Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore | Hacker News Reader

Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore

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683 pointsdlb0071,162 comments

Remote work has pros and cons--both at an organization level and at an individual level. I think that "both sides" have argued the pros and cons enough that I don't need to repeat them here.

It's clear to me that no work situation is ideal for everyone or every group.

My "selfish" point of view is that I hope that remote work takes over more and more, and that companies stop forcing workers back into the office full-time.

My personal life situation makes remote work almost a requirement if I want to continue being a software developer. I'm divorced with a young son over whom I have 50% custody. I won't move to a "tech hub" city for a job and abdicate my responsibilities as a father. Even my current job is only a 40 minute commute for me by car, and I still only go to the office once or twice per week: the days that I have to drop off or pick my son up from school won't really accommodate a 40 minute commute unless I'm only going to work a 5-6 hour day.

I count myself as very fortunate that my current work situation is with wonderful people, who all have families as well, and mostly-remote was part of my initial negotiation.

On the flip side of feeling fortunate, I have to remind myself that the company is fortunate, too. Not that I'm not humble, but I do think I'm a pretty good software dev and a generally good employee who takes pride in their work.

I guess the point of spilling out my personal life story on the internet is that I hope that companies realize that forcing on-location work is not just a choice between an employee being at home or being in the office; it may be a choice between having a good employee and not having them at all.

Yup, this is where the hypocrisy of the return to office is loud and clear.

There is one side that is unambiguously pro-family, pro-environment, pro-church involvement, pro-bowling league, pro-parents in kids lives, pro-marriage, pro-divorced child raising. As in something for each and every side’s loud and clear broadcasted preferences.

The other is pro-people in seats, pro-commercial real estate, pro-commuting, pro-certain type of manager, pro-one type of extrovert who can’t find friends outside of work.

There are clear lines here on where the wfh benefits are how it aligns with many, many stated needs for the country from each party and various stakeholders.

Edit - going to use my soapbox since this got some traction:

I’ve led individuals in-person, and fully understand how different and sometimes less-than it is to do it fully online. I’m an engineer currently, but I speak MBA and fluent in leadership. Especially for inculcating interns/new hires into an org, in person is great.

But: the above seems to be adequately accounted for via learning org culture via Slack and quarterly off sites. And the remaining negative benefits of WFH + periodic flights + learning new leadership patterns via Zoom/Slack + gentrification of the rust belt and other cheap areas seem to, far and away, no doubt about it, pale in comparison to the extensive issues of how our country is coming apart at the seams due to do family finances, environmental issues, rust belt multi decade decay, labor issues, and general personhood. WFH’s benefits seem to significantly help solve all of these problems.

There’s some delusion that a reversion to the old ways is all it’ll take to fix what’s happening. But maybe spending more times in our communities, our families, our churches, our local lunch places in town vs Chipotle, is what is needed. Or just help commercial real estate and chad the manager instead.

They're trying to get as many people to quit as possible so they don't need to do more layoffs.

I think layoffs would be way better than trying to force out one group of people, but the people at the top don't care about what's good for the company - they care about themselves.

C'est la vie.

And pro- "not jamming everyone into unaffordable cities" which makes real estate costs for the employee untenable....while increases in remote-work enable growth or at least maintenance of current population in smaller towns and regions. If one wishes to see their own small town non-major-metro area thrive and not continue to lose population, work from home is a clear win for that goal.

Not to mention the added hypocrisy that at nearly every company I've worked at, big and small, C-levels are almost never physically in the main office building. Sometimes they're traveling the globe to work on making deals, but sometimes they just want to be at home with their family, or take a semi-vacation.

If you can run a company on the go or at home, certainly I am capable of shipping quality code at home.

> The other is pro-people in seats, pro-commercial real estate, pro-commuting, pro-certain type of manager, pro-one type of extrovert who can’t find friends outside of work.

I think it's great if everyone can work where they prefer. I miss the days when I could see my colleagues in person in the office. But on days when I work from home, I can totally see why they prefer it.

I do think that newer employees can benefit from being in an office with experienced team members. However, if this is the new way of things, then I suppose they will need to adjust.

Hear, hear!

Personally, I favor WFH for scores of reasons. That said, I am aware of the pluses (and the minuses that often cannot be clearly delineated) of having people together in locations. A fair amount of the benefits are subtle, and fairly unquantifiable. These factors balance off against often similarly subtle drawbacks. Most of this comes out of human psychology and social traits / elements of social cohesion.

To provide at least a little specificity, some examples that spring to mind:

On the plus side, you have little bits of useful information, quick answers / responses, knowing who knows something like 'where to find X', ... even being able to SEE how people look day-to-day - that colleagues seem healthy and well, and to ask them in person how they are... lots of little cues, small semi-random interactions of these types.

Of course, these can also be minuses to some / to some degree. I.e., the interruptions that come with semi-random interactions, digressions in conversations (of overly substantial length) about current events &/ recreational activities etc., the "talking behind the backs of others" gossip, ...

It's a very mixed bag.

Now, as always, people are constantly changing too. Generations replace generations. And, those who have grown up with text messages and all sorts of other channels for keeping in touch, ... well, it's another factor in how useful / important "physical presence" may or may not be.

Ultimately, though, for me, WFH has been substantially more efficient and productive most of the time. I didn't even have a long commute or some of the other hassles of many, but, cutting out the commute, transitioning between environments time, random interactions and potential for distractions (ADHD being a factor), etc., has been beneficial to all parties. I agree with your points to a very large degree ... the objective advantages to (substantially) reduced "company office presence" are generally quite clear, and are mostly to be contrasted with more subtle human / social factors including the needs of some "managers" to feel like they are "in control" and are "the employers".

The "MBAs" may have won the "round" starting in the 70s and 80s of decimating unions, but, the environment has changed yet again - including in terms of demographics in as basic a way as sheer quantity of workers available (vs. roles to be filled).

I look forward to more power returning to labor, so-to-speak, even as someone who is involved in running several businesses and operations.

woah, I was with you until you brought chipotle into this. Hopefully we can agree that it's valuable to support your local chipotle over the financial district's chipotle, since it's also keeping people employed in their communities.

100%.

We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.

I think that information is also known to people making decisions and is why we’re seeing hybrid policies which essentially codify the pre-covid behavior of taking a WFH day. Pre-covid, having two or three company sanctioned WFH days was the dream. Let’s not forget.

So what really annoys me at this point are the holdouts still arguing for 100% fully remote positions for every employee or the employer is essentially abusing them and just wants to creep on people working in desks and watch them type. I mean come on… fully remote just doesn't work for every employee, sorry. For every “I’m more productive at home” there’s an “I need face to face interaction with other humans to effectively collaborate”. That’s life.

IMO, hybrid work policies are an incredibly positive and generous outcome of the pandemic. If you don't like even that then either become a fully remote employee after a discussion with your manager. Or go work for a place where it’s explicitly part of the policy/job/contract up front.

Mostly sick of hearing whinny parroting of the same arguments ad nauseam.

The issue is that the employees that do love hybrid/on-site also have to force everyone else to become hybrid - otherwise, their hybrid days become "video meetings but in a different building".

I'm not fully convinced that there are two strong camps, on the merits. If there were, you wouldn't have to have policies requiring one over the other, as you would let it win on the merits.

That said, I'm also not convinced remote is amazing. I do wish they would move to more performance oriented metrics on who they are allowing to work from where. This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring. If you just want people in the office, surely you have a reason for that.

This is especially true for a company that famously lauds OKRs. If they work as well as we've been assured that they do over the years, make that your push. Don't focus on "percent in the office X days a week."

>We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.

Perhaps having a goal of "optimizing productivity" is the problem.

If employeers were allowed to drive this to its ultimate conclusion they would adopt forced servitude as the maximum productivity setup (which, they historically, and even today in many places, have adopted).

This is where I get hung up every time. As a software engineer, “I cannot collaborate with someone unless I am physically next to their body” is just not a tenable position.

We collaborate through reviews on PRs, virtual documents, links, search queries, and yes, conversations. But this has all happened in virtual settings for a long long time, and almost can’t work any other way.

I worked for a company pre-pandemic where I had more or less the best of all worlds. The company was already split between East Coast and West Coast, so meetings from conference rooms in the office were often the same quality as meetings from anywhere remotely, since Google Meet had always been there to connect both coasts.

As a result, we never needed to have specific days "in office" or "you can do what you want"; as long as you could attend the meeting, you could be wherever you needed to be. I found just as much value on days in the office as days elsewhere, but the biggest value was that every day it was my choice.

Then the pandemic hit and we lost the office, and naturally I discovered the downsides of being permanently remote.

Today's "compromise" of forced "in-office" and "do what you want" schedule doesn't strike me as inducing the best collaboration based on what individual teams and groups need.

> Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.

Hopefully, there will be companies that are in one camp or the other as well. That seems to be the only way to create a workplace that is beneficial to everyone.

Google demanding RTO, for instance, doesn't impact me because I have negative interest in ever working for Google. However, I still retain hope that the sorts of companies I am interested in working for will have a working environment that suits me.

Hybrid, even if it were one day a week, removes the #1 advantage of fully remote work, which is being able to live anywhere you want.

Lol. You're getting exactly what you want and yet, still finding a way to bitch about it.

I think for me it's more that the pros/cons need to be stated clearly and evaluated honestly, which I sometimes feel they aren't.

Recently a company I work with (but not for) announced a similar policy: everybody is required to be back in the office. Through informal conversations with two senior managers I know that this is effectively just a fishing expedition to reduce the amount of people that will be involuntarily laid off in the next round (here in Europe it's much less costly if they walk away on their own). Aside from the fact that this is a terrible way to make a selection (you will lose good employees), I find it also immoral to use a list of bullet points to justify the move when there is a totally different reason behind it.

During COVID I also saw a lot of middle managers nervously squeaking through the pandemic ('maybe all of those meetings COULD have been and email' syndrome), and now that it's possible to bring people back to the office there is lots of rationalization about why it's good and/or necessary to do so. When in reality their job depends on it, not the company's success.

I think if commute time was even partially employer-paid we would see a much more honest evaluation of the pros and cons of remote vs office-based work.

> you will lose good employees

Another poster here said recently: the unspoken truth in the industry is that good employees will still be allowed to work from home.

> I find it also immoral to use a list of bullet points to justify the move when there is a totally different reason behind it.

Well, if the actual intent is to be left with a smaller number of more obedient people who'd bend over for the company and do things without asking questions, putting a bogus reason out is an effective way to accomplish the goal.

> I think if commute time was even partially employer-paid we would see a much more honest evaluation of the pros and cons of remote vs office-based work.

Companies do have to pay for their office space. My employer did not review our lease during the pandemic. Recently, we got out of the other lease in the region and consolidated both offices into one smaller office for people who want to work in an office. We're saving a ton of money.

My selfish POV is that there should be companies that are remote, and companies that are in person, and employees should have options in terms of the type of work experience they'd like to choose. This may even lower compensation so it will be a win for the employers, because employees will choose to work for you for reasons beyond compensation.

Seems like the way to go, but instead these companies are all copying each other.

Isn't this sort-of happening, just with the differentiation not being among Big Tech but between them and everyone else?

Big Tech is forcing people to put butts in seats; smaller companies that can't afford to pay that much are embracing remote work as a competitive advantage in the labor market.

At least that's what I'd expect, and it fits with how a lot of my friends are working. OTOH I have seen a lot of companies advertising for in-office or close-to-office (keeping their RTO powder dry) despite obviously having no chance of competing on compensation.

I want to blame that on the recent mass layoffs, hirer's market and all that, but I'm not sure -- maybe they're filtering out employees with high self-regard on purpose?

If I were hiring I'd probably look for "insists on remote" as a positive signal at least for devs. Values things other than cash, willing to have work output measured, can take late-night meetings sometimes, won't be poached by FAANG -- what's not to like for a manager?

I think this POV is the _opposite_ of selfish! It's advocating for a system in which everyone gets to individually decide for themselves what working environment they want. Instead of the pro-remote or pro-office crowd trying to impose their preferred working environment on the whole industry.

> Seems like the way to go, but instead these companies are all copying each other.

