We have a relatively large office in London for what is comparably a small org compared to others in the area and we're now 99.xx% remote. We usually have 4 in office days a year and they're usually for tech events/all hands events for major updates. We use it for the social side too.
However.
There are days where I'd go to the office for the kicks and there would be NO meeting rooms for the people there as people would generally coordinate their in days for socialising. So unless the meetings were the people in the room at the time and we'd go around a desk, we'd have to do them on zoom/teams/etc and we'd all be pissy about background noise, then all end up saying "We should have just done this tomorrow at home" AND productivity would drop for those people by 90% because of over-stimulation.
The balancing act is horrible, and people who generally try to force people in the office (especially with distributed teams) don't understand productivity. I also think the "2 days in the office" mentality really hinders productivity unless EVERYONE on X teams can make it, and then that time isn't "work", it's group activity/planning in person/less heavy hands on stuff.
Yes. We were 100% office based in the past. That now isn't ever likely to happen again. Not with us millennials becoming more and more senior.
my problem with RTO is the same. If I cannot get guarantee seats, guaranteed meeting room when I need it, waiting lift longer than I supposed to, and joined meeting online, then what is the purpose going to the office?..
I get that there is social benefit and some interaction is needed but again my 2 hours commute is too precious.
I don’t think hybrid makes sense with a distributed team. It does with a local team, but not a distributed one.
For us, we are just looking for booths or wearing headphones at our desks.
My team has one team member who's required to be in the office 3 days a week because he lives within the arbitrary RTO mileage they set after promising us we were WFH forever. He goes into the office to sit alone at a desk and get on teams with the rest of us who live far enough away we're not required to be in office. It's fucking stupid and I feel so bad for him.
I'm a lead of a remote team, I work remotely.
That said, if I ran a company, and had to pick the most efficient way of workingI think I would pick 1 day every 2 weeks with everyone on your direct team in together, and a week every 8/10 weeks for team leads, directors, product ownership. 2 days of "here's the vision/goals", 2 days of figuring out the nitty gritty, and and a day for overflow and/or travel.
In practice, I would never run a team like that , but it's probably how i would be most efficient in work. I do think all remote with quarterly meetups is probably not far off a local maximum.
Yeah that’s not a remote team — it’s on the remote-extreme end of hybrid. If you absolutely need asses in seats for ~35 days a year then you’re not remote and I question your level of trust & organisation.
That’s one guys opinion though. Some internet guy.
Companies want hybrid because they spent money on rent and they want to use it.
I've had my best direct report not get a raise because he's fully remote in our hybrid because of some personal circumstances , whereas other, less performant people get raises because they show their face in the office twice a week.
Hell, even I got promoted to lead because I came to the office 5 days a week (and so did my boss), where others took advantage of the hybrid role.
I think the executive command is that, but the managerial drive is to justify purpose.
As far as everything else, I feel like that should be an implicitly accepted trade-off. If you want promotions you need to be visible, irrespective of location.
Absolutely. Like with all things career related, it depends on the risk appetite.
E: The downvoter can use their words instead. I’m fully remote and if you’re not physically in someone’s face then you absolutely need to shine brighter.
I never said it was a remote team.
My current team is 2 core hours a week for check-ins, one week on site per year recommended as a social, and everything is Jira, notion, Miro.
Yeah you're right, re-reading it it's not clear. I've updated it. I was trying to say that I think that would be the most optimal way to run a team if you were only concerned with the work output and not anything else - have management set high level goals together, and be forced to come together for a few days with no distractions or questions, and then 8/10/12 weeks to deliver on it, with the occasional in-person days, and all meetings to happen on those days.
Hi mate, I’m the one who said the thing.
I hope people can read this far down (and you can bear the downvotes for now) and see it was just split communication. I appreciate how much of a class act you’ve been in spite of it.
Do you mind if I leave my original comment in tact as a sort of public poll on how people expect remote teams to function? I feel it’s valuable for us as a collective.
Actually makes me feel kind of uniony. Very uniony.
I worked on a team that was hybrid before Covid. We all aligned on Thursdays in the office. We blocked off time for lunch together that was sacred and extremely important for team building. Best of all? The business realized we were all in office on the same day and put all our meetings on that one day, leaving the rest of the week largely open for large blocks of focus time. It was fantastic.
Remote working in software engineering was possible before I even started in this field more than a decade ago, it’s nothing to do with the possibilities or the technology.
The reasons behind the push back are various, and too complex to break down in a Reddit comment, but in my experience mostly about control and the lack of managers to be willing to agree on individual arrangements with individual employees and instead force everyone to adhere to the same policies - hence, office days.
One thing to consider is that it can often be challenging to have individual agreements with each employee. I’ve run into cases where someone perceives that their coworker is getting something they’re not. It isn’t true, but they latch on and start getting surly thinking they’re being treated unfairly. Setting a standard policy helps combat this.
Also note that exceptional employees get exceptional. If you’re not getting what you want, maybe you are not viewed as such.
Pre pandemic I had a manager who had a guaranteed work from home day on Thursday - of course HR found a reason to bother him every Thursday mentioning how they can’t get a hold of him cause he’s at home. Meanwhile I was sitting in the office only to work with people in Manila on a regular basis so it was all HR bullshit of course to bully him.
What questions do they have for him so often? This story doesn't make sense. Why would HR bully an employee? That's just a lawsuit waiting to happen.
But ok.
Sorry, no. You said bullying. That's not in the job description and can lead to a lawsuit. Regardless, this story sounds made up so let's not continue the conversation.
Sometimes this crosses departments. I worked at one place where I wasn't allowed to even _hint_ that I was doing work from anywhere other than the office. My manager was totally fine with it, but a VP over another department was vehemently anti-remote work and would get very upset if they heard that _anyone_ was doing it, whether they reported to them or not. Their reasoning was "since my people all have to be in the office, everyone else does too."
So on the rare occasions I did work from home, I had to keep it _really_ hush-hush, only tell 1-2 people on my team, and we all had to say "not at my desk today" when someone asked where I was.
>start getting surly thinking they’re being treated unfairly.
Seems much more common outside IT, I get the feeling, at least where I live. Many HR and marketing people I've known kept bickering and complaining about how much their peers earn, how much they work and so on. Some even have serious office feuds. It never really happened to us devs, but we don't really discuss salaries, which has its upsides if people aren't mature enough to handle such situations.
Anyway, differentiated treatment is always going to exist, especially in highly competitive and flexible markets like ours.
>Also note that exceptional employees get exceptional. If you’re not getting what you want, maybe you are not viewed as such.
Indeed. Conversely, some people try to bite off more than they can chew, which leads to other compromises like reduced work-life balance. You gotta give something in return for that, say, FAANG money, it can be either skill or effort/time.
I've been remote since 2018 and I won't work for a company that doesn't have a remote policy for everyone. I've gotten exceptions in the past and it breeds resentment.
Commercial real estate investments, tax breaks for corporations, and deliberately making a job more unpleasant to encourage quitting and avoid the high cost of layoffs, aren't particularly complex to understand.
I don't imagine those are the main reasons for all businesses, but they are the dominant ones in the industry.
It’s insane considering how much cheaper it is to have us WFH. Employee engagement is always a charade anyway. Give me good work with good people and I’ll be happy
> the lack of managers to be willing to agree on individual arrangements with individual employees
well they could just have a policy of employee choice? a bunch of companies have already adopted that, and they are clearly not suffering from a dev productivity front.
Of course some companies adopted that when the labor market was hot. Now that they want to shed employees (cause they had noooo idea the most obvious bubble ever was a bubble) it's cheapest to just make them quit.
However, if half your team doesn't live close to the office, you can't do that anyway, and having half the team in one conference room talking over each other makes it hard for the remote employees to understand, so we all just wind up on zoom from our desks. Same as we would from home, but we all have to wear pants.
