> many still spend large parts of the day on video chats they could have done from home
This has been my experience of "in the office" post-pandemic. I end up on a video call for almost every meeting anyway. And being on a video call meeting in an open-plan office with an internet connections that's trying to serve 10s of video calls is a considerably worse experience than being on one in quiet environment with an internet connection that only needs to serve 1 or 2.
Being in an office when other people are on video calls can also be quite unpleasant.
My wife's company returned to the office. Even if all or most of folks on a video chat are at her location, everyone takes the call from their own cubicle or office anyway. So she never interacts with anyone in person even while in person at the office.
That's a rather sad office. Maybe I'm just lucky, but my experience is that if you're in the office, you will meet people and have casual chats with them.
The physical environment things makes sense, but uplink contention isn't an inherent feature of office buildings. It means that someone goofed and underprovisioned your infra.
The physical environment thing isn't an inherent feature of office buildings either. But space for people to have individual offices, sufficient meeting rooms and video conferencing equipment for all meetings to be able to use one), and internet connections that can handle significant numbers of video calls are all expensive.
avoiding video calls is not why they did RTO so not sure how that's relevent. They are just sick of ppl walking their dogs, going to the "dentist" , doing laundry, taking a nap, cooking lunch, going to the post office, going to afternoon spin class and still logging off at 5pm. And these are not even half the things i do on weekly basis.
The last time I worked in an office, I spent half of my time working alone at my desk, or in a video call. I can't remember ever having a significant non-video call meeting. It got to the point where most days none of the folks in our corner of the open office even talked to each other. What was I spending 2 hours a day commuting for? Sure the office was extremely nice, but the whole thing was a farce.
Later on I asked to transition to fully remote, which was denied as I didn't have a track record of working remotely. Ignoring this torturous, flawed logic, I pointed out that I had effectively been working remotely the entire time I was there, but it fell on deaf ears.
I soon left and have been working remote ever since. I'll never go back, and I'll never have to. Turns out there are tons of more sane remote friendly employment opportunities out there than there are in-office jobs in my city.
I had a similar experience, but my employer was fortunate to have our lease expiring in late 2020, so we just took the dive into being all-remote. Since then, I've had direct reports from the UK to Oregon. I live in a major city with a lot of talent, but being able to increase our pool to a global search has been amazing, and I think we all get more done by working from home.
I invite you to visit Bangalore or any city in India.
Unless you are a career beginner and living in a shared one room "paying guest" arrangement closer to office or you are upper management earning enough to afford an apartment closer to office ... you are more likely living in an affordable apartment (that still costs you your life savings and 20 year mortagage) and commuting through horrendous trafic for 2-3 hours each day. This is me.
Is it? Back when I was commuting from Boise -> Nampa (a suburb where a lot of folks live) leaving at rush hour it'd easily take me a minimum of 45 minutes to get home. They've done some upgrades since so it might be better now, (I blessedly don't have a reason to find out). Plenty of folks were going to Caldwell (even further out).
I don't have firsthand knowledge but it would surprise me to learn the big tech hubs are better.
Having recently driven through downtown Toronto at rush hour for an in person office visit, I could see how an hour would be easy to rack up, because I’ve done it. One day at the end of the workday, it took me 20 minutes to get from my parking garage, around a single city block, and to the highway on ramp. Never again.
Only the people who have long commutes are going to make comments about it, and thus every comment makes it seem like every person is saying they have an hour commute.
When in reality the people with short commutes don't comment on it.
> Employees at Amazon’s Toronto office said their personal belongings have repeatedly been stolen from their desks.
This is the stupidest thing to do, presuming the Toronto offices are similar to SLU. There are cameras everywhere and if someone is stealing, all it should take is 15 minutes of footage review and a notification to HR to terminate them.
I just left Amazon because of RTO. Have worked out of various offices across EU and NA, including Toronto… and Toronto was by far the worst. Partly because Amazon does not own the entire building, and partly because of issues such as space constraints.
Also as a fun side note, when they gave assigned desks for RTO5, they were assigned by last name. Not by team, but by name, so everyone ended up separated from their actual team… great for collaboration lol.
Hence, they're probably not being "stolen" as much as someone being like "there's someone else's stuff here where I either thought my desk was, or on this desk which I want to claim for my own, so I will move this other person's stuff elsewhere."