That's the problem, IMO. Tech companies, down to the smallest start-ups, love to cargo-cult the big guys. If Google, Apple, and Twitter do something, pretty much the whole industry will follow suit without needing much more justification than "Well, Google does it and they're amazingly successful. Therefore, we should do it."

So, I'm very disappointed at how many of the big tech companies are forcing people back into the office.

We're doing something in between here at Meta by generally pushing people to choose one or the other but allowing both.

The company just announced a 3 days per week RTO policy for those assigned to an office, but employees are free to go remote if that's what they prefer. The main thing you give up by going remote is an assigned desk in the office -- if you live nearby you can still drop in to an office whenever you like.

I think it should be employee based not company based. If you're in the office you don't have a real good reason to discriminate against someone working remotely. If you need the person you'll arrange a meeting or call them regardless, how does it work with clients? If they're working remote, do you just decline their business? If you're discriminating against a colleague on that basis, you're actively chosing to do so. If you're subconsciously doing it, you're probably doing it for other factors, which you should be consciously considering and mitigating.

I am also selfish with regards to remote work. I don't have any kids, but to me remote work just simply works and makes sense. Having said that, there is an argument for in-person collaboration to an extent. But as a software engineer, I loathe going back to the office and refuse to under almost any circumstance.

If an employer wants me to return to the office, I'm very direct in communicating the additional cost to them and salary bump for me. My go-to response to any request to return to office is "I require a 40% salary increase or no bueno" and thus far they have backed down.

Back when I was working in the office, I had co-workers who liked to lounge around my desk making small talk, asking questions, and generally trying to be friendly and social, which I understand why they would, but it interrupts my "flow state" and leaves me more disgruntled than anything.

Work is work to me, and I don't care to socialize nor is it critical in my current job. Not hating on others who feel anything to the contrary, it's simply not my cup o' tea.

The benefits of WFH greatly surpass any conceivable benefit of having to return to the office, for me. And with my current employers, I cannot see any benefit of it for them.

Corporatism needs a wakeup call and it's finally receiving just a taste of it. Considering salaries are repressed and have been for more than 20 years, it's the very least of what we, as workers/minions/peasants, deserve (at least in the U.S.)

> I think that "both sides" have argued the pros and cons enough that I don't need to repeat them here.

Then proceeds to repeat the arguments of one side.

Everyone understands easily how remote is more comfortable for individuals; all the benefits have been repeat times and times providing examples of thousands of individual situation in which being home is better than being in an office. This is example 15768984.

The question that execs are trying to answer is "are we stronger with an in-office team", knowing they will cut themselves from the "ragneses" in the talent market, but looking more attractive to the people who prefer in-office work; or "are we stronger with a distributed team of ragneses", and having other people who prefer presential offices flock to other companies. It looks like the GAFAs (and many other) are choosing the first option and are fine not having access to some remote-only talents. Others are sticking to their remote-first (or remote-only) culture.

Many of the bigger companies seem to go on the same direction; maybe that decision is based on internal data they have gathered showing that office-first teams are more efficient and performant. Or maybe it's based of sheer traditional management backwards reactionary push. If that's the case; we should soon see fully remote companies starting to take the lead in terms of growth, IPO, successful exits etc since they have been able to identify a better collaboration model that yields better results for less costs.

But can the big big companies afford to lose a few good employees to apply a hybrid/in-office culture? For whatever are the trade offs.

Their bulk of hiring will be younger folks. Those people generally move closer to work and show up everyday at office.

Smaller companies will be pragmatic in a different way. They will try to retain good employees. They realize the benefits of remote workers.

> They will try to retain good employees. They realize the benefits of remote workers.

You have two wrong assumptions here - one is that all the good employees want remote. That's not true. Good people also like offices with some flexibility to work remotely whenever they choose. Second assumption is that companies big and small won't make exceptions for their superstars. That's not true neither. A lot of companies are forcing their policies on their cogs while bending over backwards for their superstars.

This all feels like screaming because companies are bad at adapting.

I don't think 100% full time remote is going to work for all cases/all positions, but I am pretty sure that the companies that are going to be above the curve the coming years will figure out the best way to handle a hybrid environment.

"Everyone in/Everyone out" is so cludgy when we've got the tools to customize better, and the ones that do will probably attract more talent. Obviously there are issues when places like FAANG are resistant because they can pay the most and set the tone, but there's enough advantages to getting this right it'll filter in eventually.

I have always thought most resistance from FAANG companies was more about preventing leaks of their property than actual issues with productivity. Am I mistaken?

Yeah. I work for Google, I'm remote. I much prefer being in person with my team in Mountain View but the Bay Area is such a fucking nightmare for families that it's simply not worth it.

Your bottom line is true for me in a different way. I am about to move from NY to TX. My employer only has offices on the west coast. I like my job, and AFAICT they're quite happy with me...but I'm definitely not moving my family to the Bay Area.

A 40-minute drive to work sounds absolutely miserable. Is there a high anti-office sentiment in areas with decent density where most people can get to "the office" with a quick ride on a train? Sometimes I think "anti-office" is a lot more "anti-soul-crushing-commute".

A quick ride on the train means you’re spending a hell of a lot more to live near the train in American tech hub cities.

I'm glad to see more discussion around remote/in-office work being a preference. I hate wfh and feeling stuck in the house all the time. However, I don't expect that everyone else must match me. I think it is good that some companies are landing on both sides of the fence and people will weigh their office preference as another part of their comp package. Companies will have to decide how they want to compete. They will have to decide on what exceptions they are willing to make to attract talent and that seems good for everyone.

My only real problem with RTO is that many of these companies want to shove us in bull-pen style offices. I won't return to that. Give me a damn cubicle.

I don't understand the push against remote work from employers.

It's a pain when someone in my teams meetings is in the office because of all the noise in the background. This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's a lot of distraction going on there.

"Communication" can also mean getting distracted or drawn into irrelevant discussion or being continuously interrupted by people wanting something.

I think it's quite ridiculous to claim to value personal presence in an age where I'm working with people all day who are in other countries and other offices - even down the hall - and that's all happening by chat and email and teams meetings. I really think it's about the way some people manage lazily by looking to see if you're typing or not instead of looking at results and understanding the work.

It's nice to meet people in person once or twice but I don't need to see any of them once a week or once a month.

I only manage 3 people but I have to work with a lot of people to get things done and have to understand their personalities and points of view and what they're doing up to a point. I can't come up with a reason why I would want to be able to look over their shoulder.

IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close.

It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.

As someone who's been working remotely (or nomadically) for nearly a couple dozen years or so, I firmly subscribe to the notion that the sentence "hell is other people" was coined because someone kept interrupting the author, or because they had to share a workshop (or an open space office) with apprentices, bolstering peers or customers barging in unannounced.

You can have spontaneous conversations in a number of ways, but anything that requires focus work suffers greatly because of the insistence in shoving people together without providing suitable spaces for isolated work--which is why I would, back in the 2000s, frequently grab the brick that passed as a laptop and find an empty meeting room to work in, and later (thanks to GPRS and 3G, not even Wi-Fi) "upgraded" to sitting in the cafeteria or a lounge for two hour stints every day just to get work done.

Yes, you need to coordinate with people. And yes, you need to manage them. But doing either by having them within earshot and "not knowing" what they are up to are truly the hallmarks of incompetent managers, or of a broken company culture. Set up office hours. Rotations. Anything but mandatory RTO at arbitrary days that will force people to spend 4h a day in a commute, be unable to pick up their kids from school, or aid elderly relatives (or friends).

I sincerely hope that I do not have to go back to an open-space office ever again, and that my trips to the office are driven by actual need rather than management insecurities.

> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.

Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it. In every office I've worked in in the past 20 years none of this really happened. It was 99.9% distraction. It's trivial to hop on a meeting with close collaborators or even non-close ones to bounce ideas off of. It's a mask argument for FOMO and the desire of those who simply prefer that environment for various non-collaborative reasons.

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question.

Well, the person that got interrupted by you probably lost quite a bit of productivity because of you.

> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.

People repeat this like a mantra when defending open floor plans (usually managers), but I very much doubt it. Most people seem to hate open floor plans. The subject seems to have gone by the wayside with the pandemic (then it was a question of finding a quiet place to work in a house shared with other people). I'm sure it varies by occupation, but the cost of distraction relative to whatever benefit you might gain from conversation is like investing money in the lottery. Yeah, you might win something, but you mostly won't and the cost will be enormous. I sense a bit of classic FOMO opportunism motivating such rationalizations.

You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

Depending on who you are, massive massive benefit. In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.

training is AWFUL remote. Not even close

Definitely agree with this as a statement on how things currently ARE (in general), but they don't have to be that way. A lot of companies who struggle with this turn out to be just really bad at training in general. Previously, they got lucky; the people in need of education scrounged it by interrupting people or watching people or asking someone to metaphorically hold their hand. Companies were training by chance, rather than by design. Remote working demands a different way of training people, a different way of managing people and measuring output; a lot of companies are failing badly at this and falling back to failing less badly at it in the only way they know (i.e. everyone back to the office so we at don't suck quite so much at training and management and collaborating).

Maybe it varies by field. For myself, onboarding new developers has felt about the same as it did in person. I can't just stop by their desk but banging a message into chat and then starting a call if their response seems to far off track is not that much harder. A little friction but isn't it part of my job to get past that and make sure this person is productive as quickly as possible?

Overall my team has improved with remote work. Before the pandemic it was a struggle to find developers, in large part because of our location (expensive New England college town) and the (unspoken but clear) requirement that people come to the office every day. Now my current team is comprised of developers from Toronto, Sweden, etc. We hit our targets and get work done.

I wouldn't trade it for anything and I hope the pay grade above me realizes the concrete importance of the people and the work over this abstract idea of "community".

Historically, people at work wanted to talk about anything other than work. They'd talk about football, politics, last night's Britain's Got Talent, or whatever; yet spend a whole day struggling with a task without asking their colleagues at the same desk for help.

I'll take wfh, thanks.

Our remote teams have this culture that you say is impossible. They're in their chats or voice calls all day communicating, and measurably crush the in-office teams' productivity, maybe due to the efficiencies gained by going async, or maybe due to the type of people (people who find interactions through text more meaningful than in person or verbal, and insist upon it)

The in office teams on the other hand seem to rely on synchronous work and so they block each other, and this seems to mean the group can only finish a small number of tasks per day, whereas our remote teams complete bigger work more frequently.

I also find a lot of our juniors or quieter folk are a lot more confident talking to people in the remote setting.

>sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation

Only thing I've ever gained this way were some bread-making tips (which admittedly were pretty good).

Our office has handily addressed this problem by making communities of expertise that anyone can join, occasional icebreaker events, and monthly showcases of what we're working on or investigating (this usually is just a few minutes of presentation by each team and is optional).

Make it easy for people to connect and they will do so. Meanwhile when I'm at the office, it's headphone-city and the open office format makes those random chats very distracting and frustrating.

Disagree, twice.

>You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close.

I've joined company that wasn't remote-native and yet they were well prepared

They had training videos, documentation, presentations and introductory codebase walk - a lot of stuff

I've been really quickly productive.

So maybe training is as good as your effort put into that?

>You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

I can send message to someone over chat way faster than you can get to his office room / desk.

> ... people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart ..

Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or do you just believe it to be true?

At my last company, we had to go into the office once per week. The hellacious commute aside (I would arrive somewhere around 10:00, and leave somewhere around 15:00 to avoid rush hour - subtract lunch, and that’s not a lot of work getting done), it was just full of distractions. I don’t want to take regular breaks to go shoot the shit, or to go have a beer after lunch. I want to get work done, and I do that best with headphones on and not being bothered.

> It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.

There's no data on this, at the very least you could mention that it's only your personal impression ?

IMO (and this is clearly a personal take) there are two competing effects: - higher bandwidth and easier to align face to face - more distractions, interruptions, more complicated to get things done

If you're in a business or position where you have no IP or nothing hard to do per say, you'll see the first one dominate. If you're somewhere with IP and competitive advantages through smarts then I'd say (personal again) the second effect can come to dominate.

Google pulling a "no remote" move means to me that their competitive advantage in terms of engineering and smarts is not a priority + using the fact that the market swung back towards employers vs. employees. But not general comment about "this take is obviously so much better", this is just intellectual lazyness I believe

Really depends on the stage of the project and nature of the work. Also, on the individuals.

