CEO demanded all employees return full-time to the office. Only half showed up
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Some people like the office, some people can't abide it.
A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls.
I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy.
I don't think the future is fully remote _for everyone_, because fundamentally we are social people. On the flip side, I don't think full office 5 days a week is going to be the future either (caveats apply.)
The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.
That's because it's true. You're either a remote company or the remote people find that they routinely hear about things much later than everyone in the office knows about them.
The market advantage only works where there is a lack of labour. In cities with a big scene, there will be a lack of labour for a given industry.
everyone remote will depress your labour's value because you are competing against a much bigger pool of talent.
In tech its not so apparent yet, because there is a short supply of staff generally. But that wont persist for ever.
There's a lot more programmers on the market right now than 10 years ago thanks to bootcamps and short degrees.
Honestly, for each one hired you generally need a proper engineer to cleanup the mess afterward. I'm not worried about an oversupplied of qualified engineers anytime soon.
Being good tech staff is a hard skill. This idea that there will ever be enough just because the demand is high (and therefore there are many people getting schooling) is not healthy. Even when there are a lot of tech workers, there will be sourcing trouble. Instead of not finding anyone at all, companies will find very poor tech folks. In a very real sense this is already a problem today.
I've tried to properly document basic reasonings and how-to's for future people in the roles, and told that wasn't really the work needed done. Then again, management failed to understand that onboardinng and more routine-ish tasks could be documented and sped up.
I jumped ship from my previous job (that was forced WfH with grumblings of returning any day now), to a 100% true remotework position. I'll *NEVER* go back to a hybrid or WfW job again.
I think this notion is built on pre-pandemic reality, when it was like 95% in office, 5% remote. Then remote was a 2nd class citizen, in-person conversations reigned, and remote ppl were fairly out of the loop. But when 50% or more of people are remote, everything is “remote first”, basically all communication happening in Slack (or at least being summarized online), and I just haven’t seen this happen.
Basically, I agree that your company is currently remote-first, even if they have offices and most people are in one location, but only time will tell if it stays that way after coming out of the pandemic (strongly depends on company culture and their policies).
It does need to be a culture of “remote first” communication, with the office primarily being a place for people who want a more social work experience. But I suspect this will be a lasting, common setup for many tech companies, that works well.
I'm not sure this tracks with my experience. It seems like the organizational structure of a company is what keeps people from learning about things, not their location. The common case I can think of is that some meeting occurs in which a decision is made, and that decision and the context around it are not communicated outside the meeting (in a timely or efficient way, that is).
Some people are "in the know" and others are not, but it's a function of who they work with, not who they meet in the hallway.
If you mean gossip, watercooler chat, that kind of thing, sure. But, I don't miss that stuff.
Maybe you're thinking of some other example that I'm not.
Being remote often means you have more unknown unknowns, because you can't see the daily goings-on. If you haven't experienced this, you're either very lucky or your company is a lot more remote-centric than you think it is.
Are you satisfied with your job? Are you being paid the amount you want? If yes, who cares? I try to avoid being too informed about certain things anyway because it ends up making me a target for added responsibilities that I don’t care about.
You're not working on a team if decisions are made by 5/6 of the people most of time without even a consideration that the other person might have input. At that point you're a weird internal contractor, and to your point, if they wanted me to be a contractor and just deal with whatever choices the team makes without input, I'd expect to be paid as a contractor.
Sometimes people use face to face as a crutch.
I was told the look into another language was part of "a bake off" between a couple options, and I assumed they'd have a more general meeting/decision before picking. I'd made my general opinion known earlier, but I didn't want to clutter meetings that weren't about the relevant decision by cramming my opinion on the matter into them.
I have no idea if my opinion would have changed things, but I never got the chance to find out. I'd have rather lost an argument where my point of view was heard than just had any objections overridden by default though.
I've asked about the decision later on, but that was after tens of hours of work had gone into the system I disagreed with, so making the case for throwing away most of a week of a couple dev's work is a lot harder to make than pushing to not "waste" that work in the first place.
I've been working remote for 2 years, and the team has been mostly good about it. I bring this up specifically because it's a good example of the pitfalls that can hit even a team that is otherwise doing a good job of remote inclusion.
The whole point is that not having folks as looped in to meetings and choices when you're remote makes it a lot easier to intentionally or accidentally cut people out of important decisions. In this case, now I have to be the disruptive jerk that's going "I don't like this. Stop." if I care, or I just have to go along with the decision.
If an employer is not willing to accomodate remote first and payme well as a contractor, I'll find another one willing to.
It is also about being able to be effective. Because if they don't tell you things, your productivity goes down.
Sure, for a reasonable amount of time until either you are able to be once again, or they let you go.
> Productivity is the company’s problem, not mine.
I know this can feel hard to believe when you're stuck in a crappy situation, but there are many folks who value their output for its own sake.
You might also choose to care about your productivity because it can correspond with your ability to get promoted, earn more, etc.
Your company may not have any remote employees, but if four people on a team are at the company's US headquarters and the fifth is in the company's office in Ireland, expect the Irish employee to get cut out of the loop constantly.
Remote roles ask for so much more interviewing but offer more money.
Nowadays people get either side of binary about all sorts of things. Then they fight for their side with tooth and nails without even considering ideas of other side of that binary. Truth is neither white or black it's millions of shades in between.
Saying we are a remote company or a mandatory office company is an attack on the individual to be subordinate to the collective. The pandemic upended this cultural norm and additionally made unprecedented demands on the individual by the collective on a global scale. In context it is not surprising to see visceral reactions and people drawing battle lines.
