The workers have spoken: They're staying home

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in.

This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a productivity hit on a good day, but they're extra awful when every day it's a new set of voices to learn to tune out, and another half hour spent packing and unpacking all your shit, adjusting computer monitors to minimize glare from the overhead fluorescent lights, etc. And, if you want to actually take advantage of the co-location, 15-30 minutes spent figuring out where all your collaborators are sitting today, and scrambling for meeting rooms and huddle spaces, which are now in high demand since collaborators can no longer sit together in any sort of stable way and must instead fight for huddle space if they want to do any in-person collaboration. Alternatively you spend the entire day with headphones on (uncomfortable!) because you decide not to do that, and instead spend the whole day on team meetings because it's easier. And even headphones when you're not actively in meetings because everyone around you makes the same decision.

A couple years ago, I was eager for a return to office. That died pretty quickly after return to office happened, because the reality is that we're not returning to anything. Office life post-COVID is an entirely new thing that's worse than what office life was like pre-COVID in almost every way. And so the mandatory in-office days are, in practice, just the days that fully remote team members need to cut the hybrid members some slack for not being able to get anything done.

We'll be writing about why this is for years.

COVID gave people or in many cases made people re-evaluate what's important to them and many people concluded that their work-life balance placed too much importance on work. People had been thinking, what parts of their life were they willing to give up for work, but now the question of what parts of work are they willing to give up for their life is considered a valid, and possible decision.

This decision wasn't made in the abstract; WFH gave people real experience in what they would gain and lose by not going into the office, and what they would gain and lose by not commuting, and in many many cases, the tradeoff was worth it.

If you give me a private office I will come into work every day from 9-5 and make sure I spend at least 40 hours a week being "fully present" for work.

If you force me to hot desk I will come into work as infrequently as possible and may or may not be "present" for work whether I'm at home or in the shared-space environment at the office.

But the "fully present" metric doesn't show up on the bean counters' spreadsheets as a quantifiable metric, so here we are.

Companies get so much more out of people working from home - Microsoft has realized this and still broadly supports remote work.

It really is a 'you need to double my salary' kind of negotiation with your employer. When you're actually functional doing remote/home work, adding a commute to the job requirement is like adding vinegar to wine.

Quite a lot of companies are thinning the herd for the past months and it is set to continue for I have no idea how long. I might stop tomorrow but I highly doubt it.

The more places get rid of workers the more the pendulum swings giving more power to the companies over their employees and who they hire.

A lot of tech worker primadonnas who have not seen the ugly politics of downsizing, right sizing, and outsourcing are going to have a tough time, as companies won't be bending over to hire folks anymore. The possibility of being unemployed not by choice, for a few weeks, until a phone call is made and a new job awaits, but as a reality for months.

The attitude that "I QUIT if I have to the office", might encounter "Good, we need to reduce headcount anyway".

The tech worker primadonnas vastly overestimats their own value to the company.

When X had mass layoffs, the general consensus for some techies was that X would die in a months' time, with all the essential people who had lost their jobs. I dont have any inside information in X and they may well have had disasters but they do appear to still exist and still function. (Or so it seems to me, but I dont even have an account)

I dont like this. I dont want it to happen. but I have been around for a couple of cycles of seeing the pendulum swing one way then the other.

I work in an admnistrative office on a university campus. Work from home was great for IT folks, but not so much for a lot of regular staff. Some people had young children that didn't understand that "you can't bother mommy or daddy right now" and it was a constant fight. Some of them had to use their own computers to connect to their machine at work through a vpn, and had a lot of trouble getting that to work. Some had noisy roommates, some of them had problems "turning off" at the end of the day. Some of them had to call students back and didn't have a private place to have those conversations.

There were some that enjoyed it, of course. Also, most everyone in the office loved using Teams to stay connected and it's still used for everything even after we've been back in office for years at this point.

But not everyone lives in an environment where they can just set up a chair on the deck and sip wine while they work on their items for the sprint.

It was a pretty easy sell getting workers back in the office for us. It helped that most people lived less than a 10 minute drive away.

It shouldn't take me an hour and 30 minutes in congested, underbuilt roads to drive 20 miles into the office. Cities and their wealthy politically-connected commercial office building owners have had decades to fix this problem. No sympathy.

That's the strategy. The places calling for return to office are mostly doing it to thin the herd. Make people voluntarily leave.

Give me my own office and flexible hours. That’s what I have at home.

For all the talk about the environment, there are no incentives for companies to reduce commutes. We’re still at only 7% percent of EV cars in the US. Our freeways are packed with gas guzzling engines pumping out smog during rush hours. Reducing the number of commuters is an easy environmental win.

Is this really the case? I've seen countless companies pull their employees back to the office, either full time or part time. With the economy slowing, I don't see that workers will have much say in it.

Unpopular opinion: Being an extrovert but living alone and working thirty feet from your bedroom is hell.

I know how to get the workers back. Make office workdays 6 hours long. And home workdays 8 hours long.