Being in the office mostly means you can afford to have less gems because you know you'll spend more time in person walking them along.

I favour some WFH/Hybrid setup, personally. And I view a lot* of this new office push as mediocre managers being unable to leverage their talent.

> the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

This is an anti feature of offices.

Usually that brief interruption costs about an hours productivity for anyone doing stuff like programming, etc, due to the massively high cost of context switching.

It could have been an email/IM.

> training is AWFUL remote.

This implies that the training is lacking anyway, in most cases.

I agree that onboarding remotely is terrible. From a junior perspective trying to figure out what is going on remotely is hard. Things happen like you get stuck with things and wait two hours for a slack response which still isnt great.

I have spontaneous conversation and ideation daily at my remote job. In slack. Both with teammates in DMs and team channels, and in more general channels.

I have never had trouble asking people questions. And I get asked them all the time. In fact, that the questions and answers are written and async is superior. When I was in the office, people would frequently take conversations to Slack (or say "could you Slack me what you just told me?")

Personally too, I find written communication to be superior. I will do quick video calls with people but that's rare (and usually to the taste of the other person).

We also have excellent training backboned by mentorship.

> spontaneous conversation & ideation

The company: All the magic happens face to face.

Also the company: All your coworkers are in a different country on the other side of the world who are asleep when you're awake. Figure it out.

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question.

That's a benefit to working from home. One of the worst things about office work is that it makes it easy for someone to come and interrupt your train of thought. It takes time to enter the flow, and almost no time to be shoved out of it, at which point you have to take time to get back into the flow.

A quick question can cost a half hour or so that way.

This is where IM or email shine. You can ignore it until you're in a place where answering it won't be so costly.

I have a hybrid schedule.

I lose 2 hours/day commuting + 1/2 hour de-stress from driving through shit traffic. I get far more work done on my WFH days than I do my in-office days. I'm an IC and don't need to do much mentoring, and when i do it's always easier to do it remotely with screen sharing than to try and sit two chairs into the same office. The only reason I come into the office is to have lunch with my co-workers. I do NOT see them the entire rest of the day.

Do NOT approach me to ask a question when I am sitting at my desk. I am trying to work. Send an email or some other message through another collaboration platform. Stay AWAY.

I think in-person collaboration helps, but with folks on the outside of your team. If you are on a small team or in a small startup, I don’t see a big impact of in person communication. You will be interacting with these same people so much that you will grow a close bond with them regardless. When I think about the small company projects I’ve done, it’s honestly hard to tell which were remote and which weren’t - the bonds formed and amount of teamwork was the same.

For large company settings it’s a different story - if I have to have tons of meetings with a pool of various 100 people for many hours a week, some of them occasionally, yes it would be super helpful to have all those in person to establish connections quicker. However, even with RTO there is little chance those people would be in the same office, so you would be stuck on video calls anyways.

There is probably a sweet spot of medium sized companies where there is a lot of people but they are still in the same floor where in office would be effective. But for google scale - not so much.

None these things are immutable laws of work though. They can all be fostered in a remote first environment, its just not the same thing.

Its a "lazy" solution to require RTO for the sake of collaboration, training etc. as there are demonstrated examples (like GitLab, for instance, also see companies like Linear, Supabase etc that are full remote and still pushing out great work).

While I get sometimes in person meetings are great, they really start to lose their effectiveness past a certain point, and I think thats pretty clear with these remote first companies that are successful is they took the time to re-think process, re-think culture, and re-think the approach.

What I find with RTO companies is they want to plug their ears to the idea of real change, because its a real effort to get everyone to do things a bit differently. For example, look at the struggles everyone seems to have around maintaining useful documentation and async communication. One thing I realized is companies that took remote seriously gravitated away from everything being a Zoom call and started pushing in earnest centralized documentation and async communication. Long form responses became the norm. In depth Wiki's became the norm. Those are two examples I've seen in successful remote environments that I think, anecdotally, remain true across the board.

Companies that don't give this real thought are the ones that seem to also be going back to RTO. To me, RTO is an implicit acknowledgement that the culture of the company is unchangeable, and leadership is unable to consider different ways people work.

You can have all this in remote first cultures, that much is clear.

That said, I think it should be everyone's individual choice, if one was to ask me. I have no issue with people wanting to work an office everyday, but forcing everyone to work in an office every day is the problem

Counter argument: there's lots of ways to share knowledge remotely, some people just aren't used to it.

Learning: presentations, pairing, questions via messages, asking for a quick call to clarify something. Also: document your shit.

Ideation: set up ideation sessions before tackling a ticket. At the end of a daily scrum, ask people x and y to stay and trade some ideas.

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

Isn't that the distraction people try to avoid? I don't think there is an expectation from anyone that people should walk over to someone's desk and ask questions. In fact, I believe it's the opposite of what's typically being welcomed – do your own research, dive deep into the problem, work with the problem from different angles, etc.

I do not believe that remote training is awful. When someone's trained remotely, they can always record a meeting and come back to that recording many times in the future. If something is unclear, just send a message. Nobody's recording screenshares in the office, so training/onboarding material from your co-workers gets easily lost. This leads to distractions, such as walking over to someone's desk and asking follow up questions.

> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

Here's what typically happened in every company I worked at. I ask a question, they tell me to look at the documentation. I look it up, do what I needed to do, and at some point, it all unravels because the documentation is horribly out of date, and there was something else that needed to be done from the beginning, which this other guy knows about.

Training is always awful, in person and remote. Nobody wants to help or give any info, even when you are asking questions specific to the company product. Things that can't be googled, or things that the team would be better off just telling rather than letting the new guy struggle for a week.

No I'm not bitter at all.....

This is different for junior and senior engineers. If your work is a lot of smaller things and you need to ask a lot of questions, an office is useful. If you have deeper work and need to focus for hours, the open-plan office is terrible.

One of the many benefits of working from home is that writing great software is heavily dependent on getting into a good "flow". Commuting alone absolutely destroys that for most people. When you work from home you drop so many stages and so much stress out of your morning routine. I find myself being productive within an hour of waking up. That's definitely not the case if I'm forced into an office. Especially if people start chatting me up once I get there (which always happens). Commuting home after a long day is soul destroying as well. It's time stolen from my personal life.

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a partial owner of a company with 50 employees - about half are distributed. We used to meet 4-6x per year F2F pre COVID. Post COVID we’ve met twice in 2 years.

I notice that people are much friendlier after we meet F2F. They remember that there’s a human who they know and have hung out with. This feeling fades as time passes.

I don’t know what the right answer is, and I feel a little hypocritical living abroad and managing my team. But some things are definitely lost by solely working outside the office.

The noise and interruption problem can be about the same at home: whether it's the spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ...

You can only get quiet time if it is properly managed, and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home.

> This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's a lot of distraction going on there.

No, no. I think you mean there's a lot of creativity and community going on in the background. What you're hearing is serendipitous collaboration popping off like fireworks.

Just kidding, open plan offices offices suck.

This says more to how shitty calls are. To a group in person, that background noise is hardly noticeable, but it becomes completely debilitating to a call. I'd be interested to dig more in to why, I guess the microphones on laptops are just not as good as our ears at picking up closer noises with priority or something.

This is a huge problem for me! Frequently I can't hear people at all. My team is fully remote from each other, but we're all required to go into one of the company's offices five days a week. The worst of both worlds.

To your first point it seems pretty clear to me their goal is to have everyone on the team in the same office so meetings are in person.

Vacancy rates for commercial real estate are what 20-30%? While the economy continues to grow, so no this narrative about productivity is pure bs.

Every post about how I overhead some conversation, the problem is you not knowing how to manage people. There are field workers, trades, all of India working remotely, always, long before Covid.

Had a 4 hour call to fix a bug , 1 on 1, never got distracted, no one butted in, no one asked to go out for lunch, coffee, had some bs made up management emergency that required everyone. No one told me that x,y,z brought apples and they are in the kitchen. My working day has more working hours than it ever did while living in NYC because as everyone knows ~20% of your waking hours are spent commuting.

Oh I remembered my all time least favorite activity, where we pile into a room to eat team lunch with plastic utensils off paper plates, while someone from some management organization tells us how we should see the world… yeah no thanks. I wonder why is there is no demand for commercial r/e oh that’s right because unless you are a unicorn company or actually physically need to be at a location to perform a task, the vast majority prefers working from home.

> Vacancy rates for commercial real estate are what 20-30%?

US doesn't look great:

Office Vacancy Rates by City:

1. San Francisco: 31%

2. Los Angeles: 26%

3. Chicago: 24%

4. Phoenix: 24%

5. Cleveland: 23%

6. Denver: 22%

7. Philadelphia: 19%

8. Boston: 19%

9. Houston: 19%

10. Austin: 19%

11. New York: 17%

12. Dallas: 17%

13. Miami: 16%

14. Detroit: 13%

15. Seattle: 11%

from https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/166608978195110707...

but other places, like London UK, are getting back on track:

> This reflected a total vacancy rate of 8.9% and remained above the 10-year average of 5.5%

from https://www.jll.co.uk/en/trends-and-insights/research/q1-202...

Also, in US, landlords outside of huge metro areas and non class A buildings in metro, are throwing out crazy TI credits and building offices for free for a lease. So if you are looking for an office because you have some portion of the workforce that prefers it. A great time to get a new office built out for free, on a very cheap lease. I have clients that are having entire floors redone for free because they just mentioned cancellation/renegotiation of a lease.

Knowing how NYC real estate operates, I'm willing to bet that 17% wildly under estimates the true numbers of what we'd consider 'office space'.

Slightly related, not sure why Atlanta is left out of many statistics like this. Atlanta's metro population is bigger than most of those cities.

>Had a 4 hour call to fix a bug , 1 on 1, never got distracted,

So here' what is missing from a lot of modern work. The stuff you're doing requires input from multiple people. The overhead for 6 hrs of actual work is 60 hours of scheduling, meetings, additional people, your-court-my-court.

Meanwhile, semi-spontaneously spending a half day on something because "good progress" is something people hide. what kind of a ridiculously long "meeting" is that?

"Meetings" as a concept, has replaced working with people.

> "Meetings" as a concept, has replaced working with people.

Organizations are in decline when they begin to think of meetings as the work instead of the meeting output.

> Had a 4 hour call to fix a bug , 1 on 1, never got distracted, no one butted in, no one asked to go out for lunch, coffee, had some bs made up management emergency that required everyone.

You had a 4 hour call and didn't take a single break for lunch or coffee or even just to stand up and stretch legs?

I can walk around my home office, go downstairs make a coffee without having to navigate society and social structure in the office. Put myself on mute for 5 minutes... Unless you are already hiding away from everyone in the office, good luck doing the same on a floor, and good luck not having someone run up to you to say oh hey can you come take a look at x,y,z.

when i'm working from home, i can take a break and walk my dog, go to my fav coffee shop or just sit by the park nearby and enjoy the sun.

when i'm at the office i can... go to the lounge and hear people working?

> There are field workers, trades, all of India working remotely, always, long before Covid

Sure, but they're paid a fraction of US workers so its put up with.

Because the assumption is that they work less because they are remote, clearly Covid has shattered that elusion by now.

I will say. I'm gonna be burned for this here, but... yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.

As a worker I like it! And there are some positives - mainly, you don't have to commute and live in a cheaper place. But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective, and I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while. One thing that's good is that it gives you access to a bigger talent pool, and you can pay people less, because they are happy they can work remote.

I was originally against hybrid, because it's not really one thing or other thing, but now I start to see its positives too.

I keep saying this — as a fairly senior engineer, remote has basically blocked me from actually doing many of the things that made me good at my job.

I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.

Fundamentally, information is the biggest asset you can have on the job, and I lost access to all the information that came from organic, unstructured, ad-hoc, and often passive interactions. Unfortunately, the more structured, proactive alternatives cost a lot more of my time and effort, so it's all around less effective.

I'm going to get downvoted by the managers, but chances are, your team is doing just fine, but you can't keep up with that remotely.

When you're in the meeting, everyone politely explains to you what they're doing and they say "yes" to your ideas, so you feel like you're making progress.