A rough idea I would like to see knowledge worker companies follow some sort of flexible model (not hybrid). That might look like a small hub office. Space at the hub needs to be reserved and people who use it less often are prioritized for seats (regular visitors may find themselves working from home occasionally to accommodate others). Travel to the hub is a 0 friction business expense if you have a reservation. Ideally this allows easy adhoc in person collaboration, creates norms that include individuals working remotely while also providing an accessible professional/social environment for people that benefit from those spaces.
I'd love to see some creative collaborative problem solving instead of an all or nothing battle between artificial groups.
Does this create an unfair condition for remote workers? It could be.
Why? I can chat with my boss, he can share with me ideas he he has and I can give my opinion.
As an introvert, I resorted to that in large part because it removed my ability to manufacture excuses for myself or just forgetting because I rarely get the impulse that I feel a strong need to talk to someone.
But you can do the same yourself even if you're not in a position to demonstratively schedule actual meeting slots with people: Just put reminders in your calendar to talk to people without scheduling an actual meeting. If you want to make it seem more organic, just put in the right number of slots and keep a list to yourself that you randomise week by week. You can always tick people off if you have conversations outside of your schedule.
Maybe some teams are small enough or well-adjusted enough for this not to be an issue, but I've definitely felt I've lacked this sort of context since having fewer informal talks with my boss.
Sometimes we'd have "nothing" to talk about until people realised I'd still insist on doing the call and it turned out they had stuff to talk about when I was there on the phone anyway and they didn't feel like they were wasting my time because I'd made it clear this time was already blocked out.
Doing fully remote requires managers who understand how to ensure they pick up on things from team members when they can't see them, and that will be an adjustment for a lot of companies.
But once you have that, and managers learn how to be available in the same way, it'll work just fine. Consider that lots of managers don't know how to be available in person either, but lock themselves away in offices and only emerge for meetings with agendas that does not leave much room for raising issues or general chat other than for a selected few, so this is not a new issue - just a different version of an old one.
The only time either of them are at the office are new employee introductions and that's a half-day max.
Proponents of remote work don’t generally oppose hybrid or in person for anyone else who prefers it, but those going to the office would find themselves effectively doing “remote from the office”, if enough people choose not to go.
This is the reason why I think hybrid is a bit dumb. Regardless of the social component, the hybrid model effectiveness relies on everyone who collaborates in the same field, to agree when and where to attend, most of the time. If not, it’s just an excuse to fill up cubicles.
It helps to keep up some in-person social constructs - you can spend time with coworkers at lunch, or going out for a group activity if you want, but keeps the majority of the day-to-day focused on making remote work for everyone.
The counter to that is then that lots of the ways one must deal with remote workers (e.g. more better written communication, getting tools to attempt to recreate some of the interactions that were previously in-person remotely, although the best-in-class tool is usually still terrible only people sometimes don’t say it because they don’t realise we ought to want tools that don’t suck) are good improvements to in-office working. And having people remote isn’t so different from having multiple offices (and is perhaps better than different offices separated by large time differences) although being beholden to whatever Internet connection someone can get and chooses to pay for in the place they choose to work can be frustrating and the quality of communication hardware/software is frankly abysmal.
Certainly there is something to be said for companies that try to take remote seriously (eg stack overflow had private offices which recreated some of the quiet and isolation and communication requirements of remote work within the office). But a lot of companies basically had their hands forced by the ’rona and I think significant culture changes are required to more thoroughly embrace and accommodate remote or hybrid work.
This is true, but in most of the rhetoric I see, this gets omitted (I'll assume with benign intentions). There's also a lot of people on social media (e.g twitter) who wax lyrical about how it's only controlling management teams who want people in an office, and how everyone else wants remote. As an IC who hates remote on a personal level, it makes me feel increasingly marginalised and depressed.
A handful of people go to the office because they prefer it that way and/or don't (want to) have a proper work setup at home.
The majority is fully remote, but have signed a hybrid contract so they can be called to the office if there is a need. The only need so far has been a going-away party that involved a case of whiskey =)
Nor I, with the complete ridiculousness of "hybrid". And I support climate justice. Commutes to go to a workplace where someone is hacking coughing, and I'm still doing Teams meetings is fucking ridiculous. Never again.
> A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls.
Standard introvert/extrovert justifications. People need to learn how to partition these things to create a hard delineation between work and not-work. Most whom I know who hate remotework don't have these essential skills.
> I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy.
It is binary. Either you're a remote-first org, in which where your butt's geographical location doesn't matter, or it does.
If you're remote, there's a LOT of positives including: uses no gas to get to work, less wear and tear on vehicle, climate benefits on massive scale, easily eat from home with food amenable to us, have access to niceties here at the house, pets, multitask with stuff like laundry (3 minutes activity with 1h waittimes), and I'm compensated the moment I log in versus commute.
WfW is bad because all the above aren't true. The major justifications I'm seeing with this revolves around business rents, middle-manager surveillance capitalism, and appearance of work vs work really done.
Hybrid it's worse than WfH or WfW. Now, most of the above are true, but in work's location, you're now having to also act remote.
> The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.
That's the first real big change with remotework. YOU MUST SET HARD GATED THINGS BETWEEN WORK AND NOT-WORK. Me? I set my work laptops out at 8:55a and log in at 9a. I pack up my work laptops in their respective bags at 5p. I'll even do a short walk before and after shift as a "commute" and exercise. And sometimes, I'll even change clothes. The hard line is what's absolutely needed to partition work from not-work.
