It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location.
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.
> you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe
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.
>There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech.
American companies are welcome to start offering Western European level benefits (and compensate for missing government benefits) at any time. I would happily accept 30-50% less pay for a very solid health insurance plan, pay for my childcare 30 days of paid vacation a year that I'm actually entitled to take, 6 months of paid maternity leave + some paternity leave, a contract that restricts my working hours and makes it meaningfully legally difficult to frivolously fire me and practically impossible to lay me off of the company isn't failing, and an hour paid lunch every day.
Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason. The closest is non-profits, who lack the cash to meet standard salaries but try to make up with benefits (which are, after all, cheaper), but for profit companies seem to prefer to pony up and retain the control at-will employment grants them
First of all, companies have already outsourced all that they could a couple decades ago. Then when it comes to hiring in different countries, this gets extremely complicated due to taxes and regulations. While some remote-first companies can navigate this complexity (usually through some sort of HR as a service type company), most companies are not structured in such a way to feasibly hire people outside their incorporated area.
I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are. I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year. I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.
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.
> I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are
I speak Italian, English and French. I speak English to you because it's the only language you know. We are not the same.
> I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year.
We work to live, not the opposite. Again, we are not the same.
> I speak Italian, English and French. I speak English to you because it's the only language you know. We are not the same.
I have worked with overseas coworkers who spoke English. You're right, it's not the same as having native fluency.
> We work to live, not the opposite. Again, we are not the same.
You're making my point for me - offshoring work fails for cultural reasons, not because overseas workers are dumb. Making work remote is not gonna change the cultural factors.
Also a very funny take because if you have ever visited the Bay Area, you can't throw a rock without hitting someone who struck it rich and retired at 30.
This is not true - most American companies hire contractors, usually through a local intermediary.
> with a statutory month off every year.
This is something work pondering about, really. Take step back, look at your life, and think a bit about this point, no matter if you're blue- or white-collar worker.
> I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are.
This is sortof absurd on the face of it. For context, I'm a European who's been working for US based companies for well over a decade now, and rarely do I have communications issues (and they're generally with non-native English speakers, mostly Europeans living in the US).
> I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year.
It's important to note that not all Europeans are unfireable. In fact, none of them are, it's just that you need to 1) give a verbal warning, 2) give a written warning and 3) fire them if things don't improve. Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.
> I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.
This is the actual reason. There's so much capital available in the US that it sucks in a lot of ambitious people.
> 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.
In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.
> This is sortof absurd on the face of it. For context, I'm a European who's been working for US based companies for well over a decade now, and rarely do I have communications issues (and they're generally with non-native English speakers, mostly Europeans living in the US).
You might have excellent fluency, but my experience is that it varies a lot depending on the person.
> Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.
I think this is underselling the degree of employment protection in Europe, but I will freely admit I'm not an expert.
> In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.
But "better person" here doesn't mean smarter - it means a more effective employee. Working in a very different timezone, language barriers, and culture differences make that an uphill battle, which is why offshoring hasn't exploded.
In order to fire a German employee outside of their multiple month trial period they have to commit a crime or willfully ignore instructions, or the company must be in financial trouble due to outside circumstances. Underperforming is not a legal reason to fire somebody.
> In order to fire a German employee outside of their multiple month trial period they have to commit a crime or willfully ignore instructions, or the company must be in financial trouble due to outside circumstances. Underperforming is not a legal reason to fire somebody.
Do you have a source for this claim? I'm not an expert in German employment law but would love to learn more.
Yeah, the magical American is the reason for US tech dominance. There's a reason why the biggest software companies come from big countries:
1. large internal markets provide more funding and more competition at the start
2. which leads to better product-market fit
3. which leads to more dominance as the natural software monopolies happen
4. which leads to easier taking over of smaller foreign markets
Biggest software companies? American and Chinese. Also Indian ones are starting to rise, too.
In comparison Europe is super fractured. Ignoring big US companies, the average French person buys stuff from a totally different website than the average German, for almost category you can imagine.
The argument doesn’t hold water. Companies aren’t pushing RTO because they want to pay higher salaries to office-bound staff in expensive metros. If raw “input–output” and cheap labour were the only metric, they’d go fully remote, tap global markets, and slash payroll overnight.
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.
> 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.
Well, it's not just capability. I know people who had offers at Big Tech, but had to move. There was no option to work from Bucharest or Eastern Europe. You either move to the US or to some other country like UK or Germany. Even if the job is remote. For legal and accounting reasons apparently. I know someone who officially rented a tiny space in rural Germany then secretly worked remotely from Poland, because they needed the official address for paperwork. So there are many artificial hurdles as of now. But the more normalized remote work becomes, the more people will realize these rules don't make sense.
Well, if we're going to negotiate, let's negotiate both ways. You want me in the office? Then I have to commute, and my time's not free. Are you going to pay me for my commute time?
Right. If employers set RTO as the default, you may be able to negotiate remote time instead of a pay raise. They’re less willing to pay you more to commute and would rather see the commute as the expectation.
Salary isn’t a meter ticking from 9 to 5, and it’s not a line item of “WFH credits” vs. “commute debits.” Salary is simply the number that convinces you to show up and do the work. Whether you sit in an office, in your kitchen, or on the beach is irrelevant - the company pays because they need outcomes, not because of your postcode or chair type.