But when they actually need to do focused work, which you don't want to know the details of because it's too hard, they do far better outside of an oxygen-deprived, loud office that they need to commute to.

If you believe that you are less effective as a manager of a remote team than a office one, that's a manager problem not a location one

Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done.

Don't force your team back to the office because you find it easier to manage them.

I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones.

> I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while.

I've worked remotely for years before COVID and these meetups are always hyper productive.

I'm also burned out and need to sleep for a week straight afterwards.

Just because people get motivated seeing each other once in a while doesn't mean that's sustainable if they were in an office.

To me, working remotely was less effective in the beginning, it uncovered undiagnosed ADHD and after dealing with that I'm doing far better than I ever did in an office.

Office work is fine if you prefer it, working from home requires a lifestyle and an office space to make it work, something not everyone can manage.

But that doesn't make it worse at all, and as others have said, it requires different management skills, if you haven't picked them up, you probably won't see the benefits from your perspective because you're not letting your team work properly.

I'm not a manager and agree that in an office I'm more productive, but at home I'm much cheaper for the company and the company gets more for their money.

Realistically at Google I'd probably be an L5 or L6 software engineer so let's say I'd make somewhere around 400k USD. Working from home in Spain I make 80k euros and I cost the company around 92k euros with taxes, so let's round it up and say I cost to the company 100k USD per year.

I'm not 4 times less productive for working in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Spain, so even if I'm not in my peak productivity I'd say the company gets more for their money.

> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective

As a manager I can't disagree more.

Remote really is a horses for courses situation.

Practical example: my younger brother worked as a designer for a company that manufactured light steel frames. Their USP was that their design office was attached to their factory, so they were able to provide better designs with a faster turnaround on manufacturing. Despite living a 20 minute drive from his office, he felt that his ability to have these conversations ad-hoc helped him do his job better. Slack would never work because the lads on the floor were never going to pop that up. Also, it physically can't replace him going onto the factory floor to see what a problem was and being able to adapt his designs. He'd occasionally go on-site for construction issues but this, naturally, is a case where the site has to be away from the office; it might be on the other side of the UK.

In contrast, I'm a manager at a fully remote software company (a very successful software company, I might add). The simple truth is that most of our work can be handled remotely. The biggest challenge is getting the right people together. This isn't a remote/office issue, though. I saw this in my office-based role previously, as well as hearing it from all my (office-based) friends.

If you have something in software engineering that you feel requires people to be fully in-office, please raise it and I'll try to outline how we manage that.

> I can tell that remote is far less effective.

This is a mixed bag. Remote work can be less effective if you don't have the right people. Employees who can sustainably work remote and generally keep their shit together without being babysat via Teams every day are surprisingly difficult to find. I am starting to think the "10x unicorn" is more common than the employee that you can trust to autonomously get their work done while at home.

Certainly, everyone on HN (and during the interview) will spin the most elaborate tales about how they are an exemplar of Christ and enumerate all of the virtues of their home office/life separation. But, many of us know how these things really unfold in the following weeks and months. I am a human too. I fuck off periodically and am probably borderline disqualified from working remote per my own criteria. This is really hard to do right over long timeframes.

I've been at it for a decade now and I still don't have any perfect answers, aside from sending 100% of the team back to the office 5 days a week. For whatever reason, both extremes are the only suitable option for my brain. The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.

I agree, it's far less effective.

People will say that remote work lets them focus / write code or whatever, but that's not where the real work happens (or at least, it's only a tiny part of the real work).

The real important work happens when you can play the politics games, identify key players, uncover closely held secret institutional knowledge, and reach across silos to make projects succeed. You need to bypass the red tape and figure out how to get other people to complete the things that are blocking you. You need a way to back-channel delegate things when there is no official chain to do it properly.

Trying to deal with organizational dysfunction is always a challenge, but it's a skillset that any truly productive employee needs. It's hard enough in person - remotely is almost impossible. You won't organically find the right people in a zoom meeting and you definitely won't convince them to help you that way (and vice-versa).

You might think "well my organization isn't dysfunctional!" - well you'd be wrong. All organizations are dysfunctional, it's a matter of degrees and how well the dysfunction can be worked around.

I'm a big believer of enabling people to perform their best, which means accomodating their needs. If someone has a later circadian clock I'm not going to set up a meeting at 9AM with them. That's the same for work environment, neither remote or in-person is "better" but they are for some people. You will always have people who only excel remotely and people who excel and thrive in-person. Mandating one specific environment is not efficient in my view. I've always followed this and generated hundreds of millons in value through the years so I guess it works.

I don't think it's globally far less effective. I think it's particularly less effective when you need constant communication, say being next to your teammates throughout the day, or when the people are really unmotivated and they won't work unless they're being constantly physically monitored.

As someone who's in a startup and is very motivated, with coworkers who are experts in their area and there's little overlap in skillset, so that everyone knows what they need to do and do it well, without having to constantly synchronize with what each other is doing, I strongly doubt someone would be more effective than me simply because they're going to an office. Specially if they have a long commute and a family.

Meeting together once in a while is very different than either hybrid or in-office. I once worked at a small all-remote startup spanning from the west coast of the US to Eastern Africa. Yes, we all met in person for a week several times per year. That didn’t mean 3+ days per week in office.

And yes that company is still around and doing fine several years later even now. My last information on their in-person meetings is itself years old now, but when they got too big to have everyone meet in person together, they still continued the same principle, just in appropriately sized subgroups.

Maybe you're just not a good remote manager?

No offence.

Perhaps you're a fantastic on-site manager. But you should consider the probability (from what I've read) that remote management isn't in your toolkit ... and it is a distinct skill.

And at my company, we've seen performance and throughput improvements across the board that the managers themselves agree with :)

It’s absolutely less effective for the majority of organizations and engineers. Most of the engineers claiming they’re more effective aren’t actually. They may get to do the part they like more (though in my experience that’s not programming despite their claims, that’s goofing off on HN or doing their laundry), but that’s not the same thing as being more effective for the organization as a whole.

(And sure you can blame it all on “managers” and how they should be better in all kinds of ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that remote, for most organizations and most engineers, is less effective as things stand today.)

This comment claims to be able to tell, but doesn't mention any attempt to measure.

Most attempts to measure that I've read about find increased productivity with remote work. Do you believe your organization has circumstances that cause it to buck the trend, or that those measurements are flawed?

>> remote is far less effective

I think it depends on the type of work, personality of workers and maybe other factors. For example, I used to work in a team where we were each doing separate part of the thing and it was not too beneficial to talk about work. Sure, we talked in the office, but mostly about movies, personal stories and stuff like that. I did a lot more work from home because the office environment was distractive and I get distracted easily. I can imagine that remote would be far less effective if I worked in a different department.

> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.

Completely disagree, and the countless examples of successful remote teams disprove your claim.

As you say remote is nice for the worker, and i am certainly not less productive, but for "let's concentrate on this task today to get it out" i tend to drive to the office. And it is also nice to have chats and friendly banter with others that might be in on the same day. Ofc most devs seem to be the strightly professional and introverted type.

Remote you definitely get less of the gossip that might help you, either for advancement, or by planning to steer things / intervene.

Would be super effective to live on premise, and not have a partner/kids (huuuuge loss of time), to have nutrition handled by intravenous feeding tubes, diapers so that you don't have to go to the bathroom anymore, we could work until 80 too after all!

Sooooooo many things to improve, we gotta please the capital overlords, god forbid we enjoy the progress we made so far to, you know, live life

> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.

In my experience, remote work is only more effective for "heads down" type coding work where you need long uninterrupted blocks of focus time. Modern offices tend to have lots of distractions.

For work that requires synchronous collaboration or conversations, remote work is less effective. It requires you to explicitly set up meetings to chat, which is much higher friction than just walking over to someone's desk.

Remote work is also much worse for building cross team relationships. In an office, you can easily bump into people across the company and at various levels. You learn a ton from these people, and sometimes these connections can be valuable for your career or even personal life. I've made several friends once I started going into the office frequently.

> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective

With respect, this is a skill issue. I also manage people and satisfaction among those I manage is high (there is no change) and everyone else is just as happy with our output as they've always been. Of course there is plenty of complaining by other extroverted managers that they'd like to "see their colleagues more", but should that come at the cost of 2h per day for every single person? Absolutely no. If this is not clearly communicated they will abuse (IMO) their managerial powers by mandating folks do something to serve them. This is entirely the wrong attitude to take.

No offense intended but if remote is less effective that's management's fault. Remote is a completely different way of working. If you don't adapt to it, yes it'll suck. But there is nothing you lack when remote. Even in-office, if anyone is not within 20 feet of you, they're basically remote. Ya gotta adapt and learn new ways of working, and then remote is more productive, not less.

>how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while

The operative phrase here is "once in awhile". I agree that there is a need for teams to be in-person at times. But somehow that translated to everyone being in the office 3X a week last year and now that's turning into a push for 5X a week at many companies.

In my experience the “productivity” many teams achieve on their “all in office days” usually amounts to a whiteboard of good intentions (and yes, whiteboard sessions are 100 times better in person), which indeed energizes your average PO/PM/manager.

Could it be that it just makes manager's jobs easier?

The coordination part can be much easier in person, but the actual work part can be much worse, and what you as manager care about, and get rewarded for, is just the coordination part.

I see a huge shift in narrative even in comments around the Internet about return to office. Just saying.

I am a manager and manage a team of six people. One of them is in a completely different country. I trust all people in my team to do their job properly and am available to them all the time if needed. It works. Our team is profitable and we do a good job. Client and employee retention is high.

Managers requiring return to office and 'butts in seats' have their own issues. Nothing to do with work, communication, performance. That applies to jobs that can actually be done remotely of course.

Funny how the same people that are against remote work have no issue with remote customers. I doubt google would be happy with customers showing up at their offices to make payments or check emails. They expect customers to trust them. But google wont trust their very own employees to work remotely.

In my view its time to out these dinosaurs out of their misery and move on to companies equipped for modern day and age work habits.

Not sure that makes the point you want. The experience of being a remote customer of Google is pretty awful. You can't talk to anyone, things go wrong and there is nothing you can do about it.

They prefer remote customers because they want this dysfunction.

You mention that your team is profitable and your client retention is high: this suggests a very particular type of business.

Could it be that the nature of your work is well suited to remote work? Perhaps you’re delivering fairly well-known outputs or have really mature processes around getting work done?

It would be interesting to ponder some of the worlds greatest creations and timelines they were created on, if folks had all been remote. Could the transistor have been created if your physicist and mathematician were both sitting at a slack screen?

Probably not, but also modern day plumbers can’t really WFH either. I didn’t notice any implication that _every_ role can be done from home successfully, but many software engineering roles definitely can.

I know this one! Yes. One of my good friends is a senior electrical engineer who designs components for cern and during covid (and still) they told everyone to take all their equipment home and so his second bedroom is a a full on lab. They've never stopped launching new products.

Could something like Linux have ever developed and matured without the entire Linux team sitting in the Linux office?

The opposite argument. Could AI advancements have accelerated if your ML engineers had to live in a crumbling city spending 25% of their work hours commuting and preparing to commute?

I really hope Google and other remote-hostile companies lose their prestige as some kind of stamp of excellence that's supposed to signal you're some higher caliber engineer. I never applied to work there because of their absurd interview process (along with other FAANGs) which require candidates to spend months on "interview prep" grinding Leetcode questions - a colossal waste of everyone's time. Even during COVID when all companies were remote I didn't apply because most big corporations tend to require employees to be trapped in their country unless you go through the hassle of transferring offices, and I prefer the freedom to live wherever I want.

This banning of remote work is so backwards, and will only contribute to their demise from their former peak. Next thing you know Google will no longer be seen as a "cool" place to work, and face the same fate as many former behemoths like IBM and Yahoo.

At this point I wonder who even desires to work at companies like Google except for entry level hires, prestige whores, and old people with families wanting stability.

Honestly I think Google has already lost its prestige. But it's not just RTO that's doing it, it's the politically toxic way they did their round of layoffs. RTO is not going to save them, they lost their mojo years ago, and they're now in a spiral towards being an IBM-style "legacy" company and the layoffs (which were just about playing to the stock market) just cemented that. That's the general consensus I see both from Xooglers and Googlers I talk to.

