Continues to die
Is forcibly killed off by companies who hate their employees
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Yeah, that's a trash headline. This isn't something that's just happening from impersonal natural effects, it's management trying to kill it. And at least as of March, 35% of workers with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home. This isn't a "last gasp for WFH", it's a few big Silicon Valley employers trying to reassert control and their friends in the business media joining the cause.
I know I'll never go back to an office and a lot of other WFH employees don't even live near their companies anymore. Good luck retaining top talent if you treat them like children in need of supervision.
They don't hate them, they just don't consider them. Production is not at risk, they are. They are losing control and it is worth it to them to lose people to gain back the control. Above all else, even money they want power.
Once you have enough money to meet your needs, all money is is power.
When the US government broke up the oil companies with an antitrust suit the owners were worth more than before because the companies were valued higher individually. It was the best for everyone but the owners wanted power not more money and value. Consolidation hurts everyone.
It's just managers terrified people will realize they have 0 value.
Senior Management make these decisions, if not C suite. They have a lot to do but these decisions come down to not letting business interests falter by dropping commercial rents and not having employees having too much convenience.
Commercial rent is absolutely a huge reason. However, you're missing something. It's an easy way to get rid of a certain percentage of folks. A lot of MBAs, and by extension a lot of the C-Suite, act like employees are perfectly spherical and operate in a vacuum. So if they need to shrink their workforce by X% it doesn't matter which employees leave.
Unfortunately for the employers the high performers are generally (not always) the ones with more options.
It's another layoff.
I don’t think it will be that cut and dry.
A huge number of tech companies are still and/or will always be fully remote.
Over time, the big pay checks that Meta and Google and Apple are offering will be overshadowed by the possibilities of remote work done right (as opposed to simply working as you are in the office but from home).
There are lots of smart, talented folks out there willing to take a pay cut to gain back the time that office culture can waste, commuting first of all.
Sure there are challenges to the sense of togetherness that can help build great teams, but plenty of remote-only organizations make the time and space to foster that appropriately.
Ultimately, I think we’ll find that the eventual competitors to the MAANG-like behemoths emerge out of smart, well designed, remote-first organizations. Though I think Netflix is largely remote - at least for the engineers I know who work there.
Sounds a lot like what my company did. They made going in on Mon, Tue, Wed mandatory for everyone not designated as "Remote" beginning the day after Labor Day. The dumb thing here is that people don't have a desk to go to.
They announced a construction project on one of the buildings a few months ago, and have since closed that building completely, moving those people into the main building, and announced at the same time the closure of 2 more buildings for "reasons." This forced the need for "Flex Desks" as well as the installation of "bench desks" in what used to be common areas, just to fit people in. Further stupidity was introduced when they said that teams would have designated "neighborhoods" to sit together in, which is anything but. It's really a floor or part of a floor for an entire organization - "figure it out." So now when we arrive after our shitty commute, we have to wander around for a place to sit.
Then there's parking, which, if you didn't get into one of the 2 parking garages that are company owned and paid for by pre-tax deductions, then you have to find your own parking with your post-tax pay, because the agreement with the local garages wasn't renewed during the pandemic.
All dictated to us by someone who regularly joins video conferences from his car, home, or Yacht.
We might as well been coworkers. Crazy just how sheepish all the big execs are. Productivity was supposedly up at the peak of the WFH policies, but now suddenly it is so important to go back even though there is not enough room for everyone.
I don't miss being crammed into a pretencious office being surrounded at arm length by 5 other people, some of which at loud as fuck and spend their days on zoom. I really won't do it anymore, I don't care if I starve.
45min commute which cost over a hundred per month and still require me to walk in shitty weather, already soaked in sweat half the months of the year, so I can walk in and plug my shitty laptop on a dock and ultimately still have 99% of my work done remotely and on zoom on my shitty webcam because half the office is home and three quarter of my colleagues live in a different country.
Not to mention that COVID season is already starting up again and with things like long COVID still not being understood fully it's absolutely ridiculous that people are being herded back into an office.
Yeah, somehow it was just declared over. I hate the conspiracy crowd as much as the next sane person, but it is pretty crazy how quickly the public opinion can be manipulated regardless of reality.
Sounds about the same. We heard "record profits" every year during the pandemic when everyone was home. Suddenly it's "we're better together" and "culture."
A coworker in another city going into the office the company has floors in, who is also the only one from our team there: "nothing is different. I'm still on zoom all day."
I've worked at a company and had exactly the same experience. People were sitting in hallways with constant walking and noise, trying to work, just "because".
I used to say that the office is now the worst place to work, and we may as well sit at McDonald's next to the baloon section with kids.
And we are paying for this experience, paying for fuel, and paying for time or tickets to get to and from the place... :)
We all know companies are pushing for a return to offices but I expected more pushback from employees.
Luckily I have it in my contract that I am a remote worker and the company doesn't even have an office in my city, so I'm safe, but still I'd like to see wfh become the new normal.
Granted my company is much, much smaller but they have leaned into work from home. They didn't renew the office lease on our larger space and instead just moved to a small we work space for a few folks that like to work in the office. The CEO actually loves it because it saves the company a ton in rent/leasing.
But Meta is probably just trying to triage folks without having to pay severance or unemployment.
I hope a lot of people will leave that crappy company for this. WFH is the way!!
My company is 100% wfh. They have no vested interest in real estate though.
Many corporations did the same already. Seems they would loose control of their employees if they don’t have them like cattle in the office. Governments do the same with the population on big cities. It’s an old resource to keep control over the population.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Over the last three years, Meta went through the same cycle of remote work as an increasingly large number of other tech companies.
As time went on, though, executives began to discover that a lot of things about work are simply harder to do through a webcam and a chat window and began to try to bring people back to the office without upsetting those who had gotten used to having no commute and no nearby co-workers.
And then, this year, the company simply stopped caring about the backlash and told everyone to come back.
Earlier this year, in a note to staff, Zuckerberg wrote that while the company was committed to distributed work, “our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.” The company found that younger and newer employees in particular performed better in an in-person environment.
Most Google employees are in the office three days a week, and Amazon has been enforcing the same policy since May.
Meta, of course, is investing billions in the metaverse and specifically the idea that the office of the future may be inside your Quest headset.
The original article contains 490 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
No one expected it to continue at peak covid levels. It was a grand experiment and a lot was learned, now there are a lot more options than there was 5 years ago.
Yeah, a lot was learned, like how useless to commute to work, and how easy to WFH
It depends. We learned after 3 weeks of WFH that it was a disaster, and the year of zoom meetings with clients was torture. The day we got letters from the governor saying we were "essential employees" and exempt from WFH and all other covid restrictions was amazing.
Sounds like a skill issue. The company I was working for at the time had been fully remote since its founding and we were totally used to zoom meetings. We barely skipped a beat when COVID hit.
small company, so lack of advanced IT was a small part, but there's just no substitute to actually walking through a project site with a contractor/customer.
Ah, yeah, that sort of thing kinda needs to be in person. I was selling software so the demo was on a screen anyway so it didn't matter if the screen was in the same room.
Too bad the metaverse sucks so much because that would be perfect for your use case.
Oh yeah, there are certainly some positions where WFH is appropriate. My wife was in software development with a WFH job prior to covid and through it. Covid actually drove her to find a new job with a hybrid policy so she can do whatever she wants.