> if an employee does not want to relocate, it is their direct manager's problem

Doesn't OP say that this only applies to employees that live within 40 miles of an office? It sounds like if you're remote, you're not affected.

40 miles is quite a lot if you don't own a car. In the city I live in, it would take me several hours of commuting (including several inter-system transfers) to get to an office that's 40 miles away from me.

If your commute's too long, just move further away from the office /j

Indeed -- I live just under 40 miles from a Salesforce office, and I used to work at Salesforce. I went fully-remote as soon as I could, because living just under 40 miles away meant that my commute was typically an hour and a half _each way_, sometimes worse than that if there was any sort of atypical congestion.

40 miles is absurd for the majority of metropolitan areas.

That is easily a 1:30hr commute, one way. Depending where your office is, 4 hours a day of commuting..

I used to commute 1.5-2 hours a day for 6 years since I was a junior after the recession and had no options. Nowadays as a highly valued senior, no fucking way.

My pre-pandemic commute was 40 miles, including three interstate highways, averaging 2hours each way, sometimes up to 3hours when busy. Did that one for 10 years.

Took remote work as soon as company offered it and will never go back to the commute.

Thats not how most of the US works.

The big tech companies executing on these return-to-office "strategies" aren't in "most of the US"; they're in very specific large metropolitan areas of the US (and also, large metropolitan areas of other countries.)

I would absolutely quit if i lived 40 miles away... 80 miles every day driving sounds awful. even if you lived right off a freeway and the company was right off a freeway and you have 0 traffic with a 75 mph speed limit you are still doing an hour a day just driving in idealized conditions. rough.

It's not every day, it's 3 days per week. However, I have done that before and it gets old very quickly.

> 80 miles every day driving sounds awful

Just to be clear, it's 3 days, not every day.

That's just as bad, you have to own a second car if you have a spouse now too.

yeah i get that and maybe i wasn't precise enough in my language on the original post but even 3 days a week is a bridge too far for me. knowing that these things are done incrementally usually the writing on the wall for 5 days a week is not that far down the line once everyone gets used to working 3 days and then the mangers says "we missed some quarterly target and they are used to 3 days lets make it 5 and eek out a little more 'productivity'."

that's over an hour minimum in best case, unrealistic scenario... the real drive for these people is going to be at least 2 hours a day... probably more like 2.5 hours in the areas we are talking about.

40 miles in silicon valley is a 90+ minute commute each way.

Oh I know — I live here. But GP is talking about people not being willing to relocate (as in, from other places back to near an office). That isn't required.

Interesting to note that San Jose is 39 miles from the Salesforce tower.

> It sounds like if you're remote, you're not affected.

For now - first they change to hybrid 3 day within 40 miles, you don’t think they can change it again ?

Several year back when Yahoo decided that everyone needed to be in the office my company decided to play follow the leader. I got a note from HR telling me I had to go into the closest office which was about 30 miles from my house. I explained that the drive was about 90 minutes each way if the sun was shining, honest to god HR sends me a link from Mapquest showing it was only 65 minutes (at 2:00pm n a Tuesday). To make matters more interesting one of my co-workers didn't have an office in his state and he was told that he could move near an office or be fired. What they didn't plan for was the thousands of employees that needed desk space in offices built for a few hundred. Suddenly HR sends out another email saying we would remain remote temporarily and that was 8 years ago.

40 miles is pretty far. That's pretty easily an hour long commute, and maybe one you weren't planning on making.

40 miles can be a 4 hour/day transit commute or a 2 hour/day vehicle commute in SFbay, the region of the Salesforce headquarters.

I mean, 40 miles in the Bay Area is 3-4 hours of driving each day you have to commute, longer if they're also going to require 9-5.

That's basically saying "because I want to feel power over my plebs I'm going to give you a 20-25% pay cut".

This isn’t great for people who live nearby and would like an arrangement where they’re mostly remote and visit every once in a while.

So managers with more pull have less reason to care.

infosec will see badged people connecting to remote VPN instead of in-office wifi.

Just don't cheat and fraud, easily detectable

If the only way to detect this "fraud" is that VPNs are in use, then why bother returning to the office? Seems like it's only a cost center with no added benefit.

Control. The old guard of large business cannot stand that people have their own lives away from work and how will they know that someone is actually working rather than collecting a paycheck?

It is actually odd they perceive it like this. I work much harder from home than I ever did from the office.

It is impossible to hide doing WFH like one can do “endlessly” collaborating with your colleagues at the office.

Not odd at all. First-level managers may still have a tenuous grasp of being an empathetic person, but managers of managers are only interested in growing their kingdom. To that end, WFH makes it harder for them to demonstrate a need for more headcount.

Let me make it very clear: Employees that WFH are more productive, so you don't need more of them. If you don't need more headcount, the executive has no use. If the executive has no use, they will be executed (symbolically, as a re-org).

It's not odd, it's 50% incompetence 50% feelings of self-importance

there are countless ways to detect fraud, these days we leave digital footprints all over the place, I just gave one simple example how to do it in 5 minutes with 2 SQL queries

Or maybe just don't cheat because it's not ethical?