But also in addition to demanding RTO, their actual office situation sucks now. In the years before I quit Google (after 10 years of being there) they just made the actual office experience worse and worse. Cramming people in like sardines. Open concept noisy auditorium workspaces. Messing up the parking situation and requiring people to park and walk 10 minutes away while they ripped up the parking lot to build new castles to cram people into. Overhiring and overstaffing into dubious projects. Lowering quality of food and other perks. And during WFH if you actually wanted to come in there was a whole song and dance about reserving desks, and not getting any kind of permanent comfortable workstation.

I don't like working remotely. But I also despised the commuting situation; I was willing to tolerate it while the office was a pleasant environment. COVID ruined that.

Google started on the path to not being a "cool" company to work at when Ruth Porat came on as CFO. She did great things for the stock price, but long term bad things for the culture of the company.

Say what you will but Google is still a great place to work in my opinion. Work life balance is great, coworkers are solid, mentorship is abundant, culture is still great (subjective, but still true when I compare my experience to friends who work at other companies), there is continual investment in tooling and developer productivity, etc. I'm not just shilling because I work there and want to justify it to myself. I regularly investigate alternatives and cannot justify leaving when I'm happy.

I currently work at Google (though my time will be ending soon due to this shit show) and everything you said couldn’t be farther from the truth at least for me. I want to make sure everyone has both sides here instead of the rosey picture that so many want to paint.

Google is, by far, the worst place I’ve ever worked with the most useless work and uninspiring management and coworkers. I haven’t learned a damn thing in my time there. FB had its problems but I was at least learning there.

To me not being able to be fully remote is a complete non-starter for any job. I've been remote for the last 5 years, no way in hell I'd give up that freedom to be chained to an office again.

Also I'm not interested in wasting my time studying competitive programming questions for those interviews.

But sure if you love grinding Leetcode and don't mind being chained to a desk, I'm sure Google is alright.

Google has already lost its prestige. It’s a code factory, that’s why it demands butts in the seats and formalised interview questions - to ensure homogeneity and obedience. Avoid them like the plague, both as a customer and as an employee. Same goes for amazon and anyone else demanding employees return to office.

Thoughts on finding the latest “punk” workplace?

Gonna assume it’s a “who you know” and “right place, right time.” But I’ve been holding out in AngelsList for some time.

It certainly is a big test. Seems the most aggressive RTO companies are traditionally the best performing - Meta Google Goldmans, JPMorgan. Its going to be fascinating in 10 years looking back to find out who was right.

Meta and Google have insane cash cows and they are outliers no matter where their workers work. Other huge companies like Walmart and Amazon have huge workforces that have to work somewhere. I’d like to see breakdowns by industries: healthcare, retail, tech, or oil.

It’s going to be hard to tell what’s related to the Covid shutdown and what’s related to remote working.

What I'm seeing looking for remote work at tech companies right now:

- startups: MANY (most?) are committed to "remote-first" and talk about this prominently on their careers page

- larger companies (~1000+ employees): do seem to be making more noise about being in the office 2 days a week.

- really big companies: still ignore my English Major ass so idk

2 days a week in an office is useless. Either make it 5 days a week in the office with up to x weeks of remote or make it full time remote. When an office requires 2 days a week in an office, you get none of the alleged benefits of in person work as everyone chooses which days they want. In a part time remote situation, the office ends up being 60% empty all the time anyways, and it's almost always a waste of time to hold a meeting in an office if even one of the attendees is remote, which is extremely common in modern software teams.

Agreed, but for other reasons.

Even 1 day a week in the office is useless. It means you HAVE to live near the office or in the same state even. It's either remote or it's not.

The two days a week crew generally has two designated office days

But there still are benefits from being allowed to work from home, even if it's just 3 out of 5 days.

And the days in office can be with your team.

I don't understand how allowing some remote work makes it 100% useless.

The reality of meetings is that they're all a waste of time. I'm starting to think the same about Teams meetings.

Video chat (for screensharing) with colleagues? Wonderfully effective. 64 people in the one Teams meeting? 100% seems to be "manager who can't bring himself to write a more then a 1 paragraph email and instead thinks too highly of his oratory skills".

Which has led me to my grand hypothesis that if you're calling a meeting just to give a fixed speech, write it out first and then decide why it's not an email...or decide just not to send it at all. If you think you need a meeting, then prepare the topics for discussion ahead of time and solicit an initial round of feedback.

We have 1 day where everyone related to the project is present, which is nice. The other day is useful for the junior we hired recently so we can support him better, but otherwise a waste.

My commute is 3 hours both ways. Bearable 1-2 days, but not 5. 1 day is enough to have most periodic meetings in person if everyone on the team comes the same day. To make office less empty different teams can come on different days so much smaller office can be used. The problem is many companies bound by long term contracts so a large office is a sunk cost.

this is not my experience.. our team does 2-3 days in and 2-3 WFH and it works really well.

Disagree.

Just decide that you meet e.g on monday, so you can plan everything

and spend rest of the week actually doing the work without disruptions

My company ('systemically important' bank, ~100k enployees) is trying furiously to get us into the office 2 days a week. For many people this is more than was required of them pre-COVID.

What is actually happening is that people come in 1 day but there is nowhere to sit appropriate for development or any kind of 'engineering' work unless they are on site before 8am (no good for those of us with school runs to do). If there's no desk we're being asked to sit at benches or refectory style tables with our tiny laptop screens. The actual result of this is a day of no work, and, being europe, it means a bunch of people filling in the accident book saying they have a neck injury at the end of each day. This is going to get worse as they pressure people to come in without adequate desk numbers. The unions are swamped with complaints (yay for unions!).

If people can find a desk they are surrounded by project manangers or non-technical staff from other teams who are on calls all day with people who are remote, and they themselves are on calls with people who are remote, at home or in another EU country, India/US/etc. No synergy, no quick chats by the water cooler/kettle.

##Remote, virtual global teams do not benefit from being in the office.##

On a more personal note, I'm also finding it's a very noisy, distracting environment. For neurodivergent people (ADHD, Autism) the office is actually really challenging. I find I have to go and close myself in a meeting room to get some quiet at several points throught the day, and I leave early. It's exhausting.

I'd estimate that 80-90% of my team are neurodivergent engineers, cryptographers, or architects, and are actively seeking remote positions. I wholly support their efforts.

I am 100% sure this drive to get people in is because senior management are bored and lonely at home and don't want to come into empty offices. They've paid for these giant offices in London, NY and elsewhere, which cost a fortune, and need to see bums on seats. The way they stay up to speed on what's going on is chatting to people in the halls and corridors, so they don't even really need a computer! They live in a different world.

Screw banks, anyway.

Entire SV VC sphere wants people in the office grinding

That's the opposite of what they just said (and, probably, of reality). My perception is that remote work is much more common in successful startups than it is in large companies.

I'm one of those weirdos who hates going in to the office. However, I'd like to provide a counter-point to that fact. My company has offices in Europe and I _love_ going to the office over there. Hate it in America. Love it in Europe. The question I ask myself is why? I don't feel isolated from my family. Its a couple blocks away. Safe and easy to get to. My son whose very young could safely walk there and back without being harmed (intentionally or accidentally). The city is so safe he could take the subway on his own if he wanted to. If I want to go home I can. If I want to go to lunch my family can meet me halfway.

The office in Europe _feels_ like an extension of home (in my experience - maybe not true for all). I feel a general sense of ease there. Taking the subway in New York or driving to work in Houston feels like a horrific burden that I'm just not willing to put up with anymore.

I work about 10 min away from the Chelsea Google office in NYC. It's just like you said. I usually start my day reading near my apartment and then going to the office. The subway is right under the building, so I can often get to where I'm going after work conveniently. The pharmacy and groceries are on the way home. When I'm not feeling well, I just go home to rest. Or if I'm need to go home and wait for a package. But lower Manhattan is one of the few pockets of "European-style" walkable areas in the country.

There's a growing consensus that most people like having an office to go to (more social, separated from kids/partners, etc.) but hate to commute.

As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?

I live in Europe. And love working from home. It's not that I hate going to the office, but it's so convenient to have the possibility work from home, since some days I need to focus. I often get much more done from home, since the workplace has a lot of distractions. I also have a family, and I get much more time with them. I think Google would benefit from giving a little slack there.

I go to an office where they have the AC running on full blast. It's insane, I'm freezing inside, and then outside it's like 90 F. Why do office people do this? Is it like that in EU or is it just a NA thing?

Imagining your scenario is like utopia to me. I hate going on the bus, always some crazy homeless person there, but I don't want to pay for parking either.

I wouldn't mind the office if it was like that. Safe and easy to get to. What a dream.

I live in Europe (well, Eastern Europe) and couldn't afford to live in an apartment close to the office, so my commute from / to the suburb is 1.5 hours each way, I'd literally get mental health problems at 3 hours a day in the traffic.

So no way I'm returning to the office. Almost all employers here state at least hybrid work (3 office + 2 home) on paper but in reality with tacit acceptance from management it's nearly 100% remote only, with occasional meetup in the office. Like once per sprint or even less.

I agree. I used to occasionally take my daughter into the office in Copenhagen when she was 5. The first time I thought I'd have to sacrifice some of my work time to make sure she was Ok and stop her getting underfoot / disrupting anyone else. Instead she got taken away by the design department to help make company videos.

When I worked for the same company in America - no way. I wouldn't have even tried.

It's the toilet cubicles. Americans have renormalised having a communal poo like the Romans.

I always wonder why city centers in Europe and Asia feel so safe and prosperous, while many US cities are like, you know.

European engineer here. All you said is totally valid, but still, what people complain here is "forcing" to go back to the office. What advantage does forcing people to work out of their homes bring? It can only be justified with "companies don't trust their employees"

> I'm one of those weirdos who hates going in to the office.

I feel like a weird one for the opposite of that. It is nice having the option of working from home, or from my parents in the next county and I need to bob off to look after them, and the cats certainly appreciate me being around more when I WFH, but I don't get on with it long term. I like home being home and work being work, and I generally prefer work to stay out of my home.

I also prefer working in the same room as the people I'm working with¹ and consider hybrid to be a lie. We are officially hybrid, but really I'm remote most of the time because even though I go to the office many of the people I'm working with usually do not. Not that I begrudge other people doing what works best for them, and we get the job done so I don't see a productivity problem, but my level of comfort or lack thereof might mean I go for a bigger career change if I decide to move on from here (because every tech company I know locally seems to be the same in those respects).

Having said that I have the advantage of being near the office, a 15 minute walk² through a relatively nice city (York, the real one in the UK), so I don't have to factor a long commute into my likes/dislikes.

[1] I think I'm sometimes seen as difficult for avoiding phone and video calls as I really don't find them comfortable: unless it is a group thing or a situation that benefits from screen sharing either come talk to be _really_ in person or send IMs/emails.

[2] Or a 10 minute jog when running late, or much longer if I take a more scenic route

It's really telling how those of us in Europe have much different opinions than those of us in America. The office was horrible back there, here I enjoy going in tuesday-thursday.

For me it is less about distance from home/commute, but isolation/distractions.

It is easy to get distracted and unless I have an office where I can __close a door__, I want to work from home (I live alone). I'd prefer the office. I don't need isolation all the time. But when I do, it is critical or I'm not getting any work done. It is already difficult enough with Slack and everything pinging me all the time, despite trying to minimize notifications I can receive (I'm religious about this). People @channel instead of @here, so even muted channels ping me. Every app has poor notifications that are "get a billion pings", "in theory this work, in practice you get the same", and "no notifications." (seriously, how is this not solved?) I can't do the latter or my boss gets mad, and the other two just ping me all day. It's false positive overload.

At least in the office I can turn off all my notifications, turn my computer on focus mode, turn my music up, and rely on the fact that if someone really needs me, they'll __knock on my door__ (or have someone do it for them). But many places have open floor plans or cubicles, and these are worse than slack. Don't get me wrong, I love the collaboration and I think being localized does help people work as a team. Whiteboard collaborations are an essential tool when working as a team. But at the same time, there are times where I need to just be left alone to get my work done. The door lets me clearly visually communicate this to my coworkers. So give me an office with a door (don't cheat with a glass room) or send me home. You're paying me to work, right?

Give me a door.

