Social and Economic Effects of the [Bubonic] Plague
Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them.
And for about 150 years they enjoyed such a rise in living standards, until the gains were erased in the early 1500s, leading to the Great Peasants' War in Germany.
By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes. Not necessarily refusing to work in an office. The headline is misleading.
It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
The higher turnover is expected in a booming economy like the one we’re in.
These articles with hyperbolic headlines and underwhelming actual data are very common right now. It feels like the journalists want us to believe some sort of revolution is happening, be it WFH or remote work or people quitting in droves. I’m beginning to think the reality is mostly a boring return to pre-pandemic normalcy, though, given how hard these articles are teaching for something noteworthy to share.
What people miss in these discussions about going full remote is that the market for software developers is very good right now but this won't last forever. Many companies are surely going to embrace full-remote once they have built up the right processes and infra.
When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working remotely, the burden of looking for employees in the locality of your office is gone. Wages will stop growing. While WFH is very convenient, the strong market is giving developers a false impression that they won't become replaceable cogs in the future.
I think you are very much correct - for all the people lambasting working in an office, I hope they realize it will mean they will be competing against a much larger swath of humanity.
Also, I'm glad you highlighted "Mexico or Brazil". Unlike decades past where lots of outsourcing was done to India, I think many people now realize the inherent inefficiencies when teams are 12 time zones apart. The Americas don't have that problem for US-based businesses. In fact, I often see lots of complaining on HN that Canadian dev salaries tend to be much lower than in the US - seems like a no-brainer to work remotely for a US company if you are in Canada if it results in a big salary increase.
>> It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
If those are monthly figures they are roughly going from "quit once every five years" to once every three. It's a pretty big change, I think. Positive, IMO -- mobility is healthy for the economy.
But the caveat should be that we can't extrapolate from a unique event like emerging from an 18-month quarantine, which is the context of this entire phenomenon. I think that at least part of the original commenter's point is that the article shouldn't try to frame what may well be a temporary correction as a revolutionary shift, which I agree is what it's trying to do.
Seems most commenters on HN for this thread didn’t read the article.
We’re at a daily occurrence now of these “I can never go back to the office” threads. I thought HN was supposed to be an area of intellectual stimulation - not droning on about the same thing for months with no end.
I use to think the same thing, but it seems that HN is both the place where there are cool technical articles and where journalists can pump their tech-clickbait.
>By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes
I actually had someone on my team quit until WFH was over. They couldn't take WFH any more and plan to return to the job market once they're able to go to the office.
WFH also appeals to American conservatives who want to target cities, which are democratic strongholds, and reduce their power and reputation. The WSJ is the leading news source of U.S. conservative elite.
Can’t imagine not having at least partial WFH after this pandemic. If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. A good portion of my team is similarly minded, but management is insistent on disallowing WFH. I can’t wait to see their faces when the company bleeds massive swaths of engineering talent.
It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that they are. Absolutely sick of this infantilizing, childish requirement to force employees to come into the office.
People are not obligated to come into the office so you have someone to talk to, and the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth the countless hours of employees’ lives wasted in commute.
The 'hybrid model' is just a marketing trick to try and force people back to offices using the Fear of Missing Out routine.
It's classic foot in the door sales psychology.
Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote and understands that remote can only work properly if everybody is operating in the same mode - precisely to avoid the natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical room.
A good way of judging all this is to start costing your time from the moment you start getting ready for work to the moment you stop thinking about it and start doing something else.
When you do that, you'll often be shocked at your hourly rate.
We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device?
> We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device?
Assuming that there is ~260 working days in a year, subtracting 30 years for holiday we have roughly 230 days that one would have to commute on.
My average London commute was 1 hour each way. That's 2 hours per day. That's 10 hours per week. 460 hours per year. 4.6k hours over a decade. This is not a chill "going on a trip" time in a train - it is stressful rush hours madness, breathing underground air and constantly bumping into a crowd of frustrated commuters who happen to be power walking the opposite way.
To put this into perspective and assuming that an average working day is 8 hours, over the last 10 years I could've easily spent 19 months of full time work commuting during rush hours.
Also ironically ~20 years of commuting adds to almost 10k hours which supposedly would put me on a world-class expertise level in terms of being a train passenger. The problem is I'm a Software Engineer, not a professional underground train passenger.
> natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical room
It's not just ignoring them, but making it hard for them to get a word in edgewise, or sometimes even to hear what others are saying. Most of the time it's not even intentional. It's getting caught up in the moment, and/or failing to adapt to an environment where different etiquette is necessary.
> Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote
Just to be clear, truly embracing remote works means more than just having butts in seats in homes instead of in an office building. There are still plenty of people out there making most decisions in the same kind of clique-only conversations they used to have in the office, excluding not only people in different time zones but those who are just more socially/culturally distant from the inner circle. Truly embracing remote work means adopting an asynchronous workflow that makes information and conversation available to any team member at any time. Requiring them to be in the right place at the right time to gain full participation isn't embracing remote work, even if that "place" is a videoconference call.
Even US federal employment has started considering remote work as a permanent policy (where possible).
I'm currently looking for new work, and full remote has become a _hard_ requirement. In addition to the great point that you've made; if an employer is insisting on in-person work, there exists a strong signal of deeper issues. For example: dogmatic/discriminatory thinking, egoistic processes, stifled/silenced innovation.
This certainly isn't universally true, but it is a giant red flag.
There's also my responsibility. This is my responsibility by choice, and I'm not out for anyone who doesn't make the same choice. If I am hired by said in-person employer, then I am supporting and perpetuating that behavior. The transport device also happens to be destroying the planet: I would be supporting that. The transport device is a luxury: I would be supporting discriminating against people with no access to it. Some jobs are by definition in-person (doctors, baristas, cleaners, etc.), and I would be consuming their transportation resources (whether that's room on a train, or a road). The housing market madness has been driven by access to in-person work hubs.
In-person work, where it isn't actually required, is a terrible idea. It's bad for you, and it's also bad for everyone around you.
Have you considered that some of us actually see the benefits in a hybrid model? There are downsides to working remotely, just like there are downsides with working in the office. Some of us just want to get our work done.
