Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay | Hacker News Reader

Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay

fortune.com

164 pointssafaa1993212 comments

Hybrid work is the worst of both worlds. Can't move out of a HCOL and now you have to co-ordinate with your co-workers to reap any "benefits" of being in-office.

What would be really cool is reconceptualizing hybrid work as quarterly retreats, where the company provides housing and other amenities for 1 to 2 weeks every quarter. This gives everyone time to bond and work on harder problems.

I get this wouldn't work as well for those with families because being away for that long is tough, but this would be great for say juniors and seniors with greater flexibility. It also solves some of the other issues, ie I could move to an MCOL and just fly in once a quarter to work together with everyone. The "retreat" aspect of it would also incentivize more people to be there.

On the company side of things, instead of leasing out a building for a long time, they can just rent short term and use the money they are saving to make the retreat more fun and productive.

It makes it bearable to live more cheaply in the suburbs and make the long drive to downtown only a couple times a week. Live in MCOL suburb and work a couple days in HCOL city seems like a fair compromise to me.

Really depends on the area though. In LA for example, you'd have to move 1-2 hours away to get into MCOL or LOCOL.

And that would be perfect if you only have to go in once a week. Many of my coworkers are in that situation and had been commuting 4 hours round trip for years before the pandemic.

That's not an unreasonable commute 1-2 days per week though. I've done it in the past. The Bay Area is probably particularly difficult to get far enough out for housing to be reasonable but many areas are not.

A two hour one way commute is entirely unreasonable at any frequency unless it's on the clock.

I'm close to that if I come into the city for a customer visit at the briefing center. I'm salaried so I'm not sure what "on the clock" means in that context. But I don't do it frequently so it's not my favorite thing but it's manageable.

I have 2 hours round trip every day, 5 days a week. Id take 2 four hour round trips in an instant just because being in the office 5 days a week is absolutely draining all my resources.

I did what you’re doing for three and a half years. I was so depressed I had thoughts of suicide and cried in a fast food parking lot on my lunch break. I’ll never accept a long commute again. It broke me.

I’m all for periodic retreats. I volunteered to do something like this when I was moving about 6 hours from the office. Then the pandemic happened, and about 6 re-orgs, so it no longer makes sense for me to go there.

I agree about the issue with not being able to move, but i'd hardly call some of the many benefits "worst of both worlds". Avoiding the traffic, avoiding crowded offices, avoiding distractions, gaining life time back (no commute), etc - if you like it and have a proper space for it i'd still say it's a net benefit to hybrid WFM.

I'm fully remote atm, but i've also done hybrid. WFM was always a benefit to me personally.

I don't advocate that it's for everyone, ofc. Just saying many of the benefits hold true even if you have to work hybrid.

If someone has to relocate to a HCOL area for a hybrid job, the WFH days are seen by the company as a benefit, but the move to the HCOL area is generally going to be a net loss. It’s not enough of a benefit to make up for the significantly higher housing costs.

I agree and never thought about it this way as im already in a HCOL area (NY). Also In not allowed hybrid where I work, the office is cramped, noisy and hostile to deep work.

I’m HCOL both because of the market (SF Bay Area) and because I love the area. I’d still be here even if I switched professions. In this scenario, getting any wfh days is a win. My previous employer went fully remote and my current one is hybrid. I’ve never relocated for a job, so this aspect simply never occurred to me.

Add on that you need to get housing in that HCOL area that has enough space for an office/workstation

hybrid means, in random order:

- two desk, both underutilized, often equipped with laptops and eventual docking station to economize money, witch means also moving equipment and having less than optimal horsepower or less mobile friendly stuff;

- living in cities or nearby or accepting regular long commute to reach the office, a significant geographical limitation for what?

- works in the office as you work at home, because part of the team is remote, so to avoid cut them out you need to work as if you where at home, and no, wasting money and create infosec nightmares with Meeting Owls and alike does not help.

Long story short I fail to see any benefit in hybrid work for the workers and for the company, I see some "benefit" for some actors, who have many other business in cities/around the city model, but they are outside both a company on it's own and workers interests. Working in the office might offer advantages in certain scenarios, like introducing a new member in a team, where the new can observe the others and learn quicker from this, have an easy mentorship etc. But this is sub-par with hybrid work, and similarly hybrid works means you are still geographically bound much, so well define this model the worst of both world is true for me.

Beside that fully remote means, on company side:

- no offices, they only need to take care about work organization (not harder per se than in the office, but being for many a relatively new thing potentially a bit more challenging, especially for those not accustomed) and arrangement for the home office setup, witch might be a little challenging for NON-IT workers WFH, since operation can count on them nor count on a direct LAN access as needed;

- no offices ancillaries like cleaning services, fire safety, ...

- able to hire workers if not from the entire world (challenging for fiscal reasons) at least from a whole country instead of a small area of a whole country, also being protected by "future developments" of such small area;

on worker side:

- being not geographically bound, so being able to live in nice places, potentially in far better accommodations at a far lower costs;

- having more comfortable work environment and no commuting

- having more competitors, but also more offers, and an easier change for a company to another since the office, the commuting etc does not change.

