This whole debate seems so absurd. Some people want to go back and some people don’t. Why not accommodate both groups? Why is it the return to office group feels the need to impose their preference on the other. The WFH group seems fine to let the in office group go in if they want… We’ve already proved that both approaches can work.
I think some (but certainly not all) in-the-office people only realize their desired context if everyone else is there to populate the office and give them easy access to co-workers. For some (not all): what's the point of being in the office if it has few of the people they need to interact with?
No idea how large that group is. Maybe it's zero. Maybe this is exclusively moneypeople doing moneypeople stuff with their spreadsheets.
> In person still has the same problem but it gives a quantum of more accountability like helping identify those mooning with multiple remote jobs.
If a dev isn't performing well go through the PIP protocol and then fire them. If a dev IS performing well but you're afraid they might be working two jobs is it really a problem (and if so, why)? This is the sort of thing that'll shake itself out over time and feels like fear mongering more than anything. People screwed around in the office and took way too long to do things too, they just had to be sneakier.
As someone who works from home, and hopes to never work in an office again...I think this doesn't do justice to the Office people's argument.
The Office people think the WFH people are poisoning the company culture. It's like if you had a neighbor who dumped sewage into your shared pond: "I prefer not to dump sewage into the pond, they prefer to do so, so let's accommodate both groups and allow each to do what she wants."
It's important to make the case that WFH does not poison the company culture--that it can result in a more successful/effective/healthier organization. I think it requires a change in mindset and/or working patterns for certain manager types to see things this way.
I don't agree with this, but I think the case can be made by those on The Office side that WFH does poison the culture. Culture is immutable, so any change to it recreates it. For some folks, being seen is contributing. Being able to swing by a cube and look over a shoulder is important. Taking that away takes something away from them. Again, I don't agree, I've work from home for nearly ten years now, but I see their point.
I think it also threatens them, because we're challenging a norm, and change is scary. They like the office, and us wanting to WFH makes it seem like the office is bad, and they're bad for liking it. No one likes their cheese moved.
Bosses also like being able to walk around the floor and see people working, and like the power trip of being able to physically tap people on the shoulder and pull them into a meeting.
Also really puts a crimp on their dating / sexual harassment game and would force them to spend more time with the wife and the kids.
My strong anecdotal evidence based belief here is that remote work requires more management effort to coordinate and that's the actual cause of the friction.
There's a greater need to schedule, document (generally more writing things down), and coordinate when working in a team with remote culture. (Either that, or you have a team with really strong social capital and everyone knows what needs to be done with little coordination overhead)
Now management type have more work on their hands to keep everything coordinated and that's why you have this showdown.
This reasoning is quickly falling apart in a hybrid model. Once a single person is not on-site, you will need to work as if everybody were remote. According to the article, Amazon is apparently is currently targeting said hybrid model.
As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening
Yeah, but ask for developers to do better documentation and you will get angry answers ;-)
Remote work requires higher seniority, more independence and more decision making on worker side, but a lot of people don't want to make decisions, so there is a lot of meetings, calls and similar stuff which is replacing normal in office interaction. Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings, finding time which fits both sides and so on. Stuff which was done by talking during walk for lunch is now meeting. Meeting in person which took 30 minutes are taking 60-90 minutes because people are not build to use simplex channel where only voice is transferred. Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Working from home you don't have all this stuff which is happening next to watercooler.
IMHO WFH is making people also less happy, it is more comfortable, but makes people more miserable.
Tons of assumptions in this that don't fit with my experience. I need a meeting, now I just send a message on teams. "Hey, do you have a minute for a call? Yes, great. No, ok, when is a good time for you?"
I wouldn't say that, it just requires better juniors.
You can't do as much hand holding remotely but remote mentoring is definitely possible. But it requires employees that have above average communication skills and an ability to debug and investigate themselves.
These abilities aren't cheap but pretty much required to pass a serious Engineering/CS program. The difference is just night and day.
> Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings
Or a well written email.
> Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Margeret Heffernan has a really good TED talk on this topic [0]
"Social capital is what gives companies momentum. And social capital is what makes companies robust. It means that time is everything because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better because it takes time to build the trust you need for openness and candor. And it’s time that builds better value."
Really good talk.
Brian Chesky of Airbnb also talks about this as "culture" [1]:
"Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap. Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes."
When you have strong "social capital" or "culture", there's less management overhead, but it's very hard to come by and requires time (or hiring the right people).