Companies that don't allow partial WFH confuse me. All my employers, even before the pandemic, have allowed ad-hoc WFH whenever. It worked fine. If the team had a meeting or day where we all needed to be in we just said so and worked around anyone who had to WFH at certain times or days. There was never any official policy, people were just trusted to be sensible. Got a GP or dentist appointment near home, just WFH. Feeling under the weather but not so bad that you take a sick day, WFH. Need a day to focus, WFH. Hell if you know you're going to have a hangover, WFH (you never said so but it was an open secret and no one cared so long as the work got done). It was great and I can't see any downside to it at all.
I've been remote/WFH for the past 20 years, and it gets more common every year. For the past 4-5 years, I haven't even worked for companies in the same time zone/continent. Its never been an issue for me personally/professionally. The EU companies I've worked for seemed based around the 'life happens, just get your work done' premise.
Our CEO wanted everyone back in the office even after agreeing that fully remote resulted in no perveptible decline in productivity. The rationale is that serendipitous interactions happen more often in person, which I believe, but not enough to come back in full time. Anyway, engineering was pretty clear that we would have even more attrition if we had to come back in, and the CEO relented.
I’m trying to think of a less dramatic way to describe the aftertaste of that interaction, but all I can come up with was that it felt a bit like servitude—like this person felt he could dictate to me where I would do my work including an unpaid commute (it’s not like my work depends on me being in a factory, for example). I’m thankful that my skill set is basically on fire right now and I can go elsewhere without losing money, but at the same time sad for everyone else who lacks that luxury.
A feudalistic remnant in the nature of corporate hierarchy is that people higher up in the hierarchy feel that this gives them inherent superiority over people lower in the hierarchy. In reality, there's no reason that someone in a corporate hierarchy needs to have their status (including compensation, etc.) determined by their place in the hierarchy. A hierarchy should just be an efficient means to organize a group effort, and not a social order.
The hybrid model is such a joke. For most, working in the office might as well be the 21st century business suit: an antiquated formality designed to demonstrate your obedience to authority. The hybrid model is a suit on a t-shirt. And forcing employees to be in the office X days a week means productivity on those WFH days will be nonexistent, especially if they butt against a weekend.
But of course while the WFH life will be sweet for the next 5 or so years, increasingly invasive productivity/monitoring/presence tools will make us long for the days when we could walk away from the computer and not worry about triggering some inactivity alarm.
The hybrid model makes sense, because some people (like me) enjoy being at the office with colleagues.
I don't want a situation where I am forced to always be in the office. But I also don't want to have colleagues I never see. That doesn't mean "mandate exactly X days at work". But it does mean "be at the office sometimes".
I feel fortunate that I will be half-retired/self employed by the time the entire industry is a mix of sweatshops and plumbing work, which will be before the end of the decade.
I think a lot of management will be out of a job in the future, and they are grasping for control. Not saying we don't need managers, just that there are lots of fat that can be removed, and people have noticed lots of the managers weren't needed or invisible when WFH.
Having worked from home for ~8 years, I don't think it actually makes that much difference - you still end up with a manager who is responsible for making sure they can handle problems you have or about you and asking you to do things, and you still have managers associated with the projects you work on (those may or not be in any way related).
The ones who randomly rearrange the seating however can disappear.
Just like with developers there is a huge difference between a mediocre and a splendid manager, both in productivity and how nice they are to work with.
I hear this a lot of times recently — what I'm interested by now is where the new equilibrium will be going forward.
So far us software engineers have often seen jobs as replaceable and we know we'll have another one at the snip of a finger should we quit.
But with enough people actually quitting, how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision?
Genuinely curious here: Any of those quitting for the same reason recently, how hard was it to land an equally well paid remote job?
> how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision?
We'd have to take into consideration how the demand will change at the companies who are refusing remote work right now. I'd expect that it wouldn't diminish: they will still have business goals that will require developers to fulfill. They won't suddenly say "No software people want to work for us? Eh, we don't need them anyways. Let's build toasters instead".
I changed jobs recently, though not because the old one was going to make me come back to the office. I've never seen such a frothy job market, I had multiple offers for fully remote roles with a 20%+ raise.
I'm a data engineer in the Midwest with just under a decade of experience. All these companies seem to be hiring plenty of other roles and levels of seniority as well.
> So far us software engineers have often seen jobs as replaceable and we know we'll have another one at the snip of a finger should we quit.
I think this is going to be the thing that cracks.
If everybody is WFH, I probably don't need YOU specifically. Programmers are about to get a big wake up call as to what their value actually is in the global market--and it's a lot less than they think.
If I were a particularly nasty manager, I would be pushing WFH like crazy and looking at laying off both my most expensive and most vocal WFH people in 18 months.
The most senior folk pulling the strings will survive. The rank and file will get decimated.
I suspect that most of the drive to get back to the office is coming from the middle manager. You just can’t do ass sniffing at home at it’s essential for their carrier advancement in the megacorps.
Oh man do I feel this. I used to report to the director, just one step below the VP. Zero issues. Everything went smoothly. My team is very independent and we interacted with the guy like once a month, he’d just ask about one particular issue and move on.
Everyone is retiring here and they want to prepare new blood, that means unnecessary middle management. Everyone has them, but I was lucky. Until 2020.
This new guy wants to meet once a week. Got us all in the office FIRST, while everyone else was still WFH. I do need to be onsite for a few things, but I live 3 miles from work and being on call had been working great, but you think he was listening? Now I just spend my time sitting at the office when I could be letting my dog out with the same productivity.
Additionally he has no power of making any decisions that matter, so talking to him is useless. He doesn’t have the courage to transmit messages to other teams that could be a problem for someone else, so we are basically gagged. And whenever something happens he will defend himself, not us, so we are pretty much abandoned. The decline in quality of my position went from an easy 90 to a 10 in a matter of months.
In other words, my happy job turned into me looking for a job.
> If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving.
Agreed. I hope to never work in an office again. It's a horrible concept.
I was ok with office work during the first 15+ years of my career when I had a private office. That works very well. Commute was annoying, but I'll take it.
But then came the cubicles. Ugh. Then came the open office nightmare. I will never be in an open office again. Not an option, full stop.
