It's about a whole list of things and many shades of gray between them: control, social needs, the need to be seen, crappy home life, unprepared for a home office, etc.
My managers at work (I'm a software engineer) tend to not have a dedicated office. They have kids running around being noisy and nosy. They STILL dress up wearing nice clothes. And I swear some of them talk about their gorgeous cars for the sake of talking about their cars, especially now nobody sees them drive or park those cars anymore.
They are also very verbose in any sort of meeting and dislike it when people turn off their cameras. I blame their extroverted social needs for this. They got to become a manager because of that social skill and need, and they are working with software engineers who are more toward the introverted side of the spectrum.
I don't want to wake up early, drive my car in traffic jams, find a parking spot, see that someone stole my favourite (but still bad) office chair, sit in an open office full of noisy people, working on shared & dirty keyboards, looking at small budget screens, on desks that can't be adjusted.
At home I have a dedicated office with a sofa. Height-adjustable desk. Herman Miller Aeron chair all to myself. Mechanical keyboard (that doesn't drive other people nuts with its sound) and expensive mouse. Two 27" 1440p 144Hz screens on desk mounted arms. Both of my cats to keep me company. My own toilet all to myself. A fully stocked kitchen. A place to work out. A very nice 55" OLED screen. My coffee machine is all mine (Gaggia Babila) with freshly roasted beans delivered every week. And my office has a view over a park and a large body of water.
Best of all: no office small talk. No interruptions at my desk. And if I realise, during a meeting, that I could just be a fly on the wall and continue working instead? Then I do exactly that, whereas in an office situation I couldn't do that.
You had me at "My own toilet all to myself". I understand not everyone in the world is loathe to use a public restroom, but Jesus H. Christ, people use public restrooms like apes in a zoo.
Not to mention, My loud, clickity-clackity mechanical keyboard (which isn't allowed to leave my office on punishment of death from my wife - I have the silent one for the living room gaming rig).
I can run a couple of rigs at the same time, and work when the meeting I'm in doesn't particularly pertain to me, even though I lead a small team - which means I'm invited to meetings, but only have to listen to a quarter of what gets said and still have to get work done.
My team generally had their heads in the screen all day, anyway. We're fairly socially awkward and loud talkers/laughers, which means we annoy everyone when we don't communicate via Slack... which is almost every team I've worked on (I'm the worst offender, yes).
I understand remote doesn't work great for every team, but for A LOT of software teams... and we work with an accounting and ops team, it works great for all of us =/
> You had me at "My own toilet all to myself". I understand not everyone in the world is loathe to use a public restroom, but Jesus H. Christ, people use public restrooms like apes in a zoo.
It's not just cleanlines: I've also encountered issues like the hand-soap or toilet paper having run out and not been replaced, toilets not working due to plumbing issues (in one office they installed a fancy new rainwater recycling system that didn't initially work, so toilets wouldn't flush), a toilet on the top floor of a building where the flush was very weak and the cistern would take minutes to slowly refill before you could flush a second time, poorly designed sinks that look pretty but splash water everywhere when you turn on the tap, or a building only having a single cubicle so that I'd need to walk to another building if it was in use.
And air circulation, or lack thereof!
Yes, the one in my building has crappy air circulation (no pun intended!) and the facilities people know this, but they "won't" fix it (too expensive for FANG company to fix a toilet).
The solution: they put those fruit-smelly things in every corner of the toilet. Not only does this NOT solve the problem, The only thing, IMHO, this does is make you hate fruits :-(
Not just the toilet - but also the toilet paper. Every office I've ever worked in has used the same cheap and awful single-ply mega-rolls that I like to call "John Wayne toilet paper." It's rough and tough and doesn't take sh*t off nobody.
They might dislike the low participation in the meeting (camera off) because people just tune out and do work when they're supposed to be paying attention.
I much preferred when people were clearly in or out of a meeting (myself included).
I'm an EM and I would say 30-40% of the meetings I'm in I have to be there in case I'm needed for something, but do not need to actively participate day to day. Some I just need to know for my reporting, but I'm definitely not asking anyone to take notes for me, so I just listen. Some I might be needed every third or fourth time and it's easier to just be there rather than have someone get me if something comes up. The rest I'm actively contributing to (at least somewhat regularly).
