It's been a "fun" time in Detroit lately. The Big 3 have been forcing people back into the office some, with increasingly shrill demands. Last year, GM required us to come back 3 days a week, you pick the days. Managers looked at that, listened to employees and it was quickly 2 days, then they weren't enforcing it at the HR level at all, so it was no days. Until suddenly in December, after a bit of a struggling year, we got an email (at the same time as our managers and senior managers, make of that what you will) that they had actually been tracking badge swipes in aggregate and that we would all be returning to the office 3 days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday starting the second week in January. Then it got delayed two weeks because there literally weren't enough seats for everyone, much less seats in the building you were assigned to, much less parking, much less parking for the building you were assigned to. And wouldn't you know it, about 6 years ago, GM had moved to "hoteling" or "hot desking" with an intentional 90% capacity for the number of people assigned to the building, but the COVID hiring binge hit us too, so now there were main buildings with as low as 60% capacity for the number of people assigned. Then, we got an updated email, some teams were going to come back a few weeks later, so that IT and facilities would have enough time to fix problems as they arose and get desks setup, etc. Then we had an ugly winter storm. Then it got delayed another two weeks. Now it's the second week in February. Order, followed by counter order, equals disorder. Isn't RTO fun guys?
To be fair, forcing employees to while away their lives by wasting their own unreimbursed time sitting in a car commuting every day represents a non-negligible portion of every automaker's bottom line.
> And wouldn't you know it, about 6 years ago, GM had moved to "hoteling" or "hot desking" with an intentional 90% capacity for the number of people assigned to the building
Why do so many organizations seem to have such a poor grasp on estate management that you keep hearing the same story again and again? Maybe the question should be: why is it apparently so common for leadership to make wide ranging policy without arming themselves with the most basic data, which should be easily available? It's not even a bigcorp thing. I've seen it personally somewhere that has nothing in common with GM.
>Maybe the question should be: why is it apparently so common for leadership to make wide ranging policy without arming themselves with the most basic data, which should be easily available?
LIRP/ZIRP prevented the market from weeding out businesses and practices that should have failed. Any time the business world seems incongruous with basic assumptions, LIRP/ZIRP is the culprit.
Remember, maximum employment and 'stable prices' are our monetary goals. Not production or efficiency.
No, my bad for the phrasing, they've pushed the first day you have to RTO out to the second week in February due to the lack of seats in my building. Should have been tomorrow for me, but we got the update today at 4:30.
Taking my bitterness and sarcasm out of it for a moment, in our case it feels much more like a way to deflect blame from senior leadership onto employees for company culture and product choice issues that are affecting the bottom line, along with prep for an ugly round of layoffs to make up some of the cost of conceding to so many of the UAW's demands. Not necessarily that those demands were unreasonable, but it's interesting that "badge swipes will be tracked" came pretty much at the same time that managers were ordered to stack rank like in the bad old MS days under Balmer. We haven't officially received word of the firing of those bottom 10% with "needs improvement" performance reviews, but I think that's mostly a function of performance reviews being communicated now-ish. History says that it'll probably be mid-March. Either way, we've reached updating the old resume time. The unfortunate thing is that I have zero interest in relocating to the Bay, and all the really high paying jobs have also mandated some RTO, so I doubt I'm going to be special enough to get a fully remote role at any of the FAANG companies.
Oh, and also ironically, we just hired a bunch of Silicon Valley people who get to be 100% remote, along with some execs in HR, DEI and the like that are weirdly all in Denver. These announcements came roughly in the same time frame as the new RTO mandate, which is especially insulting because a number of people hired in 2021 and 2022 were hired as fully remote, but if they live within 50 miles of a major office center (not counting assembly plants) they were all redesignated as hybrid or in office, without their consent. This means that some of my coworkers now have 40 mile commutes and needed to figure out much more complicated child care, since they get to spend hours on the road that could have been used to pick kids up at reasonable times. Gotta love the double standard.