You want my expertise? The options are remote or private office.
We already had partial WFH - my company has a lot of developers late in their career (aged 50+), they've been through the mill and can't be fucked with stupid hours anymore. And don't need constant supervision either.
Another thing; partial work from home has been a thing over here for a long time now, called "the new working". In practice though, it was just as bad as the open office, in that it was a tactic to reduce the amount of office space needed. Because some clipboard warrior decided that office space was their biggest expense, not staff, nor the realization that they can do more with the same staff if they make some changes to improve their productivity - e.g. no open offices, fixed workspaces, and a goal in their career.
I think asking employees to come in, say once a month is a pretty cool balance. So on that day that everyone comes together, rather make it a social thing and not a sit and work day. Have a friendly townhall and focus on cohesion & empathy. Ask them what they need, if their home circumstances can be improved etc.
They can have a much smaller office space (can be fancier since it is smaller) for people to meet if they really need to (specifically client facing), then there are internet & coffee & snacks, desks & couches available. 90% staff don't have to go to the office to be honest.
And the rest of the money being saved on having smaller offices can be funneled to employee bonuses/benefits or gear (better desks/chairs if you are chair-bound) (more frequent upgrades or let the employee choose what gear they want (within reason)), (at work I have 1x 24" 1080p screen, at home I have 2x 27" 1440p but I bought it with my own money... (which is the ultimate size and density for programming for me)), (decent webcam & dedicated microphone and good headphones), paid for tooling (like gitkraken/jetbrains/pluralsight subscriptions). Stuff like that will make a huge difference.
> ... the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth ...
Crazy idea - install a whiteboard at home and point a 4k camera at it. The broke college student version of this involves a pen, paper, and the camera on your cellphone; it works quite well.
Whiteboard area in a conference room has some challenges to recreate. That said, we've found collaborative editing replaces a lot of sloppy handwriting and people capturing with smartphones and recreating after the meeting. To say nothing of the fact, that wealthy SV companies complaining that they have to structure their entire companies arounf in-person because virtual whiteboards are a really hard problem should be basically ridiculed.
I actually agree that in-person get-togethers are useful. I'm just not convinced they can't be handles as quarterly events in many situations--as many companies with distributed workforces already do.
Not so crazy. I've been looking for whiteboards (well, smart boards) with hdmi out or just using a camera for instructor at home use. A Black Magic Design ATEM allows for multiple inputs and use on Zoom as a web cam. We did buy an overhead web cam specifically for our beadwork instructor do she could show closeups of her working hands free.
Personally I look forward to hybrid but where I decide when to go in to the office as needed to get work done. Probably that would mean 2-3 days a week for me, given the kind of engineering work I do. I'm actually tired of staying home all day every day because of work. I actually kind of enjoy "going somewhere" for the day, seeing the sun rise, smelling the fresh bread and coffee as I pass the bakery, seeing restaurants setting up for the day, and the world waking up together with me as I step outside. Somehow that sensual experience gives me a sort of motivation to get stuff done.
In my current commute situation it meas going from peninsula to SF for the day, which also means I get to have lunches in the city that I wouldn't otherwise get at home, and can meet people after work who live in the city. My work is also a couple blocks from the Caltrain station, and so the commute isn't really an issue, I just walk into this big metal box and keep working and I appear in SF an hour later, it's actually kind of relaxing, and I just like trains in general, and looking out the window watching the entire Bay Area fly by me without me having to drive. In the evening on the return ride I see the fog rolling over the mountains as I look out the train window, and that's relaxing too, and as I pass by about 10 other bay area towns, I can choose any single one of them to get off the train and have dinner, or bike around the town just for the hell of it, to get some exercise.
I don't want to commute for face time though. Rather, I'd do it for things like a big space with proper air conditioning, sunlight, and conference rooms without annoying gas leaf blowers that linger in front of my front door exactly when I'm having meetings. I also work on industrial-sized robots, and even if the company were to buy extra hardware, it's pretty impossible/unsafe to be running that kind of stuff at home. It's enormously more efficient to sit in front of the actual thing than to try to cope with a video feed.
I'm a bit of an ambivert, slighly more introverted, but not an extreme introvert. I do enjoy company, and I do miss the lunch conversations about wild and awesome things that I didn't get during the pandemic. I've also found time and time again at past organizations that those in-person socializing circumstances enormously helped build mutual trust with coworkers (specifically peers, not managers or subordinates) for when things actually went wrong. We're social animals and it's still hard to get around that biological fact.
Moving to the middle of nowhere to get cheaper rent and a bigger work space isn't really what I want to do either, because I do like having access to public transportation and food from around the world, including the grocery stores of the ethnic foods I'm used to eating. I'm kind of happy living in a cosmopolitan/global part of the world. I hate the high rents, admittedly, but I realize I can't have it all.
But yeah, no, I wouldn't commute or do hybrid to please management. It's just me. I still want to make the decision about when to go in myself based on circumstances.
> I actually kind of enjoy "going somewhere" for the day, seeing the sun rise, smelling the fresh bread and coffee as I pass the bakery, seeing restaurants setting up for the day, and the world waking up together with me as I step outside. Somehow that sensual experience gives me a sort of motivation to get stuff done.
This sounds rather idyllic and I'm sort of picturing you as Belle in Beauty in the Beast as she walks around her provincial town singing to the shopkeepers as she walks to the library.
It sounds like it would suit your needs to work remotely from a rented office desk. It sounds like it’s not as big an issue for you since you’re a few stations from work, but it also sounds like the work office doesn’t afford you much over many other offices.
They will be happy to replace you with a H1B worker (who himself will be happy to migrate from India to the USA). The current situation is temporary since COVID immigration restrictions remain in place.
I’ll have a new job. They can do what they want. Hiring fresh H1B employees to replace seasoned engineers rarely ends well. It’s part of the reason we get paid as much as we do.
If I end up leaving because the company refuses to offer WFH, it won’t be getting a 2-week notice or any form of knowledge transfer from me.
It's going to be harder to justify a "shortage" of workers when companies cut themselves off from the remote worker pool. I have no doubt they will, but the lie will be much more obvious.
Companies also won't be able to claim they hire the best if the rule out remote, but of course they'll still say it.