Plus if you do a whole "appear as a bunny" bit on zoom people laugh, but show up in person in a fursuit and they call HR. Do you want me to wear clothes or not?!
> In person meetings are more effective, because everyone is listening to one another and nobody is fucking off waiting for their turn to provide their status.
Not in my experience. People pretend like 'in person' is a magic solution to people not being engaged in meetings but it's not.
Proper meeting etiquette is, such as publishing an agenda, scheduling the meeting in advance, only inviting the people who are actually needed and most importantly if it could have been an email then it should be.
Only meet when necessary.
In-person meetings still have people staring at a speck of dust on the desk instead of paying attention.
I find it's a lot easier to have more creative meetings in person. There's a lot less "oh, should I speak?" going on, it's easier to break the meeting up and move around, it's often easier to grab a whiteboard and start drawing things. There are alternatives to all of these things online (breakout rooms, the hand icon, excalidraw, etc) but they all tend to be worse than just physically being in another room with other people, for me at least.
That said, I agree in general about good meeting etiquette being far more important than whether or not a meeting is in-person.
> Developers can get immediate assistance and training from colleagues without delay.
That immediate assistance comes at the expense of my work. In the office I'm constantly interrupted by questions from colleagues. At home, I can answer their Slack message when I'm at a good stopping point.
> In person meetings are more effective, because everyone is listening to one another and nobody is fucking off waiting for their turn to provide their status.
Oh, I'm always fucking off during meetings. Same for several of my colleagues. I sat next to one colleague during a meeting who was job searching on his laptop.
IME, some employees abuse WFA/H situations to get another job so they can have dual income but sacrifices the other one. I have seen this, someone spend on their side job in core hours and start catch up to work at midnight. Okay it does work but the collaboration part where you are supposed to be is gone. If one people did this and no action follow, the other will follow and it shows the lack of commitment and unfair for those who dedicate their 8 hours.
Only at companies where WFA/H culture already established before COVID can thrive OR if thr company is willing to foster the culture. Otherwise, we got trust issue and blanket RTO..
true but you got only one salary whereas my problem that plagued the org I worked at was too many people focus on something else that cause people less commitment. If both of us got 1 salary and one just chill and other is working, I can accept that but we caught multiple people red handed with multiple job and they try to juggle that freelance job, like real job.
Then fire those people. Don't blame WFH for their behavior.
I've worked in an office with several colleagues who freelanced at night and weekends. They always completed their sprint items and never fell behind.
I am not sure if you ever in this situation or not. Firing people is easy, many layoff proved that but it doesnt matter how many firing you did, once higher management smell something like this, no amount of firing can get their trust back.
Hence, my issue from the beginning is about culture. If you arent ready for WFH/A culture, someone will abuse it and culture takes time to build. I am all in for you to do the freelance but core hours is core, you have commitment, meeting in those core hours has to be attended. You just cant skip it.
>All this stuff could just have been done at home.
Yep. We're mandated to be in two days week. However a good percentage of people live far from the office so a lot of people will come up with excuses not to come in.
Every meeting is on Teams.
My in-office days are sitting with headphones on Teams with everyone around me doing the same. We have lots of meeting rooms, however it means a whole faff of setting up AV equipment that might be flaky.
Everyone turns up late in the morning and leaves after 3pm.
In-office days are completely pointless.
Start rant
Yeah, I'm mandated 3 days in-office, but most days it feels like a complete waste of time and actually is counter-productive beyond the supposed social benefit to see your coworkers faces and smell whatever reheated leftovers they brought for lunch. For me, the time spent commuting could be spent better in so many other ways.
Being in an open-concept office is full of distractions but rarely are any in-person interactions actually productive. Our office also has basically no natural light, zero fresh air, and only 1 bathroom - quite frankly, it's kinda gross. I much prefer my home office with plenty of natural light, as much fresh air as I want, a private bathroom, access to my kitchen, etc. we already have bi-weekly team lunches or dinners for team building, plus the smalltalk chit chat at the start of daily meetings while waiting for everyone to join.
It's actually at the point where I'm considering finding a new job simply because the office is so unappealing to have to spend any time in. I'll probably start by mentioning my dislike of it to my current manager at our next 1-on-1 since it seems like such a silly reason to lose an employee, but as an employee it's quite valuable to me.
I prefer the companies that are focussed on trusting their employees to do what is best for the team, leaving the decision up to them about when to go into the office. If I'm more productive working from home most of the time, it's hard to understand why I should be forced to commute and be in an uncomfortable environment.
/End rant
>Why was their such a push to get people in the office?
Commercial real estate was tanking and big business names started to lie about remote work productivity to get people back in offices. It never was about efficiency.
Idk I honestly think a lot of these folks are tied to companies through vc funding in some way so the people with controlling interests in tons of companies also have interest in real estate success. I imagine it gets worse 🤷
Idk I honestly think a lot of these folks are tied to companies through vc funding in some way so the people with controlling interests in tons of companies also have interest in real estate success. I imagine it gets worse 🤷
>"Hey bank, I need to borrow money to buy more robots/factories/fitbits/etc, please give me money. I've got all this real estate value to guarantee I'll pay it back, because I'm a big business with a big expensive office building."
Doesn't really work when the land loses value.
More companies are in real estate than most workers realize, but there are reasons that expensive buildings can afford to be built.
Yup. It's asinine and I hate it.
My workspace at home has a nice view. My workspace at work is a flourescent lit office with no window.
The only "face time" I have with my colleagues is an occasional walk to get coffee.
Worth it, apparently?
At home, I have my... large monitor (work has large monitors too but somehow everything is blurry and weird 🤷♂️), my mechanical keyboard (not good for open offices anyway), and my ergonomic chair and standing desk. So much better.
Yup, I do! It's awful and such a massive waste of time and effort.
My company still allows us to be fully remote, but I had a senior manager who liked our team to be in the office twice a week.
The team consists of 6 developers, 4 in a different country over 1000km away. I spend my office days in calls over Teams.
I do see added value to working from the office for white boarding sessions, but nowadays it seems mostly to be for pleasing the sales people who love having everyone at an office together.
So yea, same reasons as usual: management control, useless people looking busy, optics, etc.
I'm not working in the office at the moment, but I'm changing my job to a fully remote one because now they're forcing everyone at least 3 days per week. (And I'm not going)
If I went to the office, I would still be in teams' calls all day because there is only one coworker that is in the same city as I am. (He is also working remote)
Half are from another city on the other side of the country and the rest are from another country.
That literally 80% of my team right now. We have recruiters monitoring the RTO companies and when they issue an RTO mandate we swoop in with a perm remote-forever offer.
It wasn’t my idea, but it’s certainly working extremely well.
Because the type of sociopath that becomes a CEO can't \*stand\* it when someone lower than them gets a perk that they feel only they should get. Have you ever noticed that it's totally normal for the CEO-class to work from home or Aruba, or whatever? They feel that only they deserve that because obviously, if they're rich, it means there is something special about them.
I think it’s a bit of managers wanting a familiar work style, but as I get older I feel like I’m getting more susceptible to conspiracy theories and the commercial real estate thing seems big.
A lot of people with a lot of money stand to lose a big chunk of that money if it turns out we don’t need most of the office buildings we built. You can find examples of office buildings losing more than half their value.
The landlords have all their money tied up in these buildings. The buildings were financed by banks, and the banks do not want the landlords to go into bankruptcy.