If it were in person I'd still have to be there, except I'd only really be able to check email or maybe take half-assed notes rather than actually get work done.
What's your point exactly? You see it way more now and, at least to me, the culture accepted quietly excusing yourself more than silently dropping out of a call.
The point is that low participation is a symptom of pointless poorly organized meetings (often that should have been emails), not lack of engagement. The rudeness of it is on the part of the organizer not the attendee.
Well conversely I dislike being scheduled to attend meetings which are a waste of my time. And I dislike even less the idea that my participation at meetings is important for my career, even if participating in the meeting does not actually produce anything of value.
A common retort might be that "this is the reality of the world." And this may be true, but I shouldn't just acquiesce and accept the reality of the world when I actually have some options.
this sounds great, and i wish everyone else could have this luxury and privilege, but that's not the case for millions of people. i wish the focus of the convo wouldn't be on "waaah my employer wants me to come back" and more "waah society is fundamentally broken and we are lucky to have such options though our cities need huge reforms"
i mean seriously, i would like to be 100% flex and choose when i go in and not (i virtually do that already) but i know what i signed up for, i enjoy going in to the office, and the mix is good enough for me because i care about my work deeply.
techies don't realise just how abnormal their situation is, and they want society to do for them what it should do for every other person, so i don't really care much for the constant arguments about wfh. just go find a place that lets you do it and then maybe fight for unskilled labour to also have 55" OLED TVs, a fancy coffee machine and the ability to work from home or choose their own hours.
If I have a good home and a job that can be done from it why not profit? That "luxury" and "privilege" does not touch others, instead some who can potentially have better homes that can't because working in a specific expensive location they can't buy nor rent something as good, but potentially can in another far cheaper location?
100% flexibility is simply unsustainable: a company can't keep offices for some only or people keep moving gears from home to office and vice versa or having double gears in both location.
A call center operator can work from home and perhaps instead of a cubicle in a city can afford a larger home in the countryside having a better life WFH, banking, assurances, various tertiary sector jobs can be done from remote, not just techies, skilled and rich.
> I don't want to wake up early, drive my car in traffic jams, find a parking spot, see that someone stole my favourite (but still bad) office chair, sit in an open office full of noisy people, working on shared & dirty keyboards, looking at small budget screens, on desks that can't be adjusted.
What... where do you work? Budget screens? Bad office chairs? We're quite spoiled in the US with big tech. Everyone gets giant monitors and Herman Miller chairs sprinkled with freedom.
20+ Years of experience, most chairs are budget, most screens are budget Dell, most keyboards came packaged with the Dell offer. It's unimpressive 9 times out of 10.
In the rare case you do find a good setup you tend to also see people hijacking your stuff when they get to the office before you do.
(American here) Only 1 of the dozen or so offices I've worked at gave everyone Herman Millers. At least each one had dual budget screens instead of 1, or we could bring our own. No hotdesking.
I hope you're being sarcastic, since this isn't the case with my office. We do have some Aeron chairs, but those were bought over a decade ago, and new chairs are decidedly non-ergonomic. And monitors? Nothing 4k (much less 5K for the Apple guys), just generic 24" screens that are terrible.
Only a little bit. I've worked primarily with big tech and startups. We've always had top of the line equipment. No one blinked at the fully spec'd Macbook Pros, 34" monitors, standing desks, and 2,000 USD ergonomic chairs.
Sounds like my home office somewhat :) I think the biggest takeway for me in respect to an office or wfh is something that is the most important commodity that always decreases and never replenishes - time. I used to spend sometimes 3-4 hours daily commuting in extremely stressful commutes. I will never get that time back and the stress it inflicted upon me probably aged me along with the environmental damage(exhaust) me and millions like me did while doing similar commutes.
And you are fully productive all the time and maybe even producing more than what is expected of you at any given time .... yet for some there is something wrong with the picture. Not withstanding the fact that indeed a two hour commute does not help the planet and continuous gossip and the open office space does not help to focus , unfortunately even with clear logic like that the primal part of our brain makes it hard to accept change to something new. However the fact is that technology has evolved to the point that many of the white collar work is entirely possible to be done remotely and therefore companies that embrace and adapt to these changes will do better in the future.
Oh BTW the overlords have taken note of your "audacity" and now they are going to strike fear into thy hearts via stock market crash and recession followed by mass layoffs.