Eh I don’t think so. If it comes to that Americans will just stop letting people come here to work and dismantle these programs. It’s actually something that has been unifying the Sanders/AOC and Trump camps for some time. I don’t know if he has but if not I don’t see Biden really changing much in terms of opening up/increasing H1B visas or any others in the foreseeable future. Maybe more refugees or asylum seekers though.
I'll be distressed if we don't have at least optional work-from-office after the pandemic. I'm vaccinated. You're vaccinated. We're all adults. The company remains in possession of empty office space. Yet most firms seem to think the best thing to do is lead from behind, wait and see, until they can protect themselves by saying "i guess everyone is doing it".
Never mind that. In some companies HR mandates meetings on various social and workplace issues where they essentially being told what they should think. This blatant disregard for freedom of thought makes me think of nothing short of "politinformation" meetings in good old USSR. Teambuilding outings especially when forced and on weekends fall into the same category.
I am very lucky that I was employed only in one company before going on my own and never had to deal with the crap like that personally but I saw it happen to other people.
Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online.
The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business. I want to be able to jump on the whiteboard at a moments notice and maybe pull in a couple of others, while other people in the office can also listen in. This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business. If the sales guy and I are having a discussion and the junior front end developer hears us, he gets a sense of how we work that he’ll never get if the meeting is held in PMs on Slack or Discord.
I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office.
I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary. I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first. But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
> they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business.
You basically want the seniors' suffer the uncompensated inconveniences of WFO so that the juniors can grow.
> This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business.
This is not altruism though, juniors' professional growth is important for your business growth.
> if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week.
We know from "unlimited time off" experiments that the game theory of this doesn't play off that way. People will race to bottom yielding to tacit peer and management pressure.
> I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary ... But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
No one is saying it is arbitrary. It works better for management. And management makes the calls. That's the reason.
> I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation
Or lose the talent that prefers to have more agency on their work conditions.
I think that most people that hate working in the office don't hate it because of the office - they hate it because of focus quality.
A social obligation here, a senseless chat there, a coffee here...a person reminding you about an unimportant email there.
There are just way too many distractions from work, at work. And those distractions are what people describe as "corporate life" because corporates over-micro-managed everything.
Open office spaces are horrible, except for the people not having to work in them - which coincidentially always decide pro open office work space.
If the work culture is manifested in interrupting your colleagues over unimportant stuff all the time, it's perceived as toxic by engineering people because they lose valueable focus time.
That is essentially what it boils down to. Add the additional time required to get there (and costs on the side of the employee for commute) and you have the perfect formula to get rid of quality work people.
While there are upsides of working in the office, there's also huge downsides that management likes to ignore in the discussion.
"I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first"
It will be interesting to see if discouraging WFH can actually be an advantage when it comes to recruitment and retention, but when all of the main players in tech are embracing WFH, its hard to see how smaller players can sell "no WFH" as a benefit.
Is this statement true, that all the main players in tech are WFH first? Didn't Apple just announce 3 days WFO are mandatory?
But in any case, I'm no FAANG, and I was just trying to explain the motivation for my preference that people WFO where possible. I wouldn't say I see it as a competitive recruitment advantage, but I'm yet to be convinced it's a disadvantage either.
> I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office.
Lets hope to god there is a large enough demand for WFH that your position becomes intolerable for more companies. I think having access to on office as an option is great, but thinking its "better" is a unfounded claim.
But so is WFH! I’ve literally had a guy beg me to WFO. Surely a better world would have a diversity of options? Or are we one size fits all now? (That size being the one that fits you)
Have you actually asked your team if they feel the same way, though? (and I mean actually asked, not just "hey bud, you're happy with coming into the office, right?")
I used to whiteboard out problems with the whole team. I loved it. We had a couple of star employees who were really good at coming up with ideas and sketching them out. Being able to get the whole team on-side for a problem and understanding the answer was great. Then I discovered (overheard conversation at a social function) that half the team absolutely hated them. I followed up in 1-to-1 meetings, and yes, over half the team didn't enjoy them, didn't feel they could contribute, and saw them as a waste of everyone's time (and saw them as me ego grandstanding). The couple of "stars" did enjoy them, and thought they were great.
During my MBA, I discovered this is common. Introverts don't enjoy this kind of interaction, and don't benefit from it. Some people don't come up with ideas by "vibing" off others - they come up with ideas by themselves. Some people can't talk about an idea until it's complete - the whole idea of "talking through" an idea to completion gives them the shudders, and doesn't work for them.
You may find, after digging, that (like me) you're doing what you love, and not what the team benefits from.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but you are making assumptions that don't necessary apply to me.
I don't generally do huge whiteboarding sessions with the whole team. Typically I write detailed technical documentation about what I'm trying to achieve, and how I think it should be done, which I share with the team who are implementing it.
It's typically only when they don't understand something that I jump on the whiteboard. And it's typically the more junior people that don't understand things.
It's not that I love huge, didactic whiteboarding sessions; I don't. What I do enjoy is explaining ideas in small whiteboard sessions with just one or two other people, or with small teams who have specific questions, and I feel that these sessions are much more productive in person than they are remotely.
Everyone on my team is different from goals to what makes them happy to how they work, cant expect them all to work the same and management is figuring out what’s best for each one
I am rather junior and recently joined a fully remote team. The culture is so geared towards written documentation that it's honestly not a problem. Every one is extra careful about writing up extra detailed instructions for the youngsters. Also, I'm spending a good chunk of time exploring and researching by myself obviously, but I consider that a perk since one tend to learn better that way.
I dunno man, documentation is way different to what happens in person. I’m sure you’ll learn heaps, but I think what you learn will be qualitatively different from what you’d learn in an office. Maybe not better or worse, but certainly different. Good luck to you though! Welcome to the industry.
>Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online.
In my BigCo job, your run-of-the-mill managers don't have any influence on this stuff. The high-level decisions are being made by executives who are at least four or five layers of reports away from the masses of ICs (eg the CEO is seven hops above me on my management chain), and whose entire job--as well as the entire job of everybody they come in contact with--consists of attending meetings. We experience the company and the workplace in vastly different ways, and articles & discussions like this are the result of that disconnect.