On the social side:

- WFH means a spread population for those who work from home, witch are a significant slice of the total population, meaning a more spread economy, less big business for big players, more small and medium business for SME

For the negative I've seen so far:

- for companies having workers less keen to accept doing more than they are paid for, just because keeping the job is much more important than monthly payments alone, because hunting for another job means potential need to relocate, family issue since a partner can't relocate so easily and so on

- for workers, specularly, companies can fire easily since new workers need to be trained, but the market is at least a whole nation, and the chance to find skilled workers who do not need much training and are very effective it's high, there are as well less social links in the team who can obstacle firing someone

I fail to see disadvantages for the society except maybe if not enough people can be disciplined enough for WFH, having social issues of a significant slice of WFH population that do not works well simply because they are not interested nor disciplined enough for this model coupled with a slice of population who are still not accustomed to deal with remote workers, like people who feel the need to go to an office instead of call someone on one side, coupled with someone on the other side that do not answer because he/she like async work even if hes/shes works can't be done asynchronously (yes, remote work is not only for devs, it's also from various kind of office works who have no asynchronicity).

YMMV. I prefer hybrid with two days a week in the office.

You can dedicate those days to meetings and conversations and keep the remote days for more heads down work.

And if you can’t make it to the office due to snow or travel, you’re prepared for remote work.

Doesn’t this only work if everyone you need to have meetings with also has the same plan for 2 meeting days per week?

Some hybrid workplaces specify which days you need to attend

Which means you need office space for 100% of the people, but that's only used 40% of the time.

You can get a little clever with GTM coming in on different days than Eng but it's tradeoffs all the way down. (In a value-neutral way)

Well yes, hybrid working isn't generally a way to save office space. It's a way to help workers be more productive and also to give them time to deal with their non-work responsibilities.

witch actually is untenable: the whole history of human social evolution is toward a more efficient use of resources, not "need more stuff to do things more comfy".

WHF means better home usage, since you both rest, eat, etc and work in the same building, while the company needs no buildings, meaning a far simplified real estate:

- homes

- factories

- special buildings (hospitals, army, politics etc)

- sheds

Instead of the various forms of multi-storey buildings, high-rise, towers and so on alongside their incapacity to evolve, very high construction and operational costs etc just to pack more humans in a tight space.

Similarly for workers being at home means better time usage, no need for commuting, ability to do something at home while working, like run the washing machine, pre-loaded, when the Sun start to allow p.v. self-consumption and so on.

WFH means far better usage of time, space, tools. Witch is a natural evolutionary move.

I think one and a half days is the best.

One of those days is the Friday so you get the half day automatically while being sociable.

And I think that's a good thing because you want your team to have sociable relationships it helps with the overall synergy and longevity of the team.

2 of 5 days? Or 2 of 4? If your company went to the 4 day week, would you still prefer 2 days?

Absolument. But these 2 days are close to a lost for me and my team as people start talking about anything and everything for a few hours. I mean it's fun and simple but deep down it's a bit of a lost of time in the end...

I find quarterly retreats worse than hybrid. You lose control of your life, if you have to travel for a week or two every quarter, with the dates set by the employer. I don't mind business travel as such, but I expect to be the one who decides if the trip is worth doing.

My previous employer brought everyone to town for a week with only two days counting g toward the retreat. I really loved the social aspect of it, getting to know people from other states whose role meant I’d never really interacted with them. I found out a guy who I’d thought of as a liability was actually a really great guy. Food and drinks as a team ftw. (We were a ~25 person team; our small size was a major contributing factor.)

Exactly, this can definitely work under the right conditions and unlike the weekly hybrid model, you don't actually have to live 1-2 hours from where you work.

> I get this wouldn't work as well for those with families

Your whole post is a series of contradictions where you hand wave gigantic problems and exaggerate small ones

Such as?

My hybrid work is 2 days a month (one day every two weeks rather) and this allow me to live ~ 480km away from my office (300 miles), on the coast. Basically 3h10 by train+metro, which make the day quite tiring.

Man, two days a month?

If you lived near a major airport with a direct flight, you could live almost anywhere.

I had the reverse of this where I worked in-office all week, but spent the weekend in an entirely different city with my girlfriend. It was never meant to be a long term arrangement as I was staying with my family during the work-week, but it can work. It was a new job and I timed it well as 6 months after I started , COVID hit and everyone went remote.

Flights were in state and I was buying them ahead of time, so I got them for cheaper than an Amtrak ticket.

I prefer a hybrid work model, currently I spend two days per week in the office but it only has to be a half day as long as I'm available for meetings and sharing sessions. This schedule allows me to avoid peak traffic, enhance team relationships, and still enjoy ample time at home with my wife. Prolonged remote work tends to feel isolating and somewhat depressing. Despite the higher cost of living in these areas, businesses often thrive in such locations due to the close proximity to industry resources and collaborative opportunities. It's expensive but beneficial.

Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. I read articles stating that "the majority want hybrid", but what people truly want is freedom to work wherever it suits them best. I've been remote for 15 years, and I've seen people that want the connection an office provides, and others (like me) prefer to never set foot in an office again. Just look around at the other comments and you read differing preferences. And that's cool. Just leave me and others alone and let us work how we prefer.

As far as your quarterly meetings comment is concerned, even that is a variation of hybrid. I worked at a company once that had the quarterly meetups. It worked, but sometimes it was a disruption to a normal routine, especially for some co-workers who flew cross-country. Another company (100% remote company) had the annual weekly retreat which I liked better. You got your face time/watercooler collaboration bullshit/whatever out of the way, then 358 days of peace til the next one.

True, but the quarterly thing doesn't have to be a requirement and the beauty of of is that 3 months is a decent amount of time to plan for who's going and who is no going. I'd leave it to people to decide if they want to attend every quarter, or every 6 months or every year.