For the longest time, we tech workers have convinced ourselves we're special. We believe we can act on our own behalf against our employer on equal footing. We start to believe in the myth of meritocracy.

Remember the "Day in the Life" vidoes? When was the last time you saw someone showing their amazing workspace, the free food, the amentities and all that? A few years ago they were everywhere. Now? Nowhere.

We are now in permanent layoff culture. Some of us still believe this is companies trimming the fat. It is not. It is wage suppression. If you get rid of 5% of your staff and just make the remaining 95% do what the 5% were doing then you've saved money. Even better, the reamining 95% won't be asking for or demanding raises. After all, aren't you luck to have your job?

But severance packages cost money. You know what's cheaper? Return to office mandates. A certain percentage of people will quit. That's a cheap layoff.

Now some of you think your WFH status is safe. You may even take a pay cut to continue WFH (even though it's objectively cheaper to employ people remotely).

Trust me when I tell you that the flood waters are rising. You're just temporarily on the high ground. Your remote status won't last. For a handful it might but for the vast majority, you will be faced with the choice of losing your job or going back to the office.

This is more wage suppression. It is employers forcing their will on you so they can walk around the cubicle farm and see what you're doing. It's the compliance of having you there regardless of whether you need to be or not.

As a tech worker, you are just like any other worker. You are not immune. The only effective counter is to act collectively with your fellow employees. Unfortunately we've spent the last 50+ years completely dismantling any kind of collectivism.

I would be interested to hear from Indian, Philipino or other off- near- shore locations. Is this “give me WFH or give me death” actually just USA/European entitlement and Chennai Devs will gleefully work in air-conditioned offices (hopefully not open plan cubicle hell but nicely designed “WeWork-like” places) and discover the turbo-charge of a co-located mission locked team?

Are we Western Devs about to learn a very hard lesson?

I definitely want to keep working at home. My workplace rebuilt all the cubicles to be half their previous size. Coincidentally, this was just as COVID started. Now we're required to work 2 days a week in the office. It's great to see people in person, but if you need to meet with someone in their cubicle, you're either going to be hanging out in the aisle or sitting very very close to them.

When someone says you must RTO to a place like San Francisco or Seattle just respond that you will require a 250% pay raise for real estate cost differences.

Might help change zoning policy in those cities too if managers and executives see that the entire local economy is basically an elaborate machine to funnel money to property owners with extra steps like employment.

Working for the past 30 years, I've had the chance - like many others - to live the closed office times, then the open space extravaganza to finally the "work from home" era.

I've seen companies spend tens of millions in open space offices in the past decades and this was by far the greatest work killer of all time.

Many, if not most companies, self created this ridiculous situation to finally realize it was a complete failure at so many levels, all that was left was to justify it. From awful diners and mini restaurants to ridiculous spaces no one really uses unless they need to make a phone call - open concepts don't work and never will.

Now days the only thing I see are noise cancelling headsets, people leaving early and a complete lack of interaction.

For many, working from home just works. My setup here is now years ahead of what the office may offer...

It's interesting to read the comments complaining about all the zoom/teams calls, not questioning or addressing why on earth we need that many zoom/teams calls.

Why would US companies continue to pay US wages for people at home when there are remote people much cheaper in south America and Europe ?

When I started my career in late 2018 and went fully remote in early 2020, a ton of folks said that the worst thing I could do as a junior software engineer was to work remotely.

Four years and a few promotions later, you couldn’t pay me extra to bring me back to the office. I like strict 9-5 work, and nothing can make me give up five hours of post-office daylight during the summer.

My problem is that I quite like working with other people. It’s really hard to build relationships with other human beings when not in the same physical location- sharing jokes, lunches, walks and just shouting across the room about the weird code change .

It’s vital. Most large companies think that as they are hiring “the best from around the world” that leaving them around the world is fine. Look leaving people on different floors of the same building screws up team cohesion.

So from a certain standpoint, it does not matter. Companies have long ago chosen to cripple their productivity and WFH simply helps, but frankly it annoys me.

Get better at building and releasing great code. In the same office. Move people, pay them well. Or maybe I am wrong - maybe the extra cost to co-locate and do the job well is more than the loss of productivity by seperated teams

But I bet you the CEO of Crowdstrike is rethinking that idea right now

Ive seen it.

I see people take 25% pay cuts to have WFH/Flex hours.

I've done it and I've still made work friends. Heck, if it wasnt WFH, I would have been gone because there are closer places to work.

This is an opinion piece, not a researched article.

I work in manufacturing, there is no wfh

They have given us fuck all for raises during a period of rampant inflation and now they want to take away the one good thing that covid-19 did for workers.

Remote work for developers is a viable option. We are rapidly moving the majority of our software development to India, and only keeping product leads in Europe and the US.

By staying home, you're making yourself (even more) replaceable with bots.

Note that a 'remote worker' is increasingly used as an analogy for bot performance.

(edit: I should clarify that I don't mean it in absolutes, if you got a task at hand, wfh by all means, but I won't do zoom meetings, if you wanna talk, come to the place)