I actually don’t mind one way or the other, but I just want a clear rationale for over riding the employees preference.
I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM. I do it at work and then shortly afterwards with friends on discord.
The real reasons for return to office should be tangible. If you have metrics that people are taking advantage, share them. The only thing I’ve seen so far is out of this world productivity increases.
> I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM
Different people have different work styles. The water cooler theory is predicated on random, unplanned interactions, which are much harder over those channels. At the proverbial water cooler, an employee might engage with someone they had not planned to speak with, or maybe don't even know, and get some information or connection of value. Maybe you overhear* a couple of other people talking there and you join the conversation because the subject happens to impact you. I'm not sure how well that's replicated by Discord/Slack channels.
After a year+ WFH during the Inside Times, I have come to see the value of at least quarterly, if not monthly, face-to-face team meetings or casual events. Of course, if you have employees in different cities, like west and east coast, you can't affordably meet very often.
* I would hope people would not have a conversation that should be private in a public space, so being overheard is not a bad thing.
It's also worth noting that there's a huge bias toward pure software engineers on HN.
I do software, but I have to work with some large industrial hardware and it's so much easier to just have the hardware in front of you. Especially when you have to from time to time set up hardware that isn't even on the network yet.
Telepresence just isn't there yet, and the quality of internet connections and videoconference tools still suck. I have dual 4K monitors and still get 720p feeds or worse on most videoconference tools, you can't even read a damn whiteboard with that, let alone push physical reset buttons or e-stop buttons on actual hardware.
I mean, that's a great example of a clear rationale! If my job required interacting with machinery or hardware that had to be centrally located, I wouldn't need to be "required" to come into the office any more than I'm "required" to use Git to manage my code—I'm a professional, and that's just part of what I do.
The issue comes up with roles when that isn't the case. In most programming roles I would not have any clear reason to be in-person, and even if I did have times where I clearly needed to be in the office, I would not appreciate being forced to come in outside those times. Requirements like that are frustrating because they require a real cost on my end (less flexible schedule, less control over my environment, a commute) and simultaneously signal a fundamental lack of flexibility, respect and trust from my employer.
I also work on hardware. Oddly enough I moved my lab to my house when the pandemic hit, but I don't work with really huge or dangerous stuff.
I think there's going to be an interesting dynamic when the hardware workers go back to the office and the software workers stay home. The tendency for the software department to become isolated from the rest of the business was already present before the pandemic, but may become more pronounced.
I do a mix of software, smaller scale hardware, larger hardware, and am spooling up manufacturing.
So, right now I am in a lot, but no longer have an office. That is at home now, including enough gear to work on the small scale hardware.
If I come in, you can find me in the shop. My senior firmware engineer and I work best together, but work very well remote too.
So, I am going to move a machine here. We normally get together for a few days and will now just do it more regularly.
I am the better tech anyway, and do enough software to make me a good working extension. We expect this to be a net gain.
As that manufacturing spools up, I will WFH, only coming in when doing R&D, or to improve on or resolve manufacturing problems.
Pre-pandemic, I traveled everywhere, hated it. That is gone now.
Outside of software and other info heavy roles, having flexibility will be seen as a great thing.
As we optimize the diverse tasks, we will work better, and have many options. One of my favorites is to get up at oh dark 30, work in the shop when there are no distractions and head home after lunch. Those are the days when I get the most physical work done, and or solve the worst problems.
I've been working from home for the last 5 years, and I'm never going back. I get more done, I have more energy throughout the day, and it makes it much easier to put family first (which is one reason I think FANG and others are so afraid -- they lose a little bit of control).
I had a job where I worked in a cubical next to the main door, unfortunately also next to the head of engineering's office. I actually got in trouble with him because I would frequently walk by* and also a lot of people would talk to me as they hung around the area (literally the water cooler...). The experience completely soured me on the whole company, and as soon as I could I found a remote working job and am much happier now!
*after I was told I walked around too much I kept an internal record of every time I left my desk and for what reason. It turns out, the main reasons I walked by was 1) meetings, 2) lab work, and 3) bathroom. I was hoping he would bring it up again so I could show him the Excel sheet!
I find it kind of absurd that management thinks it’s appropriate to chastise employees as if they are naughty children. It’s dehumanizing to say the least.
Why does management care what I do in my free time, so long as I get my job done? It’s a power trip, plain and simple.
I hope you gave a reason if they asked why you’re leaving.
Readit News
Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them.
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plagu...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351
It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
The higher turnover is expected in a booming economy like the one we’re in.
These articles with hyperbolic headlines and underwhelming actual data are very common right now. It feels like the journalists want us to believe some sort of revolution is happening, be it WFH or remote work or people quitting in droves. I’m beginning to think the reality is mostly a boring return to pre-pandemic normalcy, though, given how hard these articles are teaching for something noteworthy to share.
When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working remotely, the burden of looking for employees in the locality of your office is gone. Wages will stop growing. While WFH is very convenient, the strong market is giving developers a false impression that they won't become replaceable cogs in the future.
Also, I'm glad you highlighted "Mexico or Brazil". Unlike decades past where lots of outsourcing was done to India, I think many people now realize the inherent inefficiencies when teams are 12 time zones apart. The Americas don't have that problem for US-based businesses. In fact, I often see lots of complaining on HN that Canadian dev salaries tend to be much lower than in the US - seems like a no-brainer to work remotely for a US company if you are in Canada if it results in a big salary increase.
It will last as long as the software industry keeps growing, or until AI can do the job of a dev. I don't see either happening for a long time.
> In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.
If those are monthly figures they are roughly going from "quit once every five years" to once every three. It's a pretty big change, I think. Positive, IMO -- mobility is healthy for the economy.
We’re at a daily occurrence now of these “I can never go back to the office” threads. I thought HN was supposed to be an area of intellectual stimulation - not droning on about the same thing for months with no end.
I wish there was an easy solution.
My friend received a flagban seven years ago or so on his “Show HN: Hide this repetitive subject on HN” tool.
I actually had someone on my team quit until WFH was over. They couldn't take WFH any more and plan to return to the job market once they're able to go to the office.