I work for a large org with several offices across the country. You can work in a local team (i.e., immediate supervisor is in the office next to you) or in a remote team (i.e., your boss might be in another state, and team distributed amongst three locations). I've done both and am currently in the latter. We run weekly online meetings for the team, plus weekly project specific meetings. Then about every 2 months my boss and his boss fly over for an informal fireside with anyone in the team at my location. This approach seems to work well if not better than the local team approach. In both cases we are hybrid but in my case I have no reason, and thus no pressure, to attend the office more than once a week.

Any minute I'm out of offices is great for me. They've now become this lost soul area with unassigned desks, ridiculous spaces and security measures.

100% agree: hybrid works and short workweeks are made as kind of gifts/bonuses to force people in cities instead of allowing remote work witch have the effect of depopulate congested and unlivable cities to spread toward smaller and less denser areas, witch means a good density for the modern economy of scale for all humans, except for giants who can't enslave people making them spending 100% of their income, no matter how small or big it is, in services.

> Hybrid work is the worst of both worlds.

Best of both world to me.

I really don't want to commute every day, that becomes exhausting. And given how miserable offices are these days (open offices everywhere), I wouldn't get anything done in an open office every day.

I've done 100% remote and while it sounded great on paper, it is a lot easier to built rapport with people if you can see them once in a while. I worked at one remote-only company for a couple years and never met anyone, everyone just tiny boxes on a zoom screen. Never felt I knew anyone.

Going to the office once a week is great. I get to know people personally and while the open office is miserable I don't even pretend to sit down and work on the office day, I stack it with meetings (both formal and informal).

As to the HCOL area it still helps. A commute that would be insane every day becomes a lot more palatable if it's once a week.

Not for me. I love working 2 days in the office and 3 days at home. But mainly for the social aspects. I am more productive WFH.

I have ADHD and am autistic so loud open floor plan offices are a challenge. I'm in the category of people most likely to benefit from remote. Honestly it's been a much bigger challenge trying to collaborate and connect with coworkers in the new world than trying to cope with an office. People often don't perceive you as an actual human if you've only ever been a video square to them. And quick collaboration just doesn't happen anymore, or happens in a much slower and more frustrating way on Slack. Juniors especially struggle and I watch them take many times longer to ramp up than pre-pandemic. I honestly desperately wish my team worked in a room together 2-3 days a week.

I do miss the old "whiteboard brainstorming session" sometimes

Lets figure out how to make that work from home.

Large screen plus Wacom.

We do 3 days in person, 2 days from home. Seems like a good split.

The ideal I think is 2 days in person, 2 days from home.

I hate to be the guy who says "you're holding it wrong", but complaints like this usually indicate that a company is trying to manage their remote work the same way they did in the office, with no adjustments. Some specifics:

> People often don't perceive you as an actual human if you've only ever been a video square to them.

My remote company does regular on-sites and off-sites, which for me strikes a perfect balance between not having to deal with the headaches of an office (mostly commute and open floor plan) while still having time to meet my coworkers face-to-face.

> quick collaboration just doesn't happen anymore, or happens in a much slower and more frustrating way on Slack

Slack's huddle feature is great for the times where you need to quickly drop into collaboration mode with someone. Doing that occasionally and then structuring your work to be more parallel works very well in my experience.

> Juniors especially struggle and I watch them take many times longer to ramp up than pre-pandemic.

This is one that I actually have seen, even in my current org. I think the root of it is that going remote revealed just how much time senior engineers spend mentoring juniors by requiring that that time be scheduled. The most successful junior onboarding I've seen is when people make a conscious effort to schedule in lots of time for mentoring and training and to ensure that there's a space where juniors can get feedback quickly on Slack.

It's not that you need more time than you'd otherwise need, it's that you have to be intentional about creating the learning spaces, which doesn't come naturally to many organizations.

>I think the root of it is that going remote revealed just how much time senior engineers spend mentoring juniors by requiring that that time be scheduled.

This is the big thing I've noticed in general with WFH, I miss those interactions where the junior members of the team ask me a quick question because I happen to be in their area. Those questions never get asked now beacuse they have to make the effort to send a message over chat and there is an extra mental barrier about asking something potentially stupid over text. So many people are more comfortable interrupting me when sitting on a call than they are sending the chat message.

I've also seen it with a new team that the company recently spun up that does work related to my team. The manager wanted to leave the new hires to somewhat figure it out on their own and just be available to provide guidance if they ask for it. Their onboarding and getting up to speed has been super slow because of it.

There's a compelling argument that new hires should be work from office for their first couple of weeks, and that their team should probably spend more time in the office during the new hire's first few weeks too.

That's no reason to throw out hybrid work wholesale, though, and if that's the only thing keeping a workplace from going full remote the full costs and benefits need to be weighed appropriately.

I love WFH, but I admit that it would’ve been really tough as a junior employee learning the ropes. It’s easy to lean over and ask someone a quick question in person and/or learn passively by just seeing how they work. No equivalent that I can see wfh.

This is the most balanced take I’ve seen so far. Great and obvious call.

> their team should probably spend more time in the office during the new hire's first few weeks too

Would this be mandatory? If so, a team member might be inclined to sabotage a new hire.

If someone's intentionally keeping their own team understaffed just to avoid a couple of weeks of coming into the office 3 days a week instead of 2 days a week, I think you have bigger problems than the specific situation.

> People often don't perceive you as an actual human if you've only ever been a video square to them.

I don't have a camera, so I'm just a picture of Uncle Fester. No one I work with (across 3 jobs) has seen me in nearly 5 years.

And?