That’s why all this “WFH as benefit / RTO as cost” chatter is sleight of hand. It nudges you into negotiating around scraps instead of the only thing that matters: total compensation for total output. Companies push that framing precisely because it distracts you from asking for a bigger number.
My point is that, from the employee's point of view, the commute has to be factored into "total output". So if I've been getting $X for Y hours WFH, and now they want to give me $X for Y hours in the office, that's (Y+C) hours to me, and that's the same pay for more of my work - though part of the work doesn't benefit the company.
You're partially correct in RTO being about control. Sunk costs in real estate and local tax benefits pay a significant role.
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
I think there's an element of management incompetence, or at least lack of confidence. They're not confident that they know how to manage a bunch of remote workers.
As a management, I understand that this is the perception… but it’s not remotely true. It astounds me how often this is repeated. It’s almost more of a conspiracy theory at this point. “Those evil incompetent managers are just so stupid they have to justify their existence by having people in office.”
RTO is not about watching people in their seats all day to see who is productive. It’s about getting talented people to sit next to each other, as there is significant benefit to that. It builds culture and internal networks (which helps attrition rates, especially for junior employees) and that helps junior employees learn from senior employees. They need that hands-on feedback from seniors, minute to minute. It helps people across teams work together, as in remote land, most communication is intra team only.
It’s not about input->output. It’s about building a long term company culture and employees who grow with it. It’s about building a system where communication and collaboration have less friction.
Can this be done remotely? Maybe, by a few companies who are very intentional and do it well. But remote is very difficult to do well.
If it were just about input->output, I’d offshore everything and save a ton of money.
The whole “RTO builds culture and networks” story is upside down. Culture isn’t something you force by sticking bodies in the same postcode; culture is what people build when they trust each other, share information freely, and aren’t ground down by pointless commutes. If your company can only transmit knowledge through overhearing desk chatter, you don’t have culture - you have an ad-hoc crutch for bad processes.
Mentorship isn’t “minute-to-minute hand-holding.” It’s structured review, clear documentation, and intentional teaching. If seniors are expected to babysit juniors in person all day, you haven’t built a system for growth, you’ve built a dependency loop that collapses as soon as those seniors leave.
And claiming remote is “very difficult to do well” is just an admission of managerial laziness. Remote is harder only if your toolkit begins and ends with meetings and hallway gossip. The companies that are intentional about remote show it scales just fine.
So yes, RTO is about (damage) control - not because managers are cartoon villains, but because without control, the hollowness of their systems is exposed.
As a person working with Americans, if I may express my honest opinion, this is BS. Your advantage is the fact that you are professional, hard-working, are able to question the demands in a positive way, can communicate with American management more easily, live in the same time zone and in general you can get on with the rest of American team more easily. I would never say physical location is an asset (although I might be biased as I work for corporations that have multiple offices in various continents, for small startups it might be different).
If the entire organization is offshore then fine, but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration. South America is ok but there aren't many software developers there.
> but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration
This is definitely part of it, but if you have east coast or central teams, this is totally doable. In fact, often the European employees get more done as they get a whole morning before the US based pings/meetings start.
> If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
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.
I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list:
* 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.)
> * 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.)
You know what, since the dawn of work - it's always been the extroverted way. Introverts suffered through. Now that the tide has changed, let the extroverts suffer too, it's their turn. We have done our part.
Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus?
I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.
> Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.
Yeah, me too. It's much harder for me to focus at the office, which is annoying as mentally it's great for me to get out of the house and see people who aren't my family (who are great, I just do better when i see and interact with more people).
* Doing summin: Gotta be seen doing something to move a needle. Doesn't matter if the needle is a compass, odometer or voltmeter, as long as it swings up or to the right.
> Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person
The funny thing is that the CEO of my current employer lives in Connecticut and rarely (ever?) comes into the office in Manhattan. When he does come in, they shut the office down for "leadership meetings" so all the New York based employees can't come in anyway!
I wonder if it can be a genuine attempt to save positions. E.g. the board might be asking why they keep remote employees in the US instead of letting them go and hiring in a cheaper location
>selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership.
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.
For example, the last big company I worked for had invested in building out its campus with multiple new flagship bespoke buildings, including during (and not reconsidered due to) the pandemic. It would be quite difficult and/or a loss of corporate face to sell/lease them out.
I'm not saying it's rational, but that doesn't mean it's not sometimes an influential factor.
I think the bigger driver is that cities and states are pressuring companies to RTO because of the massive negative impact to local businesses and governments who no longer have thousands of people coming into a particular area on a daily basis.
I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by each role".
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.
I was also studying many MBA books about decision making in corporate environments. Many cool things about data driven decision making. Costs and alternative costs, etc., many cool things, some even with scientific background. RTO is also analyzed in similar manner. The truth is that RTO is great way to ditch people with longer commute and/or kids easily and for free.
And unions (as they’re in Germany) are happy.
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.
I think, two rounds of RTO reduce headcount by 4-6% and the company is still functional. Work packages are delegated to the folks who stay. Few months later lost key persons get replacement. It’s not like throwing 2/3 workforce and concentrating on core business.