In a way, there's almost an argument to be made for offices timeshared out to different companies: On Monday all of AlphaCorp comes in, on Tuesday they're all remote because the office is being used by all of BetaCorp, etc.
This subject has been discussed to death, especially on this site. There's no new information about this debate. The first issue seems to be that front line managers see WFH making them irrelevant, and this is bubbling up to senior management as "company can't do X because no one is in the office." Separately, you have a large contingent of workers who really prefer working in the office at least some days. Lastly, senior management came of age in a pre-Internet era and it's hard for them to imagine any work getting done if people are not physically in the office.
These factors together seem to be conspiring to cause companies to try to solve a non-problem related to the physical location of the work activities. This will gradually sort itself out as companies come up with better ways to measure performance, but the transition period has been a bit rocky so far.
I think it's interesting to see an article like this every couple of weeks. The way I view it is that we're watching the five stages of grief (with regard to the "death of the office") play out in real time, at population scale.
At first it was denial - "everyone will be back in the office eventually!"
Then it was anger - "you will RTO or you will lose your job!"
Now it seems like we've finally hit bargaining - "you'll come in 3 days per week, wait, 2 days, wait, special exception for the last week of every month".
I wonder how long it goes on until we get to depression and acceptance?
Well, you may be waiting a while. Those "stages" models are fake news. Great myths have been built up around them, but they've never been validated. Anyone who works with grief can tell you, it won't work like that.
>The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once done at the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of the 20th century thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the ability to build tall office buildings and the previous immovability of the “work” telephone, which was stuck to a desk. All this, thankfully, is going the way of the dodo.
This seems to me to have been forgotten as technology evolved over the last 2-3 decades. There was a time when you HAD to be in the office, because that was where your desk phone was, your desktop PC (including local software) was, the physical access point for your corporate network/applications was, etc. With laptops, smartphones, the internet, VPNs, SaaS applications, that hasn't been the case for a long time, Covid was just the CATALYST that forced people and companies to actually utilize the capabilities they already had.
And invest in them for the whole office instead of them being limited to specific departments. Like it used to be that only sales got Zoom licenses because they were on calls with remote customers, only devs got access to Slack everyone else was on Teams/Outlook. The pandemic made everyone build out the infrastructure for work anywhere. It's got to be in the top 5 advancements in the information age that obviates so much waste moving people back and forth to office buildings and execs desperately want to go back for some strange reason.
I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" (Don't sweat the exact timeline. I'm about right.) Yes, vaccines/medical issues but that's somewhat orthogonal.
I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. Yes, we could have mapped home phones to office numbers, bought people cell phones and paid for their plans, subsidized a second phone line, etc. But it would have been hard and difficult; most people would have been nowhere near prepared. I suspect at the end of the day, we'd mostly have made do for a month or three, said screw it, and reopened offices even if we knew more people would probably get sick. Oh, and forget things like grocery delivery or streaming TV (Netflix DVD barely existed) for the most part.
Oh, I agree. At one point I did try to research how much good the various (non medical) mitigations did 100 years ago but didn't come up with a lot of good information. Admittedly I'm not sure how much better our handle is on that today around COVID. But we'd have almost certainly done what we had to do even if significantly more people died as a result.
Sweden is the counter example to this, they mostly didn't shut down, just took precautions with the elderly and those who came in contact with them, and did not have excess deaths compared to their nordic neighbors who did lock down....
It’s extremely hard to draw any conclusions from this. The Nordic cultural tendency to remain physically distant from strangers is so pervasive as to have been a meme long before COVID. You wouldn’t expect as strong a comparative effect between countries. Not to mention the general collectivist attitude which almost certainly yielded different baseline behaviors than, say, Florida’s culture did, regardless of top-down mandates.
In the UK people's behaviour changed significantly changed significantly before lockdown. The same in other countries - even places with very little concept of personal space (e.g. friends in Sri Lanka shared pictures of long, socially distancd, orderly queues).
