I guess this could just as easily be posted in an anti-work community
I can’t think of a worse marketing strategy for a company that relies on remote work to remain relevant. This would be like if General Motors forced every employee within 50 miles of an assembly plant to ride a bike to work.
These are fun. For any other CEOs reading along, here’s your new policy/advertisement:
- Furniture Row could convert every employee workstation to standing only.
- Starbucks could require every staff member to go caffeine free.
- Underarmor could set a black tie dress code for all employees.
- Master lock could shut down their staff gym citing uncontrolled theft from lockers.
- Grayhound could ban employees from traveling together to events.
- General Mills could establish a rewards program for employees who participate in a daily morning fast until lunchtime.
- Atlassian and Salseforce could shift their internal help desks to in-person only with 100% paper records.
- Peterbilt could start an incentive program that reimburses staff for buying local.
-
Microsoft could require Macs for all employees.
-
Xfinity could only offer dialup at their offices.
-
Dairy Queen could only hire diabetics.
-
The cafeteria at Purdue Farms headquarters could be all-vegan.
-
Barnes and Noble staff must have a library card and check out books regularly.
-
Amazon delivery drivers must have their license suspended.
-
Bed, Bath and Beyond could require their floor staff to only come in if they haven’t showered.
Didn’t BBB go under, close all their stores, and sell their name to overstock.com?
is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
I briefly worked for a company that took this approach. The oversight they made was they had 2 offices (different teams in each), but as long as you lived within 50 miles of one of the offices, you had to come in.
Even if your team was exclusively in office 1, and you lived outside the radius of office 1 BUT were in the radius of office 2…you had to come in to office 2…and teleconference with your team in office 1 🤦
I know a lawyer in the Boston suburbs who went full WFH during the pandemic. He loved his job but was upset when his boss pushed for him to come back to the office. Boss said he lived too close to the office in Boston to justify it.
Lawyer moved to Vermont with his girlfriend and still works fully remote for the same law office.
most have contingencies that if you are in the 50, then move out of the 50, that’s on you. You still gotta come in.
see that little shack about 40 miles away, out town road 37, past the old faded barn and the tree that looks like homer simpson?..
no. the other barn. the one on the edge of that huge dairy farm.
yea. that’s the one. well, that shack is outhouse at your new office. the office itself is the smaller shack behind it.
wifi? sure! at the adjacent on-site outdoor gym, there’s an old exercise bike hooked up to a generator to power it.
Wow that’s next level dumb. My job did something similar. Someone whose team was based out of Texas yet they still made the 2 people from MI go to the MI office. And on separate days “so someone was always available”
Then the same company closed 75% of their massive building and said the hybrid employees have to share cubes with other people. I’m so glad HR made me permanent remote.
There’s a guy at my company that lives in Sacramento, and commutes twice a week to go in the office in mountain view. That’s a 4 hour commute with no traffic.
His entire team is in the San diego office. There’s literally zero point, but I guess his manager isn’t willing or capable of fighting for an exception to the hybrid mandate.
A friend of mine works for amazon (well, worked). He was fully remote. He moved from seattle to chicago.
Then they told everyone to go back to the office, lol.
Commuting is a total loss, and I find being in the office makes it much harder to actually get work done. Fuck all this shit.
I’ve been getting a lot of messages on LinkedIn from recruiters, a lot of these are asking me to be in the office 2 to 3 times a week. If I was to commute, I’d leave before my son is awake and arrive after he has gone to bed, working from home, I see him whenever I want.
Never saw my dad growing up unless it was the weekends and by then he was tired. He commuted a decent amount. Now he’s in his later years and unable to physically do much. I wonder what kind of relationship we would have had. I wish I knew him at his best.
I like being in the office but the commute is so fucking dumb. Giant swarms of gridlocked cars blasting pollution into the air, wasting vast amounts of time/money/public resources… then you think about how you worked perfectly fine 100% remote for a year and yet these tech companies are all of a sudden herding everyone back into the office doing everything possible to piss away a valuable tool to reduce pollution, increase space for housing while reducing their own overhead, and build resiliency against future pandemics.
It’s frustrating.
It’s straight idiotic. I think it’s because the big guys enjoy making the unwashed masses miserable.
It’s almost certainly much more about commercial real estate and making sure they don’t lose out on the huge investments they have made there. It’s always always about money.
It’s just weak management. Some people work best from home. For some people, that doesn’t really work. For people like myself, I need to come into the office once per week and I’m good.
But it’s easier to manage via policy instead of managing individuals. So that’s what they do.
Every single serious study about working from home has had the result that it makes workers more productive.
It heavily depends on your circumstances. A lot of people really want to get back to the office.
I’m not suggesting that people should be forbidden to work in the office, just that they shouldn’t be forced to do it. My company has a completely liberal policy concerning home office, so you can work from home pretty much all the time, but I still come to the office regularly because I want to.
I mean… as a software developer, Sorry, I will not be returning to the office.
You need me, more than I need you. The market is HOT right now.
Companies will learn, the hard way.
Is the market hot right now? With all the layoffs, the sentiment on blind seems to be don’t try to find a job now
The layoffs were all from the big tech companies, the small ones are still operating as per usual.
Not necessarily. The ones you HEAR about are from big tech companies, but many small tech companies are also tightening their belts to follow suit.
My evidence is inherently anecdotal, but my current (at the time) and previous companies of 100-ish people both also had (multiple) layoffs – more like 5 people each time rather than thousands, sure, and they never hit the news. I reported mine to layoffs.fyi, with the evidence that “company X just laid me off,” and they never posted it.
90% of the people who were laid off in December had a new job by February. That timeframe has been consistent across the board.
There is still a huge talent gap and there are still a huge amount of high paying jobs available for folks in software. You may have more trouble getting into the largest orgs, but aim a bit smaller and you can find work pretty quickly.
That’s for relatively fresh programmers, and in particular BSc or BA.
If you have years of experience, it’s the opposite, companies fight each other to get you.
That is true.
Two years ago, if I failed to reach out with an offer within 35 hours of finishing the interview, the candidate had already accepted one of the other two offers.
Today it seems like it can take two months for developers to have 3 competing offers. So if I end up needing to hire this year, I’ll have the kind of leverage that lets me take the whole work week to interview every candidate I want to, before making an offer.
The great news for me is that some hiring managers I compete with saw the layoffs and decided it was safe to reveal themselves as assholes. That’s going to make my job (of stealing their top talent) easier for many years to come, because people have long memories.
Recruiters are still flooding my DMs (and calling me) so yeah, the market is still hot.
I’m turning down recruiters pretty much daily, many offering better pay than my current job. I stay where I am because I like the people I work with.
The tech hiring market is most definitely NOT hot right now. It’s the worst it’s been since the 2008 crisis aftermath.
Obviously there are still things out there but companies are hiring less and the market is flooded with big tech layoffs. Companies are being flooded with applications for available roles.
Startups are also struggling to raise which means there are less new jobs in startups too.
If you’re in STEM it’s really not a problem. I feel for others in auxiliary roles though.
Return to office to sit at computer on zoom.