> Its a couple blocks away.

Imagine this not being the case. And I don't mean a different district, but some neighbouring town. Not many people like to live in a city, and it's also not scaleable for a company to have most of its employees living around a specific office. Especially true for EU cities that all have huge satellite regions with cozy villages and small towns.

    The city is so safe he could take the subway on his own if he wanted to.

What city!? Tokyo or Seoul, I could believe it was that safe for children, but continental Europe? Certainly not London.

do you live in europe or are you an american on a working vacation? if the later, it might just be the novelty of it making it interesting or the location of the hotel and office being close

> My company has offices in Europe and I _love_ going to the office over there. Hate it in America. Love it in Europe

I was in US only once for business travel, in large city. Seeing the sea of people during rush hours on the sidewalk and in trains, moving towards dense "downtown" looked like every hollywood movie, in negative way. I like commuting by bicycle in European cities.

I live about 2 miles from my work. The campus is beautiful. The building are gorgeous. The work environment is top notch. Between my house and campus is a nice 15 minute bike ride on paths through forests. It’s quite a nice and easy ride. Or I could drive there in about the same amount of time.

I hate it. I completely refuse to go in. I am working from home until they fire me.

Where in Europe? It's not a big place, but there are some pretty major regional differences, even within countries.

Are offices in Europe open offices like in the US? Because those are a big reason why I prefer to work from home

I went to Europe on a work retreat with all my coworkers last month, ~1/2 of whom are based there, and came to the same conclusion. “Oh, it’s actually just America that is so wildly inhospitable, not being back in the office.”

It sure does feel like most anti-office people do complain about multi hour commutes and being stuck in traffic or whatever. That is very much American issue.

In which city was it? Sounds like a nice place. I live and work in Stockholm and it's similar to what you described.

Europeans or literally anyone else are nicer workplace people.

American Corp culture is toxic af. Money thirst, shameless self promotion, competition etc really make you anxious all the time.

> Its a couple blocks away.

From what? Your home? Hotel?

I saw a Twitter thread about this that I didn’t want to engage in there, but figure I might get more intelligent discussion here. Basically there’s a motif like “we should allow people to work where they’re most comfortable and productive!”, but what about the folks that are most comfortable and productive in an office surrounded by other folks also working on the same product as them?

On one hand I don’t think people who don’t want to work should be forced in, but on the other it seems like a lot of companies are taking this as an opportunity to get rid of offices all together. Just look at recent “who’s hiring’s”: the majority are exclusively remote, leaving folks like me who would prefer to work with others and don’t mind moving no options.

This doesn't seem like a hard problem, if you want to work in an office seek out companies that are working in the office. What's the issue here? Plenty of companies require it and are slowly enforcing it. I don't know where you live but plenty of companies in Boston, which use to be remote, are requiring more people to come in the office now (DataDog, Klaviyo, Chewy, all the finance/insurance companies, DOD contractors, and lots of the satellite big tech offices like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce, etc are requiring it).

Are you upset that more interesting companies/problems to work on are mostly remote teams? Remote work is one of the few hard, real, and sought after benefits people want that a company of any size can provide to stay competitive in the labor market.

As for me, I have no problem working in an office but the commute needs to be less than an hour of walk + subway/bus otherwise it's too much of a negative externality. Maybe there should be more offices where people live and not massively congregated into a single location? You can blame poor planning for that. There's no reason why there can't be more mixed developed neighborhoods.

At large companies with distributed teams, work from office makes no sense. Post pandemic, I started commuting in, only to sit outside or in a hallway on zoom calls, and then eat (excellent) cafeteria food that is bad for my health.

I traded that for a full remote job, and 4 hours for exercising a week. My watch says all my health trends have been markedly improving ever sense.

I wouldn’t mind an in-office job with a strong, 100% local team, but that’s rare these days, especially since I don’t want to move across Silicon Valley or deal with anything longer than a bike commute (and I am not the only one!).

It seems like a very unusual desire to specifically want to work in-person with people on the same project, rather than working in close collaboration with friends/coworkers you get along with. There are many people I've worked with that I absolutely don't want to be in the same room as, and some that made lab-type environments fun.

You don't get to choose with in-office. Everyone's forced to work together. Is there something about working on livestream/groupchat video that you don't find as an acceptable alternative? My office has a dedicated session for that once a week if people want to join, though it's been pretty empty since lockdown lifted.

Oh, most people want people to be able to work the way they work best. Many companies leadership are morally opposed to a remote work environment as they view it as a degradation of their direct power over people, a refutation of how they became successful, impinges on their preferred way of working, and diminishes the stage they can perform on. But this is an argument of passions. On the other hand, once the passions die, what you’re pointing out sets in - and it was setting in before the pandemic. Real estate is expensive, and if you can offload office space to the employee, you improve earning per share materially. In the end this is all that will matter. But it’ll take a while for the dinosaurs in charge to retire enough that enterprising directors of finance can pitch the board successful the end of mass corporate real estate holdings. Forward thinking companies will keep smaller offices and coop work spaces for those that truly feel a deep need to be in the office. The rest will require you to BYOO (bring your own office)

My guess is that established companies (esp. those with existing offices) will require on-site work, new companies without will more likely not... more flexibility for founders and reduced costs if they believe in remote.

That should leave everyone with plenty of options, but on-site + startup combo would have fewer positions and vice-versa remote + established company.

Otoh, over time I could see a profound shift to remote if these new companies were to start replacing old ones and remote worked for them. But there might be a limit where a certain company size favors on-site.

I like working in office and working at home equally. I have a more comfortable setup at home. I have a proper home office. Working from home allows me to do my best work at peace.

Working in office with people gives me a sense of belonging. It also makrs a clear distinction between working and non working hours. But my commute sucks. It's 1.5 hours one way! Moving closer is not an option. I would prefer to go to office on alternate days so I can have the best of both worlds.

Would you like to join my company? They've only been getting stricter on WFH policies. My company absolutely cannot stand WFH for some reason.

In a thread about a large employer forcing its employees to switch back to in-office work, you couldn't pick a worse place to make this point.

> leaving folks like me who would prefer to work with others and don’t mind moving no options.

This reminds me of when Christians in America say they're being persecuted, when of course, they're dominant. I think it would be a good idea to acknowledge that "wanting to work with others in the office" is the norm, not unusual. If this is truly your preference, don't worry, you aren't losing your dominance any time soon.

I think there is a general acceptance in the leadership of most established companies that fully remote isn't ideal. Obviously there will be companies that don't want to spend the money for an office space and there will be employees who seek fully remote, but I don't think that will be the only game in town by any means.

Personally I wouldn't consider a fully remote job.

It's like the paradox of tolerance, right? You can pick the best working environment for yourself, except to the extent that your choice infringes on your coworkers' ability to pick the best working environments for themselves.

Does anyone else feel like this mostly undermines the entire point of "tech" and "the web"?

What the hell is the point of having a hyper connected, super charged by AI world, when ultimately it boils down to having to "go to an office"?

I honestly feel like 95% of tech is smoke and mirrors, the people who own "tech" know this so they end up just asking people to come back to work to help them sell advertisements, which seems like the only way we know how to make money from all this "innovation".

It's really quite mad.

Great point. For at least the last three decades, everything in tech is about "connectivity", "mobility", "cyberspace" and recently "telepresence" and "metaverse". And yet, the solution they use for themselves an 18th century invention: the office building.

it's about control

Google famous for being so particular about having data to justify their decisions, even down to the color of blue in the css.

Do they have data to back this move up? Data that suggests that WFH is less effective?

Or are they just annoyed that their expenditure on office real estate is being wasted?

I think these are data backed decisions. Most big tech hasn'r given the actual data but Meta was at least open that they saw a difference in performance scores of people who work in office vs who work remote, specially the new ones.

This is the same Google that routinely ends up writing off billions of dollars in a product even before launching the first stable version of it, they will not hesitate to sell their real estate if they saw remote work was more effective.

>Data that suggests that WFH is less effective?

If you even have to ask this, you haven't interacted with many normal people working from home. Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids. I bet your normal young dev with small child at home (even with their spouse taking care of the kid) does half as much work as they could have had they been at the office.

Yes. yes. offices have brain drain in form of small talk and whatever, but at least you in a different environment and detached from your home. And yes there are some people who have the luxury of separate home office and if you dont have kids then that could easily be better for you. However we aren't maximizing only you but your team, your department, and ideally whole company.

Just like everyone got a bunch of ultra low interest mortgages & now will never consider relocating, a bunch of employees got work remote jobs at companies & positions that will be much harder to get again.

It's really insane how if I tried to buy the same house I bought 5 years ago my payment would be right under 3x. At 40 it would be almost cheaper for me to retire than to move -- especially from Austin to California.

The big question we should be asking ourselves, particularly in a mostly virtual service economy, is why it is the people that have to move and not the businesses that need the people.

Why do we have a society where social standing is determined by how far away from your mum you have to live to get a job?

Ultimately this will be determined in the marketplace. The best thing a startup can do at present is master remote management. Then it can get good people cheap.

Honestly, I got a job last year in a hybrid office and i love it. We are treated like adults. We can step out if we need to. We can remote in an extra day or come in an extra day if we feel like it. I also love my team and hanging out at our desks was something I didn't realize I missed until I had it again.

Remote is cool. Full time strict office is blah. Hybrid flex is lovely

But when you say hybrid, does that mean people can go to the office if they want or they're controlled and forced to go at least X days?

I recently joined a team that meets in the office once per week on Wednesday. It was nice to go in for the novelty, my office is very nice so it was kind of like going to an expensive hotel for a day. I didn’t feel any less or more productive though. It was good to overhear the insanity of very very junior people and be able to correct them before they try to type it out however.

You’re aware that this is absolutely standard right?

Personally I highly prefer the office. I hate the commute but prefer the office. It’s a great conundrum for me. I guess this is a hot take - but I miss the pre pandemic days when most people were in the office most days.

My takeaway from this experience is to bemoan the construction of US society around cars. If we all lived close to the office and or had quicker / easier transport maybe this would be less of a problem.

For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community. Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”

now.. maybe it's just me, but re-reading that sentence makes my eye note "AND WHO LIVE NEAR" as well as CONSIDER SWITCHING as well as EXCEPTION ONLY.

Is EXCEPTION ONLY limited? how do we know?

what about "how big is LIVE NEAR" as a cohort.

The article is a hot take I want to believe too, but legalistic reading says its "doesn't want" in the sense of "want, not is not permitting"

nobody is being strongarmed, from whats read above. There's getout clauses a-plenty for any authorised manager to 'exception' their way out of this.

Google doesn't want people to leave en mass, or unionise either. Want doesn't drive hard sometimes. The real world intrudes.

It seems the exception process will be required: https://www.inc-aus.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work...

The "exception only" links to further reading for Googlers that got the email.

Depending on the org, most Google employees are already part of a distributed team. This is nothing but making management appear functional and bean counters that manage the buildings feel like their buildings are being used.

Has zero to do with productivity.

Or they’re legitimately seeing the dire condition Google has been finding itself in with the lack of product success and increasing existential threats of LLM’s, the declining health of the open web from which they derive their profits, etc etc, and taking a hard look in the bloat they have in their existing workforce.

If management is heavily signaling they don’t want remote work, believe them. When the layoffs come, the remote workers will be very close to the front of the line to get the axe.

If we are totally honest though, people working in a google office generally have fewer private distractions like porn, taking naps on a sofa, watching Succession, playing with their cat etc. Reading the discussion on Blind is very illuminating on this, like one guy claiming to have frequent sex with his wife during the workday.

> Depending on the org, most Google employees are already part of a distributed team

citation needed

The biggest factor for RTO/Hybrid for most, is that they moved to a lower cost area. I was in South Bay - bough a 70 year old just before pandemic - a small house for a lot of money. I found a huge, value for money house, 1.5 hours away from the south bay, for far less and sold off my south bay one.

There's no way I'm coming back to south bay and pay more in rent for a small apartment than I pay in mortgage. Even hybrid is a pain with commute totaling 3-4 hours on weekdays

From the article:

> The email also reminds [non-remote-designated] employees […] that managers can factor their absences into performance reviews.