I think you're making my point to at least some degree. There were a lot of different policies and behaviors around the world and across large countries that seem to have not made the degree of difference as a general rule that people might have hypothesized depending on their priors.
In the case of Sweden, people will counter-argue that Swedes aren't overly social anyway and people did take precautions so the end result was sort of the same for all the hubbub. Is that true? Don't know.
Different diseases, different population sizes/densities, different world environment, different healthcare capabilities. I'm pretty sure there's no way to say with any confidence that had most people just been forced to get on with their lives, fatalities would have been X% worse (assuming an otherwise equivalent outbreak in 1997).
>> I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work.
I worked at a large asset management company during Hurricane Sandy's arrival in NYC. Ocean water was dumped into lower manhattan and many buildings' elevators shorted out from the salt-water. Also, so many buildings had the same issue at the same time that we had a 3-mo queue for replacement parts. We didnt go to the office for 4 months.
No work was done. At the time, most of the staff didnt have VPN. Virtual jump boxes were tried but the latency was too low. Ultimately almost all staff except accounting/etc were "off"
Yes. Prior to 1995/1996 WFH would have been effectively impossible for 99% of office workers. From around then to around 2007 it would have still been fairly difficult for probably the majority of people. Since then, however, it became more and more feasible for more and more people every year. By the time Covid hit, the real question was why most office workers WEREN'T working remotely.
Entertaining to compare that 2007 mark (what I would have naively assumed) to the sibling comment talking about during Hurricane Sandy, which was ~5 years later and people still couldn't reasonably work from home. In many ways that was a lack of preparedness by IT departments, but to some degree it was also a lack of generally available and well developed services. Skype worked pretty well for phone calls in 2007, but it wasn't a MS product yet, so it would have been much more of an adventure to conference call a bunch of people for all hands meetings an the like.
WebEx was founded in 1995 and I recall using it at work long before Cisco acquired them in 2007. Even back in the late 1990s where I worked all managers were given a (voice) conference bridge number to use to set up conference calls. Outlook Web Access was first released in 1997. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android in 2008. WiFi was becoming fairly ubiquitous by 2003 and 3G by 2008. If people were unable to work from home during Sandy (late 2012) it was either due to an incompetent IT department or the fact that the hurricane knocked out power and internet.
I think by the time I joined my current company we were using Bluejeans but it wouldn't have been around in 2007 and not sure what was in place before. 2007 you'd presumably have mostly been using an audio conference solution and emailing files around.
So it would have been clunky but the enterprise software company I work for could have presumably made things work but with more friction. Certainly I was mostly working from the road or at home by then. I wouldn't have been out of commission for 4 months assuming working physical IT infrastructure.
Status quo bias is pretty huge--though I admittedly was mostly remote by 2007. I did go in more for a while when I switched jobs in 2010 but I've effectively been fully remote for years.
But to my basic point, most office workers wouldn't have been able to effectively work remotely most of the time until somewhere between the late 90s and the mid 2000s or so no matter how questionable going to an office would have been as a matter of health policy.
I think one thing missed by most comments is the night-shift.
Some people I knew that had to use tools that were not available at home did so "off-hours" so that there was a smaller cohort of people in a confined space at the same time.
I mean, a large fraction of people of course had to continue working in situ through the pandemic because it's physically impossible to do their job remotely. Office workers had the privilege of being able to go remote, but in these discussions it feels like people believe non-office jobs don't even exist and that the entire world just started working from home. 25 years ago everyone would have simply done the same as teachers and nurses and store clerks in fact did have to do.
It was far better going into an office with no traffic, being able to drive there rather than a crowded train and tube, having an office with maybe 90% of the normal occupants missing, and plenty of room for those of us who were in.
WFH is great for those who commute to an office, it’s quieter than working on a Sunday.
