Comment by paxys 2 days ago
And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week - kids to pick up from daycare, health issues to manage, a social life in the evenings, travel plans - basically the exact category that a company like Meta would want to replace with a younger, more exploitable bunch.
That's not how the job market is right now. There's like 5 companies in the world that can compete on compensation while allowing remote work with meta.
I would take a lower comp for remote work and a better work environment. They will never pay me the amount that would make me choose 2h in traffic everyday instead of having enough time to cook breakfast to my family, take my kids to school, have lunch with my wife, etc.
No point in quitting, reduce workload.
If leadership needs to manage folks out make them do the work and collect a paycheck while it happens.
Yeah I don't get people who quit when RTO or unreasonable changes are made. Quitting makes it easy for them and means they stop paying you now.
Letting them fire you means at worst you end up with the same outcome, at best you call their bluff and get paid a few months more (or forever).
Yeah but RTO takes real time and money. Sure you can earn a paycheck, but if you're commuting 2 hours a day total, you're still losing those 2 hours until they fire you. And that kind of stinks. And that's assuming you don't need to move. Moving for a job you hate is the worst.
I think the suggestion is just ignoring the RTO mandate and continuing to work remote, until they fire you for insubordination.
Reduce workload, get in a bit later and go home a bit earlier.
Avoid attending meetings involving people dialling in from a different office (that’s not in person collaboration, so it’s worthless work. Sorry, I don’t make the rules) and be present at the meeting (keeping the chair warm it’s all it counts after all) while browsing HN in the ones you really cannot get out of it.
There have never been "company hours" in tech. Until recently (before badge tracking became a thing) asking your manager what time you were expected to come in and leave would be met with blank stares. "We don't enforce set hours here, just get your work done". And conversely "I came to the office and worked 8 hours a day like you asked" is never going to be accepted as an excuse when you fail to meet your targets at the end of the quarter or miss a page in the middle of the night. Heck you can't even work on your own projects after hours or patent your own ideas because the knowledge in your head is company property. Simply put - they are hiring you for your skills and your output, not for warming a seat at an office for 8 hours a day. Tech companies have always treated employees like adults and expected adult behavior in return, and both sides have benefited greatly from this arrangement. Sadly it seems like the new crop of tech leadership seems adamant on making their companies more like a call center.
So you'd think right? Nobody would like anything better than to just get output without worrying about hours or location or anything like that. But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there. And to be fair, there are absolutely a limited set of employees who are perfectly capable of working remotely with no issues whatsoever. But for the majority.. the feedback we've gotten is there is too much temptation to just do the laundry or dishes or "my wife needs a hand with X", and output just continues to stay low. And while it would be great to separate employees into groups based on who can be trusted to WFH and who can't, it feels too discriminatory and would cause way too many headaches.
So, as I'm sure you've seen in the news stories over the last few years, basically every large organization everywhere has enacted some sort of RTO mandate. I'm sure there are a few smaller startups kicking around who want to keep trying things the other way, but for the most part, the industry has spoken. We can keep complaining about it but short of another pandemic it's unlikely covid-style work is going to make a comeback IMO.
> But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there.
I spoke with my manager about this. This wasn't true for our team, and it wasn't true for any other team in our (fairly sizable) division. I didn't give a shit about any other group, so I didn't ask.
If your employees are spending their days fucking around instead of working when they're working from their home office, I'm here to tell you that when they were in the corporate-leased office, they were browsing Reddit on their phone or off on yet another coffee break to "get the pulse of the office". Slackers and shirkers are gonna slack and shirk, no matter where they are.
The thing to do is to fire folks who aren't doing enough to justify their pay. That's something that hasn't ever changed.
The practice of an entire working population commuting from an hour+ away to a few buildings in the center of the city, sitting on their ass for 8 hours a day, eating a packed lunch, and commuting back home is at most a couple hundred years old. But sure, go on about your "hundreds-to-thousands of years of history".
> Throughout hundreds-to-thousands of years of history your options have been
You might want to brush up on your anthropology a bit.
>Throughout hundreds-to-thousands of years of history ... but that was a long time ago man.
This seems like a self defeating argument.
Honestly, if the bus/delivery driver needed a mid-shift break to deal with some life stuff, yeah by all means, I personally think they should be able to do that kind of stuff (though maybe we start by giving them bathroom breaks?). The business hiring them should adapt.
Al, Wake up! It's 3AM and we need you to come in urgently!
Why? What happened?
We need to make sure we have shoes on the shelves! Bob had a nightmare there are no more shoes left!
People did this, I used to do jiu-jitsu with a ups guy that would stop and join the class mid day, then go back on his route.
I Had a manager that would go and drink beers in his car durring breaks.
I had Coworkers that would leave the office to pick up their kids pre covid.
Lots of people are messing around
Looks like you don't know how to properly manage your team.
I had a similar argument with a previous manager I had. Careerist dude started on some bullshit management-speak on measuring workers by ass-to-seat-hours while he had no idea I had a management degree from one of the most respected business colleges in my country. Had to rebuke him with Business Management 101.
Of course, this definitely contributed for him pushing me out afterwards, as small minds can't handle being wrong, and he even had the gall of trying and pushing me an unethical assignment. I got out with a nice severance package, and from the grapevine (it's a small community down here after all!) I hear every quarter somebody quits from his team or moves to a different one.
So yeah, bad managers got to career.
> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week
Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.