Often the people here on HN try to make it out that anyone who appreciates or wants to work in an office is evil or stupid or the like, but honestly probably half of people actually want a few days in the office. Comments here are not actually representative of the whole industry.
I've been talking with people in the tech sector and getting hired is hard for far too many people. Remote or in-person.
To be honest I think perhaps more than 50% of “work” need not be done. It’s a game theory dilema and tragedy that we put each other up for these charades.
But maybe that's the way it should be - a lot of rubbish and among them one good idea that gets developed and actually make some positive change.
The only thing that changed is the power balance. It's still perfectly possible to get skilled workers into the office, they just have to want it.
I have also heard that productivity for remote government jobs is not as high.
[1] https://framerusercontent.com/images/5R1ZfThrPbROdkJ8pHw8qvD...
Unions are a way to collectively make sure that we (as workers) get what we need from our jobs, like optional remote work, lay-offs structured to minimize disruption (eg, volunteers-first, ensuring options for internal moves), and so on. Things we'll be hard pressed to argue individually, especially as the McKinsey increasingly colors us as replaceable components.
I'm not saying the office is some perfect, joyous or highly social place or anything. I just think for me, it makes a big difference to have a place (different from my house) where people come together to work on common goals, and occasionally interact face-to-face while doing it.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35090739
I miss nice offices though. Before the whole let's stack people side by side on desks, rather than give them some nicer spaces with lots of room for deep thought. When I was working for HARC, we had a nice former industrial space near UCLA. I totally could go for that, but when the only way to get something semi-nice and private is to work at home, well, that is going to bias people.
One of the hidden chilling effect is Section 174. I don't know why it is such a big blind spot among tech workers. (Section 174 ruling means US companies can no longer expense software development, and must amortize it. That creates a significantly higher tax burden. It is driving companies to shed all but their best engineers, and drive AI adoption. I don't even know how startups are going to start up without enough capital to cover the higher taxes).
Your employer rents a desk for you, you probably get to walk to work or at least enjoy a very short commute. You have people from other employers around you for the social aspect. Etc
I guess WeWork was a similar idea that shows now is not yet the time for this.
I still think it’d be great - reduced commuting miles / time wasted. Cheaper offices that are nicer (don’t like this co working space? Just book into a different one) etc etc
Let's say I'm remote and making 140k. I can live wherever I want. If a recruiter was like "If you come to NYC we can hit 190k".
Think about it. After taxes that's a 25k increase. Rent will be an additional 2 to 3k a month over what I'm paying now. Plus I'm spending a minimum of 45 minutes each way commuting.
So I'm already losing money on this. At a certain point more money wouldn't even be worth it. I'd need an additional 50k take home for this to make sense, which due to how taxation works quickly prices me out the market.
Basically I have a WFH job and unless I got a ridiculous offer, I'm not giving it up. I imagine if I finally get a FAANG job with 300k TC I'd consider it.
When it's a sunny June day, it's too easy to blow off why anyone would ever want a jacket.
Forcing five-day RTO is still ridiculous.
During the pandemic a lot of in-office teams were forced to adapt quickly, and that doesn't always work well; it takes time to build a culture around that and some people just don't work well that way. So not too surprised that after sometime it was declared a "failure" and everyone is forced to RTO.
For me, I was never in the office to start with, so there is nothing to "return to". I know I am taking a pay cut picking choosing, but I picked to spend more time with my family instead of commuting. It helps the environment, too. But being with my family was my top priority.
We have forced-office and office-available, no one is arguing for forced-remote.
It's probably even reasonable to organize teams around similar styles, preferences, and demands of the actual work output. But it's good to recognize that a LOT of IC roles benefit strongly from greater control over their work environment and time, which can often be achieved via remote (and even a lot of managerial work that's high contact light touch direction can benefit from the tooling and organization required to support remote work).
What's less good is to universalize. It rarely reflects detailed attention to organizational and individual needs and output. It's more like the fad that produced the categorically inexcusable open-plan-office. Where it happens, it's often a cover for something else, or a reflection of limited interest in good management.
[1] https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/quantifying-the-cost-of-rto
My three refusals / boundaries are:
1. Work permanently from an office building, unless I am given a private office with a door that closes and locks.
2. Work within waterfall processes for software projects.
3. Work on an almost entirely outsourced team (whether that's "on-shore" or "off-shore" is irrelevant, contractors don't have skin in the game)
That's pretty much it, I'm otherwise remarkably flexible and have done a lot of interesting stuff in a lot of different domains through my relatively lengthy career. I've been permanent remote since 2015, so since well before the current WFH shift. For senior level technical people with unique skills, you've always had the leverage to set boundaries in even really poor labor markets, and even more so as you move up in corporate rank.
