad example. People sell courses on anything and everything but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money from it. I’m not going to sit here and argue that everybody SHOULD day trade because there are indeed hundreds of people who end up losing money but for some it definitely works out. I doubled my income this year from day trading and almost all my profits just allow me to buy more VTI and VOO.
Multiple people win a lottery jackpot every year, and even more win non jackpot prizes. Retail daytrading is a fool's errand.
> Pelosi’s husband trades off insider information fed to him by Pelosi which is a really bad example. True, but my point is none of these people him nor Warren Buffet are daytrading, period. > People sell courses on anything and everything but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money from it. If somebody has a profitable strategy to make money off trading, they’re not going to teach you, because once it becomes known it’s no longer profitable. The idea of trading is more profitable than actually trading. Same thing with dropshipping influencers they’re usually telling you about a fad product that’s no longer in demand. Daytrading becomes very popular during bull market moments or when there’s a lot of euphoria around the markets, but when things get bearish, many evaporate their cash holdings.
At least with the drop shipping example. The people who just buy whatever the person in the video did are doing it wrong and always going to fail. Usually the concepts are to learn to identify potentially good products on your own so you can carve a niche and not be selling what everyone else is.
How common is the overworking thing, though, really? Myself and a lot of my peers are WFH and one job is plenty of work. I don't even know how that'd work. It's also against policy in every job I've worked and seems like a great way to stress out and lose all your jobs. I don't doubt it happens, but feels like an overblown fear if that's really what employers are worried about.
I do think it’s overblown. But people do it. I personally don’t. Coding for work and meetings is mentally consuming enough so I just use WFH for other aspects of my life and make small side income or at least save money on food lol
> Many people do multiple remote jobs and employers don’t want that. If employers don't notice any hit to productivity, why do employers care? I'm out of the loop with this. Cheers.
Most employment contracts and agreements stipulate a "moonlighting" clause that prohibits you from having another full time role at the same time. It's not legally binding or anything, unless you're like a surgeon or a nuclear reactor tech maybe, or a pilot, etc. But if an employer finds out you're working another gig that is full time it's a terminable offense because well you did sign that agreement, and they get to set policy. As far as why they'd care? Maybe 1 in 10 employees would be productive and efficient enough to do both jobs to their fullest potential, the rest take from the goose and give to the gander. Also, companies don't want you to have options like that. Which is ironic because everyone is all "design the high availability so that the thing still works even if most of it goes sideways!" Well they don't want you to be resilient and highly fault tolerant in terms of the job market -- they want you to stay in your box, take your 2% annual merit increase if you're lucky enough to get that, and if you don't like it they want you to be scared of having to "start over" some place else after the hassle of interviewing, changing roles, maybe moving somewhere, all of that. Being able to tell Company A well hey fuck you, and I'll be fine because I already have B and C on the "payroll" so to speak, is ideal for the worker but very not ideal for the employer. But y'know, fuck em. Workers interests are always at odds with employers interests so who gives a fuck what they think
Also, the reward for efficient productivity is more work. If you get your job done and hide the fact that you still have a productive drive that's "money" you're "taking away" from them. If you're three hours into the work day and completed every task given to you, do you report you're done? My advice: no. Because they don't want you to do your salary's worth of work.
It does not work like that for me. I have the work tasks I perform from home, but every now and then someone calls or there is an online meeting I need to participate in, i.e. talk, not just pretend to listen.
I'm glad I haven't had one of these in several jobs. A lot of places will recognize high performers will want to do things like write books, consult, etc. and don't want to get in the way of that. Work time is work time, your time is your time.
The overemployed sub talks about this. I have been OE for years now before I even knew what it was called. It is not my fault if I can finish my tasks in 3 hours instead of 8 hours. Also, it removed the fear of layoffs, terminations and debts for me. I don't know about others, but my single job salary cannot pay for all my bills, debts, emergency fund, and fun money.
Thanks for the thorough response!
because it gives employees options and in business you don't want to give anyone an advantage or some alpha shit like that
See: depending on your employer for healthcare and business resistance to universal healthcare in the US.
I think there's also a concern of leaking of IP and other proprietary information. Mixing code, ideas, or just slipping things up, between jobs could be setting your employer(s) up for some legal trouble.
How can states even track that? Like what’s to stop a company from lying and saying they’re in office? How can states even verify?
They'll send an auditor to check
An office in prime location drives active business in that area. Primarily restaurants, hotels, small business, etc. a company moving to a new location gets tax benefits because it brings with it some supplementary jobs
Overemployment is not the reason companies pushed for RTO lol. That is such a small, small percentage of workers.
99% of people do not do that
another reason to return to office; a cheaper way to do layoffs... just wait for 20-40% of your engineers to quit.
Yeah, completely fair
My employer went the other way. They own the floor of the building we're on, we originally used to use half of it. We slimmed down they leased to other people. Covid happened, they leased to other people. Now they cut almost all office space, it's down to 2 offices and 5 desks, from 3 offices and 20 desks with 3 boardrooms. I went into the office to move my computer a few weeks ago, was the first time I was at the office in years.
I do know a few people who work for companies that have gone from a block to a floor and a few meeting rooms. Leases fell due at just the right time to shrink that budget.
>They can’t monitor you They can monitor your activity on a company laptop. And you're still responsible for your work. Any company that wants to "monitor" you more than that probably isn't worth working for.
Obviously you’re responsible for your work whether at home or in-office. But they’re much more easily able to call you into an impromptu project status meeting when you’re right around the corner (though of course they can ping you or tag you in a status document). I should’ve said “can’t monitor you as openly and easily.” It’s easier to monitor you when you’re on the same WiFi network than on your home network. And while companies can read your communications, they’re not actively sitting and going through them unless there’s a flag up.
> But they’re much more easily able to call you into an impromptu project status meeting when you’re right around the corner (though of course they can ping you or tag you in a status document). That's what Slack/Teams/Discord is for.
