The back-to-office backfire: Companies ending WFH perks lose out on top talent
businessinsider.com
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If offices, schools/nurseries and housing are all within a 20mn cycle radius the question of remote or in-office work becomes different
I'm lying there detecting the foul odour of my neighbours diet wafting through the overflow hole in the bath and basin!
At least my supplements are improving my olfactory bulb, who would have thought being on a mains water supply is a low level neighbourly germ warfare zone.
No wonder the water companies tell us to spend no more than 4mins in the shower!
You have a plumbing problem - both the drain and the overflow should be protected by the trap, preventing intrusion of sewer gases and other odors.
I can watch the water in the toilet rising and then receding when the basin and sink gurgle.
I also would not put anything past the US and UK military around here.
Basically, the sewer line should be vented to air on top of the building somewhere, or in some cases air could be let in via an air admittance valve. This should prevent the creation of a vacuum that would cause gurgling or odors.
I prefer my water cooler chat to be with my family, not random coworkers.
Therefore, you're just traded the time for money.
WFH solves both problems at once. AKA, it increases efficiency of the entire system.
Having a quick chat when your kids get back from school, taking a 10 min break with your family, spending 15min cooking a fresh lunch instead of waiting in line at the restaurant etc.
Of course not everyone wants that proximity, but if you do that's a big deal.
Even if a close cycling trip, that's still a burden most don't want to deal with anymore. Just think about cycling in a heat wave or thunderstorm (they're common where I live and dense enough to where being outside for just a second is the equivalent to jumping in a lake)
It is a little nicer from an efficiency standpoint to have more experienced workers around to train the new ones, but that doesn't change the fact that those experienced workers are now quite mobile and can get a new job with little effort. When my old company went to hybrid we started immediately losing the best talent. It was a trickle at first and then a dam bursting. They're finally accepting remote-only because they don't have a choice. Their engineering staff went from an average of 8+ years of service to like maybe 3, and that has huge inefficiency losses.
Also, most of us change work more often than where we live (wasn't true for me in the past but should be from now on, and I think I was an outlier).
Another point - moving kids older then say 6 between schools/locations is pretty harsh on them too. For every single one that thrives with such dramatic changes and finds new friends easily there are tens who struggle.
But it's not only that. Kids need more than just being transported, fed and put to bed. You need to rush home to cook, do chores because you didn't have time to pick up the mess in the morning, take care of them. Then once they are asleep, more chores, and then your free time starts at 9-10pm, until you crash.
Being at home, especially flex time, nothing prevents you from doing laundry, and because you eat at home, you can do a bit more dishes after lunch, start cooking something for supper, etc. It alleviates my routine a lot and I also work more time with less stress.
You'd think for once the money people would think about the money, not the method.
I can't choose when Janet or John taps me on the shoulder whilst I'm in the middle of something important.
I take breaks when in the office too, I just can't spend that 5 mins putting the washing on. Usually I just look out of the window.
Edit to add: Whether I'm at an office or at home, I go on at least one 20 to 30 minute walk and ideally two or three each day. I've been doing that for over a decade. I have no qualms saying that in public. Any employer or manager who sees this as a negative habit because I'm doing it while I'm "on the clock" is not one I have any interest in working for, and I'm very happy if they'll filter themselves out of my set of prospective employers.
If you do computer work, it's important to move your legs and extend your gaze into the distance, often. What you're advocating here and are "startled" that it's "controversial" is just strictly unhealthy. Don't kill yourself for a job. There are many many employers who won't require it of you, because they know that happy healthy employees are more creative and more productive than unhealthy burned out zombies.
If I do laundry and quick groceries in my worktime it's a lot less of an issue if I have to log in to quickly flag an error outside my worktime. Balance is still needed, but that's a world of difference when flexibility goes both ways.
(inconsiderate workers are an issue however you turn it)
What if they are at home?
Because even with Star Trek teleport WFH means do not need to dress up accordingly to some common social dress code, enough for traveling outside depending on the season and so on.
I WFH in my underwire in a dedicated, locked, room at my own home in my own environment. So the problem is ALSO the office, not just the commute. The problem is the absurdity of keeping up models that was needed in the past, but have no reason today for most, they are needed only by some giant capital who profit pasturing humans like cows.
This is the problem: a society not centered on actual tech levels and for the people instead of for exploiting the most for the interests of a very little cohort.
I don’t want to cycle 20 minutes when it’s 105F outside (today), or 30F outside (February). Frankly it could be a 5 minute cycle and it’s not going to happen in those temperatures.
Secondly, when I get there, I don’t want to sit in an open plan hell hole listening to other people on video calls talking about things which are irrelevant to me because there aren’t enough meeting rooms with AV equipment.
I like the office more than most of my coworkers like the office. And I hate the office.
Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?
Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours. Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
1) add an 'r' at the end and pronounce it in your head (looser, loser)
2) convert to past tense (loosed, lost)
not lose gose
I think one thing people always misunderstand it: WFH doesn't need to mean separating work and home is impossible. Separate room that you can close if you have a house. Or going to a co-working space. Or in my case: Renting a 2-people office with a colleague.
Some of it was on the workers' end (including me). It just becomes so easy when you're in the same physical space at all times.
"My workplace used WFH as an excuse to get more labor out of us outside work hours" is not evidence that WFH is inherently going to lead to that. It's just evidence that your workplace is shitty. It is one anecdote, not actual data that can be used to describe trends.
When COVID hit, and we all switched to WFH, this continued. At one point, we were only working part-time, but were free to work as we liked. Some did a few full days and took the others off, others worked every day, but fewer hours. This worked fine, too, because there was flexibility on both ends. Need to set up a meeting at a time when Jim isn't usually working? See if you can move it earlier / later. Not possible? Jim'll see if he can work later / earlier and adjust some other day.
I think the lesson is that what counts is both sides trying to work together. Of course, if either party tries to abuse the situation, like slacking off day in day out, or always setting up meetings outside regular hours, this falls through because the good will is lost. I work operations, so I sometimes had to drive to a datacenter at five in the morning to replace a switch or whatever. But I also sometimes could clock out at 3 PM to attend to some personal matter because it allowed me to not have to waste time waiting in line or some such, without having to take the afternoon off.
Commutes are long. They also need to happen at specific times. It’s easy to start your day +/- an hour or two when working remotely. It’s not really an option if you’re expected to be on site by a certain time and have home obligations prior to that.
Want to work 6h per week? Live on the strict minimum.
Want everyone to work less. Not happening.
Regaining time spent commuting is a pure gain of time without conceding on throughput.
An argument could be made that if all workers who can converted to remote but also went part time, all kids would truely have parents and environment deadlocks we face would be more half solved.
But here we are still debating which of hybrid, on-site or remote is best for some company cultures, whether the model benefits employers or employees most and how can we make populations and businesses swallow a carbon tax
It could. How did we settle on 40 hours?
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...
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The first demand of organized labor was 10 hours - the 10-hour movement. And they made a concerted effort and were successful, to a certain extent, to obtain the 10-hour day.
By the late 19th century, Hunnicutt says, the workweek begins to shrink to something closer to 60 hours a week for more and more people.
But it took the Great Depression to make 40 hours the norm. Government saw a shorter workweek as a way to fight the massive unemployment crisis by spreading the remaining labor out over more people. That led to a series of laws that eventually enshrined 40 hours as America's workweek in 1940. And it seemed like that trend would keep going. The most respected economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, famously predicted that improving technology and increasing efficiency would deliver a 15-hour workweek by 2030.
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A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.
In France, the official workweek is 35 hours. It was brought in with the same argument: spread the work to more workers. Didn't exactly work out as expected.
Once we solved the production problem it didn't take long to invent new ones.
If his prediction is right we would already be at the 20h week. Not sure why we would suddenly get into sprinting sprinting for the next 7 years to catch up with the productivity gains observed in the last 93y. Efficiencies have many folds increased.
All the California bill will do is guarantee access to lower paid jobs. Not necessarily bad since so many low paid jobs dare to get workers to do 40 + non paid extra time.
Ironically the workers who delivered the bill and those who will vote in its favour all work somewhere between 60 and 80h per week. And will continue to do so if the bill passes.
Today, a lot of productive output goes towards supporting the elderly.
Which people?
It's the ones with all the money and power who actually control this. Don't try to blame this on regular working people.
People who are advertised to, and told that they aren't good enough unless they use <product>. Ads create negative utility by attempting to make people less satisfied with what they were already happy with.
Obviously "not all ads", some ads do useful work of informing the public about a useful product when word-of-mouth isn't working "fast enough". I'm adding this line specifically to pre-empt nitpicker replies.
Most people are very much attached to consumption, it's been a bigger factor that kept the common 40h week than the employers very possible desire to keep workers hustling so much.
Which people? In term of numbers and total impact that would be regular people, more so than those possibly having more leverage on defining what a working week should look like.
In any case the control is over the regular people. If the latter change the other bunch will de facto have to revisit how much they consume, by rough as much.
At minimum you should make up plausible-sounding fake reasons for why you prioritize parrotless applicants over me.
I mean, citation needed. I know that e.g. Japan is having issues with an aging population but they could probably fix that with more immigration if they wanted to. The US certainly could.
This is how a person like Mitt Romney can be both a ruthless private equity capitalist and also an advocate for natalist policies. There is no capitalism vs. socialism binary. Both things are good for a society in different ways for different things at different times.
There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too). That means the economically optimum equilibrium is still to concentrate knowledge into select employees and have them work hard. Imagine that to achieve a certain outcome we can do it with, say, either need X people working Y hours or 10X people working Y/10 hours. Of the two, X people is usually a much better choice for employers because it reduces the per-employee overheads.