I read somewhere that Uber CEO mentioned job as a "privilege" for you. How dare you even question anything at all let alone how you spend majority of your day?
It cuts both ways Dara(Uber CEO)! Taking a rideshare is also a privilege and one that I shall not be indulging in after idiotic comments like that from its leadership.
The open office is the bane of my existence. I have helping disorder (made up) and it makes me 100% interruptible. Meaning I do 5x as much deep work in the office after hours or on a holiday. Imagine the productivity I could gain if I could simply close my office door.
I've often had to wait until Friday afternoon when everyone's mentally checked out to get work done.
There's a magical period between Friday at 3pm to late night Sunday where no distractions means I can actually coherently focus for hours at a time. Also it's typically enough time to get to a MVP if I need to prove a point. Just sucks that this magical productivity time also happens to be "the weekend" =(
I don't think I'd be where I am today if it wasn't for sitting physically next to people and watching what they do, picking up on non-verbal cues etc. I love working from home, but I also have the mentality that we all need to "pay it forward" sometimes, so I tend to spend a couple of days a week in an office with (typically) more junior engineers who may not even have space for a desk in their flat share. The "I'm alright, Jack" WFH crew really get on my nerves - it's a disappointingly selfish mentality.
We train new devs at our office using screen share and open audio channels. Which is to say there’s ways to do it. It’s a bit disingenuous to brand WFH as self centered and not helpful to new devs.
IMO that's not a good replacement (and I'm definitely in search of one!):
- You lose all asynchronous aspects to work.
- Screensharing is basically one screen at a time and usually "zoomed in", not representing your actual screen. You can't sit side by side and compare laptops. You lose a lot of those subtleties about how you physically do the work.
- Open audio is, I wager, very atypical. For me, it's almost a faux pas.
- This can add up to a lot of lost time for senior devs, so it's going to be avoided. Meaning you'll need to push uphill to make it happen.
Precisely. People are mimics. Without offices no one knows what to do and how to be successful.
I don't believe all the people who say they are super productive at home because being productive is being a good team member. And remote people aren't good team members. They are absent and aloof and the barrier to interacting with them is higher.
People hate the commute. That's fine. I wish everyone would stop lying that WFH is a pareto improvement. It's not.
Since you're post is light on facts, here's some from my company:
In 2020, we had a record year in both revenue and earnings. That's the bottom line. I won't mention all the KPIs that our IT staff hit since KPIs are all bullshit, but we exceed the previous year by a significant margin. During this year, my team grew by 20%, and hasn't had any turnover.
In 2021, we had yet another record year in both revenue and earnings. Specifically, earnings were up almost 15%, and we're a financial services business, so we didn't get a boom from commodities etc. As with the previous year, we exceed the goals for our KPIs by a substantial margin.
So now in 2022, we're hybrid, though most of my team prefers to work from home. And we're still doing exceedingly well as far as we can be measured, both as a team and a company.
So that's hard data. The company, despite being 100% remote in 2020/2021, has never been more profitable. Ever.
Maybe your team is full of losers who are absent, aloof, and difficult to interact with. Or perhaps it's something else...
I started my career at a fully remote job and it was really difficult for quite some time.
Today I see working from home as a tool with a spectrum of useful applications but I really haven’t found a replacement tool to being next to people in the same space.
Although, I am optimistic about these more casual video chat tools that enable spontaneous conversations. However, I haven’t used one in a serious capacity yet.
The assessment that it is more difficult to "have the managerial experiences and interpersonal experiences that you need to have to take your career forward in a work-remotely environment" is fair. Because that's office politics.
Also, it's fair that it makes the company culture fragmented and nearly impossible to move together as a team for folks without that experience. Silos are real.
But, in my experience, the main reason is that senior leaders cannot let go of the 'it's work time you should be working' mindset, and understand that some people work best in the morning, some at night, and some in small bursts with breaks between.
I have learned that a VAST majority of companies simply suck at setting goals and measuring employee productivity.
Many of the prevailing HR assumptions, including those of some if not all execs, are rooted in early 20th century industrial understanding of human beings. It's deeply rooted in prevailing culture and systems.
This is also about job security. Technical people often have a record of what they have done. Think commits and PRs. Managers don't have this. Their job doesn't produce anything tangible, this is not to say that it is useless. There are good managers and bad managers, with the majority falling in the latter category.