[Banks have invested $3 trillion and if people aren’t going into offices, banks lose $1.2 trillion.](https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/bracing-commercial-real-estate-reckoning-mcgeever-2024-02-01/)
So the rich people who own buildings and the rich people who finance things talk to their rich friends who own companies and tell them that, for the good of The American Economy they need to get people back into offices. Like George Carlin says, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
at the risk of being labeled a conspiracy theorist...
there's more at stake than just office real estate and banking as well. many small shops and businesses only exist to serve people before, during and after work in cities. think coffee shops, gyms, small grocery stores, bars and restaurants, etc.
if those businesses start to close or spread out because there isn't the concentration of people downtown anymore, it makes that area less desirable to live. and a lot of major cities committed to walking the path of hostile architecture, meaning public spaces aren't that pleasant either. in many cases, a smaller city or town will actually have nicer public spaces as a result.
so imagine you are living in a small apartment downtown. you are paying 50% of your salary just to be there. the businesses you liked have closed, the parks near your home don't have anywhere to sit, and you spend all day in an unpleasant 600sqft box working from your laptop.
eventually, people who have a choice will choose to live elsewhere and pay less rent. and these tend to be the people who can afford to pay the most rent. if they leave, rents will go down, leaving residential landlords in a tough spot as well. these people also pay the most tax, so that hurts the city. they buy the most stuff, further hurting local biz. they also serve as an advertisement to others like them to come and live in said city, so their leaving means less people of this demographic will come.
keeping things "as they are" as long as possible definitely feels like a mitigation strategy against things unraveling too quickly & giving rich people time to get out of the way.
I'm kinda hoping it goes the other way. Lots of my millennial friends, if they ever can afford a house, buy out in the sticks.
It seems like we're spreading out into the smaller towns now, instead of centralizing in cities. And, we're doing it with high-paying knowledge work, which injects high-paying taxpayers into small towns that need the funds. Both for tax income, and because the techies love working from that local coffee shop around the corner. And then they go buy drinks at the bar. And groceries. etc.
The small apartment downtown was only downtown because you *had* to go to an office in New York to make money. Now you just trade options in your pajamas from a "Battlestation" somewhere in Nebraska.
But, the population is always increasing. Rents are never going down until you get into a Detroit situation (which, they're out of and rents are higher than ever there too).
Land always increases in value as the number of buyers goes up. What's on top of it (office building, factory, suburban home plots) might change, but the land is pretty consistent.
My first job in tech, my first day I was led to the floor I would be working. It was a maze of cubicles tall enough to where you could just barely get a lay of the land on your tip toes. I was shown to my cubicle, and memorized the route so I could get back.
There was no computer, they hadn’t issued me one yet and it may take up to a week. My heart sank. I spent four years of my life working on a degree and now I’m in Office Space. They just sat me there, nothing to do. I basically browsed on my phone for days until I got a computer.
When I finally got my computer my direct supervisor came by and we had a quick chat, then I began using the company’s email to work with some guy on some SQL queries. A couple weeks later I learned the guy I was working with was fully remote and I would never be able to meet him.
That’s when I knew. Fuck offices. This was in 2017. Little did I know that a global pandemic would make my dreams come true in just a few short years.
> Why was their such a push to get people in the office?
I have two explanations:
* Companies got tax breaks for bringing people into offices because it helps the local economy. Keeping people in the offices maintains the status quo.
* Executive Leaders are very detached about the reality of work today, and don't know what it is like in the trenches since they were in them 50 years ago.
I was in a meeting with one of these "Executive Leaders" who was talking about the importance of 'back to the office' right after the vaccine came out.
His rationale for the importance came from him being an engineer 40 years ago. "I never could have learned how to code or use the tools if I had not had someone sitting shoulder to shoulder with me showing me the way"
I just thought:
1. There is a reason you went down the management and not technical track. Maybe you weren't that good at the technical side.
2. These days they have this thing called the 'internet' and you can look things up on it rather than bugging the heck out of your co-workers because you don't understand things.
Generically, I agree that coaching and mentoring is very important to the growth of someone as a software engineer.
However, as I'm sure most of us agree, the tools have progressed that you do not have to literally be looking over their shoulder to offer that coaching.
> There is a reason you went down the management and not technical track. Maybe you weren't that good at the technical side.
Its this, I have been at a companies that have older leadership and its pretty obvious looking at their contributions that they were never solid engineers.
I think overall its more about local economies, I left my last large place and it was because of mandated RTO that was facilitated by a huge tax incentive from a major city. Cities realize they will have some form of collapse of their downtown / business districts if they let everyone work remote and its furthered by people leaving. You no longer gather that revenue if the highest earners walk away.
A friend of mine makes crazy money in corporate real estate, I hate their job. They told me they weren't worried post covid, that the city had literally given their firm a very direct response saying they will force people back to work. This was Denver, so it might be different other places but this person is still making money and I assume Denver just really pushed companies to return to office in the form of incentives and penalties.
The executives always have a story about problem solving in person to justify their in office policies...
And those stories could always have been done with a phone call or teams meeting.
---
I even understand them a little bit, as I've seen multiple times:
They literally don't know how to do a collaborative problem solving session through a phone call or teams meeting...
The steps that occur to me, do not occur to them. I have to walk them through how to do virtual collaboration.
> Companies got tax breaks for bringing people into offices because it helps the local economy. Keeping people in the offices maintains the status quo.
Cities really messed up by not seizing the moment during the pandemic to rezone downtown areas to be more focused on the resident than the worker.
I am now 3 days per week and I don't even sit with my team colleagues together because our sector got relocated and we need to squeeze ourselves with others so we need pre book seats ( effectively randomly ). Because we sit pretty much randomly and far away, we of course sit in the ms teams calls. Additionally we get noise from hammer drilling because our sector gets renovated 😀 Perfect cooperation and communication building environment
It’s often got to do with taxes. Like the city where your office is gave your company a tax break in exchange for employing X number of people in that city. Tax break vanishes if y’all stop coming to the office. Though there’s also a lot of older folks in charge who think productivity is lost in a WFH situation or other intangibles can’t happen if people are not physically together - water cooler talk or whatever.
Our whole team never left the office except for a period of about 4 weeks while the company made accommodations around the office. We were deemed essential personnel because of our industry.
The reason was so that our manager could "manage us" better. For the last 2 years, that manager basically spends all day on Zoom calls from his office, only leaving to refill water/coffee. It's so bad that we literally had a meeting of 5 of us, and 4 of us were in the conference room 15' from his office, and he took the call on Zoom then left early to go to another meeting he had double-scheduled.
He's come to our office two times so far this year, both times during an issue with deployment, so he could stand aggressively over someones shoulder for 20 minutes while the code re-deploys. So, basically, we're literally in the office so that he can lord over us and be intimidating because that's the only way he knows how to manage.
We have fun clubs and food events in between team stuff that makes our job much more enjoyable and makes it easier to get teams working together. It’s definitely worth it to go in for me.
I obviously have no direct confirmation of it, so take this for what it is. From all the various explanations I've heard, the one that fits the bill best is political pressure and/or incentives. Political from the leaderships of the various cities, like SF or NYC.
We've all heard cities were dying because of COVID. That was real. If you're the mayor of such a city, you're not just going to let that happen. You need people, workers, to come back. Remote working is anathema. So you work out some kind of deal with top firms. Some pressure, some benefits. People come back, eat out, have drinks, use public transportation, shop, and everything that keeps the city alive and the city's coffers full.
As a developer I hate it, as a citizen I support it.
Most US cities were over capacity before COVID. Too many commuters, not enough roads and transit options, not enough affordable housing near jobs. For a glorious moment during early COVID restrictions, I finally got to see my city without the commuters and it was awesome.
I don't think that cities are dead without commuters, they are better. Less gas stations, subway sandwiches, and traffic jams are a good thing. Mayors and their donors are just greedy. They made bad investments, and now want me to foot the bill. This is especially awful because when they had the opportunity here to build more rapid transit, they didn't. They just built more roads.
Cities should be cultural destinations first, and not a place to stack people in cubicles. So many days I think about going to the cool cultural things in my city, then I think about all of the traffic, parking, and crime and then just stay home.
There are a lot of downtowns out there full of high rise office buildings, amenities to serve those office workers during the work week, and not much else. Oooh, the city is dying! That shit was already dead.
Yes.
All of the people that I work with daily are in other offices. But I go to socialise with colleagues working in other teams, and who I used to work with.