Oh, I agree. WFH would have been a blip that mostly didn't work very well for the relative handful of people not already able to do it. Everyone else would have been back in their offices pretty quickly.
> I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?"
This is not nearly, to my mind, as interesting as the question "Was COVID the direct beneficiary of 21st-century technology?"
That is, would COVID have had the chance to spread intercontinentally without the benefit of affordable air travel which itself is the byproduct of workers enabled by cell phones, computers, and global economic trade?
Furthermore, had mRNA vaccines been available 25 years ago, many more millions of people exposed to the first virulent strains of COVID would have died.
The idea that workers would have been forced to RTO because WFH would not even be an option does not even rise to the level of fantasy, much less meaningful speculation.
Yes, there was more air travel than 25 years prior. Looks like a little under 2x. That's not nothing but's certainly not an order of magnitude.
And mRNA vaccines were presumably not going to be available 25 years ago.
So I don't see the evidence that, had COVID emerged from China in about 1996 (which it may not have done but see other related diseases), it would have had so much less impact. (And if that were really the case, we'd just have ignored it in the West and you'd still be working in an office.)
This article simply doesn’t reflect my personal experience. I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same (we have full freedom to never do though).
>> I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same
I had a fast-growing career trajectory and it was definitely due to the magic of working in close quarters with my co-workers and especially bosses and mentors.
That was 20+yrs ago. I do wonder how that would work now -- I go into the office and i'm on Zoom calls for 6hrs of the 8 or 9hrs. The Zoom calls are with overseas team members.
Even the folks in the office on the same call are on Zoom, each of us in separate rooms to prevent microphone reverb. It feels nothing like the magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms.
I think RTO makes sense, but we need a lot of breakout conference rooms. We also need to be opinionated about scheduling meetings so there is actual facetime IRL rather than just facetime via Zoom while in office.
Conversely, I grew quickly over the pandemic because using a lot of written communication played to my strengths. I never learned much from my seniors. Being remote made it so I could create a working environment more conducive to concentration and fully develop self-sufficiency when it came to learning skills and solving problems.
With RTO I’ve found that people are communicating a lot less over chats/docs, but not communicating well in person either because half of the people are remote or in other offices. Personally I believe we need to all be remote or all on-site for things to work properly.
> That was 20+yrs ago. I do wonder how that would work now -- I go into the office and i'm on Zoom calls for 6hrs of the 8 or 9hrs. The Zoom calls are with overseas team members.
> Even the folks in the office on the same call are on Zoom, each of us in separate rooms to prevent microphone reverb. It feels nothing like the magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms.
That sounds like my life at GE. I worked there 2002 - 2010.
> magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms
Yeah, I also like to reminisce of my youth, playing video in LAN centers and having endless energy to go do pointless things like commute in traffic, and have nearly 0 responsibilities outside of taking care of myself (which is easy when you have a young and fit body).
This is completely orthogonal to the pros and cons of RTO though.
Having the option to work remotely doesn't mean that in-person work must be eliminated. Even considering only the people whose jobs can be done remotely, it's entirely valid to want to be around people. But requiring people to be in the office when their jobs can trivially be done remotely is silly.
I speak as someone who likes to work in the presence of others, so I mostly do, but I appreciate the option to work remotely and make use of it regularly. The notion of "the office" isn't going extinct, it's just evolving, and in this case I think it's evolving in a good direction.
Onboarding, new hires, even teams getting together when possible/practical some of the time are the things I hear even from execs who are generally supportive of letting people continue to work from home whenever they want to.
I happen to be on a very distributed team and the person I'm mentoring lives in a different city anyway, so it's impractical for me. But I'd actually go into an office now and then if it were convenient and I'd know people there.
To each their own. It is reasonable that the company may provide some physical common space for workers like yourself. It is totally moronic however to force people who do not want to to be there.
