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Comment by hardware2win | Hacker News Reader

I wouldnt change my job even with 30% increase if they werent offering remote.

If you do not offer remote, then you better be... idk NASA, Microsoft, Apple, Jane Street or some fancy shit or paying way, way more

If a company does not realize that 0% fully remote workforce is significant talent pool disadvantage then Im shocked.

>They’re working with a more complex kind of product. It means a lot more coordination from a lot of different points of view, where previously these workers were permitted to work in silos,” Harrigan said.

Yea, I do wonder how those complex, cross-geo products get built!

Teams across US, EU, Asia - how do they do it??

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This is the same group of people who overhired so much they needed layoffs immediately after. There is no long-term vision here. There is corporate real estate and executive hubris and control. They live in entirely different worlds than most of us.

I think if anything, this shows that CEOs aren't any better at predicting the future than you or I.

Dead reckoning seems to be all they do. Things are great? Let's hire like there's no tomorrow that won't be even better. Things are bad? Let's layoff and cut costs like there's no tomorrow that won't be worse.

Nobody possesses a working crystal ball. Especially not those who think they do.

They don't care about corporate R/E at all.

It's 95% self-preservation by management. Maybe 5% thinking about tax incentives.

Time will tell if shareholders reward or punish companies that force RTO. So far they don't seem to care. But this will play a role in whether this trend continues or reverses.

> They don't care about corporate R/E at all.

Yeah, the meme about an evil conspiracy of corporate CEOs also owning commercial real estate is really, really dumb. Maybe you could theorize that when Andy Jassy and Tim Cook were the only people pushing for RTO, but now more and more companies are doing it, and I assure you that the CEO of (insert random 100-person tech company here) doesn't have deep investments in commercial real estate.

Occam's razor: the simple fact is management thinks that people are more productive when in the office. They may be wrong about that, of course. But if the question is "why is management pushing for RTO," it's simply because they believe their teams will produce more and better output while in the office.

> But if the question is "why is management pushing for RTO," it's simply because they believe their teams will produce more and better output while in the office.

I strongly disagree.

Managers don't care how productive their teams are. They care about keeping their jobs. They care about hiring more people and building an empire and climbing the career ladder.

If your team is more productive working in Hawaii, but you'll lose your job, you're not going to recommend they work from Hawaii. You're going to recommend they be less productive and you keep your job.

The same way if your team doesn't need any more people, you're going to fight to get more people, because you don't care about the company, you care about climbing the ladder.

Of course, they don't see it like this.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

This is like saying developers don't care about the software they work on and intentionally introduce tech debt for the sake of job security. True in some cases, not universally applicable.

I hate to break it to you but people do exactly this in the form of grossly over-engineered solutions with fancy design docs that impress the right people at the right time.

That's why I said "true in some cases"

Though in my 15+ year career as dev and dev manager I've only ever encountered one person who was intentionally building things poorly for job-related reasons. (Even then, that was for a company doing a federal government contract, so arguably building it in a way that encouraged expensive maintenance contracts was good for the business, in a perverse way.)

I've seen a lot of overengineered solutions with fancy design docs but they've always come from a good place, genuinely thinking that the hot new tool X or architecture Y is going to solve all of the problems. I've built some poorly overengineered solutions myself. But even if that road of overengineered solutions leads to hell, it's at least paved with good intentions.

> Though in my 15+ year career as dev and dev manager I've only ever encountered one person who was intentionally building things poorly for job-related reasons.

I agree, I've very rarely seen this done by individuals. However, I've often seen it done by teams.

> thinking that the hot new tool X or architecture Y is going to solve all of the problems

Wanting to use X and Y and finding a way to shoehorn them into usefulness is called "motivated reasoning." Does that look any different from "coming from a good place?" Heck, it could be both motivated reasoning and coming from a good place.

I guess we've had wildly different career paths.

The VAST majority of developers I've worked with couldn't give 2 shits about the business (as they probably shouldn't - the biz doesn't give 2 shits about them).

Most of them don't really care about self preservation, because if you're an IC - it's so much easier to get a job compared to a manager or a VP or an exec.

But most of them just want to build new things and use the hottest framework or drive some overly complex design just for the sake of it. At the same time, there's bugs that actually effect customers that no one is working on, because no one has time for that because they're too busy re-writing something in some new language or framework or whatever...

> Managers don't care how productive their teams are. They care about keeping their jobs

Can you see that the second is a likely consequence of the first?

Dont you mean the other way around? The primary motivation imo is keeping your job. If the team is productive even better no? I am not sure a manager wakes up in the morning thinking about productivity as much as what's gonna get in between them and their job (source: I've been there).

