As soon as there are any remote members involved, the local collaboration benefits are lost, and a mixed team becomes less effective than a fully-remote one - because few offices offer the necessary space and equipment for large groups of people to participate in remote / hybrid meetings and work groups effectively (most / almost all existing conference room equipment is complete junk). Unfortunately, fully co-located teams appear to be a thing of the past, and as you say, mandates aren't going to help here.
Or nobody is there and I end up having driven (40 minutes each way) to the office to have Teams meetings with a wonderful view of the car park, under fluorescent lights, using a cheap low-resolution office monitor. When I could have been having those Teams meetings with a view of my garden and a much nicer monitor I have invested in
Alternatively, you networked, built useful relationships and shared knowledge.
I also found results suggesting flexible working policies had positive properties like higher employee satisfaction, retention , and a wider applicant pool.
I'm not interested in hearing why the choir here at HN thinks companies are making these decisions, I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
A small percentage of countries also mandate severance even if the employee is fired (with cause).
But yes I'm pretty sure this is a big part of the reason for these mandates.
IMO, RTO efficacy should be measured on a team-by-team basis. There are no doubt zero "one size fits all" approaches for entire orgs, or entire companies (and if there are, then the metrics should /strongly/ reflect that)
You spent $10m or $100m on a building that's now half empty.
Either you downsize or commit to enterprise scale sunk cost fallacy and enforce RTO so your real estate investment isn't "wasted".
City centres also thrive on RTO, with high street shopping on a generational decline it's up to office workers and their employers to prop up the economy of the CBD one overpriced lunch at a time.
It should be a tradegy of commons at best: it may affect the CEOs 401k, but not by much (0.000001% for their individual decision to RTO for that company y). It like buying McD shares then going to McD for lunch every day with your team.
I think there are other reasons.
In fact, a whole bunch of office leases were supposed to be expiring in 2024/2025. If this was the reason RTO wouldn’t be picking up right now since they would be cutting back and ending their leases.
But let’s get back to reality, the business decisions are made in the style “I like this” and “I don’t like this”. Only most obvious decisions are somehow backed up. And RTO is known to work well to ditch 2-3% of workforce in few months for free. Parents go first, high performers go afterwards. Headcount reduced, job well done!
The way with severance packages can go for years with many rounds when the packages are too small. Severance packages also involve social plan negotiations with unions… Somebody will go to court for sure and sue the company… So obviously let’s do RTO, it’s cheap and quick. And improves collaboration of course. First round with mandatory 3 days in the office and second one with 5 days in cheapest possible open office with chaos, distractions and noise.
So you're really going to have to deal with only hearing what people think.
RTO is trending for many reasons - some are doing this for bad reasons, I'm sure, but I also know that some managers are pushing for this because they a) see that junior developers aren't getting the necessary mentoring to help them develop and grow into seniors, and b) because they feel that people are spending more time on tasks because they're less likely to reach out if they have to ping people, wait for a response, and try to work through things without benefits like being able to draw on a whiteboard and such. --Maybe some companies are handling this better than others, but they are valid concerns.
[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.
[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.
I think worthwhile evidence would only be available if two things, both questionable, were true:
1. an unbiased sample of companies implementing RTO are willing to disclose their reasons - e.g. make public announcements, or cooperate with academic studies. 2. they were honest about the reasons.
If common reasons for RTO would make the management look bad (and some might even be illegal in some places) then the first is less likely, and the second is highly unlikely.
One point I did note is that there is an increase in management overhead when workers are separated, and this increase in workload by senior management is likely a pain point for them - even though there are likely productivity benefits in forcing management to communicate through official channels and have a more organised approach to task delegation/internal messaging.
From a financial perspective office spaces are a type of investment vehicle. Prior to the GFC office space was lucrative, and that was again peaking pre-covid. There are likely secondary motivations at play beyond productivity.
Excuse me, what? Unless he's referring to something like before and after school care for an older child, he's saying people were foregoing daycare for their young children? As a parent of two children younger than kindergarten age, I don't understand how productive remote work was being done without childcare.
Personally, I can't count the amount of times I've switched sides, and I don't think I'm the only one.
IMO, mandated RTO is (objectively) an effort by large organizations to make their "systems" more predictable in aggregate. The manner of predictability will be largely depend on the size of the organization (e.g. A startup vs. Microsoft) and their needs (productivity/reliability/consistency/etc), and we see this manifest in any number of the RTO announcements we've seen online.
* Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person; being reduced to equally-sized thumbnail videos on Teams doesn't feed this need.