Being seen in meeting rooms filled with people, talking to them, and pointing to things on a powerpoint presentation can give other more senior managers (who determine their position and compensation) the aura that they are hard at work and making things happen.
My previous manager arranged the furniture in his office to be sitting facing the door, computer at his side, to be able to look at us, and call us, more easily.
Guess who was strongly for the return to office.
> 75% wanted to be in the office three days a week or more; only 34% of non-executives felt the same way.
They go on then to talk generally about people might need to be in the office. This is missing something really obvious though - Executives think executives need to be in the office. Not everyone. It makes sense that Executives - people whose role is primarily about co-ordinating the organisation obviously are better off being in the office because the office is good for all the things you need to do as an executive. It is great for high bandwidth communication. Meanwhile, individual contributors work is primarily solitary and so enjoy far more benefits from working at home in a more controlled, isolated environment.
Executives think they themselves should be in the office 3 days a week. That doesn't necessarily mean that executives think everyone else should be in the office 3 days a week.
From my experience it's all about control. If you're at home they're not sure if you're working even if the results are there, but if they see you on your desk they think you're working.
Jokes on them I used to procrastinate a lot more in the office
Though I do think there's a lot of bad managers around, one thing to consider is that executive type roles tend to be people jobs, and people jobs are hard to do without face to face conversations. Office politics requires you to weigh what people want to do, and that's often hard without seeing exactly what expression someone is making. It also thrives on knowing who is talking to who, and that's also a lot easier to figure out in real life than via slack.
As someone fortunate enough to have worked remotely over the past two years, I've found the change enormously refreshing.
But, as with most things, there's tradeoffs, and the author correctly points out a few of them:
> These concerns have substance. Virtual work risks entrenching silos: people are more likely to spend time with colleagues they already know. Corporate culture can be easier to absorb in three dimensions. Deep relationships are harder to form with a laggy internet connection.
Another issue I'd add to this list is that promotions partially hinge on "chummyness" with decision makers. Remote work makes this challenging, and consequently, it might explain why folks are eager to get lucrative pay-rises and promotions by jumping ship to different companies. (Maybe this has always been the case, but it seems to have been exacerbated).
Absolutely nothing can overcome the fact that being fully remote allows me to decouple my physical existence from earning a living. Nothing. I would literally take a 50% pay cut if it were my only option to remain remote. It has completely transformed my entire life and I can't possibly imagine ever going back for any reason. Yes I miss my coworkers. Yes I miss lunches and happy hours. But none of that even comes close to how much I would miss not being chained to a physical location and daily work schedule.
But in a hypothetical where, all things held equal, it's you verses someone else up for promotion, and they're friendlier with the decision-maker, they'll be the one receiving it.
Corporate culture is BS. Do McDonalds employees wake up feeling that their customers "Deserve a Break today!"?
Most of us on this site are professionals, who don't need mission statements, corporate culture etc. to do our jobs. We need effective guidance and management, we don't need a kumbaya culture to make us spend all our waking moments following Keir's precepts.
Am I the only engineer who does miss a hybrid office schedule? My productivity has cratered over the pandemic with WFH becoming constant. My motivation is nonexistent. In the past, having one or two WFH days per week allowed me to get solid focus time to crush tasks that required deep thinking. But that effect only lasts a few days tops. Going on three years of this, even the simplest tasks feel like pulling teeth. I’m burnt out and I really feel like being in a room with other engineers is the only solution.
It’s to the point that I’m thinking of leaving my fully remote company to find an in person office. Something I never thought I’d say.
My group got moved 100% work from home, but people remained in the geographic area. We get lunch together on a biweekly schedule which helps keep the social aspect of working in the office alive. Depending on your situation, you could try something similar.
You really don't need an entire article to understand this - just ask your boss or your boss's boss why they like being in the office. It is because it is harder to manage people (or they think it is harder to) remotely.