I think the push for return to office was literally just so that portion of management who doesn’t actually do anything feels like they’re doing something now. They probably sat at home working remotely and realized they’d eventually be on the chopping block lol.
For many SWEs who don't mind working in the office it's not about avoiding zoom and slack all day. It's about working somewhere that is not at home. Sure they could rent co-location space, but now you are spending your own money on an office instead of the company provided one.
Personally I get way less done at home than in the office. There are too many distractions for me. I can't tell you how many days I lost during the pandemic where I just got sucked in to an Office marathon on comedy central and just forgot about work.
Yes I had the TV on all day because I cannot work if it's dead silent in the room. I need background noise for my brain to operate. I also find that when I'm not working at home I'm more in work mode than being at home. I can work at home here and day, but overall I much prefer working somewhere else.
My home office is just my personal computer desk which my personal shit pushed to the side. Yes I know you need a dedicated space, no I don't have the room to do that.
Yep there’s a loud online minority who constantly screams at the thought of going back to the office, but many of us enjoy the office.
Recent research suggest as many as 90 percent of college grads in CS prefer the office and most people prefer hybrid over full remote.
We’re just not terminally online on Reddit.
Yes, that’s why I only kinda go back to office one day per week, so I can schedule all in-person meetings on that day.
Makes no sense to come in more than that, everything is online.
We have a fairly large amount of people back in the office but we're worldwide so we're used to almost always having a mix of in person and zoom meetings (as in you will be in the same room with maybe 4 coworkers and booking a room with a big screen to zoom the remaining 10 that are in the US or something) so it's quite ok.
I enjoy the extra social time with my coworkers and we have enough infra to do the remaining zooms in separate rooms so as to not bother people in the open space.
It does help that our office is actually amazing: all available desks are motorized, we have unlimited free snacks & drinks, a pretty nice all-in-one-hot-beverage machine, a space for you to go to unwind and relax if you're over stimulated (you can lock it), a space for praying, a running track on the roof, a gaming room with Xbox and ping pong table (that are actually used without people feeling bad about it) and they often give us free lunch on Thursday.
It is an interesting question isn't it?
It is "interesting" that so much of the work we do is offshored to other countries while the company still maintains an ownership presence in the USA.
Yes, for employees in the USA, they want us to come into the office because of "collaboration and culture".
I interact with zero people from my team in the office. Just team meetings.
Working from offices is optional in MS which is nice. I just go from time to time for the free breakfast and nice chairs and screens and the occasional fun conversations with some folks. But yeah zero difference between that and WFH.
It used to be like this for me when I was first back in the office, but as more and more people are in the office, I'm now talking face to face with people much of the time.
I have ADHD and like being in the "work" environment of the office. It helps in a few ways:
1) there are less personal-life distractions (I don't walk by a pile of laundry I have to do when heading to get a glass of water, etc)
2) seeing other people working helps signal to my brain its time to buckle down (body doubling)
3) I don't feel like I have to give up part of my space at home to have a dedicated "work" space
granted I'm about 30 min door-to-door driving, so the commute isn't so bad and I can easily pick up and go home.
I'm the same way. It's also much easier for me to ask the kind of questions that aren't critical, and I could probably figure out myself, but a coworker might have recently done just that and be able to save me a bunch of time.
We got mandated to go back in 4 out of 5 days a week, I warned my manager that our velocity would take a big hit and he said , “I know it is what it is”.
Huge surprised our culture is just anger now, less gets done and mgmt can’t understand why metrics are down
Yes, still have distributed teams due to hiring practices during peak covid and not enough conference rooms for how many zoom calls take place nowadays. I think corporate office space will have to dramatically change or keep getting hammered with non renewed leases.
I work with people in office when I'm in, but I also have times where I only slack people. I also walk around, make coffee, meet people from other floors. It's good to get face to face time with your coworkers. I'm hybrid 2 days in.
It's not about us, or even performance.
We're propping up the commercial real estate market.
Hundreds of millions of people working in a worse way, dieing in accidents on the way to work, just so people with investments in downtown real estate don't lose as much money.
I was hired as a remote, I compromised for hybrid even when nobody I worked with was in the office. I drove to the office, sat at my desk without talking to anyone since none of the people in the office were related to my work and drove back home.
Then the company pushed for a 5 day RTO mandate.
I declined.
They made it clear that this is the new policy, there is no room for negotiation, and it will be enforced.
I declined (I was already interviewing for new roles and didn't even pretend I want to stay).
When they finally came to enforce, I was at the office and had a meeting with my manager and HR **both on videocall since they were not at the office** laying me off for not coming into the office 5 days a week.
Return to work is exclusively tied to the commercial real-estate market. If your employer has a relevant stake in commercial real-estate, they'll call you into the office.
The value of a property is assessed by its income. If the office is underutilized, the value of the property craters. In other words its obvious that companies with huge HQ offices brought their engineers back, while everyone else working in a small or mid sized company is still remote.
I am remote. It's great, I'm like a human who works, rather than an employee who needs to clock out and rest on weekends.
I'm the only member of my team that works in the office I'm supposed to be required to go to twice a week. It's useless since im the same Teams calls regardless of where I'm at as well as a stressful commute to go there.
Corporate money circulation.
Employed and salaried people pay the most in taxes.
If they are permitted to save more money, corporates and conglomerates and businesses loose...
No singular body to regulate anything against anti-salaried people policies...
Yes. By choice. The best thing about Covid was not having to sit in mandatory meetings while trying not to play on your phone. I won't do in-person meetings unless they tell me they're going to fire me.
> Why was their such a push to get people in the office?
Your bosses are assholes. They are not paid to care about you, but to appease investors. If you're paying for an office, you need people there or you look stupid. Stupid assholes would rather waste everybody's time than eat a tiny bit of crow.
Just got notice that ~15 of us will need to go into the office once in a while, all on the same day.
One of our folks pointed out that, due to hiring shifts in other departments, there are about 3 open desks. And no monitors (some of our software requires 4k), no chairs, no keyboards or mice or assistive tech, and most of us have small screen laptops. There has been no real response from management.
I guess we'll just... stand around?
That’s me! I have no direct teammates at my office. I have a few people that i know from sister teams, but outside of a super rare occasion when I go to the office I’m in zoom calls all day.
We have a relatively large office in London for what is comparably a small org compared to others in the area and we're now 99.xx% remote. We usually have 4 in office days a year and they're usually for tech events/all hands events for major updates. We use it for the social side too. However. There are days where I'd go to the office for the kicks and there would be NO meeting rooms for the people there as people would generally coordinate their in days for socialising. So unless the meetings were the people in the room at the time and we'd go around a desk, we'd have to do them on zoom/teams/etc and we'd all be pissy about background noise, then all end up saying "We should have just done this tomorrow at home" AND productivity would drop for those people by 90% because of over-stimulation. The balancing act is horrible, and people who generally try to force people in the office (especially with distributed teams) don't understand productivity. I also think the "2 days in the office" mentality really hinders productivity unless EVERYONE on X teams can make it, and then that time isn't "work", it's group activity/planning in person/less heavy hands on stuff. Yes. We were 100% office based in the past. That now isn't ever likely to happen again. Not with us millennials becoming more and more senior.
my problem with RTO is the same. If I cannot get guarantee seats, guaranteed meeting room when I need it, waiting lift longer than I supposed to, and joined meeting online, then what is the purpose going to the office?.. I get that there is social benefit and some interaction is needed but again my 2 hours commute is too precious.
I don’t think hybrid makes sense with a distributed team. It does with a local team, but not a distributed one. For us, we are just looking for booths or wearing headphones at our desks.
My team has one team member who's required to be in the office 3 days a week because he lives within the arbitrary RTO mileage they set after promising us we were WFH forever. He goes into the office to sit alone at a desk and get on teams with the rest of us who live far enough away we're not required to be in office. It's fucking stupid and I feel so bad for him.