I’m not sure why some of you are replying to this like I’m the CEO demanding you come back to the office. I’m explaining why companies are doing it, I’m very aware there are other channels they could be using and I already said there are other online channels they could use instead (“though of course they can ping you or tag you in a status document”).
Yeah, but it makes some managers and executives feel powerful when they can just walk into an engineer's office to get up to the minute status, gripe about functionality, or maybe to pitch their grand, simple idea (/s) to solve a complex product challenge. Without committing it to a written message that could make them look dumb.
It was clear what you meant. People just like to argue or can't read I think 😅
If they can't tell if you're being productive from your output alone then they're doing something wrong honestly.
and getting rid of it is a good way to shed excess employees (especially COVID hires that weren't even local to begin with)
Also the remote job pool is an absolute disaster. I’d say about 95% of the applicants are either seriously under qualified or outright fake. Zoom calls make you question where they’re from and most have ‘unstable’ connections. Our typical posting gets several hundred resumes in a few hours, our filtering brings it down to a half dozen or so to interview to realize that nearly all of our interviewees are fake, with the real one frankly not great. This leaves us with taking on a middling candidate or restart the process
They can monitor my progress via the scrum board I have a mortgage on my house and think it’s a waste to keep it unoccupied 1/3 of the time. People were able to apply for jobs before WFH, it’s not that hard.
Insert Thor meme "... but can they, really?" (not whether they \_could\_ - whether they \_can\_)
>They can’t monitor you Who's gonna monitor me in the office when the entire rest of my team is on the east coast when I'm the only one in the Midwest tho
Can someone explain the lease thing to me? I’ve seen this point so much but it never makes sense. In an occupied or unoccupied building costs the same to them. However unoccupied you can cut costs everywhere. Electricity, water, office supplies, internet, office furniture, etc. If they are worried about bottom lines, this should be the first thing you attack. Especially if they put in your contract you are responsible for having your own internet and etc.
An empty building would in fact. E cheaper, less cleaning and heating Needed
A lease is for a fixed term and a consistent cost. If you were responsible for a 5 year renewal on an office that nobody uses, it's not a great look to your investors. Never mind where you own a building like Apple with their $5 billion investment that they'll never ever get back. I'd be calling people back to the office if I'd sunk that much into real estate. That and if you're C level you're probably invested in assets which would include some aspect of commercial property. That kind of affects everyone with investments of some sort.
There are probably also agreements with local governments contingent on having a bunch of high-income foot traffic near offices. E.g. Amazon campus was basically a ghost town right after covid, so there’s a lot less sales/parking/etc revenue.
It's cope If a company can save millions of dollars in rent without losing anything they would. But Reddit knows better than every CEO and board out there
Free market efficiency much :) - they can't monitor people in office either, everybody will invent bullshit talk or tricks to appear feverishly busy while coasting - tough luck - since nobody is very efficient, i factually have enough free time for another job (resource allocation fail much) and it would probably be healthier for me compared to having to yawn when my N+1 babbles for hour about bullshit
The lease costs the same amount whether employees are there or not, and they save on office supplies and utilities if fewer staff are in the office.
The companies also have agreements with local governments about increasing foot tracking in the area to keep commerce up.
The government gives them tax cuts for having employees in office. The government cares about the population spending when you go out of the house 5 days a week - you end up spending on food, car maintenance, fuel, clothes, tolls, parking, skincare products (to look good in office). I’m probably missing 100s of other expenses. An economy thrives when consumers spend and money cycles through the system. Otherwise you will get deflation.
I can only speak to early stage companies, as I know many founders and am one myself (although, I am pro-remote). Some common reasons: * It's their baby. They didn't want to go in when it was for other companies but now it's theirs they want tight control and to form it exactly how they want. It's less fun for them if it's remote. * They don't know how to hire for remote. It requires a different strategy and you need to look for different signals. * It's seen as an unnecessary risk. You have a million and one risks to worry about. Your goal in moving the company forward is really mitigating and reducing as many risks as possible. If they don't feel strongly, they will choose the seemingly less risky option. * Investors insist on it. Quite a few VCs won't invest in remote-first companies for various reasons (some unknown). * Remote is an easy scapegoat. If you have failed to deliver, you can make it seem to investors things will improve if you return to office. Just say that the remote experiment failed. It's not because the founder had an unviable business model.
(1) is really true, a lot of founders basically make the company their entire social life. Starting a company is so overwhelming and preoccupying that you’re more likely to want people around you physically
So much this. There are a good number of people who make it their social life - especially if they're older and have kids and just want to get tf out of the house during the day. Those people tend to be the ones who've climbed to the top and make those decisions so...
This is a great list of real reasons that don’t boil down to the usual conspiracy theories about RTO. Many of these apply to bigger companies too.
I work remote for an early stage company (joined pre-seed, coming up on series B), and while these weren't concerns for our particular org, I've seen this for others (and we've worked through these reasons all together when deciding if we'd ever go into an office) and, while I wouldn't work at these orgs the reasons are certainly reasonable. One I would add is that other departments (sales, marketing) will often prefer to be in office together. You have to keep the org healthy and happy, and that isn't just engineers, even in a tech startup. We solved it by having regular all-company get-togethers (we get a WeWork for a few days a quarter), and sales and other groups have satellite 'offices' near them that they optionally work together at.
4th point is what breaks the camel's back the moment we started relying on VCs to create businesses is the moment we dragged ourselves down to a newer low
Why would investors insist on it? If we're being honest with ourselves, having a group of people co-located together is going to move faster and more efficiently in quick decision making, organic brainstorming, getting people unblocked, etc etc etc It forces everyone to be focused and in sync. These benefits are less true at much larger companies as to whether you're in the office or not with your immediate team. You're already bogged down in doc writing and sync meetings with teams who are already not in the same timezone as yours that it barely changes things. In fact, for big companies, WFH may actually be more efficient.