I don't think it is actually harder to manage people well when they're remote. But if you're not doing it well, it's more obvious to everyone, including yourself.
all cynicisms aside, if my presence makes an impact then you bet I'd like to be there too and it just so happens execs make calls that matter at the end of the day so they're more likely to want to be present. salaried workers are labourers, having no say in company affairs, and it's little wonder that they feel like they're needed there. to do the work sure, but actual engagement? hard ask as they are decoupled (rightly or wrongly) from decision making therefore cut from the profit.
ps. having stock/options doesn't help either, it's about control and agency and less so about ownership and profit
And to me there's absolutely zero shame in this working arrangement. I'm a laborer, I work cards, fix bugs, add features. I don't live to work, I work for a salary and benefits and want no emotional investment in what I do. My actual life is what I do outside of work.
You might like Severance the tv show, and The Stanley Parable game hahahaha
zero shame here too, I'm exchanging my time and skill for salary nothing wrong with a hustle!
I work on-site and from home. There are pros and cons to each. Some people prefer one or the other. A hybrid solution is probably best, but I can do either or both.
Each side has valid arguments (empty office space, office rent cost, lack of in-person chemistry) versus (no commute, more time to focus, just as productive).
Some people do take advantage of WFH and work less. Some people who cannot WFH feel it is unfair. It's a complex issue and both sides should work together to come to a fair solution for everyone. Bickering about it and not compromising is unproductive.
IMVHO definitively not because of some practical aspects: a company needs offices to host workers, and using them less they are paid and less used, also people need gears, witch means or moving stuff around or have two set of anything. Surely, offices can be rent, can be smaller etc but I see exactly no reason to even try hybrid setup. It's like at war having two generals with opposite ideas and decide to put themselves in the middle, witch means something that does not work in BOTH cases... Not counting the fact that for hybrid setups remote workers still need to be at a reasonable distance to reach the office as needed cutting some economic and life options for many...
> Some people do take advantage of WFH and work less. Some people who cannot WFH feel it is unfair.
Normally we should be paid for the value we gives to the company, not for how hard we work... If with much less effort I do more there is nothing wrong from the company POV, at maximum I might feel overqualified or being happy with the load. The complexity lay IMVHO in the fact that there is very little experience in WFH on scale, witch scare many, there is incertitude for the future so many do not want to invest in something new until the society stabilize etc unfortunately like for ANY "new" thing we can't have "young and experienced workers". We can progress taking risks and eventually profiting from results or remain as we are giving up progress, research, development. Both can work a bit, until something break things again. Since we have only one life and no undo for it I prefer exploring instead of remaining locked. With care, surely, taking time to live and breath but still evolving.
I do think there are valid arguments in favor of in-office work, but "empty office space" and "office rent cost" are not valid. An old employer of mine had a company car that got shared when people had to go to remote sites for same-day work. That wasn't getting passed around during COVID just because they were paying for it, it just sat there unused.
The cost in particular is just a sunk cost fallacy. You're paying for the office regardless, so because of that you're going to force people to pay out of pocket for gas and other incidentals just so they can sit there and (at least for most software engineers) be less productive? And you've also just increased your own costs because you probably could have left the lights and HVAC off? Nonsense.
I think it's reasonable to believe that the kind of work executives do is done better in person. I've never been an executive, but I'd believe it. I do know that, for many individual contributors, the kind of work they do is better done remotely. Certainly their lives are better. That's the real tension, in my opinion: whose experience is more important, and if it comes down a zero sum contest, who can make the other side blink first?
Ideally it should not come down to a zero sum contest, but that's often how these things happen.
Life happens outside. Most of us only work for the sole purpose of actually doing things in that outside world.
You sit at home and work at Uber for X but everyone's at home all day so there's no need for Uber because no-one moves.
It's like people here have fully internalized "there must be work" but not really thought about what the point of even doing it is.
Post-2020 life has been a neverending comedy show of these sort of quotes from people who "like" sitting in front of a screen so that tomorrow they can continue sitting in front of a screen.
> Most of us only work for the sole purpose of actually doing things in that outside world.
If the main point was to do things outside, I'd spend most days doing what I do (outside) on the weekend. I suspect for most people it has more to do with getting a paycheck.
I think managers being extroverted (or, if you read this thread, useless narcissistic status-seekers with bad home lives!) is part of the answer, but not all.
Another simple explanation:
For an individual dev, your job might be to, say, take a new feature and then work for hours or days on coding, debugging, documenting, etc. that feature. How that maps to WFH is pretty obvious (just code at home instead of work!) Getting up to talk to another employee is maybe a few times a day thing that just becomes a quick ping on Slack. Likewise, if you have a meeting that day, do it on Zoom.