The problem is that proper studies on this topic will take years to really understand the positives and negatives of having the majority of your employees working remotely. --Researchers need to be able to track people through their careers to understand whether or not WFH is a net benefit to them and/or their companies.
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.
To be clear, I'm not wishing for evidence of whether RTO is good or bad.
I want evidence that proves "it's about cheap layoffs" or "it's about real estate" or "it's because they want to monitor people" or "<insert any speculative reason on this thread>"
Once we have evidence"it's about layoffs" then we can debate whether it's ultimately helpful or harmful to cull headcount that way.
It is likely too late for many existing contracts with packages built-in, which probably also overlap with the longest-working (and thus most expensive) engineers.
Depends what sort of contract they have (and/or how much perceived leverage they have - firing high-income workers who have a public platform can make for messy PR)
It's also a dumb strategy because the good people will easily find another job and leave and you end up with office full of the least competent employees.
But yes I'm pretty sure this is a big part of the reason for these mandates.
From what I've seen (at a fortune 100 company) they made the supposedly "best" employees fully remote, and they neglected to tell the others that there were "limited slots" for fully remote and thus they had to come in to work. After a few months of coming in for work, they then laid off those employees, as not enough people quit for that to happen. To be fair, I was given a severance, but it still sucks. And the office was in bad shape, bathrooms poorly maintained, cafeteria in disarray, with substandard food (compared to before). The reason they're trying to get rid of employees is to make their stocks look good. We did better during covid by all measures, when everyone was working remotely.
I've long suspected it's got to do with office real estate.
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.
The city centre / real estate thing sounds like an externalisation - which companies famously dont give a shit about.
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.
Most companies, at least in the U.S., don’t own their offices. They lease them.
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.
I feel that companies still misunderstand how to evaluate these metrics they're collecting on the efficacy of RTO.
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)
To actually measure efficacy of any measures, you need to implement them in isolation. It is really hard to evaluate how working from home is affecting productivity while simultaneously doing mass layoffs and pushing people to replace their fired collagues with AI
> I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
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.
You'll probably get better results than the level of Sloan from the NY Fed, the AEA or Glass Lewis. They point out that profit-seeking strategies outside of the concept of ordinary business[1] can exist on a spectrum from highly ethical to highly unethical, ideally[2] all pursued simultaneously in proportion to their risk.
[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.
[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.
Of the information I have reviewed brain storming / creative sessions are better in person versus online sessions. This does lend to hybrid approaches being useful. All other metrics were better or had no difference.
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.
And the worse of all, is that in most cases the work is exactly the same, and there is no collaboration on the office, because the team is geographically distributed anyway, so the only thing changing are the location of the video calls, and with whom to chat during coffee breaks.
This is a thing I've been constantly bringing up with our company. I _do_ think that local collaboration in the office is vastly more effective than remotely, _but_ only given that the entire team is co-located.
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.
Exactly, before covid, I don't think I ever saw any serious efforts to shuffle team assignments to have them more geographically segregated. But now it's all about in-person collaboration for some reason.
> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare
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.
It depends on the age of the child - having a 7-year old return from school at 2pm and hangout at home with an adult present is fine and saves you the cost of afterschool care.
A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.
My wife and I work remotely. Everyone in my team has children, so everyone's very flexible. We tend to work less during the afternoon, and pick it up later in the day. I start earlier when I'm not the one doing the morning drop-off.
My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.
You’re right for younger children but for older children in school you can definitely handle it while working remotely. You just pick them up from school and then they can mostly do stuff on their own the afternoon. But if you have to go in office suddenly that doesn’t work anymore.
To expand on this a touch, kids are only in school for 6 hours a day. For ages between kindergarten and grade 4 or so, it is generally frowned on to let them make their way home alone. A single parent with no child care cannot be in an office for 8 hours straight.
>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.
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.
I really, strongly believe that if devs were building genuine friendships with their team mates remotely, there would be no RTO. I have only ever seen the opposite: people are distancing from each other more than ever. Aren’t we in a “loneliness epidemic”?
In the end it's all about friction, communicating IRL is much easier and less constrained. You can make online work but you have to adjust your expectations of how much time something takes and optimise for a split between focus time and comms, which you don't have to worry too much in IRL, that works but you have to adjust your expectations of how many people are working together and how long it takes to cooperate and adjust course. So I guess you better find a team that makes this mindset work?
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.
I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.
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.
RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research
I work together with my team and I socialize IRL with friends, family, or sometimes coworkers essentially every day of the week. I’ve been fully remote since 2018. Your comment makes no sense to me.
Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.
Ditto, and I find that that socializing is higher value, because it is special: we made an effort to meet (and depending on one's WFH habits, that effort might be considerable), we didn't just shout "pub?" over the partition.
> Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)
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.
“The medium is the message.” People who work remote become that person who doesn’t value their team, because that’s what the environment promotes. We work in companies because of the team and the community though, that is the whole point of them.
The arguments people make here are so strange. They could be true, but they pretend that (1) life before 2020 didn’t exist and 99% of companies from startups to large companies didn’t constantly work in a single location, (2) companies weren’t already paying premiums not just to hire in areas where their offices were but to pay people to relocate from cheaper areas to where their offices were instead of just paying them a lower salary to work out of the LCOL place, (3) that there isn’t a massive amount of economic literature on agglomeration effects and the advantages of being colocated while working.