People also seem to misjudge their own preferences. Many might say that they'd like shorter days, but when tested they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff. Employees would like to work less hours in principle, but if you offer them more hours + more pay they take that deal.
In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.
If that were true our workday would be something like 6 hours.
>they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff
My paycheck is the same whether I work 40(45) hours per week or 90. I've actually reduced my productivity rather than increased it because there's no point in being more productive as an employee. All that will do is give me more work to do for the same wage.
The answer is that we (I speak as an American) hate lazy people and view anyone not working full time plus as lazy. That's it. There's no additional overhead that magically appeared as productivity went up. It's greed and presenteeism. Work hard so your boss notices you so you can get that sweet, sweet 1% raise and a promotion that entails 200% more work. Why?
Broadly speaking, that isn't correct. In the short term, over maybe a few months, the logic works. But over the longer term money tends to move away from unproductive workers and towards more productive workers. People don't make hiring, firing and pay decisions every day but when they do relative productivity is a consideration. Thinking this way leaves you open to being outcompeted.
Your experience may differ and that's fine. In my experience having worked at numerous businesses from startup to enterprise it's all the same. Hiring budgets are always bigger than retention budgets. 1% raise vs 10%+ salary increase. I know which one I am going to pick.
Everywhere I've worked promotions are handed out by brown nosing. While, yes, you need to have a baseline of skill it's not nearly as much as one might expect. You can hit senior while being a junior if you sniff enough of your boss' farts.
>You’d be surprised how few employees really understand how their work translates to business value
That's really irrelevant in my experience. Sure some places may be different I haven't worked at every single employer. I've done the enterprise, mid-sized, mom and pop, and start up gauntlet both as a contractor and a full-time employee and it's not been much different regardless of the company.
>how things could be done better with the same amount of effort will make one much more upwardly mobile.
I don't care how much better something can be done. I care about a paycheck. I've pushed myself to near burnout for jobs before (plural) and you know what happened? Nothing but more work added to the pile.
So at the end of the day I do the bare minimum required to hit my metrics. The people that put in the hours are surprised when we get the same raise. In some cases, people that do less than me get promoted and then have to figure out why they took on so much more work and responsibility for barely an increase in salary. It's laughable.
Butt-in-seat time, as you put it, is the metric nearly everywhere actually cares about. Status go yellow? Where were you and why were you AFK?
So, sure, I guess you could say that I've only ever worked for clueless management but in my experience all management is clueless. I've never worked anywhere IT or not, nor have I ever known someone personally who has worked anywhere, that management could turn the lights on in the morning without help. That's just what management is. The people who can do the job are doing the job. The people that can't get promoted to management.
The more significant overhead is internal communication. Recently, after coming back from a week-long vacation, I spent an entire day catching up on unread chat messages and e-mails. [1]
In a group of N people where everyone needs to communicate with each other, you will have N(N-1)/2 lines of communication, i.e. communication overheads per person even scale quadratically instead of just linearly (like the things that you mention do). Having a hierarchical org structure alleviates this somewhat by centralizing the flow of communication, but this introduces a different set of inefficiencies which most people around here are intimately familiar with.
I used to work 70% part-time (i.e. 5.6 hours per day) for a while, accepting the trade-off of less money, but more free time. However, as I ascended through the ranks, I ended up going back to full-time because my current position as senior IC involves so much communication work (meetings, mails, workshops, etc.) that I would not be able to do any actual programming if I were still on 70%. And the programming part is what I like the most about the profession, and also where I feel like I produce the most value, so I'm not quitting that.
[1] I opted not to "Mark all as read" because I have learnt over the years that it's actually very valuable to be up-to-date on what people in adjacent teams are up to, even as an IC.
But broadly speaking we in the US view down time as somehow the greatest sin imaginable. Take time off? Better be sick. Don't want to spend 3+ hours of your day in waste? How dare you, you entitled commie!
WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have. I get to lose two hours commute and an hour lunch that wasn't really mine anyway. My work week isn't going to be reduced so the time I have around that is what I can reduce. Given that I see no other way to do that besides working from home. When we work from home we must be diligent to create boundaries. Don't install Slack on your personal phone. Don't put your email on your personal phone. At the end of your workday shut the work machine down and leave it until the start of your workday.
>so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
I don't work on my personal time without additional compensation. If you want that task done on Saturday you can do it yourself. If you want me to do it then you can wait until Monday.
We shouldn't be required to work less. We should get the benefit of our productivity. If you are more productive you get punished by getting more work thrown your way.
>Anyone can find an arrangement where they work less.
Sure, anyone can quit their job. I don't see how that's helpful.
But an important corollary is that you absolutely do not have to be at the tip top of that competition to live a good and successful life. It's a global competition, but there are a lot of slots to be filled out there.
Is it? WFH is great for many reasons but the normalization of WFH is also bringing a lot of pressure for more hours. Some (many?) companies are using those hours you are no longer commuting to do more meetings.
