Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office

This is not something I've ever heard of. Some websearching produced this article. - is it describing the concept?

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...

as a former business owner (good exit, so no bitterness here) all i can say is good riddance, and i hope they take a massive haircut as an industry.

they're the biggest pricks i've ever dealt with in running my business. 'arrogant' doesn't even begin to describe the attitude they had in the 2015-2020 time period. and they are literally no fun at parties. even the front desk receptionists were arrogant, WHILE I WAS LITERALLY HANDING THEM CHECKS. mind blowing.

example in another industry - think of all the restaurants you've ever loved that have had to close their doors because of asshole corporate landlords, for no other reason than to avoid setting a precedent for lower rents even when it wasn't financially necessary.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dei

look at that beautiful, beautiful drop. it brings a tear to my eye. a tear of joy.

While we seem to be on a backswing a bit from it, eventually supporting WFH will be a matter of competitive survival. Office mandates will be the next hallmark of legacy firms who have become inefficient and wasteful in their spending.

I've seen several people point to this narrative on HN and it just doesn't make any sense. There's three possibilities as I see it:

1) There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason. So these overlords go to their puppets running major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Dell and tell them they must make their workers return to the office in the name of propping up commercial real estate. Apparently some people on HN think this is likely?

2) The managers at Dell/Amazon/etc. feel the need to prop up commercial real estate as an act of charity. Rather than focusing on their own businesses, they are worried about their friends in commercial real estate. This seems even less likely than 1.

3) Managers at major companies believe that there are benefits to working together in person.

Why are people so reluctant to accept option 3? You don't even need to accept the premise that working from the office is better. You just need to accept that premise that management believes it's better to be a proponent of this option.

I suspect that alongside the obvious reasons (inflexible management styles, micromanagement, etc.) always discussed, this is a major driver: ongoing spend on office buildings needs to be justified, and is probably very difficult to get out of - e.g. long-term building projects, or ownership of buildings which would be difficult (or a big loss) to resell, or long-term leases signed when obviously the offices would be needed for decades, or senior leaders feeling personally invested in particular building projects, etc.

No surprise JPM leading the charge on draconian RTO measures, given their CRE exposure..

Most communication norms aren't tied to the physical location, it's just easier to communicate communication norms when conversations are visible to the people not involved.

I was on two projects during covid WFH. The digital collaboration styles were night and day. One's mattermost team still has less than 50 messages total across all channels. The other team's mattermost was and remains a major collaboration point now that we're back on site. One team always had cameras on during calls, the other didn't. And wasn't just chat, just calls or just emails. The communication was different on every medium.

There was a lot of the same people on both projects, too. We all adapted to different collaboration styles depending on the project. The only difference was that project management made a few gentile pushes to enable fluid communication at the beginning of one project, and the other team didin't.

And I've noticed something similar with younger people. They're much more interactive in discord chat/calls than the slack/mattermost/zoom/chime equivalents. Not that this is necessarily unique to young people, just that older people tend not to lurk discord as much. What might be unique to that age group is they've been taught corporate tools mean bifurcated groups (e.g. teacher/pupil) where they're not equal participants.

If you have never worked in that way, let me tell you it's the absolute worst situation.

I'd rather go back to the office instead of having it work like that.

People at the office will have hours of discussions that are not recorded anywhere, might even make decisions without your input and you are always playing catch up.

If a company has remote workers, the company ought to be remote first otherwise it's horrible for everybody and resentment is the only thing you reap from it.

To be on the safer side, I try to consider only offers from company that have no physical office at all, so it's quite impossible that in the medium term they call a "return to office" policy... I mean, they could always decide to buy office space out of the blue, but usually in those companies all the upper management is there exactly because they want to WFH for life

It doesn’t unless the company makes the decision to let it “win.”

Some people prefer working at companies that are 100% in person. Some prefer 100% remote. Some are OK with some type of hybrid arrangement.

If a person is working at a company with policies they don’t like, either they work to get the policies changed, they find a job with policies they do like, or they live with the policies they dislike and keep the current job.

Just like people who prefer in-person work aren’t going to get their way at all companies, people who prefer remote work aren’t going to get their way at all companies.

Post-pandemic I worked with a few project managers who hated this, and would constantly complain about people not coming into the office for meetings because now they had to actually plan things, rather than just finding a random corner and talking things over. I even kind of get it, semi-remote meetings are the worst of both worlds, with the people in a meeting room wanting to draw on a whiteboard, and the people who are remote often struggling with audio from whatever crap microphones are in the room.

I suspect, after another few years of having this same discussion every few weeks, things will eventually settle down with some companies choosing to be co-located companies, and others choosing to be fully remote. Similarly to how you might select which company you work for based on what they do, or the personality of the people you interviewed with, people will also take into consideration how they want to work. I very much doubt there'll be many companies which routinely have both remote and co-located employees.

My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.

It's a shame too because it has a seemingly interesting premise. Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist.

Now roughly the same percentage believe in lizard people, bigfoot, etc. so we should maybe take self-reporting with a grain of salt but it does seem to ring true to us right? It feels like we've all seen people in jobs that don't need to exist.

And by the way that's exactly what modern economic models would predict. When we say the market is efficient we don't mean that's it's 100% completely and instantly efficient. In fact innovation relies on people recognizing areas where there are marketplace inefficiencies and exploiting them.

The propagation of new technologies through a market takes time and in that time there will by definition be useless jobs in places that technology has not propagated to yet.