WFH also appeals to American conservatives who want to target cities, which are democratic strongholds, and reduce their power and reputation. The WSJ is the leading news source of U.S. conservative elite.
It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that they are. Absolutely sick of this infantilizing, childish requirement to force employees to come into the office.
People are not obligated to come into the office so you have someone to talk to, and the extremely rare spark of whiteboard innovation is not worth the countless hours of employees’ lives wasted in commute.
It's classic foot in the door sales psychology.
Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote and understands that remote can only work properly if everybody is operating in the same mode - precisely to avoid the natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical room.
A good way of judging all this is to start costing your time from the moment you start getting ready for work to the moment you stop thinking about it and start doing something else.
When you do that, you'll often be shocked at your hourly rate.
We all have a finite life. How much of it do you want to spend incarcerated needlessly in a transport device?
Assuming that there is ~260 working days in a year, subtracting 30 years for holiday we have roughly 230 days that one would have to commute on.
My average London commute was 1 hour each way. That's 2 hours per day. That's 10 hours per week. 460 hours per year. 4.6k hours over a decade. This is not a chill "going on a trip" time in a train - it is stressful rush hours madness, breathing underground air and constantly bumping into a crowd of frustrated commuters who happen to be power walking the opposite way.
To put this into perspective and assuming that an average working day is 8 hours, over the last 10 years I could've easily spent 19 months of full time work commuting during rush hours.
Also ironically ~20 years of commuting adds to almost 10k hours which supposedly would put me on a world-class expertise level in terms of being a train passenger. The problem is I'm a Software Engineer, not a professional underground train passenger.
In that case, i work 168 hours a week and i’m the most productive when walking my dog.
It's not just ignoring them, but making it hard for them to get a word in edgewise, or sometimes even to hear what others are saying. Most of the time it's not even intentional. It's getting caught up in the moment, and/or failing to adapt to an environment where different etiquette is necessary.
> Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote
Just to be clear, truly embracing remote works means more than just having butts in seats in homes instead of in an office building. There are still plenty of people out there making most decisions in the same kind of clique-only conversations they used to have in the office, excluding not only people in different time zones but those who are just more socially/culturally distant from the inner circle. Truly embracing remote work means adopting an asynchronous workflow that makes information and conversation available to any team member at any time. Requiring them to be in the right place at the right time to gain full participation isn't embracing remote work, even if that "place" is a videoconference call.
I'm currently looking for new work, and full remote has become a _hard_ requirement. In addition to the great point that you've made; if an employer is insisting on in-person work, there exists a strong signal of deeper issues. For example: dogmatic/discriminatory thinking, egoistic processes, stifled/silenced innovation.
This certainly isn't universally true, but it is a giant red flag.
There's also my responsibility. This is my responsibility by choice, and I'm not out for anyone who doesn't make the same choice. If I am hired by said in-person employer, then I am supporting and perpetuating that behavior. The transport device also happens to be destroying the planet: I would be supporting that. The transport device is a luxury: I would be supporting discriminating against people with no access to it. Some jobs are by definition in-person (doctors, baristas, cleaners, etc.), and I would be consuming their transportation resources (whether that's room on a train, or a road). The housing market madness has been driven by access to in-person work hubs.
In-person work, where it isn't actually required, is a terrible idea. It's bad for you, and it's also bad for everyone around you.
I’m trying to think of a less dramatic way to describe the aftertaste of that interaction, but all I can come up with was that it felt a bit like servitude—like this person felt he could dictate to me where I would do my work including an unpaid commute (it’s not like my work depends on me being in a factory, for example). I’m thankful that my skill set is basically on fire right now and I can go elsewhere without losing money, but at the same time sad for everyone else who lacks that luxury.
A feudalistic remnant in the nature of corporate hierarchy is that people higher up in the hierarchy feel that this gives them inherent superiority over people lower in the hierarchy. In reality, there's no reason that someone in a corporate hierarchy needs to have their status (including compensation, etc.) determined by their place in the hierarchy. A hierarchy should just be an efficient means to organize a group effort, and not a social order.
But of course while the WFH life will be sweet for the next 5 or so years, increasingly invasive productivity/monitoring/presence tools will make us long for the days when we could walk away from the computer and not worry about triggering some inactivity alarm.
It still means that I need to live near the office. Instead of a cheaper, quieter place far away from cities.
Besides making middle-management happy, I'm not sure what is the benefit of having one required day per week at the office.
The company would be run like they're fully remote but there would be an easy place for people to meet up when necessary.
I don't want a situation where I am forced to always be in the office. But I also don't want to have colleagues I never see. That doesn't mean "mandate exactly X days at work". But it does mean "be at the office sometimes".
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I'd swear it just keeps getting worse.
I think a lot of management will be out of a job in the future, and they are grasping for control. Not saying we don't need managers, just that there are lots of fat that can be removed, and people have noticed lots of the managers weren't needed or invisible when WFH.
WFH just makes the difference much more obvious.
So far us software engineers have often seen jobs as replaceable and we know we'll have another one at the snip of a finger should we quit.
But with enough people actually quitting, how many remote or soon-remote companies will there be to scoop up the supply until quitting an office job cold could be a bad decision?
Genuinely curious here: Any of those quitting for the same reason recently, how hard was it to land an equally well paid remote job?
We'd have to take into consideration how the demand will change at the companies who are refusing remote work right now. I'd expect that it wouldn't diminish: they will still have business goals that will require developers to fulfill. They won't suddenly say "No software people want to work for us? Eh, we don't need them anyways. Let's build toasters instead".
I'm a data engineer in the Midwest with just under a decade of experience. All these companies seem to be hiring plenty of other roles and levels of seniority as well.
I think this is going to be the thing that cracks.
If everybody is WFH, I probably don't need YOU specifically. Programmers are about to get a big wake up call as to what their value actually is in the global market--and it's a lot less than they think.
If I were a particularly nasty manager, I would be pushing WFH like crazy and looking at laying off both my most expensive and most vocal WFH people in 18 months.
The most senior folk pulling the strings will survive. The rank and file will get decimated.
Be careful what you wish for.
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Everyone is retiring here and they want to prepare new blood, that means unnecessary middle management. Everyone has them, but I was lucky. Until 2020.