If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.
I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.
Everyone has their own explanations for why businesses do these things, and I see merit in many of them. Here's my contribution to the list.
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.
We have a similar push for RTO here in Germany as well where the usual U.S. centric reasons don't apply (tax break law has not changed; we're still semi-ZIRP at 2%, no H1B visas, outsourcing is not a major trend either as many companies want German speaking employees).
I think the reason is simple: Lock-in for employees. Moving for your employer demonstrates dependence and highlights your inferior bargaining position. If you have to move again to switch jobs it will be quite painful so you'll likely accept a lower salary instead.
These are weak arguments in the post. It is not the commute which is the problem. In my experience (tech specifically) office is unnecessary because I do less work, and it is more depressing because you still talk with the same people over the chat and calls. There are issues with the shortage of phone booths, and listening to every conversation does not help concentrate. Then there is poor old hardware, not many will buy Herman Miller for their subordinates. Another thing not mentioned is the total show of appearances over outcomes. Not to mention geographically distributed teams.
At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.
> “We don’t think people do their best work from home”: Prove it.
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.
I feel that the reason RTO is still such a wonderful topic to write about or debate online, is that the spectrum of human "experience" is so wide, that there will always be a significant number of people on either side of the fence.
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.
What RTO and WTAF means? Who knows. I clicked on link to find out but looks like website blogs my IP range. I will never know this important information..
RTO is way to force people work for two more hours per day for the same pay (1 hour typical commute one way). Hence it is done to suppress wages and make people leave voluntarily. It's not that hard to deduce.
But it is not, people work more when remote. It is harder to disconnect from work. This kind of bothers me because it seems RTO will reduce the hours spent working (on average) which should affect the output, but somehow companies expect the inverse.
We have some sort of hybrid policy. Every single time I have showed up at the office, I either end up socialising far too much and get nothing done (I find it extremely hard to work next to people without talking to them).
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
Sure. I catch up with many of them on weekends anyway — we hike together, our families know each other, some live nearby etc.
Regarding knowledge sharing, that happens equally well via Slack. (Actually, I'd say a screen share works better than over-the-shouldering someone else's screen in person)
It's indeed one of the most stupid decisions a management could make.
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.
People who have to be in the office should also object to RTO. Needless commuting clogs the roads and public transport. Fewer commuters mean less chance of being stuck in traffic and a better chance of getting a seat.
"but it’s a sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees. "
That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)
>sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees
This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.
> You will cause untold mental, physical and financial upheaval for many employees who now have to spend money on commuting, childcare, pet care, to name but a few.
If the tone of the article wasn’t so flippant I’d maybe have read all the way through it. I’m not going to read an article that sounds like it’s written by a petulant child.
It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location.
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.
> you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe
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.
>There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech.
American companies are welcome to start offering Western European level benefits (and compensate for missing government benefits) at any time. I would happily accept 30-50% less pay for a very solid health insurance plan, pay for my childcare 30 days of paid vacation a year that I'm actually entitled to take, 6 months of paid maternity leave + some paternity leave, a contract that restricts my working hours and makes it meaningfully legally difficult to frivolously fire me and practically impossible to lay me off of the company isn't failing, and an hour paid lunch every day.
Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason. The closest is non-profits, who lack the cash to meet standard salaries but try to make up with benefits (which are, after all, cheaper), but for profit companies seem to prefer to pony up and retain the control at-will employment grants them
> Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason.
different NDA rules, HR rules, non-compete rules, expectations about unions, hiring & firing rules, etc. etc. etc.
non-starter for a lot of fairly obvious reasons if you've done hiring before.
it's an issue with any offshoring, but 4.14/hr for India offsets that risk compared to 2/3s of NA salary for EU and all sort of hoops.
First of all, companies have already outsourced all that they could a couple decades ago. Then when it comes to hiring in different countries, this gets extremely complicated due to taxes and regulations. While some remote-first companies can navigate this complexity (usually through some sort of HR as a service type company), most companies are not structured in such a way to feasibly hire people outside their incorporated area.
I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are. I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year. I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.
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.
> I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are
I speak Italian, English and French. I speak English to you because it's the only language you know. We are not the same.
> I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year.
We work to live, not the opposite. Again, we are not the same.
> I speak Italian, English and French. I speak English to you because it's the only language you know. We are not the same.
I have worked with overseas coworkers who spoke English. You're right, it's not the same as having native fluency.
> We work to live, not the opposite. Again, we are not the same.
You're making my point for me - offshoring work fails for cultural reasons, not because overseas workers are dumb. Making work remote is not gonna change the cultural factors.
Also a very funny take because if you have ever visited the Bay Area, you can't throw a rock without hitting someone who struck it rich and retired at 30.
Fair enough, on both points. And yet, a tech company in the US may prefer someone who is US-style rather than Europe-style on the second point.
> an unfirable European
This is not true - most American companies hire contractors, usually through a local intermediary.
> with a statutory month off every year.
This is something work pondering about, really. Take step back, look at your life, and think a bit about this point, no matter if you're blue- or white-collar worker.