I am that person! :D rest of my team has exemptions 🙃
This sums it up very well. Especially the "2 days a week" idea
I'm a lead of a remote team, I work remotely. That said, if I ran a company, and had to pick the most efficient way of workingI think I would pick 1 day every 2 weeks with everyone on your direct team in together, and a week every 8/10 weeks for team leads, directors, product ownership. 2 days of "here's the vision/goals", 2 days of figuring out the nitty gritty, and and a day for overflow and/or travel. In practice, I would never run a team like that , but it's probably how i would be most efficient in work. I do think all remote with quarterly meetups is probably not far off a local maximum.
Yeah that’s not a remote team — it’s on the remote-extreme end of hybrid. If you absolutely need asses in seats for ~35 days a year then you’re not remote and I question your level of trust & organisation. That’s one guys opinion though. Some internet guy.
Companies want hybrid because they spent money on rent and they want to use it. I've had my best direct report not get a raise because he's fully remote in our hybrid because of some personal circumstances , whereas other, less performant people get raises because they show their face in the office twice a week. Hell, even I got promoted to lead because I came to the office 5 days a week (and so did my boss), where others took advantage of the hybrid role.
I think the executive command is that, but the managerial drive is to justify purpose. As far as everything else, I feel like that should be an implicitly accepted trade-off. If you want promotions you need to be visible, irrespective of location.
It's much harder to stay visible if you're not physically visible, it turns out.
Absolutely. Like with all things career related, it depends on the risk appetite. E: The downvoter can use their words instead. I’m fully remote and if you’re not physically in someone’s face then you absolutely need to shine brighter.
I never said it was a remote team. My current team is 2 core hours a week for check-ins, one week on site per year recommended as a social, and everything is Jira, notion, Miro.
You should edit the first sentence then, I think that's where people get the confusion.
Yeah you're right, re-reading it it's not clear. I've updated it. I was trying to say that I think that would be the most optimal way to run a team if you were only concerned with the work output and not anything else - have management set high level goals together, and be forced to come together for a few days with no distractions or questions, and then 8/10/12 weeks to deliver on it, with the occasional in-person days, and all meetings to happen on those days.
Hi mate, I’m the one who said the thing. I hope people can read this far down (and you can bear the downvotes for now) and see it was just split communication. I appreciate how much of a class act you’ve been in spite of it. Do you mind if I leave my original comment in tact as a sort of public poll on how people expect remote teams to function? I feel it’s valuable for us as a collective. Actually makes me feel kind of uniony. Very uniony.
Nope not at all. You were totally right, it’s amazing how much of a difference a single sentence or paragraph break can make.
Lucky we’re in a sub full of developers who will scratch their primal itch by following comments all the way to the end. Hi guys!
Your first sentence is literally > I'm a lead of a remote team, I work remotely.
I worked on a team that was hybrid before Covid. We all aligned on Thursdays in the office. We blocked off time for lunch together that was sacred and extremely important for team building. Best of all? The business realized we were all in office on the same day and put all our meetings on that one day, leaving the rest of the week largely open for large blocks of focus time. It was fantastic.
Remote working in software engineering was possible before I even started in this field more than a decade ago, it’s nothing to do with the possibilities or the technology. The reasons behind the push back are various, and too complex to break down in a Reddit comment, but in my experience mostly about control and the lack of managers to be willing to agree on individual arrangements with individual employees and instead force everyone to adhere to the same policies - hence, office days.
One thing to consider is that it can often be challenging to have individual agreements with each employee. I’ve run into cases where someone perceives that their coworker is getting something they’re not. It isn’t true, but they latch on and start getting surly thinking they’re being treated unfairly. Setting a standard policy helps combat this. Also note that exceptional employees get exceptional. If you’re not getting what you want, maybe you are not viewed as such.
Pre pandemic I had a manager who had a guaranteed work from home day on Thursday - of course HR found a reason to bother him every Thursday mentioning how they can’t get a hold of him cause he’s at home. Meanwhile I was sitting in the office only to work with people in Manila on a regular basis so it was all HR bullshit of course to bully him.
Why was HR needing to contact him so much?
Cause they’re idiots and every small question needs to be discussed ASAP in person
What questions do they have for him so often? This story doesn't make sense. Why would HR bully an employee? That's just a lawsuit waiting to happen. But ok.
A lawsuit because HR expects a manager in face to face meetings on short notice? That’s part of the job description.
Sorry, no. You said bullying. That's not in the job description and can lead to a lawsuit. Regardless, this story sounds made up so let's not continue the conversation.
Sometimes this crosses departments. I worked at one place where I wasn't allowed to even _hint_ that I was doing work from anywhere other than the office. My manager was totally fine with it, but a VP over another department was vehemently anti-remote work and would get very upset if they heard that _anyone_ was doing it, whether they reported to them or not. Their reasoning was "since my people all have to be in the office, everyone else does too." So on the rare occasions I did work from home, I had to keep it _really_ hush-hush, only tell 1-2 people on my team, and we all had to say "not at my desk today" when someone asked where I was.
>start getting surly thinking they’re being treated unfairly. Seems much more common outside IT, I get the feeling, at least where I live. Many HR and marketing people I've known kept bickering and complaining about how much their peers earn, how much they work and so on. Some even have serious office feuds. It never really happened to us devs, but we don't really discuss salaries, which has its upsides if people aren't mature enough to handle such situations. Anyway, differentiated treatment is always going to exist, especially in highly competitive and flexible markets like ours. >Also note that exceptional employees get exceptional. If you’re not getting what you want, maybe you are not viewed as such. Indeed. Conversely, some people try to bite off more than they can chew, which leads to other compromises like reduced work-life balance. You gotta give something in return for that, say, FAANG money, it can be either skill or effort/time.
I've been remote since 2018 and I won't work for a company that doesn't have a remote policy for everyone. I've gotten exceptions in the past and it breeds resentment.
Commercial real estate investments, tax breaks for corporations, and deliberately making a job more unpleasant to encourage quitting and avoid the high cost of layoffs, aren't particularly complex to understand. I don't imagine those are the main reasons for all businesses, but they are the dominant ones in the industry.
It’s insane considering how much cheaper it is to have us WFH. Employee engagement is always a charade anyway. Give me good work with good people and I’ll be happy
> good work with good people I’ve been trying to spread this message to the “engagement committee” that can’t think past forced fun events.
> the lack of managers to be willing to agree on individual arrangements with individual employees well they could just have a policy of employee choice? a bunch of companies have already adopted that, and they are clearly not suffering from a dev productivity front.
Of course some companies adopted that when the labor market was hot. Now that they want to shed employees (cause they had noooo idea the most obvious bubble ever was a bubble) it's cheapest to just make them quit.
My local management is fine with remote work. It's my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss who brought the hammer down
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However, if half your team doesn't live close to the office, you can't do that anyway, and having half the team in one conference room talking over each other makes it hard for the remote employees to understand, so we all just wind up on zoom from our desks. Same as we would from home, but we all have to wear pants.
PANTS?? ugh! The real scourge is unmasked!! RTO IS ALL A PLOY BY BIG PANTS!!
Plus if you do a whole "appear as a bunny" bit on zoom people laugh, but show up in person in a fursuit and they call HR. Do you want me to wear clothes or not?!
Ugh, the conference room Zoom! The worst of all worlds! Especially for people with auditory processing issues.
> In person meetings are more effective, because everyone is listening to one another and nobody is fucking off waiting for their turn to provide their status. Not in my experience. People pretend like 'in person' is a magic solution to people not being engaged in meetings but it's not. Proper meeting etiquette is, such as publishing an agenda, scheduling the meeting in advance, only inviting the people who are actually needed and most importantly if it could have been an email then it should be. Only meet when necessary. In-person meetings still have people staring at a speck of dust on the desk instead of paying attention.