Yes, if you live in a nice place with nice amenities. When you are starting out you're either stuck in your parent's house, or a shitty house share. (yes yes, if everyone is remote pricing changes. But it won't sort out inequity, if you're poor, your housing is going to be shit. )
> Hybrid it's worse than WfH or WfW. Now, most of the above are true, but in work's location, you're now having to also act remote.
I don't understand this. surly full time office is the worst? There is no flexibility, You have to optimise for the commute.
> YOU MUST SET HARD GATED THINGS BETWEEN WORK AND NOT-WORK.
Oh I'm a sysadmin, I did this already. If I'm not on call you're shit out of luck.
However thats not my point. When you are bullied, or have to accept cunts into your VC, or the work is just plain awful, you associate that feeling with your surroundings. It taints your living area. It leaves an emotional stain that's really hard to remove. Now with an office, you just YOLO to a new place (in know I know, its not always possible). a complete change of scene, no bad memories.
At home its a lot harder.
To conclude:
I am not arguing for exclusivity, I think its possible to accommodate fully remote workers, I've had at least one remote worker on my team (or a remote team) for the last ten years. Its never been an issue (apart from fixing hardware errors.) With decent planning tools and decent comms its perfectly possible to help people thrive remotely or onsite.
Fresh out of college hires belong in the office. After a year or two it depends.
Remote as an option doesn't work well for the remoters. They will be passed up on opportunities for career growth. The people who didn't show up when the CEO demanded it should strongly consider finding a place that is more remote friendly -- especially if their manager isn't one of the people who refused to go in.
There are a lot of unique challenges that come with fostering all remote teams. It would be easy to put the remoters on the back burner if I had a group of devs I saw face to face every day. That will be especially true for people working at a company that harbors active hostility towards those people who refuse to come into the office.
It’s like there are cat people and dog people. If companies forced people to own a dog, or own a cat there will be lots of conflict.
I don’t want to see companies become tribal, but a company that tries to make me come into the office for random reasons will make me really angry and frustrated and probably make me seek out a non-stupid company.
Stupid because if remote works for me and I’m highly productive, forcing me to come into an office to do the same thing is inefficient.
The reality is that if you need more flexible working arrangements, you are extremely subject to the whims of people who want offices to be the primary mode of work. If they don't want you to be remote, they don't need venom or arguments or to seem angry or even to seem to have much of an opinion at all. Simple inaction and lack of effort, followed by an "oh I'm sorry I forgot to tell you after we all got back from lunch" 3 weeks later is enough to make the remote person's situation untenable. Eventually the "oh I forgot you worked here. Just kidding hah hah hah" jokes kick in and then you know you're a couple months from being let go.
To have a successful working relationship with people who aren't in the office, work must be done by the people who are in the office to keep things working. Essentially, it can't work unless everyone adopts a remote-first approach where major discussions happen in writing out in the open.
The massive proliferation of slack and similar in the covid era certainly has and will continue to help establish this mode of working, but the people who don't want it because they feel uncomfortable when they don't see butts in seats 8 hours a day will likely put in a lot of passive-aggressive effort to bring things back to the old status quo.
The biggest hazards lie in the grey area between extremes. If everyone is remote always, everyone is on equal footing. Same can be said if everyone simply has to show up at the office every day.
Maybe the whole org doesn't have to be all on way or all the other, but you should at least be consistent within the teams that work closely together every day.
Or maybe don't interrupt the person who is deep in thought about a complex problem?
I've worked with clients who are fully on board with Slack (or Teams or whatever) and their culture doesn't really do email or phone so the most effective way to communicate with them remotely ends up being to join whatever channels the people you need to work with are on. If you all get along well it can be fun in the same way as any social network. But it can also be toxic to productivity because of the constant interruptions and if anything that effect is worse when everyone gets along because it's like everyone is in permanent water cooler mode as well.
The endlessly proclaimed, robotically repeated benefits of office work -- the vaunted "serendipitous encounters", "water-cooler conversations", and "impromptu lunchroom innovation sessions" -- they all involved nothing but small talk. All meetings were calls. No meaningful thinking or decisions occurred in-person.
When everyone joined me in working from home in 2020, the main thing I noticed was that people stopped trying to force down my throat all the mindless, unjustified, undocumented decisions they made in the office. I finally got a chance to use my voice to make the org stop being so dumb. And people were grateful.
I think people mostly make this "benefits of the office" stuff up to rationalize getting out of the house, away from their spouse and kids, and into the local urban center with all their favorite food trucks.
There are probably some industries where it has real benefit, like artistic ones, but for the most part I don't think SWE falls in that category.
I understand the role, I'm not ignorant of the purpose of these positions. But I'm painfully aware of how many people are b*llshitters and found their positions using these very office politics to get ahead. Their ultimate fear is being assessed on their own for their effort. Largely because they don't actually contribute much at all.
Personally I moved back from Lead Architect/CTO roles to being a consultant mainly doing IC work where I deliver the entirety of a system myself. In other words I do deliver the goods technically, and happen to prefer that to working politically.
So it would seem my observation/perspective is coming from a different perspective than you were thinking of!
If the real work is done, remotely or at work, then importance is irrelevant.
No, I said I didnt understand the vehemence.
> The reality is that if you need more flexible working arrangements
Yes, I don't think I'm going ever really go back full time. Currently, I come in ~twice a week.