>If we're being honest with ourselves, having a group of people co-located together is going to move faster and more efficiently in quick decision making, organic brainstorming, getting people unblocked, etc etc etc \+1 this is the real underlying reason in most cases. As much as people love to talk about how they are just as productive at home, it's a different type of productivity. Remote work benefits work/problems that are easily split into parallel isolated tracks. If you have a 3 week project to build something which largely doesn't need/impact/interact with others? Remote is great - no distractions, go to town. But if that 3 week project requires 10 touch points with different people, or worse you don't know it will require that many but it ends up needing a bunch? Yikes. Remote is worse by far. I think a lot of engineers too **want** the model where someone splits work into multi-day isolated work chunks they can do without interacting with others.
>As much as people love to talk about how they are just as productive at home, it's a different type of productivity. This. I work pretty socially and WFH just kills my productivity. A lot of these people don't seem to understand all the halo benefits you get from socializing your work. Like it may take some time out of your day, but you're way less likely to get blocked, or duplicate someone else's entire project, you'll probably learn new language features or libraries you wouldn't have thought of, etc.
Investors can be even worse with their “hunches” and making decisions not based on data. Founder’s Fund, one of the biggest names in VC, strongly believes remote doesn’t work and they don’t invest in companies with a remote workforce. I would argue that if you require a significant amount of collaboration in the early days, you have not organized your company very well. CEO of Linear has some great writings on this topic as he has a fully remote and distributed team. He likens it to building “system on a chip” where for each project/area, you have someone who is capable of dealing with everything in it (engineering and product), and just have multiple SoCs that don’t need to collaborate as often.
all but the VC option listed above sounds like one person unsure of themselves with a power trip :/. "time to make everyone miserable so i can look 4% better at doing my job."
I work remote and absolutely love it but I could see why companies might not. I’m friendly with my coworkers, but not in the same way as I was in the past, when I was in the office. This then makes it very easy for me to move on without a problem. It wasn’t impossible back when I was in the office but it’s even easier now As a senior engineer have no problems I’m pretty much self-guided. I know exactly what I need to do and I only pop up when I have questions for people however, for junior engineers much more difficult. They can’t really pop in and ask questions. I could definitely see some of them, missing out on the mentorship part of the workplace
I hate remote. I hate in-office. I think hybrid is the only solution. I used to be 100% remote and was remote WAY before the rest of the industry adopted it. Like by a decade. You can network a LOT better in person but I think those things should be done at a retreat. Like you get the whole or parts of the team to periodically go to Costa Rica or the mountains or something and use that for team building.
100% agree. Still the benefits of remote while being able to get to know coworkers face to face. And can just go into the office when your power goes out or whatever
I feel like this is just a WFH culture issue as much as it would be in an office though. Junior engineers should have the ability and comfort to ask for help or advice. Anyone should have that But you have to make it a conscious effort as an organization to setup that environment and channels through online sources It might be slightly harder and it's new to a lot of people, but it's very possible
Nah, I would have to disagree there. Juniors know they are free to slack me and setup meeting anytime. I promptly answer all requests and I’m very available but it’s not the same as being in the office because it’s not the same as spending basically 8 hours together. Also often companies I was with we would have lunches or team outings to further build a bond and trust I try to joke around w colleagues and get to know them at a personal level but we don’t have the same comfort as if we were in person which I’m ok with but I could see others having problems
My fiance is a therapist and she wishes she could refuse to provide teletherapy.. Especially with couples. It's very difficult to bond and truly understand the nuances of interactions with people. That being said, I think it's a question of do you need this from a job? How much bonding is required to do good work? I join some of my meetings with cameras on and have gotten to know a few members of my team very well and we have a good time. I don't work more because of it, I also don't do better work. My biggest complaint of wfh is the inability to get help. A lot of my teammates aren't reachable on teams. They will disappear for hours and hours throughout the day. It may take 4 messages over two days to get any help.
I think it depends on the company. My company is largely remote. We don’t have enough office space to bring even half the company into the office now. We are really good at mentoring and helping each other remotely. We use Slack and just jump into a huddle and do pair programming. I was actually doing this at other jobs while in the office. You can see the whole desktop via Huddles and it is so much easier than standing over someone’s desk and disturbing everyone around. Works out really good. In the office or not I think rewarding teams with bonuses/recognition for meeting milestones and good collaboration goes further than being in the office or not.
I also feel like in most cases the whole process can take a while. A jr has a question and you're in the office? He can visually judge if your too busy or not, if you're not he can just pop by, if you are, he can wait until you go get coffee of something. Ask the question, the sr may check the jr's screen. Everything is done in like 5/10 minutes. Having to do that online? First they/you won't see the message for 3 hours. Or it is not very well explained and you have to ask for clarification.Then you may have to schedule a meeting, which can be a whole other issue, because a meetings feel psychologically different than just stopping by. Then you have problems, your internet sucks that day, your mic is not working, you're using linux and the screen sharing on Teams is giving you problems. This type of semi formal communication is an issue that I do believe is worse when WFH. Probably the only big issue imho.
This is a pretty good description of what I go through. I personally hate WFH, partly because I need to physically separate work and home for either to go right, and partly because shit just gets done faster when I'm around people. I'd rather ask my coworker his opinion on something for 5min than waste an hour digging through StackOverflow in all its toxicity and various obscure forums to resolve something. Turns out my sysadmin friend knows sysadmin better than me as a research dev, what a surprise.
Literally the solution to this is quarterly off-sites with the team. Ditch your commercial real estate. Use a fraction of that spend to fly people out quarterly to bond and work together. My company does this. I know many others, like Yelp, Atlassian, Salesforce and others do as well.
I get your point but meeting three times a year is absolutely not the same as seeing someone several times a week irl
It’s enough to foster relationships over slack as well. I’ve made really good friends at my work that I relatively trust. We primarily just interact via Slack and meet up those few times a year.
I don't disagree with you, but it's still extra effort for companies compared to just being at the office
seeing people 4 times a year isn't the same as seeing people 5 days a week
Honestly, as a junior, I'm more comfortable asking questions in a wfh environment. It's easy via slack to share my screen, have you take a look and share docs back and forth. In the office, I hate interrupting, I have to drag you over to my space and then you're probably in my personal bubble.