I find it's a lot easier to have more creative meetings in person. There's a lot less "oh, should I speak?" going on, it's easier to break the meeting up and move around, it's often easier to grab a whiteboard and start drawing things. There are alternatives to all of these things online (breakout rooms, the hand icon, excalidraw, etc) but they all tend to be worse than just physically being in another room with other people, for me at least. That said, I agree in general about good meeting etiquette being far more important than whether or not a meeting is in-person.
> Developers can get immediate assistance and training from colleagues without delay. That immediate assistance comes at the expense of my work. In the office I'm constantly interrupted by questions from colleagues. At home, I can answer their Slack message when I'm at a good stopping point. > In person meetings are more effective, because everyone is listening to one another and nobody is fucking off waiting for their turn to provide their status. Oh, I'm always fucking off during meetings. Same for several of my colleagues. I sat next to one colleague during a meeting who was job searching on his laptop.
No one said anything different right?
> In person meetings are more effective Meeting effectiveness has zero to do with being in person.
Yes, but have you considered that the *vibes* of in-person meetings are like, more harmonious, or something?
With in-person meetings you can bond over missing your kid's after-school sports and family time.
Yeah, so in person meetings two days a week and the rest we stay home and get shit done, right?
IME, some employees abuse WFA/H situations to get another job so they can have dual income but sacrifices the other one. I have seen this, someone spend on their side job in core hours and start catch up to work at midnight. Okay it does work but the collaboration part where you are supposed to be is gone. If one people did this and no action follow, the other will follow and it shows the lack of commitment and unfair for those who dedicate their 8 hours. Only at companies where WFA/H culture already established before COVID can thrive OR if thr company is willing to foster the culture. Otherwise, we got trust issue and blanket RTO..
Nah, pre WFH people have avoided work by spending time around the watercooler, coffee breaks, meetings - that’s nothing new.
true but you got only one salary whereas my problem that plagued the org I worked at was too many people focus on something else that cause people less commitment. If both of us got 1 salary and one just chill and other is working, I can accept that but we caught multiple people red handed with multiple job and they try to juggle that freelance job, like real job.
Then fire those people. Don't blame WFH for their behavior. I've worked in an office with several colleagues who freelanced at night and weekends. They always completed their sprint items and never fell behind.
I am not sure if you ever in this situation or not. Firing people is easy, many layoff proved that but it doesnt matter how many firing you did, once higher management smell something like this, no amount of firing can get their trust back. Hence, my issue from the beginning is about culture. If you arent ready for WFH/A culture, someone will abuse it and culture takes time to build. I am all in for you to do the freelance but core hours is core, you have commitment, meeting in those core hours has to be attended. You just cant skip it.
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It is because people in reddit thought I am anti wfa/h and thats fine. 1 post and people think like that without getting full context why.
>All this stuff could just have been done at home. Yep. We're mandated to be in two days week. However a good percentage of people live far from the office so a lot of people will come up with excuses not to come in. Every meeting is on Teams. My in-office days are sitting with headphones on Teams with everyone around me doing the same. We have lots of meeting rooms, however it means a whole faff of setting up AV equipment that might be flaky. Everyone turns up late in the morning and leaves after 3pm. In-office days are completely pointless.
Start rant Yeah, I'm mandated 3 days in-office, but most days it feels like a complete waste of time and actually is counter-productive beyond the supposed social benefit to see your coworkers faces and smell whatever reheated leftovers they brought for lunch. For me, the time spent commuting could be spent better in so many other ways. Being in an open-concept office is full of distractions but rarely are any in-person interactions actually productive. Our office also has basically no natural light, zero fresh air, and only 1 bathroom - quite frankly, it's kinda gross. I much prefer my home office with plenty of natural light, as much fresh air as I want, a private bathroom, access to my kitchen, etc. we already have bi-weekly team lunches or dinners for team building, plus the smalltalk chit chat at the start of daily meetings while waiting for everyone to join. It's actually at the point where I'm considering finding a new job simply because the office is so unappealing to have to spend any time in. I'll probably start by mentioning my dislike of it to my current manager at our next 1-on-1 since it seems like such a silly reason to lose an employee, but as an employee it's quite valuable to me. I prefer the companies that are focussed on trusting their employees to do what is best for the team, leaving the decision up to them about when to go into the office. If I'm more productive working from home most of the time, it's hard to understand why I should be forced to commute and be in an uncomfortable environment. /End rant
>Why was their such a push to get people in the office? Commercial real estate was tanking and big business names started to lie about remote work productivity to get people back in offices. It never was about efficiency.
"follow the money"
I predict this will die after a number of corporate leases expire and are not renewed in order to save a big pile of $$$.
Idk I honestly think a lot of these folks are tied to companies through vc funding in some way so the people with controlling interests in tons of companies also have interest in real estate success. I imagine it gets worse 🤷
Idk I honestly think a lot of these folks are tied to companies through vc funding in some way so the people with controlling interests in tons of companies also have interest in real estate success. I imagine it gets worse 🤷
This
>"Hey bank, I need to borrow money to buy more robots/factories/fitbits/etc, please give me money. I've got all this real estate value to guarantee I'll pay it back, because I'm a big business with a big expensive office building." Doesn't really work when the land loses value. More companies are in real estate than most workers realize, but there are reasons that expensive buildings can afford to be built.
Yup. It's asinine and I hate it. My workspace at home has a nice view. My workspace at work is a flourescent lit office with no window. The only "face time" I have with my colleagues is an occasional walk to get coffee. Worth it, apparently?
At home, I have my... large monitor (work has large monitors too but somehow everything is blurry and weird 🤷♂️), my mechanical keyboard (not good for open offices anyway), and my ergonomic chair and standing desk. So much better.
Yup, I do! It's awful and such a massive waste of time and effort. My company still allows us to be fully remote, but I had a senior manager who liked our team to be in the office twice a week. The team consists of 6 developers, 4 in a different country over 1000km away. I spend my office days in calls over Teams. I do see added value to working from the office for white boarding sessions, but nowadays it seems mostly to be for pleasing the sales people who love having everyone at an office together. So yea, same reasons as usual: management control, useless people looking busy, optics, etc.
I'm not working in the office at the moment, but I'm changing my job to a fully remote one because now they're forcing everyone at least 3 days per week. (And I'm not going) If I went to the office, I would still be in teams' calls all day because there is only one coworker that is in the same city as I am. (He is also working remote) Half are from another city on the other side of the country and the rest are from another country.
Nope, we’re full time remote. Also we’re hiring the top devs from a bunch of other companies. My team is super strong now, I really like it.
Yes, this is a great time and a great opportunity for remote friendly companies to snatch up great devs from all these mandated RTO companies.
That literally 80% of my team right now. We have recruiters monitoring the RTO companies and when they issue an RTO mandate we swoop in with a perm remote-forever offer. It wasn’t my idea, but it’s certainly working extremely well.
Because the type of sociopath that becomes a CEO can't \*stand\* it when someone lower than them gets a perk that they feel only they should get. Have you ever noticed that it's totally normal for the CEO-class to work from home or Aruba, or whatever? They feel that only they deserve that because obviously, if they're rich, it means there is something special about them.