My boss (middle management) is very staunchly opposed to more than 1 day per week of WFH. She spends about 90% of her time on video calls, so I was always confused by that until she was telling me that when she does WFH she's always distracted by other things which doesn't happen in the office.

Maybe a lot of the WFH opposition is really just managers projecting their own work ethic onto others?

When I work in the office I’m distracted by other things which don’t happen at home

This is why I like to work in the office at work from home days. It's usually just me and one other person in the entire building.

> projecting their own work ethic

Alternately, they're projecting their own home environment, which won't always be the same level of distractions/benefits across different employees life-styles/situations.

"My house is filled with screaming two-year-olds and my commute is five minutes away, so obviously office-work is superior."

In general people struggle to consider how others' experiences might differ from their own.

Which is why it’s just as absurd to say “remote work is superior”. Just don’t try saying that to anyone here.

I support people in working how they want to work.

I'm curious to know what types of interactions happen on that 90% of her time on video calls. If it's one-on-one meetings all day over video call, I can imagine why they might want to have them in the same room with someone as video calls can really drain some people (including me).

A lot of larger companies already have distributed teams though, so even if you are in an office you often can't get everyone into the same room, and you have to do a video call no matter what.

Yes, but we’re talking about one person here. She’s not speaking for all people or organisations. She’s speaking for herself and her own experience.

Yes, we're distributed with 5 locations across town. I had to go to a one hour meeting across town once which chewed up 3 hours of my day after driving and parking and whatnot was factored in. Videoconferencing makes 100% sense for our organisation.

Yeah, that doesn't sound fun. But to some people, that 3-hour trip may be a relief from a home environment they don't enjoy or frankly just grateful to see colleagues in person. I imagine individuals respond to it differently and at different times of their lives and different job roles. If I'm coding, yeah, I'd probably rather work remote. If 90% of my time is having one-on-one meetings with people, I'd probably prefer to do most of those in person, maybe some walk-and-talks.

But again, this all depends on a lot of variables. I think in the past, few people knew what remote work was and now that many of us have tasted it, there are lots of pros/cons to any remote/hybrid/office choice.

Fair point, I guess I was more trying to imagine what the day looks like for someone who has a managerial role. I imagine people coding or doing spreadsheets or designing may often prefer remote because of the increased focus (unless they have domestic distractions), whereas a manager's job seems to be a lot of conversations with people and getting a feel for the group and individual performance and dynamics.

> she's always distracted by other things which doesn't happen in the office

Ah yes, some people will use any excuse to get away from their family/kids.

Before WFH these people were traveling to any meeting or conference they could find.

Working 90 minutes from home, each way…

I remember a coworker that would go to a closed office 5/5 days in middle the covid discouragement + ban (managed to find a way to get access from some manager) just to get away from his wife, his children are grown up (18+).

I was so full of questions those 2 years we worked in the same office but couldn't really ask without it being touchy.

> Maybe a lot of the WFH opposition is really just managers projecting their own work ethic onto others?

That might be. But it more likely they are traditional managers or leaders and don't want to learn how to navigate WFH team members (i.e., work in the 21st Century). It's not as simple as just-add Zoom or just-add Slack.

Thinking WFH is going away is like saying "The Internet... It's just a fad." We've been to this rodeo before. Managers and leaders who are in denial - and unwilling to learn new teicks - aren't worthy of their current role.

There is nothing in the world stupider than driving into the office to get on a video call.

I do it 5 days a week, all year round

Same. Then I email, IM and work in the cloud on my company laptop for the rest of the day...

My boss is opposed to any WFH but he is working 2 days from home. Only managers have the luxury of hybrid in my little world.

Well you don't need to be on video calls if you're in person.

> She spends about 90% of her time on video calls

Doing what? And I ask this not as someone who is a junior, or even mid-level, far above it.

But this legitimately seems like "make-work."

UBI would go a long way to resolving a large class of these problems.

The absurdity of driving into an office, to get on video calls is not a new absurdity or problem, but we already proved its pointless. And yet people stick to it.

Maybe they shouldn't be in charge of people, let alone working.

Remember how excited we were at the start of the pandemic? "Now we get to find out which of those meetings could have been an email" the joke went.

But now it turns out that almost every email exchange degrades into "let's get everybody together and have a quick video chat about this"

Ha ha.

I don't think UBI would help the situation as much as people being bold enough to make decisions on their own without a bunch of useless "consultation"

I manage a team of 12. I am in favor of more WFH.

But when I am in the office, I take full advantage of face to face meetings. I take team members out for coffee to have one on ones.

A lot of business executives fall into the demographic that heavily invests into commercial real estate, which is facing some substantial depreciation. Telling everyone they need to get back to the office would help to keep those prices up. To everyone else, they have no incentive to keep fighting traffic every day (and paying for it) to go to an uncomfortable place full of maybe awful people.

Is that true everywhere or just the USA? As far as I know remote work really only stuck around in the USA.

TBH this sounds like a massive conspiracy theory that somehow gets continiously propagated.

Your average small software company CEO doesn't give a crap while still forcing people to RTO.

all the small companies my friends work for in my neck of the woods stopped leasing office space

Indeed, which is why this real-estate conspiracy is downright bizarre.

And even a larger company I'm familiar with has been looking very hard at lease renewals and has been walking away from a bunch of them. There's a certain lip service to the energy associated with having people back in the office but, in practice, people are being switched to fully remote if they don't come in and offices are being eliminated or swapped out for smaller spaces.

I've never been in USA and I wfh.