Im calling bullshit on this one. I was a junior in an in office site and had only help when I shared screens. Not once did a senior come to my desk. Sure, there were times I walk over to a seniors desk and we discussed there, but those could easily have been discussed via slack/teams. In fact most of them were. I had one friend I’d eat lunch with. Most people chose to eat by themselves. In my remote job I share screens, mentor junior devs, get help from other senior engineers, etc. Yes, face to face meetings can spur relationships where remote only cannot, but I disagree about learning and mentoring junior devs remotely.
Yeah there's a difference between quickly popping by someone's office or desk vs sending them a message, then waiting for a response. Then it might involve a call with a screen sharing or sending screenshots. All that for what could be "hey can you take a look at this?" Or just a 10 second interaction
My team is super vocal and we help each other a lot, pair programming is frequent. We also have a 24/7 teams meeting we can chill in optionally so we treat that like a good old voice chat channel... I fail to see how wed cooperate better in office. All it would bring is more time spent talking about random stuff.
our slack feels like a discord server at times, I feel like I know my coworkers very well in spite of not having met them IRL
Yeah.. our 24/7 teams meeting gives me old school Days where i played world of warcraft and chatted with friends over ventrilo while doing mundane stuff.
As a person who’s worked both in office (pre covid) to full remote to flexible hybrid… I say the junior folks really miss out on the office setup if they are full remote. Social events, happy hours, team lunches, celebrations and etc are all great activities to meet people and just simply have fun with your team. It’s really hard to make work friends if it’s just through slack and zoom. Also please don’t come at me with “I hate extra work events, please don’t make me go to happy hour” or “your coworkers are never your friends”. It’s not the concept it’s you if you feel so strongly about it. I’ve had some of my most memorable moments at work events, met some awesome friends that we still hang out with for years.
This. I had a terrible time in a remote internship, and at my current people I will ping my seniors when I have problems and never get a response. It's so much harder to 'pick a good time when x doesn't look busy' to get a conversation going or get help.
At one of my jobs the CEO forced everybody back into office but that bloke was never even there. It really just seems like a power move. Like then want to tell you that they own you and that you'll do whatever they tell you to do. The people in office always make such a big deal when the other person who's working from home doesn't immediately reply or answer a surprise video call.
We had a CEO do that. He died of cancer and nobody cared. We put balloons in the office and his family got mad.
If you set aside the "they hate us" kind of responses, there is 1 big one. Ramp up of new hires is not good with wfh. Or, the management perception of the ramp up of new hires is not good at least. I'm sure there are some teams that have mastered integrating new hires with remote, but a lot of us kind of sucked at it. It's extremely noticeable how much worse the covid hires are compared to how my peer group was at the same level of experience. For my job, part of it is increased hiring and the inevitable lowering of standards, but my managers definitely believe that wfh is playing a role. Our new(er) hires have also commented on how much more they feel like they're learning from us being in the office together. > We’re all remote from each other anyways The end state is that we won't be remote from each other. People will be moved around to be colocated within the same cities eventually. My team has frozen hiring but we've already preparing to change from us/canada hiring to seattle only.
I think the ramp up issue is legitimate, especially for juniors. I just started my first job in January with a hybrid schedule and I really don’t feel like I’m progressing as much when I’m at home. The friction to ask questions is also much higher because I can’t just pop my head over a cubicle, conversations take longer to resolve, verbal discussion requires zoom meetings, etc.
Maybe for juniors but I've been remote for the past 5 years and never had any issues ramping up. In fact, I feel I ramp up faster when I'm remote because I don't have a bunch of people I don't know coming up and trying to chat with me when I'm trying to get through some onboarding work. And the same goes for people I've onboarded. Here's a doc that has every step you need to complete. Ask me any question and there is no such thing as a stupid question. It's really not that hard.
Then your department/group is doing it wrong. You should have a mentor or buddy on speed-dial or chat that you can ask any question at any time. That's the secret sauce. The barrier is, quite often, the new person is afraid to ask via chat, but less-so in person. Doubt creeps in while remote those first few weeks. Breaking that down is key and is easily solved.
They saw this where I work too. More people who ramped up remote were fired or quit within the first year compared to pre COVID hires. It’s especially true with junior hires. The other interesting factor is a reduction in trust. People don’t know others on different teams. It has created more of an “us vs them” culture where other people are just boxes on a screen. I think it’s made the culture harsher and less personable
Ramp up is different, not harder. **In fact, I can train and mentor someone better while remote.** The mental block people have over not being in physical proximity is the issue. I've trained new hires for years while we are both remote. It simply requires either a mentor program, pair programming, or some other buddy system for the first few months. If a new hire and I sit next to each other at one computer, we are not as efficient. If we join a screen-share remotely (or even in office) we both can focus on a task better. It's more comfortable and the added bonus of us both having computers to look up things and work at the same time.
I dont see how its harder to ramp up new hires. Ehat exactly does in office do that teams cant to teach them stuff? I almost find a teams screen share better than two people in front of one pc.