I've worked with remote singular and remote offices for years(10+) before covid. Its been part of tech for a long time. Even my dad has be doing remote since the early 90s (if not more)
If you have decent planning, ticketing and retros then you'll know if your remote(or any other) team are not performing well.
> Essentially, it can't work unless everyone adopts a remote-first approach where major discussions happen in writing out in the open.
I just don't think that's right. Sure people need to be included in the "room" to make the decision, but that's not the same a remote vs office. Decisions are only a tiny part, the rest is execution and unblocking.
don't get me wrong, you need to have a culture of respect and brining people up to speed, siloing doesn't work well.
Yeah, I don't like commuting, paying for gas, parking, and other stuff that comes with the office, but for me personally I think it's going to be good.
I agree, the best companies will let people choose to work the way they do best. Getting that right isn't easy.
This is a massively underrated comment that needs to be highlighted.
> but the people who don't want it because they feel uncomfortable when they don't see butts in seats 8 hours a day will likely put in a lot of passive-aggressive effort to bring things back to the old status quo.
That is, in the first part of your comment basically says "Remote work isn't tenable unless in-office workers put in a significant amount of additional effort (e.g. always using written communication, impromptu conversations are verboten because you might be leaving a remote worker out, etc.)", but then you complain in-office workers just want to see "butts in seats" and are being "passive aggressive" if they don't put in the extra effort to make remote work tenable.
It could just (fairly) be the case that in-office workers don't want to put in the extra effort. I mean, a big reason many execs want people to be in office is because they see the efficiency in impromptu and verbal communication, and your post concedes that point by my reading of it.
Perceived efficiency. Like everyone is saying; for some jobs and some people it is apparently efficient (I have not seen this in practice much outside having a whiteboard with all in the room for brainstorming or solving a harder problem, but that really doesn’t happen that often and we can do that now with miro and/or VR), but for many it is just wasting time and annoying. I don’t mind hybrid if your team is all remote and the other teams are not; if you are part of a team that is hybrid, I don’t think it is very good in any case.
Most people on your team aren't listening to every conversation everyone else ever has. You should be documenting all meaningful communication for your project, regardless of remote availability.
The idea behind working for a boss is that they can tell you what to do and how and where to do it. And if you don’t like it, you can go work for yourself or for another boss.
The loudest voices are the whiniest and most entitled, thus more likely to engage in online discourse about it. That in turn amplifies the team sports mentality that has become so pervasive in all aspects of society. I think most people have a moderate live/let live attitude toward it all, with the understanding that if they don't like it they will quit for something more suited to their interests.
Feels like we are in a 60s/70s cultural change period. People are battling over what they want the world to be. This is no different.
> The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't.
I really don't understand this point of view, just pay for wework
I think both extremes want their own way. I don't want to force people in or out of the office. I want the option to do either.
> just pay for wework
You do see the inherent problem with that, its basically subsidising the facilities budget. If you have enough money to pay for a wework, you can pay for better home accommodation.
I actually think remote work places should start offering wework budget to employees. I agree that not everyone can be comfortable at home.
I don't necessarily feel the need to be militantly against in-office, but outside the elite bubble of fat TCs, loads of places expect juniors-mediors to just deal with it while giving them a pittance for what is otherwise a pretty difficult white collar job, to either settle in the city and make next to no savings / hope to further their life goals or live outside the city and erode one's sanity by dropping their QoL through commutes. Of course there's going to be some rebellion when the in-office crowd brings out BS arguments like "because it fits our culture better" which equates to "because we say so" with such a large benefit on the line.
I think the structurally advantaged management will let people work the way they work best and figure out how to smooth the rough spots.
The WFH people are okay with other people going to work. The going to work people want everyone to come in for them.
That's nice, but what does that have to do with your job? You can meet people anywhere and when you choose the venue and the context they may even have something in common with you. All anyone at your job needs to have in common with you is a desire to eat.
Something funny is going on in a few states. In most states, as case rates decline, so do deaths, a few weeks later. In Florida. Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina, reported cases are way down, but reported deaths are climbing.
[1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...
That's not to say those kinds of NPIs weren't very important at earlier phases of the pandemic.
Primary immunization with two doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 vaccine provided limited protection against symptomatic disease caused by the omicron variant. A BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 booster after either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 primary course substantially increased protection, but that protection waned over time. (Funded by the U.K. Health Security Agency.
Don’t get me wrong they oversold the vax. But what I quoted are the key words here. If Trump’s vaccines turn COVID into a literal cold for all but the most compromised of individuals… it works.
Note that immunocompromised people are still protected by vaccines and some are not even higher than average risk; maybe they need a second booster and that's all.
On social media I've noticed they all think they're going to die but that's because they get all their news from irony poisoned podcasters.
Polling shows people are done with it.
Trust in the related institutions is at an all time low.
No politician is going to get in front of this bus.
> Everyone would still be done with it
Hospitalizations and deaths have been so low for so long that as soon as people stop paying attention, it is over. We've been out of the pandemic phase and crossed over into endemicity for most of a year. Time to get used to it.
Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020 [1], with much worse drops for minority populations (3 years for the latino population) and 10 years of progress of equalizing white and non-white life expectancies has been reversed.
Is this an acceptable steady state for society? I don't think it should be. This is all preventable and we otherwise spend lots of resources on improving these metrics.
What you are saying sounds like people being done with lung cancer and start smoking again.
We've not only decided that's an "acceptable steady state", but actively embraced it.
> Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020.
In other words: it dropped around 1/10th as much as the difference between today and 1970.
Do you think the average person in 1970 would have accepted 10x the invasiveness of the measures we've had for the last couple of years to reach parity, or were they just used to the "normal"?
You can argue that we should or shouldn't do something, but claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd.
Another way of putting it: We're back to where we were as recently as 2007.
Or, to put it another way: Life expectancy peaked in the US in 2014[2], while it kept rising in most peer countries. That certainly made the news, and something was being done about the root causes of that, but by and large it was being ignored politically.
Again, none of this is an argument for or against any particular COVID measures. I'm just pointing out that it's a particularly egregious case of historical blinders & end-of-history thinking to think that human beings as a species can't get used to the relatively small (in a historical context) rise in risk the world has seen in the last couple of years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... 2. https://thesoundingline.com/in-brief-us-life-expectancy-peak...
World war 2 lowered life expectancy by 3 years. Is 1.5 ok for COVID?
I’m not sure what you mean by that but nobody I know thinks it’s perfectly fine to have half a million people per year die unnecessarily.
> claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd
People are dealing with those risks all the time. About ~90% of people were voluntarily wearing mask when I went grocery shopping earlier today. People had their seat belts on on the roads there. Their kids were in child seats even though it’s quite inconvenient to put them in there. We do lots of things to mitigate risks. Some of them are pure theater (letting the pilot go through airport security), others are really effective (having a co pilot in the cockpit).
People SHOULD update in light of new evidence. Right now I think I am quite safe from crime. If I get robbed twice next month, I will absolutely re-evaluate that statement.
That said, the most recent spike was vastly milder than previous spikes, so it would be extremely surprising to suddenly have The Worst Spike Ever
What you are saying is: "Society thinks it is now ok to have ~1000 deaths from this disease per day" as a steady state. The problem with that is that the health infrastructure to deal with this amount of disease on top of other seasonal diseases like influenza just isn't there in most places.
People being done with it will change again when tumor removal surgery and other procedures need to be postponed and general quality of life is suffering.
There is also the aspect that lots of people will still take precautions like not eating out in crowded indoor spaces when seasonal infection rates are high. This will change business environments in the long run, whether we like it or not.
Yes, but there are concrete reasons it didn't end: new variants showed up, and in the case of omicron in particular it was able to overwhelm resistance established by previous strains.
That can absolutely happen again, but increasing vaccination rates across the globe mean the odds of a new variant are lower.
deaths up because you can't not report a death
But then it changes when you are using company tools. Teams can be configured to automatically record all conversations. The consent is baked into your employment agreement.
Whatever it is, it isn't for 'off the books' conversations.
As a rule, toxic management avoids leaving paper trails. I had a boss who was so predictable about this, any one on one call with him would inevitably default to threats and harassment.
Of course, there are always toxic managers dumb enough to leave a clear and permanent paper trail.
Witness SAC getting shut down. Or the Libor scandal. And many other scandals involving the financial sector.
Now, does GS specifically engage in such practices? Maybe, maybe not. But it's more than plausible.
A family office isn't the same thing...
Nobody that is asked to do illegal (or grey area) things or that gets threatened in person will yield to your demand for "evidence". To ask for it in this context is not very humane of you, it's not hard to imagine why it isn't there.
_Office culture is a cubicle and 12 hour workdays_
Why is policy to go back to the office? That's going to guarantee viral spread. Shouldn't we at the minimum avoid clustering until the last of the virus is killed? This policy makes no sense to me.
Between the two options, I would certainly trust an epidemiologist over an elected politician on the topic of epidemiology, and I have a hard time understanding the cognitive dissonance that allows people to get to a state of "we have to trust our governor because governments lie." It's not like the governor isn't part of the government.
But formal logic assumes absolute and understandable truth or falsehood of facts among all parties. In terms of data analysis and interpretation, especially when both involve parties that lack the skills or training to do these things, trusting authority is likelier to generate positive outcomes than trusting one's gut or one's untrained analysis in most circumstances.
In general sure scientists can be wrong, even in fields they are experts on. But overwhelmingly they are not.
Also as I mentioned, and you did not respond to, all of us use appeal to authority probably multiple times every day. One example is that most people go to experts to see help, for example lawyers, doctors, dentists etc. The other is that it is common at work to have an expert resolve an argument. It would of course be better to research 100% from first principles every time, but that is just not feasible to do all the time.
Hope that clears it up. Next time it would also be more constructive to bring your own arguments, not just say "appeal to authority". Logical fallacies are pretty often quite nuanced and it is very easy to use them incorrectly.
We don't toss gravity out the window because Einstein refined Newton and found cases where Newton's laws give the wrong answer.
If so, then no, you don’t take the CDC seriously. You only take them seriously about Covid, probably because their advice on Covid matches your priors.
Their job isn't to give you guidelines to strictly follow, it's to give a pessimistic take that someone else can use to plan tradeoffs.
You don't get it because you have a totally ridiculous expectation of "until the last of the virus is killed"
sars-cov-2 is endemic, we're well past the flattening the curve phase, it's time to get on with life. Everyone eligible in the US has had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated and boosted to prepare for the inevitable exposure.
As much as lots of people did not want to be forced to stay at home now maybe even an equal amount of people don't want to return to the office every day.
Probably there will be a lot of different variants in terms of how people work in the future.
Cubicles were bad enough, but open offices are an idiotic environment to subject knowledge workers optimally kept in a flow state to.