Nobody (at least in Silicon Valley) would do 8am meetings because commutes made that impractical. But if you're sitting at home already.. hey let's meet at 8am.
Everyone had to leave the office at 5 to 5:30 to go sit in traffic. But now you're home already, so let's run this meeting to 6:30 or 7pm. You're not commuting after all, let's be productive with the time.
Citation needed.
> Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours.
It this some plot from employers? "We are forcing you to the office for your own sake so we won't make you work from home on weekends"?
> Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
Is this a serious question? Because I have other more interesting things to do on Saturday.
Someone who works 25% more than you will make 25% more wages and will afford a 25% more expensive apartment, etc.
So long as you’re comfortable living in a suburb with lower desirability, you’ll be fine. But you might get priced out of places where people work more…
In fact, it doesn’t take a law for you to decide to start working less. Plenty of people work part time… You just need to balance how much you work with the affordability of the lifestyle you want to live.
Someone who is at work for 40 hours is not necessarily "working more" than someone who is at work for 30 hours, it just means they are less efficient. If both workers produce the same output, they should be paid the same.
In many cases, it's easy to make a 40 hour job into a 5 hour job with proper planning and automation. But since workers are required to be at the office for 40 hours a week anyway, the work "expands" to fill the time with useless meetings and time-consuming manual processes.
Here's the thing. Right now, it's difficult to work 25% less for only a 25% pay cut, especially when you include other benefits. And that's because people who work less than 40 hours are considered more temporary and less dedicated—because the market of "part-time" job seekers usually is more temporary and less dedicated, as of today.
But I think that's cultural.
I'd like to encourage more people to re-evaluate how they're spending their time. If a certain mass of workers decided they'd prefer to work 30 hours, it would become easier for others to work 30 hours as well. Not entirely unlike how normalizing remote work allows more people to do it.
Bare minimum productivity.
And in my quiet-quit zone, I'm spending at least 20% of that time in the office sifting through roles trying to find the perfect hybrid/remote role.
p.s. the title of this article says "WFH perks" ... that's exactly what's wrong with how the Big Cheese view WFH ... as a perk ... it's not a perk, it's leveraging technology to make your staff more productive with the benefit of a more balanced life ... while, literally, showing mercy on them by not forcing the sardine-commute on them 5 days a week.
Anyway.
Seriously, I can't stand hearing other people talk. I can't stand hearing their keyboards, or their mice clicking, I can't stand to hear people walking around, I don't want them to be able to talk to me abruptly.
Work gets done faster when I'm allowed to focus in my own controlled environment.
https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productiv...
For what it’s worth, I agree with all of your office complaints. Yet, personally, I’m still more productive at the office. I liken this to working out at the gym alone vs. with a personal trainer. Working out alone is like working from home. No one is watching you to keep you accountable. Feeling sleepy? Take a nap! Whereas at work you have to appear productive all the time, similar to how it’s hard to slack off when working out with a trainer. And the easiest way to appear productive is just to be productive.
I'm also very frenetic about focusing (or not), so the ability to work for 10min and then be distracted for another 10min is great for me. That might sound like I'm less productive, but ... my work output is higher than my coworkers and is generally completed earlier.
I can realistically see it being a net loss, because I think a lot of workers aren't in tune with how their minds work relative to focusing on a tast, and a structured environment is perfect for dealing with that.
Personally, I wouldn't really call this "hard data." It's also interesting that the same authors previously found the opposite effect -- https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Barrero-A...
Don't poison the lives of the ethical workers that are productive from home.
This whole productivity thing is so dumb.
They never provide numbers.
Remote work is a new paradigm which needs heavy investment in rewiring the culture of work. Obviously, the burden of proof is on remote work to prove it's utility.
I clearly remember Sonia Lebel, a minister of the provincial government, explaining WFH worked and that the public workers were more productive in that environment.
Here is an article where she is quoted saying WFH employees were at their productivity peek: https://www.journaldequebec.com/2020/08/26/teletravail-des-e...
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The state [New Jersey] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
With WFH, the employees stay at home in their upscale suburb areas that don't need artificial incentives to attract money.
So instead they give a $3m tax credit to a largish company to locate in that area, which brings in X number of employees each day; and those employees will eat lunch nearby, etc. And then stores begin to open around that area because the demand is there. If done right, the government gets way more than $3m worth of redevelopment, and more than $3m in increased incidental tax revenue (sales tax, etc).
If done wrong it's a horrible flop, but they're usually just out tax money they wound't have received anyway. This is why you see it being done so often.
WFH is disrupting this strategy.
Perhaps one other benefit to remote work is states will stop with this "race to the bottom", where big, rich companies pit states against each other for bigger handouts. Remember the whole "Amazon HQ2" fiasco from a couple years back where all these states got totally played by Amazon? With increased remote work an "HQ2" makes even less sense.
Have they heard of the innovator's dillema?
Bueller? Bueller?