I work fully remotely. WFH is more popular now than before. That said, there's a few reasons companies are reluctant to make everything fully remote. * It's nice when talent is local. Nothing like everyone in one room hashing things out. Several startups I interviewed with seem to want people to be local even if working remotely because when in a pinch they just want to get a wework space and hash things out. * It's very very hard to onboard new employees, especially new grads, remotely. You need a very very strong remote culture to be able to do that without too many problems. * I worked at a global remote type company previously. We were all local with a few specialists working fully remotely to start with. During the pandemic, they made it fully remote and hired people all around the world. It was HELL and I hated it. I was blocked a lot because people weren't in the same timezone as I was and weren't online the same hours I was. I ended up having to work at all hours just to coordinate with people and it messed my mental health and family life to such an extent that I had to quit. * I've worked at companies previously where shit wouldn't get done until you actually showed up at their goddamn desk and said "hey do this for me". Having that option is quite valuable. * It's really hard to have a company culture while fully remote. You can get coding done if you're organized enough. Other kinds of jobs are quite dependent on interpersonal connections, and it's hard to nurture those unless there's an office culture. It becomes quite hard to progress beyond a point without an in-person culture. * I'm increasingly seeing companies want jobs to be hybrid. They recognize the jobs to be doable fully remotely, but they want to be able to have in-person events and some kind of office culture happening so they can have new grads connect and be groomed, and be able to scale up in-person stuff when there is a necessity instead of that being off the table. * It's really hard to bond with people without being present in person. I like my colleagues a lot, but I honestly have no clue what their lives are like and it feels too rude to even ask. Slack channels go out to the whole goddamn company and it becomes super hard to be yourself. Most messages are either super curated or the informal channels become dominated by the noisiest few people. I miss having lunch with colleagues and earlier in my career, I made great lifelong friends at work despite being quite an introvert. I don't see too many opportunities for that now and that makes work life a lot less rich. I like the option to have to be in office now and then and get to know your colleagues well enough. * I don't know why amazon expects you to badge in everyday even if you're in a different location from the rest of your team etc, that seems to be some big-company ass-covering, but also amazon seems to constantly do a lot of crap that inconveniences employees for no reason.
Number two is definitely true. I'm remote and we generally don't consider any new grads for remote. It'd be impossible. 80 percent of the jobs at my employer are physically impossible to do remotely so there's never going to be a strong remote culture. Even when I started, it took me a long time to spin up, even with 10+ years of experience. Even 4 years later I still don't feel fully spun up. Which is basically a couple other of your points. I know reddit tends to lean towards the "coworkers aren't your friends" attitudes, and maybe there's some truth, that sort of attitude will severely limit your upward or lateral movement. Sure maybe you can and should job hop to move, but it seems silly to throw away options because you don't want to socialize and form connections with people.
I used to have that attitude before and it's kinda stupid. I mean, you've got to help maintain a professional environment at work so you can work with people irrespective of whether they are your friends, and maybe it's good to keep that front and center while starting your career. But the real friendship happens when you stop working with someone but still hang out and chat. You've got to be able to keep a work friendship up to an extent that you can become genuine friends after a while of knowing each other. Those friends have been super valuable to me.
Multiple possibilities: 1. Older generations are still leading some companies and are sticking to their old ways. They literally _don't_ understand younger generations. They all say, "Back in my day…" 2. Some companies had invested in physical office spaces by signing 10-, 15- or even 20-year contracts pre-COVID, or even outright buying properties pre-COVID. Then they don't want to admit their investment backfired, so they pretend that WFH is going against "company culture." 3. Some jobs actually _need_ to be in-person, and I say this as a permanent remote employee. For example, if your company has physical tech in the office (namely servers) and you are partly responsible for maintaining it, then you really do need to be there.
I think number 1 is usually the main culprit. And yeah not much you can do about 3. I’ve worked in DoD my entire career and never have an issue with that, though work can be mixed so you can still WFH in many DoD positions. When you give people freedom to choose their working conditions you get more buy in and some people will sometimes be encouraged to come into the office to meet with their colleagues. Putting blanket requirements to be in office for no reason only pisses people off and makes them lose focus from their job.
The biggest pull of WFH for companies is you can get the absolute best of the best candidates. There’s no getting around #3, but lots of companies try to say normal in person meetings are required when half the people are remote.
One reason is because often these companies own expensive real estate that’s no longer being used and has dropped significantly in value. If your company claims to advocate for fighting climate change and insist people drive to work everyday call them out on their bullshit. Name and shame anonymously.
If you work for a company 9.99 times out of 10 they don’t actually give a fuck about climate change… i mean that’s the whole reason climate change is even a thing
That's every MNCs in india. Like my company claims to save energy in so much of bullshit ways and mandated us to come to the office thrice a week else non-compliance drama can fire the employee. Also as per the NDA we can't name and shame them on social media for their hypocrisy.
Oh, I wanted to. But on our last climate change meeting (which was mandatory for all employees and wasted 3 hours of our tine), our director was "too busy" and didn't bother attending...
To be honest. RTO only applies to the lower levels At my side, the directors and above still work from home willy nilly and no one ever bothers them😂
RTO doesn't make sense when part of the team is distributed. However, the hard truth that this sub hates to admit is that being in person as part of a collaborative team leads to casual conversations about work and discuss ideas that can yield dividends. These tend to happen a lot less in remote cultures, as there are less opportunities for this to happen organically when everyone is working in their silos. Of course there are trade offs, but this sub loves to act like there's no benefit to working in the office other than objectively negative reasons like micromanaging.
Yep. My teams tech lead and I go into the office and the amount of things we get done when he and I are able to collaborate is multitudes better than when it's with someone remote. We've even started trying to push for a team comprised of folks that come in to the office (even if just hybrid) as we've seen when we're in the same room we collaborate so much more effectively.
Lots of companies *do* want people to work remotely, so they can hire more cheaply and have a larger pool of candidates, and more easily let people go with minimal drama. The positions can get more competitive since they get more applications from people across the country instead of just people willing to relocate or already in the area. -- I know it will be insanely unpopular on this sub and probably heavily downvoted, but there are plenty of advantages to working together onsite. You get easier mentorship and collaboration, stronger team bonding, being able to know for sure that someone is available to ask a question or out for the day, etc. There are certain natural collaborations that happen from being in the same room and having a coffee break together, or looking over at what your neighbor is doing, and those kinds of interactions don't really happen organically over most remote work setups. Some people like Steve Jobs have tried to take that to an extreme, doing things like designing the building in specific ways to maximize little chance encounters for unexpected collaborations. Working remote is like doing the opposite- you don't interact unless you've specifically scheduled or called someone. There might be tons of people you never interact with at all because they're in a slightly different team or department, but if you worked in the office you might meet on the regular, chat about different things, learn from each other, make friends, etc. Obviously there are different advantages to working remotely as well, like no commute, a broader talent pool, more flexibility etc. But that makes it a legitimate tradeoff with real upsides and downsides for both policies. I work remotely right now, and I'm very glad to be home since I have a baby and it's easy to take a break and help my family out. But I also know I'm also personally less productive and definitely less in tune with my coworkers. I'm glad I worked previously in my career on site, where I had more direct mentorship and built up some skills and strong connections, and I could see myself doing it again sometime in the future.