I have days with 7 hours of meetings. Why should I stress my colleagues with talking the whole day into a computer.
Covid is here forever, same as any other cold/flu, we must learn to live with it.
The deaths and suffering others faced doesn't justify that, but wfh has been the catalyst in this improvement.
I must be living on a different planet then.
> but forcing everyone to live in fear is not the solution
Nobody forced me. I could have gone into the office. But why should I have?
Being vaxxed and boostered the risk is relatively low. Still I don't go back. The last two years were the most free of all in my career. I missed theater. And concerts. But regarding work. Or weekly food shopping with distance or click and collect were a boon.
Do I expect that to be true for everybody? Hell no.
Everybody has a different view. Projecting ones view onto the planet probably dies not help us discuss in good faith.
Less than 15 years ago, I was well below the poverty line. In the meantime, I live well. And I can't complain.
Still, I know that as the child of a middle-class single father, I am clearly counting as privileged.
Everyone worked their entire lives to get to where they are in this moment, whether that's rich or poor, privileged or not. Enjoy your blessings.
Even if "only" 30% of the population had a very bad time during the lockdowns I would still call the last 2 years a dystopia.
We even kept our sport/dance group running via zoom. Did cooking sessions and social dates.
I am enjoying the moments to meet some people in person. Even in group settings, when our local business network is able to meet and enjoy the produce from the farms and producers in the network.
> Even if "only" 30% of the population
As said I would call it a dystopia for these people. Not for the planet or all members of society.
Else you would need to call pre Corona times a dystopia as well as around your number of people probably have a bad time in "normal" times.
You and me are very different people. Maybe that would be acceptable a couple of months in but not after TWO YEARS
I totally get that people want to return to the office. To socializing, to chats at the coffee machine.
That people want to travel to clients. Have workshops, go to conferences. And so on.
As much as I understand how people discovered more freedom during the pandemic and do not want to trade this freedom in for the sake of the ones that want to go back to the way it was before.
We need ways to accommodate both.
Remote work is even more fun when there's movies and shows and other events available. Makes all that extra free time during the day even more fun :) I've been remote for half a decade and I can't wait for stuff to open up. Feels half-retired.
There are plenty of trustworthy orgs recommending opening procedures and personal safety mitigations without the baggage of weird US “libertarian” think tank funding and completely ascientific calls for action.
Pay-to-publish: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-...
Think tank Funding: https://bylinetimes.com/2020/10/13/koch-funded-pr-agency-aid...
For example, it says "Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside" but in my country there is no such lockdown for any age group.
It says "Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home" but in my country employers aren't required to stop allowing young people to work from home (before 2020 working from home without breaking laws was basically impossible in my country).
If they're only speculating it at this point, then they're way behind the times and shouldn't be called experts. Animal reservoirs were confirmed in 2020, and more found in 2021. Omicron may have been a jump back from rats to humans. We're way past the point of it being here to stay.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precaut...
That seems (literally) unbelievably high. If you take an average life expectancy in the US of 78 years (it was 79 in 2019), assume roughly equal number of males and females, each female would have to be pregnant for 7.8 of the 78 average years, or 10.4 full-term pregnancies per woman in the US. That can’t possibly be the right figure.
Total estimated pregnancies in US in 2009 (most recent figure I could readily find) was 6,369,000 (4,131,000 live births, 1,152,000 induced abortions, and 1,087,000 fetal losses). If you give all 4.1 M as full term and treat all the others as half-term (a gross over-estimate), you get around 5.2M full term pregnancies or 3.9M years of pregnancy against a US total population of 307M (person-years in 2009) or a bit over 1/4 of your figure.
It is not the flu.
GB declaration supporters are part of the reason why so many are still dying.
Nobody is forcing people to live in fear - we are just not pretending everything is ok when clearly it isn't.
The most dystopian part of the last 2 years has been the loud voices of those who actually support the virus (for financial and ideological reasons)
Even if we waved a wand and destroyed all traces of COVID once and forever, this statement would still be true.
We can't let our plans hinge on the presence of a virus. If offices need better air management to reduce the risks, then that's what we should focus on.
No. Is it not common knowledge that viruses are a constant threat to human life that we must live with? Do you remember before COVID when people got sick and died and the world still turned? Unfortunately, we are all mortal. We can't live this way forever. We stopped society because of things like what happened in New York. That's not happening anymore. COVID is now a hazard of life.
At some point you just have to get back to living your life, unless you want to become a recluse who's stuck inside for the rest of your existence.
Most employers though consider that stealing.
Offices aren’t unnecessary but practically all offices I’ve ever worked from are torture chambers.
Thanks but no thanks.
Sounds like a bit of churn happens?
It takes a lot of churn to get a time tested leader.
> graduates every year, who learn from experienced bankers and build networks face-to-face. The experience also encourages teamwork, which is central to the firm’s culture
I’m pretty sure the result is not teamwork!
That's why, IMO, jr. investment bankers work such horrendous hours. They know it's a temporary thing, and that the real payoff comes later.
Take what I'm saying with a gigantic grain of salt because I am not some economist.
We have had 10 years+ of quantitative easing both in the US and in Europe, with it all peaking during the last 2 years due to Covid. This has delivered an aritificial stimulus to the economy in the form of basically free money. This has had a lot of consequences, including the craziness in the housing market & stock market, as well as a huge influx of money that went into other investments like startups, expansions and so on. Basically, in simpler terms, everybody could easily get money because money has been very cheap.
