5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office.
I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
I think before that, we just postpone making this appointments until our home issue became much worse ( health, house maintenance, child-care, etc... ). I notice my house smelling much nicer just due to weekly cleaning instead of every 2-3 weeks.
>I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office
The quality of offices was also much better in the past like a single office for for 2 to Max 6 people. Now it's crowded open space hot desks offices with 40+ people.
To add to that, we had almost no free time during the week to ourselves. Commute, dinner, shower, bed. So what did we do? We borrowed personal time from our sleep time, always feeling foggy and tired. I would wake up and go "eh, nothing that a cup of coffee won't fix", and off I went.
I am the same way - 3 days I actually find invigorating. It cures that cabin fever. But back to back, five days, after the pandemic, it just feels like straight up abuse. And it's what it really is. We just TOOK it.
I don't understand why companies don't "get" this bit of it.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
This is why many see it as babysitting. In larger orgs, many or even all meetings l, depending on your function and seniority, are going to all be online and spanning multiple time zones.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth.
If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place?
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
It's quiet layoffs. You agreed to be in their city any time they want in the contract, but you signed it anyway despite the pay being less than the rent in that city. Now you're being called in, you're quitting, so it's technically not a layoff.
Why is 3 seemingly always the minimum? Why not 2? I did 2 days in-office for 2 years—it was a great balance. All the meetings ended up on Tuesday/Thursday and M/W/F was solid get-shit-done time at home. You also never started or ended the week in-office.
My whole team (it's a large one) is doing one day in the office per week. It's the same day for everyone. I personally like calmness of the office, so I usually go two times. I don't see any fundamental problems with that arrangement.
5 days a week at the office is not happening for me unless they pay mid six figures. And I live in Europe, we don't get Facebook AI team salaries here :D
Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
I am also hybrid, currently we can still distribute the monthly count as we feel like it, the moment they start pushing for more is when I will remind them of my remote work clause on the work contract, and then lets see, maybe I'll be again on the job market.
> Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
Probably the same here. This week might actually be my first 4-day in office week this year, come to think of it. Next week, I'll be in office at-most 1.5 days, because I'm going to be taking a day off in the middle of the week and then working from the other side of the (admittedly small) country for Thu/fri.
Question- how common are fully-remote software engineer gigs in Europe? I'm considering a relocation from the US (currently fully-remote) and this will be a huge factor in my decision.
I work full remote. If they ask me to RTO, I quit and retire. Game over, man.
But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet.
Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
In most companies this mythical collaboration doesn't exist unless it's between actual decision makers who steer the product's direction. In the end, most office employees just do their work, ask a question or two from their colleagues and participate in some, often unnecessary, ceremonies.
No days in offices could be accepted because they are a useless waste of resources. Simply. Few days/hybrid is a gift to try bribing people in the office, not something to be accepted.
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
Cultural inertia IMO. If youre growing headcount like gangbusters, the PIP quota is arguably reasonable as a forcing function for bad hires. When youre holding steady or shrinking it's much more toxic in terms of incentivizing politics and killing institutional knowledge. But it's "how we do things".
It's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.
It's true. Most of the "innovators" are either high up in the company, quit for greener pastures, or sit around waiting for their stocks to vest. Current employees have one job: maintenance.
The way budgeting works at Amazon, every team contributes items to lines in a spreadsheet. Those get rolled up at every level all the way to the CEO, who then approves or denies, and then it all rolls back down.
There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working).
I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.
I am convinced that by forcing employees to RTO, managers are converting meaningful work into bullshit jobs[1], thereby harming not only the employees but also the companies. At a macro level, this hurts societies and economies. What an extremely short-term oriented mindset!
When I ran the numbers, I realized commuting for RTO was going to cost the equivalent of 6 full time weeks of work. My whole team is at a different location. So I am driving in to be on Zoom calls. It is deeply pointless and frustrating.
I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.
It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.
Obviously true, but Amazon never wanted top tech talent. They wanted disposable tech talent. When I was there the expected tenure was 18 months. Managers were expected to fire 10% of their team every year. Benefits were mediocre and the pay was so so. They chewed through devs by putting them in brutal oncall rotations with expectations like, "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go. Everywhere."
So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
This is definitely a big part. Some of that was listed in the article, but it's a big barrier when you look at COL in places like SLU Seattle. Then you have the terrible vesting schedule. Now this. It's no wonder people are looking for work elsewhere, and really I think this is just the final straw for many.
I used to work at Amazon, 3-day RTO was not nice but tolerable, 5-day RTO made half of our senior staff leave. my commute to the office wasn't so bad, but my friends had to drive 1+ hours to the office and then pay $26/day for parking which you only get 50% reimbursed.
Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.
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I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
The quality of offices was also much better in the past like a single office for for 2 to Max 6 people. Now it's crowded open space hot desks offices with 40+ people.
I am the same way - 3 days I actually find invigorating. It cures that cabin fever. But back to back, five days, after the pandemic, it just feels like straight up abuse. And it's what it really is. We just TOOK it.
I'm not saying you do, but people abusing the WFH flexibility are probably a big reason for RTO push.
That, or the (possibly irrational) management fear that people may be abusing the WFH.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
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If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
Probably the same here. This week might actually be my first 4-day in office week this year, come to think of it. Next week, I'll be in office at-most 1.5 days, because I'm going to be taking a day off in the middle of the week and then working from the other side of the (admittedly small) country for Thu/fri.
But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet.
Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
Its the fact that the policy doesn't work in a shitty culture!
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Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
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There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working).
I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.
It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.
So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.
Why is that brutal? That's what on-call is. That's literally the point of paying someone extra for being available.
I saw one comment here replying to a post about why companies wouldn't just hire from Poland/India/etc. if they could do remote-only
He replied that you must hire in the US to get "high quality talent"
And the first thought I had was: is that really the case anymore, that companies are so desperate for "high quality"?
It increasingly seems like there is no such demand for that anymore, it's just about "how can we cut costs?" (the greatest corporate innovation ever)
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.