When you are an employee, you are literally selling your labor, knowledge and experience in exchange for money and services (healthcare, etc). Think of yourself as your own for-profit business - a business of you.
Just like selling anything - if the terms don't satisfy you, then don't sell. Find someone else willing to accept your terms of sale.
You have the power folks... not the employers. Many have been led to believe the power-dynamic is reversed, and that the employer holds all of the power. That's absurdly untrue.
You have the labor, knowledge and experience (aka talent). Be your own advocate.
I individually have almost no power to shape how the industry treats its laborers, I'm forced to maybe find the job marginally better than the median position for my needs. Collectively though...
Just to offer a little counter point to your motivational speech.
I took a stand at a company where they asked for RTO. They fired me, I sued them, and the first phase of the trial just ended where the judges cut the baby in half and dismissed the "firing with cause" and offered a 3 months severance (to cover what would have been a notice period), but without asking anything more of the company. The lack of empathy for the worker was surprising to me, frankly. Overall it was basically pointless.
So, if you do try to offer resistance to RTO policies, make sure you're not entirely alone, and probably leaving on your own with garden leave is a better option than trying to fight them in court. (This was all in the EU, so YMMV.)
Fighting RTO is going to be an uphill battle. First off, it’s a fairly narrow class of job that can be performed in a WFH environment. Those same jobs can arguably (because there is no real solid productivity data either way) be at least equally productive in an office too. Prior to 2020 and the pandemic WFH was a rarity.
So you are fighting against work tradition even within your industry, poor productivity data supporting your assertion, and frankly a general work culture where most everyone else doesn’t work from home. Your deck is stacked against you.
I work from home, but if my company chose to RTO, I wouldn’t challenge it. I know from my team’s experience (same base group pre-pandemic) we are not measurably more productive WFH as in office. It would suck to add a commute back to my day, but prior to 2020 I did that for over 3 decades anyway.
This is kind of true, but it depends on risking your financial stability in the short term. Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike. What are they going to do, not have IT? they’d be out of business in a month.
Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…
> Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike
Why would you do that? That is by definition, a hostile work environment.
Find a place where you don't need to pull a bunch of shenanigans to get what you want.
Especially in the IT field, you have a massive amount of options. People tend to only think about FAANG and friends, but there's millions of SMB's out there that need IT of all levels, pay well and offer generous benefits.
> Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike. What are they going to do, not have IT? they’d be out of business in a month.
Last year there were nearly 100k tech layoffs in the US, the year prior nearly 200k. Every tech opening is saturated with a few hundred resumes. Do you really think your company couldn’t hire replacements?
> Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…
Shame on your company if they don’t control security to prevent this. Shame on you if you are willing to withhold more than your labor in a strike situation. There is work stoppage and there is sabotage. If you are not relinquishing the only set of keys to the factory, that borders on intentional sabotage.
> And isn't it interesting that your worker empowerment talk is aligned with what the billionaire CEO publicly says?
And that means the GP is wrong when he says, "you have the power folks... not the employers." The employers have the power."
He'd be right if there was a lot more worker solidarity and unionization, but that's not the world we live in. Right now worker power is too diffuse and unorganized to make a difference. Individualism divides and conquers workers.
While true, this is a bandaid and frankly a battle the common people will never win. Small, organized groups that have no morals will always win. There may be small victories (5 day work week) but they will eventually be eclipsed (nearly all households are dual income - the capital class ended up with 10 days worked a week per household instead of 7).
Americans need unity, and from that needs to come leaders who have a concept of noblesse oblige. We need rulers that care for their people and are judged by the state of their poorest. Unfortunately, America is far too diverse (both genetically and spiritually) for this to happen. Diverse democracies never succeed (there are many books on this - one was even on Obamas reading list). People will pattern match the solution to “facism”, “Hitler”, “tyranny” - reject it - and continue to live in a time of technological miracles worrying if they’ll be able to afford a place to sleep. The knee jerk rejection is exactly what the capital class has engineered to continue leeching off the rest of us.
We could unionize but what’s the point? Our leaders should love us and we should love them. And wealth gaps as large as they are are anything but love - they’re a moral failing.
May be I get this wrong. This sounds like a bold statement. Switzerland, Canada, Belgium but also India are multi-lingual or even multi-ethnic democracies. They know tensions but they are not failed.
I think WFH is another point of leverage for employees. If something doesn't work out with the job it's easier to deal with it on your own terms, whether that's taking more breaks or silent quitting. This leverage is exactly what employers are afraid of and want to rollback completely.
Companies treat employees like just another resource, so I personally think it's fair when employees try to game the system back. If you can work less and get away with it, I think that's fair because companies do the exact same in the opposite direction.
If it were up to companies they would select for indentured servitude, if not slavery, because that maximizes profits, and that's the bottom line. Companies even admit as much, and they're going to fight to remove as much leverage from employees as possible.
I've worked for an all remote company for over a decade. Dimon is largely correct. There is a huge amount of abuse and we pay a high cost for it. It's not that remote interaction is worse in terms of creativity and productivity, I don't think it is. It's about the discipline to spend the time on task when nobody is watching. It takes a rare character to keep that up over years, and I'm not one of them. (And being free to say that is why I don't put my name on this account.)