> I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are.
This is sortof absurd on the face of it. For context, I'm a European who's been working for US based companies for well over a decade now, and rarely do I have communications issues (and they're generally with non-native English speakers, mostly Europeans living in the US).
> I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year.
It's important to note that not all Europeans are unfireable. In fact, none of them are, it's just that you need to 1) give a verbal warning, 2) give a written warning and 3) fire them if things don't improve. Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.
> I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.
This is the actual reason. There's so much capital available in the US that it sucks in a lot of ambitious people.
> 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.
In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.
> This is sortof absurd on the face of it. For context, I'm a European who's been working for US based companies for well over a decade now, and rarely do I have communications issues (and they're generally with non-native English speakers, mostly Europeans living in the US).
You might have excellent fluency, but my experience is that it varies a lot depending on the person.
> Granted, you can't fire them for not laughing at your jokes but the same sort of process gets followed in California where most US tech companies are headquatered.
I think this is underselling the degree of employment protection in Europe, but I will freely admit I'm not an expert.
> In fact, it's normally easier to get a better person outside the US, as they have less options at big-tech level wages. The US dominates the tech sector because of availablity of capital, not availability of talent.
But "better person" here doesn't mean smarter - it means a more effective employee. Working in a very different timezone, language barriers, and culture differences make that an uphill battle, which is why offshoring hasn't exploded.
In order to fire a German employee outside of their multiple month trial period they have to commit a crime or willfully ignore instructions, or the company must be in financial trouble due to outside circumstances. Underperforming is not a legal reason to fire somebody.
> In order to fire a German employee outside of their multiple month trial period they have to commit a crime or willfully ignore instructions, or the company must be in financial trouble due to outside circumstances. Underperforming is not a legal reason to fire somebody.
Do you have a source for this claim? I'm not an expert in German employment law but would love to learn more.
A quick Google produces this: https://boundlesshq.com/guides/germany/end-of-employment/
The only thing that seems different from Ireland (where I live) is the Works Council hearing part.
My guess is, the employer just needs to do the legwork of documenting the performance issues.
Yeah, the magical American is the reason for US tech dominance. There's a reason why the biggest software companies come from big countries:
1. large internal markets provide more funding and more competition at the start
2. which leads to better product-market fit
3. which leads to more dominance as the natural software monopolies happen
4. which leads to easier taking over of smaller foreign markets
Biggest software companies? American and Chinese. Also Indian ones are starting to rise, too.
In comparison Europe is super fractured. Ignoring big US companies, the average French person buys stuff from a totally different website than the average German, for almost category you can imagine.
The argument doesn’t hold water. Companies aren’t pushing RTO because they want to pay higher salaries to office-bound staff in expensive metros. If raw “input–output” and cheap labour were the only metric, they’d go fully remote, tap global markets, and slash payroll overnight.
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.
> 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.
Well, it's not just capability. I know people who had offers at Big Tech, but had to move. There was no option to work from Bucharest or Eastern Europe. You either move to the US or to some other country like UK or Germany. Even if the job is remote. For legal and accounting reasons apparently. I know someone who officially rented a tiny space in rural Germany then secretly worked remotely from Poland, because they needed the official address for paperwork. So there are many artificial hurdles as of now. But the more normalized remote work becomes, the more people will realize these rules don't make sense.
It also turns remote work into a negotiated benefit, which may be preferred over actual raises.
Well, if we're going to negotiate, let's negotiate both ways. You want me in the office? Then I have to commute, and my time's not free. Are you going to pay me for my commute time?
Right. If employers set RTO as the default, you may be able to negotiate remote time instead of a pay raise. They’re less willing to pay you more to commute and would rather see the commute as the expectation.
Salary isn’t a meter ticking from 9 to 5, and it’s not a line item of “WFH credits” vs. “commute debits.” Salary is simply the number that convinces you to show up and do the work. Whether you sit in an office, in your kitchen, or on the beach is irrelevant - the company pays because they need outcomes, not because of your postcode or chair type.
That’s why all this “WFH as benefit / RTO as cost” chatter is sleight of hand. It nudges you into negotiating around scraps instead of the only thing that matters: total compensation for total output. Companies push that framing precisely because it distracts you from asking for a bigger number.
My point is that, from the employee's point of view, the commute has to be factored into "total output". So if I've been getting $X for Y hours WFH, and now they want to give me $X for Y hours in the office, that's (Y+C) hours to me, and that's the same pay for more of my work - though part of the work doesn't benefit the company.
You're partially correct in RTO being about control. Sunk costs in real estate and local tax benefits pay a significant role.
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
I think there's an element of management incompetence, or at least lack of confidence. They're not confident that they know how to manage a bunch of remote workers.
As a management, I understand that this is the perception… but it’s not remotely true. It astounds me how often this is repeated. It’s almost more of a conspiracy theory at this point. “Those evil incompetent managers are just so stupid they have to justify their existence by having people in office.”
RTO is not about watching people in their seats all day to see who is productive. It’s about getting talented people to sit next to each other, as there is significant benefit to that. It builds culture and internal networks (which helps attrition rates, especially for junior employees) and that helps junior employees learn from senior employees. They need that hands-on feedback from seniors, minute to minute. It helps people across teams work together, as in remote land, most communication is intra team only.