We are now starting to see the side-effects (of an otherwise arguably good thing) in the form of inflation. So the greater powers are now at a fork in the road - they either allow inflation to wreck the working and middle class or they turn off the money tap. The problem is that after living for so long with 0% interest rates, any significant change to this might trigger a recession that will make 2008 look like the good times.
I started my career after 2008, so I have only ever experienced an environment in which employeers were heavily competing for engineers (and generally workforce in all professions), so I'm afraid that anyone in a position similar to mine has simply no way of realizing the way things will look a few years from now.
Unless I'm seriously missing something of substance, then I'm afraid that there will be quite a few years in which people will lose homes, jobs, sanity and us privileged developers are maybe in a better position than most, but make no mistake - we will all suffer.
We’ll see what inflation is like this year, but it’s reasonable (due to Russia oil) to assume it’ll be just as bad as last year. This has a ton of economic and political implications. Some that can be predicted and some that will likely be surprising.
So making statements about what the the labour market will look like in 2 years…
Not sure this is as insightful as you think. Yes, obviously that is the case. So? If inflation and housing continue to be this bad, then we have to stop printing the money or maybe find a way to better allocate the wealth, which would mean even more turmoil than your regular economic crisis.
> Some that can be predicted and some that will likely be surprising. So making statements about what the the labour market will look like in 2 years…
Yes, which is why I'm not making predicitons about company X in Y months from now. If you think that continuing in this manner for another 2 years is sustainable, then it means that one of us is _seriously_ misunderstanding the macro-economic situation. We can't have house prices increase 20% every year and inflation edging towards 10% inflation and stagnating salaries.
Something has got to give, and the point I'm making is simple. Things will get worse before they get better. If you think that is simply a coin flip or a matter of pure opinion, then I'm afraid, again, that one of us is really, really uninformed about the situation. Maybe it's me.
One (just one) question is whether anyone has the political will or clout to make things worse in the short term to potentially correct it in the long term. Interest rates should have been raised long before covid if you’re thinking long term and yet that never happened. Raising rates right now could be political suicide (albeit the most logical path). There are a lot of other hard to reason about factors. Economists a couple months ago were predicting lower inflation this year, like in the 4% range. Seems unlikely now.
Any conclusion about the labour market is predicated on some pretty massive assumptions and therefore complete speculation.
...isn't that the entire point of this particular thread? Looking at possibilities without necessary prediction?
Is there any point in history where you can't say "there are likely very large and potentially unpredictable changes in store."? Why predict anything ever then?
Pardon the rudeness, but that’s silly. Of course there are times of varying turbulence where predictions can be more / less accurate. To be honest though economic predictions in the last 20 years haven’t done better than a coin flip.
I think we’re mostly in agreement except the part about everyone will suffer so demand for software engineers will decrease. In fact I think the economy is probably worse off (not just QE causing issues) than you laid out.
But the demand for software engineers decreasing? I mean, maybe, but I don’t think your points support that. I think there’s a mountain of assumptions you need to make to conclude that.
In a vacuum I would actually argue the opposite and say software engineering is even more important today than yesterday and that we aren’t producing enough. For example (anecdotal), the almost complete lack of technical fluency shown during the remote learning shit show that was my kids education last year. But we’re not in a vacuum and the economy is so untethered to reality that I can’t predict anything about the labour market.
If all businesses are suffering in that scenario, then who will employ the software engineers?
This is itself a massive assumption. What extremes are we assuming and how likely are they? There are businesses who flourished under covid and also businesses that basically print money during conflicts / wars. Almost all of them require and use software. So are we talking apocalypse here? If so, then I have no idea what the job market will look like, and neither does anyone else.
If we look at Europe and Japan, despite the historically low interest rates, they haven't exactly been a beacon of innovation in the last decades. In fact, the US and China have eaten most of their market share.
This article on The Economist talks about that:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora...
I think the US has cultural advantages when it comes to innovation and funding, and I don't see this changing anytime soon.
You're also saying that just because the US and China have done better than Europe, that means that QE has not had a measurable effect on the job market?
I'm sorry, but it looks to me as if you're strawmanning becasue your reply is barely adjacent to the points I was trying to make.
When the value of the entire tech industry shrinks that dramatically this quickly, companies are bound to become a bit more conservative in their operations, which cloud slow the pace of hiring in tech (and for some, layoffs)
As for "when", the slow down has already started and will accelerate over the next few months (my prediction, no evidence).
That capitalist check-writer? They can't do. That's why they hire.
This is what a market with an oversupply of check writers looks like.
Reminds me of a LinkedIn post from a CEO that said they watched the "Return to Work" notices being hated online from competitors, and he'd send recruiters to employees recruiting and using remote as a reason to jump.
Worked really well too.
Along with the absence of driving through a potentially deadly obstacle course for two hours a day.
I doubt the question of productivity, team-building, communication, were even briefly considered as part of the initial decision. Those would all be post-hock rationalizations.
Just my guess.
There will be jobs available, some will be WFH, some will be in-person. The WFH jobs will be able to get away with paying 10% less and the companies, especially small companies, will save money on office space.
Those advantages and disadvantages will play out regardless of the quality of the labor market.
If WFH works for that than we should go for it, if not we should not. The world is not that big, but also not that little, there is room for diversity, not only: diversity is the engine of evolution, we do things differently and compare the outcome in a constantly improving manner, a thing all dictator hate because let people see different worlds instead of "there is no alternative", "we are in the sole and unique possible system" etc but the real engine of human evolution.