If anything it's easier for folks to goof off in the office vs. working from home. In the office, you have the appearance of being "at work". When working from home, you tend to be judged much more on your output rather than when you start and end your day.
Managers should be able to know whether people are productive or not. If their only measure is looking if people are in the office or not, their problem isn't remote work.
> It's about the discipline to spend the time on task when nobody is watching.
Again, if you're expected to deliver something, the discipline should come from risk of being fired if you don't deliver.
I have done both over the past 3 decades. in the office the most I worked productively ever is maybe 3.5/4hrs. at home it is not uncommon I hit 9-10hrs of straight up work. just about everyone I know feels the same way. my at-office day is like:
- drive 20 minutes
- get in, hit the breakroom, coffee and chat for 20-30 minutes
- work a bit, maybe a meeting
- IM bunch of people about lunch plans
- go to lunch for 90 minutes
- back at the office, another 15-20 minutes before settling in
- work a bit while keeping an eye on traffic to head home
- head home
At home,
- get up and work for about 90 minutes
- bike to school with my kid.
- work for 6-ish hours
- pick up my kid
- work another 90 minutes while she is doing school work
- parenting fun
- work another 60-90 after her bedtime
the core difference between at-office and at-home is that when I have to go to the office I do not touch my computer at home ever (often won’t even take it home with me) while when I am at home I will frequently work late at night etc
I think it ends up being a sort of an evolved trait. Somebody in a full remote company doesn't show up for work one day, they notice that the next day nobody says anything, nobody noticed, or nobody cared. Over time, this leads to disconnection from work.
When I first did remote working I suffered from motivation problems. I had days when I did nothing at all. It actually made me depressed.
But, that was also a failure of the company. They did not manage me well or even think about my productivity. I strongly suspect that I wouldn't have done anything much even if the role had been office based. The role and the company were simply poor and not a good fit for me.
These days I'm much more productive working from home than an office, but I'm in a place where what I do matters and I like that.
The only formal study that I've seen shows that there is 15% more fraud in remote financial services work. Do you have any studies pointing to this being wrong?
You can also waste time in an office. It doesn't make that much difference, ultimately.
What matters are deadlines and productivity. If you can be productive in less time than others then good luck to you. Wages are 'flattened' between people employed at the same level so why shouldn't the more productive workers benefit in some way.
RTO is just a cheaper way of reducing the workforce. The 'star' talent will sign contracts that say they can work from home 1-3 days a week and as soon as they make enough seats empty, WFH privileges for the rank and file will come back as well.
That's not actually a huge number in the grand scheme of things. That's entertainer/pro athlete money. Especially considering he runs one of the most powerful companies in the country and his net worth is $2.6 billion.
That's such a strange number to me these days. If I got paid that much in a year, I'd instantly retire, and yet it's still essentially nothing compared to $1 billion, which Elon Musk probably makes or loses in an average day (and has lost much more than that over the past few months due to the drop in TSLA) and has no actual effect on his lifestyle.
The only CEO who I've worked for who I would describe as winning at capitalism is a former bank CEO who worked in the job for 8 years, retired in his late forties (IIRC) having pulled in a minimum of $50m over that time. And actually retired.
The rest of these people are as addicted as heroin addicts.
He earns so much money, of course he loves to work and doesn’t give a damn about people who don’t even earn a fraction of his salary. He also seems to forget that people who actually work for him bring these high profits for the company. How about being thankful for having smart employees who help you to keep your business so profitable?
If I were to get paid as much as he does, I wouldn’t even leave the office; I would sleep there.
This is a very abused fact. When you are comparing the incomes, you are competing in your region, not globally and then your income goes from top 0.1% to top 10%. And then you realize that you won't be able to buy that house or that you don't have as much flexibility to change your employer. If you want to feel like top 0.1%, then you probably have to move to some forgotten place in Africa (most large cities do not count due to income inequality and corruption) but then your standard of living with your top 0.1% income is even worse. Statistics is too easy to abuse without critical thinking.
You’re correct :) I think I understand what you’re trying to say, and I agree, but I still don’t understand his arguments. It’s not like his company is not profitable, or the employees work not well enough
Been WFH for many years, but I can understand why some companies prefer (demand) in office. Sorry, but unless its written into employment law, no-one has a "right" to it.
I would think this could be a perk that companies could use to get an advantage in hiring. Although, maybe those who it appeals to on the whole may be lower performers?
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Just like selling anything - if the terms don't satisfy you, then don't sell. Find someone else willing to accept your terms of sale.
You have the power folks... not the employers. Many have been led to believe the power-dynamic is reversed, and that the employer holds all of the power. That's absurdly untrue.
You have the labor, knowledge and experience (aka talent). Be your own advocate.
They almost never work, because they are a bad deal for the company and a bad deal for above average workers.
You’ll waste years trying to push a rock up hill, when you should have just changed jobs.
I took a stand at a company where they asked for RTO. They fired me, I sued them, and the first phase of the trial just ended where the judges cut the baby in half and dismissed the "firing with cause" and offered a 3 months severance (to cover what would have been a notice period), but without asking anything more of the company. The lack of empathy for the worker was surprising to me, frankly. Overall it was basically pointless.