The drive to get people back into the office isn't due to any sunk cost on commercial real estate — it's a strategy to prevent workers from working multiple jobs simultaneously.

When did all the CEOs meet to decide this? I missed that one.

There's a large whatsapp group containing hundreds of Silicone Valley CEOs. I imagine they keep up with gossip and coordinate policies in that group.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38583253

Is there any evidence that this is actually happening and going undetected in large enough numbers for it to be rational to allow the possibility to dictate the official remote/not-remote policy of large companies? This feels more like a meme that circulates among management/executive types than it does an actual problem in the real world.

The thing about executives is... they don't need evidence, they can operate on feelings. And there's certanly enough of overemployed people around to have managers convinced its a problem.

It has a pretty active subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/

While this is happening, I don't think it's happening at a large enough scale to matter or long enough timespan. Most people burn out after a year or so of working multiple jobs. It's posted all the time in /overemployed.

That's all well and good until you're the second job people are working.

And then you notice that they don't produce any work and fire them. What's so hard about that?

If you didn't notice before, you won't notice now. If they were producing enough work, why would you want them to leave?

It's amazing how many people in this thread are saying "it's not X, it's this one single issue Y."

This is a complex, multifaceted issue that doesn't have one root cause or solution. Claiming otherwise shows extreme inexperience or lack of imagination.

Where I live the act of being "over employed" is considered fraud, and can land serious penalties. Because it is fraud, when your employment agreement stipulates that you will not divide your time in some manner.

https://mcmillan.ca/insights/employment-and-privacy-implicat...

That was just getting fired for cause homie. If they catch you, you are definitely getting fired.

The simplest reason is lack of effective communication, team bonding, and morale.

People behave differently behind a screen even if incentivised by money. This becomes a problem at the scale of big companies.

Eg - without body language, tone and context - everyone needs to be extra charitable to avoid miscommunication or distrust. This might cause people to be overly defensive in their approach to communicate.

I've said this in other places, but as a _manager_ it's much nicer to work in the office, in person. That gets more true the higher up the management chain you go. Managers spend most of their time in meetings. Meetings suck over video chat. This is the entire reason CEOs (and pretty much everyone between them and line employees) would rather everyone come back to work. It makes their workday more pleasant.

Managers and execs ought to already know that not everyone else is an exec, and don’t have the same face-to-face requirements, and do actually need time to do the “productivity” that nets execs their fat pay checks.

Meetings tend to be some the least productive activities, especially when everything "discussed" could have been sent out as an email (which can be read remotely).

Depends on the type of meeting. Where I work, we have a short 15-minute meeting every morning that's done over video call, just to see who's working that day and make sure everyone is on the same page. The CEO constantly does screen-share meetings with clients so they can show him what they're trying to do with the product, and he can watch the recording later and break it into tasks to give to us. I'd say it works pretty well. Without this the product would lose out on a lot of valuable feedback.

Meetings can only be replaced with E-mail if people actually read (and respond to) their E-mail, and I've found fellow employees' E-mail hygiene to be pretty spotty.

The idea of in-person meetings only works if there is one office where everyone is at.

I was forced to move to another state (pre-pandemic). The people on my team were in offices, but 5 different offices. So I moved to another state to be in an office, so I could sit on the phone all day, every day. There is no sense to that. It’s no exaggeration that the forced move cost me tens of thousands of dollars… and for what?

I recently had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me and when I brought up this concern when I was told I’d need to relocate to an office location, I was told the recruiter was in a similar portion on her team, spending all day on the phone because her team is spread across multiple offices.

In person meetings are great, but if the reality of the office strategy isn’t going to make them possible, then there is no point. I think the occasional in-person meetup can do a lot to build rapport with members of the team without being in an office all the time, or on a weekly hybrid schedule.

I’d go a step further to say that a meeting where 3 people are in a conference room and others are remote, is worse than everyone joining remote or from their desk. Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience. I think it’s a safe bet that any company making news about return to office strategies has multiple offices with teams spread across multiple cities, states, and even countries. This makes meetings a poor justification for workers being in the office.

>Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience.

Agreed, even one person joining remotely completely changes the meeting. The remote person is slightly out of sync with everyone, can't participate in any whiteboarding sessions, and you lose the connection because they are a face (or icon) on the screen and they are looking at a wide angle feed of the entire room.

More people use these things as coercive tactics than effective communication.

How those cross-geo projects manage to do it then?

or OSS like Linux?

Lots of email, chat, and video calls. Also conferences in the case of major projects like Linux.

They behave differently behind screens, yes, but I would not say the negatives outweigh the positives. I have worked, and worked with, tons of people in both scenarios. Some of the best colleagues I never/rarely saw in person. Some of the worst were around all the time.

Do you have a source for the view that executives invest in commercial real estate, or is the view based on anecdotes? I have not observed any such trend/relationship, and am under the impression that most MBA-types are generally averse to CRE and similar markets, but this is anecdotal, and I have no data to support it.

I have heard rumors (yes, completely lacking proof) that some major banks with huge commercial loan portfolios are using those loans as leverage to coerce companies into loudly demanding return to office. That's actually pretty easy to believe, because they'd really be hurting if commercial real estate values were to plummet.

How are they using those loans as leverage? The terms are set, your student loan company couldn't make you, I don't know, tweet something you didn't want to.

It could be a line of credit, which might be modified. There could also be an ongoing relationship, related to the issuance of a series of loans used for financing inventory or something like that.

Student loans are different from commercial loans. Student loans are long term, with all the details fixed for the life of the loan. Commercial loans are more fluid, and generally have short terms, adjustable rates, and other fun things.

