I interviewed with Uber last year and they wanted me in the office two days a week so I could remote in with the rest of the team scattered throughout the US.
I don't mind the end of remote work, as long as the "cool office" actually comes back. Here in Ann Arbor it feels like the tech scene died with remote work and all the jobs are remote.
From my perspective, wages have increased faster elsewhere, and there are far more remote jobs than local ones. The whole reason I moved to Ann Arbor for work was because UMich had created a little startup scene that I could aspire to. I expected the scene to grow, not fade. It really seemed like the beers on tap, foosball table tech job fantasy for a few years there.
That's too bad. The little tiny "hip" area of town seemed pretty neat, as did the fledgling coworking spaces attached to a neat coffeehouse in an old brick building.
Of course, in my own operation it would be very hard to justify to building out some "cool office". Our workers simply seem to prefer other things. They sure aren't interested in forced socialisation.
I'm at a Fortune 500 that cut back nearly all of its remote work. I prefer remote work, and I thrive at it. However, it can't be denied that there are some drawbacks. A few: A) Training new hires, B) bonding (while those in-office chats often detract from raw work-time, they also contribute to relationships. Positive relationships are a worthwhile lubricant when make requests of others), C) increased friction for chatting, which is often a net positive, but does have the potential to block progress that is born from impromptu chats.
Yes, you can try to work around these and other challenges, but working around long-evolved brain firmware that, for many cases of interaction, favors in-person communication, is tough. Of course many people prefer to stay at home, as do I, but there is a huge increase in the level of connection I feel when I go back to the HQ and hang out with everyone (a handful of times each year).
This is word play. It can't be denied that there are some drawbacks to everything. It absolutely can be denied that the drawbacks of remote or individual choice are larger than the drawbacks of forced office work.
I disagree as strongly as possible with the implication that it makes sense to force everybody to communicate in-person because "the brain was designed for it". I communicate much more efficiently - and am even better at connecting socially - through text first, conference (audio or video) second, and in-person a distant third. Yet I speak well and am friendly and sociable in person. I.e. it has nothing to do with being anti-social or something. Most people I know personally are the same way. I don't think people like me are strictly the majority, but they are very common, and may even be the majority in tech contexts. I.e. it's irrational (or simply hostile) to ignore us.
The common implication that allowing each person to work in-person or remote at will is somehow a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario is a fallacy.
It certainly can be denied--or at least argued. Are there actually studies that show these things are significant drawbacks which are worse in the balance after also accounting for the benefits of remote work?
Proponents of both in-office and remote work are just spouting feelings and vibes rather than actual evidence that it really makes a difference.
There is research supporting the benefits of remote work (less distraction, increased productivity, etc.), and there is research appearing to confirm the negatives. One excerpt from a study at MS[0] "Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts."
Gallup [1] found that far fewer workers felt respected while remote during the pandemic. I thought it was wild to see the huge uptick (31%) year-over-year in SEC whistle-blowers. [2]
Research of this type is challenging, especially because it's difficult to source the volume and quality of data needed from businesses. I'm sure we could find weaknesses in any study for or against.
Hybrid might be the best of both worlds per HBR, see [3]
Honestly I'd love to see a solid refutation of the benefits of in-person work, so that I could use it for leverage the next time my remote job is at risk of being converted back to in-person.
I have not searched for a new job for a long time so I have
little feel for what the job market it these days.
I do know that many companies have let devs go for various excuses.
We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back
in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity.
Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it
thye company would tank since all the devs would quit.
Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions
on working from home?
They creep it up. Like frog in boiling water, not much to be done. 1 day a week with 1 optional day for the social butterflies. 2 days mandatory with 1 day optional for social butterflies. 3 days mandatories + some extra mandatory days like all hands and Q-end. Next up is 5 days mandatory with 2 optional days for social butterflies.
During COVID WFH peak I naively thought that the government, especially the EU, will take the growth of remote working as an opportunity for its Green Deal the bureaucrats love so much talking about. It started falling apart quickly when they started subsidizing restaurants, albeit that was the national government prerogative.
To this day I still wonder why there are no parties that tout this as part of their election programs. It's the way to reduce pollution and stimulate less-populated regions which have been dwindling as cities have been growing and getting so expensive.
That might work for an organisation that only recently implemented remote work so has a great deal of their staff anyway in the same city as HQ. For fully remote workers there's no creeping. I live thousands of kilometres from my office, there's no practical difference for me between a day a week in office or full RTO.
My past 2 jobs have been a big Bay Area unicorn "startup", and a small real startup. I'm remote because I grew up and live in BFE, USA.
My take on remote work is that bigcos with big names can broadly do whatever they want and still get headcount because people want the name on their resume and their stock (mostly still privately held!) in their portfolios. So they can jerk people around in a million ways, one of which is RTO, and still hire. They obviously make exceptions where it would really hurt them wrt high level roles.