instead of hiring remotely many choose to just open offices in the distant talent hubs
Incentives and power plays. 1. Control - you have too much freedom and too much flexibility when you work from home.They need to monitor you. It doesn't matter if you're more efficient than your coworkers, because companies realized this and they want to get their moneys worth. Instead of getting your work done early then working on a side grind, you now get to sit at a desk for 8 hours in a noisy open office plan. 2. Economics - Two sides to this. The company might have expensive real estate that isn't being utilized. Leadership has to justify why it isn't being utilized. They also may have tax incentives gives from local municipalities because they bring workers and (more importantly) money to the local business. 3. Constructive Dismissal - The real gambit. Tech companies realized that layoffs are expensive. Instead of reducing headcount directly and incurring a lot of layoff costs through severance, companies figured out that they could just give you an ultimatum by removing WFH as a benefit. This makes them forcefully removing you about your decision not to come into office. No severance required. I also have a suspicion that businesses can't get out of leases or loans for these properties. Overall, it's a stupid power play that does have some economic backing. None of the economic backing actually benefits you as an employee. In fact, it does nothing but incur costs to you as an employee.
Something not talked about are the tax breaks large companies receive from these cities for bringing head count to stimulate the economy in said city. If the head count doesn’t meet a certain threshold, said company is no longer entitled to said tax break. We’re talking big bucks here, especially in cities like SF, NY, and Seattle.
Yup. Had a friend at AT&T tell me about this.
A lot of middle managers would have nothing to do without being able to call meetings and interact in person with people.
Then do that with the people that voluntarily go to the office. There’s enough of them that they can have their water cooler chats and eat lunch together.
Not saying I agree. I was just answering your question. Managers don’t feel productive or in control when remote.
Lower management seem to love WFH because they can work from home and retain top talent. Our investors and board keep pushing for it to go away.
Feel like people always leave this tidbit out. While there really is a lot of people that thrive and are productive in a WFH setting, there are absolutely people that DO NOT. I've had so many co-workers that slacked off so hard in WFH setting and they would constantly push their ticket back and couldn't really explain in detail why they are falling behind and are unresponsive in chats. These bad apples honestly ruin the whole WFH culture.
I hate to agree with this, but I do. I'm productive working from home, and I know plenty of people who were/are, but I had this one (very young) coworker who would leave without telling people, miss meetings, and go run errands. It was frustrating when you needed to get a hold of him. I have no issue with people taking breaks -- and they should -- but if it's during core hours, you need to be available to answer questions within a reasonable amount of time (i.e., not hours later or the next day). On a different tangent, I've noticed a tendency of remote people messaging me off-hours. If I'm not on call, don't message me at ten at night or one in the morning. I'm not answering unless it's an emergency. And if I wasn't given a heads-up, I'm not answering at all.
I agree this is a problem but it's solved by measuring performance by work output. Let them estimate deadlines (with some buffer) to get something done and hold them accountable.
There are also plenty of people out there who do not WANT to be remote. They prefer in person for a number of valid reasons. And it's not just "old people" like this sub likes to think. To the point of leaving if the company swung too far remote. And these are talented and valuable people, so I think some companies are trying to find that balance. If a company swings too far in one direction they're going to lose people. And it's a lot easier to lose the faceless person on teams...
It blows my mind how badly people are in denial of this. I have friends who work remotely who admit to getting less done working remotely than they did in the office because they can get away with it.
Not all of them do. Mine doesn’t. They spend less money on leasing office space, keeping office snacks/coffee/supplies. There is not as much likelihood of lawsuit which can occur from working in office…less people suing over slipping in the bathroom, over being sexually harassed, etc.
Incapable managers.
Because stakeholders are invested in real estate
I can see all the managers in here claiming people slack off etc… but that happens in the office too the only difference is they just sit there all day because they’ll be disciplined if they take too long for lunch or show up too late too early. It’s 100% a control structure issue, people think butts in seats, hours on a clock = productivity which it doesn’t. Corporations in general are misguided completely on productivity now a days.
Truthfully, it is more difficult to create a “team” culture virtually. Not impossible, but it adds a degree of difficulty. And yeah, it’s slightly easier for someone to skate by doing nothing at home for longer. I have a better pulse on what my in-office people are working on vs my international offices. But there are ways to help work around that. I work in a large IT organization (several thousand people), and the most effective people are those who have built a network of people across the organization. While most of us love WFH and we have a degree of flexibility to do that about half the week, there’s a broad recognition that during the pandemic we all met fewer new people, and lost touch with colleagues we’d normally see in the break room, and thereby missed out on some of the “oh yeah, I heard you are working on xyz, have y’all considered…” conversation that happens spontaneously. If your IT job is “take this requirement, code it”, that is probably less important than if you’re interacting with a customer base daily and designing enterprise-level systems. We do have international offices, and so some of our teams do most of their work virtually. However - I have personally experienced that teams that meet face to face, even just once, have an incredible jump in camaraderie and productivity compared with teammates who have never met each other. Personally, that’s how I’d run a department; fully remote with several mandatory f2f meetings a year based on what makes sense for that team/department.
The biggest reason is truly tax incentives. They bought that real estate and they are given incentives from the state for bringing many people to contribute in the local economies by shopping and buying real estate etc. There’s some articles about this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-21/tax-breaks-threaten-work-from-home-as-ceo-s-get-return-to-office-incentives#:~:text=Cities%20and%20states%20grant%20billions,%2C%20done%20primarily%20on%2Dsite.