First assumption is that there is a miscommunication between GREF and a team about desks being permanent or "hotel" setup, and most of this stolen stuff is in lost & found or a locker or something like that. But a scratched itch for those seeking a reason to not RTO, for sure.
Getting more desks is probably not a bandwidth issue but a logistics issue. Putting more support people on it is not going to speed up the trucks shipping the desks.
Before the pandemic, my experience of the open office at Spotify, Skype, or other places I visited was: never enough conference rooms, whenever I tried to talk to people I would get shushed (my voice is not quiet) and almost everyone listens to headphones all day anyway.
Open office configurations have never been a particularly good way of working. They became popular because they are cheap.
I think RTO really should only apply where the nature of the business requires people to engage directly. Engineers do not really need this. Also technically remote employees save companies thousands a month per head per space needed. Renting an office and the capacity to seat it is pricey! Bet you Spotify and Netflix save millions of dollars not paying for office space.
For my first full time job, I was a junior sysadmin. My toolset had to include LOAF floppies, one FREEDOS floppy, and a bent paper clip.
I had an office. My office. With a door.
Since then, every advance in my career raised my skill level, raised my pay, and shrank my office. First came the open office plan. Then came hot desks. Now I'm all-remote, and I mostly float around libraries and cafes when I'm not zooming.
Seriously, it's so demoralizing to be ordered to come to an open office plan where you don't even have a desk you can unload a backpack's worth of things on. (Not happening to me as I'd have to commute on the Acela.) If the powers that be want a return to the office, it's time to rethink what that means.
It's crazy how I also had a private office when I was a fresh-out-of-school 22 year old only making $55k a year, and now it seems absolutely no one has an office despite making 4-10x that at big tech companies!!
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This has been my experience of "in the office" post-pandemic. I end up on a video call for almost every meeting anyway. And being on a video call meeting in an open-plan office with an internet connections that's trying to serve 10s of video calls is a considerably worse experience than being on one in quiet environment with an internet connection that only needs to serve 1 or 2.
Being in an office when other people are on video calls can also be quite unpleasant.
This is not a hard problem to solve if she wishes to.
It's a lot easier to procrastinate in the office, actually, when everybody just assumes you are working just for being there.
At home I actually feel more pressured to show results from what I am doing.
Later on I asked to transition to fully remote, which was denied as I didn't have a track record of working remotely. Ignoring this torturous, flawed logic, I pointed out that I had effectively been working remotely the entire time I was there, but it fell on deaf ears.
I soon left and have been working remote ever since. I'll never go back, and I'll never have to. Turns out there are tons of more sane remote friendly employment opportunities out there than there are in-office jobs in my city.
Unless you are a career beginner and living in a shared one room "paying guest" arrangement closer to office or you are upper management earning enough to afford an apartment closer to office ... you are more likely living in an affordable apartment (that still costs you your life savings and 20 year mortagage) and commuting through horrendous trafic for 2-3 hours each day. This is me.
I don't have firsthand knowledge but it would surprise me to learn the big tech hubs are better.
Only the people who have long commutes are going to make comments about it, and thus every comment makes it seem like every person is saying they have an hour commute.
When in reality the people with short commutes don't comment on it.
I’ve had 3 hour commutes in Chicago suburbs too.
Austin and the Bay Area are awful too. Did all of them.
Now I live in a town where it’s no more than 15 minutes to anything.
This is the stupidest thing to do, presuming the Toronto offices are similar to SLU. There are cameras everywhere and if someone is stealing, all it should take is 15 minutes of footage review and a notification to HR to terminate them.
Also as a fun side note, when they gave assigned desks for RTO5, they were assigned by last name. Not by team, but by name, so everyone ended up separated from their actual team… great for collaboration lol.
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Open office configurations have never been a particularly good way of working. They became popular because they are cheap.
I had an office. My office. With a door.
Since then, every advance in my career raised my skill level, raised my pay, and shrank my office. First came the open office plan. Then came hot desks. Now I'm all-remote, and I mostly float around libraries and cafes when I'm not zooming.
Seriously, it's so demoralizing to be ordered to come to an open office plan where you don't even have a desk you can unload a backpack's worth of things on. (Not happening to me as I'd have to commute on the Acela.) If the powers that be want a return to the office, it's time to rethink what that means.