Same for older employees like myself actively recruiting younger employees to replace us: it's much harder with full remote. For many younger parents or long-commuters WFH is perfect but if you're rebuilding a workforce those Zoom only coworkers don't connect the same way.
Honestly, it's a first world problem to solve. It's great that we have the flexibility, just need to figure out how to avoid long-term negative repercussions that have not fully been felt yet.
I'm also at the beginning, and I started right when COVID hit. :D To me, it seems like an intense gray. There are upsides and downsides to both in-person and remote, and they balance each other out almost perfectly.
I have a great home situation, though (it's better than my office physically), and most of my coworkers are older than I am, so they're less keen on interpersonal connection and rarely ever go to the office.
I think WFH primarily benefits "older" workers and parents with young children; it also allows them to live where there is more space for their kids without having a huge time-wasting commute. For many workers in their 20s, for example, working at the office is often a better experience, they're happy living small downtown flats, and WFH can be lonely.
I think it depends on your colleagues and workplace. Most of my coworkers that go into the office are too shy and quiet for it to help much. My company also doesn’t really lend itself to collaboration so much as delegation or being delegated.
So when I go into the office, even though I’m pretty extroverted for an engineer and would love to collaborate on stuff, it’s just as lonely as WFH.
And that's what WFA's whole thing is. We have an office, come in if you like -- we have snacks, high speed internet, and (hopefully) fewer distractions. It's where it's forced everyone in some fixed days a week 1-5 that eliminates most of the benefit of actually working anywhere.
> It's where it's forced everyone in some fixed days a week 1-5 that eliminates most of the benefit of actually working anywhere.
I sorta feel like you do lose those few actual benefits of being in the office together collaborating though, if you don't all come in on the same days. E.g., Mike comes in on Tuesday, Sarah comes in on Wednesday, Marks come in on Thursday--when this happen no one actually gets that benefit of in-person collaboration and mentorship.
So I think some structure is necessary to get real value out of hybrid RTO. Otherwise it feels like this ham-fisted management RTO crackdown is really just about control and justifying expensive downtown leases and not actually about trying to get people working together.
There are companies that hired distributed teams over the past few years. When everyone was remote, the geographic makeup of the team didn't matter. But now many of those same companies are forcing employees back "the office" which ends up being the employee's local office. Where they proceed to work remotely with their distributed team from "the office". They've badged in, they're in an official office space, but the actual mechanics of work are still just as remote as they ever were.
The people pushing for "Return-to-office" are by and large people who have substantial portions of their personal wealth invested in commercial real estate. Most wealthy individuals hold at least some real estate in their portfolios, and commercial is much easier to invest in at scale than residential, so the wealthiest folks often have a sizeable chunk of their portfolio wrapped up in commercial real estate. This whole "Return-to-office" thing is a bare-faced lie, as it has absolutely nothing to do with "Productivity," "Creativity" or whatever other BS these people are spewing, and EVERYTHING to do with shoring up the value of their commercial real estate holdings.
It's a lot less PR friendly for them to be honest and say to their employees "You need to spend 2 hours a day in a car in traffic, whilst not being compensated for that time, so the office building I own doesn't lose value" though.
It may be less about personal wealth than decisions made about corporate real estate by the execs before the pandemic...T-Mobile US decided to renovate its corporate campus for north of $100mm just before the pandemic...the work completed during the pandemic and so starting last Sept it was RTO 3 days per week ... and your manager did get "badge swipe" reports, as did the chain up to the CEO.
Because people care if they or their kids are having their own learning and development impacted.
While they do not care if the companies ability to function is degraded. Notice how the people who are impacted by this are the ones calling to return to in office.
I'm not sure why you find it surprising. School exists in part to provide lower socioeconomic demographics with a part-time stable environment for their children.
Also, workers are paid during that time, whereas children, particularly of younger age, can't really be expected to maintain concentration for 7+ hours in a physically isolated environment with no other children, or a teacher watching.