That means it's about time to change the society, and yes that's not easy, that's might provoke big disasters and suffering before arrive to a new stability but that's is. There is nothing "fully right" and nothing "fully wrong", there is almost never "the best solution" to anything, we need to try, fail, correct, keep evolving.
Management can choose to to forgo part of their own bonuses if money is hard to come by (which is not true in the case of GS)
It’s not binary. Think of a continuum of always-in-office <-> satellite team <-> wfh.
Most people would not plant themselves in a single point in that line (I would like to be in the office a few days a week, though I have friends who prefer and are more productive at 100% wfh). I used to lock myself in in my office sometime to be productive. And at times I have needed to work in a lab but could do data analysis etc just as well at home.
So instead of thinking “we need to start with a bias towards X”, think: how can we support all these modes and how can they even help people who stay in a single point (e.g. accounting who may need to be solely the office for security reasons).
E.g. keeping convos in writing not only decouples you spatially but in time. One can search for and return back to prior discussions. This can help everyone.
Recording and auto-transcribing meetings, not just zoom calls but ones in conference rooms frees note-takers and opens up new modalities. Perhaps I can skip that meeting and just skim the notes.
My gf likes working at big companies (basically FAANG). She says that even before Covid they were videoconferencing people in other buildings and even other floors simply because travel around campus was too slow. These modes should all be considered as falling on that same axis.
Frankly the (for many, new) communication habits around zoom calls have been a wasted opportunity to rethink the whole system.
Going to be an ageist here, but I think it's foolhardy to claim that remote is as easy for boomers and centenarians as it is for xyz. I think we are seeing a shift in workplace demographics and that is fueling a new normal for work. It's not bad, it's just evolution. My boomer mom loves her remote work now that she has been doing it because she has better interactions with her team. And like me, her office was already global with remote locations everywhere. Mileages may vary, we are all figuring this world out and riding the tiger. I won't go back to a physical office neither will she- if asked she said "I'll just fucking retire" so I think the seas have shifted anyone trying to push for full on-prem IS going to lose resources. When I hear this honestly I think of some crusty old out of touch manager who still uses a paper desk calendar.
While yes, older ones are more afraid of hybrid setup ending up punishing workers from home, because that pattern was visible even before pandemic. However, everyone at home thing was awesome for middle aged people with families or hobbies.
And yes, it boils down to people in their 20ties using work for socialization and often socializing only in work.
Older folks have houses and resources and established social networks. They didn't necessarily like remote, but they didn't take a huge hit.
Younger, less established workers got crushed. They had to work in suboptimal (read lots of roomates and no rooms) conditions. Mentoring was down. Experience was down. Social networks were smashed.
Even as an older tech worker, my social networks have atrophied. And I even took extra time to try to keep them up.
To be perfectly honest, it feels like the gap between my level of technical skill and the technical skill of incoming employees grew a LOT on both sides.
While new folks lacked experience, it felt like they also always brought loads of new stuff to the table--not all of it was valuable but some of it literally gobsmacked those of us in the greybeard category--that seems to be missing now. I suspect a lot of it is the lack of peer social interaction.
And, as someone experienced, it seems that the pandemic released me from a lot of useless social obligations as a manager and my technical skill got a HUGE boost (if I get my work done in an hour today I'm not going to sit and do nothing, you know) from being put back into use. So I seem to be a lot better at direct technical tasks than I was pre-pandemic.
I doubt GS's internal culture applies to any startups... not every company needs an apprenticeship culture and it would be a large capital and time expense for startups. GS's model is very different (IIRC), hire a lot of young talent out of premier institutions, then see who's left after 2+ years of 50+ work hour weeks.
It's very HN to think infrastructure is "zoom" and not the implied: internet, housing, roads, power.
More like 80+
I don’t see this happening. GS interests in real estate and churning finance folk in and out, have nothing to do with their riskier investment priorities.
Also, GS is not a major player in the venture capital landscape.
If so, this decision may turn out to be a liability.
Obviously, Goldman Sachs is a big name that may make people put up with this stuff, but still.
This battle is not rooted in those who like remote and those who don’t. This battle has been fought a long time ago between K-12 and College. In K—12, you are under strict rules to show up on time for every class, 5 days a week, where attendance is taken. Every week for over a decade, and your best chance of escaping it is a snow day or a wonderful sick day.
Then you get to college and everyone says ‘enough of the nonsense’, you are free. Your obligation is to pass the class, whether that be by showing up to every lecture or just a few, whether you eat at the cafeteria every day or travel a few blocks to a restaurant.
It’s a matter of freedom. Covid was a black swan event that forced everyone for a second time to ‘cut the nonsense’, and ask ‘what is work really?’. Work is work that gets done. If work getting done is the measuring stick, then what is the superfluous push to add additional work? The commute, the banter, the office theatrics (yes, believe it or not I don’t work past lunch, even in the office - I’m staring blankly at the fucking screen). You want to keep the bullshit going?
I haven’t had Covid (I haven’t had even the smallest cold in 2 years) and am vaccinated, but even unvaccinated people can develop long Covid. Forcing people who can work remote into the office where their chances of getting seriously sick go way up seems immoral.
My mental health has greatly improved since I started working from home exclusively. Forcing people to work in the office, at the detriment of their mental health, seems immoral. For those whose mental health is improved by working in an office, they should have that choice. Though, if they end up being the only one in the office, that is no justification for forcing everyone else to commute to the disease incubator.