> Managers don't care how productive their teams are. They care about keeping their jobs. They care about hiring more people and building an empire and climbing the career ladder.

All true

> If your team is more productive working in Hawaii, but you'll lose your job, you're not going to recommend they work from Hawaii.

Huh? I don't see why a team being in Hawaii would lead the manager to lose their job. You still need management in a fully remote setting.

> I don't see why a team being in Hawaii would lead the manager to lose their job.

It's just a hypothetical.

In my circle, it seems popular thinking that remote work could lead to less managers.

Time will maybe tell if that's true or false.

> it seems popular thinking that remote work could lead to less managers.

But.... why? A manager's work still stays the same whether their teams are in office or online. Really curious to understand why one would think otherwise.

Are there ETFs that allow easily taking either side of the remote-or-not bet on better, long-term shareholder value?

Teams around the world but also outsourcing. They had absolutely no issue working with people that didn't belong to the company, were less accountable, and couldn't be easily tested before being hired.

But now it's a big issue if I want to avoid traffic jam and work more in a peaceful environment.

I'm in the process of switching jobs, and when I'm offered less than 3 days of WFH, I increase my price but the recruiters still don't understand why. It's like COVID never happened and no one managed to adapt to this "old new thing" (because WFH is as old as the internet).

It’s not about productivity.

This is entirely about the effects office space utilization will have on their balance sheet and the macro economy at large.

You are being told to bail out CRE holdings. That is it.

Do you and everyone else who keeps repeating this really believe that no one in corporate management has ever heard of sunk costs. Plenty of companies are working to downsize their real estate footprint.

Like it or not, for some it’s also just their preference and they happen to have decision making power over it.

Not everything is a conspiracy and some people do actually prefer working from the office.

The problem is being offered that flexibility and then having it taken away, and people are well within their rights to protest that by walking out or putting themselves back on the market.

These same companies were eager to cut pay for people choosing remote work so it follows that they should be prepared to increase pay for bringing people back into the office.

I think everyone is struggling to understand why the push for RTO is so strong. The reasons we're being given make no actual sense and contradict other corporate stances.

The cost of real estate is a possibility that is obvious from the outside, so of course people latch onto that. When you have no information, you speculate.

Among the reasons I've heard is that a lot of younger workers have struggled with remote, on-boarding them has generally been harder, company culture has probably fragmented some, there can be an energy to people getting together physically, etc. You can disagree with some or all of that but it came from the mouth of a senior exec who I think was genuinely trying to figure out how to get back some in-person advantages without forcing a lot of people back to the office on some schedule.

I've heard those reasons as well. The reason I don't believe them is that in the last couple of decades, every place I've worked has done all collaboration and communication online despite everyone being in the same office. So those purported benefits were nonexistent to begin with.

So, at least in my mind, those explanations explain nothing.

How is an empty office that costs the same as a full one any worse on a balance sheet?

May as well just downsize.

you can't just get out of a lease by decided "i dont want to be there"

COVID was only a couple years ago, and many will have 3, 5, 10 year leases. And that assumes they didn't buy and are now paying a mortgage.

> How is an empty office that costs the same as a full one any worse on a balance sheet?

It isn't. The random companies are spending tons of money to bail out Property Owners meme is a nonsensical conspiracy theory some people have decided to latch onto.

How is an asset that costs to do nothing worse than an asset that costs to be productive?

HN readers really struggle with basic financial concepts. A lease or an owned building is an asset that is utilized for income. If it is not being utilized it is now a cost with no return. That is now unneeded cost when analyzing income and investment.

On top of that if owned it is marked down at its value and any real loss in value needs to be marked down as well.

This is the real analysis going on. This is not a conspiracy. This isn’t complicated. It’s really basic accounting. So please think before brushing everyone off.

> You are being told to bail out CRE holdings. That is it.

This is such a ridiculous claim that it's hard to believe without any citation.

I work for unsexy manufacturing company.

I haven't been to the office and we agreed I'm remote first.

If recruiter messages me about "Hot company but onsite", I just ignore it. I honestly don't care about the company. At this point I care about 1-Remote 2-Money.

>I work for unsexy manufacturing company.

In which country?

I had an interview for a SW dev position at a Austrian (Europe, not kangaroos) company that manufactures some high tech shit and they said it's 100% in office because if production workers need to be on the factory floor, then it's only fair that so does everyone else, no exceptions, including the SW devs.

I'm struggling to find companies that offer 100% WFH here. Every single company mandates you in the office at least a few days a week here and why I ask them I get the answer "because Covid is over so we're back to normal now and we're more productive when everyone is in the office".

> they said it's 100% in office because if production workers need to be on the factory floor, then it's only fair that so does everyone else, no exceptions, including the SW devs.