Requiring on-site vs remote work is one thing; tying it to performance considerations is another. If an employee is performing well against all other standards and isn’t causing collaboration problems, but has absences against the on-site policy, that should prompt a totally different conversation.

Overall, that note (plus the fact that it was sent in a company-wide memo - recall how huge Google is) seems like it creates gray areas for incompetent managers. Or, for a way to make any manager’s job easier during layoffs.

I wonder how long it takes to go from “those who live near Google offices” to “all employees”. Once 80-90% of employees are back at work regularly it’s not a stretch to believe that those few people who are always remote will be seen as less effective and less connected to their peers going into the office everyday. This is likely one step of many.

> For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community

Definitely sounds like a veiled threat to one's career if they don't choose to be connected to the community

Fully expect most people in the discussion to be pro-remote-work. But does anyone have hard evidence that working from home is as productive as working in the office?

If 'hard evidence' that WFO is superior to WFH were so easy to come by, organisations would be having a far easier time justifying their RTO antics.

Humorous that you're getting downvoted for asking a valid question. It's simple to me - you can emulate remote work in an office by locking yourself in a conf room and never talking to anyone IRL. You can't emulate an office while remote. Working from the office offers more optionality for communication, so there's no downside and only upside vs. remote.

If you simply want to minimize time working, which is an unknown but certainly non-zero amount of employees, it's definitely easier and more fun to do that at home vs. in an office.

There won't be hard evidence for a long time, if ever, on which is better - but the optionality argument makes the decision pretty obvious to me.

It depends (Thanks senior developer!). On the type of work, on the organization. On one extreme you have me: I do 7.5h of focused "alone work" a day. And if I went to my office, none of the people I work with would be there, as they'd be in offices in other countries. We aren't a fast paced startup and our office has individual closed-door offices for each employee. So basically IF I went to the office I'd be sitting in a room by myself doing 7.5h of programming and 30 minutes of video calls to other countries. It's not going to be more productive there. Scientific studies, as always, will be hard to find.

On the other extreme you have other people with other tasks and in other kinds of organizations.

In reality though the biggest productivity boost for me is the lack of commute. Because let's face it, I'm not going to commute an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening AND be eight hours ass-in-seat. 10-11 hours away from home. It didn't happen when I did work in an office and it certainly won't happen now. The solution most did I guess was being creative and doing emails or calls while commuting. I had to pick up kids at school or kindergarten at say 3-4PM regardless of whether or not that school was an hour away or two minutes. That meant I often left the office at 2-3pm if commuting. Now I can do kid pickups, do 8h of ass-in-seat all in 8h per day (which is basically the total time of one day that I'm willing to allocate to my employer).

Me personally, I couldn't give the slightest hint of a shit about of it truly is more productive or not, I just know that I personally will never in my life step foot in an office ever again

Google seems to have always said this externally, but every time I met with Google pre-COVID, all their engineers dialed in from home. Managers in the office. I would even travel to their office. Engineers? Nope. At home.

Team by team

This is the genius plan by Sundar Pichai, who prefers to blame WFH than himself for Google's failures.

Soon many companies will not renew their lease, and there won’t be much office to return to. Those that invested a lot in their office space will try to make the best use of it, but in the long run it’s more profitable to downsize offices.

Selfishly, I love remote work. But I also think I’m not quite as productive or engaged when I’m fully remote. Still pretty productive, but not quite. (Compared to a sane in-person company without copious interruptions)

That’s a fine tradeoff for me. I’d much rather get the same salary, work from home, and just be marginally less productive.

I must be a useless worker because I really can't relate to everyone praising the productivity when WFH. My productivity is almost non-existent unless I have a super interesting task.

Seriously, I can't be the only one who is just slacking off when working from home.

It sounds like there is a mix and the most vocal ones are those whose preferred method of working is being threatened. :)

I slack off in office for a similar duration that I do at home. They might be different but the "productivity" is identical if not favoured at home because I'm more comfortable. I'll spend time configuring my nvim or reading some interesting but unrelated technical article/book or getting snacks or HN or reddit in the office. At home I might just take a nap or shower or go to the gym (or do one of the aforementioned things).

People operate differently but for me I'm only going to produce as much value as I believe I'm getting paid for. Not more and not less. I see the request to go back to office as managers believing they can act as a coercive force which might work on some (perhaps many) people.

I live about 1:30 hour from my office. Before covid I went in 2x per week. Since covid I've been to the office about 6 times in 3 years. Never going back to a regular commute. Never. Open floor plan is terrible for thought-work (programming). Having my own home office and regaining several hours per week is priceless. I would gladly take a 50% pay cut if they required me to return to commute.

Reading a lot of the comments, I think I must be an outlier.

I've got a nice study at home, with a really good PC setup, rock solid gigabit internet, very nice office chair, all the coffee in the world.

But I still really like going into the office as much as possible. I love the cycle in, the coffees with colleagues, being able to just "chat" without scheduling a call, getting lunch out with people.

Same. I bike to the office everyday despite having a remote job. Getting outside feels great

Is there some kind of standards-document available for what makes an office comfortable? I love the collaboration of office work but I also am extremely uncomfortable with bright light, a lack of good food, and a computer setup dictated by others. It’s not enough of a distraction to want to walk away from the job — the work is great and the engineers are smart — but there’s this general lack of care and attention to detail in my workplace that makes it far inferior to my own home.

A set of core values to share with my office manager would be great. Another idea would be to find some kind of training for them in how to turn an impersonal office space into a cared-for home-from-home.

Something like Patty McCord’s / Netflix’s employee handbook, but for lighting, desks, colors, and espresso machines. It sounds so ridiculously trivial and entitled, but in business we are always trying to stay ahead of our competitors yet when it comes to the workplace the competition is gorgoiler’s home, which is stiff competition indeed.

That couldn't really exist as people are different and want different things. Using just the "espress machines" category, my partner hates light roasted third wave coffee and I like it. The only way to win is to have both a small roasters beans and Starbucks or equivalent beans.

I don't think so? I feel like that's the sort of thing that'd make the front page here, and I haven't seen something like it in a decade. It's a good idea tho!

Is there any research about why companies might want people to come back to the office?

It seems just another masked round of layoffs. If the remote worker is important, an exception will be made and nothing will change; if the remote worker is redundant, it's very regrettable that they are unable to adjust to the shifting realities of the workplace.

Cool, I don't want to work at Google anymore.

They don't care

Wow, you're quite lucky, because Google doesn't want you working for them either.

I'm in a tough spot with this new RTO guidelines (similar ones issues by my company). I live ~2-2.5 hours from my assigned office due to two-body problem. I travel to the office once/twice a week, but thats the max I can do - 3 days per week is impossible. I'm more productive WFH, however I utilize my office time to meet as many people in-person I can. However recently that has reduced to mostly VC time in-office as most of my team are from a different coast altogether. To me, going forward Remote works best, but these blanket rules really doesn't work for all edge cases like mine.

If your entire team is in the office, that can be much more productive than remote work. But how many companies will be able to get even 50% of a team in the same office at once, even if they force everyone to RTO? Companies already moved away from that when they started setting up offices around the world and allowed people to effectively work from anywhere. If 25% of your team is in an office in Belgium, 25% in San Francisco, 25% in Mumbai, 25% remote... is it the 25% remote that is really holding back workplace synergy?

I work remote for a startup.

I have a 15 minute walk to my kids' school - not a bad one either, a 30 second walk to the bus stop, a 3 minute walk to the grocery store, a 7 minute walk to the fancy grocery store near the hardware store. My religious group is a 2.5 mile drive/bike. We are approximately one hour from grandparents.

I have an old house with a small backyard and gardens, a neighborhood stuffed with kids and a community that values kids. In addition, I can save money.

Absolutely none of that is possible for my (quite decent) income in Seattle (closest tech hub).

To move me to a par Seattle house with par livability, par neighborhood, and par mortgage cost (but further away from grandparents), would be on the order of a +1M outlay - maybe +750K (but I haven't checked recently). (Wedgewood, Ravenna, or Magnolia neighborhoods, if you're curious).

In short: moving to a tech hub would be a radical downgrade to the quality of life.

As another posted:

> ... There is one side that is unambiguously pro-family, pro-environment, pro-church involvement, pro-bowling league, pro-parents in kids lives, pro-marriage, pro-divorced child raising. ...

concur.

I would also note, pointedly, that if you're a bigshot in a major tech company in a metro hub, you should be having very serious discussions with the city government about workforce housing for the > 30 set. It is actually possible to have a good metro life - if the city is designed for it.

A workplace is not a community. Google alumni don't get together at barbecues and reminisce about the good of days. They're not raising houses together for Habitat on the weekends. It's unethical dark manipulation all the way down the line.

ex-Googlers should class-action sue for emotional damages experienced by losing their only community when they are laid off

Let's see how valuable community is, then, for Google when it becomes a liability.

I honestly don't know if I could work another job where I can't work remotely. If circumstances were dire and I just had no choice, I guess I'd bite the bullet, but I would demand a -lot- more money. Even if you live close, it can take up to an hour to get to my office downtown, that's 2 hours a day that I'm sitting in traffic and not getting paid for...it actually costs me time and money. Time that is impossible to get back.

I've made countless friends over the years from office work, met one of my best friends working in an office and made a lot of contacts that have helped my career; but I'm not in my 20s anymore, barely clinging to my 30s, the office environment is mostly useless to me now.

The main drivers I see behind this is to save commercial real estate investments. Productivity can't be dropping much, if at all, if companies are still making record profits while cutting back on their workforce. I can understand wanting to meet up for a big collaboration, but after that you can go back to remote and then meet up again, that doesn't require a 5-day work week in the office.

Are they going to provide a pay raise for the lost time commuting or do they just expect their employees to take a quality of life hit without recompense?

Maybe they should focus on launching ANY successful product since 2009?!

I'm at least 2x as productive remotely than in the office. Even if commuting didn't waste my time for no reason and I'd like to hang out with people at the office I don't think it would be a good idea.

Wat? 2x? You can lock yourself in a conf room in the office and...it'll be effectively the same as if you were remote, right? I don't see the reasoning

It seems like the most likely explanation for this is that it's a "soft layoff"; rather than endure the PR and morale hit of a real layoff, let them quit. Plus, even if remote work is not a within-worker disadvantage versus office work, management may nonetheless estimate that people willing to come in to the office are more attached to their jobs.

Or as it is said: the purpose of a system is what it does. If the primary effects are likely distributional via who remains a Google employee, then we can infer the goal of the decision.

There are a ton of dueling anecdotes in these comments. Is there any actual data on remote work productivity?

To me the dominant fact is that COVID happened and work seemed to continue just fine. This strongly implies to me that remote work is not a major productivity drain. But I realize there are various counterarguments (e.g. it could not have been sustained, because junior employees can't onboard successfully remotely). I don't buy them personally but I only have anecdotes, which is all anyone seems to have.

>Is there any actual data on remote work productivity?

How would you even benchmark this in software world?

Companies, teams, products or even months differ strongly

I did a silly little exercise the other day, pitting my company's official Corporate Values against the non-negotiable RTO policy they forced into effect a couple months ago:

Megacorp's recent mandatory return-to-office (RTO) policy, when evaluated against its stated corporate values, raises several potential points of conflict.

Integrity: The company's value of integrity may be questioned if the policy is perceived as being imposed without transparency or clear rationale. If the decision-making process was opaque and unaccountable, it could undermine trust and the sense of fairness.

Innovation: A mandatory RTO policy could be seen as inconsistent with the value of innovation. Innovation often involves embracing change, adapting to new circumstances, and leveraging new tools and methods – remote work included. Thus, reverting to traditional office work may be seen as regressive.

Customer-first mindset: If the RTO policy adversely affects employee morale, productivity or retention, there might be indirect negative impacts on customer service and satisfaction.

Entrepreneurial thought and action: Entrepreneurship often entails autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to work independently. A top-down policy mandating return to the office might be seen as limiting these aspects, potentially contradicting this corporate value.

Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion: A mandatory RTO policy could disproportionately impact employees who have caregiving responsibilities, health concerns, or other personal circumstances that make remote work more feasible and attractive. This could lead to concerns about inclusivity and equity.

Collaboration: While collaboration can indeed be enhanced by in-person interaction, modern digital tools also enable effective remote collaboration. Thus, enforcing a return to the office might be seen as a narrow interpretation of this value.

