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Comment by klardotsh | Hacker News Reader

You enjoy your 3d/wk RTO, but please don't claim it's a perfect balance. To me more than 1 day a month is unacceptable at this point. Why would I want to go into downtown Seattle to do exactly what I could have done from my house deep out in the sticks of Kitsap County where rent is significantly lower for the space and it's nearly dead silent and - most importantly - I'm largely left tf alone? The only reason is social bonding with coworkers, so a day a month or so for that purpose seems sane, and worth the ferry ride over. More than that is incompetent management trying to own and control me and/or being ineffective at managing distributed/asynchronous teams, barring a few specific industries that require on-site development for some reason or another (embedded on highly-specialized hardware, perhaps).

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> incompetent management trying to own and control me and/or being ineffective at managing distributed/asynchronous teams,

We are looking at the same thing but through different lenses. It is true that most of the current management layers are inept at managing remote workforce effectively. But they are capable of managing an in-office workforce - that's how they got promoted in their positions in the first place (mostly).

Guess what is easier decision for the decision makers - change their own skillset and habits, or force everyone back to office?

So let's say they go full remote for jobs that allow it - why should they hire you, then? Why not hire someone in Vancouver for 80% of your salary, or Mexico for 60%, or Brazil for 40%?

Surprise, companies have been outsourcing for decades and not slowing down, and WFH or not does not change any of that. My company's current headcounts are almost only in India, yet they are asking people to come in 3 days a week.

Right - and this resistance against RTO from a basis “companies are doing it just because of sunk costs” has a logical conclusion companies should increase outsourcing further.

All the reasons companies already don't successfully do that at the scale the RTO fear mongers claim they will: work culture, language barriers, various workplace and taxation laws that are/aren't in their favor, and frankly, experience and expertise. I bring value to a business that's worth paying American wages for, and so do so many folks I've worked with. This isn't to say there's not excellent engineers in other countries - there absolutely are. But (1) the tech industry has been centered on the US for so long that a lot of the top talent in this industry is concentrated here, and (2) the folks in other countries who bring the expertise and experience a senior or staff or beyond engineer in the US does aren't that much cheaper, because they know companies can and will pay high rates for the right talent.

Funny you mention Vancouver, which I used to live in and, talking to tech folks there, it was routinely called the "H1B holding pen" at the time - the place tech companies would hire folks and bring them to work at US wages while awaiting visa paperwork to head down to, say, Redmond or San Francisco. And BC famously has a huge brain drain to WA and CA on account of - you guessed it - salaries, and those folks often never went back to Canada. Back to: the talent concentrated here and demands a certain wage.

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