It’s not about input->output. It’s about building a long term company culture and employees who grow with it. It’s about building a system where communication and collaboration have less friction.
Can this be done remotely? Maybe, by a few companies who are very intentional and do it well. But remote is very difficult to do well.
If it were just about input->output, I’d offshore everything and save a ton of money.
The whole “RTO builds culture and networks” story is upside down. Culture isn’t something you force by sticking bodies in the same postcode; culture is what people build when they trust each other, share information freely, and aren’t ground down by pointless commutes. If your company can only transmit knowledge through overhearing desk chatter, you don’t have culture - you have an ad-hoc crutch for bad processes.
Mentorship isn’t “minute-to-minute hand-holding.” It’s structured review, clear documentation, and intentional teaching. If seniors are expected to babysit juniors in person all day, you haven’t built a system for growth, you’ve built a dependency loop that collapses as soon as those seniors leave.
And claiming remote is “very difficult to do well” is just an admission of managerial laziness. Remote is harder only if your toolkit begins and ends with meetings and hallway gossip. The companies that are intentional about remote show it scales just fine.
So yes, RTO is about (damage) control - not because managers are cartoon villains, but because without control, the hollowness of their systems is exposed.
If you want a job, feel free to work remote.
If you want a career, get back to the office.
As a person working with Americans, if I may express my honest opinion, this is BS. Your advantage is the fact that you are professional, hard-working, are able to question the demands in a positive way, can communicate with American management more easily, live in the same time zone and in general you can get on with the rest of American team more easily. I would never say physical location is an asset (although I might be biased as I work for corporations that have multiple offices in various continents, for small startups it might be different).
If the entire organization is offshore then fine, but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration. South America is ok but there aren't many software developers there.
> but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration
This is definitely part of it, but if you have east coast or central teams, this is totally doable. In fact, often the European employees get more done as they get a whole morning before the US based pings/meetings start.
> If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.
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.
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I think there are three alternative hypotheses the article misses from its list:
* 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.)
> * 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.)
You know what, since the dawn of work - it's always been the extroverted way. Introverts suffered through. Now that the tide has changed, let the extroverts suffer too, it's their turn. We have done our part.
> Ego
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
> We can give them bigger/more-prominent zoom portraits by seniority. Should make everyone happy.
This would be hilarious, from a malicious compliance sort of angle...
From coveting the corner office, to coveting the corner 200x200px zoom square. What a time to be alive. :D
Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.
> Do these extroverts have a job that requires any level of focus? I'm also pretty much an extrovert but if I need to get any work done, being in the office is actually counterproductive for me and for people who I interact with.
Yeah, me too. It's much harder for me to focus at the office, which is annoying as mentally it's great for me to get out of the house and see people who aren't my family (who are great, I just do better when i see and interact with more people).
One additional reason: all the other CEOs are mandating it at their companies. Can't be the odd man out in the CEO group chat.
Also mating/dating and the less pleasant side of that exemplified by Harvey Weinstein et al.
* Doing summin: Gotta be seen doing something to move a needle. Doesn't matter if the needle is a compass, odometer or voltmeter, as long as it swings up or to the right.
> Ego: senior people need to be seen and respected in person
The funny thing is that the CEO of my current employer lives in Connecticut and rarely (ever?) comes into the office in Manhattan. When he does come in, they shut the office down for "leadership meetings" so all the New York based employees can't come in anyway!
The missing one is: “Poor managers - do not base the decisions on data, and are not qualified to deal with the remote/spread out/async processes”
And extroverts are probably a high proportion of upper management.
I wonder if it can be a genuine attempt to save positions. E.g. the board might be asking why they keep remote employees in the US instead of letting them go and hiring in a cheaper location
>selling or ending the lease early might reflect badly on leadership.
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.
For example, the last big company I worked for had invested in building out its campus with multiple new flagship bespoke buildings, including during (and not reconsidered due to) the pandemic. It would be quite difficult and/or a loss of corporate face to sell/lease them out.
I'm not saying it's rational, but that doesn't mean it's not sometimes an influential factor.
I think the bigger driver is that cities and states are pressuring companies to RTO because of the massive negative impact to local businesses and governments who no longer have thousands of people coming into a particular area on a daily basis.
How are cities and states pressuring companies?
I'm genuinely interested in why RTO is trending. I searched Harvard Business Review, Gartner, and other sources just last week trying to find the rationale, but I wasn't successful. In fact, I found those sources to be a little cautionary. E.g., they say "if you do switch to in-office or hybrid, make sure you actually have metrics to evaluate the effects" and "ensure it makes sense for the actual work to be done by each role".
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.
I was also studying many MBA books about decision making in corporate environments. Many cool things about data driven decision making. Costs and alternative costs, etc., many cool things, some even with scientific background. RTO is also analyzed in similar manner. The truth is that RTO is great way to ditch people with longer commute and/or kids easily and for free. And unions (as they’re in Germany) are happy.
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.
I wonder if it’s possible for to sensibly short stock based on RTO announcements?
Generally people don’t push for redundancies is companies growing organically.
If this is a signal I wonder what the lead time is before it starts to bite?