So, if you do try to offer resistance to RTO policies, make sure you're not entirely alone, and probably leaving on your own with garden leave is a better option than trying to fight them in court. (This was all in the EU, so YMMV.)
So you are fighting against work tradition even within your industry, poor productivity data supporting your assertion, and frankly a general work culture where most everyone else doesn’t work from home. Your deck is stacked against you.
I work from home, but if my company chose to RTO, I wouldn’t challenge it. I know from my team’s experience (same base group pre-pandemic) we are not measurably more productive WFH as in office. It would suck to add a commute back to my day, but prior to 2020 I did that for over 3 decades anyway.
Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…
Why would you do that? That is by definition, a hostile work environment.
Find a place where you don't need to pull a bunch of shenanigans to get what you want.
Especially in the IT field, you have a massive amount of options. People tend to only think about FAANG and friends, but there's millions of SMB's out there that need IT of all levels, pay well and offer generous benefits.
Last year there were nearly 100k tech layoffs in the US, the year prior nearly 200k. Every tech opening is saturated with a few hundred resumes. Do you really think your company couldn’t hire replacements?
> Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…
Shame on your company if they don’t control security to prevent this. Shame on you if you are willing to withhold more than your labor in a strike situation. There is work stoppage and there is sabotage. If you are not relinquishing the only set of keys to the factory, that borders on intentional sabotage.
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> And at the end of the day, Dimon stressed, employees have a choice in whether to work for JPMorgan at all. “It’s a free world,” Dimon said.
And isn't it interesting that your worker empowerment talk is aligned with what the billionaire CEO publicly says?
And that means the GP is wrong when he says, "you have the power folks... not the employers." The employers have the power."
He'd be right if there was a lot more worker solidarity and unionization, but that's not the world we live in. Right now worker power is too diffuse and unorganized to make a difference. Individualism divides and conquers workers.
Why? Are we now saying anything a billionaire (gasp!) says is automatically wrong or nefarious? Come on people, I expect better from the HN crowd.
Americans need unity, and from that needs to come leaders who have a concept of noblesse oblige. We need rulers that care for their people and are judged by the state of their poorest. Unfortunately, America is far too diverse (both genetically and spiritually) for this to happen. Diverse democracies never succeed (there are many books on this - one was even on Obamas reading list). People will pattern match the solution to “facism”, “Hitler”, “tyranny” - reject it - and continue to live in a time of technological miracles worrying if they’ll be able to afford a place to sleep. The knee jerk rejection is exactly what the capital class has engineered to continue leeching off the rest of us.
We could unionize but what’s the point? Our leaders should love us and we should love them. And wealth gaps as large as they are are anything but love - they’re a moral failing.
May be I get this wrong. This sounds like a bold statement. Switzerland, Canada, Belgium but also India are multi-lingual or even multi-ethnic democracies. They know tensions but they are not failed.
Companies treat employees like just another resource, so I personally think it's fair when employees try to game the system back. If you can work less and get away with it, I think that's fair because companies do the exact same in the opposite direction.
If it were up to companies they would select for indentured servitude, if not slavery, because that maximizes profits, and that's the bottom line. Companies even admit as much, and they're going to fight to remove as much leverage from employees as possible.
> It's about the discipline to spend the time on task when nobody is watching.
Again, if you're expected to deliver something, the discipline should come from risk of being fired if you don't deliver.
- drive 20 minutes
- get in, hit the breakroom, coffee and chat for 20-30 minutes
- work a bit, maybe a meeting
- IM bunch of people about lunch plans
- go to lunch for 90 minutes
- back at the office, another 15-20 minutes before settling in
- work a bit while keeping an eye on traffic to head home
- head home
At home,
- get up and work for about 90 minutes
- bike to school with my kid.
- work for 6-ish hours
- pick up my kid
- work another 90 minutes while she is doing school work
- parenting fun
- work another 60-90 after her bedtime
the core difference between at-office and at-home is that when I have to go to the office I do not touch my computer at home ever (often won’t even take it home with me) while when I am at home I will frequently work late at night etc
But, that was also a failure of the company. They did not manage me well or even think about my productivity. I strongly suspect that I wouldn't have done anything much even if the role had been office based. The role and the company were simply poor and not a good fit for me.
These days I'm much more productive working from home than an office, but I'm in a place where what I do matters and I like that.
What matters are deadlines and productivity. If you can be productive in less time than others then good luck to you. Wages are 'flattened' between people employed at the same level so why shouldn't the more productive workers benefit in some way.
Mask is off, watch your best people go work for Chime.
I can see how it might make sense to accept that you’ll lose some of your best people, in order to significantly increase the average.
Your comment seems to lack any awareness of the distribution of annual income.
The rest of these people are as addicted as heroin addicts.
If I were to get paid as much as he does, I wouldn’t even leave the office; I would sleep there.
I would think this could be a perk that companies could use to get an advantage in hiring. Although, maybe those who it appeals to on the whole may be lower performers?
Would love to see some real data on this.