What's more the main objective of a job is not always clear. That government employee who feels like he's doing nothing might actually be doing nothing but the purpose of their job might not be to accomplish anything, it might be to make them financially dependent on the government (or maybe the government would say it's a means of economic stimulus).

This is a really interesting topic and there's plenty to explore and lots of existing science to mine from economics to sociology, etc.

David of course ignores all of this and uses the premise to set up a rant about anti-capitalism (without making a cogent argument for an alternative). He includes such amazing insights as, "The only reason countries have armies is because other countries have armies. If we all agreed to stop waging war we could spend that money on better things." Brilliant! Why hasn't a great philosopher thought of this before?

He addresses this briefly in the book saying that the only push back he's gotten is that he's ignoring economics and that he doesn't consider that a valid argument. The problem is twofold. First, much like someone claiming they've found a perpetual motion machine, I don't need to debunk your specific version of it, I can just say, "That violates every observed law of physics, you'd better have extraordinary proof for me to consider your claim." Secondly, David makes no particular claim nor does he have any coherent theory. You can't 'disprove' his claim because he doesn't make any (or more specifically he doesn't have a central theory that can be disproven - he has an observation that broadly consistent with what we know about the world and would expect already, if surprising to some people).

And his criticisms of capitalism contain so many logical fallacies and half truths that it would take a book of greater length or a youtube video on par with the classic "debunking ancient aliens" to get through them all.

It's nonsense political drivel and it's disappointing that so many people here seem to consider the book profound in some way.

A good manager is not ego-driven and is perfectly able to function when being paid less than the people they manage.

And then we can just give people more money and keep them in the role they work best at instead of having to Peter Principle them up to their level of incompetence or lose them.

But Commercial, HR, Marketing - all face the problem of spiraling communication loops. Physical presence does make a difference in planning and implementation, believe it or not.

I think a big part of many people’s contempt for their jobs comes from the sense that it’s an endless, thankless stream of tickets and demands. Seeing people in person, remembering they’re human, can help make the rest of the job more pleasant. A day of socializing might make the other four days of remote work more productive, increase job satisfaction, increase retention.

We had an example at our office several years ago where employee X was a great worker, nothing to say about that, that was having his own "working" rhythm (e.g., until late at night, mornings off, etc.), and was coming to the office only from time to time, just because the manager was really pushing hard, or for certain office events.

This spread and people started to ask - can I work from home? -> only 1 day Why? X does more than 1 day, and sometimes X is not available when I need.

... as a manager you can only "yes, but ..." that much. At a certain point people (who I would like to remind everyone again and again: most of the time are people with a high college degree, used to read books, papers, and do things, not 3 years old kids) connect the dots and say "alright, it's time to go". And before they go, they let the entire apple tree rot to hell. If that doesn't happen it might be because this spreads and goes to high management that asks the manager "WTF are you doing?"

That's when either more rights come in equally for everyone, or ... they need to let go of their best employee, or they need to find a compromise. Just having the nicely protected "best" employee is never a good strategy. Eventually people get pissed off and leave, and if they don't, congrats, you have just made the "non-best" employees even less motivated and less productive.

Honestly it seems like it’s part of a tech career trajectory. Once you are very established and your skills are built up there are several tracks available to you. Two of those are WFH specialist or 5-10X experienced dev and WFH consultant.

The cube farm grind is something you go through to get your skills and network up.

I have seen the same in other knowledge areas: corporate law, finance, some types of editing and design, accounting, etc. WFH becomes one of the options at more senior levels.

The other reason it’s a more senior option is that senior people are seen as better able to self direct and thus requiring less micromanagement.

Pre-covid my entire team was office and I was the only remote. Without wanting to brag, it's factual: my Drupal knowledge made it worth for them to keep this up. Post-covid my entire team is scattered to the winds. You couldn't get them to come to the office because almost no one is within the same metro as the office.

It's also I realize kind of iffy. If Dell said explicitly "we will not ever require RTO", and you moved following that, then maybe your lawyer would be willing to bring a case, but in this case Dell is saying "if you live within an hour" you have to come in to the office. Given my employer's RTO has given me 3+ hours of commuting a day that seems in the region of what the US considers reasonable.

You’re free to challenge the norms. I just don’t agree with the arguments made on this occasion and had listed other reasons why beyond just social norms. Ie you’re already being compensated by choosing to live in a bigger yet cheaper property then you’d have afforded if you wanted to live closer to work.

Ultimately there is always going to be a trade off but that’s your choice not your employers.

* More office space required * Need to pay workers to be within reasonable distance of the office

There are penalties to WFH as well:

* Additional living space required for WFH

How would travel time compensation work in this situation? Why would companies not discriminate implicitly or explicitly against employees who live further away?

Sure there is time savings in not commuting, but there are also time savings in face-to-face interactions, team spirit etc.

Instead of cooking some food and eat alone at home you can eat and discuss with colleagues or friends who work in the same area.

Instead of commuting people waste their time on social media, news and other junk before, during and after work. A commute via bus, train, subway, bicycle can often be productive or even relaxing versus taking the car. It's an often needed break between work-time and free-time. It's hard to make that break when working form home.

You already get compensated by having both a higher paid job and living in a bigger property in a cheaper yet desirable neighbourhood. And more to the point, your employer didn’t choose where you live, you chose that yourself.

If you were commuting to different site(s) than the one listed as your “base” location then it would be a different story. But most businesses already compensate you for that. They just don’t pay for you travelling between home and your base location because that was the expectation you agreed to when you took the job.

Cool, and I'll apply for the now open position as I have great train access to the city.