I think, two rounds of RTO reduce headcount by 4-6% and the company is still functional. Work packages are delegated to the folks who stay. Few months later lost key persons get replacement. It’s not like throwing 2/3 workforce and concentrating on core business.
The problem is that proper studies on this topic will take years to really understand the positives and negatives of having the majority of your employees working remotely. --Researchers need to be able to track people through their careers to understand whether or not WFH is a net benefit to them and/or their companies.
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.
To be clear, I'm not wishing for evidence of whether RTO is good or bad.
I want evidence that proves "it's about cheap layoffs" or "it's about real estate" or "it's because they want to monitor people" or "<insert any speculative reason on this thread>"
Once we have evidence"it's about layoffs" then we can debate whether it's ultimately helpful or harmful to cull headcount that way.
It's a lazy and cowardly way to get people to cull themselves and save money on severance packages. It's not that deep.
Isn't it possible to just not give people severance packages?
Somewhere between 85% and 90% of all countries have some sort of mandated severance pay in the event of a layoff.
A small percentage of countries also mandate severance even if the employee is fired (with cause).
US doesn't seem to be such a country though?
It is likely too late for many existing contracts with packages built-in, which probably also overlap with the longest-working (and thus most expensive) engineers.
Depends what sort of contract they have (and/or how much perceived leverage they have - firing high-income workers who have a public platform can make for messy PR)
It's also a dumb strategy because the good people will easily find another job and leave and you end up with office full of the least competent employees.
But yes I'm pretty sure this is a big part of the reason for these mandates.
From what I've seen (at a fortune 100 company) they made the supposedly "best" employees fully remote, and they neglected to tell the others that there were "limited slots" for fully remote and thus they had to come in to work. After a few months of coming in for work, they then laid off those employees, as not enough people quit for that to happen. To be fair, I was given a severance, but it still sucks. And the office was in bad shape, bathrooms poorly maintained, cafeteria in disarray, with substandard food (compared to before). The reason they're trying to get rid of employees is to make their stocks look good. We did better during covid by all measures, when everyone was working remotely.
I've long suspected it's got to do with office real estate.
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.
The city centre / real estate thing sounds like an externalisation - which companies famously dont give a shit about.
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.
Most companies, at least in the U.S., don’t own their offices. They lease them.
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.
I feel that companies still misunderstand how to evaluate these metrics they're collecting on the efficacy of RTO.
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)
To actually measure efficacy of any measures, you need to implement them in isolation. It is really hard to evaluate how working from home is affecting productivity while simultaneously doing mass layoffs and pushing people to replace their fired collagues with AI
> I want to see evidence of their rationale so I can put myself in management's shoes.
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.
You'll probably get better results than the level of Sloan from the NY Fed, the AEA or Glass Lewis. They point out that profit-seeking strategies outside of the concept of ordinary business[1] can exist on a spectrum from highly ethical to highly unethical, ideally[2] all pursued simultaneously in proportion to their risk.
[1] e.g. through leveraging class politics, hyperstition or militias.
[2] From the point of view of the responsible stakeholders, that is.
Of the information I have reviewed brain storming / creative sessions are better in person versus online sessions. This does lend to hybrid approaches being useful. All other metrics were better or had no difference.
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.
At some point I cared about the reason. I have since stopped caring.
Even if a bunch of companies adopt RTO, many others just embraced remote work as a competitive advantage. I can just choose to work for those.
So, RTO all you want. I am not joining.
And the worse of all, is that in most cases the work is exactly the same, and there is no collaboration on the office, because the team is geographically distributed anyway, so the only thing changing are the location of the video calls, and with whom to chat during coffee breaks.
This is a thing I've been constantly bringing up with our company. I _do_ think that local collaboration in the office is vastly more effective than remotely, _but_ only given that the entire team is co-located.
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.
But it's absolutely essential that you chat with HR and sales people at the coffee machine!
Exactly, before covid, I don't think I ever saw any serious efforts to shuffle team assignments to have them more geographically segregated. But now it's all about in-person collaboration for some reason.
> employees who now have to spend money on [...] childcare
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.
It depends on the age of the child - having a 7-year old return from school at 2pm and hangout at home with an adult present is fine and saves you the cost of afterschool care.
A lot of people abused it to care for babies and very young children while working though. I understand the appeal but it doesn’t sit right.
My wife and I work remotely. Everyone in my team has children, so everyone's very flexible. We tend to work less during the afternoon, and pick it up later in the day. I start earlier when I'm not the one doing the morning drop-off.
My daughter still goes to after-school care twice a week, but this lets us save three days of after and five days of before-school care.
You’re right for younger children but for older children in school you can definitely handle it while working remotely. You just pick them up from school and then they can mostly do stuff on their own the afternoon. But if you have to go in office suddenly that doesn’t work anymore.
To expand on this a touch, kids are only in school for 6 hours a day. For ages between kindergarten and grade 4 or so, it is generally frowned on to let them make their way home alone. A single parent with no child care cannot be in an office for 8 hours straight.
Sigh This debate has been going on for years now.
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.
>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.
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.
I really, strongly believe that if devs were building genuine friendships with their team mates remotely, there would be no RTO. I have only ever seen the opposite: people are distancing from each other more than ever. Aren’t we in a “loneliness epidemic”?