But Blackrock et al convinced me that there must be a better way. It's the responsibility of capital holders to employ their capital intelligently, not to hand it off to some faceless corporation and hope it gets invested well.
This means owning shares in companies you understand, and then voting in their annual meetings (this can be done asynchronously).
Capital is power, and deferring all of yours to Larry Fink is a horrible idea, even if you agree with him on most things.
Owners should always, always act like owners.
Everyone should do a minimum amount of due diligence on the companies that they own and that make up their retirement / house purchase / kid's university fund.
If not that, then it's better for most to accumulate capital by paying off their home loan or some other scheme that they understand.
The answer cannot be to hand off all power to a single megacorp that owns a significant chunk of the US economy and whose CEO gets to dictate the entire boardroom agenda for the whole country.
The problem is that most people are too small to have a material impact.
The best the smalls can hope for is to invest in companies that are majority owned and run by owners you agree with.
But I don't see how diffusion is a problem; it's simply decentralization. I think the main problem is disengaged owners who think they can buy-and-forget.
If every owner paid even a modicum of attention (even just skimming the annual report) and every owner voted their opinion, we'd see a much better corporate America after one single year.
It would be nice if there were index funds that promised to vote for socially positive issues on votes. That may be more impactful than social good indices.
Even a small minority of voters who care about an issue and raise a stink about it can swing a big change.
Most shareholders, including rich ones, are happily coasting along on autopilot. If someone with even a single share stands up in an annual meeting and makes a good point, I would pay attention.
The parent comment I replied to originally said that return to office is pushed at regular by a fund (Blackrock) that owns office space as well as shares in companies like say Apple or Google, even if that is a suboptimal choice for Apple and Google.
If there's a bloc of even 5% of ownership arguing against this at an annual meeting, it would be a major improvement in the state of affairs. Corporate America runs the world. We can't just relegate all important decisions to big owners by default - at the very least give them hell!
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/upshot/stocks-pandemic-in...
Would this mean that billionaires would have to manually manage their portfolios themselves? I assume not because they could hire a non-"faceless" firm.
Ultimately, this feels like an objection to BlackRock that would prevent the average person from having a chance but do nothing to stop the problem of large companies and already powerful individuals gaining more power.
If all of middle and upper-middle class America skimmed their annual reports and voted their shares, things would change a lot. Boardrooms right now are full of people that somehow get in and stay in automatically. CEO's tend to dominate proceedings, when really they should dance to the tune set by the board, the composition of which should reflect the shareholders, which for a big corp is probably about half of the USA.
I also don't care to use that power - my only goal is to retire one day by investing in the market as a whole through broad market ETFs. I have no interest in individual companies or how they vote. I, and the majority of other retail investors, are simply interested in financial security. Are we wrong to have that goal? Why do we need to start playing boardroom games that we can't and don't care to win?
Far more reasonable to me is the idea that management wants a communal atmosphere when working on team projects. You can disagree with this, and say it's unnecessary, but I am not sure why we need to generate conspiracy theories about Blackrock's real estate holdings. Silliness.
And likely with the market right now you can’t exit a lease or sell a building without taking massive losses, cause nobody else wants commercial real estate either.
So what I’m saying is, there’s often quite a lot of internal push at these companies to avoid realizing losses/making the COO look like an idiot/etc. It’s not just “blackrock wants them to”, although I’m sure that exists at the government levels etc. There is also broad corporate level resistance to the idea of realizing losses and taking blame for real-estate investments that are now underwater.
Not that anyone in 2019 could have predicted that the nature of the workplace would fundamentally change 6 months later.
I think it's much simpler - remote work can be awesome but needs complete rewiring of corporate culture, especially how we collaborate and communicate. Biggest obstacle to that is the ingrained habits of decision makers, who have worked for decades and find it easier to mandate RTO rather than changing their habits. On the other hand, I see remote being adopted by startups, typically led by young-ish founders who got used to the flexible lifestyle during COVID.
It's the rest of us who are impacted. Most companies don't need or want top talent, just good enough mediocrity that will fall in line, do the work, and not make a stink about it. They don't care if they lose a few percent of top workers as long as they have a steady stream of easier to manage mediocre applicants. It's kinda a filtering process both ways.
Projects and products can fail when key people leave, because the organization no longer knows what it's doing. When the knowledge is gone, new people will have a hard time rediscovering it on their own. But they can have more success with new projects, because it's their project and they understand it.
Experience can often be detrimental as the person may be too biased to see what they are missing.
I have experienced this bias first hand at AWS. Experience can be blinding as it doesn’t let you explore new ideas.
I have more experience in the academia and with volunteer projects than in industry. Based on what I have seen, while talent does exist, it's rare. Success comes mostly from having the right mix of people working on the right project in the right environment. There are far more successful people and successful projects than truly talented people.