Two possible approaches to leverage quickly come to mind:

- The carrot: "You've got a loan with us for $xM at y%. If you show you are committed to this office by maximizing occupancy, that lowers our risk and we can give you a 0.1% discount."

- The stick: "Your loan term is expiring soon. I know it'd hurt to need to make that big balloon payment. Let's discuss our conditions for rolling you over into a new loan."

Commercial leases are typically five years.

It is 2024. COVID was 2020.

If you don’t own your building you should be thinking hard about your new negotiating position with your landlord.

The funny thing is that if they invested more and made offices into, you know, offices people would want to work there.

Instead we have these open floor plan monstrosities for the hoi polloi and private offices for the masters of the universe.

I have no idea what brain damage causes this but if you can't work efficiently in the space you give to your workers to work in how do you expect them to work?

A more or less verbatim conversation between the CEO and myself as CTO shortly before I quite:

>The new office is so stuffy. I'm going to work from home.

>>We need to get a new office.

>No we paid too much to break the lease.

>>But you can't work there.

>I can work from home most of the time. I'll only come in for the big company meetings.

> if you can't work efficiently in the space you give to your workers to work in how do you expect them to work?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that most CEOs and COOs use private offices as private, perpetual conference room space. I know my own executive manager has office space he barely uses because he's in conference rooms all day.

Privacy for me but none for thee?

Code monkeys need conference rooms twice a month

Even fairly mid-level execs are probably in meetings--whether in their offices, at home, or in conference rooms--maybe 6+ hours a day.

I often have to hide from folks who want to interrupt me doing my work so I can do their work for them. If I turn them down I get a bad peer review and get labelled a "Jerk" (no jerks allowed!). If I help them, I don't get to begin doing my own work till 5PM.

Surely there's a ticketing system you can abuse to defend your time?

Curious what you have in mind, how so?

"That sounds important! As you can see, I have three tickets in flight already. Can you open another one up, and $MANAGER and I can prioritize the work that you need done?"

They're already working on the ticket? (assigned to them) This is about people stopping by for help on their assigned work, and at the end of the day I get no credit for the contributions to their work or leeway on my own.

Code monkey here and I average 3 meetings/day

Okay, meeting monkey

Money is what causes Brian damage

In my experience CEOs had a modicum of a private office, but it didn't really matter. They were in hybrid mode from the start, came to the office only for meetings and signing papers and went away the rest of the time, including working from home.

Two decades ago we had an hilarious all hands meeting where we scrambled to get to the office at 9AM while the big big boss would appear on screen from the corner of his kitchen table.

They just didn't want everyone to do the same.

The only way that many people can justify their exceptional success is to assume they themselves are exceptional. It's a nice ego stroking way to look at the world and allows them the rights to create double standards at will.

No one called them out?

The worst of the open office trend was ripe for a backlash. CEOs should have known better in the medium term. Short term, of course it looks attractive. And no one could have predicted Covid and remote work would be a big driver of the backlash.

I would love it if this is the end of the barn (aka open) office. It's such a awful place to work. Companies say they do it to foster collaboration but the truth is its very cheap, and easy to deal with a lot of turnover, which every company I every barn company I ever saw had a lot of.

The funny thing always was "everyone has the same space" and the SVP/ CEO reserved this conference room all day, the one with suspiciously nice furniture that is never available.

You can make an office as palatial as you like. If it's a 1+ hour commute I still don't really want to come in.

Yup, the biggest class of assets in SV are boring single family homes owned by multimillionaires. Once you take the proximity to offices out of the picture the SV property bubble pops. Make the drones come in a few days a week and the assets value keeps going up due to artificial scarcity.

I think it’s more that the big asset holders spent marketing money in CEO monthly magazine and it was effective.

That doesn’t make sense unless the CEO owns the building the company rents. If you have money in REIT then your company’s little decision wont affect it. Anymore than buying a single share of Apple will affect the price.

I've never understood the "because CEOs invest in commercial real estate" angle. Like really? Why would senior executives be more likely than the general investing public to invest in that one very specific asset class? It seems like a small tail wagging a big dog.

Yeah, it feels like conspiracy thinking to me.

It's called class solidarity, which the wealthy are smart enough to have and everyone else gets grind culture and crab bucket mentality instead.

Still I’d rather SPX500 it than commercial real estate. In general.

Any source for this at all? I've seen it before and it's a top-rated comment here, but it doesn't sound plausible and it's exactly the opposite of what game theory would predict.

To quote ishowspeed: "simple as that bro".

Who benefits from keeping everybody in these offices? People who have a financial interest in maintaining those real estate prices high.

I question the competency of any CEO that enforces people return to the office on a whim.

We have crossed the rubicon on remote work. The shift has been well and truly paradigmed.

To choose to restrict your candidate pool to a small geographical location, pay relocation, pay higher salaries, have a lower employee NPS, have higher company carbon emissions, whilst your competitors have a much larger non-geographically constrained talent pool, with more attractive, flexible, family-friendly working conditions and pay less for those employees, making their companies more competitive.

It’s a no-brainer. The status quo has completely shifted. Any CEO that doesn’t yet realize that should consider quitting.

What is happening is people who are being forced into RTO are demanding a higher salary. Basic supply and demand dynamics are coming into play. Those CEOs are now learning this perhaps the (not surprising) hard way.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240322-us-salaries-hi...

I'm rather amazed at the short-sightedness of the highly paid engineers here who don't see the dangers of full remote actually being adopted.