The problem is the genie is out of the bottle - unless in office is enforced and required 100% of the time it's still going to be Teams calls. Even before 2020 most of the meetings I were in, even if they were in person, had a teams call going at the same time because someone had to remote in.
It already was this in some places, but being annoyed by it was allowed and supported because it wasn't normal. Outlook has been adding calls since it was Lync. Any office with more than one location would have a phone bridge, but we blamed the tech when it failed because it was fun, and now we've learned it works more than well enough and we should rely on it.
The same reason they could never accommodate the two groups of people who respectively loved and hated open offices - the people who love it only love it because everybody is forced to participate. If it doesn't include everybody, it's not what they're looking for.
Somehow those seem to also be the same people who love to stand in the middle of the open office and loudly converse with the sales team about what they did last weekend while you're on a call dealing with a prod outage because impossibly even in the in-open-office utopia of yesteryear if something actually really important and time sensitive was happening it'd involve people being on a Teams call.
Purely anecdotal on my part, but I’ve noticed that while many people are able to effectively work from home and be as productive as they would be in the office, there are many employees who are terrible at working from home.
Anecdotal on my part, but there are many employees that are terrible working in the office. The more productive ones wear (wore?) headphones all day to try and maintain some level of productivity
+1 - it’s great for excellent people, it’s horrible for junior engineers, it’s bad for people who have trouble motivating themselves and keeping on task.
There is a decent % of people that do close to nothing while working remote. It’s not black and white, there are tradeoffs and it varies based on the person imo.
I find this strange. If someone wasn't able to get work done in the office the solution wouldn't be "OK, we all need to work from home because Gary can't get stuff done otherwise".
That’s only one factor, though it’s not just “Gary” IME many people are in this category, the very effective remote people are less common. The junior engineer issue and the comms issue affects everyone. Companies are teams of people and you want to make the collaboration as low effort and fast as possible. In person is very good for that and I suspect better on net.
It’s why companies with the leverage to push for it (Apple and Amazon, Elon Musk companies) do so - they believe it to be an advantage.
How many people do you believe were "very effective" in office? The truth of the matter is most people are "effective enough".
I honestly don't know if it's actually better or it just appears better. Sure, there are times when fast communication is important, but as we see with Twitter lately it's obvious that rapid fire decisions sometimes aren't the best and while things seem very active and dynamic maybe it'd be better if communication was more considered and thoughtful. Isn't that why that whole "this meeting could have been an email" meme exists?
I agree the companies believe it's an advantage, but I don't know that it is. I don't know that they know it is. Leadership definitely thinks so, and there's a ton of institutional momentum that still hasn't shifted after the last few years, but I don't that it's actually empirically better.
I think we’ll get to see the experiment happen which is cool. If either truly has a decisive advantage in some contexts we should see that materialize in the market.
Like all startups, it’ll be in a new field. If it’s an advantage some sort of AGI/LLM remote company should be able to out compete non-remote variants.
So fix those issues?
Working in offices always had issues as well, some of those issues have been addressed over time though effort on the part of employees and managers. Nothing is without trade-offs and side effects.
The real question there is:
Are the minor issues associated with working remotely so bad that it is better to
force everyone to risk their lives on the roads every day (including in snow and other bad weather which exacerbates road death rates 100% purely because of employer demands to come in anyway)
destroy the environment with all of that unnecessary exhaust,
give asthma to their neighbor's kids,
harm parent/child relationships due to work schedules being out of sync with school schedules and work/commute demands leaving little time for parents to properly interact with their kids,
pass flu and cvoid around to everyone,
cause unnecessary deaths among their parents and grandparents,
drive up housing costs in specific areas causing homelessness as well,
and otherwise add layers of stress and unhappiness to every person's daily existence?
Put the other way around: Are all of the personal, professional, societal, and environmental negatives that directly result from people being forced to commute to and work in an office every day actually worth the supposed productivity and/or collaboration gains due to office related friction points having already been solved over time? (btw they really haven't been solved for many people either, see: the ongoing harassment and diversity issues at most companies)
Or might it be better to just solve the few issues with collaborating in a remote work setup like we already did for the office?
The only thing I’m focused on is: are companies with an in office working environment at a competitive advantage to those that are not.
I don’t care about the other stuff, imo it’s not relevant (putting aside I don’t really agree with your characterization). That said, I also think some of the issues are not so minor (remote is a lot harder for junior people starting out in their career).