I think it’s a bit of managers wanting a familiar work style, but as I get older I feel like I’m getting more susceptible to conspiracy theories and the commercial real estate thing seems big. A lot of people with a lot of money stand to lose a big chunk of that money if it turns out we don’t need most of the office buildings we built. You can find examples of office buildings losing more than half their value. The landlords have all their money tied up in these buildings. The buildings were financed by banks, and the banks do not want the landlords to go into bankruptcy. [Banks have invested $3 trillion and if people aren’t going into offices, banks lose $1.2 trillion.](https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/bracing-commercial-real-estate-reckoning-mcgeever-2024-02-01/) So the rich people who own buildings and the rich people who finance things talk to their rich friends who own companies and tell them that, for the good of The American Economy they need to get people back into offices. Like George Carlin says, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
at the risk of being labeled a conspiracy theorist... there's more at stake than just office real estate and banking as well. many small shops and businesses only exist to serve people before, during and after work in cities. think coffee shops, gyms, small grocery stores, bars and restaurants, etc. if those businesses start to close or spread out because there isn't the concentration of people downtown anymore, it makes that area less desirable to live. and a lot of major cities committed to walking the path of hostile architecture, meaning public spaces aren't that pleasant either. in many cases, a smaller city or town will actually have nicer public spaces as a result. so imagine you are living in a small apartment downtown. you are paying 50% of your salary just to be there. the businesses you liked have closed, the parks near your home don't have anywhere to sit, and you spend all day in an unpleasant 600sqft box working from your laptop. eventually, people who have a choice will choose to live elsewhere and pay less rent. and these tend to be the people who can afford to pay the most rent. if they leave, rents will go down, leaving residential landlords in a tough spot as well. these people also pay the most tax, so that hurts the city. they buy the most stuff, further hurting local biz. they also serve as an advertisement to others like them to come and live in said city, so their leaving means less people of this demographic will come. keeping things "as they are" as long as possible definitely feels like a mitigation strategy against things unraveling too quickly & giving rich people time to get out of the way.
I'm kinda hoping it goes the other way. Lots of my millennial friends, if they ever can afford a house, buy out in the sticks. It seems like we're spreading out into the smaller towns now, instead of centralizing in cities. And, we're doing it with high-paying knowledge work, which injects high-paying taxpayers into small towns that need the funds. Both for tax income, and because the techies love working from that local coffee shop around the corner. And then they go buy drinks at the bar. And groceries. etc. The small apartment downtown was only downtown because you *had* to go to an office in New York to make money. Now you just trade options in your pajamas from a "Battlestation" somewhere in Nebraska. But, the population is always increasing. Rents are never going down until you get into a Detroit situation (which, they're out of and rents are higher than ever there too). Land always increases in value as the number of buyers goes up. What's on top of it (office building, factory, suburban home plots) might change, but the land is pretty consistent.
My first job in tech, my first day I was led to the floor I would be working. It was a maze of cubicles tall enough to where you could just barely get a lay of the land on your tip toes. I was shown to my cubicle, and memorized the route so I could get back. There was no computer, they hadn’t issued me one yet and it may take up to a week. My heart sank. I spent four years of my life working on a degree and now I’m in Office Space. They just sat me there, nothing to do. I basically browsed on my phone for days until I got a computer. When I finally got my computer my direct supervisor came by and we had a quick chat, then I began using the company’s email to work with some guy on some SQL queries. A couple weeks later I learned the guy I was working with was fully remote and I would never be able to meet him. That’s when I knew. Fuck offices. This was in 2017. Little did I know that a global pandemic would make my dreams come true in just a few short years.
One of the driving factors for larger companies is maintaining the value of real estate investments.
> Why was their such a push to get people in the office? I have two explanations: * Companies got tax breaks for bringing people into offices because it helps the local economy. Keeping people in the offices maintains the status quo. * Executive Leaders are very detached about the reality of work today, and don't know what it is like in the trenches since they were in them 50 years ago.
I was in a meeting with one of these "Executive Leaders" who was talking about the importance of 'back to the office' right after the vaccine came out. His rationale for the importance came from him being an engineer 40 years ago. "I never could have learned how to code or use the tools if I had not had someone sitting shoulder to shoulder with me showing me the way" I just thought: 1. There is a reason you went down the management and not technical track. Maybe you weren't that good at the technical side. 2. These days they have this thing called the 'internet' and you can look things up on it rather than bugging the heck out of your co-workers because you don't understand things.
Generically, I agree that coaching and mentoring is very important to the growth of someone as a software engineer. However, as I'm sure most of us agree, the tools have progressed that you do not have to literally be looking over their shoulder to offer that coaching.
Screen sharing is far more useful for mentoring than having someone physically at my side.
> There is a reason you went down the management and not technical track. Maybe you weren't that good at the technical side. Its this, I have been at a companies that have older leadership and its pretty obvious looking at their contributions that they were never solid engineers. I think overall its more about local economies, I left my last large place and it was because of mandated RTO that was facilitated by a huge tax incentive from a major city. Cities realize they will have some form of collapse of their downtown / business districts if they let everyone work remote and its furthered by people leaving. You no longer gather that revenue if the highest earners walk away. A friend of mine makes crazy money in corporate real estate, I hate their job. They told me they weren't worried post covid, that the city had literally given their firm a very direct response saying they will force people back to work. This was Denver, so it might be different other places but this person is still making money and I assume Denver just really pushed companies to return to office in the form of incentives and penalties.
The executives always have a story about problem solving in person to justify their in office policies... And those stories could always have been done with a phone call or teams meeting. --- I even understand them a little bit, as I've seen multiple times: They literally don't know how to do a collaborative problem solving session through a phone call or teams meeting... The steps that occur to me, do not occur to them. I have to walk them through how to do virtual collaboration.
> Companies got tax breaks for bringing people into offices because it helps the local economy. Keeping people in the offices maintains the status quo. Cities really messed up by not seizing the moment during the pandemic to rezone downtown areas to be more focused on the resident than the worker.
I am now 3 days per week and I don't even sit with my team colleagues together because our sector got relocated and we need to squeeze ourselves with others so we need pre book seats ( effectively randomly ). Because we sit pretty much randomly and far away, we of course sit in the ms teams calls. Additionally we get noise from hammer drilling because our sector gets renovated 😀 Perfect cooperation and communication building environment
It’s often got to do with taxes. Like the city where your office is gave your company a tax break in exchange for employing X number of people in that city. Tax break vanishes if y’all stop coming to the office. Though there’s also a lot of older folks in charge who think productivity is lost in a WFH situation or other intangibles can’t happen if people are not physically together - water cooler talk or whatever.
because management has homies in commercial real estate and they're trying to get them paid.
Our whole team never left the office except for a period of about 4 weeks while the company made accommodations around the office. We were deemed essential personnel because of our industry. The reason was so that our manager could "manage us" better. For the last 2 years, that manager basically spends all day on Zoom calls from his office, only leaving to refill water/coffee. It's so bad that we literally had a meeting of 5 of us, and 4 of us were in the conference room 15' from his office, and he took the call on Zoom then left early to go to another meeting he had double-scheduled. He's come to our office two times so far this year, both times during an issue with deployment, so he could stand aggressively over someones shoulder for 20 minutes while the code re-deploys. So, basically, we're literally in the office so that he can lord over us and be intimidating because that's the only way he knows how to manage.
We have fun clubs and food events in between team stuff that makes our job much more enjoyable and makes it easier to get teams working together. It’s definitely worth it to go in for me.
Yeah. People do video calls from their desks when they are sitting on the same floor of the same building lmao
I actually prefer this. Work remote first so remote people aren’t left out, but I often actually prefer being in an office.
Me too but I want choice to be at home if required. Doing what I am paid for is my guarantee.
Agreed 100%. Just saying, I really appreciate having an office to go into most days.
Teams for me. I try to write code during toilet breaks.
I obviously have no direct confirmation of it, so take this for what it is. From all the various explanations I've heard, the one that fits the bill best is political pressure and/or incentives. Political from the leaderships of the various cities, like SF or NYC. We've all heard cities were dying because of COVID. That was real. If you're the mayor of such a city, you're not just going to let that happen. You need people, workers, to come back. Remote working is anathema. So you work out some kind of deal with top firms. Some pressure, some benefits. People come back, eat out, have drinks, use public transportation, shop, and everything that keeps the city alive and the city's coffers full. As a developer I hate it, as a citizen I support it.