* Real estate: some companies have financial commitments (e.g. long-term leases, owned buildings) to large office buildings which need to be justified; selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership.
* Extroverts: some people just prefer to be in an office, surrounded by and interacting with lots of people, rather than sitting at home in relative isolation. (I'm definitely not one of them, but I have good friends who are like this.)
We can give them bigger/more-prominent zoom portraits by seniority. Should make everyone happy.
> Real estate
Probably shouldn't still be gambling company finances on real estate, 5 years after a pandemic forced us all to go remote.
> Extroverts
Great! We can put all the extroverts back in the glass fishbowl, while the rest of us do actual work from home
Why? If the lease was signed before the pandemic that gives a very easy "out". It's not like anyone could have predicted the pandemic and the associated shift to WFH. If for whatever reason they signed afterwards, that's just them being dumb.
Remote is good for: People who work alone & People that don't like commuting
Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)
Too many developers think they are working alone, while in fact they are part of a team and they would be better off working closer to that team.
Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.
Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
Sounds like you think software development is like one of those stock photos with 8 people smiling and high-fiving around a whiteboard. Devs are (mostly) nerds. Nerds have been collaborating in the online world for decades. They somehow managed to achieve things and build genuine friendships without ever being crammed into an open office - crazy but true. Everytime I hear someone say/suggest "dev needs to happen in person", all I can picture is a PHB.
The main pet peeve I have is with the hybrid approach of having a single person remote where you have a constant battle of negotiating interactions between folks who hate interruptions and those who hate scheduling a meeting for a 10-minute chat.
Also taking a junior stance, a lot of us learned by just being around senior devs, when you just started you don't even know what you don't know, and learning by osmosis is huge.
Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.
I disagree, this does not make any sense to me. You can work together with other people without being physically present, and you can socialize as well. We had regular after hour meetings online drinking beer.
RTO: Return to Office
People will be more tired once they arrive in the office. From a companies perspective skilled people will just leave to another company. And you can't hire the best people from everywhere if you need to have an office present. And obviously there are a lot more drawbacks.
From a society perspective it contributes to traffic jams, it contributes to overfilled public transport, and it puts needless stress on infrastructure. In general, it's just not efficient at all.
Sadly many big corporations are lead by narcissists who care more about their ego, who need to feel like they can control other people, rather than their well being or having a positive impact. Some may use it to get rid of people, but that, truly has to be the most stupid way to get rid of your best employees.
You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent.
If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person social interaction, your cultural capital will also lose value.
There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech. Americans seem unaware, but if you insist on remote work, you'll lose that advantage quick. If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.
You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.
RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity through visibility. Actual delivery of work is the only thing that matters in tech — and remote delivery has already proven itself at scale.
The idea that “physical location is your greatest asset” is backwards. If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.
In short: RTO doesn’t protect American tech workers from global competition. It just wastes time in traffic and props up bad management.
But if every company decided "you know what? Let's go remote!", it will be a matter of months, if not weeks, before every CFO/CEO/Board decides to boost profits by tapping the global talent pool.
The recent delusions to replace software engineers with LLMs is a pretty good indication of where the thinking is vis-a-vis capable engineering
Counterpoint, developer offshoring has been happening since at least the late nineties with eh, limited success. It's hard to get around major timezone differences and thick accents. This isn't even getting into the fatal mistake that everyone makes -- thinking that there's, for example, a billion more "Brilliant Indian Guy in Our Office" clones out there in India.
There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.
as if they care.
don't you feel like everything is getting worse in some ways?
the delusion is to think you're special because you work for a big evil company.
All these complaints about poorly-thought-out RTO policies come from big corporations. If you're a senior leader in a organisation with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, it's very difficult to keep in touch with the people who actually do the work in making or providing the product or service that the business brings to the market. As a consequence, leaders come to believe that the routine of their work day - ingesting reports, engaging in discussions, and communicating decisions - is representative of what's going on in the organisation. Ultimately, I think it's a limitation of human psychology: the organisation is larger than Dunbar's number, and so starts to become opaque to its members.
My solution is to only work for businesses that are small enough for everyone to know everyone else.
It isn't the corporations job to prove it, they're paying the salary because of their own internal calculations about what is valuable to them. It really in't that much of a stretch to say companies are serious about their motivations here - there are much easier ways to do layoffs than moving everyone into an office.
"Your company didn't collapse during COVID" isn't much of an argument. It is like saying someone didn't die of COVID so they can handle being sick 24x7 for the rest of their life. Just because something is survivable or even tolerable doesn't mean it is desirable.
At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.
varispeed•1h ago
hasperdi•1h ago