If a company is no longer limited to just hiring people physically nearby, then you're competing for jobs against a whole lot of people who'd accept much lower salaries.

Companies already do that anyway. But they still need to hire people in the same timezone more or less.

Some companies do, but most don't as they have trouble managing remote workers. Forcing companies to become good at it eliminates what few barriers keep them from follow suit.

Timezones are a barrier, but 650 million people live within three timezones of the SF Bay Area.

It's almost inconceivable to me that companies would go fully remote and not over time adjust salary downwards to something more like the median demands of the available labor force (i.e., those whose workday fits within a 8:00-6:00 window.

I live in the Bay Area, but if I moved back to the low cost of living area I'm from with low income taxes, I'd come out ahead even with 30% pay cut. I like living in a HCOL area, so I'm not happy about fully remote work.

The most I can hope for is that the wage drop doesn't too far outpace the concomitant drop in the cost of living in these expensive areas.

I agree that there is a real difference between being at work vs working from home. You build a connection to the workplace. Your brain shifts into "work mode" by default. People talk to each other, culture develops, etc. These are obviously all good things.

The problem is, most jobs people do have an element of mindlessness and aren't cutting edge, innovating spaces. Most white-collar jobs people work in are satellite offices of large companies where the day-in day-out is simply maintaining and attending to larger systems, applying general verbal reasoning, keeping up appearances, etc. A lot of it is bullshit work, as has been articulated before. This work, stripped to its productive essence, can be done faster, more efficiently and in a fraction of the 9-5 work day at home, but part of the charade is for employers and managers to not admit this truth.

> Your brain shifts into "work mode" by default.

I never found this to be the case in office.

However I would agree with you on the shift out. 30 mins into the gym or drive home and I was able to stop thinking about work. Whereas now it's often 8-9pm at home before I go "whoa, I should dim these blue lights and do something with my life"

If you really want this to change, have kids.

Note: this is bad advice.

Can you tell me more about how it changes? (either your perception or anecdote)

The kids become a lot more important than work, firstly. Secondly you need to collect them, feed them and generally care for them so that tends to put a hard stop and start on your workday. Just my experience, obviously.

I found a lot of people treat being in the office as the job. They can walk around, socialize, and not really do anything useful, but they are “at work”, so it’s ok.

Meanwhile, people at home feel like they need to prove their worth and make sure their impact is being felt, so they work harder.

My co-workers now do remote standup, travel to the office to get in around 10:30, and leave at 3 to make it home for 4 and log out at 5. So much more efficient than just... staying home and working the entire day.

That’s one way to get paid for the commute…

That is what I plan to do when I have to start going back into the office 2 days a week in Summer 2025. Or just find another job that is full-time remote.

Offices or remote, nothing is perfect, it's a tradeoff.

And the habits and practices are far from settled at this point.

I think that most companies are doing remote wrong, too many meetings, not enough async communication, not enough written communication overall.

The open source world is a good example of the possible efficiency.

everyone is different, but remote is perfect for me and most (but not all) of the people I know

The problem I am finding is that I put a lot of energy into well written comms and trying to enforce async, but the less tech savvy peers of mine cannot seem to make the efficiencies work. Too much time is spent finding that file or assigning tasks to "we" instead of calling out or asking individuals to do their actual jobs. A lot of "email passing" happens which eventually leads me to booking a Zoom meeting to sort things out. It is very frustrating to watch.

If just one of them had improved ventilation, maybe some of us might have felt safe enough to give a shit.

it’s been 4 years, it’s time to move on

Yeah. Won’t make a difference anymore. Not like things will reverse

Ventilation is also for co2, and more than just covid.

it's time to move on from what, exactly? from the global realization that maybe the idea of forcing people to come to work or school when they have any sort of contagious respiratory disease isn't the best idea?

Hybrid for two years and fully remote for another two haven't gotten me sick any less often or any less severely.

When everyone was coming to work sick during flu season, I worked from home for a month or two. If they weren’t going to be responsible, I wasn’t going to subject myself to it.

> We've tried nothing, and it didn't work. Time to move on.

Uh, yeah, no.

Offices are havens of particulates, volatile organics, carbon dioxide, etc.

How long does it take that burnt popcorn smell to disappear from your office? That gives you an idea of how bad your office is.

HVAC systems can have HEPA filters, UV lights, good air exchange, etc. But the cheap ones don't. And, without pressure, nobody is going to install good ones.

Welcome to the pressure.

Where I currently work we have only office work. I wouldnt mind it if it wasn’t for my manager who loves the sound of his own voice and who doesn’t give us peace to finish the damn work, always interrupting... In my current situation hybrid would literally enable me to work.

Vote with your feet. Find a job that is WFH flexible.

Then they aren't defeated enough yet. Hybrid is fine for the people who want hybrid working, but fully remote still needs to be an option for people who want to be fully remote.

CEOs who don't want to allow full remote work "concede" that you only need to be in the office most of the time.

FYI: Meta is de-facto insisting on RTO and not offering a remote option for new employees.

This trend has nothing to do with productivity and is all about the egos of control-freak managers "maintaining control" over employees in a way that wastes employees' time and money and harms the company's reputation.

Meta has always, always always sucked at remote. The culture just doesn't support it. I worked from an office many timezones away from my team for a long time and it was incredibly difficult to be productive.

Brought to you by the people who promised us offshoring would have no effect on productivity.

They might have been right actually: if you’re paying 1/5th the salary and getting 1/5th the value added per hour in exchange, there is no net effect on productivity. Only half kidding - most people don’t realize that productivity is measured in dollars of value added per dollar spent on labor.