If I'm given a private office with a door that locks in a reasonably decent office building, and I am paid an appropriate amount to live within a reasonable commute without sacrificing my quality of life, I'd consider working in an office again for awhile. But so far I've never had a company that is willing to provide private offices for anyone below senior executive (SVP+) level, so remote it is.
It certainly seems like there is a shift in supply and demand. When getting hired is hard and you have mortgage payments due, how many people are willing or able to turn down offers because they are "WFH" only.
That's an advantage for you, though! Active desire to work in-office greatly reduces the amount of competition you're dealing with for jobs; all else equal, it should ~double your success rate.
TSMC and Intel also shopped around the country for new fabs, a combination of geological stability, water resources, support by municipal and state governments. Offering tax incentives were a part of that package, with the expectation of increasing job opportunities.
The tax breaks are not for the land, but for operating there. These often involve contracts with milestones.
But no, I don't think I'm grossly mischaracterizing anything. Even replies to my post are literal personal attacks against the OP for not wanting to stay at home, or actually making fun of the reasons people want to go into an office. It's truly toxic behaviour.
Can you imagine feeling fine with more frequent WFH yourself, if something about the culture changed?
For example, could you otherwise get the vibe that people were engaged and wanted to be working together, even when it was on intermittent chat and videoconf?
(And if there were occasional in-person meetups, if only for more personalizing or focusing?)
If every neighborhood had at least one pub and if every pub had an upstairs co-working space, that would be amazing.
edit: ah, I realize now that I took the word "shops" to mean the colloquial "tech companies", but you probably meant brick-and-mortar retail stores that have been slow-killed by the internet
Had a great time doing it, and as long as I stay in the US it's not a problem.
I actually really like NYC, to visit! Best food on Earth.
A few years back I interviewed with a company that would let me work remotely anywhere on Earth ( with reasonable limits of course). It wouldn't of paid more that 120k, but I'd rather do that than make 200k in NYC.
Office available with social events and meetups is supposed to be the compromise. The part that I can't wrap my head around is what is gained by making someone who doesn't want to be in office show up? The folks at $dayjob in that position literally just sit at their desk with headphones for 8 hours.
The way forward is finding ways to work together that the entire team is comfortable with. And employers thinking of employees more as humans and less as resources to be manipulated and squeezed. It will take compromises and growth, but it's far from impossible to achieve.
It's why the poor in the US have such a difference in life expectancy.
All the BS that we saw where local govs were giving multimillion free deals if Amazon would locate there was a travesty, because of where that money comes from.
The lack of payroll tax (and income tax), is in theory made up for by the increased number of people and businesses in the state. This leads to more people buying houses and cars (property tax), or buying things in general (sales tax). And more bodies in turn create more demand for goods and services, driving the economy more.
Now, when the bodies are leaving, the state and municipality are taking a hit -- their big tax cuts aren't being hedged by personal spending because all of the persons left.
That also crushes other demand: no one is using gyms near their office, or getting gas to/from work, or grabbing coffee and lunch at places nearby. Fewer sales there, so even less tax, and eventually less people working there and potentially going out of business.
So consequently a lot of cities and states straight up said: get them back locally or we cut your tax breaks, and executives shrugged their shoulders and said "so be it".
and 2) the massive rise in residential housing prices correlates to that risk, as commercial holders want to get out ASAP or at least hedge their risks by buying and renting.
Anyways, it isn't a mystery why people want to work at home these days, and they don't really need to be in the office anyways considering how hard it is to get conference rooms to VC all the time with your partners across the country or world.
It's a matter of preference, over time the companies who do RTO will attract talent that prefers that, remote companies will attract other ones. There are smart people in both cohorts to be alienated if forced to do the other option so I don't get the argument. It's self-selecting if the options exist, the pandemic opened Pandora's Box.
They don't grow on trees.
Using your illustration … “market rate for your position is $190k, but since we’re hiring remote - that means we can also hire someone in a developing country for 1/5th the cost.”
Great for people in developing countries.
Bad for those who were already highly paid.
I'm stuck in that "early senior" phase, so the downturn hit me at the perfectly wrong time for leverage, sadly. My domain doesn't help much, either. No one's really safe here.