Because you see how you can do your job, you are comfortable with WFH.
For a manager, your job is to get the people and teams you manage to work together to accomplish something, and perhaps make a few key decisions now and then. My contention is that, while I have no doubt that there are methods of succeeding at as a manager in a WFH system, it's simply a much bigger change from how managers are used to working.
For example, walking around the office to see if anyone catches your eye and 'grabs you for a quick question' is not straight forward (pinging dozens of people to say 'hey, anything up' throughout the day is just bothersome.) Likewise, the simple act of observing team dynamics becomes hard because lots of communication is happening in un-observable private communication channels.
It maybe that the WFH model really is better for everyone, but I think managers are simply in for a bigger change to how they work and it's therefore simple to understand why they are more hesitant.
Interesting that nobody talks about creativity in this thread or in the article. I imagine a lot of jobs just rely on execution, so those "water cooler" interactions that yield innovations down the line aren't valued as highly.
Of course, as a scientist my social landscape and work environment are really different from most Economist readers.
Fundamentally, the question of why executives prefer in-person office over remote is -- extroverted people vs introverted people.
Extroverts tend to get promoted to management. They feed off the presence and interaction of others. But, more importantly, they want to show up and show off. They want to wear nice clothes in the office, not pajamas at home. They want their accomplishments broadcasted around the office, and that's how they get noticed / promoted. There is a lot of research that shows people who are extroverted get paid more.
So of course, extroverted managers are going to push for return-to-office, while their introverted subordinates prefer to work from home and at peace, especially when social interaction can induce anxiety (it does for me).
If you're a manager, figure out how to make both personality types happy, not what makes you happy.
Time for another reminder of a study I saw long before the COVID-19 days - study done referring to software enabling distributed knowledge work.
Remote work improves the results of good managers, and makes bad managers' results worse.
Apparently because good managers manage for results, and bad managers manage only for indicia of sork, such as butts in seats, screen time, ability to walk around and interrupt to micromanage...
If a company at this point, with solid results for as-good-as or better results far lower costs (e.g., reduced office costs), and becoming more competitive (e.g., ability to hire workforce from entire continents and not just 50km from your offices), fails to be moving to substantial if not complete remote work, this is a negative sign, and you can safely avoid them if at all possible.
This goes for applying for jobs as well as investment.
Other execs I work with do too. Can only think of 2 in the past 10 years I've worked with that had all of the tropes that these articles tend to parade.
Note that the people wanting to go back to the office have one. Often a very nice one, with a gatekeeper. The horde, on the other hand, doesn’t always have a desk to call their own let alone an office, gatekeeper, …
Power trips and lack of empathy sum up (senior) management far too often. The head shed exists to run the company. Other managers exist as conduits or team facilitators. If the grunts don’t grunt contentedly, there’s no company.
My managers at work (I'm a software engineer) tend to not have a dedicated office. They have kids running around being noisy and nosy. They STILL dress up wearing nice clothes. And I swear some of them talk about their gorgeous cars for the sake of talking about their cars, especially now nobody sees them drive or park those cars anymore.
They are also very verbose in any sort of meeting and dislike it when people turn off their cameras. I blame their extroverted social needs for this. They got to become a manager because of that social skill and need, and they are working with software engineers who are more toward the introverted side of the spectrum.
I don't want to wake up early, drive my car in traffic jams, find a parking spot, see that someone stole my favourite (but still bad) office chair, sit in an open office full of noisy people, working on shared & dirty keyboards, looking at small budget screens, on desks that can't be adjusted.
At home I have a dedicated office with a sofa. Height-adjustable desk. Herman Miller Aeron chair all to myself. Mechanical keyboard (that doesn't drive other people nuts with its sound) and expensive mouse. Two 27" 1440p 144Hz screens on desk mounted arms. Both of my cats to keep me company. My own toilet all to myself. A fully stocked kitchen. A place to work out. A very nice 55" OLED screen. My coffee machine is all mine (Gaggia Babila) with freshly roasted beans delivered every week. And my office has a view over a park and a large body of water.
Best of all: no office small talk. No interruptions at my desk. And if I realise, during a meeting, that I could just be a fly on the wall and continue working instead? Then I do exactly that, whereas in an office situation I couldn't do that.