You’re right that is interesting and I’ve not seen the two compared before. Made me think. I think one of the sibling replies nails it though - it’s the difference between who is negatively impacted overall, ie “us versus them”.
Fully appreciate it’s more nuanced than this of course and there is some negative impact on some people having to WFH.
Social interaction is not synonymous with the office. Adults can choose to socially interact with any group (family, friends, shared interests) that they want to.
In theory kids can do the same too, but in practice, you'd need some set of adults to get all those kids into the same place somehow, another set of adults to supervise them so they are safe etc... at which point it becomes more efficient to combine this with schooling.
Also with working adults, there is an explicit expectation of delivery. Both the employer and the employee knows of the consequences for performance or non-performance, and part of being an adult is that you are aware of those consequences and choose to behave accordingly. With kids, such expectations aren't realistic.
At least here in rural MN, it went so well that there's no such thing as a snow day anymore. Kids now know that if school's closed due to weather, they have to log on and do class remotely on their Chromebooks.
One one hand, there's no travelling to school when it's dangerously icy with snow drifting across the roads. OTOH, kids get pissed because they remember when they'd have a snow day.
Yup, and if kids can take a bus, then so can adults. I realize this isn't the case for everyone, but in the case of the tech professionals that likely make up the bulk of the HN audience, living in a place that's a 30+ minute drive to work was a choice that person made.
The whole push back to the office was primarily from commercial landlords pushing these companies back, CEO pushed middle managers, middle managers pushed the workers. It was never about productivity or anything, it’s all about money, not for the companies but for the landlords.
"to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy consumption that comes from fewer commuters"
In my case the office is a 50 min drive away and my car is a 6 cylinder petrol engine. I've been WFH since 2020 so 4 years worth of car fumes prevented.
Savings on fuel, tolls and commute time. 100 minutes driving per day x 250 work days x 4 years = 1,666 driving hours prevented. I like driving but driving to work is the worst kind of driving.
I constantly see people say RTO is driven by landlords but Ive never seen any data to back this up. Is there really any proof to this or is it just an opinion that's restated over and over? For context, I work remotely and will never return to an office unless I'm at risk of losing my house.
RTO is driven by the inertia of economies of cities themselves.
What happens when office workers no longer have to be in the office? What happens to the physical buildings, the people who maintain them, the local businesses who serve the office workers (e.g. lunch), etc? There are many knock-on effects.
WFH, on a large scale, is forcing us to rethink the concept of cities, suburbs, infrastructure, housing, transit, telecom, etc.
The fact that WFH has been shown to be viable on a large scale indicates that we are probably going to experience a massive societal shift at all levels. A shift to where? No one knows yet.
Return to the office is a funny one. These big corps spent ridiculous amounts of cash building and furnishing a massive office building just to have it empty? What about their vanity of their business' shrine?
But worse, if they decided to sell. Who in the world can buy their vanity building? Everyone else has the same problem. Governments also came in and restrict you from using the building for other purposes. So you cant sell to someone who might make use out of it.
So you might as well try to force people back into the building, but go softly because the last people you want to lose are the first to leave.
Here's what the ever-so-helpful CNN is giving me when I visit it:
Browser Blocked
We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region.
We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser).
Hahaha. Hey, we're supposed to be in charge of "protecting" your privacy (i.e., deciding how much we want you to have). You can't take it into your own hands; our shaky profit motive will tank!
Most companies would save money getting reducing, or rid of the office space, as some did after covid
Most companies advertising jobs, have remote positions now
I don't see a RTO movement, I think they are experimenting what works best, trying to get a balance. But their processes have not evolved enough to include remote workers
Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked?
> Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked?
how do you do it when in person other than walking around and checking that people aren't playing minesweeper instead of coding? (OK, there is the social pressure to at least look like you're coding in case someone glances at your screen, but that doesn't mean you're actually getting anything done. Of course for people who slack off, WFH is a great enabler -- and that indeed is a problem.)
