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Comment by bluefishinit | Hacker News Reader

> Im perfectly fine with 3 days rto like my company and many others adopted which is perfect medium for everyone.

It's not the perfect medium because it requires living in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet. How much does a house for a family of four cost by your office?

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3-days per week seems to fall into the category of a fairly awful daily commute is... still awful. I'd fairly willingly do a day or sometimes two of a two-hour commute each way into my city office (which I sometimes go into for customers) but not more often than that.

2 days would definitely be better for the devs. That's how it works for lots of us even before mandate. So the significant change for lots of the ppl was from 2 days to 3 days ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That's the cost of staying in the company I guess

It does feel as if there's a break point for me between 2 days and 3 days where a lousy commute is tolerable vs. one that's not. But there's also a big what you're used to thing going on.

I understand why 3 days is needed for certain positions. Even for ICs there are senior techleads who have less coding requirement but more design and pm requirements and they need to juggle projects with multiple groups and the same time. For them frequent communication with large groups of people is probably more efficient when it's done in person

Though at larger companies those people are probably pretty scattered around anyway. Not a single person on my (non-development) team is within hundreds of miles of each other.

I was going to say, what about those of us working for globally distributed companies? We should go to an office so we can then use a conference room to Zoom with some people in another office? I don’t see how the office magically creates better collaboration, actually it’s worse.

I wouldn't commute 2 hours to work, even once a month. Too much risk to my personal safety. There's no way I'm driving on a highway with semi-trucks just to do some meetings.

So you live in the city already and don't need to drive on the highway to your office? Or? You don't otherwise drive on the highway to go any place?

I actually don't need to drive into the city for a day event but it still takes me 2 hours to take the train and subway.

I work from home and would never work in an office even with a "normal" commute. Two hours on a regular basis is something else though, I think there's definitely an added risk to a long distance commute that doesn't get talked about enough.

I do work from home but I also go into an office to meet with customers and I otherwise drive on highways on a regular basis. I'm an hour drive into the nearest major city to see a play. If I commuted into my nominal office a few days a week I'm pretty sure my overall risk wouldn't be much increased.

What about people that want to live in HCOL areas and work a few days a week with other talented engineers? Why should their wants not be considered?

When you're remote, you can work wherever you want including HCOL locations. You'll also be able to work with better engineers since you'll be pulling from the global talent pool and not just that within commuting distance of some office.

What you are requesting is the fully remote company, that's a totally different story. I don't see which faang company is transitioning into that. With the faang pay you can choose to stay in sf, or move to other offices, or going remote, or leave for fully remote companies.

The policy is that Remote workers are still remote. Only non remote workers are required return to office.

> What you are requesting is the fully remote company

RTO is a new policy, they could simply have continued to allow employees to work from home.

Yes. As I said in my previous post, remote workers are not required to rto. RTO only applies to non remote workers. Actually remote visits are limited because the offices are kinda full now.

Or are you talking about let everyone going remote? That's transitioning into a fully remote company which is not happening

> Or you talking about let everyone going remote? That's transitioning into a fully remote company which is not happening

This was the state of things before the RTO mandates. The whole company was remote until they started demanding people come in 3 days a week.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...

Remote work from pandemic period is a totally different story. The companies are forced to let people to work remotely because of the covid, not they really want to go fully remote.

My original post was about typical 3 days(hybrid) vs Amazon's 5 days(fully onsite). My stand is that hybrid is fine for certain people and positions if the people think that it's worth it. If you don't like it, that's fine. I never said you have to take non remote positions. I was only commenting on the Amazon's fully onsite issue anyway

> Remote work from pandemic period is a totally different story. The companies are forced to let people to work remotely because of the covid, not they really want to go fully remote.

Amazon's stock hit an all time high during this period. They chose to take that arrangement and modify it, now they have worker discontent (and a lower valuation).

Citation needed on Amazon's stock price and WFH setup. I'd argue it was more because of crazy levels of money printing. As soon as stimmies dried up and the Fed started hiking interest rates, stocks dropped while we were still WFH.

The entire stock market hit an all-time high during this period. Because of $3 trillion from quantitative easing.

>It's not the perfect medium because it requires living in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet.

This applies to the entire United States if everything that could were to go fully remote. Why hire someone for 6 figures in <a US state> when you could hire someone in Brazil to do it for 40% of the salary?

What medium-large company didn't already have teams in low cost of living countries before the pandemic?

And they continued to pay their US based employees more (including employees relocating from cheaper locales) because CEOs believed (whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant) that there was a significant advantage to having them physically collocated with their teams in the US.

Essentially, US workers have spent the last 2 years screaming at CEOs that no, they’re idiots, there is absolutely no benefit to physically collocating employees in the US and they should not have paid them anymore.

Turkeys voting for Christmas.

Because they have tried it and failed. There was this whole massive push for outsourcing to India in the 90s and 00s. Customers hated it, communication suffered, and more problems were created than solved. It’s why there has been a massive on-shoring of things like call centers to LCOL parts of the US.

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