I’ve been WFH for over a decade, but still make effort to meet up with colleagues across the country and indeed world on a regular basis.

Pre covid I would be able to doorstep them, book a trip to Glasgow or london or singapore or whatever and catch up with all number of people reliably with just a quick “you free for coffee” message.

Since covid it needs effort on both sides to be at the same location. It’s not impossible, but it does need people to appreciate the benefits of meeting physically and make it happen.

So many CEOs will lay people off (or implement mandatory attrition policies) at any time.

Employees have learned to look out for themselves and themselves alone. CEOs and productivity can go die.

> productivity can go die.

If someone on my team had that attitude I would hate to work with them. They would hold me and my projects back.

So I’m glad you’re not my colleague.

your projects aren’t actually important

How do you wake up and go to work with this attitude? I've been nihilistic, but don't you think you should spend your short time on this planet doing something that matters, at least marginally?

And if not, maybe make a change?

Do something outside of work that matters

I don't disagree, but maybe both? Also do work that matters if you can... We only have so many trips around the sun

the time i spend with my wife and kids is what matters. work is just a means to provide for them. in fact im currently not working because i quit my job for a while to spend time with them full time. this matters more to me than service health metrics and kpis

Awesome. I think your priorities are right. When it's time, I hope you can find work that provides both means for your family and personal satisfaction

When you remove CEOs from that context you do lose the point here. I can't stand to work with anyone who doesn't understand that there are games being played and takes things from C-level at face value

Ehm, no thanks. REMOTE work YES, hybrid no. Hybrid, short workweeks etc are made as kind of cadeau to keep people in cities, witch is at all illogical and unsustainable. People in cities in the modern time means just service slaves who live spending the 100% they earn in services, as human puppet of some large puppeteer.

> It’s a complete 360 on their stance last year,

whoops. who’s reading these before pressing publish in wordpress?

But it is a 360 they want people back in office just with different words.

I think that there's value in in-office work, if you can build up the proper work culture. Sadly, it seems like that culture has been lost, and it's going to be a long time before people rediscover it. (Hint: it's not about the boss looking over your shoulder every 5 minutes, it's about the conversations that happen only at the air hockey table over a pint of beer.)

“Research has echoed that nearly half of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated, and 29% of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment.”

Excellent! Vote with your feet people. That’s the only thing CEO’s will respect. I will only send my CV to a non-WFH company if there is literally no other choice available to me.

I think a lot of executives are part of the boomer generation who had a stay-at-home partner as they climbed to the top. They have no idea how much more complex the workplace is when two partners work and have kids. We have to work in open floor spaces while they have a private office. Their reality isn’t our reality.

I would never accept a job without a flexible WFH policy. Unless there is literally no other choice. I am not the only one. So companies that are not flexible will be less competitive in the job market.

People brazenly defy the RTO requests at my company. I suppose management could start turning the screws on people, but I have a feeling enough people are still willing to quit to make that impractical.

Where I work, they mandated RTO three days a week. It was largely ignored. Eventually they started checking badge-in access and strictly enforced the mandate.

There was a lot of grumbling about people quitting, but anecdotally I didn't notice much uptick in turnover at all. It's very hard to tell what will really make people quit. If the labor market hadn't softened a bit I'm sure we'd have seen more, but my guess is the disgruntled people weren't able to get full WFH without a salary decrease larger than they wanted to tolerate.

When the interest rates finally come back down and we're in the middle of the Greater Resignation, these CEOs will be admitting that getting rid of fully remote work was a mistake.

The best part about hybrid work and, even more so, fully remote work is the benefit to the business’s productivity. The ability to lay off or replace employees without ever meeting them in person allows for rapid adjustments to the work force and faster replacement of low performers. Better yet, replacing employees with AI solutions is much easier and more convenient without worrying about a physical element. The APIs for the AI based workers have effectively been established already.

I think it’s very brave of employees to recognize the writing on the wall and help make themselves more easily replaceable.

Don’t even understand what they are fighting for. The lowest cost option is there to stay

"Hybrid" is such a scam. What does it even mean? You come in to work 3-4 days a week? Cool, that's called "working from the office". If I still have to live in the same city/region as the office building and still have to commute most days of the week then what have they changed exactly?

Most tech workers I know would do random WFH days when they needed to without a problem pre-Covid, and now that is just branded as "hybrid" and sold as a perk. Give me a break.

Yep, the great WFH revolution didn't seem to have happened. Also somehow the explosion of prodictivity of WFH-only companies didn't happen either.

It means you don’t get offshored right away.

My wife has one day a week team office day that they try to keep free from meetings so they can touch base, spend time with the team, and, often, plan a happy-hour event afterwards. It's not quite as flexible as full on remote working, since, yes, we have to be in the same region, but it saves a lot of commute time, gives more flexibility for things like doctors/dentists appointments, would theoretically let her do laundry/dishes relatively easily (I mostly do them), and we could reasonably live a fair amount further away since the commute is only one day a week.

That seems like a noticeable benefit to me.

I still opt to go into the office two/three days a week. It's a bummer that nearly none of my old workmates are there anymore.

And yet, I can't help to acknowledge that there's no going back. And of course I can see that some things are remarkably convenient when working from home. So even though I miss the way things were, I understand this is here to stay.

There is no reason to count them as defeated.

They are just properly informed.

Or they just outsource jobs to cheaper markets.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240412115205/https://fortune.c...

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