Meanwhile, literally everyone else has to be flexible or they're either not going to get applications, or the adverse selection of no-remote-work makes the candidates who do apply such worse quality that hiring takes forever.
My current company tried this. Our owner (no kids or spouse) wants people in office with him so he can keep pretending it's the good old days. It's somewhat well-intended in that all it means is we started posting dual job posts and/or started posting them for SF first, then opening to remote if we didn't get any SF apps of sufficient quality. That was almost a year ago now. Despite this, we've made exactly one hire in SF within commuting distance and they didn't even apply into that position and don't have any RTO in their contract. The other 10ish HC we've added have all been remote, despite these efforts.
I also know of a different tech SMB I worked for long ago and still have contacts in. They don't offer remote at all (boomer owner). The business has essentially failed, they can hardly hire and cannot retain, and they're only kept afloat because the owner is extremely rich off the efforts of the prior non-owner CEO who he ousted to come back and ruin everything.
Is what cases is hiring an expensive taxi to get to work and back every day cheaper than the all-in cost of owning, fueling, maintaining and insuring your own car?
I plugged a used 2022 Camry w/ a short commute in CA into AAA's tool: they estimate $850 TCO per month. So at say $18 an uber in SF, you can make ~24 round trips to the office a month. That assumes you can park the Camry for free I think. On the other hand if you need a car to get groceries and stuff, the math starts to tip dramatically. Also assumes you value your time waiting for an Uber at $0 I suppose.
I don’t know, but anecdotally, I took a bunch of Uber Pool rides when I was on a business trip with people who were clearly using it to commute to or from their job. Some of them were fairly long rides as well (downtown San Diego to Poway was the most common where I’d go with someone commuting). Maybe parking is expensive/impractical?
Honestly, in the cases where you have to pay for a parking spot near your work
That is very expensive in most big cities, so if your workplace doesn't have dedicated parking and they don't comp your parking spot, you wind up spending thousands per year on parking
On top of the other car stuff, it becomes prohibitive
A startup can now afford hiring better talent at lower costs, because people value remote work so much.
Remote doesn't necessarily mean working from home. There are people in situations (having babies / toddlers?) where their productivity would improve from working outside the home, so startups should offer to pay for a local coworking space or a similar arrangement.
the startup I'm working at is doing exactly that, not really optimizing on the cost but we're getting some exceptional talent and we have an incredible leverage
Unless startups with remote talent can't get funding, because investors look at big companies and thinking that if Uber, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google think having in-office employees is better, there must be a good reason for it.
only if the golden era was during Covid but I have been working remotely for the past 20 years. I'm sure there are more jobs available now than there was before Covid.
Management is completely clueless about how noisy and distracting offices are due to other coworkers, also how contagiously sick people make each other sick. Management sitting in their private offices are far removed from the ground reality, and the worse part is they never solicit direct feedback either from 2-3 levels down.
I generally view these moves as simply a soft layoff to cut down on costs.
Uber doesn't really have any way to grow. They can't exactly start charging more. They can't pay their drivers less, who already are paid poorly. The market for expensive taxi rides isn't going to expand, either.
So now they have to be in a cost-cutting mode. The app already exists, so they don't need a large staff of highly-paid technologists.
I wonder if you plotted layoffs cycles you’d see a big gaps for tech companies for the last couple years since RTO orders will have the same effect.
Reading about the different RTO rebellions is interesting. I know multiple people who have ended up in a half day schedule that they really like. All meetings scheduled before noon-ish, then head home to focus on work. These are all kind of against company policy but there’s a shield of willingly ignorant managers between the executives and workers. As long as the managers can say “as far as any metrics I have access to tell me my people are in the office the required days per week” they’re ok with it.
Uber bet incorrectly that we would have widespread self driving robo-taxis by now. The idea was to lose money gaining massive market share and then replace the human gig economy workers with AI.
Which seemed like an iffy bet. Someone who invents self-driving robo-taxis isn't going to want to give away their profit margin to Uber. Why would they? You can just open up the Waymo app and order, well, a Waymo.
Sure, next they can corner the lucrative home improvement supply home delivery market. $50 to pick up a load of lumber from Lowes and deliver it to your back yard.
Their latest earnings (Q4 2024) showed a 20% growth in revenue, an 18% increase in trips, and a 14% increase in the number of monthly active users (all numbers YoY).
Readit News
From my perspective, wages have increased faster elsewhere, and there are far more remote jobs than local ones. The whole reason I moved to Ann Arbor for work was because UMich had created a little startup scene that I could aspire to. I expected the scene to grow, not fade. It really seemed like the beers on tap, foosball table tech job fantasy for a few years there.
Of course, in my own operation it would be very hard to justify to building out some "cool office". Our workers simply seem to prefer other things. They sure aren't interested in forced socialisation.
Yes, you can try to work around these and other challenges, but working around long-evolved brain firmware that, for many cases of interaction, favors in-person communication, is tough. Of course many people prefer to stay at home, as do I, but there is a huge increase in the level of connection I feel when I go back to the HQ and hang out with everyone (a handful of times each year).