Yeah but at the some time downtown became more alive, the center has shifted so to say or became more fuzzy.
i love commuting and used to travel every week for work and work from customer offices. i intentionally chose this life and absolutely loved it.
covid completely upended this. work travel makes very little sense when most of your employees are hybrid.
for me, wfh has been awful.
it's difficult for me to attach to the mission without physically being with others striving for the same goals. very few people outside of this wild and wacky world of tech understand what i do. i don't really have avenues for vibing on work outside of 1x1 zooms, which are awful (for me).
i can see how it's nice if you spend all day in front of a terminal churning code, but, for me, anything involving other people is just so much worse while remote. body language, dynamism, and humanity are super hard to capture over zoom, even with the camera on. (talking to a camera is extremely unnatural in my opinion; not at all the same.)
it's also extremely easy for work to melt into your personal life, though i've found an old-school workflow that mostly solves for this (separate work phone that's off after hours, being very deliberate about where I work whilst home, etc). regardless, having to be in front of a computer in your own home when the weather's great and inviting outside feels like a mental prison of sorts. the same dynamic exists within the office, but it's _designed_ for that, which makes it different.
while i understand others wishes to be remote, i very much wish i could work in an office (and/or travel every week again).
## preemptions for common retorts!
- "Just make more friends!" can't hang out with friends during work hours. see also: ideate/kvetching about common work.
- "Pick up hobbies!" i have hobbies. i can't do them during work hours.
- "Commuting is awful!" i love commuting.
- "Work at a coffee shop if you need to be around people." i actually do do this, and it's quite nice. i don't work with those people though. i'm still working by myself.
- "Invest in a better home office!" my home office is super sweet. i'd downsize in a heartbeat for a proper office and intend on doing just that when the time comes.
But how come every solution to pay these days is a dismissive "just uproot your entire life and community and move to the middle of nowhere"? If you have no social life nor reliance on modern conviniences, sure. But I've been raised in that environment and can't recommend it to most
- it's about as walk-unfriendly as you can get. Because there's a lot of empty land and the only benefit is you buy large swaths of it for housing (at least, "large" compared to urban environments).
- you have very little business to rely on locally. I had a small grocery store, an unkempt library, some liquor stores, a church, and a single burger joint. These were all 3+ miles from my home. Doing anything else required a 40 minute drive to the nearest downtown. Especially emergencies (no local hospital).
-weather in such towns is likely worse. So expect biting cold and dry environments or arid deserts. Not really places you can just walk out and take a quick jog if you're into that.
If all that is worth never coming into an office just so you can have a dedicated office, then sure. Move your life.
I will compliment the lack of light pollution, though. Amazing place if you're an amateur stargazer. Or simply want to see the night sky in the ways Hollywood portrays it.
Should I have stayed in my small town in south GA when I graduated from college in CS in the mid 90s to be close to my parents and friends?
The US is a big place with diverse weather.
I bet you I can find you a nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, a hurricane mostly safe place in central Florida, rtc.
I in fact moved from Atlanta where I spent all of my adult life since 1996 two years ago with my wife because I wanted better weather and save money on taxes (no state tax) as a bonus.
You adapt, you make new friends. Honestly most of my friends in Atlanta are so busy with their own lives and family, even when I lived in the same metro area, we still had to make an effort to plan quarterly get togethers.
I still do that now - I just hop on a plane.
and that makes it extra weird to see people repeating the memes about productivity
maybe I'm the exception rather than the rule, but I am much more productive when I'm not surrounded by people
And some don't. It's a personal choice and comes down to a myriad of factors. Do you want to stay close to family or do you in fact want to be as far away as possible? Is your town a good place to network, if you care about networking? What are the laws/policies in your old and new town (something becoming more relevant by the month)? Is home ownership important to you, present or future? Dating scene, safety, venues. It's hard to distill all those experiences down to "what lets me have a home office for my job?" unless that is your biggest factor.
>You adapt, you make new friends.
Let me know when that happens for me. If I'm struggling in Los Angeles, I dont' want to imagine how it is for smaller scenes to make adult friends. That's a whole other topic.
>I still do that now - I just hop on a plane.
My family and I aren't meeting this holiday season precisely because "just hopping on a plane" isn't an easy expense this year. Planes don't get much cheaper with CoL.
But there's a fair amount of forcing involved.
Me thinks you're not going to find many companies filled with people who enjoy living in the office.