If there are ten small dev companies who aren't competing with FANG because the upper end of their salary range is $80k, the ones that force office work will lose out on the top talent within people who're willing to work for that salary to the other small companies who offer WFH, even if none of the companies are discussing the type of "top talent" who are the best of the best in their field.
In my experience quite recently, the smaller non-FAANG technology jobs are in the $100K to $120K range. FAANG jobs, if you can get one, are more in the $150K and up range.
But surely 100-120k is far too small a range even for the US considering the variance of states AND the variance of companies from those doing similar work to FANG for cheaper all the way down to companies that just need a few wordpress devs to create small business websites?
$ 71,280, $ 96,790, $ 127,260, $ 161,480, $ 198,100
Thanks
The WFH became almost a perk, like if you work hard enough and prove yourself, maybe we'd consider it.
Being able to close my laptop, walk down to the beach and meet my friends is not something I will forget easily, nor something I want to trade for living in Madrid or Barcelona for a few peanuts more.
If you do live in London, you will reduce your travel costs but your rent goes up. I don't have figures for this, but I expect it will work out roughly the same.
That is not even taking into account the costs of extended child care,etc.
However, having to travel in to the office at all, even one day a week, would mean I still have to live within travel distance; this is a massive and expensive inconvenience. Not sure quite how to price that in.
If you rejected the offer, and they wanted you, then the location based pay would magically change.
Like most fallacies they sound in the right but they are deprived of true sense.
Your personal cost cannot be a determinant of your compensation. Get into a huge dept or whatever and see whether your employer adjust your comp due to your particularly high must expenses or lunatic lifestyle.
What does make sense is what the market says is true. Even when it isn't. Back then location was a predictor of a delta in compensation and that's exactly because there was no other way than to go to the office, hence be nearby.
Behind the fallacy is simply that they want to pick from the global pool of talent thanks to remote work, and want to use the location facfor to also lower the wage burden as they are at it.
There is a job market, i agree we should all put a stop to the non sense and if all goes well we can also start to ask ourselves why certain individuals are able to move to a limited number of locations in the world, other individuals having about the same profile only able to move to a more limited number of locations, and among those some only able to move to an even more limited number of places.
While political reasons also involved it doesn't make them ethically justifyable. A defence for more remote work and compensation not tied to location of the worker moves the needle towards the more justice direction.
Its trivial for company to understand the relationships with location and pay in given country, when you come to an interview these rules are probably already sort of set in stone.
260 work days in a year X 2 hours daily commute / 16 awake hours in a day = 32 full days per year.
If you add those 10 hours the benefits of WFH become very very real.
Does that estimate also include hours spent commuting or just fares/car expenses?
How can normal people afford this?
The choice people have is to move closer, and pay twice as much for a house of the same quality. So it doesn’t look too bad from that angle either.
Generally though, I think the London commuter isn’t getting a great deal. 40%+ tax, high house price, high commuting costs, long hours door to door, childcare potentially. You need to be earning deep into six figures to feel well off whilst living this lifestyle.
The alternative is to move closer to London, and then you can take the money you've saved on train tickets and spend it on higher rent.
And that only gets you between national rail stations - it doesn't include the underground, or busses, or parking. They don't even guarantee you a seat.
Not saying I believe you should work on site or remotely, just got curious about transit reimbursement rules in the UK.
The cost of lunch in Midtown Manhattan is now $15 to $20. People often say, "why not pack your own lunch" and others remind them they just took NJTransit-->PATH-->Subway1-->Subway2 with standing room only so carrying lunch is impractical.
Different segments of the population have different concerns. For the elderly and frail, it is their joint health and the difficulty of transportation without seating. For some, the $12500 cost is huge. For parents, it can be time with children.
I'd say the cost of commuting FOR ME is losing 40% of 50% of my free time with children. By the time I get home at 7:30pm or 8pm, their bedtime is approaching.
I'm currently on a 2/3 WFH/RTO schedule and it is a nice balance, especially after 20yrs or 5x schedules.
If a business cuts office space by half or eliminates office space completely then that is a saving for the company, end of. Lease, insurance, Energy bills, internet bills, etc.
Framing this in the context of business to business. If my service created a saving for your company then everyone would agree that I could charge more for my service, as I stand to benefit from your saving. Somehow that disolves if the relation involves an HR department.
Failing that, sure, it would be nice if people could actually think the way the founders did, and seek a collective solution. But in a country where large numbers of people absolutely insist on the unrestricted ability to cause mass death, the only possibility is that the Constitution really is a suicide pact.
This is why we have car door locks. Bicycle locks. Metal detectors. ID checks at stores. Unfortunately nothing is perfect.
I once talked with my coworkers about conceal carry. Turned out probably a good 1/8th of the office carried.
As my former firearms instructor put it: "If a bad guy ever schedules a meeting on your calendar to mug you.. you should decline and not show up. Otherwise since bad guys don't usually book ahead, always be prepared."
One of the things we train people is that just because you can carry a firearm doesn't mean you should go places you normally wouldn't. If you consider a place too dangerous to go to normally, having a firearm doesn't change that.
