Without paywall: https://archive.ph/0KvTq
the most insulting part of this is ‘people’ suddenly pretending like we love and always loved the office, when it’s been a fundamental symbol of stagnation and boredom and misery in culture ever since they became widespread. NO ONE would voluntary want to spend 5 days in a shitty building after a commute wearing clothes they don’t want to with bosses sniffing around their necks all day leaving maybe 4 hrs a day to yourself in your home. ‘top talent’ or not, everyone deserves to be able to work where they feel most comfortable.
People used to make sardonic jokes about cubicles. Then cubicles disappeared in favor of the open office and somehow the jokes stopped, just as things got worse.
Open Office was a cesspool of disease, even before covid it was problematic:
Studies have found that that those who work in open offices are more likely to take short term sick leave or a sick day. Those employees might be using 62% more of their sick days due to the environment. Employees with this office layout are also more prone to headaches and respiratory problems due to weakened immune systems.
Open Office was a cesspool of disease, even before covid it was problematic:
Thankfully enough people realised this and switched to Libre.
Through the course of my career I’ve somehow lost office space as I’ve ascended the corporate food chain. I had a private office/technician room in my first job out, then had an eight foot cubicle with high walls, then a six foot cubicle with low dividers, and then the pandemic hit. The operations guy at the last place was making noises about a benching arrangement after RTO, like people were going to put up with being elbow to elbow with Chris The Conference Call Yeller and Brenda The Lip Smacking Snacker while Team Loudly Debates Marvel Movie Trivia is yammering away the next row over.
Hell, if it meant getting a space to myself with enough privacy to hear my own thoughts I might consider giving up my current WFH gig. But everybody’s obsessed with building awful office hellscapes and I don’t have the constitution to put up with that kind of environment.
Gonna be honest, I prefer to be in an office over WFH, despite WFH technically having “advantages”.
Home is an awful environment to work in. I get less done, worse quality and in general dislike it more. While that’s technically a personal problem, it’s not fair to say no one would voluntarily work in an office 5 days a week. I do, and know multiple other people who do as well.
WFH when you’re just starting your career sucks. Both my internships and start of my FT jobs were WFH, and it made it near impossible to learn to work with a team, get information from senior developers, get IT help if there was hardware issues and a ton of other minor things that aren’t a problem for someone who had been working at the company prior to going 100% remote, but are huge sticking points for new hires.
100% with you on the new hires thing. Was remote in college and have been for all my jobs. Maybe its a case of the grass is always greener but I would much prefer to predominantly work from an office. Maybe not 5x a week nor a sizeable commute but I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of career growth, networking, and team cohesion. As an OSS contributor, homelab hobiest, and adhd experiencer, I find it difficult to sepererate my headspaces and get into work mode.
You know, I work full time from home ever since covid and it is brilliant because I had a long commute to an office I didn’t really needed to be in because all my peers/colleagues are in other countries. But when I started out, I worked in a nice office which was a 10 minute bike ride from my home and it was brilliant. If I could do the same work within a 10 minute commute I do now, I would be in the office every day I think.
I am the opposite, I thrive when I work from home. But it’s important for me to have a dedicated space for it, not in my bedroom, and free from distractions like wife, kids, pets, and neighbors with drills.
My home setup is 10x better than at the office… I have a great desk with lots of space, big awesome monitors, awesome keyboard and mouse with kvms to make switching to my personal PC easier. My coffee is better than any work coffee machine I ever used. My internet is much faster and more reliable.
I shit you not, at the last company I worked they proxied all web traffic through another country thousands of km away. As expected, it worked like shit and was failing constantly. And you couldn’t even access repos like maven central, because they used a proxy autoconfig file with hundreds of rules, which is not supported by any software except browsers.
And there’s also the benefits of having a private office, away from noisy coworkers and prying eyes.
It also really depends on what “home” is. My current home is a tiny room in a cheap apartment (to save money) with a tiny kitchen, a small living room, and a joke of a dining area. I feel inclined to go to the office despite a 45 minute commute because there isn’t anywhere good to spread out and focus on work at home. Plus in-person connections with colleagues is another benefit. I’m currently hybrid with WFH 1 day out of 5.
This is absolutely to be expected. If I was able to work from home remotely and then was told I’d have to go back, I would look for another job with the specific requirement that I must be able to work from home.
Most upper management don’t know anything except meeting numbers and the need to look authoritative so no one realizes how redundant they are.
I think a lot of people realize how redundant they are, and so I constantly wonder how they continue to be so overemployed.
You give your top talent what they want. The problem is that they hired a consultant to find out what that was. The consultant, knowing on which side his bread was buttered, told the board what they wanted to hear, which is, after all, why they hired a consultant instead of just asking.
It’s a balancing act though. A lot of top talent is going to leave either way, so over focusing on them hurts everyone else. Mandatory return to office was a lot more costly than most companies hoped for though. It was essentially a lay-off, but it left companies with pretty much only the bad employees compared to a more traditional approach.
We can’t claim to know it left them with “bad” employees. I think there’s vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the “good” employees effectively – I’m pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office – it’s possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?
What this “return to office” stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.
Problem is that post-pandemic market is ripe for a layoff. Companies purposely over-hired during the pandemic and then in the past couple years the layoffs achieved 2 things: 1) Thin the staff to show shareholders a higher short term profit in an age where they cant get cheap loans and show they’re undertaking new risky ventures (interest rate is high from the fight against inflation), and 2) They can use the layoffs to undermine the leverage of employees to create a “hard pull” back to office policy. It makes laying off people much easier when they “volunteer”
The problem with the hard pull is that the employees that had options left. Those are generally the better employees.
Also, when it goes south, they can pin the blame on the consultant instead of themselves.
That’s exactly what the consultants are for and hiring them is an easy, low-cost (in the grand scheme of things) way of shifting responsibility aka “I don’t want to do any decision making that may and will be detrimental to the company so I will hire an “expert” to do it for me”.
My manager didn’t care for it when I pointed out that making us go into the office three times per week was equivalent to an approximately $5,000 pay cut. Not including wear and tear on the car.
Because of the cost of the commute? Or because you expect to get a higher salary when applying for a non-remote job?
Edit: This is a genuine question, by the way, in case that’s why this is being downvoted.
Because while you’re commuting, that’s effectively “company time” you’re not getting paid for. If you work 8 hours a day and your commute is half an hour each way, then you’re taking 9, not 8 hours a day out of your schedule for work. That’s an extra ~250 hours a year you’re taking out of your own time for work, whereas with an “instant commute” WFH, the moment you logoff becomes personal time again.
Ah, of course, thanks.
I even used to be bothered by that quite a bit. Now I’ve been working from home for so long that it wouldn’t cross my mind, even if I thought about commuting…
Forget the cost of travel, if my commute is one hour, that’s two per day, ten per week, that’s an EXTRA WEEK they demand that I donate of my time to the company each month.
Ain’t happening.
And it’s not even a week off halfway useful time. It’s a week of fucking sitting in traffic breathing in exhaust and break fumes.
If you drive. If you use public transport you can inhale other people’s BO instead.
But yes, if you commute, nobody gains only you lose.
And it’s not like public transportation (at least here in the USA) is worth a shit, it’s an option of last resort.
It would take me three hours to get to my job using a bus due to the routes. To get home even longer because the buses stop running and I would have to ride my bike at sunset.
And on top of it, the commute is costing money, too. Either public transport tickets or fuel and wear an tear on car.
I can so much understand my former coworker. He switched jobs because not only did they pay more, but now he has a five minute commute instead of a one hour one.