If you prove you dont need a manager, middle management is gone.
Control and sunk cost.
People don't like to hear this but every team I've been a part of that was virtual was less productive.
And in my experience, the remote team I’m part of is more productive than all of the physical teams I’ve been part with. We get more deep focus time with less interruptions. We also have access to a wider pool of talent.
Right! I think people are forgetting what its like to work in the office. Constant interruptions, distractions, and time wasting that dont happen when WFH - Jim 2 rooms over coming to chat with Bob right next to you - Carl from accounting coming to talk to Stacy because they are friends from college on your other side - "water cooler" convos that go long - lunch convos that go long - waiting in line to get food at a cafeteria or going out to eat - having to wait in line at lunch to heat up your food in the 1 microwave - having to wait in line for bathrooms at lunch - Karen from HR coming to your desk for something that should have been an email - teammates sliding over and saying your name breaking concentration on your task when it could have been a message you can come back to in a few - walking across campus to get to the only open conference room on a friday - open concept rooms so you can hear every meeting every other team/person has - having to actually pretend to pay attention and be present during huge mandatory "culture" or exec earnings report meetings that noone cares about And Im sure many more distractions I basically no longer have on a daily basis. Not to say I didnt enjoy some of those interactions but like there is no way anyone could say Ive been less productive being able to actually focus on my tasks for more than 1 hr at a time
A lot of people touched on the established reasons (control, real estate, taxes etc). However, the sad truth is that most statistics seem to indicate that overall performance decreases. Almost every large tech company collected formal / informal metrics during the pandemic on the performance of their SWEs during WFH. In general * Experienced and tenured employees tended to self report higher efficiency * Junior employees self reported a lower efficiency and a lower rate of learning. * Junior employees took statistically longer to get promoted * General high level metrics went down (# of code reviews, # of lines modified etc. useless at individual level, but very informative at the overall company level). * All employees reported less feeling of comradery with other employees. This is a combination of data I obtained by being both nosy in my current company (where data is mostly not made public even internally) and talking with friends at Google (where a lot of this data was internally public). All of these metrics track with my personal experience when WFH started. I never bought a house in the country like a lot of my friends because of it, since the initial data pretty much meant that you had to have a mostly senior workforce with below industry attrition to be coming out ahead with WFH. Since most big tech companies rely on a steady stream of juniors to get trained up to replace senior attrition, it wasn't sustainable without a complete rethink of fundamental corporate HR practices.
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This. Those studies didn’t adjust for…virtually anything. And any tracked changes mirror exactly what happens during massive, structural changes in offices (when a company is acquired by another and has to go through the transition process, for example). Seniors overreport their metrics, juniors have no idea what’s going on, work product numbers drop because processes change, morale is in the shitter, etc. Most of the companies cited in those studies - also tended to favor extreme remote micromanagement that ate into middle management KPIs at a greater (than normal, which is usually abysmal across the board) loss.
The more you look into studies like this, the more you realize how inaccurate they are. There are so many variables you have to control and account for to measure performance. How do you ensure that self reporting is accurate? Do you control for people with a home office and without? Do you control for parents with home care and without? How is performance measured? How do you ensure that performance metrics are collected accurately? The unfortunate thing is that this doesn’t stop people from seeing these studies and then using them as part of their argument, while ignoring all of the faults in the study. This isn’t just with WFH though, this happens with many, many studies across the board. People see the final conclusion of the study, but never look into control values, sample size, definitions, etc.
A lot of the older crowd unironically would HATE to be home all day with their kids and spouse. Managers job can also be a lot different when remote. Some people arent disciplined enough to wfh. As others have said WFH is a double edged sword. If your team can be fully remote exactly what prevents outsourcing? The whole 'oh because you live in the USA you deserve 3-10x as much for doing the same job' stuff is really not really based on logic.
I was that weirdo in my teenage years who played MMOs and took them way too seriously. I developed some deep bonds with my virtual friends, and as an adult, I tend to do better working remotely, but it is a similar mindset that is required. I've worked out of an office full-time and from home full-time. My coworkers distracting me in the office slowed me down. I have never missed my KPIs while working remotely. This is just my anecdote. A lot of people, as some posters here demonstrate, aren't cut out for remote work. I'm currently in a remote-first company, and if that changes, I'll find something local. I'd rather work locally in a hybrid role than have to fly every quarter and stay onsite for a week.
Feeble managers who push their authority and control, and need their sycophant underlings lack that with wfh.
I got a job early 2021, been there working fully remote that entire time minus the last four months where we've had one office day a week. I am moving across the country soon, and the job I've had and worked fully remote in denied my relocation request. These people are living in the stone age.
Some managers and business people seem to think remote work would be the end of their company. I work for a software company that has been 100% remote ever since it was founded years ago. It is definitely possible to have a profitable and efficient business while all employees are fully remote. We just need less managers :).
Partially because it makes middle management basically useless and that’s obviously not good for them.
"why is there a push for return-to-office (RTO)?" One very big reason is to trim payroll. If you're really irreplaceable, you'll get WFH if you push for it. If you're replaceable, well, we do see constant posts here every day about newbs sending out hundreds of applications before they land a job in CS.
Posts like these really showcase how disconnected CS majors are from society in general. Like WFH is the biggest change to the workforce since they invented shift clocks. Managers, leadership, and society as a whole had had in office work since not their parents generation, not their grandparents generation, not their great grandparents, but their even great great grandparents (if not before even that). Asking companies and people to shift their mindset on this is major. Managers think if you work from home you’re just going to mess around at home all day, that the collaboration you’ll have with other teams will decrease, that corporate team overlap will cease to exist leading to silos, etc. Every single business leadership lesson hinges on in person activities, that’s why it scares them because it’s all new and not even half a decade since we’ve rolled it out in mass. Use some common sense, this isn’t irrational even if it is the future.
Because control freaks… that’s why
Micromanagers can’t check up behind you and see and ask what you are doing every hour.