Onsite shooting range? I'm coming in on the weekends as well.
I've been sidestepping opportunities to go to Austin on the grounds that I might be shot trying to commute to the office. Do I also need to factor in that whoever I'm talking to at the office might be carrying a gun?
First of all, active shooters can be found anywhere. Of course someone can go crazy and show up at the workplace with a gun.
Second, it depends on what you mean by common. 80% of active shooter incidents happen at work. However, you probably have less than 0.5% chances of being involved in one. Sucks when you are for sure, but these are pretty good odds.
Finally, avoiding an entire city just for that is dumb. Especially when you have way more risks in NYC or Chicago.
Probability of getting shot is related to how many guns are present. Prior to this thread I just assumed there were no guns in the office, because that's the European prior.
However I'm now thinking of the reaction to rust's no-guns-at-conferences stance where a non-zero number of people thought that was so contentious that they wouldn't go to a conference without their guns.
You say most active shootings happen at the workplace. If true, interesting in combination with the apparent frequency of school shootings.
I mentioned a specific city as I believe there's an association between Texas and revolvers which might skew the odds further.
I didn't give an ultimatum as much as say "I will stop interviewing with other companies and sign your offer now if you amend it to say I don't have to be in the office if I don't want to".
I work there now.
Although I do work for a large famous tech company, I have a sweet setup where I can bike to work (to my desk) in less than 10 minutes in Bay Area weather (which is cooperative probably 340 days a year), we are not working from office 5 days a week, and its somewhat socially acceptable to work limited hours (lets say 10-4:30) in the office.
Working in the office, I am so so so much more aware of all the other projects my team is working on, and the org as a whole. I am able to pick up on so much more. The little conversations, both about work and not are lost when WFH. Obviously many companies never 100% committed to remote work, and some of this could be made up for by different technologies and processes. But in my opinion it will be very very very hard to reach the fidelity and bandwidth of information of in person work.
I think you have a long list of pros and cons here.
A while back I was thinking about what college may look like in 20 year. I was thinking of my experience in a California UC and how useless I found the lectures and but how incredibly helpful I found the office hours and studying with peers. I was thinking a distributed satellite model could be ideal. The lectures or base instruction could be remote, or even AI based, with small "campuses" or even just glorified rooms somewhere (library, strip mall) where small groups of students can meet in groups of 5,10,15 and learn together.
I wonder if something could be done for work as well. If larger corporations could maintain lots of tiny office spaces, near where people want to, or could live and require teams to be co-located. I truly think that if the commute was just a few minutes, and the hours in office were only required to be 6 hours or something, that the working in office would not be a huge burden.
No. Fuck off with your hybrid bullshit.
Also I'm no longer near the people who I actually work with but mindless sales drones instead, barking loudly on the phone all day. I really hate the office now. I go as little as possible even though HR demands we come 2 days a week. But screw them.
I think herein lies the divide between people who find the office valuable vs those who don't (or at least part of it). Back in the pre-pandemic days, I worked for large Megacorp1234, and my team was distributed throughout the country. Most people in my immediate office vicinity were not the people I needed to collaborate with to do my job. We were essentially a remotely operating team, who nevertheless all had to have a butt in cubicle for some reason. Being able to occasionally work from home (each specific instance had to be approved though!) improved productivity dramatically.
Fast-forward to today, and I work for a small company. My team and I work next to one and another in a nice, quiet office space, with breakout rooms with whiteboards for noisy collaboration. Team cohesion is good, and we all actually know each other beyond a profile picture on a computer screen. In this environment (which I'm beginning to learn is quite rare), you simply cannot beat the benefits of in-person collaboration. The office does actually provide a real benefit, and I do actually enjoy coming in. As do my colleagues. We all have the option of working remote, yet most of choose to come in more often than not. However let's not understate that being hybrid is a big part of what makes this whole thing work. Pretty hard to beat the flexibility that provides.
So I guess my point is if businesses want people to come back to the office, they need to provide real tangible benefits to actually coming back. I've worked in an office like yours, and if I still did, my stance on the matter would be the same as yours.
Nope. They put value in fully remote. Boiling the frog wont work.
I worked remotely for years before the pandemic too, so I am not a newbie to remote work who just doesn't get it.
I get value from the office being a good social space, and a good space to focus if I am noticing my self-dicipline drift. There really is some good adhoc discussions that happen in person that just don't occur online as well.
I would never give up WFH though, it is what allows me to handle the whole week in general. Fewer distractions, no commute means more rest, means better thoughts. If I were a perfect worker robot it wouldn't matter where you put me, but I am a human so my needs fluctuate. Having options lets me be where I can work best and be happiest on any given day.
Occasionally work rents out a meeting room for the day and then we can actually get a full days work in where everyone is available and communication flows freely.
Job hunting to see if it's better at the next place but I'm not too hopeful since the last places have been so poor at remote work. Haven't been able to find anything which has an office these days.