Competitive Spirit: If other companies are offering flexible or remote work arrangements, a mandatory RTO policy might affect Megacorp's ability to attract and retain top talent, impacting its competitiveness.

Execution: Depending on the details of the RTO policy, it could potentially disrupt work schedules and productivity, thus affecting the company's capacity for effective execution.

one thing that i feel will come to a head is that there are many reasonable accommodations for wfh (family issues, health, flexibility, a11y) which i support, but that there is a growing resentment and classism associated with wfh.

i love that people can wfh 100% and spend time in their _favourite_ place and raise their kids and see their family and do whatever they want, but it's quite possibly the most privileged position to be in globally. i wish that people put as much emphasis on their communities and raising wages and transforming their cities as they do about their absolute hatred of offices.

i _support_ wfh, but some of the takes are pretty insufferable. "i want to be there for my kids" yeah so does EVERYONE. most workers cannot do that, must live very far away especially in the bay area, and don't have the resources to have a large enough space to do their job remotely, if they can do so at all. i feel so much sadness and pity for the state of affairs witnessing how privileged tech workers act. feels a lot like urban flight all over again, but this time instead of race, it's just wealth.

i don't know how to support both wfh and a reasonable equitable society like that in europe, at least not with 40k FAANG workers demanding that they live their life how they want, when they want, where they want.

> i love that people can wfh 100% and spend time in their _favourite_ place and raise their kids and see their family and do whatever they want, but it's quite possibly the most privileged position to be in globally. i wish that people put as much emphasis on their communities and raising wages and transforming their cities as they do about their absolute hatred of offices.

Very much agree, WFH is super privileged. Though I'd argue it's actually much easier for me with kids to help transform my city while WFH. Because I have more time to have workers at home, I can lunch out during the day, I can take a couple hours to participate in the local communities during the day (sports club for example) or simply use the local services while still managing a full day of work. With the commute and the office, the only thing I'm able to do is go home as fast as possible to get my kids back from school and go home to be with them.

(oh and that's without counting actually helping the folks who have to be in the workplace, by reducing traffic and decongestioning after work opening hours)

With your view of the world, no one can campaign for any improvement in their conditions if there is someone who has it worse than them.

3 days on site requires you to live close and will explode even more housing costs, driving lower wage people to leave. I just don’t get why companies and government don’t work out something that would benefit the country as a whole in the longer term.

2 days on site would eventually allow for a one night stay in a hotel in the area and focussed 2 days team work.

I can say that I will only start looking in my area in the future and evtl earn less, start to consume less as relocating is no option.

Meanwhile, we were just issued a “please work in the office at least 2 days a week” notice, and everyone just shakes their head and stays home anyway.

... except if the air is bad due to Canadian forest fires (which truly sux right now). NYC today looks like Ottawa a day or two ago. People are cranking up their HEPA filters and digging up masks from 2020/Covid.

On the serious side, companies that will trust their staff and let them work as they wish when it's ok for productivity will be the ones that have the best chance to pull in talent and the largest pool to fish in.

Smaller companies and organizations have an incentive of going remote-only or mostly-remote to save on rent.

Google owns offices. Similarly, Apple may have not demanded workers' presence in office if they haven't built their huge doughnut in Cupertino.

One can only hope that smaller orgs won't brainlessly copycat Google "because it's Google, they're big so they must know what they're doing".

At my company, I recently joined a team that meets in the office once per week. I haven’t been to an office in years. It looks incredibly expensive, two floors in a very nice office building with every bell and whistle you can imagine. I saw maybe 30 people there total (including my once-a-week team). The rent plus the cost of operating the place… I can’t even guess how much money is being wasted. Shareholders would be pissed.

I work remotely for more than 5 years. After my daughter was born, the productivity is a rollercoaster and I needed to modify my working schedule by a lot according her daytime activities. I think, I could provide a more precise output sitting in an office, on the other hand I need to be a very effective and finish the task before she starts to play around me :)

I still don't understand that a company who makes a ton of money from creating tools that fascilitate better remote working is against its own employees doing it.

Remote work is here to stay. Sure, colocated work is too, but trying to put the genie back in the bottle _at a tech company_ is surely a losing battle. Or is the total comp at Google really that good?

We're three years into this experiment and still no productivity studies referenced in any of these threads.

Anecdotes ARE all our anecdata now.

what is missing from remote work is the casual learning when folks are standing in front of you. i miss those exchanges during remote work.

what i do NOT like about working in office is the bloody commute. as a contractor, the simple fix is to charge much more when traveling. we charge by the week, not the day nor the hour, for example, discounts given for monthly stays.

Maybe it's just my work experience, but I've learned nothing more since coming to the office. The majority of conversations that happen near me are between people in their native language which I do not understand. So maybe it could be happening, but if it is, it's not happening for me

Meanwhile I (amazon) am returning to my local office by myself as the rest of my team is in Seattle or California

The next year or three will be weird for office work, but at the end I’m fairly convinced it will look like pre-pandemic (5 days butt in seat, teams colocated, remote is 2nd class citizen)

I'd say age is certainly a factor in this issue. Generation Gap for the 21st century.

My Gen X generation would be used to office work but comfortable with modern technology. Although many times for complex subjects when you get into back and force messages "just call me" would enter my brain.

Millennial would be similar but grew up with more tech. Voice calls on phones would have been replaced by texts when they were young. Last golden age of TV was over so not much of a draw. I'd guess messaging would be more comfort that for all except the oldest audio voice calls. They be more comfortable working remotely but have certainly experience office life.

I'd Gen Z was born into tech never knowing TV and wouldn't care. Face to face in an office wold be alien for some maybe they never even had a job yet. Email would be ancient tech, messaging is basically speech and cryptic at that.

Basically I think there is a clash of culture and it depends on your generation how comfortable you are which results in how efficient of a worker you are.

An office isn’t that alien to anyone who has been to school. It’s essentially a training ground for working in an office.

What percent of Gen Z don't have face to face at school or uni?

Everyone is talking about commute time and noise issues when it comes to going to the office.

No one has mentioned the smell. Some office reek of fear. In other you can smell stress. When it rains and it's hot, there a diffuse sense of sweat from all the people swetting inside the office.

Yet in other ones, usually the poorly built ones, there's a strong sense of plastic. The smell of the building is usually a constant background smell. Brick and mortar buildings smell much better than a glassy skyscraper with constant climatization.

Is no one bothered by that? Usually home, or the local park, smell much better. I prefer to work in public parks rather than office.for exactly that reason.

Undoubtedly there are certain roles that require on-site physical presence.

I doubt that's the case for most roles at Google.

"Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community."

Why and how?

So you move away from your parents house and you stop being connected to them?

In the long run, I look forward to people and companies sorting themselves to their respective camps of "remote" vs "non-remote". Economics will prove which one works better.

What I don't get in all this is the at the beginning of the pandemic, HR, management etc made it very very clear that this was all a temporary situation and remote work would be allowed (enforced) for the short duration of the pandemic and then everybody would be expected to return to the office. I'm sure everyone was given a letter to that effect by HR. What is now going on with this "surprised Pikachu face" where everybody thinks that they can just stay remote for all time? It's ridiculous.

If you decided to sell your house or give up your rental in a good (perhaps expensive) location in the city near your place of work for a "better life" outside the city in new accommodation, well under the knowledge that after the pandemic offices might very well return to work and are now complaining about things like commute and quality of life is frankly laughable. You took a hell of a risk doing that and it's now not paying off.

The thing about being in an office is it's not about you, it's not about what you want and how your life is better being away from the office. It's about what you bring to everybody else, what you bring to a team of people more junior than yourself and what you can do to help other people. It's extremely hard to find new talent in a junior team working remotely - in fact I'd say it's almost impossible.

Pulling up the ladder behind you now that you've got yours and a comfortable life outside the office is frankly selfish. I can see that managers often get the blame here with comments like "they just need people to manage in the same building" I think that's very unfair because actually what they are trying to do is to manage a team of all skill levels and seniorities and by having a remote, or even semi remote, workforce that job is made much more difficult. Covid started about 3 years ago so anyone with less than 3 years of professional experience has probably never ever seen a real working office, just remember that.

It's worker fighting for more right. I don't see the problem there. I does not mean that it is "right", or good for the company, for the team or "morally good".

In an ideal world we should all work for "the greater good", but this is just a job. Trying to get more out of your labor is fine. Company always try to squeeze as much as possible out of their worker, why should it be wrong to do the same ? It is a business relationship.

Does anyone besides FAAM-sized entities care what Google thinks or does?

There is a very real reason disruption matters. Can Google be disrupted? Absolutely. However, will they? I believe so. But not by playing by the same rules.

It's actually to their benefit to allow fully remote because if you force me to live in the bay area you need to pay me 30%+ more to pay the bank for my mortgage or my landlord.

I don’t get the vehemence on these threads. If you don’t like it, work for someone else. There is and always has been massive diversity in tech work arrangements. I’ve met engineers who have been remote-only since the 80s. Most large companies will relax their policies if you’re a good producer or have a trusting manager, long before Covid. And when I look at job openings, the vast majority still list “remote” for engineers and technical roles.

It’s painful to see the most entitled industry in the world angry that they have to switch companies sometimes…

This is a good thing. It will force some to venture out on their own where they will learn to stand on their own two feet. Or it will hold employees accountable to the shareholders (owners of the company) to provide a collaborative, in-person, company culture which ultimately enhances productivity and efficiency.

In short, Grow Up! (a message from a tech worker who has rarely worked from home and has reaped the benefits of in office work throughout the pandemic)

Absolute nonsense.

First off, employees aren't directly accountable to shareholders. Nor should they be. Company boards are.

Secondly, how about providing a collaborative, remote company culture which enhances productivity and efficency? Which also widens the global hiring pool and doesn't discriminate against those who can't travel for hours a day. For tech companies, forcing their workers in to metal tubes and high-rises for hours a day will never be as purvasive as it is now, and I hope it stays that way.

(A message from a tech worker who performs great at his remote job for the last 8 years and has reaped the benefits of remote work before, during and after the pandemic)

>Or it will hold employees accountable to the shareholders (owners of the company)

I own stock in my company, I don't want to go back to office. if you really care about coddling shareholders I suppose you're also in favor wage suppression, anti-union activity, corporate job cuts, and all the other anti-worker crap management & owners throw down. in short, grow up & realize a mindset like yours just holds the people who actually get stuff done back

if companies want people back in the office they should be required to start compensating for commutes. travel time, gas / electric for vehicles, etc. I sincerely do not give a damn about "productivity" or any other corporate BS from management when they can't even put their money where their mouth is

They already were. Before the pandemic, the compensation for commute was part of the salary. And you were expected to come to the office every day.

It was your choice to move 2 hours away from the office instead of having 15min commute.

Hopefully real estate prices will go down now that rich tech workers have to move back to the tech centers.

Could it be that all these complainers about going back to work don't want to lose out on their 2nd job?

https://www.businessinsider.com/over-two-thirds-us-remote-wo...

if a company needs you at the office then they should pay for your travel as a minimum.

I'm cool with remote peoples travel being paid for if I get the same money towards my mortgage when I can walk in.

well of course they don't want you to work from home, they want to be able to look over your shoulder, making sure you don't leak any secrets ;)

"Going forward" does not mean not going in circles.

corporations are the totalitarian regimes of humanity.

Dead horse. Please stop kicking me...

Strike or Quit

This whole thing reminds me of that letter that gets passed around from time to time online written by one Jourdon Anderson to his former white male American slaver Colonel P. H. Anderson.

I had to look it up to find the postscript which I think is very precient today:

"P.S.— Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me."

The compromise is simple but nobody wants to say it, only single people who live alone should be allowed to work from home.

People with kids or spouses, or those with roommates, should not be allowed to work from home because many in that situation (I’ve learned) do very little work and others have to take up the slack.

LOL.

"Hey, so I see you're living with other human beings. I'm afraid remote work isn't open to you."

"Oh, ok that seems fair. As a result of the fact that I can't afford a home all to myself, I will absolutely commute for 2 hours a day to come to an office filled with other parents and caregivers."

Nobody's saying it because it's nuts dude.

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