This is word play. It can't be denied that there are some drawbacks to everything. It absolutely can be denied that the drawbacks of remote or individual choice are larger than the drawbacks of forced office work.
I disagree as strongly as possible with the implication that it makes sense to force everybody to communicate in-person because "the brain was designed for it". I communicate much more efficiently - and am even better at connecting socially - through text first, conference (audio or video) second, and in-person a distant third. Yet I speak well and am friendly and sociable in person. I.e. it has nothing to do with being anti-social or something. Most people I know personally are the same way. I don't think people like me are strictly the majority, but they are very common, and may even be the majority in tech contexts. I.e. it's irrational (or simply hostile) to ignore us.
The common implication that allowing each person to work in-person or remote at will is somehow a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario is a fallacy.
Proponents of both in-office and remote work are just spouting feelings and vibes rather than actual evidence that it really makes a difference.
Gallup [1] found that far fewer workers felt respected while remote during the pandemic. I thought it was wild to see the huge uptick (31%) year-over-year in SEC whistle-blowers. [2]
Research of this type is challenging, especially because it's difficult to source the volume and quality of data needed from businesses. I'm sure we could find weaknesses in any study for or against.
Hybrid might be the best of both worlds per HBR, see [3]
Honestly I'd love to see a solid refutation of the benefits of in-person work, so that I could use it for leverage the next time my remote job is at risk of being converted back to in-person.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 [1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/657629/post-pandemic-workpl... [2] https://www.proskauer.com/blog/bloomberg-sec-receives-record... [3] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-063_639195cc-...
We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity. Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it thye company would tank since all the devs would quit.
Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions on working from home?
To this day I still wonder why there are no parties that tout this as part of their election programs. It's the way to reduce pollution and stimulate less-populated regions which have been dwindling as cities have been growing and getting so expensive.
My take on remote work is that bigcos with big names can broadly do whatever they want and still get headcount because people want the name on their resume and their stock (mostly still privately held!) in their portfolios. So they can jerk people around in a million ways, one of which is RTO, and still hire. They obviously make exceptions where it would really hurt them wrt high level roles.
Meanwhile, literally everyone else has to be flexible or they're either not going to get applications, or the adverse selection of no-remote-work makes the candidates who do apply such worse quality that hiring takes forever.
My current company tried this. Our owner (no kids or spouse) wants people in office with him so he can keep pretending it's the good old days. It's somewhat well-intended in that all it means is we started posting dual job posts and/or started posting them for SF first, then opening to remote if we didn't get any SF apps of sufficient quality. That was almost a year ago now. Despite this, we've made exactly one hire in SF within commuting distance and they didn't even apply into that position and don't have any RTO in their contract. The other 10ish HC we've added have all been remote, despite these efforts.
I also know of a different tech SMB I worked for long ago and still have contacts in. They don't offer remote at all (boomer owner). The business has essentially failed, they can hardly hire and cannot retain, and they're only kept afloat because the owner is extremely rich off the efforts of the prior non-owner CEO who he ousted to come back and ruin everything.
That's my anecdata.
When you want to hit remote working, you can make anything into a stick
That is very expensive in most big cities, so if your workplace doesn't have dedicated parking and they don't comp your parking spot, you wind up spending thousands per year on parking
On top of the other car stuff, it becomes prohibitive
Deleted Comment
A startup can now afford hiring better talent at lower costs, because people value remote work so much.
Remote doesn't necessarily mean working from home. There are people in situations (having babies / toddlers?) where their productivity would improve from working outside the home, so startups should offer to pay for a local coworking space or a similar arrangement.
But I don't know if that's how investors think?
I don't want to go back to being limited by my local labour market, and I don't want to go back to commuting daily and all the other stuff
So I'm really determined to stay fully remote, and glad to hear that people have been doing it for much longer than just since COVID
Any tips for maintaining this? I have been thinking that it would be easier to stay remote if I start contracting instead of being an employee
Uber doesn't really have any way to grow. They can't exactly start charging more. They can't pay their drivers less, who already are paid poorly. The market for expensive taxi rides isn't going to expand, either.
So now they have to be in a cost-cutting mode. The app already exists, so they don't need a large staff of highly-paid technologists.
Reading about the different RTO rebellions is interesting. I know multiple people who have ended up in a half day schedule that they really like. All meetings scheduled before noon-ish, then head home to focus on work. These are all kind of against company policy but there’s a shield of willingly ignorant managers between the executives and workers. As long as the managers can say “as far as any metrics I have access to tell me my people are in the office the required days per week” they’re ok with it.
And why would I look to them for robotaxis? Waymo seems way ahead of them.
That's demonstrably not true.
Their latest earnings (Q4 2024) showed a 20% growth in revenue, an 18% increase in trips, and a 14% increase in the number of monthly active users (all numbers YoY).