Slackers are ruining WFH for everyone but if the company tolerates them slacking off like that it means that that's the company culture and getting stuff done doesn't matter.
I've had the same issue as a junior. Stagnated at a job where the team was WFH and full of slackers who wouldn't respond.
A lot of companies haven't built a system of properly mentoring juniors remotely and accountability where people WFH can also be trusted to do their job and not masquerade at doing work.
Voluntary office work probably helps, but friends of mine who liked being in the office talk about going to work to sit in an empty bullpen and do the same zoom/slack teamwork they'd do at home.
For me, I don't have the experience as I have a job that needs to be on site.
I do not understand it at all. Are you a junior/working on simple one-off tasks with inane deadlines everyday/not in engineering?
n.b. throwaway because I never post.
If "communication flows freely" only when you put everyone in a meeting room, your team needs meetings: why don't you have virtual ones over video chat?
You are lucky if that is really an _option_ for you. Hybrid work usually means that "team" (i.e. the boss) decides which N days a week everyone must come to the office and compliance is not really optional.
Of course, in the client I work for, all the middle-management and above all work from home 100%. It's only the peons and their immediate managers who have to go into the office. It's so blatant I can't believe the upper management can keep a straight face while talking about how great it is to see everyone together while they themselves are remote.
No thanks, I'd rather take contract work or figure out something else.
Most work is done by a tiny minority. This minority will perform well from home or from the office.
The majority will slack off in both places, but less visibly so in the office.
So mandating return to office for the whole company (don't really see a practical way to mandate it for some only) to make bad employees suck slightly less, is of course going to annoy the productive few the most.
Some companies may even like the idea of shedding some of their top talent (who also tend to be paid a lot) if they feel they're still overstaffed from the covid hiring boom.
Source: I'm a hiring manager at a remote company. I've talked to candidates who are leaving their companies because they tried to negotiate 100% remote but their companies are refusing, so they're looking to land at a permanent fully remote position.
Edit: comment above is in the context of tech companies
For large companies, they'll use this as an opportunity to push salaries down.
This happened in banks in London over the 90s and 00s. At each 'crisis' (IR35, LTCM, credit crunch, etc.), they made staff redundant, and reduced new salary offers across the board, you could argue, almost like a cartel.
The back-to-office backfire: Companies ending WFH perks lose out on top talent, who view flexible work as equivalent to an 8% raise.
While I worked at the office, having a sick kid meant I had to call the entire day off, now I can simply keep him at home or go pick him up in 10 minutes and resume my day.
Productivity and stress-wise, WFH is definitely better.
When my old company (paying top of market) started to enforce RTO, I left for another company paying ~twice as much - fully remote.
I only chose the remote work because I would rather be bored at home with my fruit orchard and personal electronics than bored at an office reading CNN with 3 hours on the road. When my directness becomes offensive only due to its direct nature it becomes apparent I have made a grave mistake in choosing a my social circle, and so I would rather work with an awesome team even with a long commute.
Small, innovative startups that don’t care about the corporate bullshit will always use it as a strong lever that FAANG may or may not be willing to pull. I’ve now worked at 2 startups over the past 4 years who were remote-first culture, and probably 80% FAANG salary. Easy decision for me.
I have a flexible, remote job (I have have for 11 years of my 13 year career to date). When I think about the cost it would take to poach me for the exact same job, but non-remote, non-flexible it would be a multiple of 4 or 5 (maybe more). So 400% to 500%.
I suspect it's implied that this is for people who were granted temporary WFH status in the peak of the Pandemic...that said I think 8% is wildly undervaluing WFH
Many people died back then. Traditional manorial system, which was based on serfdom, became less viable. Land owners discovered they have to compete for workers, instead of just exploiting the free serfs. They started to pay them money, which over time launched the market economy.
I would expect that in the long term, this pandemic (combined with low birth rates in most western countries) will also improve our society.
In those quiet times I could accomplish more work than the 8 hours in an open office where every phone or person walking by was a distraction. Management thought I was so good, but the reality is that open offices are so inefficient they cut productivity by 80% and I worked around their inefficiently.
WFH evened the playing field for a while, because others became more efficient but the incompetence of insecure managers is reestablishing their inefficient open offices again.
That's a ticket in the region of £6000 per annum, which is about £10,000 of gross salary. So not doing that commute and working from home is quite a bit of money.
And some anec-data: my former employer, after 3 years of WFH and a couple of non-London offices that they embraced with out-sourcing the work "since we're all remote anyway", has told people to come back to the London office at least 3 days a week.
Almost all of my former colleagues I'm in contact with have told me they're now looking for new jobs with WFH.
Like in Switzerland it's not 42.5h week but actually 47.5h if you include the unpaid lunch. When I tell this to a British/Canadian/American they are kinda surprised.
We sadly let someone walk because while they were SUPER talented, they weren’t working effectively on things that mattered