This new guy wants to meet once a week. Got us all in the office FIRST, while everyone else was still WFH. I do need to be onsite for a few things, but I live 3 miles from work and being on call had been working great, but you think he was listening? Now I just spend my time sitting at the office when I could be letting my dog out with the same productivity.
Additionally he has no power of making any decisions that matter, so talking to him is useless. He doesn’t have the courage to transmit messages to other teams that could be a problem for someone else, so we are basically gagged. And whenever something happens he will defend himself, not us, so we are pretty much abandoned. The decline in quality of my position went from an easy 90 to a 10 in a matter of months.
In other words, my happy job turned into me looking for a job.
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Agreed. I hope to never work in an office again. It's a horrible concept.
I was ok with office work during the first 15+ years of my career when I had a private office. That works very well. Commute was annoying, but I'll take it.
But then came the cubicles. Ugh. Then came the open office nightmare. I will never be in an open office again. Not an option, full stop.
You want my expertise? The options are remote or private office.
Another thing; partial work from home has been a thing over here for a long time now, called "the new working". In practice though, it was just as bad as the open office, in that it was a tactic to reduce the amount of office space needed. Because some clipboard warrior decided that office space was their biggest expense, not staff, nor the realization that they can do more with the same staff if they make some changes to improve their productivity - e.g. no open offices, fixed workspaces, and a goal in their career.
They can have a much smaller office space (can be fancier since it is smaller) for people to meet if they really need to (specifically client facing), then there are internet & coffee & snacks, desks & couches available. 90% staff don't have to go to the office to be honest.
And the rest of the money being saved on having smaller offices can be funneled to employee bonuses/benefits or gear (better desks/chairs if you are chair-bound) (more frequent upgrades or let the employee choose what gear they want (within reason)), (at work I have 1x 24" 1080p screen, at home I have 2x 27" 1440p but I bought it with my own money... (which is the ultimate size and density for programming for me)), (decent webcam & dedicated microphone and good headphones), paid for tooling (like gitkraken/jetbrains/pluralsight subscriptions). Stuff like that will make a huge difference.
Crazy idea - install a whiteboard at home and point a 4k camera at it. The broke college student version of this involves a pen, paper, and the camera on your cellphone; it works quite well.
I actually agree that in-person get-togethers are useful. I'm just not convinced they can't be handles as quarterly events in many situations--as many companies with distributed workforces already do.
In my current commute situation it meas going from peninsula to SF for the day, which also means I get to have lunches in the city that I wouldn't otherwise get at home, and can meet people after work who live in the city. My work is also a couple blocks from the Caltrain station, and so the commute isn't really an issue, I just walk into this big metal box and keep working and I appear in SF an hour later, it's actually kind of relaxing, and I just like trains in general, and looking out the window watching the entire Bay Area fly by me without me having to drive. In the evening on the return ride I see the fog rolling over the mountains as I look out the train window, and that's relaxing too, and as I pass by about 10 other bay area towns, I can choose any single one of them to get off the train and have dinner, or bike around the town just for the hell of it, to get some exercise.
I don't want to commute for face time though. Rather, I'd do it for things like a big space with proper air conditioning, sunlight, and conference rooms without annoying gas leaf blowers that linger in front of my front door exactly when I'm having meetings. I also work on industrial-sized robots, and even if the company were to buy extra hardware, it's pretty impossible/unsafe to be running that kind of stuff at home. It's enormously more efficient to sit in front of the actual thing than to try to cope with a video feed.
I'm a bit of an ambivert, slighly more introverted, but not an extreme introvert. I do enjoy company, and I do miss the lunch conversations about wild and awesome things that I didn't get during the pandemic. I've also found time and time again at past organizations that those in-person socializing circumstances enormously helped build mutual trust with coworkers (specifically peers, not managers or subordinates) for when things actually went wrong. We're social animals and it's still hard to get around that biological fact.
Moving to the middle of nowhere to get cheaper rent and a bigger work space isn't really what I want to do either, because I do like having access to public transportation and food from around the world, including the grocery stores of the ethnic foods I'm used to eating. I'm kind of happy living in a cosmopolitan/global part of the world. I hate the high rents, admittedly, but I realize I can't have it all.
But yeah, no, I wouldn't commute or do hybrid to please management. It's just me. I still want to make the decision about when to go in myself based on circumstances.
This sounds rather idyllic and I'm sort of picturing you as Belle in Beauty in the Beast as she walks around her provincial town singing to the shopkeepers as she walks to the library.
But having the ticket master interrupt my work or sleep used to kill me
It's not infantilizing or childish.
There's pros & cons.
Find a company that aligns with what you seek.
To each company their own.
If I end up leaving because the company refuses to offer WFH, it won’t be getting a 2-week notice or any form of knowledge transfer from me.
Companies also won't be able to claim they hire the best if the rule out remote, but of course they'll still say it.
WFH isn’t just a preference thing, having the option is about being treated with dignity like an adult.
We are uniquely privileged to be in an industry where leaving for better jobs is common and rather doable.
I am very lucky that I was employed only in one company before going on my own and never had to deal with the crap like that personally but I saw it happen to other people.
The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business. I want to be able to jump on the whiteboard at a moments notice and maybe pull in a couple of others, while other people in the office can also listen in. This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business. If the sales guy and I are having a discussion and the junior front end developer hears us, he gets a sense of how we work that he’ll never get if the meeting is held in PMs on Slack or Discord.
I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office.
I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary. I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first. But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
You basically want the seniors' suffer the uncompensated inconveniences of WFO so that the juniors can grow.
> This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business.
This is not altruism though, juniors' professional growth is important for your business growth.
> if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week.
We know from "unlimited time off" experiments that the game theory of this doesn't play off that way. People will race to bottom yielding to tacit peer and management pressure.
> I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary ... But there are reasons for why we do what we do.
No one is saying it is arbitrary. It works better for management. And management makes the calls. That's the reason.
> I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation
Or lose the talent that prefers to have more agency on their work conditions.
A social obligation here, a senseless chat there, a coffee here...a person reminding you about an unimportant email there.
There are just way too many distractions from work, at work. And those distractions are what people describe as "corporate life" because corporates over-micro-managed everything.