Well, at least you are honest about not really caring about anything other than profit.
I'd love to see what makes you think think almost everything that matters to most people for most of their lives is irrelevant to the question of how people live and work on a daily basis. Please elaborate if you will.
Since you disagree with my characterization, I'd also be happy to consider what you think I have misattributed there.
Overall the point is simply that you are not working with a steady state system here.
Whether one mode of working confers a competitive advantage probably has more to do with how much effort has been put behind streamlining that process. If that is indeed the case, then you might find yourself saying this about any change to any process that doesn't just wipe the market and create a whole new competition environment.
There's no good reason to throw our hands up and say there's nothing we can do to make one or the other situation work better, especially when the benefits are great, numerous, and include increased productivity overall.
The reason I disagree with the framing is I can do the same thing and I just find that rhetorical way of discussing an issue unproductive.
For example:
“Are the minor issues of working in the office so bad that you’d force everyone to isolate devoid of human contact during a period of increasing loneliness and depression?”
“When you’d hurt a fresh graduates career prospects further cementing people already established in their careers in positions of power”
“By having people spread out instead of together we increase the carbon costs of supporting all these areas inefficiently instead of all in one place and that’s bad for the environment!”
Etc. Etc.
I find the useful way to discuss is to narrow in on the core issue (is working from the office an advantage or not) vs. ancillary effects that we can debate unproductively forever depending on who can rhetorically make shit up that sounds better.
And ultimately if it is a decisive advantage to be in the office (not obvious to me, but I suspect it is in most cases) then the market will force it anyway.
My guess is that real drive for RTO is from commercial real estate investors who are losing money. Some of those investors hold high ranking positions at Amazon. I imagine there is also pressure from the Seattle government who have had quite the crime issue on their hands ever since covid started.
It is funny you mention that, but it seems some companies are already making moves suggesting some level of adjustment ( commercial properties in Chicago suburbs seems to be sold at a discount, while residential properties become a hot item ). I can only point to individual instances so it is hard to call it a trend.
"Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.)"
Yes, but it's still one thing to say "I'm happy with my employer's new policy" and another thing to say "I'm happy with it, and I also support it being forced on others, no matter if it makes sense for them (professionally and personally) or not"...
What number of those 1.5 million are white collar employees? I would assume the lion's share of Amazon's total employee headcount are warehouse workers and delivery drivers, jobs where the WFH vs. return to office debate isn't even a thing.
Work from office is better when everyone does it. Those on my team who choose to work from the office end up not seeing another teammate the whole day, and just dial into all their meetings.
Work from office is better for people who LIKE work from office if everyone does it. The people who don't want to go specifically don't want to, to avoid those folks that want access to interrupt everyone around them. Honestly, I feel like work from office would suck less if the people who wanted it so badly weren't there. The commute would still suck but at least you wouldn't have the extroverts constantly wrecking the productivity of everyone in the blast area around them.
Ok, well then this "3-days-per-week" solution will only be temporary on the way back to 5 days per week, because even this way, statistically you will only have 60% of your colleagues present and will still have to do video calls. OTOH, you just need to have somebody from another office, or a customer, or a contractor, or ..., so meetings where everyone is in the same room will still remain a vanishing minority.
Most hybrid implementations have managers decide on the 3 days everyone on the team shows up. Team 1 does monday-wednesday, team 2 picks a different 3 days and so on.
Yes, naturally. Do you really think in-office is about the walls, and the furniture, and the coffee machine? That's absurd.
On the other hand: would you go to the office if it looked like your home?
No, it's not about the physical place. It's about the interaction with your team and colleagues.
I would only voluntarily go back to the office if the commute was similar to WFH. I don't even want to calculate how many hours of my life I've wasted on my 50 mile-each-way commute before WFH.
It gets initially discussed in individual terms, like "mental separation of work and life" and "getting away from the kids and the dog." That is set the trap.
What seems absurd to me is people thinking they have control over what their employer wants them to do. Especially when you aren’t unionized. You do what the employer wants or you get a different job. Or you unionize so you have some actual bargaining power.
I will respond with a quote from an old movie that was a thinly veiled criticism of the communist system.
paraphrased:
A: Why can't we just let them choose where they want to live?
B: The issue is we want to live here and those that don't want to live here.
==============
In other words, individual needs don't matter. Management clearly wants people back for one reason or another. The question is only whether 'wage junkies' will stick to their guns. I don't think I am being cynical here.