Did you ask them if everyone gets paid the same too, including the owners, and if not, how is that fair?

Classic capitalist bourgeoisie tactic blaming exploited workers against one another.

I'm in US. Remote is considered a part of the package for me.

Why should I care a factory worker or manager needs to be there? I did variety of jobs that required me to be onsite all the time, hence why I switched to computers/programming.

I might be switching to a hybrid model, where I go in for meetings as I will be taking a more of a leadership role. However, if I'm programming office is just not a good place to be, as it is harder for me to focus.

Same. Remote or hybrid is a given for many IT or Dev roles.

Factory, data center, and a few "owner" roles are expected to be on site. Makes sense for these to be on site, and they should have compensation and amenities (e.g. an office, or a nice cube, or whatever) to justify it.

> if production workers need to be on the factory floor, then it's only fair that so does everyone else, no exceptions, including the SW devs.

That's a common culture in Germanic companies. Hey at least everyone is equally miserable.

The company I work for is currently evaluating return to the office five days a week. First thing I did is filed a request for two 4k monitors, “fancy” ergonomic keyboard and mouse (around £400), and an expensive ergonomic chair. Just in case they push back I also got the doctor’s prescription, that I need all that because of health issues, so they won’t be able to force me to work. My negotiation tactic is going to be “I have all that at home already”.

In my experience, “I have all that at home already” has not been a good spot to negotiate from.

Quite the opposite, it's a perfect negotiating spot - you would see if the company gives a fuck fast. Surely, you should be in a position to fire the company, but it's not limited to 4k monitors.

Well, that’s the only spot I have, the other one would be to just start looking for a new job.

This is one of the big problems I’ve noticed as our company has went hybrid. The office environment in terms of equipment is generally much worse than what people had at home. Lots of requests for new monitors, better chairs etc. I think what makes this even worse is that quite a few companies I know transitioned from a private office to a “private” WeWork while they evaluate how many people are going to come in. It’s a significant downgrade in all cases. And you can’t even bring in your own gear because desks are booked and you’re not allowed to leave anything behind at the end of the day. Madness.

The standard argument from now on should be... think of the planet and the massive savings in transportation induced greenhouse gases.

Yep. If you are forcing work-from-office but it's not actually required, I think you should be forced to pay for the carbon footprint.

I tought that idea had legs. Just looked at the price of carbon credits. It's around $ 15.0/tCO2e [0]. And on average a commuting employee emits around 4.96kg of C02.

The price is so low it's clear the market is underpricing the externalities massively. I have to admit, the market is the wrong instrument for this problem.

[0] https://carboncredits.com/how-to-calculate-carbon-credits/ [1] https://www.climatepartner.com/en/news/how-sustainable-commu....

Companies have anticipated this argument. I’m not sure I believe them but apparently working in the office is more environmentally friendly in a lot of cases.

I would love to have that argument with higher-ups. In fact I would love to have them state their facts on public record. Just so historians have a paper trail to follow when they will try to answer the question , "what were they thining?" .

In practice you can't get away with that. It's like trying to argue that it would be a good idea to keep skills in house or objecting to some of the weird HR fads that go around like personality "tests"; you can't win.

They may be acting irrationally but they don't want about it.

The best thing, and probably the only thing, you can do is move to a job that treats you better. Remember though, the old company probably won't miss you because they're not interested in how retention affects performance.

It's best to be dispassionate about it. We're all just "resource" and jobs are just "work".

Disclaimer: I have worked fully remotely since 2016 and wouldn't go back to an office I couldn't cycle to in 30 minutes.

>apparently working in the office is more environmentally friendly in a lot of cases.

I would think you'd need very specific conditions. The office has to be climate-controlled in any case so any extra AC or heat used at home is incremental. (Other utilities etc. at home are probably pretty minor.) But to be a net negative, you probably have to assume you're not driving or you're only driving a short distance.

Open source projects are essentially all built in async, fully remote environments. Many of which have become essential backbones of the industry. So the argument that fully remote work promotes silos or is weak on coordination don't really hold up.

Besides, corporate silos are not a remote work problem. It has existed for as long as corporations themselves. Most big corps are not really building "complex" products but merely reinventing CRUD apps in-house.

I moved out of the bay area in 2020 for family reasons. Before Covid, I was expecting to take something resembling a 75% pay cut because of the move. Covid and increased availability of remote work meant that I got to keep my job with only a 15% pay cut. That was great.

But I'm never going back. No matter what. That 75% pay cut remains a good deal if it is the only available option. Just don't tell my employer I'm willing to take so little.

10000000% this .... vote me down CEO's!

King Kong is out of the bag and you're not getting it back in again.

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