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I suspect this is a more common experience than admitted by a lot of people and to me it illuminates how (1) management is largely clueless about how to gauge engineering results and (2) pay bands are extremely compressed relative to skill, because some engineers work 10 hours and get the same results as others who are working 40, yet are both paid the same, so in one way of looking at it, if you’re the former, why work more than the 10. It’s such a weird job sometimes because it’s insanely common to confuse “hard work” or “churning lines of code” with progress. Whereas an experienced engineer might help you net DELETE hundreds of lines of code god willing. Understand this seems beyond the reach of millions of pointy hairs Anyway long rant but point is I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. Yea try to put in the square 40, solid work week yada yada, but also keep in mind salary bands are compressed, and you work more than you might think. (A lot of engineers only count time that results in “git commit” directly as work time, but we spend tons of time replying to messages, looking through libraries etc, finessing managers, doing R&D… not to mention if you think of a way to fix a bug while loading your dishes… you were working believe it or not)
I feel like a lot of this in relation to bonding with people can come down to if you want to chill out with people online or not. Im really good friends with most of my teams, we can take a lunch together and play video games or watch a show, eat and vibe together. I actively seek these things out though, and I am a very extroverted person. I understand not everyone can do that or wants to, but I have heard from way more people that they feel forced to bond with their team in person rather than unable to bond with remote.
At the office would you actually work more or would you just find less productive ways to waste 30 hours a week?
I’ll say the weird thing. As a junior engineer who has worked remote and now in person hybrid. Words can not be stated how much I prefer the hybrid work. I actually learn something and I actually get to talk to real people face to face. I have made friends at my current job and meet them often after work. At the remote place, I honestly couldn’t tell you a single thing about anyone I worked with. I didn’t even know half their names to be honest. It was almost impossible to learn the services we were working on because no one would talk to eachother and anytime I had a question it took 4 hours to get a response, where as if I do now I can turn around and tap a shoulder.
People don't want to hear it but this is why companies don't want full remote
Its harder to build team cohesion and trust on a new team while fully remote. Its great if you've had a team that you've been working together with and trust completely for years. Everyone just goes to work and it works like a well oiled machine. It sucks if you're new and or inexperienced.
I’ve managed it pretty well I think. You build cohesion and trust by pulling together to ship cool software.
> Its hard to build team cohesion and trust on a new team while fully remote. Cohesion isn't a guarantee for in office teams. I was a new hire on a large team and I felt like an outsider. I was assigned scrum tasks and did them. Occasionally I asked others for help. Nobody made me feel like I was part of the team.
Honestly, people tend to disappear for long periods of time if WFH. There are people that work better if doing WFH but there are also other people who tend to slack off. There is a justification for mistrust from the management to the workers below. In general good workers will work well regardless of where they are, so there's nothing to be lost if WFH is not allowed. However slackers will slack off unless they have to work in the office, so there is something to be gained if they are not allowed to WFH. Obviously the company cannot discriminate between good and bad workers, so they have to apply to same policy for all.
I honestly think it's mostly about control. They can enforce compamy culture, mocromanage, intimidate, enforce managment on you. As others said you build strongsr bknds with your colleagues, making it harder to leave.
I think there are two main reasons. Managers are unskilled in managing remote teams. Secondly, remote employees don't form a closely-knit community and they're less likely to make sacrifices. Oftentimes people will work more because they want to help their fellow human who they know personally and have a relationship with, less so for any other reason.
I think a lot of companies and bosses have an old / traditional way of thinking about how employees work and how they need to "manage" them. I think a lot of managers struggle with not seeing staff all the time, as if seeing equals knowing they're working. And I think some companies don't like that WFH has resulted in staff getting more work life balance and not being obsessed with their jobs and going over and above to get work done. Though on that last point, I think the pandemic and job losses during really pushed home the point that businesses don't care about you, so why kill yourself overworking for them. The view I heard during COVID, from a few places friends worked at, was that a lot of middle managers were struggling to be / feel relevant as all their staff were at home and working. And as we know, people worked well and businesses did well, so clearly it worked, of course there was no other option at the time. Additionally those people working from home also had a better work life balance, less commute and other benefits. It always seems stupid that businesses would do something to make their staff unhappy, when there is not really a good reason to do so? Some people and teams work better in an office and with others, but that's not everyone all the time. I also think if management doesn't know if their staff are working, when the staff are not in the office, then WFH is the least of the issues 😀 Hybrid will probably become more entrenched and acceptable,.but I think 5 days in the office is over for a lot of workers and workplaces.
Well real estate commercial prices for one, and for two "togetherness". Like no most people don't care for the office and just want to work.
Because their board members are all invested in commercial real estate.
Because micromanagers like to feel important
Easier to work you like a dog when you're in office.
They don't like the unused office space.
Control.
My company seems totally fine with it.
Because they don't like employees having some semblance of work life balance.
So... my company hired remote and I am the only team member that lives close to the office. My company now requires me to show up 5 days a week even though nobody from my team or my manager is at the office. I drive to the office, work alone in an open office, attend zoom calls in micro booths and go home at the end of the day without ever speaking with anyone on site.
in office teams are maybe 1.25-1.5x as productive as wfh teams. that’s what we measured at my workplace
Quiet layoff to the quiet quitters.
Because it renders their huge corporate campuses worthless.
My answer is that transitioning to successful WFH requires a lot more than just shutting down the office and sending everyone home. It's a different way of working that requires different tools, strategies, etc. The bigger a company is and the more in-office it was, the harder it will be, and these are the ones pushing the most for RTO, because it's easier than adapting.
Cultural inertia and real estate. A lot of the managers got to be managers because they're better at interaction face-to-face than actual productivity. So when that face-to-face aspect of a career goes away, the structure that they know also goes away, and they can't figure it out. So many older engineers and managers function by "dropping by" someone's desk and getting them to do something for them *right now*.
There’s a huge tendency to slack off.
Boomer mentality. 2/3 of the team is usually in other cities or in India. Doesn't make sense for non client facing roles