In the end it's all about friction, communicating IRL is much easier and less constrained. You can make online work but you have to adjust your expectations of how much time something takes and optimise for a split between focus time and comms, which you don't have to worry too much in IRL, that works but you have to adjust your expectations of how many people are working together and how long it takes to cooperate and adjust course. So I guess you better find a team that makes this mindset work?
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.
I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.
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.
RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
> many teams actually perform better
the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research
I work together with my team and I socialize IRL with friends, family, or sometimes coworkers essentially every day of the week. I’ve been fully remote since 2018. Your comment makes no sense to me.
Also, likes commuting? You can listen to your podcast anywhere.
Ditto, and I find that that socializing is higher value, because it is special: we made an effort to meet (and depending on one's WFH habits, that effort might be considerable), we didn't just shout "pub?" over the partition.
> Remote is bad for: People who work together with other people & People who like socializing IRL (including managers)
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.
“The medium is the message.” People who work remote become that person who doesn’t value their team, because that’s what the environment promotes. We work in companies because of the team and the community though, that is the whole point of them.
The arguments people make here are so strange. They could be true, but they pretend that (1) life before 2020 didn’t exist and 99% of companies from startups to large companies didn’t constantly work in a single location, (2) companies weren’t already paying premiums not just to hire in areas where their offices were but to pay people to relocate from cheaper areas to where their offices were instead of just paying them a lower salary to work out of the LCOL place, (3) that there isn’t a massive amount of economic literature on agglomeration effects and the advantages of being colocated while working.
If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.
I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.
If only there was a way to communicate remotely.
Everyone has their own explanations for why businesses do these things, and I see merit in many of them. Here's my contribution to the list.
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.
We have a similar push for RTO here in Germany as well where the usual U.S. centric reasons don't apply (tax break law has not changed; we're still semi-ZIRP at 2%, no H1B visas, outsourcing is not a major trend either as many companies want German speaking employees).
I think the reason is simple: Lock-in for employees. Moving for your employer demonstrates dependence and highlights your inferior bargaining position. If you have to move again to switch jobs it will be quite painful so you'll likely accept a lower salary instead.
These are weak arguments in the post. It is not the commute which is the problem. In my experience (tech specifically) office is unnecessary because I do less work, and it is more depressing because you still talk with the same people over the chat and calls. There are issues with the shortage of phone booths, and listening to every conversation does not help concentrate. Then there is poor old hardware, not many will buy Herman Miller for their subordinates. Another thing not mentioned is the total show of appearances over outcomes. Not to mention geographically distributed teams.
At the end of the day it is the product and its perception by the paying customer that matters.
> “We don’t think people do their best work from home”: Prove it.
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.
I feel that the reason RTO is still such a wonderful topic to write about or debate online, is that the spectrum of human "experience" is so wide, that there will always be a significant number of people on either side of the fence.
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.
What RTO and WTAF means? Who knows. I clicked on link to find out but looks like website blogs my IP range. I will never know this important information..
Return to Office. What the Actual F***.
WTAF: WT Actual F
RTO: Return to Office
RTO is way to force people work for two more hours per day for the same pay (1 hour typical commute one way). Hence it is done to suppress wages and make people leave voluntarily. It's not that hard to deduce.
But it is not, people work more when remote. It is harder to disconnect from work. This kind of bothers me because it seems RTO will reduce the hours spent working (on average) which should affect the output, but somehow companies expect the inverse.
This is more of a rant than an article.
A 50 mile commute can be like 3 hours one way in Redmond
It's cheaper than layoffs?
We have some sort of hybrid policy. Every single time I have showed up at the office, I either end up socialising far too much and get nothing done (I find it extremely hard to work next to people without talking to them).
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
> socialising far too much and get nothing done
Alternatively, you networked, built useful relationships and shared knowledge.
Sure. I catch up with many of them on weekends anyway — we hike together, our families know each other, some live nearby etc.
Regarding knowledge sharing, that happens equally well via Slack. (Actually, I'd say a screen share works better than over-the-shouldering someone else's screen in person)
It's indeed one of the most stupid decisions a management could make.
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.
People who have to be in the office should also object to RTO. Needless commuting clogs the roads and public transport. Fewer commuters mean less chance of being stuck in traffic and a better chance of getting a seat.
Also... commuting is much less eco friendly
"but it’s a sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees. "
That's so true. In my niche, everybody WFH, only the most desperate folks take stationary/hybrid offers - and only for the time it takes them to find the proper job. (Yeah I know everybody's different but I just share my anecdata - we do meet in person sometimes but it is not forced and we genuinely enjoy it.)
>sure-fire way to rid yourself of those pesky skilled and experienced employees
This only happens if the job market supports it. If every company effectively colludes with these mandates, on top of the bad job market, then you can squeeze as hard as you want without meaningful attrition.
> You will cause untold mental, physical and financial upheaval for many employees who now have to spend money on commuting, childcare, pet care, to name but a few.
as if they care.
they're just tightening the noose.
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.
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If the tone of the article wasn’t so flippant I’d maybe have read all the way through it. I’m not going to read an article that sounds like it’s written by a petulant child.
So don't? I like the humor in it.
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