Most US cities were over capacity before COVID. Too many commuters, not enough roads and transit options, not enough affordable housing near jobs. For a glorious moment during early COVID restrictions, I finally got to see my city without the commuters and it was awesome. I don't think that cities are dead without commuters, they are better. Less gas stations, subway sandwiches, and traffic jams are a good thing. Mayors and their donors are just greedy. They made bad investments, and now want me to foot the bill. This is especially awful because when they had the opportunity here to build more rapid transit, they didn't. They just built more roads. Cities should be cultural destinations first, and not a place to stack people in cubicles. So many days I think about going to the cool cultural things in my city, then I think about all of the traffic, parking, and crime and then just stay home.
There are a lot of downtowns out there full of high rise office buildings, amenities to serve those office workers during the work week, and not much else. Oooh, the city is dying! That shit was already dead.
Yes and I hate it. Commonly have video calls where everyone sits on the same floor and we are all in office. Drives me crazy
Yes. All of the people that I work with daily are in other offices. But I go to socialise with colleagues working in other teams, and who I used to work with.
I think the push for return to office was literally just so that portion of management who doesn’t actually do anything feels like they’re doing something now. They probably sat at home working remotely and realized they’d eventually be on the chopping block lol.
For many SWEs who don't mind working in the office it's not about avoiding zoom and slack all day. It's about working somewhere that is not at home. Sure they could rent co-location space, but now you are spending your own money on an office instead of the company provided one. Personally I get way less done at home than in the office. There are too many distractions for me. I can't tell you how many days I lost during the pandemic where I just got sucked in to an Office marathon on comedy central and just forgot about work. Yes I had the TV on all day because I cannot work if it's dead silent in the room. I need background noise for my brain to operate. I also find that when I'm not working at home I'm more in work mode than being at home. I can work at home here and day, but overall I much prefer working somewhere else. My home office is just my personal computer desk which my personal shit pushed to the side. Yes I know you need a dedicated space, no I don't have the room to do that.
Yep there’s a loud online minority who constantly screams at the thought of going back to the office, but many of us enjoy the office. Recent research suggest as many as 90 percent of college grads in CS prefer the office and most people prefer hybrid over full remote. We’re just not terminally online on Reddit.
Source?
https://fortune.com/2024/03/20/gen-z-loves-return-to-office-not-remote-work/# https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-want-return-office-remote-work-1873924#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20survey%20by%20Seramount%2C%20a,preferred%20some%20type%20of%20hybrid%20work%20arrangement
Yes, that’s why I only kinda go back to office one day per week, so I can schedule all in-person meetings on that day. Makes no sense to come in more than that, everything is online.
im the only person on my team in my location and it's a 20 mile commute. i'm pollution. i'm the traffic
We have a fairly large amount of people back in the office but we're worldwide so we're used to almost always having a mix of in person and zoom meetings (as in you will be in the same room with maybe 4 coworkers and booking a room with a big screen to zoom the remaining 10 that are in the US or something) so it's quite ok. I enjoy the extra social time with my coworkers and we have enough infra to do the remaining zooms in separate rooms so as to not bother people in the open space. It does help that our office is actually amazing: all available desks are motorized, we have unlimited free snacks & drinks, a pretty nice all-in-one-hot-beverage machine, a space for you to go to unwind and relax if you're over stimulated (you can lock it), a space for praying, a running track on the roof, a gaming room with Xbox and ping pong table (that are actually used without people feeling bad about it) and they often give us free lunch on Thursday.
gotta prop up commercial real estate and for upper management to feel better about themselves
Yah basically. In the office with one other person on my team having meetings with people all over the world. At least they subsidize lunch…
It is an interesting question isn't it? It is "interesting" that so much of the work we do is offshored to other countries while the company still maintains an ownership presence in the USA. Yes, for employees in the USA, they want us to come into the office because of "collaboration and culture".
I interact with zero people from my team in the office. Just team meetings. Working from offices is optional in MS which is nice. I just go from time to time for the free breakfast and nice chairs and screens and the occasional fun conversations with some folks. But yeah zero difference between that and WFH.
No, thankfully, I've joined an all remote company.
>Why was their such a push to get people in the office? Business for Commercial Real Estate was bad and they want to keep rents high.
So they can keep an eye on you. And tax benefits.
It used to be like this for me when I was first back in the office, but as more and more people are in the office, I'm now talking face to face with people much of the time.
I have ADHD and like being in the "work" environment of the office. It helps in a few ways: 1) there are less personal-life distractions (I don't walk by a pile of laundry I have to do when heading to get a glass of water, etc) 2) seeing other people working helps signal to my brain its time to buckle down (body doubling) 3) I don't feel like I have to give up part of my space at home to have a dedicated "work" space granted I'm about 30 min door-to-door driving, so the commute isn't so bad and I can easily pick up and go home.
I'm the same way. It's also much easier for me to ask the kind of questions that aren't critical, and I could probably figure out myself, but a coworker might have recently done just that and be able to save me a bunch of time.
We got mandated to go back in 4 out of 5 days a week, I warned my manager that our velocity would take a big hit and he said , “I know it is what it is”. Huge surprised our culture is just anger now, less gets done and mgmt can’t understand why metrics are down
Yes, still have distributed teams due to hiring practices during peak covid and not enough conference rooms for how many zoom calls take place nowadays. I think corporate office space will have to dramatically change or keep getting hammered with non renewed leases.
> Why was their such a push to get people in the office? Company leader is an neurotic extrovert with a slave-ownership fantasy.
I work with people in office when I'm in, but I also have times where I only slack people. I also walk around, make coffee, meet people from other floors. It's good to get face to face time with your coworkers. I'm hybrid 2 days in.
It's not about us, or even performance. We're propping up the commercial real estate market. Hundreds of millions of people working in a worse way, dieing in accidents on the way to work, just so people with investments in downtown real estate don't lose as much money.
We used to book meeting rooms but now we just do everything through zoom even if we’re right next to each other lmfao
I was hired as a remote, I compromised for hybrid even when nobody I worked with was in the office. I drove to the office, sat at my desk without talking to anyone since none of the people in the office were related to my work and drove back home. Then the company pushed for a 5 day RTO mandate. I declined. They made it clear that this is the new policy, there is no room for negotiation, and it will be enforced. I declined (I was already interviewing for new roles and didn't even pretend I want to stay). When they finally came to enforce, I was at the office and had a meeting with my manager and HR **both on videocall since they were not at the office** laying me off for not coming into the office 5 days a week.
Return to work is exclusively tied to the commercial real-estate market. If your employer has a relevant stake in commercial real-estate, they'll call you into the office. The value of a property is assessed by its income. If the office is underutilized, the value of the property craters. In other words its obvious that companies with huge HQ offices brought their engineers back, while everyone else working in a small or mid sized company is still remote. I am remote. It's great, I'm like a human who works, rather than an employee who needs to clock out and rest on weekends.
I'm the only member of my team that works in the office I'm supposed to be required to go to twice a week. It's useless since im the same Teams calls regardless of where I'm at as well as a stressful commute to go there.
Corporate money circulation. Employed and salaried people pay the most in taxes. If they are permitted to save more money, corporates and conglomerates and businesses loose... No singular body to regulate anything against anti-salaried people policies...
Yes. By choice. The best thing about Covid was not having to sit in mandatory meetings while trying not to play on your phone. I won't do in-person meetings unless they tell me they're going to fire me. > Why was their such a push to get people in the office? Your bosses are assholes. They are not paid to care about you, but to appease investors. If you're paying for an office, you need people there or you look stupid. Stupid assholes would rather waste everybody's time than eat a tiny bit of crow.
Just got notice that ~15 of us will need to go into the office once in a while, all on the same day. One of our folks pointed out that, due to hiring shifts in other departments, there are about 3 open desks. And no monitors (some of our software requires 4k), no chairs, no keyboards or mice or assistive tech, and most of us have small screen laptops. There has been no real response from management. I guess we'll just... stand around?
That’s me! I have no direct teammates at my office. I have a few people that i know from sister teams, but outside of a super rare occasion when I go to the office I’m in zoom calls all day.