Open office spaces are horrible, except for the people not having to work in them - which coincidentially always decide pro open office work space.
If the work culture is manifested in interrupting your colleagues over unimportant stuff all the time, it's perceived as toxic by engineering people because they lose valueable focus time.
That is essentially what it boils down to. Add the additional time required to get there (and costs on the side of the employee for commute) and you have the perfect formula to get rid of quality work people.
While there are upsides of working in the office, there's also huge downsides that management likes to ignore in the discussion.
It will be interesting to see if discouraging WFH can actually be an advantage when it comes to recruitment and retention, but when all of the main players in tech are embracing WFH, its hard to see how smaller players can sell "no WFH" as a benefit.
But in any case, I'm no FAANG, and I was just trying to explain the motivation for my preference that people WFO where possible. I wouldn't say I see it as a competitive recruitment advantage, but I'm yet to be convinced it's a disadvantage either.
Lets hope to god there is a large enough demand for WFH that your position becomes intolerable for more companies. I think having access to on office as an option is great, but thinking its "better" is a unfounded claim.
I used to whiteboard out problems with the whole team. I loved it. We had a couple of star employees who were really good at coming up with ideas and sketching them out. Being able to get the whole team on-side for a problem and understanding the answer was great. Then I discovered (overheard conversation at a social function) that half the team absolutely hated them. I followed up in 1-to-1 meetings, and yes, over half the team didn't enjoy them, didn't feel they could contribute, and saw them as a waste of everyone's time (and saw them as me ego grandstanding). The couple of "stars" did enjoy them, and thought they were great.
During my MBA, I discovered this is common. Introverts don't enjoy this kind of interaction, and don't benefit from it. Some people don't come up with ideas by "vibing" off others - they come up with ideas by themselves. Some people can't talk about an idea until it's complete - the whole idea of "talking through" an idea to completion gives them the shudders, and doesn't work for them.
You may find, after digging, that (like me) you're doing what you love, and not what the team benefits from.
I don't generally do huge whiteboarding sessions with the whole team. Typically I write detailed technical documentation about what I'm trying to achieve, and how I think it should be done, which I share with the team who are implementing it.
It's typically only when they don't understand something that I jump on the whiteboard. And it's typically the more junior people that don't understand things.
It's not that I love huge, didactic whiteboarding sessions; I don't. What I do enjoy is explaining ideas in small whiteboard sessions with just one or two other people, or with small teams who have specific questions, and I feel that these sessions are much more productive in person than they are remotely.
In my BigCo job, your run-of-the-mill managers don't have any influence on this stuff. The high-level decisions are being made by executives who are at least four or five layers of reports away from the masses of ICs (eg the CEO is seven hops above me on my management chain), and whose entire job--as well as the entire job of everybody they come in contact with--consists of attending meetings. We experience the company and the workplace in vastly different ways, and articles & discussions like this are the result of that disconnect.
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I despise the water cooler theory because I’m perfectly capable of socializing over voip or IM. I do it at work and then shortly afterwards with friends on discord.
The real reasons for return to office should be tangible. If you have metrics that people are taking advantage, share them. The only thing I’ve seen so far is out of this world productivity increases.
Different people have different work styles. The water cooler theory is predicated on random, unplanned interactions, which are much harder over those channels. At the proverbial water cooler, an employee might engage with someone they had not planned to speak with, or maybe don't even know, and get some information or connection of value. Maybe you overhear* a couple of other people talking there and you join the conversation because the subject happens to impact you. I'm not sure how well that's replicated by Discord/Slack channels.
After a year+ WFH during the Inside Times, I have come to see the value of at least quarterly, if not monthly, face-to-face team meetings or casual events. Of course, if you have employees in different cities, like west and east coast, you can't affordably meet very often.
* I would hope people would not have a conversation that should be private in a public space, so being overheard is not a bad thing.
I do software, but I have to work with some large industrial hardware and it's so much easier to just have the hardware in front of you. Especially when you have to from time to time set up hardware that isn't even on the network yet.
Telepresence just isn't there yet, and the quality of internet connections and videoconference tools still suck. I have dual 4K monitors and still get 720p feeds or worse on most videoconference tools, you can't even read a damn whiteboard with that, let alone push physical reset buttons or e-stop buttons on actual hardware.
The issue comes up with roles when that isn't the case. In most programming roles I would not have any clear reason to be in-person, and even if I did have times where I clearly needed to be in the office, I would not appreciate being forced to come in outside those times. Requirements like that are frustrating because they require a real cost on my end (less flexible schedule, less control over my environment, a commute) and simultaneously signal a fundamental lack of flexibility, respect and trust from my employer.
I think there's going to be an interesting dynamic when the hardware workers go back to the office and the software workers stay home. The tendency for the software department to become isolated from the rest of the business was already present before the pandemic, but may become more pronounced.
So, right now I am in a lot, but no longer have an office. That is at home now, including enough gear to work on the small scale hardware.
If I come in, you can find me in the shop. My senior firmware engineer and I work best together, but work very well remote too.
So, I am going to move a machine here. We normally get together for a few days and will now just do it more regularly.
I am the better tech anyway, and do enough software to make me a good working extension. We expect this to be a net gain.
As that manufacturing spools up, I will WFH, only coming in when doing R&D, or to improve on or resolve manufacturing problems.
Pre-pandemic, I traveled everywhere, hated it. That is gone now.
Outside of software and other info heavy roles, having flexibility will be seen as a great thing.
As we optimize the diverse tasks, we will work better, and have many options. One of my favorites is to get up at oh dark 30, work in the shop when there are no distractions and head home after lunch. Those are the days when I get the most physical work done, and or solve the worst problems.
Jeez, give it a rest. Companies don't give a crap about your life. None have ever showed the slightest interest in anything I do when not at work.
*after I was told I walked around too much I kept an internal record of every time I left my desk and for what reason. It turns out, the main reasons I walked by was 1) meetings, 2) lab work, and 3) bathroom. I was hoping he would bring it up again so I could show him the Excel sheet!
Why does management care what I do in my free time, so long as I get my job done? It’s a power trip, plain and simple.
I hope you gave a reason if they asked why you’re leaving.